Imperialism and Expansionism in American History by Chris J. Magoc

Copyright © 2016 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Magoc, Chris J., 1960- editor. | Bernstein, David (Professor of history), editor. Title: Imperialism and expansionism in American history : a social, political, and cultural encyclopedia and document collection / Chris J. Magoc and David Bernstein, editors. Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2015017561| ISBN 9781610694292 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781610694308 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Territorial expansion—History—Encyclopedias. | United States—Territorial expansion—History—Sources. | Imperialism—History—Encyclopedias. | Imperialism—History—Sources. Classification: LCC E713 .I47 2016 | DDC 970.01—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015017561 ISBN: 978-1-61069-429-2 EISBN: 978-1-61069-430-8 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publishers will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments General Introduction

VOLUME 1: Seven Years’ War to the Annexation of Hawai‘i Chronology: 1754–1898 1. From Colony to Empire: The Transformation of Anglo North America, 1754– 1850 Historical Overview Adams, John Quincy Algonquians American Revolution (1775–1783) Articles of Confederation Astor, John Jacob Astoria Baring, Alexander Blockade of Confederate Ports (1861–1865) Cayuse War (1848–1850) Citizen Genêt Affair (1793) Convention of 1818 Cook, James Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 Embargo Act (1807) Fort Stanwix, Treaty of (1784) Hard Labor, Treaty of (1768) Hudson’s Bay Company Indian Peace Medals Indians of the Middle Missouri River Indians of the Pacific Northwest

Iroquois Confederacy Jay’s Treaty (1794) Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) Lower and Upper Canada Rebellions (1837–1838) Madison, James Missions Neolin New Orleans, Battle of (1815) Nootka Sound Convention (1790) Northwest Passage Oregon Boundary Dispute Oregon Treaty (1846) Paris, Treaty of (1763) Paris, Treaty of (1783) Paxton Boys (1763) Pinckney’s Treaty (1796) Pontiac Proclamation of 1763 Quebec Act (1774) Rush-Bagot Pact (1817) San Juan Islands Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) Spalding, Henry and Eliza Hart Stevens, Isaac Thompson, David Trent Affair (1861) Vancouver, George Wampum War Hawks War of 1812 (1812–1815) Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842) Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss XYZ Affair (1797–1798) Primary Documents Pontiac’s Speech Explaining His Reasons for Making War on the English (1763) “We Are All Equally Free”: Broadside of the New York City Workingmen Demanding a Voice in the Revolutionary Struggle (1770) Mohawk Joseph Brant Comes to London and Addresses King George III (1776) George Washington’s Newburgh Address (1783) American Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) President James Madison’s War Message (1812) “Star Spangled Banner” (1814) Monroe Doctrine (1823) Andrew Sherburne’s Experiences on an American Privateer During the Revolutionary War (1828)

“For Oregon!” Settlers from Illinois Describe the Oregon Territory (1847)

2. Imperial Conflicts on the Spanish-Mexican Rim, 1769–1855 Historical Overview Adams-Onís Treaty (1819) Alamo, Battle of (1836) Alta California Anza, Juan Bautista de Austin, Moses Austin, Stephen F. Barceló, Maria Gertrudis (“Las Tules”) Bear Flag Revolt (1846) Becknell, William California Missions California Republic (1846) Californios Comancheria Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno East and West Florida Empresarios Fredonian Rebellion (1826–1827) Gadsden Purchase (1854) Gregg, Josiah Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848) Herrera, José Joaquín de Houston, Sam Indians of California Indians of the Southwest Kearny, Stephen Watts Kirker, James La Amistad Schooner (1839–1841) Las Gorras Blancas Lisa, Manuel Maxwell, Lucien Bonaparte Mestizos Mexican-American War (1846–1848) Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 Mexican Land Grants Neutral Ground (Louisiana)/Sabine Free State (1806–1821) New Spain Osages Pike, Zebulon Presidios Russian-American Company

San Ildefonso, Treaty of (1800) San Jacinto, Battle of (1836) San Lorenzo, Treaty of (Pinckney Treaty) (1795) Santa Anna, Antonio López de Santa Fe Trail Seguín, Juan Seminole War (First) (1817–1818) Serra, Junípero Smith, Jedediah Strong Taylor, Zachary Texas, Annexation of (1845) Texas Rangers Texas, Republic of (1836–1845) Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe Walker, Robert J. Wilkinson, James Wilmot, David Primary Documents Junípero Serra’s Report on the Missions of California (1773) Stephen F. Austin’s Address Supporting Texas Independence (1836) “A Foreigner in My Own Land”: Juan Nepomuceno Seguín Flees Texas (1842) Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Account of His Imprisonment During the Bear Flag Revolt in California (1846) Samuel Chamberlain’s Recollections of the Mexican War (1846) Vicente Filisola’s Account of the Battle of the Alamo (1849) José Antonio Navarro’s Letter to the Editor, San Antonio Ledger (1853) Elfido López Recalls Rural Mexican-American Life in the Late 19th Century (1870s)

3. Beyond the Continent, 1798–1898 Historical Overview American Colonization Society American Exceptionalism, Roots of Amity and Commerce, Treaty of (1858) Bakumatsu Barbary War (First) (1801–1805) Barbary War (Second) (1815) Bayonet Constitution (1887) Black Ships Burlingame-Seward Treaty (1868) Cushing, Caleb Filibusterers Gray, Robert Guano Islands Act (1856)

Gunboat Diplomacy Hawai‘i, Annexation of (1898) Hawaiian League Japan, Opening of (1853–1860) Kamehameha Kanghwa, Battle of (1871) Korean Expedition of 1871 Koszta Affair (1853) Liberia López, Narciso Midway Atoll Missionaries, Hawai‘i Monroe Doctrine (1823) Nicaragua, Republic of (1856–1857) Opium Wars Ostend Manifesto (1854) Pacific Mail Steamship Company Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of (1854) Perry, Matthew Calbraith Quasi-War Queen Lili‘uokalani Quitman, John A. Roberts, Edmund Sakoku Santo Domingo, Annexation of (1869–1871) Shimonoseki Straits, Battle of (1863) Shufeldt, Robert W. Strong, Josiah Sugar Plantations, Hawai‘i Tianjin, Treaty of (1858) Tyler, John Upshur, Abel Parker Walker, William Wanghia (Wangxia), Treaty of (1844) West Indies Squadron Whaling Industry Wilkes Expedition (1838–1842) Primary Documents Enslaved American James Riley Encounters an Arab Trader (1815) Matthew Perry’s Account of His Landing in Japan (1853) Ostend Manifesto (1854) Excerpt from William Walker’s The War in Nicaragua (1860) Glossary

Bibliography Index

VOLUME 2: Northwest Indian Wars to Wounded Knee Chronology: 1775–1898 1. The Expanding Nation in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1785–1835 Historical Overview American System Assimilation Black Hawk Black Hoof Blue Jacket Boone, Daniel Boudinot, Elias Brant, Joseph Calhoun, John Caldwell Cass, Lewis Cherokees Chicasaws Civilization Policy Clark, George Rogers Creek Wars Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of (1830) Factory System Fort McIntosh, Treaty of (1785) Fort Stanwix, Treaty of (1784) Fort Wayne, Treaties of (1803, 1809) Goschochking (Ohio) Massacre of 1782 Greenville, Treaty of (1795) Hamilton, Alexander Harrison, William Henry Hopewell, Treaty of (1785) Horseshoe Bend, Battle of (1814) Indian Removal Act of 1830 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 Jackson, Andrew Jefferson, Thomas Keokuk King Cotton Knox, Henry Little Turtle

Madison, James Marshall (John) Court Decisions (1823, 1831, 1832) McGillivray, Alexander McIntosh, William McKenney, Thomas L. Morse, Jedidiah National Road New Echota, Treaty of (1835) Northwest Land Ordinance (1785) Northwest Ordinance (1787) Northwest Territory Ohio Company Ohio Indian Confederation Osceola Paine, Thomas Potawatomis Prairie du Chien, Treaties of (1825, 1829, 1830) Red Sticks Ridge, John Ross, John Seminole War (Second) (1835–1842) St. Clair, Arthur Stokes Commission (1832–1837) Tecumseh Tenskwatawa Trail of Tears Washington, George Wayne, Anthony Whiskey Rebellion (1794) Primary Documents Northwest Ordinance (1787) “The Print of My Ancestor’s Houses”: Little Turtle Balks at Giving Up Land to General Anthony Wayne (1795) “My Husband Was Seized with the Mania”: Harriet L. Noble’s Account of Emigration from New York to Michigan (1824) President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress on Indian Removal (1829) Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) The Burlend Family Encounters America’s System for Populating the West, Pike Country, Illinois (1831) Black Hawk Remembers Village Life Along the Mississippi (1834) Journal of Occurrences of a Party of Emigrating Creek Indians (1837)

2. Into the Plains and Beyond, 1803–1898 Historical Overview

Alaska, Purchase of (1867) Anglo-Saxonism Artists, Western Ashley, William Henry Bent, William Benton, Thomas Hart Carson, Kit Catlin, George Chouteau Family Clark, William Compromise of 1850 Corps of Discovery (1803–1806) Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army Crédit Mobilier Scandal (1872) Douglas, Stephen A. Exodusters Free-Soil Movement Frémont, John Charles Frontier General Land Office Gilpin, William Gold Rush, California (1848) Gold Rush, Colorado (1858) Gold Rush, Klondike (1897–1899) Great American Desert Homestead Act (1862) Louisiana Purchase (1803) Manifest Destiny Mining Camps Missouri Compromise (1820) Mormonism Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857) Mountain Men National Parks Oklahoma Land Run (1889) Oregon Trail Pacific Railroad Act (1862) Pacific Railroad Reports (1853–1855) Polk, James Knox Powell, John Wesley Preemption Act of 1841 Romantic Thinkers Smith, Joseph Telegraph

Transcontinental Railroad Turner, Frederick Jackson U.S. Geological Survey Utah Expedition (Utah War) (1857–1858) Young, Brigham Primary Documents Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803) John L. O’Sullivan’s Article on America’s “Manifest Destiny” (1845) President James K. Polk’s Speech Reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine (1845) Senator Thomas Hart Benton on “The Destiny of a Race” (1846) Journalist Edward Gould Buffum Pans for Gold in California (1848) “This Muddy Place”: Mary Ballou, a Boardinghouse Keeper in the California Gold Rush (1854) Homestead Act (1862) “We Are Not Entirely Out of Civilization”: A Homesteader Writes Home—Letter from Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and the Wheeler Thomas Family (June 16, 1873)

3. Controlling the Indians, 1835–1903 Historical Overview Allotment American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Big Foot Black Hills Bosque Redondo (1863–1868) Buffalo Cultures Buffalo Soldiers Bureau of Indian Affairs Carlisle Indian School Cherokee Outlet and Cherokee Strip Chief Joseph Cochise Crazy Horse Crow Dog Custer, George Armstrong Dawes Severalty Act (1887) De Smet, Pierre-Jean Dodge, Henry Dog Soldiers Fletcher, Alice C. Fort Laramie Treaties (1851, 1868) Geronimo Grattan, John L. Great Peace of 1840 Great Sioux Uprising or Minnesota Uprising (1862)

Indians of the Eastern Plains Indians of the Great Basin Indian Territory Jackson, Helen Hunt Lakotas or Western Sioux Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle (1876) Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) Long Walk of the Navajos (1863–1864) Manuelito Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty (1867) Métis Nez Perce One Hundred Slain, Battle of (1866) Pawnee Scouts (1864–1876) Peace Policy Red Cloud Red River War (1874) Reservation System Sand Creek Massacre (1864) Schoolcraft, Henry Sherman, William Tecumseh Sitting Bull Treaty System Vanishing Indian Virgin Soil Epidemics Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) Yakima War (1855) Primary Documents Chief Arapooish’s Speech on Crow Country from Washington Irving’s The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1830s) “A Sioux Story of the War”: Jerome Big Eagle Describes the Great Sioux Uprising (1862) Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) Red Cloud’s Speech at Cooper Union, New York (1870) Excerpt from Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881) Dawes Act (1887) Wounded Knee Massacre: Testimony of the Sioux (1890) Glossary Bibliography Index

VOLUME 3: Spanish-American War to World War II

Chronology: 1868–1945 1. Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars Historical Overview African American Military Units Aguinaldo, Emilio American Anti-Imperialist League Beveridge, Albert J. Bryan, William Jennings Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention (1895–1902) Great White Fleet Guam Hay, John MacArthur, Arthur, Jr. Manila Bay, Battle of (1898) Martí, José McKinley, William Moro Rebellion (1899–1913) Paris, Treaty of (1898) Philippine Commissions, First (1899–1900) and Second (1900–1916) Philippine Organic Act (Philippine Bill of 1902) Philippine Revolution (1896–1898) Platt Amendment (1901) Propaganda, Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars Roosevelt, Theodore, and the Rough Riders Social Darwinism Teller Amendment (1898) Twain, Mark USS Maine Weyler y Nicolau, Valeriano Wood, Leonard Yellow Journalism Primary Documents José Martí’s “Our America” (1891) President Grover Cleveland’s Final Message to Congress: “American Interest in the Cuban Revolution” (1896) General Calixto Garcia’s Letter to General William R. Shafter (1898) “The Big Type War of the Yellow Kids” (1898) New York Journal and Advertiser Article Calls Sinking of the Maine the “Work of an Enemy” (1898) Lyrics to “The Battle of Santiago” by Charles F. Alsop (1898) Albert Beveridge’s “March of the Flag” (1898) President William McKinley’s “The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” (1898)

“Ten Thousand Miles from Tip to Tip” (1898) Andrew Carnegie’s “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways” (1898) “Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts” (October 3, 1899) Emilio Aguinaldo’s Manifesto Protesting the U.S. Claim of Sovereignty over the Philippines (1899) Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1899) Platt Amendment (1901) “Columbia’s Easter Bonnet” (1901)

2. American Expansion into Latin America and Asia, 1899–1945 Historical Overview American Samoa Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) Butler, Smedley Darlington Chicago Columbian Exposition (1893) Dollar Diplomacy Dominican Republic (1893–1945) Education Good Neighbor Policy Haiti (1893–1945) Jones Act (Philippine Autonomy Law of 1916) Lodge Corollary (1912) Mahan, Alfred Thayer McKinley Tariff Act (1890) Mexico (1893–1945) Nicaragua (1893–1945) Open Door Policy Panama/Panama Canal Puerto Rico Roosevelt, Theodore Root, Elihu Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) Somoza García, Anastasio Standard Fruit Company Taft, William Howard Tracy, Benjamin Franklin Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 United Fruit Company Venezuela (1893–1945) Washington Naval Conference (1922–1923) World’s Fairs Primary Documents Excerpt from Captain Alfred T. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) Chicago World’s Fair (1893)

Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Note (1899) Map of “Greater America” (1899) Roosevelt Corollary (1904) Excerpt from the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905) President Theodore Roosevelt on International Relations in the Western Hemisphere, State of the Union Address (December 3, 1906) Excerpt from “The Panama Canal a Sound Business Proposition,” a San Francisco Call Article Outlining the Expected Economic Benefits of the Panama Canal (1908) President Woodrow Wilson’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Mexican Affairs (August 27, 1913) Protest by Women of Palacagüina, Nicaragua, Against Destruction of Their Church by U.S. Marines (1929) General Smedley Butler’s Memorial Day Speech, “War Is a Racket” (1933) President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Statement on the Good Neighbor Policy in Cuba (August 13, 1933) Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934) Standard Oil’s Reply to Mexico: Standard Oil Puts Forth Its Position on Expropriation of Oil Leases by the Mexican Government (1940)

3. World War I and the Interwar Era Historical Overview Addams, Jane Africa, U.S. Interests in American League to Limit Armaments American Red Cross as Agent of U.S. Expansion Baruch, Bernard Committee on Public Information (CPI) Debs, Eugene V. Espionage Act (1917) A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway) (1929) Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations (1918, 1919) Hughes, Charles Evans “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1914) Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Isolationism Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) Lenin, Vladimir, Anti-Imperialist Critique of Lodge, Henry Cabot Peace Movement, World War I Preparedness Movement Road to War: America, 1914–1917 (Walter Millis) (1935) Russian Civil War, U.S.-Allied Intervention in (1918–1920) Schenck (Charles) v. United States (1919) Sedition Act (1918) Selective Service System

Tarzan Unrestricted Submarine Warfare Versailles, Treaty of (1919) Virgin Islands Wilson, Woodrow Zimmermann Telegram (1917) Primary Documents Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s Note to the German Government in Response to Unrestricted Submarine Warfare (May 13, 1915) Lyrics to the Song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1915) Helen Keller’s Speech “Strike Against War,” Delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York City (January 5, 1916) Zimmermann Telegram (January 1917) Speech of Former Secretary of War Elihu Root on the Need for U.S. Intervention (January 25, 1917) American Declaration of War Against Germany (April 6, 1917) Committee on Public Information Propaganda Posters (1917) President Woodrow Wilson’s Proclamation “Do Your Bit for America” (April 15, 1917) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917) Lyrics for the Song “Over There” (1917) President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918) Speech Delivered by Eugene Debs in Canton, Ohio, in Violation of the Espionage Act (June 16, 1918) Randolph Bourne’s The State (1918) The Conviction of Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare and North Dakota Politics (1918) Speech of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts Opposing U.S. Membership in the League of Nations (August 12, 1919) George Creel’s How We Advertised America (1920) Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

4. World War II: The American Century Dawns Historical Overview America First Committee American Armies of Occupation (World War II) American Century/American Exceptionalism Arsenal of Democracy Atlantic Charter (1941) Atomic Bomb Bretton Woods Conference/System China (World War II) Coca-Cola Fascism, Support in the United States and Economic Ties to General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Hull, Cordell Lend-Lease (1940–1941)

Micronesia Middle East Nazi Germany, U.S. Relationship to Neutrality Acts (1930s) Northwest Defense Projects Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis Peace Movement (1930s) Potsdam Conference (1945) Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Southeast Asia Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) Stimson, Henry L. Tehran Conference (1943) United Nations (UN) Why We Fight (Frank Capra) (1942–1945) Yalta Conference (1945) Zionism Primary Documents The Nye Commission Report (1936) Charles Lindbergh’s Address to the America First Committee in New York City (April 23, 1941) The Atlantic Charter (August 14, 1941) Map of U.S. Defense Projects in Alaska (1941–1945) “This Man Is Your Friend” Propaganda Poster Series Two Letters Describing U.S. Interests in the Middle East (1944, 1948) Excerpts from the Diary of President Harry S. Truman Regarding the Potsdam Conference (1945) “Japan’s Struggle to End the War” from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report (June 30, 1946) Senate Committee Report on the Support U.S. Corporations Provided for Fascism and Nazism Prior to World War II (1974) Glossary Bibliography Index

VOLUME 4: The Cold War to the War on Terror Chronology: 1945–2015 1. The Early Cold War Era and Global U.S. Interests, 1946–1954 Historical Overview Acheson, Dean Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons (1946–1954) Berlin Blockade/Airlift (1948–1949)

Byrnes, James F. Castle Bravo Nuclear Test (1954) Central Intelligence Agency (1947–1954) China, Early Cold War (1946–1954) Cold War Cultural Imperialism Dulles, Allen Dulles, John Foster Eisenhower Doctrine (1957) Eisenhower, Dwight D., “New Look” Policy of Figueres Ferrer, José French War in Indochina (1946–1954) Geneva Accords (1954) Greek Civil War (1946–1949) Green Revolution Guatemala (1946–1954) Iran, Coup d’etat (1953) Israel (1946–1954) Italy Japan, Postwar Occupation of Kennan, George Korea (1945–1953) MacArthur, Douglas Marshall Plan (1948–1952) McCarthyism National Security Act (1947) National Security Council Paper NSC-68 Nitze, Paul North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Operation Splinter Factor (1948–1956) Organization of American States (OAS) Point IV Program (U.S. Home Economics Education in Iran) Radio Free Europe (RFE) South African Apartheid Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment U.S. Military Bases Primary Documents President Harry S. Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress Declaring the Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947) North Atlantic Treaty, Establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (April 4, 1949) Excerpts from Dean Acheson’s Speech on the Far East (January 12, 1950) Excerpts from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within” Speech, Delivered at Wheeling, West Virginia (February 9, 1950) and Senator McCarthy’s Follow-up Letter to President Harry Truman (February 11, 1950) NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950)

President Harry S. Truman’s Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea (July 19, 1950) (Including the Text of a Message from General Douglas MacArthur Describing the Situation in Korea) United States Embassy, Iran Cable from C. Edward Wells, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, to the Department of State Regarding the Pro-Soviet Film North Star (December 28, 1950) Cable from U.S. Egyptian Embassy to State Department Regarding an Article in an Egyptian Newspaper on American Aid to Saudi Arabia (January 5, 1951) Defense of Iceland: An Agreement between the United States and Iceland (May 5, 1951) Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan (1951) CIA Document on the Arbenz Government in Guatemala (1952) CIA Propaganda Document Smearing Prime Minister Mosaddeq of Iran as a “Dictator” (Summer 1953) and CIA Summary Entitled “Campaign to Install a Pro-Western Government in Iran,” a Redacted Draft of the Internal History of the Coup That Overthrew Prime Minister Mosaddeq (1953) Philip C. Roettinger Recalls the 1954 CIA Coup in Guatemala (1986)

2. Vietnam and the Limits of American Power, 1955–1975 Historical Overview Antiwar Movement Antiwar Protest Songs Apollo Space Program (1963–1972) Argentina Australian Coup d’Etat (1975) The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo) (1966) Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis (1961, 1962) Berlin Crisis (1961–1962) Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Brazil (1954–1975) British Guiana Cambodia Castro Ruz, Fidel Chile (1954–1975) Congo Crisis (1960–1961) Diem, Ngo Dinh Dominican Republic (1954–1975) Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick) (1964) Ecuador (1954–1975) G.I. Joe Greece, Military Coup d’Etat and Junta (1967–1974) The Green Berets (1968) Guatemala (1954–1975) Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che” Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution (1964) Haiti (1954–1975) Hanoi-Haiphong Bombing (1966–1972)

Ho Chi Minh Indonesia/East Timor Jazz Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, John F., American University “Peace” Speech (1963) King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” Speech (1967) Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik Kitchen Debate (1959) Lebanon, U.S. Interventions in LeMay, Curtis Madman Theory Mayaguez Incident (1975) Military-Industrial Complex My Lai Massacre (1968) National Liberation Front (NLF) Non-Aligned Movement Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1968) Paris Peace Accords (1973) Peace Corps Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg Phoenix Program (1968–1972) Red Power Movement Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (1975) Six-Day (Arab-Israeli) War (1967) Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) (1954–1976) Sputnik (1957) Taiwan Strait Crisis, Second (1958) Tet Offensive (1968) Tijerina, Reies Lopez (1926–2015) The Ugly American (Eugene Burdick and William Lederer) (1958) Uruguay U-2 Spy Plane Incident (1960) Vietnam War (1955–1975) War Powers Act (1973) Westerns Yom Kippur War (1973) Primary Documents Ho Chi Minh’s Appeal on the Occasion of the Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party, Delivered at Hong Kong (February 18, 1930) Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (September 2, 1945) Telegram from Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the U.S. Consulate in Hanoi (May 20, 1949) Excerpts from President Dwight Eisenhower’s News Conference, Remarks on Future of Indochina (April 7, 1954)

U.S. Mission to the United Nations Dispatch 790, (UN-UND) Petition from the Marshallese People Concerning the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (May 5, 1954) Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s Statement on Indochina (May 7, 1954) and Communiqué to State Department Diplomats at Geneva Regarding Indochina (May 7, 1954) Senator John F. Kennedy’s Speech in the United States Senate: “Imperialism—The Enemy of Freedom” (July 2, 1957) CIA Director Allen Dulles’s Cable on Possible CIA Involvement in Plots against Patrice Lumumba during the Congo Crisis (August 26, 1960) President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in Which He Warns of the Military-Industrial Complex (January 17, 1961) Cuban Revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara’s Speech to the Santa Clara, Cuba, Sugar Workers (March 28, 1961) Fidel Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana (1962) President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Message to Congress on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (August 5, 1964) and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964) “Memorandum for the Record” on the Orchestration of Chilean Coup (September 17, 1970) Teleconference between President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the Overthrow of President Allende in Chile (September 16, 1973)

3. Confronting the Vietnam Syndrome, 1976–1989 Historical Overview Afghanistan (1976–1989) Angola Antiapartheid Movement Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola) (1979) Born on the 4th of July (Oliver Stone) (1989) Camp David Accords (1978) Carter Doctrine (1980) Children’s Toys Church Committee Hearings/Reports (1975–1976) Country Western Music (1970s–2014) Dellums, Ronald V. El Salvador (1976–1989) Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick) (1987) Grenada (1976–1989) Honduras (1976–1989) Hussein, Saddam Invasion USA (Joseph Zito) (1985) Iran-Contra Scandal (1985–1987) Iran Hostage Crisis (1979–1981) Israel (1976–1989) Lebanon (1976–1989) Libya (1976–1989) Marcos, Ferdinand (1917–1989), and the Philippines

Missing (Konstantine Costa Gavras) (1982) Nicaragua, Contra War (1981–1990) Nuclear Freeze Movement Oil Industry in the Middle East Panama Canal (Torrijos-Carter) Treaties (1977) Panama Invasion (1989) Permanent Court of International Justice “Rambo” Films (1982, 1985, 1988, 2008) Red Dawn (John Milius) (1984) Rhodesia/Zimbabwe School of the Americas Top Gun (Tony Scott) (1986) United States Central America Peace Movement Vietnam Syndrome Young, Andrew Primary Documents President Jimmy Carter’s Address to the Nation on the Panama Canal Treaties (February 1, 1978) Testimony of Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz on Vieques, Puerto Rico (October 2, 1979) President Jimmy Carter’s State of the Union Address Declaring the Carter Doctrine (January 23, 1980) Tom Carhart’s Statement to the U.S. Fine Arts Commission Opposing the “Black Gash of Shame,” the Design Selected for the Vietnam Wall Memorial (October 13, 1981) President Ronald Reagan’s Address on a Plan for Middle East Peace (September 1, 1982) President Ronald Reagan’s Address on Central America (April 27, 1983) Excerpts from a Cable Sent from the U.S. Embassy in the United Kingdom by Charles H. Price II to the Department of State on Donald Rumsfeld’s Meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (December 21, 1983) Excerpts from In Search of Hidden Truths, the Second Interim Report of the National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras (1998) Excerpts from a Report to Congress on Congressional Concerns Regarding the School of the Americas (April 16, 2001) Profile of Antiapartheid Activist Jennifer Davis (2007)

4. The Lone Superpower, 1990–2014 Historical Overview Abu Ghraib Afghanistan (1990–2014) Al Qaeda Balkans, U.S. Interests and Intervention in Bin Laden, Osama Bolton, John Bush Doctrine Cable News Central Asia

Cheney, Richard B. “Dick” Climate Change Colombia Drone Attacks Egypt (1990–2013) Georgia, Republic of Guantánamo Bay Haiti (1990–2014) Homeland Security/Intelligence Establishment Honduras (1990–2014) Iran (1990–2014) Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991) Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011) Israel (1990–2014) Mexican-U.S. Border Relations Militarization of American Culture National Missile Defense North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Post–Cold War Expansion of Pakistan (1990–2014) Powell Doctrine Private Military Contractors Rumsfeld, Donald Saudi Arabia September 11, 2001 (9/11) Soft Power Somalia Sustainable Development True Lies (James Cameron) (1994) Venezuela Wolfowitz, Paul World Trade Organization (WTO) Primary Documents “Defense Planning Guidance,” a Policy Statement on America’s Mission in the Post–Cold War World (1992) “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a Report by the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000 of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (1996) Project for the New American Century, Letter to President Bill Clinton Regarding Iraq (January 26, 1998) United States Information Service, “State Department Fact Sheet on the Enlargement of NATO” (February 11, 1998) An Interview with Colombian Guerrilla Movement ELN (National Liberation Army) Commander Antonio García (October 2000) Memories of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks: Narrative of Henrietta McKee Carter (September 11, 2001) President George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address (January 29, 2002)

George W. Bush Administration, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002) International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705, “Resolution Against the War” (October 18, 2002) Remarks by President Barack Obama in an Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 24, 2013) Russian President Vladimir Putin Addresses the Russian Annexation of Crimea (March 18, 2014) Glossary Bibliography Editors and Contributors Index

Preface

The United States of America, a nation whose founders feared a permanent standing army and urged future generations to avoid “foreign entanglements,” has become unquestionably the largest global military power in history. Imperialism and Expansionism in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection was conceived partly in response to increased attention to the costs and consequences of American interventionist policies and the nation’s position as the world’s dominant military force. The encyclopedia is broadly framed chronologically in four volumes and further divided both thematically and chronologically into sections that encompass the major periods of American continental and overseas expansionist history. The four volumes chronicle the historical roots of America’s growth from colony to hemispheric hegemon to global empire of unprecedented power. Featuring more than 650 individual topical headwords, the encyclopedia encompasses the full historical scope of American expansionism and imperialism—from the colonial and early frontier era of the 18th century through the “War on Terror” of the 21st century. Topics include major biographical figures such as American presidents and statesmen, influential public and intellectual figures, military commanders, and key episodes of imperial conflict both at home and abroad. These conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries feature Native and non-Native relations; land laws and other legal, legislative, and scientific instruments of continental expansion; early forays of overseas expansion, such as the opening of Japan; and a thorough, all-encompassing treatment of America’s first overseas imperial conflicts in Cuba and the Philippines. Entries encompassing the early 20th century feature key economic concerns and figures driving U.S. imperial interest in Latin America; the often-forgotten dimensions of U.S. overseas ambitions regarding American involvement in both world wars; broad and deep coverage of the American projection of economic interests and military power throughout the Cold War and beyond, through the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East; and isolationist and antiimperial/antiwar forces from the 1930s through the present. We believe that one of the distinguishing features of the encyclopedia is its thorough inclusion of cultural elements of American expansionism and imperialism. Entries and primary sources pertaining to such topics as Indian captivity narratives, Romantic thinkers, the Red Cross, overseas education, jazz and Hollywood westerns in the Cold War, and protest and country music help to shed new and interesting light on familiar subject matter. The encyclopedia is multidisciplinary in scope, offering student and nonspecialist readers key insights, for example, on the intersection of popular culture with the projection of U.S. military power. Though structured in encyclopedic format, the entries are succinctly and incisively written and informed by the latest scholarship on issues ranging from Native peoples’ responses to westward movement to today’s complex engagements in the Middle East and Africa. Glossaries, chronologies, extensive primary sources, sidebars, and bibliographies in each volume combine to make

this work a thoroughly comprehensive encyclopedic chronicle of one of the most urgently important topics of our time. Chris J. Magoc and David Bernstein

Acknowledgments

Any project of prodigious volume and scope such as this does not happen without contributions from a great number of dedicated people. Tremendous debt is owed, first, to Senior Editor Michael Millman at ABC-CLIO, whose vision for the project inspired me to take it on. Michael’s initial conceptualization of a project centered on American imperialism, coupled with his intuitive understanding of its value in this historical moment, gave me all I needed to convince my colleague, David Bernstein, to accept the great challenge of serving as co-editor of a work we both believed was too important not to embrace. We are both grateful for the keen editorial eye, perseverance, and boundless patience of John Wagner, Senior Development Editor for the project at ABC-CLIO, and for the steady hand of Project Coordinator Barbara Patterson who was always there to resolve concerns from our authors. All of us are deeply indebted to the nearly 200 scholars who have contributed enormously to this project; it simply could not have happened without them and we are forever grateful. Great thanks is owed also to my undergraduate Research Assistants at Mercyhurst University, Chelsea Marie Morris and Mohammed Al-Bidhawi, who performed exceptionally well on a range of challenges. I am not sure if the project would have gotten off the ground at all without Chelsea’s fine organizing work and attention to administrative detail in those first challenging months. I am so thankful to David Bernstein for agreeing, perhaps in a weak moment, to take this project on. His good spirit, scholarly expertise, personal support, and timely good work have been indispensable to our success. I will note also that whatever errors may remain in these pages belong not to him, but to me who had the final editorial set of eyes. Other debts are personal and can never be repaid. I am eternally grateful to Mary Ellen Magoc, my lifelong partner. As always, she has been unfailingly patient and lovingly supportive throughout this richly rewarding but immensely challenging project that cost her far more than a few evenings of her gardening partner. There is little that I write or do in this life without thinking of my children, Ethan and Caroline. With the last words of this encyclopedia go my hopes for a more secure future and peaceful world for them. Finally, to my parents, Stephen J. Magoc and Frances Judith Uhric Magoc, there is nothing left to say, except … je te milujem. Chris J. Magoc February 2015

General Introduction

In the 1890s, historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the experience of settling the western wilderness and advancing a continuously receding, westward-moving frontier had molded Americans into a uniquely democratic and adventurous people. His analysis held that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development” (Turner). Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” quickly became, and in fact remains, a powerful and influential national document, reinforcing Americans’ conception of themselves as an individualistic, heroic, and pioneering people. Subsequent historians have pointed out significant flaws in Turner’s thesis including its ethnocentrism and neglect of areas such as Texas, Oregon, and New Mexico, which do not fit into an east-to-west model of development. Nor did many darker episodes of westward movement square neatly with Turner’s sanguine interpretation of the course and consequences of national expansion. Despite, and in some ways because of its fatal flaws, the Turner thesis provides the perfect overture to this four-volume encyclopedia and document collection encompassing the immense chronological sweep of American expansionism and imperialism. Turner famously delivered his address at the 1893 Chicago Columbian World Exposition, an extraordinary moment in the nation’s cultural history, the evolution of America’s view of itself, and in the growth of the United States from a continental expansionist nation to a global imperial power. A showcase of American technology and innovation, industrial and agricultural production, as well as history and culture, the Chicago fair made clear that an ascendant, progressive United States had arrived among the great nations of the globe. A live ethnological display of global humanity organized within a social Darwinist framework drove home the message of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The classically inspiring, imposing Beaux Arts architecture of the fair’s electrified “White City” suggested the dawning of a new imperial power. Although historian Turner was looking backward, the combination of his compelling conclusion that American history, political development, character, and identity all derived from the story of westward movement—coupled with the conclusion that that same western frontier was now “closed”—prompted profoundly unsettling concerns about America’s future. Questions about America’s postfrontier identity and development struck political and economic elites with a sense of urgency in the economically and politically volatile context of the 1890s. Indeed, Turner’s explanation that each new western frontier had opened up new lands and resources and provided a “safety valve” to release economic and political pressures arrived with an exquisite sense of timing. It came at the very historical moment that American strategists, political officials, and other influential voices saw enormous strategic advantage in joining the European imperial scramble for colonies. Moreover, just as Turner explained America’s westward expansion as a natural, cosmically logical development—in the words of newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan, a manifest destiny ordained by continental geography, a

restlessly progressive and racially superior people, and divine providence—so, too, did it seem “natural” to many Americans that the nation extend its righteous mission overseas. Chicago offered other points of nexus between the continental expansionism of the past and an emerging imperialism. Right outside the shimmering fairgrounds, William F. Cody set up his “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Buffalo Bill’s popular exhibition of sharpshooting riflemen, cowboys, and Native Americans delivered with dramatic flair another, complementary version of western history, famously transforming pioneering, expansionist Americans into innocent victims of savagery and establishing the archetype for Hollywood westerns to come. It is altogether logical that the transplanted, regenerated western rancher and sportsman Theodore Roosevelt and celebrated western artist Frederic Remington were two of the most colorful and vocal advocates of U.S. imperialist expansion and militarism. To further cement the righteous Turnerian frontier epoch with the imperial future that awaited in the new century, the future president’s First U.S. Cavalry unit that fought in Cuba was given the appellation of “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” Roosevelt’s lived experience as a transplanted westerner and Cuban warrior charging up San Juan Hill was only the most famous expression of how a fin de siècle generation of male elites joined an infatuation with the mythology of regenerative western violence and expansionist conquest to the formulation of an imperial American foreign policy. In the process, they believed that they would also strengthen and ennoble an American manhood that had degenerated amid the influences of urban modernity. There is danger in conflating or even drawing parallels between the forces that drive any centuriesold history with those that shape the relatively recent past. The intellectual, legal, and moral justifications of the “right of conquest” offered by the Founders and first generations of American statesmen for Indian policy and wars of conquest do not account for Harry Truman’s decision to initiate a “police action” in Korea in 1950, no less the 2003 preemptive invasion of Iraq. Cartographic projections of western lands and resources in the 1860s have little bearing on the Apollo space program’s mapping of the moon and the penetration of a galactic “New Frontier” of Americans in the 1960s. Neither continental expansion and the conquest of both Native American peoples and one-third of Mexico, nor even the hemispheric hegemony of the Americas attained by the 1920s, led inevitably to the United States becoming the preeminent global imperial power of the early 21st century. Without question, however, users of this encyclopedia and document collection will undoubtedly discover the same intellectual, political, and cultural threads that run through time and across place that we have. To cite just a few examples, some dripping with irony: American soldiers in Vietnam called areas controlled by the Communist Viet Cong “Indian Country”; Americans today rain down massive firepower in the Middle East via helicopters named Apache and Comanche; both jingoistic patriotism and anti-imperial resistance courses through the history of the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, World War I, and on through Vietnam and to contemporary conflicts in the “War on Terror”; Ronald Reagan, seeking support for his administration’s Contra war in Nicaragua, invoked the Truman Doctrine of containment and throughout his administration summoned mythical rhetoric and imagery from America’s past in an attempt to reassert a righteous and activist American international agenda; and certainly the powerful, enduring mythology of “American exceptionalism,” which continues to finds strident expression, is deeply rooted in the 19th-century history of Manifest Destiny. Although Frederick Jackson Turner said little of it in his treatise, American expansionism is inextricably bound to the history of U.S. Indian policy. From the country’s inception throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, the guiding principle of Indian policy was the acquisition of land in specific areas of encounter where Indians were an immediate barrier to either westward-moving settlers or an

expanding nation-state. While this essential framework simplifies a very complex story of expansion, it does direct our attention to those regions and tactics that were most important to policymakers at the time. Beginning with a policy of first conquering and then “civilizing” in the Old Northwest, followed by one of removal in the South, to a Permanent Indian Territory on the Middle Border and the creation of reservations on the Great Plains, policy was fashioned with the acquisition of a specific area of land in mind, only to be replaced with other policies better suited to acquire a new region once the first was settled. Thus the history of American territorial expansion—with its concomitant questions of legal jurisdiction—is deeply entwined with the history of federal Indian policy. While the primary goal of American Indian policy remained remarkably consistent, its effectiveness did not. On the contrary, one of the primary reasons for the continual change in tactics was Indians’ reaction to conditions that they did not approve. Indians were not helpless victims at the mercy of the American government, but used a variety of diplomatic, political, and military tactics to influence policy. Similarly, not all Indians viewed American expansion in the same light. While some Indians tenaciously fought against any American presence, others welcomed representatives of the government as possible allies against other, more immediate enemies. Nor was American Indian policy driven by overwhelming consensus. Intricately tied to questions of slavery, land use, and federal jurisdiction, not to mention the variety of attitudes of white Americans toward Natives themselves, Indian policy was passionately debated both within the government and by the public at large. Thus it is important to remember that while U.S. government policies attempted to treat Native Americans as a homogenous group, neither the officials who created them, nor the Indians who were affected by them, spoke with one voice. From the very beginning, Americans wrestled with profound, troubling questions of how to reconcile a constitutional republic with the inexorable pressures of expansionism. The Founders were challenged to establish the legal architecture of a system of methodical westward movement into Indian lands that somehow rested on essential democratic precepts guaranteeing the sovereign, universal “rights of men” with the practical needs of a growing nation. Indian tribes of the Old Northwest showed that they would not simply accede to American claims of conquest and violently resisted settler expansion. Aware the United States was unable financially or militarily to protect frontier settlements from increasingly violent interactions with Indians, the Continental Congress conceived a new Indian policy whose aim was to gradually obtain Indian land as cheaply as possible. The new “Peace Policy,” designed by Secretary of War Henry Knox and George Washington, was articulated in Article III of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787: The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress. (Northwest Ordinance) Along with the bloodless acquisition of land, the plan added a moral dimension to Indian policy with its plan to “civilize” the Indians. Begun by Knox and Washington but greatly expanded by Thomas Jefferson, this program aimed at transforming Indians from hunters to farmers (disregarding that many were already expert agriculturalists) who could then be absorbed into white society. Thus, as Americans acquired new lands by formal treaties, Indians living in adjacent regions would learn agricultural skills and other Euro-American arts of civilization, making the next cession possible. Although Congress attempted to control the pace of the frontier’s advance, it was not long before white encroachment onto

Indian lands and the violence it fostered highlighted a major flaw in the theory of controlled expansion: the speed with which settlers called for lands made any civilization project nearly impossible. Although each episode of westward expansion obviously varied, the administrative foundation and essential pattern for the taking of Indian lands had been established. So, too, the direction of a varied Indian response: while many Indian groups in the Old Northwest actively fought American expansion, many of those living in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had successfully adapted to the agricultural standard envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and lived relatively peaceably among the advancing whites. With the exception of the Seminoles, the majority of the Indians of the “Five Civilized Tribes” willingly ceded extensive portions of their land and moved west in exchange for the promise of no future relocations. To the Pacific Coast and throughout the century, Indian groups would respond very differently to the pressures of American expansion—a history further entangled with that of intertribal warfare and the shifting American-Indian alliances that would bring. For example, the sudden presence of forcibly removed southeastern tribes in southwestern “Indian Territory” put immediate pressure on Indian peoples already living there. Despite the deeply problematic removal policy, some Indian groups in the region that would become Kansas and Nebraska looked to the expanding United States as a possible ally against Plains Indians such as the Western Sioux and Comanches, both of which were also expanding into their territory. One of the biggest obstacles to a consistent Indian policy was the resurgence of republican imperialism in the 1840s. With the annexation of Texas in 1845, the settlement of the Oregon question in 1846, and the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the United States grew by an incredible 70 percent. That enormous expanse of lands contained Native peoples who had to be incorporated into a very tenuous system of governance. Add to this the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill in 1849 and the hundreds of thousands of people and animals traveling through lands guaranteed to Indians in perpetuity, and one sees the impossibility, even for the most sympathetic of Indian advocates, of forming a realistic and humane policy. Nonetheless, expansion itself was not foreordained. O’Sullivan’s claim that it was American’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” captivated many Americans, but was far from universally embraced (O’Sullivan). Inevitably, the ideological fervor and practical urge for continental expansion confronted the growing sectional divide over slavery and the resultant onset of the Civil War. Regardless of its source and momentous ultimate outcomes for the nation, westward expansion was an unmitigated disaster for Indian peoples. Unlike the antebellum Permanent Indian State, the huge reservations created in the post–Civil War era had all along been conceived as a temporary measure. As soon as Indians were no longer dependent on hunting and had learned the agricultural arts, it was expected that individual families would establish their own farms and the extraneous lands would be sold to white settlers. In order to speed this process, the Interior Department introduced what would finally become the General Allotment or Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which gave 160 acres of land to heads of Indian families and 80 acres to unmarried adults. As with most of the century’s Indian policy, assimilation through forced severalty would be a destructive failure for the Indians. Though undeniably created as a mechanism for taking the lands of Native peoples, American Indian policy was not conceived with the goal of destroying Indian cultures. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, numerous politicians and reformers acted with what they believed to be the Indians’ welfare in mind. As with the popular attitudes toward Indians, policy oscillated through periods of more and less humane administration. The execution of more humane policy often ran afoul of great differences between conflicting intentions and actions in Washington versus those in the West. Whatever the intentions of its

regulators, however, the policies of removal and assimilation were largely destructive for Indians. And Western expansion did not stop at the turn of the century. Even as elites grappled with the closing of the western frontier of which Turner had spoken in Chicago, Native peoples in Alaska and Hawaii experienced the damaging effects of policies that bore the same primary purpose of acquiring land. In that respect at least, a century of expansionist policy had been a remarkable success. Beyond the end of the Indian wars and the closing of the West, the 1890s proved to be the watershed historical moment in the evolution of America as a world power. Multiple forces were at work. First and foremost, the imperial colonialism of European nations and Japan’s newfound expansion drew the eye of American political and economic elites who, along with military strategists led by Captain Alfred T. Mahan, believed the United States was well positioned to become an imperial force and enjoy the economic benefits of raw materials, new markets, and cheap labor that accrued to colonial powers; expanding investments by large-scale American agribusiness operations in Hawaii and Spanishcontrolled Cuba pointed toward deepening economic engagement overseas, and the need for naval power and a chain of strategic possessions to protect those interests. The Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars marked a profound change that went deeper than the acquisition of the material territories. Once “the taste of empire [was] in the mouth of the people,” as the Washington Post declared, there was no turning back (Zinn). Deepening U.S. economic engagement throughout the Americas underlay a half-century of armed imperial intervention from Cuba to Nicaragua. Island possessions that came with the victories in the Spanish- and Philippine-American Wars helped to defend U.S. interests in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Beyond their economic benefits, Hawaii and the Philippines provided the United States with an excellent naval harbor and an imposing strategic presence in the Pacific, fortifying U.S. pressure for an economic “open door” in China. The First World War appeared to position the United States to play a major role in reconfiguring portions of the world map and reshaping the paradigm of international relations. However, the combination of Wilson’s intransigent leadership and Americans’ resistance toward further entanglement with European affairs doomed the Versailles Treaty and led U.S. foreign policy into a period long described as “isolationist.” Americans turned inward. Disillusionment and outright revulsion with the war enjoyed broad mainstream support and found expression in music, film, and literature. Although pacifist and isolationist sentiments dominated the American polity during the interwar era, the nation remained a hemispheric power and quietly began a surge in global economic expansion. American corporations dramatically increased their overseas investments in Africa as well as Europe— some of which directly contributed to arming the Third Reich. These deepening global investments further established the strategic context for a more potent projection of U.S. military power following the Second World War. It was in part the U.S. determination to protect its own interests in Asia, in particular access to a besieged China, and the broader South Pacific that led toward the path of conflict with the Empire of Japan. Wartime developments helped to create the superstructure for what publishing magnate Henry Luce envisioned in 1941 as the “American Century” of global dominance. The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference established the outlines of an American- and Anglo-European–directed global financial system for the promotion of trade, expansion of the market economy, currency regulation and stability (pegged to the U.S. dollar), and reconstruction. With the haunting specter of radical ideologies that arose from the ashes of World War I, and with a nervous eye on the appeal of communism around the globe, the overriding goal of U.S. officials was to promote free-market economic growth and noncommunist global political stability. The ability to heavily capitalize reconstruction efforts gave the United States proportionately strong influence at the International Monetary Fund and what became the World Bank. Further, the flow of

millions in aid to Saudi Arabia during the war presaged the dominant role the United States would play in the Middle East in the postwar era. After the war, the United States committed itself to a global struggle to contain the spread of communism. With zealous determination, an immense global military establishment and intelligence operation not only resisted Communist aggression in Europe and Asia, but also worked to crush nationalist rebellions, subvert democratic elections that threatened to end with victorious Socialist or Communist leadership, topple governments, and plot assassinations of foreign leaders. Rarely acknowledged was that the extraordinary, unprecedented national commitment of resources required of Americans to win the Cold War and defeat communism paralleled and reinforced the equally important goal of advancing the nation’s own strategic agenda. In any case, by the early 1960s a vast national security state had already fought a “police action” in Korea, secretly gathered personal information on several million allegedly “subversive” Americans, and amassed an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. Further, as President Eisenhower famously noted in 1961, much of the nation’s economy was dependent on weapons spending and large portions of its scientific research had effectively become militarized. And now, the generation of Americans that had whipped the Nazis steeled themselves to do what the French could not do in their imperial war in Indochina. Their sons, who had watched John Wayne defeat both savage Indians and Japanese and played with G.I. Joe, would bring home a heroic military victory against the Communists. Except that they did not. The defeat in Vietnam, America’s longest war until Afghanistan, changed everything and nothing. The mid and late 1970s witnessed a season of reform that included oversight of and modest restraints on the exercise of intelligence agency activities at home and abroad, and ostensibly the ability of presidents to take military action. In confronting the crisis of the Yom Kippur War, President Nixon found his hands tied by a war-weary nation and a Congress suddenly exercised by the postwar drift toward an imperial presidency. The somewhat chastened America of the post-Vietnam era would not last. President Jimmy Carter faced a storm of criticism in 1978 when agreeing to a bipartisan-negotiated set of treaties handing off control of the Panama Canal to the people of that country. To conservative critics who saw America afflicted by a “Vietnam Syndrome,” the treaties embodied a weakened nation in retreat. The fall of the U.S.-installed shah in strategically crucial Iran and the unchecked aggression of the Soviets in Afghanistan seemed final proof that the United States had lost its resolve to act decisively in a world more dangerous than ever. In the decades that have followed, whether Democrat or Republican in the White House, the nation has determined to leave the misguided adventure in Vietnam to the historians and to reassert a vigorous, almost unceasing level of military engagement overseas. In the face of such national recriminations as that which came from the fall of Saigon and disclosures of CIA abuses brought forth by the Church Committee, Ronald Reagan declared that the “era of self-doubt [was] over.” Reasserting America’s unflinching determination to both defeat the Communists and confront the rising specter of terrorism, President Reagan fought a proxy Contra war in Nicaragua, bombed Libya, deployed American forces to both Lebanon and Grenada, sold weapons to both arch-enemy Iran and the notorious Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and presided over a massive nuclear weapons buildup. His successor, President George H. W. Bush, toppled a longtime U.S.-supported strongman in Panama and then became the first of four successive presidents to wage war in Iraq. Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act calling for regime change, and in concert with Great Britain, bombed that country over the alleged continuation of a weapons program the United States had once fueled, bombed the terror-training camps of Al Qaeda, pressed for an expansion of NATO eastward that provoked Russian antagonism, and led the United States into a NATO military campaign in the Balkans. Indeed, the post–Cold War era

witnessed not a reduction but a significant enlargement of the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East, Eurasia, and Africa. Independent analyses at the turn of the millennium judged that if one included nuclear and conventional weapons production, all military, intelligence, and security expenditures at home and abroad, and the cost of past wars, the United States was spending more on national defense than every nation on earth combined. The United States also led the world in weapons sales. And this was before September 11, 2001. The shocking attack that morning by 19 Al Qaeda terrorists on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. took the lives of 2,996 people. In the wake of the tragedy, few Americans were of a mind to discuss the historical context for the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism. Amid chants of “USA! USA!” and the deployment of yellow ribbons on bumpers, it was impossible to entertain any possible geopolitical rationale of the terrorists for their diabolical assault. Scholars, however, have pointed to a convergence of forces: the emergence of a strain of radically violent Islamist ideology to which a small but potent slice of the Muslim world ascribes; the U.S. role in the unresolved issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and more broadly, U.S. policy in the Arab and Muslim worlds and the related, increased—and increasingly unwanted—U.S. military presence in the region. After 9/11, however, U.S. military activity in the region not surprisingly expanded and intensified. A 13-year war in Afghanistan officially ended in 2014, though the violence and the U.S. commitment to the country’s security continued. The Bush administration in 2003 orchestrated a preemptive, highly controversial, protracted, and costly war in Iraq. The conflict eventually descended into bitter sectarian bloodshed. Saddam Hussein was gone, but Iraq became a politically volatile, highly unstable country that by 2014 faced a new threat in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—provoking yet another U.S. president, Barack Obama, to deploy U.S. troops to the country. For critics of the Iraq War, the first casualty of the conflict was the idea that the United States was still a nation that respected the rule of international law, particularly following revelations of torture at Guantánamo and secret “black site” detention prisons. Well over a century removed from the first generation of ardent American imperialists, what is arguably most stunning as one surveys the state of the American empire is how seemingly indifferent we have become to it all. As political scientist and military historian Andrew Bacevich has observed so incisively, the same citizenry that fought two long and costly wars, whose president was attacking terrorists and invariably innocent civilians in several countries thousands of miles away with aerial drones from computer-operated pilots in the United States, and was by any measure the overwhelmingly dominant military power in the world, was also a people whose “experience” of war came either as cinematic production or through high-tech video games. Even as the nation’s police forces became more militarized, surveillance of daily activities intensified, and the culture was saturated with the veneration of soldiers, Americans lived largely insulated from the costs and consequences of their immense global empire. A decade and a half after 9/11, we are still not in much of a mood to ask penetrating questions about the nature of what seems to be a permanent state of war. Perhaps Americans today are not so very different from those who sat in the tent on the Chicago fairgrounds listening to Turner describe the heroic qualities of those who led America’s westward expansion. That it had all come to an end may have caused some to wonder what it portended for the future, but few asked about the darker implications of the conquest that was already in hand. If, as Americans are wont to believe, Manifest Destiny was “correct” that it came as much by the hand of God as by the practical decisions of men, what sort of destiny—or calculated policy choices—have fated legions of American men and women under arms today to be “defending freedom” in 150 countries around the world? What does it mean to be the world’s oldest democracy, liberty’s “shining city upon a

hill,” and also be the nation perceived in many global opinion polls to represent the greatest threat to peace in the world? What are the consequences of having evolved from a modest republic to a continental nation to a global empire? Can America become the first empire in world history that does not effectively crumble under its own weight? We do not pretend to offer in the voluminous pages that follow an answer to these questions. All we can say for certain is that these questions and many others we hope readers will raise on their own are urgently important—for the future of the republic and the security of the world. And we can be sure of one more thing: the nation we are today has come a galactic distance from the country in which James Madison once wrote these now haunting words: Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. (Madison) Chris J. Magoc and David Bernstein

Further Reading Madison, James. Letters and Other Writings of James Madison. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865, p. 491. http://archive.org/stream/lettersandotherw04madiiala#page/490/mode/2up. Accessed February 1, 2015. Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787: An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio. avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/nworder.asp. Accessed February 1, 2015. O’Sullivan, John L. “Annexation.” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17 (July 1845): 5. Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The paper first appeared in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893. http://xroads.virginia.edu/ãHyper/TURNER/chapter1.html. Accessed February 1, 2015. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. The Washington Post quote is found on p. 292.

Chronology: 1754–1898

1754

1763 1763 1763 1763 1768 1768 1769 1774 1774 1775–1783 1776 1777 1778 1783 1784

French and British colonial forces, along with Native allies, begin armed conflict in the Ohio Valley in what becomes known as the French and Indian War in North America and the Seven Years’ War in Europe. Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years’ War, giving Great Britain control of eastern North America. King George III establishes Proclamation Line along ridge of Appalachian Mountains, theoretically demarcating western edge of British colonies. In direct response to the Crown’s prohibition on westward expansion, the so-called “Paxton Boys” of western Pennsylvania massacre unarmed Conestoga Indians. Ottawa leader Pontiac and Delaware religious leader Neolin help create a panIndian uprising in the Ohio Valley in response to British diplomatic failures. Treaty of Hard Labor establishes border between Cherokee Indians and expanding British colonists. At the time the largest assembly ever between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix opens up large swaths of land to colonists. Father Junípero Serra establishes a mission at San Diego, the first of 21 that would shape the development of Alta California. The Quebec Act, which grants several concessions to French colonies, becomes the “Fifth Intolerable Act” and helps initiate the American Revolutionary War. Violence erupts between Indians and settlers in the Ohio Valley in Lord Dunmore’s War. American Revolutionary War. The 13 American colonies declare independence from Great Britain and form United States of America. Continental Congress approves Articles of Confederation as a frame of government for the United States. British sea captain James Cook explores the coast of the Pacific Northwest. His journals will spark international competition to control the lucrative sea otter trade. Treaty of Paris marks formal end to American Revolution. Iroquois Confederacy treats away Ohio Country to United States despite its dubious claims of control during second Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

1785 1790 1790 1794 1795

1798 1800 1801–1805 1803

1804

1806 1807 1808 1808 1812 1814 1815 1815 1816 1817 1817–1818 1818

Spaniards negotiate treaties with Comanches of Texas and New Mexico. Alexander Baranov becomes manager of Russian fur trading operations along Pacific coast and becomes known as “Lord of Alaska.” Nootka Sound Convention strengthens Britain’s claim to the Oregon Country as Spain relinquishes its claims. John Jay negotiates commercial treaty with Great Britain known as Jay’s Treaty in which British agree to evacuate forts in Old Northwest. Treaty of San Lorenzo, or Pinckney’s Treaty, between Spain and United States establishes some boundaries between the two and grants Americans privilege of free navigation on the Mississippi River through New Orleans. XYZ Affair initiates undeclared naval war between France and the United States known as the Quasi-War (1798–1801). Spain cedes claims to Louisiana back to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. First Barbary War begins after President Jefferson sends U.S. Navy to protect American ships in Mediterranean. United States purchases 828,000 square miles of the North American interior from France for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubles the size of the young nation. William Clark and Meriwether Lewis lead the Corps of Discovery on exploration of new Louisiana Territory in search of Northwest Passage and to lay economic and political control of the region. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike is sent to explore the American southwest. Congress passes Embargo Act of 1807, forbidding American ships from engaging in foreign commerce. John Jacob Astor incorporates American Fur Company. Manuel Lisa and Pierre Chouteau incorporate the Missouri Fur Company. United States declares war on Great Britain over maritime issues and conflicts in Old Northwest. Treaty of Ghent ends War of 1812. Second Barbary War erupts between Algiers and United States over merchant vessels in Mediterranean. Andrew Jackson becomes national hero at Battle of New Orleans with both sides unaware that the Treaty of Ghent had ended the war the previous month. American Colonization Society founded with the goal of sending emancipated slaves to Africa. Rush-Bagot Pact between United States and Great Britain limits militarization of Great Lakes. First Seminole War marks the beginning of nearly four decades of conflict between U.S. forces and Seminole Indians in what becomes Florida.

1819

1821

1821 1821 1823 1824 1833 1835 1835 1836 1836 1842 1844 1844 1845 1846 1846 1846 1847

Convention of 1818, or the Anglo-American Treaty, establishes border between British North America and United States at 49th parallel from Maine to Rocky Mountains. Adams-Onís Treaty (Transcontinental Treaty) transfers claim of East and West Florida to United States from Spain and places boundary between United States and Spanish Texas as running along the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas Rivers as far as the Continental Divide. From there to the Pacific Ocean it runs along the 42nd parallel. William Becknell leads an expedition along an Indian route from Missouri to Santa Fe, initiating Anglo-American trade along what becomes known as the Santa Fe Trail. Mexican empresario grant allows Moses Austin to settle 300 families in the state of Coahuila y Tejas, initiating two decades of rapid American settlement. End of California mission system as Mexico declares independence from Spain. President James Monroe lays out Monroe Doctrine to Congress, establishing keystone of U.S. foreign policy into the 20th century. Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 allows American settlers such as Stephen F. Austin to settle in Texas. Edmund Roberts negotiates Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Siam and the United States, the first such document between America and an East Asian country. Ladd & Company establishes first successful commercial sugar plantation on Hawaiian Islands. American colonists and Mexican-born Tejanos declare Texas to be independent from Mexico. Siege at Alamo becomes rallying cry for Texians and Tejanos against Santa Anna’s Mexican forces. Battle of San Jacinto marks end of armed conflict in Texas Revolution, and Sam Houston is elected president of Republic of Texas. Webster-Ashburton Treaty fixes boundary between United States and British North America with the exception of Oregon. Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia) significantly expands economic, legal, and religious privileges of Americans in China. Josiah Gregg publishes his tales of travel on the Santa Fe Trail, Commerce of the Prairies, helping to foment Americans’ belief in Manifest Destiny. United States annexes Texas. Oregon Treaty establishes U.S.-Canadian boundary along 49th parallel. President James K. Polk initiates Mexican-American War (1846–1848). John C. Frémont helps capture the garrison of Sonoma, initiating the “Bear Flag Revolt” and furthering American control of Alta California. Death of missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman spark the Cayuse War (1848– 1850) in the Pacific Northwest between indigenous groups and Oregon Territory settlers.

1848 1850 1851 1853 1854 1854

1855 1855 1856

1858 1858 1863 1868

1869–1871 1871 1875 1882 1887 1898

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally ends Mexican-American War with Mexico ceding its claims to Alta California and Texas for a payment of $15 million. Oregon Donation Claim Act recognizes existing Euro-American land claims in the region and encourages more settlement by grants of free land. The Land Law of 1851 strips Mexican- and Spanish-born settlers of ability to settle land in California. Commodore Matthew Perry arrives with his “Black Ships” in Edo (Tokyo) Bay. United States purchases almost 30,000 square miles of northern Mexico with the Gadsden Purchase. American and Japanese representatives sign Treaty of Peace and Amity (Treaty of Kanagawa) that forces Japan to accept the United States as a favored trading partner, opens two ports for trade, and guarantees the safety of shipwrecked sailors. William Walker establishes “Republic of Nicaragua.” Yakima War erupts after Governor Isaac Stevens forces Indian groups onto reservations in Washington Territory. With the Guano Islands Act, the United States claims more than 100 islands in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, signaling one of the earliest attempts of the U.S. government to officially expand overseas beyond the North American continent. Treaty of Tianjin officially ends first phase of the Second Opium War. Townsend Harris negotiates the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (Harris Treaty), which forcibly opens Japan for trade with Western powers. American victory over Japanese in Battle of Shimonoseki Straits. Anson Burlingame, William H. Seward, Chih-Kang, and Sun Chia-Ku sign the Burlingame-Seward Treaty in an effort to remove barriers to reciprocal travel, study, and immigration. Congress debates annexation of Santo Domingo. Battle of Kanghwa between American and Korean forces marks the willingness of the United States to engage in gunboat diplomacy during its expedition to Korea. King Kalākaua cedes port of Pearl Harbor to United States in Reciprocity Treaty, increasing flow of American capital and influence. Robert Shufeldt negotiates Treaty of Chemulpo with Korea that grants United States most-favored-nation status. “Bayonet Constitution” forced upon Hawaiian monarch Kalākaua by a small group of unruly haole (white) subjects. United States annexes Hawai‘i.

1. From Colony to Empire: The Transformation of Anglo North America, 1754–1850

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW FROM COLONY TO STATE In the spring of 1754, a small Virginia militia under the command of a 22-year-old lieutenant colonel by the name of George Washington was deployed into the Ohio Country. He had been sent by the governor of Virginia to confront French troops building a string of forts from Lake Erie to the Forks of the Ohio River. Washington, knowing he would be unable to locate the French without Indian allies, let alone defeat them, turned to the Iroquois Confederacy, which itself was struggling to maintain a foothold in the region. Its representative in the Ohio Country, Tanaghrisson (called the Half-King by the English), guided a mixed force of English colonists and Iroquois warriors to the banks of the Ohio where they surprised the French in a narrow glen. Had Washington wanted to take the French without a battle, that decision was taken out of his hands as Tanaghrisson set his Indian force upon the trapped French. Rebuking European norms, Tanaghrisson’s men killed even those wounded asking for quarter, saving special treatment for the French ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. After crushing the ensign’s head, Tanaghrisson “reached into the skull, pulled out a handful of viscous tissue, and washed his hands in Jumonville’s brain” (Anderson, 6). So began the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War. The story of the transition from British colony to American state is frequently told as a conflict between republican ideals and a hierarchical monarchy, where farmers, artisans, laborers, and women found enough common ground with elites to form a coherent geopolitical unit called the United States. Whether understood to be a conservative movement by men hoping to maintain their liberty and property, or seen as a democratic upheaval rooted in social inequity, these interpretations generally begin with the premise that North America was going to fall under the control of either colonists or the British Crown. Yet such a fate was far from determined. The contingent nature of the transition from colony to American state cannot be understood, as Tanaghrisson’s actions make clear, without including the role of Native peoples. France, after all, had not wanted to engage the English in a regional war, let alone the global conflict it became. The Half-King’s actions precluded any attempts at negotiation. Between 1755 and 1757, French forces and their Ohio Indian allies battered the English and Iroquois, including killing General Edward Braddock and 1,000 English soldiers in their failed attempt to take Fort Duquesne. Yet once William Pitt, England’s Parliamentary leader, focused his energy toward the North American theater, even their Indian allies could not help the 7,000 French forces defeat 50,000 British. In

1760, Montreal fell and the French empire began to collapse. Though £133 million in debt, the British had won the war for North America. Three years later, the Treaty of Paris secured ostensible British supremacy, though actual administrative and military control proved much harder to win. One of the first actions taken by territorial governor Jeffery Amherst was to end the diplomatic practice of gift-giving that had formed the basis of French-Indian relations. Amherst’s ignorance of proper custom infuriated Ohio Indians, and his refusal to supply them with ammunition left many starving. In response, hundreds of Indians including Shawnee, Mingo, and Delaware groups began to follow a prophet named Neolin who preached against what he viewed was the corrupting power of Europeans. An Ottawa chief helped militarize Neolin’s teachings and was part of an uprising that took his name. By destroying 9 of 13 British forts in what became known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, Ohio Indians proved the tenuous nature of English control in the trans-Appalachian West. It was not only Indians who were frustrated with British policy along the Euro-American frontier. While the procurement of land was one of the primary reasons colonists came to North America, the 1763 Proclamation Line prohibited settlement on Indian land west of the Appalachian Mountains. Many colonists felt cheated out of territory and land speculators like George Washington began to protest against the empire they had formerly served. A number of conflicts, such as Lord Dunmore’s War, and some outright massacres of Indian peoples, such as that perpetrated by the Paxton Boys, grew out of land conflicts in the Ohio and Pennsylvania backcountry. It was thus anger at the Crown’s perceived protection of Indian lands, and the taxes levied by England to offset its expensive war against France and its Indian allies, that were the primary reasons for colonists’ decision to revolt. While New England Indians generally favored the now-independent colonists (the Stockbridge from Massachusetts were among the first to join Washington’s siege of Boston in 1775), most Indian groups continued to fight against those clamoring for their land during the Revolution. Neither form of alliance earned Indians any part in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, however. Mohawk chief Joseph Brant declared that he had been betrayed by the British “for whom we have so often freely bled.” The terms of the peace gave the Americans control of most of Iroquois territory. For their part, the Stockbridge found that their American neighbors had taken over their lands and town when they returned from fighting the British. Despite Americans’ treatment of actual Indians, one of the more interesting aspects of the revolutionary struggle was the way in which a distinctly American sense of identity became articulated through the use of Indian images and imagery. It was no coincidence that at that pivotal moment when American colonists protested the imposition of new taxes by dumping barrels of tea into Boston Harbor, the perpetrators chose to masquerade as Native Americans. From Indian place names to the adoption of Indians on currency, and from fraternal organizations to distinctly American fictional characters, the use of Indian imagery differentiated the revolutionary generation from their colonial predecessors. Yet the adoption of Indian imagery also reflected the deeper anxieties about the place actual Indians would take in the new republic. If Native lands were to be absorbed into the new country, what should be done with the Indians?

SOLIDIFYING THE STATE In contrast to the nearly universal belief in Americans’ right to expand into Indian territory, early leaders were very cautious in their dealings with European powers. In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson announced a foreign policy of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliance with none.” Such a policy proved hard to maintain, however, when British ships blockaded French ports during the Napoleonic Wars. Hoping to trade with both powers, the United States

claimed neutrality. The British responded by seizing American ships bringing goods from the French West Indies and France. The conflict escalated as the British navy began impressing British and American sailors on American ships. The U.S. Congress, hoping to starve the British manufacturing sector of raw materials, responded by passing the Embargo Act of 1807 that forbade American ships from sailing into any foreign port. The act decimated the American economy as exports fell from $108 million in 1807 to $22 million in 1808, pushing Congress to repeal it in 1809. While the next two years saw the passage of other bills intended to prohibit trade with Britain, including the Non-Intercourse Act, frustration with England’s ability to deny American neutral trading grew. The belief that Britain was behind Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa’s attempts to create a pan-Indian alliance (see volume 2, part 1) only added to the growing American resentment against its former mother country. This sentiment was articulated by a rising generation of politicians first elected to Congress in 1810. Led by future leaders such as Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, these War Hawks, as they were called, were eager to strike a blow for national honor. They also had more practical goals in mind, including the annexation of Canada and the occupation of Florida to prevent runaway slaves from seeking refuge with the Seminole Indians. Perhaps most importantly, these congressional leaders believed that the new country could only succeed if America had unimpeded access to overseas markets, something that Britain was making increasingly difficult. The prospect of war deeply divided the country. Federalists and Republicans in the northeast—where most of the mercantile and financial resources were concentrated—voted against the war, while southerners and westerners supported it. The United States, therefore, entered the War of 1812 deeply divided along sectional lines. Ironically, while most historians view the war as both foolhardy and relatively inconsequential for international relations, it had an important effect on American morale. News of the Treaty of Ghent—which restored the previous status quo, ignoring questions of impressment and neutral shipping rights—had not reached New Orleans by the time Jackson fought off the British invasion of New Orleans in 1815. His victory allowed the country to believe it had thrown off Britain’s imperial yoke once and for all, and catapulted the general into the political spotlight. While neither the United States nor Great Britain could afford further warfare, many of the issues that brought on the War of 1812 remained, including the location of the border between the two. Both British and American garrisons patrolled Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes region, and when a British warship fired on an American vessel in 1815, it nearly escalated into a full-pitched battle. Hoping to avoid additional confrontations, President James Madison ordered his minister to Britain, John Quincy Adams, to begin disarmament talks. Signed in 1817, the Rush-Bagot Pact effectively implemented arms control on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, limiting the number, tonnage, and armament of ships that each nation could deploy. The 1817 agreement also set the stage for a more comprehensive meeting held the following year between representatives of the two nations. The Convention of 1818 addressed fishing rights, boundary issues, and the transfer of American slaves, as property, back to their owners in the United States. It also regulated commerce between countries, allowing both the United States and Britain to expand. During the first half of the 19th century, the British depended on American cotton for manufacturing, while the United States depended on British loans to construct railroads and British manufactured goods to stimulate the American economy. Decreasing the animosity between the United States and the United Kingdom also allowed Americans to focus their limited funds away from the now-secure northern border that was established along the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods all the way to the Rocky Mountains. The parties also agreed that the area west of the Rockies would be jointly controlled by both countries for the period of 10 years. Though

renegotiated in 1827, it was this joint occupation agreement that would push the United States and Great Britain into renewed tensions in the 1840s.

FROM STATE TO EMPIRE The region the Americans called the Oregon Country encompassed nearly one-half million square miles of the current states of Oregon and Washington, and much of the Canadian province of British Columbia. With excellent timber and fur resources, as well as one of the finest natural harbors in the world in Puget Sound, the region garnered the attention of not just Great Britain and the United States but also Spain and Russia. However, in 1819 Spain relinquished its claim to all lands north of the 42nd parallel in the Adams-Onís Treaty, and in 1822, Czar Alexander I decided that Russia would no longer assert its claims to any territory south of 54° 40ʹ. Treaties with the United States in 1824 and Great Britain in 1825 formalized this decision. The foundation of the British claim to this area was rooted in the expeditions of British explorers in the region dating back to the 1500s; British commercial interests, including those of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC); and Britain’s establishment trading posts, including Fort Vancouver. For their part, the extensive exploration and documentation of the region by Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Engineers; the development of a highly lucrative fur trade, led by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company; and American settlement in the Willamette Valley served as the basis of American claims to the region. Though the British believed that the presence of the sizable Hudson’s Bay Company would be enough to control the territory, by 1841 “Oregon Fever” had gripped many Americans. Lured by reports of lush, fertile lands, as many as 10,000 Euro-American settlers made their way overland to the Pacific Northwest over the next five years. Building on the Democrats’ faith in Manifest Destiny, Speaker of the House James K. Polk made the “reoccupation” of Oregon one of his primary platforms in the 1844 presidential election. Along with his promise to annex Texas, Polk’s slogan of “Fifty-Four Forty [54° 40ʹ] or Fight” earned him a narrow victory of 38,000 votes against the more restrained expansionary vision of Whig Henry Clay. In fact, despite Polk’s rhetoric, the president knew that all of the Oregon Country was never in serious dispute. It was only the region between the Columbia River and the 49th parallel—which contained Puget Sound—to which the United States had any rightful claim. And though most American settlers were in the southern portion of Oregon Territory in the Willamette Valley, their presence had disturbed enough furbearing animals that the HBC decided to move its operations further north. So the conflict that inspired so much bluster on both sides of the Atlantic ended with the sensible decision to simply extend the 49th parallel all the way to the Pacific. With the exception of the San Juan Islands, which were awarded to the United States in 1872, the 1846 Oregon Treaty ended a long period of geopolitical maturation as the boundaries between America and its former mother country were finally fully demarcated. Simply determining its geopolitical borders in relation to other empires, however, did not make the United States an imperial power. What defined the United States’ transition from simply a sovereign state to an imperial one was its treatment of the Native people who lived in territories it now claimed. As historian Donald Meinig explains, an imperial acquisition is “the aggressive encroachment of people upon the territory of another, resulting in the subjugation of that people to an alien rule” (Meinig, 23). Such a definition could be applied to many geographical regions of North America and perhaps none more so than the Pacific Northwest. The “aggressive encroachment” into the region began with a specific form of cultural imperialism known as missions. The term itself involves two ideas. First was the process individuals or groups

participated in while trying to spread Christianity. Second, and as important in American history, is the idea of the mission as a physical place where religious conversions and teachings may be performed. In both senses, the concepts and practices of missions were a critical part of American imperialism in the Oregon Country. In April 1836, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Narcissa and Marcus Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding departed Liberty, Missouri, in what became the first overland migration of American families to Oregon. Upon their arrival in the Columbia River valley in December, the Spaldings settled near Lapwai Creek in present-day Idaho while the Whitmans established a mission some 120 miles away at Waiilatpu. While the two groups met very different fates, each became part of the aggressive encroachment that defined American imperialism in the 19th century. The Spaldings, though initially well liked by the Nez Perce to whom they proselytized, helped create avenues that the American government eventually used to dispossess the Indians. Because the Nez Perce were loosely affiliated groups rather than a unified political unit, Spalding convinced the federal Indian agent in the region to name a single head chief for purposes of land negotiation. In 1842, he helped introduce new laws that condoned capital punishment, supported an agrarian economy for the Nez Perce, and granted Native leaders jurisdiction over the Indians, therefore centralizing Native authority. These laws created a rift among the Nez Perce and set the stage for outside influence over their affairs by shifting political power to the federal government. They also became precursors to the terms set out in the treaties of 1855 and 1863 that reduced Nez Perce landholdings by more than 13 million acres while establishing a reservation and implementing a federally directed civilizing program for the Indians. Trying to elude such a fate, in 1877 Chief Joseph helped lead the Nez Perce on a 1,600-mile journey to the Canadian border (see volume 2, part 3). While the Nez Perce did not seem to hold the Spaldings directly responsible for the drastic changes in lifeways they faced, the Cayuse were not so forgiving of the Whitmans. In 1847, after a brief visit in the east, Marcus returned to Oregon leading a wagon train of 1,000 settlers. While the influx of people might have been enough to anger the Cayuse, when a measles epidemic seemingly brought by the immigrants broke out, decimating the Cayuse, the Indians lashed out. Cayuse men broke into the mission and killed Marcus, Narcissa, and 12 others. The ensuing violence, known as the Cayuse War, typified EuroAmerican interactions with Indians in the Oregon Country for the rest of the century. Though five Cayuse men were hanged for the Whitmans’ death, settlers continued to attack Cayuse bands, forcing the tribe to cede most of their land and join the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in 1855. The actions of the Spaldings and Whitmans alone did not bring the perhaps 50,000 emigrants to the Oregon Country between 1840 and 1870. Their work did, however, typify the first stages of American expansion into Indian territory in the 19th century and helped complete America’s transition from colony to empire.

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000. Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 2 of Continental America, 1800– 1867. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Adams, John Quincy (1767–1848)

John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, the second child and first son of John Adams, the second president, and Abigail Boylston Adams. Highly educated and well traveled, he was prepared almost from birth for the role of a distinguished, disinterested statesman. During the Revolution, teenage John Quincy Adams began assisting his father in diplomatic duties abroad. Returning to Massachusetts in 1785, he graduated from Harvard in 1787 and was admitted to the bar in 1790. He was appointed to his first diplomatic post in 1794, serving in the Netherlands, Portugal, and Prussia. He met his future wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson, on a diplomatic mission to London in 1795; they would be married for 50 years and have three sons. Adams’s first elected office was as state senator in 1802–1803. In 1803, he was appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy, but proved a fiercely independent statesman. He supported President Jefferson on the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and in 1806 was the only Federalist to support Jefferson’s Embargo Act, a vote that cost him his seat. By Madison’s presidency, Adams was a Republican, and Madison picked him as the minister to Russia. He helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 and served as minister to Great Britain from 1815 to 1817. Adams’s most important post was likely secretary of state under President Monroe, from 1817 to 1825. An ardent nationalist and expansionist, Adams was the lone defender of Jackson’s 1818 attack on Florida and negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty that gained Florida for the United States. Adams also wrote part if not all of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a key diplomatic document that forbade further European colonization or military interference in the Americas. In 1824, Adams was one of five men running for the presidency in a highly contested election. With no clear majority, the election was decided by the House of Representatives. While war hero Andrew Jackson had received a majority of the popular vote, the House, persuaded of Jackson’s unsuitability by its Speaker, Henry Clay, chose Adams. When Clay later became Adams’s secretary of state, Jackson’s outraged supporters dubbed the election the “Corrupt Bargain.” The controversy tainted Adams’s oneterm presidency. In the 1828 rematch election Jackson defeated Adams soundly. After his presidency, Adams served in the House of Representatives from 1830 to 1848. Fear of the expansion of slavery caused Adams to modify some of his earlier expansionist stands. He fought Texas annexation, which he described as “the heaviest calamity that ever befell myself and my country,” and the Mexican-American War, which he saw as immoral (Adams, 173). In 1848, Adams was rising to give a speech opposing the Mexican-American War when he collapsed. He died two days later, a day after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was approved by the Senate. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Adams-Onís Treaty; Jackson, Andrew; Monroe Doctrine; War of 1812; Primary Documents: Monroe Doctrine (1823)

Further Reading Adams, John Quincy. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary form 1795 to 1848. Edited by Charles Francis Adams. Vol. 12. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877. Nagel, Paul C. John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Parsons, Lynn Hudson. The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Weeks, William Earl. John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.

Algonquians The Algonquian languages are the most widely dispersed of all language families in North America. Algonquian languages are a subfamily of the larger Algic language family, which itself originates from proto-Algonquian. The term Algonquian refers to both the language family and the wider cultural grouping to which speakers of that family belong. Languages that belong to this family can be found from northern Quebec to Virginia in the south, from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the west. Linguists group the various related languages into three categories based generally on geography—Eastern, Central, and Plains Algonquian. Within the overall linguistic/cultural grouping there are somewhat varied forms of economy with hunter-gatherers in the north, agriculturalists in the south, and others practicing a marginal agriculture with hunting and gathering. Algonquians also had varied forms of political organization ranging from bands, to tribes, to confederacies as well as taskbased and hereditary forms of leadership. Eastern members of this linguistic family were in contact with Europeans the longest and suffered some of the greatest dislocations, which led to several of the languages and peoples disappearing. Members of this linguistic family include, for instance, the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Cree, Montagnais (Innu), Naskapi, Menominee, Ojibwa (Chippewa, Anishinaabe, Ojibwa), Algonquin, Potawatomi, Odawa (Ottawa), Mi’kmaq (Micmac), Massachusett, Mohegan, Mahican, Delaware (Munsee, Unami), Powhatan, and Carolina Algonquian. Many of the Algonquian languages encountered along the Eastern Seaboard have become extinct due to the effects of contact—both warfare and disease, as well as smaller survivor populations merging to form “new” nations. For instance, Powhatan, Massachusett, Mahican, and Miami are considered extinct, although there are efforts to revive some of the disappeared languages by surviving tribal descendants and linguists. Miami is a prime example of this initiative. All the tribes with varying degrees of success from community to community across Canada and the United States are undertaking revival efforts. Today, Cree and Ojibwa are the most widely spoken languages. Linguistic historians place proto-Algonquian in the Columbian plateau. Around 3,800—4,000 years ago speakers of the proto-language moved eastward across the continent, eventually settling in the Ohio River valley about 400 to 500 years later. Here the language split into northern and southern divisions. For the next 800 to 2,000 years proto-Algonquian speakers spread throughout northeastern North America and began to spawn dialects that eventually became the languages encountered by Europeans. Thus, linguists believe that by 2,000 years ago, the groundwork existed for the emergence of the Eastern, Central, and Plains Algonquian languages. The earliest language to emerge, according to linguistics, is proto-Blackfoot. It is recognized as the earliest based on the fact that the language has very little in common with the Central and Eastern Algonquian languages, which indicates a long separation from the others. The next proto-language to emerge was Cree, ca. 2,000 years ago. The youngest of all the Algonquian languages, according to scholars, is the Ojibwa language, which emerged by 1,000 CE. Such a widely dispersed language family that crosses several ecological zones gave rise to a variety of cultures and languages that have both related and unique characteristics. Algonquian-speaking peoples generally organized themselves into tribal groupings based on a common language (e.g., Potawatomi) and extended kin–based family groupings or bands. Authority tended to be dispersed with a band or tribal leader who was only able to exert authority if his followers first agreed with the decision. Simply, leadership was based on skills such as hunting, war, and oratory. Particular individuals would have authority based on the task being undertaken, such as a leader of the deer or moose hunt, but once the task

was completed their role as leader ended. Scholars, as well as the people themselves, debate whether the various Algonquian peoples were matrilineal or patrilineal in their social organization. Algonquian speakers such as the Cree, Montagnais, and Northern Ojibwas appear to have been a patrilineal familybased society without clans. Algonquian speakers to the south, such as the Ojibwas, Potawatomis, and Powhatans, were family-based groups organized around clan systems that appear to have followed a mix of patrilineal and matrilineal forms of descent. Both scholars and modern Algonquian peoples debate the origins of clans within the communities—some argue for divine or in-cultural developments while others see cultural influences from surrounding non-Algonquian peoples. Some Algonquian tribes organized themselves into larger confederacies, such as the Three Fires Confederacy that included the Odawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomis, and the Wabanaki Confederacy that included the Mi’kmaqs, Maliseets, Passamaquoddy, Abenakis, and Penobscots. These confederacies were organized for cultural, ceremonial, and military purposes. The Three Fires Confederacy successfully defended its homelands against Iroquois invasions of the 1600s and cooperated during the 19th century in treaty and removal periods. While claiming older origins, the Wabanaki Confederacy appears to have assumed a new form by including the Mi’kmaqs in the late 1600s or early 1700s, in an effort to jointly oppose English-American expansion. Generally speaking Algonquian family bands moved about a given territory depending on the season. The more agriculturally focused groups, such as the Powhatans, moved about less than the hunter-gatherer Crees. The family bands would come together during the spring, summer, and early fall months at key sites where there were plentiful resources. The size and location of these regional gatherings depended on the amount of food that could be obtained. The Ojibwas, for instance, based on plentiful whitefish runs in the St. Mary’s River rapids, gathered in the thousands for the summer months, dispersed in the fall, and may have had a small permanent village on the south shore of the river next to the main rapids. During the annual gathering at the foot of the rapids, the Ojibwas along with their allies engaged in political and cultural ceremonies. With the attempts by the French, English, Dutch, and Swedish to settle the Atlantic Seaboard in the 17th century as well as earlier contacts with itinerant fishermen, Algonquian speakers were the earliest to engage in sustained contact with Europeans. As a result of this lengthy contact Algonquians suffered greatly from warfare and disease as well as dislocation and removal. For instance the Delaware Nation today, who are found in Ontario, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma, represents the survivors of numerous villages and two distinct languages—Munsee and Unami—that once existed on the Delaware River and Atlantic coast. Many Central and Eastern Algonquian speakers view the Delawares as the original and oldest speakers of the language and originators of many traditions. The Delawares who remained in their eastern homeland were generally baptized and lumped together with the “colored” population of the Delaware colony, thereby becoming invisible to white Americans. Additionally, some Kickapoos, after negative dealings with the United States, migrated to Mexico in 1839. Contemporary populations of Algonquian speakers continue to maintain and revitalize key aspects of their culture. Recent efforts to prevent further language loss among the younger generations have given rise to various language programs with varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, the programs are often hampered by regional linguistic prejudices based around dialectical differences and nonstandardized orthographies. Despite these issues Cree and Ojibwa, for instance, are the most widely spoken Algonquian language with more than 117,000 Cree and 56,000 Ojibwa speakers of various mutually intelligible dialects. Many children now attend immersion day care and grade schools with Cree or Ojibwa increasingly being the first language spoken at home. Algonquian culture continues to adapt and thrive through the maintenance and promotion of the language, culture, and history.

Karl Hele See also: Iroquois Confederacy; Ohio Indian Confederation; Potawatomis

Further Reading Chute, Janet. “Algonquians/Eastern Woodlands.” In Paul Robert Magocsi, ed. Aboriginal Peoples of Canada: A Short Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 38–81. Goddard, Ives, ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 17: Languages. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1996. Proulx, Paul. “The Evidence on Algonquian Genetic Groupings: A Matter of Relative Chronology.” Anthropological Linguistics 45, no. 2 (2003): 201–255. Yellowhorn, Eldon. “Algonquians/Plains.” In Paul Robert Magocsi, ed. Aboriginal Peoples of Canada: A Short Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, pp. 82–97.

American Revolution (1775–1783) The issues that ultimately led to the American Revolution began to emerge in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. The war effort had proven extremely expensive, and the British government expected the colonists to help pay the expenses incurred through new taxes. In the eyes of the colonists, the various tax measures, such as the Stamp Act and the Townshend Revenue Act, were an onerous assault on their liberties. They argued that since they had no representation in Parliament, the British government could not tax them. Instead, that power belonged solely to the respective elected colonial assemblies. Tensions between the colonists and the British continued to build until April 18, 1775, when British troops came under fire from minutemen in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord. Soon thereafter, the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army. On June 15, 1775, George Washington was named the army’s commander in chief. Although the colonies had an army in the field, they were still seeking opportunities to repair relations with the British Crown. Those efforts were abandoned following King George III’s rejection of the Olive Branch Petition in October 1775. Following months of debate, Congress passed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Despite their declaration, the colonies had no real government in place. It was not until November 1777, when Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, that a basic framework for a decentralized and weak government was even put forth. It was not until March 1, 1781, that all of the colonies ratified the Articles of Confederation. Militarily, the first years of the American Revolution were very difficult for the colonies. General Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Washington found initial success when he forced Sir William Howe, British commander of forces in America, to evacuate from Boston on March 7, 1776. Howe moved his forces to New York and was followed by the Continental Army. Howe’s troops delivered serious defeats to the American forces at the Battles of Long Island, Harlem Heights, and White Plains. By December 1776, the British controlled New York and New Jersey. Desperate for success, Washington attacked Trenton, New Jersey, on December 26, 1776, surprising the Hessian garrison and securing a vital victory. The Continental Army followed up that success by winning the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777. American fortunes changed in 1777 due to Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy. Congress appointed him in 1776 to be the special envoy to France’s King Louis XVI. Franklin’s charge was to secure diplomatic recognition and gain needed financial and military aid. Although France was sympathetic to the United States, it was not prepared to join in the war until the colonies proved that they had a viable chance to succeed. Following the stunning surrender of British general John Burgoyne and his army to General Horatio Gates on October 17, 1777, at the Battle of Saratoga, the nature of the war changed. France, along

with Spain and the Netherlands, recognized the United States as a legitimate country and became military allies. General George Washington retreated to Valley Forge for the winter of 1777. During that winter, European officers such as Baron Friedrich von Steuben transformed the Continental Army into a professional fighting force. The British changed strategy in 1778 and launched a campaign against the southern colonies. The demographics in the South were much more favorable to the British than in the North because much of the backcountry’s population was comprised of Loyalists. The British captured Augusta, Georgia, in December 1778 and Savannah, Georgia, in October the following year. British forces followed their successes in Georgia with an assault on Charleston, South Carolina. Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Charles Cornwallis launched the offensive from New York and landed in South Carolina in February 1780. General Benjamin Lincoln was forced to surrender the city and his approximately 5,000-man army to Clinton on May 12, 1780. The Continental Army continued to fare badly in South Carolina over the course of the year as Lord Cornwallis defeated General Horatio Gates’s troops at the Battle of Camden on August 16. It was not until Gates was replaced with General Nathaniel Greene that the Continental Army began to have success on the field in the South. The American victory at the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, led Cornwallis to leave South Carolina. He first ventured into North Carolina, where his troops met Greene’s forces at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Cornwallis then led his troops to Virginia. Determined to establish a naval base in Virginia, Cornwallis decided to fortify defenses at Yorktown. It proved a critical mistake as Continental and French forces led by George Washington, the Comte de Rochambeau, and the Marquis de Lafayette quickly blocked the British escape by land. A French fleet led by Admiral Comte de Grasse made a British escape by sea impossible by sailing into Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis surrendered his army on October 19, 1781, which essentially concluded the war. The Treaty of Paris, which formally concluded the conflict, was signed on September 3, 1783. The terms dictated that the British recognize that the United States extended from the Canadian border to the borders of Spanish Florida, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. Although the United States had gained its independence, its survival as a country was very much in question. The Articles of Confederation had made it possible for the 13 colonies to prosecute a war, but did not create a strong central government. The Articles of Confederation guided the governmental structure of the United States until 1789, when it was replaced by the United States Constitution. John R. Burch Jr.

See also: Articles of Confederation; Primary Documents: “We Are All Equally Free”: Broadside of the New York City Workingmen Demanding a Voice in the Revolutionary Struggle (1770); George Washington’s Newburgh Address (1783); Andrew Sherburne’s Experiences on an American Privateer During the Revolutionary War (1828)

Further Reading Gray, Edward G., and Jane Kamensky. The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Greene, Jack P. The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Anglo-American Convention of 1818. See Convention of 1818 Articles of Confederation During the period from 1781 to 1789, the United States operated under the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” the nation’s first written constitution. The Articles were passed by the Second

Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, and ratified by the states March 1, 1781. The Articles remained in effect until the first government assembled under the Constitution took office in March 1789. This period of U.S. history is usually called the Confederation period. On June 7, 1776, with a declaration of independence from Great Britain imminent, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee put forward a motion in Congress “that a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.” Congress formed a committee of 13 men to design a new national government for the United States. Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson would write the bulk of the document. Drafting of the Articles began in the summer of 1776, but was repeatedly delayed by the ongoing war. Dickinson put forward an early draft in July 1776, but Congress rejected it, believing it established too powerful a centralized government. An acceptable draft, with a weaker national government, was ultimately accepted by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, and was submitted to the states for ratification. Eight states ratified immediately, but others delayed. As the Articles required unanimous consent for ratification and subsequent amendment, the document was not approved until Maryland finally ratified the Articles a few months before the Battle of Yorktown, on March 1, 1781. The Articles established a “firm league of friendship” between the 13 states. While the states were not sovereign entities under the Articles, they still wielded a great deal more power than they would under the Constitution. While the national government was sovereign in matters of war and diplomacy, the states were sovereign with regard to their internal affairs. The Articles set up a one-house Congress with annual terms of election. Each state had one vote. Congress was presided over by a president who functioned mainly as moderator. A Committee of the States, consisting of one delegate chosen from each of the state delegations, made all important decisions. There was no true executive. The national government was given little coercive power. While Congress could requisition funds from the state legislatures for military and governmental expenses, it had no power to tax directly. Under the Articles, the states did give up some rights normally associated with independent countries. The individual states could not send embassies to foreign nations, declare war, or make treaties on their own authority. They were forbidden from maintaining their own private armies or navies, beyond their militias. The national government retained the sole right to coin money, to run the postal service, and to set standard weights and measurements. Citizens of the various states were guaranteed national citizenship, free travel between states, and free trading rights. The overall structure of the Articles reflected the strong antiexecutive sentiments that predominated in the Congress at the time of their writing. In the late 1770s, the states were also still functioning very much as corporate entities: delegates to the Continental Congress were chosen by state legislatures, and the Articles of Confederation were ratified by the state governments, rather than by popular vote. Complaints concerning the Articles began almost immediately after they were implemented in March 1781. The largest complaints centered on Congress’s inability to levy taxes directly and to compel the states to execute its will. States contributed troops and revenue at various levels, based on whether they felt the national action was beneficial to their local interests. Congress also could not effectively regulate commerce between states, resolve border disputes, or establish firm trade policies with regard to Europe. Also threatening to many of the more conservative-minded elites was the raft of prodebtor legislation issuing from some of the more populist state governments, which the national government was helpless to prevent. The freewheeling state governments were widely blamed for the recession of the 1780s, as conservatives felt that the states’ failure to enforce contracts and collect taxes had damaged the national economy and scared off would-be European investors.

During the period of the 1780s, many of the country’s governing elites saw clear signs of growing instability, which peaked with Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786. The rebellion was led by Revolutionary War veterans, such as Daniel Shays, who were losing their farms and homes to foreclosures triggered by high state taxes. As both the state of Massachusetts and the national Congress lacked the funds to raise an army to put down the rebellion, the rebels ultimately faced off against men hired by the merchants of Boston. In the most critical confrontation of the rebellion, on January 25, 1787, hundreds of Shays rebels attacked the state court in Springfield. Four Shaysites were killed in the skirmish, and one governmental supporter was seriously wounded. The brief but incendiary rebellion was seen as proof of the Articles’ overall inability to control the states and maintain the peace. By late 1786, Congress’s financial situation was dire, as almost no money was coming in from the states, and Congress could no longer borrow to pay its expenses. Faced with the inability to effectively change the Articles, given the requirement for unanimous consent, Congress on February 21, 1787, issued a call for a convention to discuss revising the Articles, setting up the Philadelphia meeting that would ultimately produce the Constitution. While the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was only supposed to propose revisions or amendments to the Articles, representatives almost immediately decided to scrap the Articles entirely and design a new framework of government. The Constitution fundamentally changed the structure of the national government, establishing a powerful executive, a two-house legislature, and a strong federal judiciary. The Constitution gave the federal government the power to tax and borrow directly, to take greater control over economic matters, to act more assertively in relations with foreign powers, and to mobilize state militias to crush armed rebellions. Unlike the unanimous approval by the 13 state legislatures that had been required for the Articles’ ratification and amendment, the Constitution set up special conventions in each state for ratification and required only 9 of the 13 states to ratify for implementation. Ratification by the states took 10 months of vigorous debate. The Articles of Confederation were officially replaced by the U.S. Constitution on March 4, 1789, when President George Washington’s administration took over as the first federal government under the new system of government. Shannon E. Duffy See also: American Revolution; Washington, George

Further Reading Brown, Roger H. Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Dougherty, Keith L. Collective Action under the Articles of Confederation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hoffert, Robert W. A Politics of Tensions: The Articles of Confederation and American Political Ideas. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1992. Jensen, Merrill. The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959.

Astor, John Jacob (1763–1848) John Jacob Astor, dubbed the “Napoleon of commerce,” was an enormously successful businessman, fur merchant, and real estate investor. Born July 17, 1763, in Waldorf, Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1784, settled in New York, and in 1785 married Sarah Todd, with whom he had eight children.

The vast promise of the fur trade immediately excited him. Learning the business from Quaker dealer Robert Browne, Astor began purchasing furs in Albany for resale in New York. Circumventing British trade restrictions, in 1787 he expanded operations to Montreal, the fur trade capital of North America, followed by trading posts at Albany, Schenectady, Utica, and the Catskills. Jay’s Treaty enabled him to access the rich fur-bearing region of the Canadian Great Lakes through Indian, Métis, French Canadian, and American trappers. By 1800 Astor dominated the American fur trade and looked to extend his operations in China and to the Pacific Northwest. Profiting handsomely from his investment in a trading voyage to Canton in 1792, Astor added to his fleet and became a major importer of ginseng, as well as silk, satin, and porcelain, until 1827. His plans to control the fur trade west of the Mississippi involved the establishment of posts along the route laid down by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. To mitigate government concerns over a trade monopoly, Astor presented his company as an organization of investors whose goal was to improve relations with Indians and facilitate peaceful settlement of the West. Astor claimed this would save the government financial and military resources and counter the ruinous effects of Canadian trapping in the region. In 1808, Astor and several partners incorporated the American Fur Company. Under a subsidiary, the Pacific Fur Company, two expeditions were sent to establish a post on the Columbia River. Though Astoria quickly took shape, British forces seized it in 1813, thereby ending operations. Rather than reestablish Astoria, Astor concentrated on the Old Northwest fur trade. The Convention of 1818 helped him strengthen trade around the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi. He bought Canadian companies in the region, hired the unemployed traders, and created a trading hub at Mackinac Island. In 1822, he created the Western Department to oversee the Missouri trade and extend it to the Rocky Mountains, filling the void left by the dismantling of the factory system, which he had actively sought to terminate. In 1834, concerned with increasing volatility in the fur market, Astor sold the company’s Northern and Western Departments. Focusing on his extensive real estate holdings in Manhattan, he built the Park Hotel, later part of the Waldorf Astoria, one of the most luxurious hotels in the country. Astor’s fur trading business indelibly shaped the expansion of American commerce and trade along the frontier and to markets overseas. America’s first multimillionaire, his value was estimated to be $20 million when he died on March 29, 1848. For many, the rewards for his life of entrepreneurship and ingenuity reflected the spirit and promise of the young republic. Michael Dove See also: Astoria; Benton, Thomas Hart; Convention of 1818; Corps of Discovery; Factory System; Métis; Northwest Territory

Further Reading Dolin, Eric Jay. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Haeger, John D. John Jacob Astor: Business and Finance in the Early Republic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Madsen, Axel. John Jacob Astor: America’s First Multimillionaire. New York: John Wiley, 2001.

Astoria Located at the mouth of the Columbia River in present-day Oregon, Astoria was founded as a fur trade post by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in 1811. Intended as both a terminus for the company’s fur trade west of the Continental Divide and a Pacific port of departure for its trading vessels to China,

Astoria was also meant to counter both the expansion of the Canadian North West Company and, by extension, possible British imperial designs on the region. In 1810, the Pacific Fur Company, a subsidiary of Astor’s American Fur Company, sent two expeditions to establish a trading post on the Northwest Coast near the site of Lewis and Clark’s Fort Clatsop. On March 22, 1811, the Tonquin, with a crew of 63 under the command of navy lieutenant Jonathan Thorn, arrived at the Columbia River from New York. While partner Duncan McDougall and about 40 men remained to clear the land, construct the fort, and trade with the Chinook and Clatsop Indians, Thorn and the remainder of the group sailed north to Clayoquot Sound on a three-month trading venture. Midway through the season, Thorn drew the ire of local Indians and perished along with most of his crew and the ship. Those at the fort gradually heard of the disaster. Aware that they would be unable to fend off a sizable force, McDougall invited all of the local chiefs and threatened them with smallpox if the post came under siege. Peaceful relations followed, enabling the Astorians to plant gardens and erect a warehouse, several dwellings, and a fence, all palisaded and reinforced with small cannon. A small schooner, the Dolly, was built from prefabricated parts brought from New York, making it the first American ship to be constructed on the West Coast. Though trade with local tribes and expeditions upriver to establish new posts continued, Astorians faced dwindling supplies and a persistent fear of the Indians.

Fort Astoria was a United States fur-trading post on the Columbia River, built and operated by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company. Canada’s North West Company bought the outpost in 1813 and Great Britain officially took possession when the HMS Racoon arrived in December 1813. The fort was returned to the U.S. in 1818 under the terms of the Treaty of Ghent. (MPI/Getty Images)

Compounding the problems faced at Astoria was the delayed arrival of the overland expedition. Led by company partners Wilson Price Hunt and Donald MacKenzie, the expedition from St. Louis was slowed initially because of hiring delays influenced by Manuel Lisa of the competing Missouri Fur Company. As the group made its way up the Missouri and met with trappers such as Daniel Boone and John Colter, Hunt decided to alter his route to avoid encountering the Blackfeet. Plans changed several more times before Hunt divided the group into three parties, which struck out for the post in different directions. Celebrations were had when they arrived at Astoria between late January and late May 1812, followed by the arrival of the company’s ship Beaver with much-needed supplies and personnel. Astoria’s fortunes soured soon after war was declared on Britain in June 1812. The rival North West Company pressed the British government to take control of Astoria and preserve the region for Canadian traders. When Astor’s plea to Secretary of State Monroe for military assistance went unanswered, he sent

the Lark to Astoria in March 1813 to resupply the post, collect furs, and sell them in China. Misfortune for Astoria continued, however, for the Lark was lost in a hurricane off Hawai‘i and the navy frigate that Astor convinced President Madison to send was reassigned for duty on Lake Ontario. The fall and winter of 1812 proved difficult for those at Astoria. Hunt had taken the Beaver on a trading voyage to Sitka but was nearly lost in a storm, forcing him to put into Hawai‘i to repair the ship. He became stranded when Captain Sowle, who was sent to Canton while Hunt awaited the supply ship, refused to return once learning of the declaration of war. Partners McDougall and Mackenzie, having suffered through the year without any sign of Hunt or a supply ship and fearing an impending British attack, decided to abandon Astoria, split the furs between them, and head to St. Louis the following spring. British forces arrived in October 1813 and offered the Astorians the choice of joining the North West Company or having safe passage to American territory. Captain William Black arrived at Astoria on November 30, formally took control of the fort for Britain, and renamed it Fort George. When Hunt finally returned to Astoria from Hawai‘i, he found the post sold to the British by the company partners on the ground and many Canadians including McDougall in the employ of the North West Company. Hunt recovered the company’s notebooks and sailed for New York in April 1814, while about 90 Astorians struck out for Missouri along the Columbia River. The Treaty of Ghent did not return the post to American control, and debate over its status ensued until 1818 when it was formally restored to the United States. By then Astor had decided not to reestablish Astoria, mainly because of the lack of military commitment from the federal government. Canadian traders were permitted to operate the post under the Convention of 1818 until Americans reclaimed it under the Oregon Treaty. Astoria was home to the first post office west of the Rockies in 1847 and remained a Pacific port of entry to the United States well into the 20th century. Though deemed a failure as a linchpin of an American fur trade empire in the Pacific Northwest, Astoria did bring lasting benefits to the United States. On the trip from Astoria to St. Louis, partner Robert Stuart’s party discovered a much safer and more accessible overland route than that used by Lewis and Clark. The Oregon Trail would prove a gateway for Americans emigrating to the West. Further, the establishment of the fort as a year-round settlement significantly bolstered the United States’ case against Britain in the lengthy Oregon boundary dispute. Finally, Astoria became a symbol of American boldness, entrepreneurship, and imperial ambition through the publication of Astoria in 1836 by Astor’s friend Washington Irving. It became a popular narrative of the fur trade and a beacon for many Americans to the untapped potential of the Pacific Northwest. Michael Dove See also: Astor, John Jacob; Convention of 1818; Corps of Discovery; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Lisa, Manuel; Oregon Treaty

Further Reading Dolin, Eric Jay. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Irving, Washington. Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836. Ronda, James P. Astoria & Empire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Ross, Alexander. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River: Being a Narrative of the Expedition Fitted Out by John Jacob Astor, to Establish the “Pacific Fur Company”; with an Account of Some Indian Tribes on the Coast of the Pacific. London: Smith, Elder, 1849.

Baring, Alexander (1773–1848)

Alexander Baring was a merchant, financier, politician, and diplomat. Born October 27, 1774, in London, he was the second of 12 children born to Sir Francis Baring, a merchant banker and respected government adviser, and his wife Harriet. Alexander received his commercial education as an apprentice in his father’s firm, John and Francis Baring & Co., which specialized in American trade. In June 1804, Alexander was admitted as a partner in Barings, and by 1809 he was the undisputed senior partner. Between 1806 and 1835, he sat in Parliament where he worked to remove restrictions from international trade. On April 10, 1835, he was created the first Baron Ashburton. The United States was a prominent fixture in Baring’s career. His connections with the republic were burnished after being dispatched by his father in 1795 to purchase land in Maine from Senator William Bingham of Philadelphia, whose daughter he married in 1798. Baring remained in the United States until 1801, where he devoted his time to managing the Maine lands and providing intelligence to his father in London on profitable U.S. investment opportunities. In late 1801, he returned to London. In the course of his six-year sojourn he amassed great personal wealth and a network of influential correspondents, which became the bedrock of his future success in American trade and diplomacy. Soon after his return, he arranged the finance for the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, persuading the French government to scale down demands of 100 million francs to 80 million. After a career in British politics, he came out of retirement in 1841 with his appointment to the post of ambassador to the United States. Owing to his stature in, and extensive knowledge of, the United States he successfully negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Daniel Webster, the U.S. secretary of state. After a summer of torturous wrangling, the treaty settled the long-running dispute over the location of the Maine–New Brunswick border. In addition to this, the treaty contained provisions for joint naval cruising to suppress the Atlantic slave trade on the African coast. Attacked by the opposition on both sides of the Atlantic for its compromises, the resolution Ashburton helped negotiate was instrumental in maintaining Anglo-American peace and, by removing the most contentious issue, provided the catalyst for resolving further threats to the transatlantic relationship. Ashburton died in May 1848, a respected merchant and public servant, whose career perfectly equipped him in the diplomatic dark arts required to diffuse volatile Anglo-American disputes of more than 60 years’ standing. Stephen Tuffnell See also: Louisiana Purchase; Oregon Treaty; Webster-Ashburton Treaty

Further Reading Hidy, Ralph. The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work, 1763–1861. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. Jones, Howard. To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1848. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Merks, Frederick. Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Ziegler, Philip. The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1762–1929. London: Collins, 1988.

Blockade of Confederate Ports (1861–1865) At a conference in Paris in March 1856 marking the end of the Crimean War, participants agreed to a set of four principles that henceforth would govern maritime warfare. Besides outlawing privateering, the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law protected enemy goods on neutral ships and neutral goods on

belligerent vessels. Most important was the declaration that in order to be legal, blockades had to be effective (there would be little to distinguish ineffective blockades from privateering). The United States refused to participate in the Paris Declaration because the country was unwilling to relinquish the use of privateers in wartime. However, the American Civil War would be the first test of these international legal principles, especially the effectiveness of blockades. On April 19, 1861, a week after the war had started, Union president Abraham Lincoln announced a blockade of all ports in states in rebellion. The blockade later expanded to include Virginia and North Carolina. Building on General Winfield Scott’s Anaconda Plan, the blockade intended to starve the Confederacy into submission by cutting off vital foreign trade. The Confederacy relied upon foreign trade because the new state lacked industrial capabilities. The blockade immediately raised international and legal questions. By proclaiming a blockade of the Confederacy, the Lincoln government contradicted its own claim that the war was a domestic insurrection. Blockades are only used against warring states, which meant that Lincoln unintentionally lifted the Confederacy up to the status of an international power. As a result, criticisms by the United States that the European powers had recognized the belligerent status of the Confederacy prematurely appeared hollow. More important, however, was the question surrounding the effectiveness of the blockade. Having to patrol a coastline of more than 3,500 miles and 180 ports, not to mention the many coves and bays where ships could unload cargoes, the 42 ships of the U.S. navy seemed hardly enough. The navy quickly increased its fleet, reaching 160 ships by December 1861 and more than 670 by the end of the conflict. The blockade tightened because not only did more ships become available, but also ports started to fall into the hands of Union troops, eliminating possible safe havens for blockade-runners. Nevertheless, questions remained about the effectiveness of the blockade. Confederate diplomats in Europe did not initially use the effectiveness of the blockade as an issue and instead allowed the incorrect perception to develop that the Confederate government was intentionally holding back cotton to coerce the European powers to recognize the new country. In late 1861, the Confederacy replaced its first diplomatic mission and instructed the new ministers, James Mason and John Slidell, to present the British and French governments respectively with evidence about the ineffectiveness of the blockade. Based on this outdated material, some European supporters of the Confederacy pushed their governments to recognize the new country and intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf. Knowing the precedent that even an ineffective Union blockade set, the British government never questioned the blockade. With the tightening blockade and the likelihood of capture increasing, the British perceived the blockade effective enough. Scholars have long disagreed about the impact of the blockade. It is estimated that as many as five of six runs through the blockade were successful and that about 1,500 blockade runners were captured, putting the number of blockade runs at as much as 9,000. However, this overlooks the fact that many of the vessels were smaller coastal traders. While blockade-runners obtained cotton, they brought war material and luxury goods back into the Confederacy. It was a difficult decision whether a blockade-runner should follow his patriotic duty and load war material or the much more lucrative luxury commodities. Depending on many factors, blockade-running could be a very lucrative or very short business. Due to the dangers involved, blockade-runners used modern, fast vessels with steam engines that burned smokeless anthracite coal. Speed and stealth were essential if a blockade-runner were to make it past the vigilant U.S. Navy. Despite the British neutrality proclamation barring subjects from joining the fight, British subjects became heavily involved in the blockade-running business. The runners employed British subjects who would, even if captured, be quickly released and not treated as prisoners of war. Besides the adventure, the pay for blockade-runners was significantly higher than in the merchant marine.

Running the blockade out of Bermuda, Nassau (Bahamas), and Havana (Cuba) offered short trips that required a smaller load of coal and allowed more cargo to be carried. The activities occurred with silent acceptance by the British and Spanish colonial authorities and caused frequent incidents in the relations with both countries as the United States questioned their neutrality. As the blockade tightened and the Union armies captured more and more ports, the harbors where blockade-runners could safely land their cargoes became restricted to Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Mobile, Alabama. However, the profiteering that went on disgusted many patriots and forced the government to take action, regulating the activities of blockade-runners. New laws mandated that blockade-runners carry at least half of their cargo in war material. In the end, it would not make much of a difference. While the blockade did not have the complete strangulation effect Union war planners in 1861 had intended, the blockade did make the conduct of the war difficult for the Confederacy. Arms and ammunitions had to be imported. As foreign intervention became less likely and the war continued to drag on, the Confederacy developed some industry of its own but never enough to sustain its military needs. The lack of industry forced the South to find ingenious ways to gain an advantage. As a result, railroad irons were used to create ironclads on the western rivers. The blockade also made trade close to impossible and eliminated the financial benefits that could be gained from cotton exports. While the blockade did not starve the Confederacy into submission, the blockade had a negative impact on the new country. Furthermore, the legal question surrounding the blockade showed how much work was left in defining international law. Niels Eichhorn See also: Cushing, Caleb

Further Reading Lebergott, Stanley. “Through the Blockade: The Profitability and Extent of Cotton Smuggling 1861–1865.” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981): 867–888. Smith, Andrew F. Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011. Surdam, David G. Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Wise, Stephen R. Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Cayuse War (1848–1850) Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, at the behest of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, established a Protestant mission among the Cayuse at Waiilaptu in the Oregon Country in 1836. Although the purpose of the mission was to Christianize the Cayuse, the Native people had no interest in the religion. Instead, they wanted to learn the agricultural methods practiced at the mission. Over time, settlers from the United States began arriving at Waiilaptu, which was situated on the Oregon Trail. From the Native American perspective, the Whitmans treated the settlers much better than the Natives on whose lands they resided. This convinced the Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Umatillas that the missionaries might have another agenda, namely supplanting them in their homelands. In 1847, they believed their fears had been realized as a measles outbreak that was decimating the Native population afflicted few missionaries. Believing that the Whitmans had used the disease to depopulate the region of its Native inhabitants, a Cayuse warrior named Tomahas led Cayuse and Umatilla warriors in an attack on the mission that left the

Whitmans and 12 others dead. The Natives also captured 53 people whom they ransomed a month later. The so-called “Whitman Massacre” sparked the Cayuse War of 1848 to 1850. Following the murder of the Whitmans and their compatriots, the Oregon Territory’s provisional legislature appointed three people to a peace commission charged with bringing the guilty to justice. Since only a fraction of the Cayuse had participated in the attack, it was hoped that the innocent members of the tribe would peacefully turn over the warriors involved without further bloodshed. At the same time the peace commission was formed, the provisional legislature also authorized the formation of a militia comprised of approximately 550 men. Rather than wait for the peace commission to conclude its work, the militiamen began attacking small groups of Cayuse during January 1848. With the Cayuse under attack, other Native groups such as the Nez Perce, Palouse, Umatillas, and Walla Wallas came to their defense. The militia and roughly 400 warriors met at the Battle of Sand Hollow on February 24, 1848. Although the casualties on both sides were relatively light, the battle proved a disaster for the Cayuse as the other Native groups refused to fight alongside them any longer, and they could not locate additional allies. The Cayuse subsequently broke into small bands and scattered. Although small skirmishes continued for months, the militia was unable to capture the Cayuse responsible for the Whitman Massacre. The militia disbanded during June 1848 because the provisional government did not have the money to prosecute the war any longer, and it also feared that a bloody war would stem the flow of American migrants to the region, who were needed for an eventual petition for statehood. During the war, one of the Cayuse bands that suffered significant losses was that of Chief Tomahas. During December 1849, a Nez Perce warrior named Red Wolf captured Tomahas and seven of his followers and delivered them to the Oregon Territory’s officials. The men were tried for the murders at Waiilaptu and five, Telokite, Tomahas, Isiaasheluckas, Clokomas, and Kiamasumkin, were found guilty during May 1850. They were hanged on June 3, 1850. The Natives in the Oregon Territory believed that the hangings concluded the Cayuse Wars but soon discovered that the death of the Whitmans was merely the excuse to fight with the Natives. The real objective of the Americans was to put the Natives on small reservations and distribute the remaining real estate to U.S. citizens. Immigration had exploded to the Oregon Territory due to the discovery of gold on the Pend d’Oreille River, so it became vitally important to displace the local Natives. By 1855, the Cayuse had been absorbed by the Confederated Umatillas and had settled on a reservation. John R. Burch Jr. See also: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Assimilation; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Missions; Nez Perce; Spalding, Henry and Eliza Hart; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Addis, Cameron. “The Whitman Massacre: Religion & Manifest Destiny on the Columbia Plateau, 1809–1858.” Journal of the Early American Republic 25, no. 2 (Summer 2005), 221–258. Ruby, Robert H., and John A. Brown. The Cayuse Indians: Imperial Tribesmen of Old Oregon. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Walker, Deward E., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 12: Plateau. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004.

Citizen Genêt Affair (1793)

Edmond Charles Genêt was the first minister plenipotentiary to the United States from the revolutionary French Republic, serving in 1793. His diplomatic posting was cut short after only three months. The U.S. government demanded his recall due to Genêt’s flagrant and repeated violations of American neutrality, as well as the disrespect Genêt was alleged to have shown President Washington and his administration. Earlier generations of historians accepted the contemporary explanation of Genêt’s behavior, held by Federalists and Republicans alike, that the young man was too personally rash and intemperate, and that his revolutionary “enthusiasm” led him into conduct unbecoming a statesman and diplomat. However, Genêt’s actions during his posting were in fact wholly in keeping with his instructions and the desires of the Girondist French government he represented. Edmond Charles Genêt was born in Versailles in 1763 into a comfortable bourgeoisie family with close ties to the royal government. His father was a diplomat, and Genêt was educated to follow the same path. He learned to read five languages and was well versed in American, English, and European history. While he was still an adolescent, his family connections secured him a posting in the foreign service, and he went on to serve in the French diplomatic corps in Berlin, Vienna, London, and St. Petersburg. In 1787, he was appointed secretary to the Comte de Segur, minister to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg. When the French Revolution erupted in 1789, Genêt became its ardent defender, so much so that in June 1792, Catherine demanded his recall. Although Genêt’s actions in Russia led to his removal, they also brought him to the attention of France’s new revolutionary government and led to a more important posting as the first ambassador from the French Republic to the United States. Genêt arrived in Charlestown on April 8, 1793, at the peak of pro-French sentiment in America. The Girondist government currently governing France was emphatically promoting ideals of universal liberty and republicanism. Genêt’s own title, “Citizen Genêt,” reflected the antiaristocratic sentiments popular in France at this time. Genêt’s initial reception in the United States was wildly enthusiastic, reflecting the American public’s early support for the French Revolution. Large, exuberant crowds followed Genêt as he traveled from Charlestown to Philadelphia in the spring of 1793, and may have given the young diplomat the sense that the American people favored France, even if their own government did not. Despite America’s popular enthusiasm for the French Revolution at the time of Genêt’s arrival, there were underlying conflicts brewing between the U.S. and French governments. U.S.-Franco relations had been on somewhat shaky ground since the United States violated the terms of its 1778 treaty with France in order to negotiate a separate peace accord with Great Britain in 1783. While Americans had initially greeted the news of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, reports of increasing violence in France and Southern horror at the slave revolt on Saint-Domingue were starting to erode that support by 1793. Genêt’s own actions during his brief tenure as envoy also significantly damaged relations between the two nations.

Nineteenth-century illustration shows Edmond Genêt, French ambassador, presenting himself to George Washington. Upon his arrival to America in 1793, Genêt began drumming up support for the French cause in the country’s war with England. His actions earned him the disdain of the president, who attempted to have him recalled to France. (Library of Congress)

At the time of Genêt’s mission, France was at war with both Great Britain and Spain. Genêt held secret instructions that assumed that as a “sister republic” the United States would also be hostile to the monarchies of Europe. The Girondins recognized that the United States would not be able to render any official military aid. What they wanted from America was food, money, free trade, and American volunteers for various military adventures against English and Spanish colonial holdings. Genêt was ordered to find volunteers among the American frontiersmen for an attack on British Canada and Spanish Louisiana and Florida. He was also instructed to outfit American vessels to act as privateers against British and Spanish shipping. Finally, the financially strapped French Republic wanted a large advance on the $5.6 million debt that the United States owed France from the American Revolution. Most of Genêt’s plans, if enacted, would almost certainly have dragged the United States into war with both Britain and Spain. They were also violations of Washington’s April 22, 1793, proclamation of neutrality, which forbade “all acts and proceedings whatsoever” that might involve Americans in the European conflict. When Genêt finally met with Washington and his cabinet on May 18, the administration greeted him somewhat coolly. Rumors abounded of Genêt’s attempts to outfit privateers and organize attacks on Louisiana and Florida. While Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson initially supported Genêt’s efforts, the rest of Washington’s cabinet was strongly opposed to war with Britain. Washington denied Genêt’s request for an advance on the U.S. war debt to France and forbade Genêt from recruiting military volunteers or outfitting privateers in U.S. waters. Genêt defied Washington’s orders and continued his efforts to recruit American privateers and volunteer soldiers. In response to Genêt’s clear threats to American neutrality, Washington announced that foreign nationals of belligerent nations were prohibited from recruiting American volunteers or operating within U.S. territory. Genêt then challenged Washington’s authority directly by threatening to appeal over his

head to the American people, and he demanded a special session of Congress to consider the issues. By August 1, even Jefferson had become disillusioned with Genêt, and the United States formally requested his recall. By the time the recall request reached France in October 1793, Genêt’s Girondin government had fallen, and the men who had written Genêt’s instructions were already dead. Concerned about the continuing supply of U.S. foodstuffs, the new Jacobin government quickly granted America’s request for Genêt’s recall and demanded Genêt’s arrest and deportation. Although Washington by this time disliked Genêt rather heartily, the Federalists recognized that sending the diplomat back to his certain death would be an impolitic move. Faced with execution, Genêt chose to remain in the United States. In 1794 he married the daughter of New York governor George Clinton and lived the remainder of his life as a wellto-do farmer in upstate New York. He died on July 15, 1834. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Washington, George; Primary Documents: American Proclamation of Neutrality (1793)

Further Reading Ammon, Harry. The Genêt Mission. New York: Norton, 1973. Sheridan, Eugene R. “The Recall of Edmond Charles Genêt: A Study in Transatlantic Politics and Diplomacy.” Diplomatic History 18, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 463–488. Young, Christopher J. “Connecting the President and the People: Washington’s Neutrality, Genêt’s Challenge, and Hamilton’s Fight for Public Support.” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Fall 2011): 435–466.

Continental Congress. See Articles of Confederation Convention of 1818 The Convention of 1818, also known as the Treaty of 1818, the London Convention, and the AngloAmerican Convention of 1818, was signed by representatives from the United States and the United Kingdom on October 20, 1818, and ratified on January 30, 1819. Negotiated by the American ambassador to France, Albert Gallatin; the American minister to the United Kingdom, Richard Rush; the treasurer of the Royal Navy, Frederick John Robinson; and the undersecretary of state, Henry Goulburn, the Convention of 1818 addressed fishing rights, boundary issues, the regulation of commerce between the two countries, and the transfer of American slaves, as property, back to their owners in the United States. As part of a series of agreements signed between the United States and the United Kingdom after the end of the War of 1812, the Convention of 1818 symbolized the first rapprochement between the two countries after the completion of the American War of Independence and the War of 1812. Decreasing the animosity between the United States and the United Kingdom also allowed Americans to focus on their westward movement across the continent of North America, as the country continued to build its transcontinental empire in the American West. The Treaty of Ghent (1814) marked the end of the War of 1812 and established a status quo between the United States and the United Kingdom; however, many issues were left unresolved, including boundaries and fishing rights. Both American and British garrisons patrolled the Great Lakes region and the western portion of the continent, neither being quite sure where the border between the two countries actually was. As part of rapprochement, the two countries signed the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817, vowing

to decrease both countries’ military presence in the Great Lakes region and in Lake Champlain. As part of President James Monroe’s and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams’s, desire to continue a positive relationship with the United Kingdom, the Convention of 1818 was held to continue to resolve the issues that existed in North America. At the Convention of 1818, a boundary between British North America and the American West was established along the 49th parallel, west of Lake of the Woods, running all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Ignoring Spanish, Russian, and Native claims, the area west of the Rocky Mountains, known as the Oregon Country in the United States and the Columbia District of Hudson’s Bay Company in the United Kingdom, was established as an area that would be jointly controlled by both countries for the period of 10 years. The creation of an artificial border along the 49th parallel favored the United States, in comparison to the natural boundary that could have been established by the area that is drained by the Missouri River system. In regard to fishing rights, American rights to fish off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador were restored, again favoring the United States. Although the Convention of 1818 seemed to favor the United States, both sides were satisfied with the result because it gave each country stability along the 49th parallel. For two countries that had been to war twice in the last 50 years, the Convention of 1818 was a rather impressive event and agreement. It offered both countries stability and the opportunity to focus their efforts elsewhere. For the United States, previously feeling weak along its northern borders, it offered Washington an opportunity to decrease funding to the construction of northern forts because the Convention of 1818 reduced the fear of British-supported Indian attacks. In turn, it allowed the federal government to use its limited funds to construct forts in the west and the south to protect settlers against the Indians in the area, as part of America’s transcontinental empire. For the British, although they continued to build forts along the 49th parallel until the 1840s, it meant that they no longer had to be greatly concerned about American incursions into British North America, and it allowed them to focus on expanding their empire into Asia and Africa. The rapprochement also allowed the two countries to trade with each other and to gain a better understanding of each other’s political views. During the first half of the 19th century, the British depended on American cotton for manufacturing in the United Kingdom, while the United States depended on British loans to construct railroads and British manufactured goods to stimulate the American economy. From a political perspective, British Tories feared American liberalism, while Americans feared the lack of perceived democracy that existed in the British system of government. Despite these differences, after the War of 1812 the two countries were able to avoid another conflict with each other.

“BATTLE OF THE MAPS” The 1783 Treaty of Paris formally recognized territorial sovereignty of a new, independent country. Precisely where that territorial control began, however, would plague relations between Great Britain and the United States for nearly a century. One of the most prominent areas of contention was the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick; for decades, the governments of each country searched for cartographic evidence to back up their claims. Though the Canadian government was willing to accept a compromise, the state of Maine used its veto power to reject all offers. An attempt in 1831 to arbitrate the dispute by the king of the Netherlands failed and in 1839, the militias of Maine and New Brunswick stood at the ready for armed combat in what became known as the bloodless Aroostook War. Believing that any agreement was better than continued conflict, Secretary of State Daniel Webster showed Maine officials a map found in the Paris archives that depicted a red line, drawn by Benjamin Franklin, running much further south than American officials claimed the border ran. Since they had little bargaining power, Webster cajoled, Maine was better off taking whatever compromise was offered. In fact, a lack of geographical knowledge had led to numerous depictions of the boundary, including John Mitchell’s famous map that generally supported Maine’s claims. Regardless, in 1842, Daniel Webster and his Canadian counterpart, Lord Ashburton, signed a treaty establishing the line where the Dutch king had suggested 11 years earlier. The “Battle of the Maps” was over.

In 1846, the issue over the joint occupation of the Oregon Country reemerged between the United States and the United Kingdom. Americans urged Washington to annex the area, while the Hudson’s Bay Company hoped to increase its profits on furs by killing all of the remaining fur-bearing animals in the region. Strongly worded notes were exchanged between American and British diplomats, and despite President James K. Polk’s threat of war over the region, the issue was peacefully resolved in the Oregon Treaty of 1846. Following the Convention of 1818, the border was extended along the 49th parallel, representing the northern limit of America’s transcontinental empire in the American West. Gregg French See also: Jay’s Treaty; Madison, James; Oregon Treaty; Polk, James Knox; Rush-Bagot Pact; War of 1812; Webster-Ashburton Treaty

Further Reading Stuart, Reginald C. Dispersed Relations: Americans and Canadians in Upper North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Temperley, Howard. Britain and America since Independence. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Thompson, John Herd, and Stephen J. Randall. Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies. 4th ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Cook, James (1728–1779) James Cook was an 18th-century English naval explorer. His contribution to American history includes the European discovery of Hawai‘i and the charting of the North American Pacific coastline. James Cook was born on October 27, 1728, in Marton in Yorkshire, England. His father was a farm laborer. At age 16, Cook apprenticed as a haberdasher in the coast town of Staithes. Unsuccessful at this trade, Cook moved to nearby Whitby where he studied mathematics and navigation while apprenticing aboard coal trading vessels. At age 28, Cook was offered command of a collier carrying coal off the English coast in the North Sea. In 1755, Cook volunteered for service aboard the Eagle during the Seven Years’ War. He was promoted to mate and charged with sounding and charting the St. Lawrence River before the British assault on Quebec. He spent the winter of 1760 at Halifax, studying mathematics, astronomy, and surveying. After Cook assumed command of the schooner Greenville, he sailed the Atlantic while surveying and charting the Newfoundland shoreline. In 1766, Cook voyaged to the Burgos Islands to observe a solar eclipse. By the age of 40, Cook had gained a reputation as an expert navigator and surveyor and a skilled mathematician and astronomer. In 1768, the admiralty commissioned Cook as lieutenant in command of the Endeavour and sent him to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. While in Tahiti, he established friendly relations with the Tahitians and charted the Society Islands. On his return voyage to England, he charted the New Zealand shoreline and the east coast of Australia, claiming it for Britain. He determined that a strait existed between Australia and New Guinea. Cook was named commander of the Resolution for a second voyage beginning in July 1772. Numerous naturalists, astronomers, and artists accompanied him. Cook navigated the Antarctic Ocean, concluding that the land mass was actually a continent. He sailed to Easter Island and then discovered

New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, and the Isle of Pines before returning to England in 1775. The admiralty promoted Cook to captain and he was elected to the Royal Society for his contribution to science. Cook, again commanding the Resolution, left England in July 1776. He was instructed to find a Northwest Passage, approaching from the Pacific, and to explore in detail the American coastline as far north as possible. Cook sighted the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i) on January 18, 1778. The Hawaiians spoke the language of Tahiti, which Cook knew. Departing Hawai‘i, Cook charted the North American coastline beyond the Bering Strait, discovering Prince William’s Sound. Cook returned to Hawai‘i in January 1779. He was killed on February 14, 1779, while scuffling with islanders. Jeff Ewen See also: Northwest Passage; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Edwards, Philip, ed. James Cook: The Journals. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Richardson, Brian. Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005. Williams, Glyndwr, ed. Captain Cook’s Voyages: 1768–1779. London: The Folio Society, 1997.

Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, also known as the Oregon Donation Land Act and the Oregon Land Law, recognized existing land claims in the newly created Oregon Territory and encouraged further settlement by grants of free land. One of several forerunners of the Homestead Acts, the Donation Land Claim Act was responsible for a significant migration to the Pacific Northwest during the mid-19th century. Hoping to encourage American settlement on public land in the Midwest and West, and not coincidentally to thwart the influence of the British Hudson’s Bay Company in the Northwest, Congress passed the Distribution-Preemption Act in 1841. This act allowed adult males already settled on the land to file claim to 160 acres, with the requirements that they continue living on the land for 14 months and pay $1.25 per acre. Under another set of rules established by the Oregon Territory’s provisional government two years later, adult males were allowed to claim a full section (640 acres) of land within the territory. The validity of existing claims in the Northwest was thrown into doubt, however, when Congress officially established the Oregon Territory (which encompassed today’s states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming) on August 14, 1848. This uncertainty was alleviated thanks in large part to the efforts of Samuel Royal Thurston, a lawyer who had immigrated to the territory over the Oregon Trail in 1847. Thurston had been elected the following year to the territory’s provisional government and selected in 1849 to represent the territory in the U.S. Congress, where he championed the Donation Land Claim Act. President Millard Fillmore signed the Donation Land Claim Act into law on September 27, 1850. It recognized most existing claims by granting 320 acres to Caucasian (“white”) American men above the age of 18 who had arrived in the territory before December 1, 1850, and (assuming that the men had married by December 1, 1851) another 320 acres to their wives. Foreign-born men who had legally declared their intention to become citizens were also eligible. For those arriving after December 1, the grants were reduced to 160 acres for men and 160 for their wives. While the land was free, settlers were

expected to live on it and work it for four consecutive years. Subsequently the act was amended and extended to 1855, with the revised stipulations that settlers occupy the land for two years and pay $1.25 per acre for it. One of the most important provisions of the act required that claims be surveyed and certified by the Office of Surveyor-General of the Public Lands before property was deeded. In accordance with that provision, President Millard Fillmore appointed John B. Preston as surveyor-general shortly after signing the act. Beginning work on June 4, 1851, Preston and his men established the Willamette Meridian running north and south between Puget Sound and the California border, and the Willamette Baseline running east and west between the Pacific Ocean and the eastern border of the territory. The result was a grid-square pattern making it possible to measure and record land claims accurately. While it did not allow women to file claims independently of their husbands, the Donation Land Claim Act nevertheless represented one of the first official steps to allow American women to own property in their own right. Despite these progressive terms, the act discriminated against three ethnic groups—Native Americans, African Americans, and Hawaiians. (However, “American half-breed Indians,” as the act called them, were allowed to apply.) Legislation preceding the Donation Land Claim Act was expressly designed to remove Native Americans living in the region who had every reason to regard the land as their own. Thurston had argued in Congress that extinguishing Native Americans’ title was a necessary first step to regularizing land claims in the territory, leading Congress to pass the Indian Treaty Act on June 5, 1850. Under the provisions of this earlier piece of legislation, the president was empowered to appoint commissioners to negotiate treaties that cleared the most desirable land for settlement by Caucasians. Army troops and bands of vigilantes drove out those Native Americans who resisted, as occurred most notably in the Rogue River Valley in 1852 and 1853. Beginning as workers in the fur trade during the early years of the 19th century, Hawaiians made up a significant portion of the region’s labor force by mid-century. However, Thurston had feared that Hawaiians and African Americans would find common cause with Native Americans against Caucasian settlers and argued successfully for their exclusion from the terms of the act. Thurston also pursued a petty vendetta by inserting language into the act disallowing an otherwise legitimate claim by John McLoughlin to property in Oregon City. Although he had become an American citizen in 1849, McLoughlin had previously been employed as a chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and so aroused Thurston’s antiBritish ire. By the time the Donation Land Claim Act expired on December 1, 1855, some 30,000 Caucasian immigrants had entered the Oregon Territory. In a perhaps predictable side effect of the act’s provisions, a significant spike in marriages had also been recorded. Settlers had filed 7,437 successful claims for approximately 3 million acres, with most of the claims lying west of the Cascade Mountains. Grove Koger See also: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Assimilation; Cayuse War; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Missions; Nez Perce; Spalding, Henry and Eliza Hart; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Bergquist, James M. “The Oregon Donation Act and the National Land Policy.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 58, no. 1 (Spring 1957): 17–35. Chused, Richard H. “The Oregon Donation Act of 1850 and Nineteenth-Century Federal Married Women’s Property Law.” Law & History Review 2, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 44–78. Peterson del Mar, David. Oregon’s Promise: An Interpretive History. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003.

Robbins, William G. Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800–1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Embargo Act (1807) Thomas Jefferson entered the presidency in 1800 dedicated to shrinking the size of the federal government and military, and eliminating the national debt. His “Republican Revolution of 1800” proved popular during his first term in office, 1801–1804, but his more ideological approach to government, with its deep-seated hostility to both war and foreign commerce, made it difficult for him to respond successfully to the foreign policy challenges ignited by the resumption of war between Britain and France after 1803. One major U.S. problem after 1803 was a massive increase in the impressment of American sailors by British warships. The British had been harassing American vessels since the early 1790s, but between 1803 and 1806, more American seamen were impressed into the British navy than in the entire period of 1791–1801. Locked in a desperate struggle with Napoleonic France, the British were no longer merely searching American vessels docked in English ports. They were operating in American waters, sometimes hovering just off the American coast, to search American ships for deserters. The British were also seizing neutral ships plying French waters, as these ships were seen as crucial resuppliers for Napoleon’s troops. Military concerns were not solely driving British policy. The United States was making a fortune in trade during the Napoleonic Wars. Neutral ships, which were less likely to be attacked, were taking over a good deal of the carrying trade between England and France and their respective colonies—much to the displeasure of English and West Indian merchants, who began pressuring the British Parliament to restrict American advantages. The relationship between Britain and the United States deteriorated rapidly during the last three years of Jefferson’s administration as the situation in Europe became more desperate. In 1805, a British legal decision severely limited conditions under which American ships might trade at French ports. Without first informing America of the change in policy, the British navy immediately began seizing American vessels, claiming violation of the new laws.

HMS Leopard (right) fires on USS Chesapeake on June 22, 1807. Crew of the Leopard attacked and boarded the Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia, enraging the American public. The incident led President Jefferson to press for the Embargo Act of 1807, and ultimately proved to be one step on the road to the War of 1812. (Naval Historical Center)

In April 1806, the United States responded to British attacks by passing a nonimportation act that prohibited the importation of a long list of British products. Jefferson also sent William Pinckney and James Monroe to London to negotiate with the British. The British, however, refused to make any

concession regarding impressment and made only limited concessions with regard to neutral trade. Disgusted with the terms of the treaty, Jefferson and his cabinet refused to send the Monroe-Pinckney Treaty to the Senate for ratification. The most serious British provocation incident occurred on June 22, 1807, when a British warship named the HMS Leopard fired upon the USS Chesapeake after the American captain refused to allow his ship to be boarded and searched for English deserters. The British attack killed three American seamen. The British boarded the ship and removed four suspected deserters, one of whom was subsequently hanged. The incident was a far greater insult to American sovereignty than any previous interference by either the French or British, and in the immediate aftermath, Jefferson was faced with strident demands for war. President Jefferson was deeply opposed to war on ideological grounds, seeing standing armies, increased taxes, and a more powerful executive—all those things needed to support a nation at war—as grave threats to republican government. Instead, he attempted a system of economic coercion, designed to force Britain and France to abandon their mercantile ways. On December 22, 1807, Congress passed Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, essentially forbidding American ships from engaging in foreign commerce. Foreign ships could bring imports into American harbors, but they could not carry American goods away. By forbidding the export of American provisions, which were currently feeding both French and English armies and running English factories, Jefferson hoped to starve the European governments into submission and force both governments to drop their restrictions on neutral trade. In addition to Jefferson’s desire to avoid war and his determination to avoid any further insult to American national honor, the embargo was grounded on Jefferson’s long-held belief that free trade constituted a natural right that could not be compromised. The embargo also promoted Jefferson’s cherished agenda of lessening American dependence on foreign commerce and morally corrupting “luxury” imports. It was a method by which Americans could show resistance to European bullying, while at the same time demonstrate personal restraint and self-discipline. Jefferson, however, failed to recognize that both Britain and France had other possible sources for raw materials. His government also failed to recognize the gravity of Britain’s fight against Napoleon. Britain by 1807 was committed to defeating Napoleon by any means necessary. The embargo, which lasted 15 months, was almost wholly ineffective, having little to no effect on British or French trade while wrecking havoc on America’s economy. U.S. exports fell from over $100 million in 1807 to around $20 million in 1808. Three days before he was to leave office, Jefferson signed the repeal of the embargo, replacing it with a nonintercourse bill that limited the ban to French and British trade. The political damage caused by the embargo may have been worse than its economic impact. Ironically for a president long opposed to a powerful centralized government, enforcement of the embargo required a governmental power that in many ways was more intrusive than any customs decree passed by the British during the colonial period. American ports were effectively closed by their country’s own navy, and federal port authorities were allowed to seize the cargoes of ships suspected of violating the act. Northeasterners, whose economies were especially hard-hit, came to feel that the federal government was unconcerned with their well-being and willing to use despotic measures against its own citizens. The Embargo Act of 1807 did keep the United States at peace for another four years, giving the country more time to prepare militarily. But at the same time, it created such serious political and regional tensions within the nation that by 1812, President Madison was leading a profoundly divided people into war. Shannon E. Duffy

See also: Jefferson, Thomas

Further Reading Bailey, Jeremy D. Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ben-Atar, Doron S. The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Rasmussen, Margaret Byrd Adams. “Waging War with Wool: Thomas Jefferson’s Campaign for American Commercial Independence from England.” Material Culture 41, no. 1 (2009): 17–37. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Fort Stanwix, Treaty of (1784) The 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix was ostensibly a peace agreement between the United States and the Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras, to conclude the fighting between the parties begun during the American Revolution. The treaty, which was signed on October 22, 1784, was the first Indian treaty made by the U.S. government after the American Revolution. It required the Iroquois to recognize the right of the United States to conduct all treaty negotiations with Native peoples, return all of the Americans that the Iroquois had captured during the American Revolution, and cede all lands west of Buffalo Creek in New York to a new western border that was created by U.S. commissioners. The newly defined western border abutted the border established by Great Britain, thereby putting all Iroquois properties within the territorial boundaries claimed by the United States. In return, the Iroquois were given some supplies, which they needed due to the razing of many of their communities during the conflict. The federal government’s commissioners used armed soldiers to intimidate the Iroquois into signing the one-sided treaty. Virtually all of the Iroquois leaders that had allied themselves with the British during the American Revolution repudiated the treaty soon thereafter. In truth, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix was needed by the U.S. Congress to address conflicts between federal and state authority. Since the United States considered Iroquoia to be conquered territory due to campaigns during the American Revolution against pro-British Iroquois communities led by Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton, the Americans did not believe they needed a formal treaty with the Iroquois that included land cessions. For the United States, the problem with Iroquoia was that it was claimed by two states and the federal government. Massachusetts claimed Iroquoia due to the royal charter that it received from the king in 1630. Massachusetts wanted to sell the land in Iroquoia to land speculators to settle some of its debts. New York also claimed Iroquoia as part of its western territory, which New Yorkers believed extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Like Massachusetts, New York’s state government wanted to sell the land in Iroquoia to land speculators to raise revenue. The U.S. Congress, operating under the Articles of Confederation, had given itself the power, rather than the states, to treat with Native American groups. Congress thus claimed that the states could not seize territory belonging to the Iroquois but that the federal government could. In an effort to purchase much of Iroquoia before Massachusetts or Congress could prevent it, New York’s Governor George Clinton held a peace conference in September 1784 with representatives of the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix. The Iroquois opted to rebuff Clinton’s overtures in favor of meeting with federal authorities. When negotiations began between the U.S. commissioners and the Iroquois, New York attempted to sabotage the talks by providing whiskey to the Iroquois chiefs. After the federal officials seized New York’s supply of liquor, New York

responded by having local sheriffs arrest all those associated with the seizures for stealing. Federal troops ultimately drove off all of the New Yorkers who were obstructing the treaty conference. The Oneidas also looked to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix as a way to advance their political standing among the Iroquois. As a staunch ally of the colonists during the American Revolution, the Oneidas correctly believed that the other Iroquois would look to them to represent the confederacy’s interests in dealings with both the United States and the respective state governments. During the treaty conference, Oneida leaders adhered closely to the American negotiating position, which infuriated the Iroquois who had fought alongside British forces during the Revolution. Unfortunately for the Oneidas, the Americans made no distinction between Iroquois friend or foe after the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed. Although the Oneidas represented their fellow Iroquois to American officials on many issues, their influence waned along with that of their fellow confederates. Iroquois authority over other Native American groups, especially in the Ohio Country, also declined precipitously following their apparent capitulation at Fort Stanwix. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Iroquois Confederacy

Further Reading Glatthaar, Joseph T., and James Kirby Martin. Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Shannon, Timothy J. Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier. New York: Viking, 2008. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Ghent, Treaty of. See War of 1812 Hard Labor, Treaty of (1768) The Treaty of Hard Labor was negotiated between John Stuart, British superintendent of Indian affairs for the Southern District of North America, and the Cherokees at Hard Labor Creek in South Carolina on October 13–17, 1768. It established a new border between the Cherokees and the British, extending from Fort Chiswell in North Carolina to the Ohio River’s confluence with the Kanawha River in present-day West Virginia. The Treaty of Hard Labor had its origins in the controversy resulting from King George III’s Proclamation of 1763 forbidding British colonists from claiming land west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Many settlers ignored the restriction imposed by the king and moved onto lands claimed by various Native peoples, often resulting in violence. In an effort to stem warfare between the colonists and Native Americans, Britain’s Board of Trade ordered Sir William Johnson, British superintendent of Indian affairs north of the Ohio, and John Stuart to negotiate with various Native American groups to extend the boundary established by the Proclamation of 1763 further west. The instructions given to the two men included the boundary desired by the Crown, ensuring that negotiations in the north and south would result in a consistent boundary encompassing North America. Unfortunately, Sir William Johnson deviated from his instructions, persuading the Iroquois Confederacy in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix to cede a portion of Kentucky, which was a valued hunting area that was coveted by British colonists. The actions of the Iroquois were problematic because

they had no legitimate claim to Kentucky. Although Johnson secured a part of Kentucky for the Crown, he disobeyed his instructions, establishing a boundary line farther to the west than was intended by the Board of Trade. Therefore, the boundary negotiated by Stuart became immediately controversial since colonists in Virginia wanted to honor the line established by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which included land in Kentucky, rather than the Treaty of Hard Labor, which did not. To meet the desires of his fellow colonists, Lord Botetort, Virginia’s governor, asked John Stuart to negotiate a new boundary with the Cherokees including land in Kentucky. The resulting 1770 Treaty of Lochabar was negotiated in South Carolina to establish a new boundary running from the Holston River in Tennessee to the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers. This border was superseded a year later with a westward extension to the Kentucky River. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Proclamation of 1763

Further Reading Calloway, Colin G. Pen & Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hatley, Tom. The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Revolutionary Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Hudson’s Bay Company Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was a British trading company that became one of the largest colonizing influences in North America. In 1670, Charles II issued a charter to a newly formed company that took its name from the body of water that comprised the heart of its business operations. The Hudson’s Bay Company was granted sole rights to trade in furs and other commodities found in the northern stretches of England’s territorial claim in the Americas. The company’s domain encompassed 1.4 million square miles, more than one-third of present-day Canada. The region was named Rupert’s Land in honor of the first governor of the company. Beyond its clear economic impact, HBC’s charter also played an important role in England’s imperial struggles in North America. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht transferred possession of Rupert’s Land from France to England, legally eliminating imperial competition in the region. In actuality, however, French traders still operated with impunity. The HBC’s presence enabled the British to become the primary trading partner of Indians in the Hudson Bay region, forcing French traders to retreat east. It would signal the first of many clashes between Montreal and London. The HBC continued to experience stiff opposition from the French, both economically and militarily. Unfortunately for the company, the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 did little to strengthen its hold on the Canadian fur trade. If anything it opened the door to a host of petty firms with only loose national ties, all of which desired to compete for a share of the market. By the latter part of the 18th century, the HBC’s primary rival had become a comparatively modest operation based out of Montreal, the North West Company (NWC). The competition that ensued between these two organizations was intense, costly, and sometimes violent, but the experience proved valuable for the HBC. It provided a suitable context for the company to experiment with certain strategies that would, down the road, aid in retaining monopoly control over regional economies with little direct support from the Crown. These strategies became all

the more prudent as the company continued to enlarge its territories. By the end of the 18th century, it had extended its trading grounds well beyond Hudson Bay and its tributaries, establishing houses as far west as the Rocky Mountains and as far north as the Arctic Circle. With the expansion of the HBC came the expansion of British influence in the form of trade goods, Christian instruction, and the general importation of English culture. Also, within the company’s system, local Native trappers became active participants in networks of exchange tied directly to the economic and political climate of London. By century’s end, the HBC had become a clear imperial agent. The early 19th century brought with it several significant changes. First, the HBC’s heated battle with the NWC came to a close with the absorption of the latter into the operations and hierarchy of the former, once again giving the company a monopoly over the fur trade in Canada. The Americans, however, were reluctant to recognize its authority, particularly in the Oregon Country, which had been since 1818 a site of joint occupation between the United States and Great Britain. Even with the failure of the Astoria enterprise earlier in the decade, Americans maintained a formidable presence on the coast. The HBC diligently sought to drive away these moderately successful traders by offering Natives more attractive prices for their furs and by allying themselves with the Russian American Company to the immediate north. They also deliberately overhunted in “buffer zones,” such as the Snake River area, for the sole purpose of dissuading American trappers in the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin regions from encroaching on the lower Columbia. Although shrewd, these tactics only delayed U.S. geopolitical aims. Predictions by company officers such as John McLoughlin that they would soon be overrun by American settlers were proved accurate. Lack of political or military support from London and an inability to populate the region with any British settlements other than the company’s own posts left the HBC in dire straits. All it could do was hold desperately to its land claims against the heavy current of American expansionism.

Gwich’in Indians, an Alaskan indigenous people, are seen outside the Hudson Bay Company trading post at Fort Yukon in this late 19th-century illustration. Indigenous peoples prospered through trade with the company, but not without severe costs belied by sanguine images like this. (Corbis)

Despite the Oregon Treaty of 1846 that established the boundary between the United States and Canada at the 49th parallel, the company continued many of its previous operations along the lower Columbia (Fort Vancouver) and on the shores of Puget Sound (Fort Nisqually) well into the 1850s. However, by the early 1860s, the HBC was ready to sell. Faced with depleted resources in Canada and a vanishing fur market in Europe, the company now hunted for the best price for its holdings. Unfortunately for the HBC, reaching a deal proved difficult and after a few abortive attempts to sell its assets for as

much as £5 million, it surrendered its territorial rights to the newly created British dominion of Canada for one-tenth that price. The company continued to act as a retailer and wholesaler of goods throughout the 19th century and became Canada’s largest chain of department stores by the end of the 20th. Its years as an imperial force, however, ended with its land sale in 1869. Jonathan W. Olson See also: Astor, John Jacob; Astoria; Convention of 1818; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Northwest Passage; Oregon Treaty

Further Reading Galbraith, John S. The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Mackie, Richard Somerset. Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997. Newman, Peter C. A Company of Adventurers. New York: Penguin, 1987. Rich, E. E. The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1870. 2 vols. London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1959.

Indian Peace Medals Indian peace medals and flags, official marks of American allegiance, played a prominent part within the larger context of American imperialism and Indian-white relations. They were presented to Indian headmen and warriors by government officials as tokens of friendship, symbols of cooperation and allegiance, and signs of peace. Among Indians, medals specifically were of high merit, and they were either buried together with their recipient, or passed down the generations. Much of the history of American Indian policy is reflected in the use of these medals and flags. Initially medals were bestowed to signify allegiance to and friendship with the United States. During the 19th century the meaning of these medals changed in that they lost their political significance and turned into mere awards for good behavior or services to the United States, thus mirroring the changing context of Indian-white relations. American officials carefully passed out medals and flags for a wide variety of purposes: to prevent a conflict or halt one that had already begun; to secure trade relations; while negotiating treaties; to create friendly chiefs and intimidate others; or to commemorate a significant person or event. According to one scholar, the practice became such an important part of Indian-white diplomacy “that it was impossible to conduct satisfactory relations with the Indians without medals” (Prucha, 1994, xiii). Medals were given to influential persons and their bestowment was accompanied by a speech underscoring the significance of the award. To Indians, the possession of a medal was a symbol of an alliance; a signifier of honor and dignity (frequently the recipient’s rank was reflected by the medal’s size and its material—from silver to copper); and also a symbol of personal power. By awarding medals and flags, the U.S. government consciously “made” or “unmade” chiefs and warriors with whom it dealt. Peace medals were not only presented by U.S. government officials, but were also given by fur trappers and traders (most notably John Jacob Astor and Pierre Chouteau), and religious groups (Quakers in Pennsylvania beginning in the mid-1700s). With the conclusion of the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) the young nation followed the practice of European nations in turning peace medals into a necessary instrument of their policy. When the Americans replaced the British (through the War of Independence and the War of 1812) and later the Spanish (through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803), they continued to distribute medals and flags.

After the purchase was completed, the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–1806) charted the area between the Missouri River and the Pacific. During the 28-month-long journey, 87 medals were bestowed upon Indians in attempts to secure alliances, probably the most concentrated period of Indian peace medal presentations in U.S. history. In 1805, Zebulon Montgomery Pike undertook similar expeditions in which he demanded tribes exchange with him their old Spanish and French medals for new American ones. After the War of 1812, the United States continued to curry favor with Indian groups by sending medals and flags to the fringes of practical American control in an effort to win over tribes and shake off their attachment to European powers. Medal giving did not only occur on the American frontier, however. By the close of the 18th century, Indian delegations to Washington, D.C. had become a frequent occurrence. As Indian delegations went on sightseeing tours and attended social and diplomatic meetings at the capital of the new nation, U.S. government officials lost no opportunity to demonstrate the power and resources of the host nation. Stressing the Indians’ childlike role in the paternal relationship with the Great Father (the president), delegates were showered with gifts including medals, flags, commissions, uniforms, and canes. With American supremacy established on the continent after the Civil War, the purpose of peace medals changed; tribes were no longer diplomatic forces that had to be drawn under American influence and authority. Although the United States continued its use of peace medals, their political importance diminished as medals were now awarded to those who had distinguished themselves through good service and who supported U.S. policies. By the end of the 19th century the distribution of Indian peace medals had stopped almost completely. The heraldic symbolism most commonly found on peace medals includes the eagle and olive branch; a handshake or clasped hands; and a calumet or peace pipe, often together with a tomahawk. Closely related to the peace medal is the peace dollar, minted from 1921 to 1928 and again in 1934 and 1935 to commemorate the peace following World War I. In notable contrast to the peace medals are the Indian war and Indian campaign medals; whereas the peace medals express hope for peace and friendship, the war medals (approved by Congress on January 11, 1905, and authorized in 1907) note the contribution of Indian fighters between 1865 and 1891. In 2002, Congress issued commemoration medals to honor the Navajo code talkers during World War II; another set of medals followed in 2013, this time to honor the “forgotten” role of those code talkers from 33 other tribes during World War I and World War II. Starting in 1893 and up to the present time, Indian tribes have issued their own medals with Indian peace medal designs, one of the most significant being the turnabout medals. Closely related are the presidential inauguration medals, also minted by tribes. Matthias Voigt See also: Corps of Discovery; Pike, Zebulon

Further Reading Belden, Bauman L. Indian Peace Medals Issued in the United States. New Milford, CT: N. Flayderman, 1966. Pickering, Robert. Peace Medals, Negotiating Power in Early America. Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, 2012. Prucha, Francis Paul. Indian Peace Medals in American History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Prucha, Francis Paul. Peace and Friendship: Indian Peace Medals in the United States. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1985.

Indians of the Middle Missouri River

Contrary to Hollywood depictions, not all northern Plains Indian groups were nomadic bison hunters. Along the Middle Missouri and its tributaries, there were three horticultural groups—the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras—that lived in permanent villages of large, solidly built, and well-insulated domeshaped earth lodges. These more or less circular structures had recessed floors and entryways designed to keep out the strong Plains winds. A well-built lodge could withstand the elements for 10 or more years before needing replacement. They were built by women out of heavy posts and beams covered over with branches, sod, dirt, and grass. The only role men played in their construction was in raising the heavy timbers; consequently women usually owned the lodges. A finished lodge could stand more than 10 feet high. Ceremonial lodges were sometimes 60 to 90 feet in diameter whereas family lodges typically ran 25 to 40 feet in diameter. In the center of each lodge was a large fire pit positioned below a smoke hole in the roof. The interior perimeters of family lodges were usually partitioned into separate spaces for living, sleeping, and storage. Each lodge housed an extended family, which might include 40 or more people. Such families were organized according to a matrilineal principle; in other words, a woman and her daughters and their families and the families of any of the daughters’ married daughters constituted the extended family unit. Before smallpox and warfare decimated the Middle Missouri peoples in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, each autonomous village could have as many as 120 lodges. Many villages were fortified against enemy attack with ditches and palisades. Surrounding a village were the gardens in which women grew food crops such as corn, beans, and squash (the highly nutritious combination known as the “Three Sisters”), as well as sunflowers and other edible plants and men grew tobacco. To supplement their diets, the men also hunted deer, small game, and bison and the women gathered edible wild plants, tubers, fruits, and berries. Unlike the Mandans and Hidatsas, who tended to occupy their villages year-round, the Arikaras usually planted their gardens in the spring, spent most of the summer away hunting bison, then returned to their villages to harvest their crops before undertaking another bison hunt. While away from home, all three groups used hide-covered tipis for shelter.

“Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch … A Mandan Village,” ca. 1839, after a painting by Karl Bodmer. A naturalist and explorer, Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied engaged the Swiss-born artist Bodmer to help document his 1832–1834 travels in North America, focused mainly among the Plains Indians. Images like this one provide a remarkable visual record of the peoples and cultures of the upper Great Plains who were already experiencing profound changes. (The Yale University Art Gallery)

In the early 18th century, the Mandans and Hidatsas in particular used their strategic position on the Missouri to serve as intermediaries in the lucrative trade between French, British, and American fur

traders and the nomadic hunting peoples that provided them with furs. This was a natural extension of the roles they had played in the traditional intertribal trade network through which villagers exchanged produce from their gardens as well as horses and goods acquired from other peoples for meat, tanned and rawhide skins, and other products of the chase brought in by the hunting groups. When the fur traders, explorers David Thompson and Lewis and Clark, artist George Catlin, and other Europeans and Americans first encountered them, the Arikaras, Mandans, and Hidatsas were living in a number of villages on the banks of the Missouri River along its course through the Dakotas. Archaeologists call this the Middle Missouri. For a brief period, some Cheyenne bands lived in similarly constructed earth lodge villages and cultivated gardens along rivers to the east of the Missouri. As soon as they acquired horses, the Cheyennes abandoned their villages in favor of the more nomadic life of bison hunting, in part to avoid European-introduced diseases like smallpox and in part to escape attack by the Lakotas. In contrast, the other three groups continued to raise crops and live in their permanent villages even after they obtained horses. The Arikaras, who sometimes appear in the historical literature as the Rees, call themselves the Sahnish. They are Caddoan speakers who broke off from the Skiri Pawnees and moved up the Missouri to the Cheyenne River area of what is now South Dakota in the late prehistoric period. In 1780, there were about 3,000 Arikaras. By 1910 their population had dropped to 444. The Mandans, who called themselves Numangkakis, are Siouan speakers who lived further upstream at the confluence of the Heart and Missouri rivers in what is now North Dakota. During the historic period there were two main divisions of Mandans, the “People of the West Side,” or Nuitadis, and the “People of the East Side,” or Nuptadis. Early visitors noted two other divisions, the Awigaxas and the Istopas, but they disappeared as successive epidemics and enemy attacks took their toll. Surviving members of those divisions probably joined the Nuitadis and Nuptadis. The Mandans are thought to have reached the Middle Missouri area from the east around 1500. There were 3,600 Mandans in 1780. In 1910 there were only 209. The Siouanspeaking Hidatsas appear in the historic literature under such names as the Gros Ventres of the Missouri, Minnetaree, Willow, and Falls Indians. They lived furthest north on the Missouri at its confluence with the Knife River. During the historic period, the group recognized three divisions, the Hidatsas proper, the Awatixas, and the Awaxawis. They probably arrived on the Missouri from the northeast around 1500. The Crows, who now live in Montana, broke off from the Hidatsas shortly thereafter and moved further out onto the Plains, where they became nomadic bison hunters. There were 2,500 Hidatsas in 1780; by 1910 there were only 700. Each of these peoples—the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras—has its own origin stories, which are still handed down from generation to generation. These do not necessarily coincide with the tribal migrations described here, which scholars have derived from analyses of the historical and archaeological record. Between 1780 and 1910, the Arikaras suffered a population loss of nearly 85 percent, the Mandans of more than 94 percent, and the Hidatsas of 72 percent. This staggering decline was a tragic by-product of European and American penetration into their homelands in the 18th and 19th centuries and especially the diseases that accompanied it. At first, the Arikaras were on good terms with Euro-Americans, but as fur traders began to undermine the Indians’ role in traditional trade networks and the Lakotas tried to drive them out of the prime bison hunting grounds, tensions mounted. In 1823, violence erupted between Arikaras and a party of American fur traders under William Ashley that left a dozen or more traders dead. The U.S. government retaliated by launching a punitive expedition against the Arikaras. It was led by Colonel Henry Leavenworth and supported by hundreds of Lakotas, who had a vested interest in seeing the Arikaras defeated. To the Lakotas’ dismay, the Arikaras slipped away to the north, where they took

temporary refuge with the Mandans and Hidatsas. For decades thereafter, relations between the Arikaras and the Americans were strained. Already weakened by previous waves of smallpox and repeated attacks by the Lakotas and their other enemies, the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras began—slowly at first—to consolidate their villages. By 1837, many Arikaras were living near the Mandans at Fort Clark. A smallpox epidemic swept the northern Plains that year, killing nearly half the Arikaras and an even greater proportion of the Mandans. Many of the survivors moved further upstream to join the Hidatsas, who had also suffered heavy losses. Another smallpox epidemic followed in 1845, after which the now greatly diminished Mandans and Hidatsas established Like-a-Fishhook village. Although they shared a village and cooperated in its defense, each group continued to manage its own internal affairs and to maintain its cultural identity. In 1862, worn down by continual harassment from the Lakotas and furthered weakened by disease, the Arikaras joined the Mandans and Hidatsas. By then, each group had lost most of its population, including a great many elders who were the repositories of tradition and knowledge. Each had also had its social, political, and economic structures undermined, including its longstanding role in the intertribal trading network. Although the three groups retained their cultural distinctiveness and continued to think of themselves as discrete peoples, the federal government began to treat them as a single tribe or group of affiliated tribes for administrative purposes. That linkage was sealed with an 1870 Executive Order that redefined the boundaries of their territory and created the Fort Berthold Reservation. It became official when the three groups formed a tribal government under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and adopted Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation as their joint name. As of October 2013 there were 13,326 enrolled Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribal members, most of whom are of mixed heritage. Roughly 4,500 of them live on the 980,000-acre Fort Berthold Reservation, which straddles the Missouri River in west-central North Dakota. Many of these individuals or their older relatives were displaced from their homes when Garrison Dam was built in the 1950s and flooded thousands of acres of Missouri River bottomland to create the Lake Sakakawea reservoir. Debra Buchholtz See also: Lakotas or Western Sioux; Reservation System

Further Reading Bowers, Alfred. Hidatsa Social and Ceremonial Organization. U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin no. 194. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965. Gilman, Carolyn, and Mary Jane Schneider. The Way to Independence; Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840–1920. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1987. Meyer, Roy W. The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.

Indians of the Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest is comprised of the present-day states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The region is marked by distinctive geography and weather. The area between the Pacific Coast and the Cascade Mountain range is generally wet and has a mild climate. Due to the impact of the Cascades on local weather patterns, the lands east of the mountain range tend to be semiarid or arid. Between the Cascades in the east, the Rocky Mountains in the west, and the Columbia River valley to the south is the Inland Empire. The area is a basaltic plateau, where most of the land is covered by a variety of grasses. The mountainous areas surrounding the grasslands are heavily forested. The areas east of the Cascades

and south of the Blue Mountains in Oregon vary greatly, from high deserts to riparian zones. The Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest were adapted to their surroundings, which resulted in a wide range of cultural diversity among the region’s inhabitants. Between the Pacific Coast and the forests leading to the western slope of the Cascades were a number of Native peoples including the Chinooks, Nisqually, Skagits, and Tillamooks. They resided in homes constructed of cedar planks. A major staple of their diet was salmon, which was obtained from both the ocean and freshwater rivers. The anadromous fish was supplemented during meals by fruits, clams, and tubers. In addition to salmon, a handful of Pacific Coast groups, such as the Makahs and the Quileutes, also hunted for whales. Although occasional conflicts arose among the respective peoples, they were generally friendly toward one another since they all participated in an extensive trade network that ranged north to south from present-day Alaska to California and extended east to the Great Plains. The Native groups residing on the plateau east of the Cascade Mountains included the Cayuse, Nez Perce, Spokanes, and Umpquas. Like their western counterparts, these peoples fished for salmon that they obtained from the Columbia River and its tributaries. Their lifestyle was centered on the use of horses that they acquired from Native groups on the Great Plains. The mobility provided by their horses allowed them to hunt for game to supplement the fish in their diet. The location of their homelands made them intermediaries in the trade conducted between Plains peoples and the Natives of the Pacific Coast. The first contact between the Pacific Coast Natives and a citizen of the United States occurred in 1788 when Robert Gray explored the Oregon coast. Four years later, British captain George Vancouver sailed into Puget Sound. The Natives welcomed the crews to their shores and traded with them for clothing, metal cookware, tobacco, and weapons. In return, the sailors received seal and otter pelts. By the 1800s, the Natives were trading with the Americans, British, Russians, and Spanish. Trading posts were established by the various foreign groups throughout the Pacific Northwest to obtain the pelts of beaver, otters, minks, and seals that were subsequently sold in Asian markets. In the 1840s, Christian missionaries arrived in the Pacific Northwest in an attempt to convert the Natives. In so doing, they would challenge gender roles by trying to force Native males to become agriculturalists. Fur traders also altered social networks by marrying into Native groups to monopolize trade with their new kinsmen, destabilizing longstanding relationships. In the short term, dependable access to European or American trade goods proved a benefit, but the breakdown of centuries-old socioeconomic relationships proved debilitating over time. The arrival of settlers also resulted in conflicts over land and foodstuffs, especially salmon. During the early 1850s in the Washington Territory, many of the disputes between Americans and Native American peoples involved salmon fishing. It was the major staple of Native diets and also an economic resource that promised to enrich many white settlers. Between 1854 and 1855, Isaac Stevens, Washington’s territorial governor and superintendent of Indian affairs, negotiated a series of treaties with various Native groups that contained language guaranteeing both settlers and Natives equal access to the numerous salmon in the Pacific Northwest’s waterways. Despite the treaties, many American landholders refused to allow any Natives to cross their private property, thereby denying Native Americans the opportunity to catch their share of salmon. Those that did gain access to the waterways saw the number of fish that they caught decline as commercial fisheries owned by U.S. citizens multiplied. Similar tactics in Oregon also resulted in the loss of Native Americans’ share of the annual salmon harvest. Accompanying the flood of white settlers were the diseases that they carried, such as measles and smallpox. Native peoples recognized that the contagions that were suddenly killing so many of their people were brought into their midst by white missionaries, settlers, and traders. In the Oregon Territory, a measles outbreak resulted in Tomahas leading Cayuse and Umatilla warriors in 1847 to kill 14 people

and capture another 53 in an event that became known as the Whitman Massacre. The U.S. government responded to the assault by launching the Cayuse War of 1848 to 1850 and the Yakima War of 1855, in which Native people were forced to move to reservations. Probably the most infamous war to take place in the Pacific Northwest was the 1877 Nez Perce War. Chief Joseph led a band of Nez Perce that did not live on the reservation designated for them by the federal government. When ordered to move to the reservation, Joseph refused and led his people on a four-month effort to escape to Canada. They traveled from Washington to Montana, all the while being chased by the U.S. Army forces led by Colonel Nelson Miles. After fighting several skirmishes, Chief Joseph was forced to surrender on October 5, 1877. The United States eventually moved the surviving Nez Perce to the Colville Reservation. In 1878, the Bannock-Paiute War erupted between the United States and allied Bannock and Paiute warriors. The conflict, which began in June 1878, was over by September of that year with the United States emerging triumphant. The conflict marked the effective end of Native American military resistance to the expansion of the United States in the Pacific Northwest. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Cayuse War; Chief Joseph; Nez Perce

Further Reading Suttles, Wayne, ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 7: Northwest Coast. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. Trigger, Bruce G., and Wilcomb E. Washburn, eds. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Vol. 1: North America. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Walker, Deward E., Jr., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 12: Plateau. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. Whaley, Gray H. Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Iroquois Confederacy The Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, was founded sometime in the 15th or 16th century in present-day New York. It was a political union of five Native groups, namely the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas, who spoke Iroquoian dialects. Their membership was bolstered in the 1720s by the arrival of the Tuscaroras, who became the sixth member of the confederacy following their migration from North Carolina. Together, they formed one of the most formidable and influential Native American groups in North America during the colonial era. The Iroquois first came into contact with the French during the early 17th century and warfare soon followed. Intermittent fighting continued until 1624, when the Iroquois and New France signed a peace treaty. By that time, the Iroquois had also established a trade relationship with the Dutch at Fort Orange. Their relationship with the Dutch was taken over by the British when the latter gained control over the New Netherland colony, which they renamed New York. The Iroquois were adept at advancing their agenda by manipulating the interests of the respective European powers against each other. New France proved less pliable than the British, as violence periodically broke out between the French and the Iroquois. Although peace between the two was agreed to in 1653, the truce was over by 1658. Another peace treaty was signed in 1665, and the resulting peace lasted approximately one year. The conflicts with the French were part of the Beaver Wars that began in 1641 and lasted until 1701. The Iroquois, in their efforts to be the main trading partner with both New France and Great Britain, began warring with Native American groups allied with the French for control of the trade routes used by fur traders. The wars proved devastating to the Iroquois because they were suffering through a population decline at the time, caused by endemic diseases and constant warfare. The wars themselves, known as “mourning wars,” became the mechanism for replacing the Iroquois who had passed away: the Iroquois began adopting Native captives seized in war into their families to regenerate the population. By the end of the 17th century, wars with the Eries, Hurons, Ottawas, Susquehannocks, Wyandots, and others still had not resulted in control over the fur trade, so the Iroquois changed tactics. They sued for peace in 1698 to end the fighting. The cessation of hostilities was formally agreed to in the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701. The Iroquois subsequently announced that they would remain neutral in future conflicts related to the European powers, thus positioning themselves to be the key Native intermediary between New France and the British. Then in a diplomatic blunder that would eventually help lead to the French and Indian War, the Iroquois showed favoritism to the British by pledging to defend New York as long as the British supplied them with trade goods.

The strengthening of the Iroquois relationship with the British had actually begun during the Beaver Wars. New York’s governor, Edmund Andros, had made an alliance with the Iroquois in 1677 through a series of agreements that became known as the Covenant Chain. As an example of the power of the Iroquois at the time, the British and the Iroquois agreed to be brothers, bound together as equals. This alliance meant that the British were helping supply weapons that were greatly needed during the escalating war with the French and their Native allies. A dependable source of arms also enabled the Iroquois to expand their territory into the Ohio River valley. When the French and Indian War began in 1754, most of the Iroquois opted for neutrality, although some Seneca warriors had joined the French cause. Desperate for Iroquois assistance, the British held the Albany Congress in 1754, during which they hoped to persuade Iroquois warriors to fight for the British. Despite accepting many gifts during the meeting, most of the Iroquois leaders in attendance continued to stay neutral. This was due in part to Great Britain’s poor military showing during the early part of the conflict. As the war wore on and it became apparent that Great Britain was going to win, the Iroquois abandoned neutrality and joined the British. Diplomatically, if they were going to lose the ability to play French and British interests against each other, their best tactic was to be sure to be an ally of the victor. The American Revolution devastated the Iroquois Confederacy. Although many Iroquois favored staying neutral in the conflict, it became impossible due to influential figures among them such as Joseph Brant and Guy Johnson who convinced the Mohawks to join the British. The Cayugas, Senecas, and some Onondagas followed soon thereafter. The Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and some Onondagas cast their lot with the colonists. With warriors on both sides, Iroquoia became a war zone. American colonel Goos Van Schaick burned down Onondaga communities in 1779. That was followed by other American attacks by Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton that were timed so that their arrival in Iroquois towns coincided with the harvesting of crops. The American soldiers not only razed Iroquois towns but also destroyed all of their foodstuffs, which led to mass starvation of Iroquois elders, women, and children. Pro-British Iroquois, such as Joseph Brant, led retaliatory raids on Oneida and Tuscarora towns. The end of the war found the confederacy shattered with little hope for the future, as they had lost most of their remaining land and also discovered that there was no place for them in the United States. Even the

Oneidas and Tuscaroras who had fought alongside the colonists were victimized by the new nation. Many of the Iroquois migrated to Canada, where the British had established reserves for them in honor of their service.

GREAT TREE OF PEACE Some time before Europeans reached North America, the Haudenosaunee or “People of the Longhouse” became one of the most powerful political organizations in North America. Bringing together previously warring Iroquoian-speaking peoples, it became known as the Iroquois Confederacy. According to oral tradition, Deganawidah, or the Peacemaker, convinced the leader of the Onondagas to put down his weapons and join together with the Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, and Senecas to create a league of peace to stop the violence. Deganawidah and the chiefs planted a great Tree of Peace (a great white pine) at Onondaga, which sheltered the league. The tree’s roots spread out in four directions, signifying the extension of peace and law to all humanity. People of goodwill could see the roots, follow them to their source, and join in the Great Peace. In another version of the story, Deganawidah uprooted the tree and asked people to throw their weapons of war into the pit where the tree had been. At the bottom of the pit was an underground river that carried the weapons away so that future generations would not see them. The tree was then put back in the ground. Beneath it the founders spread the soft, white feathery down of the globe thistle, which they referred to as the Great White Mat of the Law. Together the Great Tree of Peace and the Great White Mat of the Law became the ruling symbols for an organization that would control much of northeastern North America in the 17th century.

Trying to prevent the American expansion to the west, Joseph Brant tried to unite the remnants of the Six Nations and the Ohio River valley Indian tribes. In the fall of 1783, Brant held unity negotiations near Detroit and Lower Sandusky, Ohio, with the Shawnees, Delawares, Ojibwas, Mingos, and other tribes to persuade them to unite and oppose the United States. These efforts, however, never led to the creation of a viable union, and the United States never recognized any such Indian confederacy. The Iroquois Confederacy began to rebuild itself both culturally and politically in 1799 when Handsome Lake, a Seneca, had a vision that led to the establishment of the Church of Handsome Lake, also known as the Longhouse religion. It soon spread from the Senecas to the Onondagas and then to the other Iroquois nations. Its traditions continue to bind the Iroquois people together. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Algonquians; American Revolution; Seven Years’ War; Primary Documents: Mohawk Joseph Brant Comes to London and Addresses King George III (1776)

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Knopf, 2000. Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Jay’s Treaty (1794) When the American Revolution ended in 1783, the Treaty of Paris that formally concluded the war offered surprisingly generous terms to the United States. By the early 1790s, however, it became clear that not all

issues between the United States and Great Britain had been resolved. Britain refused to abide by some of the key provisions in the treaty, limiting American trade in the West Indies and continuing to occupy forts on U.S. soil. As increasing Western settlement in the Ohio region prompted Indian attacks, Western settlers became convinced that British troops at the forts in Detroit and Mackinac were inciting the Indian attacks. Great Britain also continued to search American ships in English ports for deserters and impressed some English-born American sailors. American relations with Britain worsened with the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France. In 1793, revolutionary France declared war on a number of European countries including Britain, igniting a period of intensive warfare that would only end with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. The United States, which traded heavily with both powers, declared itself neutral in the conflict and expected both belligerent nations to respect American neutrality rights and allow U.S. ships to trade freely with both powers. Both belligerents harassed U.S. shipping, but the British to a much greater degree. France, desperate for supplies, had by 1794 decided it could live with a neutral United States and had opened its ports to U.S. trade. British war policy against France, however, depended on disrupting French supply lines. Beginning in June 1793, Britain passed a series of Orders in Council that severely restricted neutral trade into French ports. The most extreme of these orders, later amended, came November 6, 1793, when the British navy was ordered to seize all vessels transporting provisions within French waters. Without warning America, the British navy began enforcing this policy immediately and captured more than 300 American vessels. President Washington learned of the massive ship seizures in March 1794. At the same time, the administration received word of a February 1794 speech in which the British governor of Canada, Lord Dorchester, hinted that the United States and Britain might soon be at war. If this should happen, Dorchester claimed, it would provide opportunities for Indian allies of Great Britain to reclaim land they had lost. Within the Washington administration, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wielded great influence, even over matters of foreign affairs. His ambitious economic agenda required a close commercial and political relationship with Great Britain. To head off war with Britain, Washington agreed to send a special envoy to Britain. In March 1794, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London with secret orders to mend relations between the two nations. Unfortunately for the United States, Britain was negotiating from a position of strength during the summer and fall of 1794. The war in Europe was going well, and Britain saw nothing to fear from the United States militarily. In the final document, signed November 19, 1794, the only significant concession Britain made was to promise to withdraw from its northwest ports by June 1, 1796. Even this was a limited victory, as the British had already agreed to evacuate these forts in the peace accord of 1783. The treaty offered America weak trade concessions, while demanding full trading rights for British ships in American ports. The British West Indies, America’s primary trade partner in the pre–Revolutionary War period, was still officially off-limits to U.S. ships. On the American side, the Jay Treaty demanded that the United States abandon its insistence on the right of free, neutral trade with all nations (the country’s formal position on trade rights since 1776), abstain from any retaliatory duties on British imports, and revoke some of the trade privileges the United States had granted France in the Franco-American treaty of 1778. The treaty made no reference to impressment or the British harassment of American ships in neutral waters. Jay returned with the treaty in late 1794, but the exact terms of the agreement were kept secret during the Senate discussions until the summer of 1795. The Philadelphia Aurora, the major opposition newspaper, leaked the terms of the treaty in late June 1795—just in time for it to be a major topic of loud, impassioned oratory across the nation on the Fourth of July. The Jay Treaty was initially seen by many

Americans as a bitter disappointment. The more pro-French Republicans were furious not only with the treaty itself, which they saw as a humiliating concession to the British, but also with Washington’s highhanded, secretive method of negotiating it, which seemed to be an executive encroachment on the legislature’s treaty-making powers. “Belisarius” in a September 11, 1795, letter to the Aurora called the treaty “an instrument so deeply subversive of republicanism, and destructive to every principle of free representative government.” Despite the ongoing controversy, the Senate ratified the “Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America, by their President” on June 24, and Washington signed it into law on August 18, 1795.

The second governor of New York, John Jay played a critical diplomatic role during the American Revolutionary War and later served as the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. A proponent of a strong central government, Jay advocated a policy of territorial expansion at home and the assertion of American interests abroad. This engraving of Jay, by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand, was inspired by a painting by Revolutionary War-era painter John Trumbull. (Chaiba Media)

The treaty had a pronounced effect on U.S. domestic relations. Even though controversy over the treaty largely subsided by 1796, as a wave of Federalists including Hamilton successfully defended it in the newspapers, the hostility engendered by the Jay Treaty between 1794 and 1795 helped solidify the U.S. leadership into Republican and Federalist factions. It even eroded some of Washington’s godlike stature, as opposition newspapers for the first time attacked the president directly. The commercial agreement also angered France, which saw it as a repudiation of the Franco-American treaty of 1778; France now began harassing U.S. shipping as well. While the Jay Treaty was a commercial success in the short-term, in that Anglo-American trade grew significantly in the wake of the agreement, the issues left unresolved by the treaty would continue to plague relations between the United States and Britain for years to come, and many of these same issues would ultimately help lead the United States into war with Britain in 1812. Shannon E. Duffy

See also: American Revolution; Paris, Treaty of (1783); War Hawks; War of 1812

Further Reading Bemis, Samuel F. Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Estes, Todd. The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Kuehl, John W. “The Power of Making Treaties: Washington, Madison, and the Debate over the Jay Treaty.” In Mark J. Rozell, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams, eds. George Washington and the Origins of the American Presidency. Westport, CT: Prager, 2000, pp. 117–134.

Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) Commonly viewed as the beginning of the American Revolution in the colony of Virginia, Lord Dunmore’s War erupted on the Ohio Valley frontier in 1774. Although the Iroquois ceded several thousands of acres of land to the British following the French and Indian War, the region was actually controlled by Indian nations of the Ohio Country who refused to allow English colonists into the region. In their rejection of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos began attacking English settlers in the frontier regions east and south of the Ohio River. In response, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, raised five regiments of militia to attack Indian villages along the Ohio River border. Although Lord Dunmore was initially praised for his victory over the Indians, opposition toward the Crown and Dunmore intensified following the conflict. In what began as a confrontation between the colony of Virginia and Indian nations of the Ohio Country, Lord Dunmore’s War served as the decisive event that pushed many Virginia Patriots to rebel against British rule. At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, King George III of Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which created an imaginary boundary drawn along the Appalachian Mountains, west of which English colonists were barred from settling. Numerous colonists refused to acknowledge the line, however, and pressed for access to the backcountry. Attempting to appease this growing dissent, the British negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix that ceded all the lands east and south of the Ohio River to the Crown. Unfortunately, the area relinquished by the Iroquois had in fact been contested by various Indian groups for over a century, and the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos who hunted the areas east and south of the Ohio River refused to recognize a treaty that sold the land out from under their feet. Following negotiations, English settlers instantly began moving into the region, particularly along the present-day Kentucky bank of the Ohio River. Indian resistance to the English heightened in the fall of 1773 when Daniel Boone led 50 settlers into Kentucky County, Virginia, to establish a permanent settlement. On October 9, 1773, a group of Delaware, Shawnee, and Cherokee Indians attacked and killed members of Boone’s party, including his oldest son, James. Violent encounters between the Indians and settlers continued through the spring of 1774, including the event referred to as the Yellow Creek Massacre (acknowledged by most historians as the beginning of Lord Dunmore’s War). On April 30, 1774, a band of Virginia settlers led by Daniel Greathouse ambushed and mutilated a group of Mingos after luring the Indians to their camp on Yellow Creek in present-day Ohio. Seeking revenge for his murdered family, Mingo chief John Logan raised a war party to attack frontier settlements in the region. John Connolly, commander of Fort Pitt, responded immediately to Chief Logan’s raid against settlements in western Pennsylvania by ordering the Pennsylvania militia to destroy the Mingo villages along the Ohio River. At the same time, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of

Virginia, volunteered Virginia’s assistance in defeating the Indians. Dunmore’s decision to request a declaration of war against Chief Logan’s group in May 1774 resulted from his desire to prevent Pennsylvania’s expansion into the areas of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. Ultimately, Dunmore used the fighting against the Indians of the Ohio Country to place his militiamen in regions he desired to claim for the colony of Virginia. Dunmore provided Colonel Andrew Lewis command of three regiments of militia from the areas west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Dunmore commanded his own company of two regiments from the interior of the colony. By early October 1774, Dunmore and Lewis had both moved their forces to prepare for an attack against the Shawnee towns on the Scioto River in Ohio. Operating alone on the morning of October 10, 1774, Lewis ordered his force of 1,100 militiamen to cross the Ohio River near Point Pleasant in present-day West Virginia (at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers). As the Virginians traversed the river, Shawnee chief Cornstalk led a band of more than 1,000 warriors in a surprise attack. Intense fighting during the Battle of Point Pleasant lasted nearly all day; however, Lewis’s Virginia militia emerged victorious. Following the battle, Lewis united with Dunmore, and the party advanced toward the Shawnee villages. During their march, the Virginians erected Camp Charlotte on Sippo Creek where negotiations began with Cornstalk. To conclude Lord Dunmore’s War, the Treaty of Camp Charlotte was signed on October 19, 1774, recognizing the Ohio River as the boundary between Indian land and the British colonies. Colonists and members of the Virginia Assembly initially applauded Dunmore for his success in defeating the Indians and establishing the Ohio River as the newly formed boundary. However, as tensions increased between the colony and the mother country, Dunmore was accused of inciting the war as a distraction so as to divert the Virginia Patriots from provoking dissension with the Crown. Even Lewis reported that Dunmore had ordered him to cross at the exact spot where he was attacked, insinuating that Dunmore had intentionally led the Virginians into an ambush. By the spring of 1775, Virginians under the leadership of Patrick Henry had begun to arm themselves against Dunmore and his Loyalist followers. In response, the governor seized the gunpowder supply in Williamsburg and issued a royal proclamation offering freedom to slaves who would join his forces. As Dunmore fought off disgruntled colonists in Williamsburg and Norfolk, his former comrade, John Connolly, designed a plan to unite the Indians and Loyalists of the Ohio Country to retake control of Virginia. Although Connolly’s plot was discovered, Indians of the region, particularly the Shawnees and Cherokees, declared war on the colony of Virginia in 1776 in a formal alliance with the British. Carl Creason See also: American Revolution; Paris, Treaty of (1763); Proclamation of 1763; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Downes, Randolph Chandler. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940. Thwaites, Reuben Gold, and Louise Phelps Kellogg. Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1905. Williams, Glenn F. Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era. Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2013.

Lower and Upper Canada Rebellions (1837–1838)

The 1837–1838 rebellions in the two British colonies of Lower Canada and Upper Canada were sparked by dissatisfaction with oppressive British economic and political rule. Although the rebellions reflected long-standing grievances among the colonies’ inhabitants, American filibusterers also participated, precipitating a serious crisis between the United States and Britain. The poorly organized rebellions were unsuccessful in the short run, but they did pave the way for a subsequent liberalization of British colonial policy. Having taken control of the French colony of Canada in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War, the British renamed it the Province of Quebec. Under the Constitutional Act of 1791, which was passed after an influx of British loyalists fled the newly independent United States, Britain then split Quebec into two new colonies. Lower Canada (Bas-Canada in French) lay along the shores of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the lower reaches of the Saint Lawrence River, and would eventually become the southern part of today’s Canadian province of Quebec. Upper Canada lay to the west on the upper reaches of the river and on the northern shores of the Great Lakes, corresponding to what is now the province of Ontario. Lower Canada, where most French Canadians lived, remained largely French in language (Francophone) and custom, while Upper Canada, where most of the British refugees had settled, was predominantly Englishspeaking (Anglophone). Most of those who lived in Lower Canada were Catholic, while most of those in Upper Canada were Protestant. Insurgency broke out first in Lower Canada, where relations between English and French— exacerbated during the 1830s by the deteriorating economic position of the latter group—had grown increasingly tense. Opposition to authoritarian British rule, which was represented by the conservative Château Clique coalition of families, eventually coalesced behind the Patriote movement (Parti patriote). The movement was led by lawyer and politician Louis Joseph Papineau, who had helped write the socalled Ninety-Two Resolutions, which would have introduced democratic reforms into the colonial political structure. The Ninety-Two Resolutions failed to gain support in Britain, and with their peaceful efforts proving fruitless, the Patriotes took to arms in November 1837 in a series of battles with British troops and Anglophone civilians. However, the rebellion collapsed quickly and its organizers fled across the border into the United States. A second rebellion broke out a year later—this time with the participation of American supporters—but with similar results. Both outbreaks triggered the looting of French farms and other property. The first French rebellion in Lower Canada was followed shortly afterward by British rebellion in Upper Canada. Frustrated with an undemocratic political system run for the benefit of the colony’s commercial classes (the “Family Compact”) and the colony’s more recent British settlers, some 800 rebels fought unsuccessfully with Canadian militia in Toronto in December 1837. Most of the rebels were of American origin and were led by Scottish-born William Lyon Mackenzie, a fiery newspaper publisher and former mayor of Toronto. A second skirmish followed a few days later, but in both cases the rebels were readily scattered. The rebel leaders fled to Navy Island in the Niagara River (which formed the boundary with the United States) and declared a “Republic of Canada.” American sympathizers provisioned them using a steamboat, the SS Caroline, but in late December 1837 a party of Canadian militia boarded the Caroline and took most of her crew prisoner. They then set the ship afire and set it adrift, after which it plunged over Niagara Falls. In May 1838 Upper Canadian rebels who had fled to the United States retaliated by boarding and burning the British steamer Sir Robert Peel while the ship was in American waters on the Saint Lawrence River.

Canadian rebels cross the Richelieu River during the Rebellion of 1837. Revolts in both Upper and Lower Canada broke out that year, led by those wanting to overthrow the government and replace it with a democracy. (National Archives of Canada)

By now the original rebellion had degenerated into a violent free-for-all that threatened to precipitate a war. U.S. president Martin Van Buren dispatched Alexander Macomb, the commanding general of the army, to the Canadian border to maintain order. In the meantime the rebellions had led to the appointment of John George Lambton, Lord Durham, as governor general of British North America. Upon his arrival in the colonies, Durham offered a reward for the capture of those who had attacked the Sir Robert Peel and sent his brother-in-law, Charles Gray, to Washington, D.C., to urge American authorities to help work out a mutually satisfying solution. Durham resigned his position after a few months due to disagreements with his government, but his 1839 Report on the Affairs of British North America led to significant reforms. He urged the British to create local governments, which would give Canadians a greater voice in managing their own affairs and result in the more responsible investment of tax monies. Durham also proposed uniting Lower and Upper Canada in hopes of integrating Francophone Canadians into the Anglophone mainstream. While French Canadians continued to resist integration, the Act of Union of 1840 merged the two colonies as the United Province of Canada. Two years later U.S. secretary of state Daniel Webster and British diplomat Alexander Baring, first Baron Ashburton, negotiated the details of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Signed on August 9, 1842, this document dealt with a number of contentious issues, including the case of Alexander McLeod, who had taken part in the 1837 attack on the Caroline and who had subsequently been arrested in New York State. Grove Koger See also: Webster-Ashburton Treaty

Further Reading Bonthius, Andrew. “The Patriot War of 1837–1838: Locofocoism with a Gun?” Labour/Le Travail no. 52 (Fall 2003): 9–43. Ducharme, Michel. “Closing the Last Chapter of the Atlantic Revolution: The 1837–38 Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 116, no. 2 (October 2006): 413–430. Dunning, Tom. “The Canadian Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 as a Borderland War: A Retrospective.” Ontario History 101, no. 2 (2009): 129– 141. Watson, Samuel. “United States Army Officers Fight the ‘Patriot War’: Responses to Filibustering on the Canadian Border, 1837–1839.” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 485–519.

Madison, James (1751–1836) James Madison played a critical role in many events that led to the birth and expansion of the United States. As a young man, Madison participated in the debates over independence in his home state of Virginia. He helped organize the Constitutional Convention and drafted the Virginia Plan, largely viewed as the starting point for the federal Constitution. Once the Constitution was drafted, Madison worked tirelessly to ensure ratification by the states. Madison went on to serve in Congress, then as secretary of state under President Thomas Jefferson. Finally, he succeeded his friend and mentor as president for two terms. Born to wealthy planters in today’s Orange County, Virginia, Madison studied at Princeton University (then the College of New Jersey). As debate over independence from Britain spread throughout the colonies, Madison became a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776. In 1780, Virginia elected Madison to the Continental Congress. Soft-spoken and small in stature, Madison was the youngest delegate to the Congress. Madison concluded that the federal government as created by the Articles of Confederation was too weak to manage domestic disputes and defend the country against foreign attack. He pushed for a national convention to consider revisions. Central in convening the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison was one of the foremost defenders of a strong national government during its debates. After the Convention Madison, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, penned the highly influential Federalist Papers advocating for ratification of the Constitution. Madison was elected to the first House of Representatives in 1789 where he helped introduce the Bill of Rights. During the administration of Federalist president John Adams, Madison and then–Vice President Thomas Jefferson formalized the opposition Republican coalition. After Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, Madison served as his secretary of state and was instrumental in Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase, which nearly doubled U.S. territory. When Madison succeeded Jefferson as president, the nation was divided between support for Britain (mostly northern states and Federalists) and for France (southern and western states and DemocraticRepublicans) as the two countries fought each other. In 1812, Madison appealed to Congress to declare war on Britain to secure maritime independence and assert trade rights. War Hawks in Congress also saw an opportunity to seize Canada, gain Florida from the Spanish, and end western Indian uprisings, blamed on the British for arming the tribes. Madison’s wartime leadership was criticized in the North and the U.S. invasion of Canada failed, but the war cemented national pride and removed the threat of Indian uprisings in the Northwest. During his second term, Madison’s policies reflected the political attention captured by the potential western vote. He supported Henry Clay’s “American System,” intended to tie the emerging West and established East in one national marketplace. After the presidency, Madison and his wife, Dolley, retired to their Virginia plantation. He denounced the idea of nullification in the 1828 constitutional crisis, and he was a founder of the American Colonization Society for the gradual abolition of slavery and resettlement of blacks to Africa. Madison died at home at the age of 85 after an extended illness. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: American Revolution; American System; Articles of Confederation; Jefferson, Thomas; War Hawks; Primary Documents: President James Madison’s War Message (1812)

Further Reading

Ellis, Joseph J. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Labunski, Richard. James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Rakove, Jack N. James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic. New York: Longman, 2002.

Missions Missions in North America and abroad have a long history. The term itself involves two ideas. First, the mission is an action taken by representatives of one culture to impose ideas and concepts on another culture, often with the hope that the second party will adapt to the culture and lifestyles of the first group, which pursues the mission. Second, and as important in American history, is the idea of the mission as a physical place where certain actions may be performed. In both senses the concepts and practices of missions were a critical part in American expansion and imperialism. Missions began in Europe as part of the Roman Catholic effort to spread the Christian religion across that continent and beyond. The first missions intended to convert so-called infidels—persons who were not Christians and who faced eternal peril to their souls without some action on their part—to become Christians. Missions to infidels were a hallmark of medieval European culture, as the church sent missionaries at intervals to Asia and Africa. Later in the medieval period, Catholics, and later Protestants after the 16th century, began missions to revitalize Roman Catholic territories thought to need additional evangelization. These missions were called missions to the faithful. When Spaniards came to the Americas in the 1490s, they brought missionaries with them to convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism and to urge Natives to change their lifestyle to match European expectations. These first missions were to convert Native peoples in the Caribbean islands and were combined with Spanish attempts to colonize the region. By 1510, Dominican and Franciscan friars actively pursued missions on the island of Hispaniola. Cuba followed, from which the missionaries would then move in later decades to the mainland of Florida, Central America, and South America. In this early period Augustinian and Mercedarian priests also engaged in missions in the same regions. The Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, formed in 1540, engaged in Spanish and Portuguese missions in the Americas after 1549. Jesuits ventured as far north as the Virginia tidewater region late in the 16th century, and eventually they pursued missions elsewhere in the region that is now the American Southwest and the northern states of Mexico. Beginning with the 1540 Coronado expedition to present-day New Mexico, Spanish Franciscans established missionary efforts in that region, expanding that presence in 1598 with permanent Spanish settlements. Franciscan missions followed in east Texas in 1690, where they remained after 1716 to the 1820s. Spanish Franciscans were sent to California in 1769 to thwart Russian and British interests on the West Coast of North America. Those missions followed the coast from San Diego to San Francisco Bay and lasted into the 1830s until closed by the Mexican government. English colonists arrived in eastern North America with a lesser desire to stage missions to indigenous peoples. There were isolated yet persistent attempts to convert Native peoples to Christianity, of which the British predominantly offered a Puritan or congregational form of Protestant Christian religion. The resulting efforts yielded the praying towns of the New England colonies, which, like the Spaniards’ missions, sought to convert both the religion and culture of local indigenous peoples. Outlying missionary towns such as that at Deerfield, Massachusetts, were later products of efforts supported by the colonial government at Boston and other British colonial centers. Late in the colonial period missionary societies sponsored by the Anglican church began missions to nonconforming British settlers and their slaves in the southern English colonies of the Eastern Seaboard.

The main competitors to the English in the northeast were French Jesuits sent to New France, presentday Canada. Here they hoped to convert peoples such as the Hurons and those living along the Saint Lawrence River valley and the Great Lakes. Jesuits also pursued missions during which they lived in Native towns and villages in the Illinois Country, and from which the missionaries continued southward on the Mississippi River, eventually finding their way to the Gulf of Mexico. Following such explorations in search of passages to new peoples and trading opportunities, Jesuits and their French lay counterparts attempted missions on the Gulf Coast, with one result being the founding of New Orleans as a French port in 1714. It was these efforts that brought the French into contest with the Spanish for control of what is now western Louisiana and eastern Texas. With the independence of the United States of America came a new, national era of missionary activity in North America. Missionary activities began to multiply among the increasing number of Protestant denominations in the United States. Unlike the colonial period in which established churches existed with support from the state, now the citizens of the young republic beheld a growing array of Christian variants that also offered new missionary opportunities. Over the 19th century the number of Bible societies, tract societies, and social reform movements grew significantly, and with these efforts came a growing desire to perform missionary work at home and abroad. In the western territories, internal missions to Native Americans became the calling card of late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant denominations. They set up missions in the Dakota Territory, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, and elsewhere on the Plains. In Utah and the surrounding area, missions to Native Americans and settlers were a part of the activity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Missionaries from Protestant denominations set up schools, clinics, and social support organizations that mimicked U.S. government Indian boarding schools but with a different context. At the same time, a resurgent Catholic missionary presence in the western states also took root, often near Protestant establishments. Jay T. Harrison See also: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; California Missions; Serra, Junípero; Spalding, Henry and Eliza Hart; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Muldoon, James, ed. The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Wade, Maria F. Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans: Long-Term Processes and Daily Practices. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.

Neolin Neolin, best known as the “Delaware Prophet,” was a Native American religious leader who was extremely influential in uniting Indians who came together to oppose Great Britain in 1763 during the socalled Pontiac’s Rebellion. He did not enter the historical record until 1761, when he experienced the first of many religious visions in which he received instructions from the Master of Life. In the first vision, Neolin was given a set of instructions for all Native peoples to follow, along with a prayer that was to be repeated at the beginning and end of every day. Among the instructions that were subsequently preached to Natives from many tribes by Neolin and other prophets who followed his teachings were to abandon European goods and culture, return to the traditional lifestyle of their ancestors, reject alcoholic beverages, end intertribal conflicts, and join together to force Europeans off lands occupied by Native

Americans. The Master of Life later provided Neolin a map to heaven and hell, with instructions for how Native peoples could earn their way to heaven, which was the domain of the Master of Life. Association with Europeans or aspects of their cultures marked the path to hell. Although the inclusion of heaven and hell reflected European religious concepts that were previously foreign to Native American theology, Neolin’s religion quickly found adherents throughout the Great Lakes region. Its underlying theology put the blame on Europeans for all the misfortunes faced by Native Americans and promised a brighter future once Europeans and their cultural influences were driven out of their lives. One of Neolin’s early adherents was Pontiac, an Ottawa leader. Neolin’s religious message dovetailed with Pontiac’s military goals to attack British forts throughout the vicinity of the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. Together they helped other Native leaders forge a pan-Indian confederacy from 1762 to 1763 that was capable of attacking British fortifications throughout the Old Northwest. Pontiac launched Pontiac’s Rebellion by attacking Fort Detroit on May 9, 1763, but was unable to breach its fortifications. Other Native leaders were far more effective in their attacks, as at least nine British forts either fell or were abandoned. Pontiac besieged Fort Detroit until October 1763, when he was forced to abandon the effort. His subsequent retreat effectively marked the end of the conflict that bears his name. Pontiac’s failure also negatively impacted Neolin’s reputation. Neolin had been with Pontiac at Fort Detroit and had repeatedly assured Native warriors there that the Master of Life had guaranteed them a victory. When the promised victory failed to materialize, Neolin lost all his credibility. Although he personally ceased to be influential, his pan-Indian message continued to inspire other militant Native American religious leaders, most notably Tenskwatawa, for generations. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Pontiac; Tenskwatawa; Primary Documents: Pontiac’s Speech Explaining His Reasons for Making War on the English (1763)

Further Reading Cave, Alfred A. Prophets of the Great Spirit: Native American Revitalization Movements in Eastern North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Irwin, Lee. Coming Down from Above: Prophecy, Resistance, and Renewal in Native American Religions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

New Orleans, Battle of (1815) The Battle of New Orleans was the final battle of the War of 1812 and is widely regarded as the greatest American land victory of the war. With Napoleon’s initial defeat in Paris in 1814, the British were finally able to concentrate their energies on the American theater. More than 17,000 men, mostly Continental veterans, sailed to America where they were to be part of a three-part strategy: one wave of the British attack was to move downward from Canada; a second would attack the mid-Atlantic region through the Chesapeake; and the third would attack the port of New Orleans. The attack on New Orleans had originally been planned as a diversion to relieve pressure on Canada, but it was reconceived as a major enterprise. Between 8,000 and 9,000 British troops headed to the Gulf under the command of Sir Edward Pakenham, a distinguished veteran of the Napoleonic wars and the brother-in-law of Lord Wellington.

Major General Andrew Jackson, in command of U.S. forces, had between 4,000 and 5,000 men at his disposal. His forces included part of the Seventh U.S. Infantry; various militia regiments from Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama; local Indian groups; and free soldiers of color from both Louisiana and Saint-Domingue. His forces also included several hundred privateers from the Caribbean island of Barataria, who had been recruited through last-minute negotiations. The Baratarians, who in peacetime raided every nation with impunity, had been promised pardons by the Louisiana legislature for their military service. They would not only supply 300–400 men to the fight, but also brought much-needed munitions. The British advance began December 14 and was initially unstoppable. Naval forces swept aside the five American gunboats guarding Lake Borgne and seized control of the waterway, allowing the British to establish an encampment on Pea Island. On December 23, around 1,800 men landed on the east bank of the Mississippi River and took control of the nearby Villeré Plantation. The assault’s only failure was in losing the element of surprise: a messenger escaped from the Villeré forces to warn Jackson of the British arrival.

Andrew Jackson leads the charge against the British during the Battle of New Orleans. This depiction of the decisive battle shows Jackson (with sword) as the heroic leader of the U.S. force, a major factor in his future political success. (Library of Congress)

Immediately upon being informed of the British presence, Jackson ordered an attack on their position. Jackson’s quick action caught the British wholly off-guard. A land force set upon the British camp, which had dug in and lit fires for the evening meal. Simultaneously, the USS Carolina, a 14-gun schooner, slipped downriver to bombard the British position. The resulting skirmish, fought wholly in the dark, was a chaotic, bloody mess, with fairly even casualties—around 200 on both sides. While Jackson’s forces failed to score a decisive blow in this engagement, the night battle was significant in that it persuaded the British to delay their assault on the city, which gave Jackson more time to build fortifications that would prove crucial in repulsing the main assault on January 8. Despite their initial successes, the British were not strategically well positioned, a fact that General Pakenham glumly recognized once he arrived Christmas Day. Due to the surrounding swamps and American command of other waterways, British troops and supplies had to be floated inland almost 60 miles. By the time the British were ready for a formal assault, the Americans were well entrenched behind a fortified canal in front of a broad field, with the Mississippi River to one side and the swamps on the other. Pakenham was displeased with the British position, but his staff, who expected little

difficulty given the prior dismal performance of American militia, convinced him to proceed. The Americans and the British met in a second indecisive engagement on December 28, when Pakenham sent two columns of troops against Jackson’s right flank to test the enemy’s strength. The British almost succeeded in breaking through the flank, but called off the assault prematurely. The British forces retreated to await more artillery for the final assault. Pakenham’s plan for the main onslaught on Jackson’s position called for a simultaneous assault on both sides of the Mississippi River. On the west bank, a force was to seize the American batteries and turn the guns on the main American line. Meanwhile, the main British force would attack “Line Jackson” frontally. Despite having significantly greater numbers at his disposal, Pakenham’s final attack on January 8 was an unmitigated disaster. The British struggled to get men and supplies up from Lake Borgne, and the lieutenant colonel in charge of the scaling ladders disappeared in the early morning confusion. Heavy guns sank in the mud. The morning fog Pakenham was hoping would obscure his advance lasted just long enough to confuse his preparations, and then dissipated. Most disastrously, within a few minutes of the assault, most of the senior officers, including Pakenham himself, were killed or wounded. This plunged the British forces into confusion. The only successful British operation was on the west bank, but it was inconsequential in the face of the fiasco on the east bank. Reports of the day’s casualties on both sides vary, but all reports make it clear that the British suffered staggering losses, while the Americans lost comparatively few. Jackson reported around 20 casualties, whereas the British saw almost 2,000 men killed, wounded, or captured. In the aftermath of January 8, the British cancelled their offensive and withdrew from the region entirely on January 19. Jackson, however, concerned that the British might attempt another assault, insisted upon maintaining martial law in New Orleans for another two months, and went so far as to imprison both a Louisiana senator who challenged his command and the judge who ruled in the senator’s favor. While the Battle of New Orleans occurred almost a month after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, this did not render the American victory meaningless. The New Orleans victory ensured that the British Parliament would accept the terms of the peace treaty. It wholly altered the political mood of the United States, transforming a troubled war into a glorious success—and dooming the antiwar Federalist Party. Jackson’s military performance at the Battle of New Orleans made him a national legend, one of the few popular heroes to emerge from this difficult war, and catapulted him into national office, culminating in his election as president in 1828. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Jackson, Andrew; War Hawks; War of 1812

Further Reading Groom, Winston. Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Laffite at the Battle of New Orleans. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Patterson, Benton Rain. The Generals: Andrew Jackson, Sir Edward Pakenham, and the Road to the Battle of New Orleans. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Remini, Robert V. The Battle of New Orleans. New York: Viking, 1999.

Nootka Sound Convention (1790) The Nootka Sound Convention was signed on October 28, 1790, by Spain and Great Britain. The convention sought to create a mutually agreeable framework to govern trade and settlement in the eastern

North Pacific and to ensure that a conflict over sovereignty on a distant frontier would not result in a general European conflict. Nootka Sound is located on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In the late 18th century, Nootka became a central hub in a trans-Pacific trade in sea otter furs. The wealth created by sea otter pelts in the Chinese market created conflict between Great Britain, Russia, and Spain over control of the resource. In theory, sovereignty over the Northwest Coast was exercised by Spain through the Treaty of Tordesillas. This 1494 treaty divided all European discoveries in Asia and the New World between Spain and Portugal. However, many other European powers did not recognize this paper division, and the signatories lacked the force required to compel the recognition of their claims. Sovereignty claims to the region were academic until 1778. A lack of geographic knowledge left the area out of the sight of the European powers until the explorations of Captain James Cook connected the Nootka region to the expanding European trade in the Pacific. Cook was seeking the Northwest Passage but discovered a potential economic resource instead. Cook’s writings reflected a general disgust for Native Americans; many members of the expedition were revolted by the Native trade in human skulls and hands, leading to the claim that they were cannibals. Despite their misgivings, a trading relationship exchanging iron products for sea otter furs began. Cook and his sailors later made an enormous profit by reselling the furs in China for silk, tea, porcelain, and hard currency. The profits from this trade attracted the attention of officials in London, who forbade the publication of any news about the Nootka fur trade until Cook’s journals were officially published. The efforts to conceal this knowledge were unsuccessful. Unauthorized accounts of Cook’s voyages soon appeared. In theory, British law mandated that the East India Company and the South Seas Company maintain a monopoly on all trade conducted in the Pacific Ocean by British subjects. These claims could not be enforced. By 1785, the first merchant ship arrived at Nootka. British merchant James Hanna earned 20,000 Spanish dollars trading sea otter furs in the Chinese market in one voyage. Hanna’s success inspired more traders to come. In 1786, three vessels traded at Nootka. John Mackay was left with the Nootkas over the winter to learn Native customs and language, and to facilitate later trade. The British government attempted to regulate the fur trade through the creation of the King George Sound Company. Legally, the company held a monopoly on all British trade at Nootka, but this claim could not be enforced. In 1788, British trader John Meares purchased a small tract of land at Nootka from the Native Americans to establish a permanent trading post. The terms of this purchase and whether or not the local chief, Muquinna, actually agreed to the sale are in dispute. News of this establishment came to the attention of the Spanish authorities in Mexico. In 1789, Spanish warships under the command of Esteban José Martinez arrived in Nootka Sound to enforce Spanish land claims against the advance of both British merchantmen and Russian fur traders operating out of Alaska. In June 1789, Martinez seized several British trading ships partially owned by John Meares and established a small fort at Nootka. John Meares arrived in London with a lurid account of his losses due to the actions of the Spanish government. Public opinion was outraged. British prime minister William Pitt mobilized the Royal Navy and threatened to declare war against Spain unless an agreement was reached between Great Britain and Spain to allow British trade at Nootka, to formally allow British ships to trade in the Pacific, and to provide restitution to the merchants who lost property due to the actions of Martinez. The Spanish government was unwilling to risk a general European war in order to protect claims along a distant frontier. The Nootka Sound Convention was signed in October 1790. Under the terms of the original convention, restitution was paid to Meares, and British merchants were allowed to trade on the Northwest Coast provided that they were more than 10 leagues away from a Spanish settlement.

The ambiguous language of the treaty and slow communications created a disconnect between the mandates of the European governments and the actions of their agents on the ground at Nootka. In 1792, British captain George Vancouver arrived at Nootka with news of the convention. Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, the local Spanish commandant, and Vancouver entered into a series of negotiations over Nootka Sound. The 10 leagues provision in the convention did not specify whether or not Spanish settlements established since the convention counted as settlements, nor was the status of John Meares’s land purchase clarified. Bodega y Quadra and Vancouver both referred these questions to their home governments. The 1793 alliance between Spain and Great Britain in response to the French Revolution diminished the Nootka Sound controversy as an issue in Spanish-British relations. In 1794 the British government proposed that all settlements at Nootka should be abandoned and that neither country should attempt to exercise control over the region; the settlements were destroyed in 1795. The agreement between Spain and Britain, by removing the territorial claims of both powers, encouraged Russian and American traders to move into the region. The draw of potential profits in the fur trade spurred exploration, including a series of land expeditions across North America. The discovery of overland routes to the Northwest Coast by Americans Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on one hand and Briton Simon Fraser on the other linked the once distant coast to a growing world economy and the expanding land territory of the Canadian and American nations. Patrick Callaway See also: Cook, James; Corps of Discovery; Fur Trade; Gray, Robert; Northwest Passage

Further Reading Akrigg, G. P. V., and Helen Akrigg. British Columbia Chronicle, 1788–1846: Adventures by Sea and Land. Vancouver: Discovery Press, 1975. Norris, John M. “Policy of the British Cabinet in the Nootka Crisis.” English Historical Review 70, no. 277 (October 1955), 562–580. Pethick, Derek. The Nootka Connection: Europe and the Northwest Coast, 1790–1795. Vancouver: Douglas and Macintyre, 1980.

Northwest Passage The Northwest Passage refers to the northern navigable sea route atop North America linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. The object of numerous expeditions by mariners representing various nations including the United States, the passage occupied the minds of explorers, geographers, merchants, and imperial officials between the early modern period and the 20th century. Compelling the search for most of this time was the promise of a more direct and less hazardous means of reaching Asia from Western Europe and eastern North America. Among the profound consequences of the quest was the European discovery and settlement of what became the United States. Continued attempts to locate a strait further south from the Arctic latitudes resulted in overland expeditions by explorers Lewis and Clark and maritime voyages of discovery to the Pacific Northwest coast, thereby facilitating American expansion. Once word spread throughout Europe of the existence of a massive continent blocking the westward route to the Orient, there began a centuries-long obsession to locate a passage around it. Giovanni Caboto (1497), Gaspar Corte-Real (1500–1501), Sebastian Cabot (1508–1509), Jacques Cartier (1534; 1535– 1536), Martin Frobisher (1576; 1577; 1578), Francis Drake (1577–1580), John Davis (1585), Henry Hudson (1609; 1610–1611), Thomas Button (1612); Robert Bylot and William Baffin (1615; 1616), and Jens Munk (1619) all searched for the fabled route but to no avail. The voyages did, however, lead to new discoveries on the American continent, which paved the way for the settlement of North America by

the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Thomas James and Luke Foxe, both Englishmen, led unsuccessful attempts to locate the passage in 1631 through Hudson Bay. Some 30 years later, New England merchants, acting on the intelligence provided by two French explorers, Radisson and Des Groseilliers, outfitted an expedition to the northwest under Boston captain Zachariah Gillam. Forced back by ice near the entrance to Hudson Strait, Gillam returned years later on an expedition that led to the establishment of the royally chartered Hudson’s Bay Company. The 18th century witnessed less such activity from the North Atlantic. British expeditions to locate a passage via the northern part of Hudson Bay by James Knight (1719–1721) and Christopher Middleton (1741–1742) ended in disappointment, as did a voyage by the California and Dobbs Galley in 1746– 1747 partially backed by Arthur Dobbs, later governor of North Carolina. Theodorus Swaine Drage served as “clerk” during the expedition and attempted to take advantage of the popular appetite for voyage narratives by publishing about his experience. Author of An Account of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage by Hudson’s Streights (1748–1749), he followed it with The Great Probability of a Northwest Passage (1768). The books produced neither fanfare nor inspiration for others, nor did the British Parliament’s announcement of a £20,000 prize to the first merchant expedition able to find a maritime route to the great “sea of the west.” The main discoveries relating to the passage were made by the overland treks of Samuel Hearne (1769–1772) and Alexander Mackenzie (1789; 1792–1793), who determined that there was no intervening strait between Hudson Bay and the Pacific. By this time, Britain, France, Spain, and the United States were heavily focused on exploring the South Seas and the Pacific Northwest coast. On his third Pacific voyage in 1778, Captain James Cook searched for the entrance to the Northwest Passage along a stretch of coastline from Vancouver Island to the Bering Sea. Despite “turning the corner” across the top of Alaska and working eastward, Cook was stopped by heavy pack ice. Entrusted with the same objective between 1791 and 1795, Captain George Vancouver conclusively found that a Northwest Passage through the North American continent did not exist. The Lewis and Clark expedition between 1804 and 1806, commissioned by President Jefferson to survey the new territory, was predicated on the assumed existence of a practicable water communication across the continent for the purpose of commerce. Their findings provided final evidence that a passage through American territory did not exist. Nineteenth-century expeditions to locate the Northwest Passage no longer held the same objective. Rather than searching for a more direct link to Asia, nations were more interested in making scientific discoveries and territorial claims. The resurgence of British expeditions, led by Edward Parry (1819), John Ross (1829), John Franklin (1845), and John Rae (1846–1847), were sponsored by the Royal Navy and largely intended to counter Russian activity on the Pacific coast. Robert McClure became the first person to traverse a route from west to east, though partly overland by sledge, in 1853–1854. The information yielded by these expeditions all but ended the possibility of locating a commercially viable route. This disappointment was greatly offset by the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the Panama Canal in 1914. In 1906, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in the sloop Gjøa completed the first voyage through the Northwest Passage between Greenland and Alaska. The St. Roch, a Canadian RCMP vessel under the command of Henry Larsen, made the crossing from west to east in the years 1940–1942. The first successful commercial voyage through the Northwest Passage was not made until 1969, when the American supertanker Manhattan, with the assistance of the Canadian icebreaker John A. MacDonald, crossed it from east to west. Its objective, to examine the feasibility of Northwest Passage commercial traffic, was motivated by newly discovered oil deposits in Alaska. Though it proved that a marine transportation route could be used by commercial vessels, thereby connecting the riches of the north to

American cities in the south, the expedition also pointed to the enormous cost and difficulty involved with navigating the passage. The steady decline in Arctic sea ice since the late 20th century, combined with increased exploratory drilling and ship traffic, has resuscitated interest in the Northwest Passage and generated new claims by northern nations including the United States to control it. Michael Dove See also: Alaska, Purchase of; Cook, James; Corps of Discovery; Gray, Robert; Hudson’s Bay Company; Vancouver, George

Further Reading Carlson, Jon D. “New World Empires and Otters: The Scramble for Nootka Sound, the Northwest Passage, and the China Trade.” In Myths, State Expansion, and the Birth of Globalization: A Comparative Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Regard, Frédéric, ed. The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Knowledge, Nation and Empire, 1576–1806. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Savours, Ann. The Search for the Northwest Passage. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Williams, Glyndwr. Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. London: Allen Lane, 2009.

Oregon Boundary Dispute Having agreed to the joint occupation of the Oregon Country in 1818 (per the terms of the AngloAmerican Convention) and again in 1827, the United States and Britain formally settled the Oregon boundary dispute—also known as the Oregon question—in 1846. Under the provisions of the Oregon Boundary Treaty of that year, the continental portion of the region south of the 49th parallel of latitude became American territory, while that north of the parallel became British. Britain also retained control of all of Vancouver Island, which extends south of the 49th parallel. Under the conventions of the time, both the United States and Britain could make legitimate claim to what would become known as the Oregon Country. American as well as British explorers surveyed sections of the region’s coast in the late 18th century, and shortly afterward fur traders working for competing British concerns, the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, penetrated the interior. The American-owned Pacific Fur Company began operations in the region in 1811, but was bought out a few years later by the North West Company. A small party of French Canadians settled in the region in 1829, as did substantially larger parties of Americans in the years that followed. Despite differing allegiances, American and British subjects learned to work together—a situation due in large part to the efforts of Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor John McLoughlin. However, the Americans were increasingly anxious to secure the Oregon Country for the United States, and they established a provisional government in 1843 with its capital at Oregon City, a few miles south of the Columbia River. With the arrival of the first wagon trains traversing the Oregon Trail, the number of Americans living in the territory rose to nearly 6,000 by 1845. Not surprisingly, Britain and the United States differed over how the Oregon Country might be divided. Hoping to retain control of the region’s rich fur trade, the British pressed for a boundary running along the Columbia, while American politicians had long favored setting the boundary farther north, at 49 degrees north latitude. With the approach of the 1844 election, however, the Democratic Party and its normally cautious candidate for president, James K. Polk, took advantage of the country’s expansionist mood and argued for claiming the entire region up to the latitude of 54 degrees 40 minutes—the southern

boundary of Russian America. Senator William Allen of Ohio introduced what would become the famous phrase “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight” in a speech on the Senate floor. Upon winning the election, Polk continued pressing the American claim to all of the Oregon Country. He found supporters in such figures as newspaper columnist John L. O’Sullivan, who wrote that it was the country’s “manifest destiny” to annex the Republic of Texas (which had won its independence from Mexico in 1836) as well as the Oregon Country. By the time the United States entered into new negotiations in 1845, however, it had reverted to its earlier, more accommodating position of dividing the region at the 49th parallel. Nevertheless the British refused the offer—a move that resulted in Polk’s taking up a more bellicose tone once again. At Polk’s instigation, Congress passed a resolution in April 1846 declaring that, from the American perspective, the period of joint occupation of the Oregon Country had come to an end, but added that the two powers should settle the question peacefully. Despite Polk’s apparent belligerence, the American government was unwilling to go to war with Britain for yet a third time, having fought its former mother country in the American Revolution as well as in the War of 1812. The prospect of imminent war with Mexico (which broke out in mid-1846) also encouraged Polk and Congress to make peace with Britain. For their part, the British were aware that the fur trade of the Oregon Country was in decline, and knew too that war with the United States would mean the loss of a valuable trading partner. But being less certain of the actual strength of their position in the region, they had dispatched Lieutenant William Peel by sea in July 1844 to assess the situation. At Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, Peel met two compatriots, Lieutenants Henry J. Warré and Mervin Vavasour, who had been sent on an overland expedition with the same purpose. Peel reported back to his government that the Americans held the upper hand in the region, but at the same time stressed the importance of Britain’s retaining all of Vancouver Island. Peel’s report, with which Warré, Vavasour, and McLoughlin concurred, encouraged the British to adopt a more conciliatory position. Prompted by overtures from the American side, the British government offered in June 1846 to accept a boundary at the 49th parallel, with the stipulation that Britain continue to occupy all of Vancouver Island and that the Hudson’s Bay Company retain the right to navigate the Columbia River. Within a short period of time representatives of the two governments drew up a treaty, which the Senate ratified on June 18, 1846, by a large margin.

PIG WAR The 1846 Treaty of Oregon established that the boundary between the United States and Canada should run along the 49th parallel until it reaches “the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island.” There are, in fact, two channels that fulfill this description, one to the north of the San Juan Islands and one to the south, leading to conflicting claims by American and British authorities that nearly led to full-fledged war over the death of a pig. In mid-June 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American settler attracted by the prime sheep-grazing lands on the island, shot and killed a pig owned by the Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company, which also laid claim to the territory. In response, British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar and evict all Americans from the islands. The famously anti-British general William S. Harney quickly dispatched 64 men to protect the Americans, which Vancouver governor James Douglas matched with nearly as many men and three war frigates. The situation escalated until, by August 10, 461 men were camped on the island, protected by 14 field guns and eight 32-pound naval guns that had been removed from a nearby American frigate. For their part, the British had 52 large artillery, which they fired for tourists who arrived from Victoria. Eventually, American and English diplomats diffused the situation and both armies withdrew, establishing joint occupation until a final border could be reached. (In 1872, a German commission ruled in favor of the United States.) Ultimately, the sentiment of British naval commander R. Lambert Baynes was followed when he stated that he would not “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.”

While the Oregon Boundary Treaty settled the main issue regarding the disposition of the Oregon Country, an ambiguity in its wording led to the so-called Pig War of 1859. This armed confrontation involved the ownership of several islands lying in the strait between the mainland and Vancouver Island, and resulted in the joint occupation of San Juan Island. By the time the situation was formally resolved in 1872 (in favor of the United States), the Washington Territory had been formed from the northern portion of the Oregon Territory and the state of Oregon had been carved out of the remaining territory. Grove Koger See also: Donation Land Claim Act of 1850; Hudson’s Bay Company; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Polk, James Knox; Webster-Ashburton Treaty; Primary Documents: “For Oregon!” Settlers from Illinois Describe the Oregon Territory (1847)

Further Reading Anderson, Stuart. “British Threats and the Settlement of the Oregon Boundary Dispute.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 66, no. 4 (Winter 1975): 153–160. Haynes, Sam W. James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2002. Pletcher, David M. The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973. Woodcock, George. “The Oregon Boundary Dispute.” History Today 5, no. 6 (June 1955): 366–375.

Oregon Treaty (1846) The Oregon Treaty was signed in 1846 by the United States and Great Britain to divide previously unorganized territory along the Pacific Coast of North America between the two countries. With the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, the United States and Britain agreed to set the 49th parallel as the boundary of their North American holdings west from Lake of the Woods to the Stony Mountains (now called the Rocky Mountains). They agreed to share occupation of the Oregon Territory until a more definite decision was needed. Since the late 18th century, early European settlers to the territory between Russian and Spanish North American colonial claims had largely been missionaries and fur traders. By the 1840s, however, 500 British settlers, mostly in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, were congregated along the Columbia River (in Britain’s Columbia Department) and had been joined by 5,000 to 7,000 U.S. settlers. In 1844, U.S. secretary of state John C. Calhoun, seeing the need for a more definitive boundary, proposed to extend the 49th parallel west to the Pacific Ocean. James K. Polk, a Democratic candidate for president, advocated taking all of the territory from the Rockies to the Pacific and from the 54° 40ʹ parallel (the southernmost boundary of Russian America) south to the 42nd parallel (the northern boundary of Mexico, independent of Spain since 1821). In his inaugural address of March 4, 1845, Polk stated that it would be his “duty to assert and maintain by all constitutional means the right of the United States to that portion of our territory which lies beyond the Rocky Mountains. Our title to the country of Oregon is ‘clear and unquestionable.’” Polk further asserted the Monroe Doctrine’s intolerance for European influence on the North American continent and refused to accept the advice of James Buchanan, his own secretary of state, to extend the 49th parallel. The slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight” became a rallying cry of proponents of American acquisition of all of Oregon.

Lord Aberdeen, the British foreign minister, encouraged negotiations to peacefully resolve the dispute over claims to the territory. Polk and the U.S. Senate acceded to negotiations conducted by Buchanan and Richard Pakenham, the British ambassador to the United States. The Oregon Boundary Treaty, signed June 15, 1846, extended the U.S.-British North American boundary along the 49th parallel to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Vancouver Island, west of the strait, remained in British North America. The 49th parallel, dividing much of the North American continent between the United States and Britain (and later, Canada), cuts through watersheds, mountain ranges, and ecosystems. It was born out of political necessity, but it is a product of the early American republic’s affinity for straight lines articulated in the Land Ordinance of 1785. The Oregon Territory of the United States was formed in 1848, while the northern portion of it became the Washington Territory in 1853. Oregon became a state in 1859, while most of the Washington Territory became the state of Washington in 1889. Other portions of the land claimed by the United States in 1846 became parts of the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Donald W. Maxwell See also: Donation Land Claim Act of 1850; Hudson’s Bay Company; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Oregon Treaty; Webster-Ashburton Treaty; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss; Primary Documents: “For Oregon!” Settlers from Illinois Describe the Oregon Territory (1847)

Further Reading Johnson, David Alan. Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840–1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Merk, Frederick. The Oregon Question: Essays in Anglo-American Diplomacy and Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Pomeroy, Earl. The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965.

Paris, Treaty of (1763) The Treaty of Paris, also referred to as the Peace of Paris, signed between Britain, France, and Spain on February 10, 1763, was the peace arrangement ending the global conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. Negotiated over a three-year period, the treaty included one of the largest land transfers in history. Though Britain emerged as the preeminent world power, its new North American possessions quickly distanced themselves from their home government, leading to the outbreak of the American Revolution. New France had been under British military rule since it was surrendered to the British some three years earlier when Governor Vaudreuil consented to the Articles of Capitulation in Montreal, Quebec, on September 8, 1760. This followed agreements made between the British and France’s Indian allies at Oswegatchie on August 25 and the Huron Indians at Longueuil on September 5. The struggle for North America, known as the French and Indian War in the colonies, was only one theater of the conflict, however, which ranged from the Caribbean to the Pacific. A peace settlement proved difficult to reach and hostilities continued, prompting France and Spain to join forces against Britain by renewing an old alliance referred to as the Family Compact. John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, appointed by King William III to replace William Pitt as prime minister, and the French minister, the Duc de Choiseul, conducted secret talks until they reached a tentative agreement in June 1762. By the time diplomats met to conduct formal negotiations in September, news arrived of the British victory over the Spanish at Havana. Matters

worsened for Spain when in October a British force captured Manila in the Philippines. The last battle of the North American theater, at Signal Hill, St. John’s in September, saw the British regain Newfoundland and its invaluable fishery from France. The vastly new imperial landscape stalled negotiations further, for the Spanish king Charles III refused to cede Cuba to Britain and Britain refused to ignore the valuable territorial gains it had recently achieved. To break the impasse, the Duc de Choiseul proposed that all three nations redistribute their territory in America and elsewhere. The terms of the treaty were extensive. In addition to obtaining Canada, including Newfoundland, Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes Basin, the east bank of the Mississippi River, and Cape Breton Island, from France, Britain also secured possession of Florida from Spain. France kept its fishing rights in Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence and had its possessions of St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in the West Indies, posts in India, the Mediterranean island of Minorca, and its slaving station in present-day Chad completely restored. Cuba was returned to Spain, which also assumed control over the former French territory west of the Mississippi River including the port of New Orleans. British government officials had strong reservations about negotiating for large parts of French North America due to the enormous expense associated with controlling the region. The paltry value of these regions’ exports compared to other potential territories, such as the rich sugar-producing islands of the French West Indies, also directed England’s attention away from North America during the negotiations. Ultimately, however, it was the threat of yet another lengthy war with France that convinced Britain to assume possession over France’s mainland North American possessions. The treaty received tentative diplomatic approval on November 3, 1762, and formal assent the following February; the effect was far-reaching. Though most of the territory in North America transferred to the British was Indian land, no formal provision was made for the Indians in the treaty, even those that fought alongside English troops. Tribes that had sided with the French saw the British victory as a threat to their freedom, as colonists immediately began to encroach on Indian lands. Four months after the treaty took effect Ottawa chief Pontiac convened a war council to plan an organized resistance. Between May and October 1763, the border became the scene of numerous bloody attacks. Fearful of another Indian uprising following Pontiac’s Rebellion, Britain issued a Royal Proclamation on October 7 that established a line along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains designed to separate Indians and colonists and quell further frontier violence. Attempts to implement the new strategic policy for North America created dissension and growing hostility among the colonies toward the British government, however. Americans along the frontier fiercely opposed the Proclamation Line, believing that idle Indian lands were rightfully theirs by conquest from the French. In the years immediately following the treaty there took place a series of frontier clashes including the massacre of the Conestoga Indians by the Paxton Boys in Pennsylvania. It was not only Indians that England was having trouble incorporating into its colony. Because of the treaty, England had greatly extended its empire, which now included more than 70,000 residents of the former New France. Renamed “Quebec,” the region consisted mostly of French-speaking Roman Catholics. The enormous cost of the Seven Years’ War, combined with its relatively small number of soldiers and administrators, led to a massive shift in Britain’s North American strategy toward the French living in the region. Britain’s efforts to administer Quebec led to the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted several major concessions to the French including free worship of Catholicism, the collection of tithes by the Catholic Church, the right of Catholics to hold political office, and the continuation of both the seigniorial land system and French civil law.

GENERAL JEFFREY AMHERST AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE Almost immediately after the Treaty of Paris gave England administrative control over much of North America, British military governor Jeffery Amherst attempted to change the relationship between Native and non-Native people. He sought to confine trading to army posts; banned the sale of weapons, ammunition, and alcohol; and most importantly, halted the expensive custom of diplomatic gift-giving. This did not sit well with the Ohio Indians. Amherst was not simply cutting off much needed trading supplies, but initiating an act of aggression that required an immediate response. This response came in the form of “Pontiac’s Rebellion” in which the Ohio Indians simultaneously attacked all British forts west of the Appalachians, including Fort Pitt. Amherst, knowing that the most damaging invader to Indian country was not people but disease, proposed that officers “send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians” by distributing infected blankets among the Delawares laying siege to Fort Pitt. While it is impossible to know if any Indians died as a direct result of the infected blankets, smallpox did indeed kill hundreds of thousands of Indians in the region in the years surrounding Pontiac’s Rebellion. For his part, Amherst’s misunderstanding of Indian diplomacy and his attempt to “Extirpate this Execrable Race” through germ warfare did lead to his removal from the American backcountry. This setback did not stop him from climbing up the British ranks, eventually being named commander in chief of the forces.

Colonists referred to the Quebec Act as the “Fifth Intolerable Act,” for it followed the hated Coercive Acts that served to restrict political and economic growth in the 13 colonies. Affirming former prime minister Pitt’s fears, the peace also gave France much-needed time and resources to rebuild its finances, reequip its navy, and return to its former stature as a major geopolitical power. The 1763 Treaty of Paris thus helped set in motion the forces culminating in the American Revolution and Britain’s defeat, reflected in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Michael Dove See also: American Revolution; Paris, Treaty of (1783); Paxton Boys; Proclamation of 1763; Quebec Act; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Knopf, 2000. Calloway, Colin G. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Paris, Treaty of (1783) The Treaty of Paris of 1783 ended the American Revolutionary War with the British government, thereby formally acknowledging American independence. The new country now claimed all territory east of the Mississippi River, save for Florida, and south of the line that ran from the St. Croix River, through the St. Lawrence watershed, along the 45th parallel, to the Lake of the Woods. The key for the United States to winning its freedom from the British Empire was gaining a European ally. Despite declaring its independence on July 4, 1776, the new nation still faced long odds in winning the war because of the lack of a navy and treasury. France could supply both ships and money. Congress dispatched diplomats to Europe in 1777, including Benjamin Franklin to Paris, to secure aid and an alliance. France had secretly aided the American rebels since the beginning of the war, but French leaders resisted an alliance and increased aid. The American victory in the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777 and the capture of a British army convinced the French that the United States could win. The Franco-

American alliance of 1778, negotiated by Franklin, bound France to fight until America gained independence while the United States would fight until the French gained colonial gains around the world. The American Revolution turned from a limited war into a worldwide conflict for the British. The American front became a secondary concern to the British government after Spain and Holland entered the war. The Spanish attempted to seize Gibraltar while the Dutch fleet raided English merchant shipping. When a Franco-American army led by General George Washington captured Lord Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, the fighting essentially ended in North America. The British government was ready to discuss peace. Congress ordered the American diplomats in Europe, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, to negotiate peace, but allow the French to lead. Franklin had previously rejected informal peace overtures from Great Britain for a settlement that would provide autonomy within the British Empire, but not independence for the American states. However, Adams and Jay saw quickly that French and American interests diverged. They convinced Franklin that the Americans had to disregard the French and negotiate on their own.

Signing of the preliminary peace treaty at Paris, November 30, 1782. Among the American peace commissioners were John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. By the terms of the final treaty, ultimately signed September 3, 1783, Britain recognized the independence of the United States and the borders of the new republic. (Library of Congress)

The British government sought peace because of its own instability. The government of Lord North had fallen over the Yorktown defeat. The new government led by the Marquess of Rockingham faced internal divisions, and King George III refused to accept the loss of the American colonies. Rockingham died in July 1782 and was succeeded by the Earl of Shelburne. His government sought peace, but hoped to avoid recognizing American independence. However, the war was straining the British treasury and Britain worried about colonial losses across the globe. The British pursued a strategy of attempting to split the alliance by proposing separate peace talks with each of its enemies. Franklin opened negotiations by demanding the cession of Canada. While the British rejected this, they accepted as a starting point American independence. Adams and Jay worried that Spain would convince the French to limit American expansion and believed that the new British willingness to accept independence offered a chance to secure a treaty before its allies could sell out American interests. In the final agreement, the United States succeeded in obtaining Newfoundland fishing rights and the privilege of curing fish in the uninhabited parts of Labrador, Nova Scotia, and the Magdalene Islands, but

not in Newfoundland. The western border of the United States was extended to the Mississippi with rights of navigation on the river granted to both countries. The British acknowledged American independence and a peaceful withdrawal of British forces. In return, the American government promised to recommend that the states repeal their confiscation laws of Loyalist property and provide for restitution of confiscated property to British subjects. The persecution of Loyalists would also end. Finally, the United States would also allow creditors to collect lawful debts, a significant concession because many southern planters were deeply in debt to English merchants. American negotiators signed a preliminary agreement with British representative Richard Oswald on November 30, 1782. The agreement would remain informal until the conclusion of a peace agreement between Britain and France that French foreign minister Vergennes was negotiating. France signed preliminary articles of peace with Great Britain on January 20, 1783, which were followed by a formal Peace of Paris signed on September 3, 1783. In the peace treaty with Spain, Great Britain ceded East and West Florida without clearly defining its boundary with the United States, creating later difficulties. While the Treaty of Paris ended the war, it left complications that handicapped the new nation. Spain controlled New Orleans, the Mississippi’s outlet to the sea, and in 1784 closed it to American shipping, thus denying western settlers a way to send their crops to market. Because the American states refused to compensate Loyalists who had suffered monetary or property losses during the Revolution as required by the Paris peace treaty, the British refused to evacuate its forts or soldiers from the Old Northwest. Because the treaty offered no provisions on Anglo-American trade, British exports flooded U.S. markets, while American exports to the British Empire were blocked by British trade restrictions and tariffs. The resulting economic depression in the United States was a prime cause of Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786: frustrated farmers, who lost their farms due to mortgage foreclosures and tax delinquencies, seized courthouses. These weaknesses led to a movement to replace the Articles of Confederation, which created a weak federal government with no executive branch and no taxation power. The Constitutional Convention in 1787 created a strong federal government in part to cope with the foreign policy problems the country faced. Stephen McCullough See also: American Revolution; Articles of Confederation

Further Reading Dull, Jonathon. A Diplomatic History of American Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Morris, Richard. The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Paxton Boys (1763) The Paxton Boys, named after the town of Paxton near the Pennsylvania frontier, were vigilantes who became infamous for their two unprovoked attacks on unarmed Conestoga Indians in 1763. Savagely murdering all 20 of the village’s inhabitants including women and children, their actions precipitated a major crisis between whites and Indians along the western boundary of the American colonies. The incident, for which no one was ever prosecuted, informed future strategies for continental growth, characterized by white aggression, anti-Indian sentiment, and the displacement of Indians from the American landscape.

Very little is known about the individuals referred to as “The Paxton Boys.” As a group, they tended to be descendants of Presbyterian Irish from Ulster who lived as squatters or poor white farmers in the hill country of northwestern Lancaster County and across the Susquehanna River in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Since the events of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, many frontier settlers believed their government to be hopelessly ineffective in both protecting and expanding the frontier. The Indian threat intensified between 1755 and 1758 when the Delawares and Shawnees, driven westward from their lands as a result of Pennsylvania’s alliance with the Iroquois, launched raids on frontier settlements. Tensions heightened further following the end of the Seven Years’ War, when the English colonies were embroiled in a pan-Indian resistance movement led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac in response to continuing incursions by whites on Indian lands. Frontier Pennsylvanians felt that the territory once controlled by the defeated French should be open to American settlement. They became increasingly hostile to government efforts at stemming their expansion onto what they believed to be idle land. Intent on seizing neighboring Indian lands, a group of between 50 and 100 frontier settlers calling themselves “The Paxton Boys” initiated a series of bloody attacks on defenseless Conestoga Indians. Their rampage began at dawn on December 14, 1763, when they surrounded Conestoga Indiantown, a village numbering around 20 Indians. Finding only six members there (three men, two women, and a boy), the riders killed and scalped them, burned the huts, and returned home. The remainder of the Conestogas, who had been away that morning trading with their white neighbors, were moved by local magistrates to the town workhouse in Lancaster for their protection. Thirteen days after they first attacked the Conestogas, the Paxton Boys rode into Lancaster and brutally killed the remaining Indians, consisting of four men, three women, and seven children. Governor John Penn’s promise of bounties for their arrest went unclaimed. In January 1764, around 250 frontiersmen under the name of the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia and threatened to sack the city. Benjamin Franklin, escorted by British soldiers and local militia, met the rebels at Germantown and quelled the immediate crisis by convincing the rebels to record their grievances. Two documents were later submitted, the Declaration and the Remonstrance, which critiqued the government’s Indian policies. News of the savage attacks quickly rippled from the colony to the backcountry. Numerous Indians fled to Philadelphia while many frontiersmen lay claim to Conestoga Indiantown by right of conquest, though they were later driven off by government officials. Some in the backcountry approved of the Paxton Boys’ actions, but most, particularly in eastern Pennsylvania, were shocked and dismayed by the violence. Relations between the Conestogas and neighboring white settlements had enjoyed a lengthy period of peace. The unprovoked killings also convinced Indian tribes along the frontier that whites could not be trusted. In the interests of both settlers and Indians, the assembly voted in favor of establishing a militia, increasing funds for the defense of the colony, and negotiating a peace treaty with the Indians on the western frontier. Despite the severity of the crimes, no Paxton Boys were arrested, thus undermining the credibility of the provincial government and threatening to trigger another frontier war. Franklin attracted considerable attention to the crisis and the deplorable actions of the Paxton Boys in his published account of the massacre, in which he condemned the group as dangerous barbarians. In his Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, he described the harmonious relations that had existed between Pennsylvanians and the Conestogas since the beginning of the colony under its first proprietor, William Penn. His account was particularly stirring in its identification and brief eulogy of the victims, in which he underlined their adopted English names. The outright denunciation of the Paxton Boys expressed in Franklin’s narrative was countered by Anglican minister Thomas Barton in his The Conduct of the Paxton-Men, Impartially Represented, which defended the actions of the Paxton Boys.

Those responsible for the 1763 massacre all but disappeared for several years until a smaller group with the same name emerged in 1769. Under the leadership of Lazarus Stewart, who had directed the second massacre of 1763, the Paxton Boys were employed as mercenaries by the Susquehanna Company, a Connecticut-based land speculation company interested in planting a colony in the Wyoming Valley of northern Pennsylvania. They fought in several battles and skirmishes during the American Revolution until they were defeated in July 1778 in the Wyoming Valley during an invasion of Loyalists and Iroquois. The Paxton Boys had an enduring effect on the development of the United States. Franklin’s published account convinced many in government and Britain to practice caution amidst pressure to extend political power to the nonelite. The violence and hostility aroused on all sides essentially marked an end to William Penn’s “holy experiment,” and the failure to arrest anyone for the massacre set the stage for further frontier clashes and racial violence. The brutality and lawlessness demonstrated by the actions and response to the Paxton Boys reflected the pervasive anti-Indian sentiment of the 18th-century Pennsylvanian frontier, which became systematic during and following the American Revolution. Michael Dove See also: Paris, Treaty of (1763); Pontiac; Proclamation of 1763; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Camenzind, Krista. “Violence, Race, and the Paxton Boys.” In William Pencack and Daniel Richter, eds. Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Hinderaker, Eric, and Peter Mancall. At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Merrell, James. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: Norton, 1999.

Pinckney’s Treaty (1796) Called the Treaty of San Lorenzo in Spain and Pinckney’s Treaty in the United States, the Pinckney Treaty was negotiated in 1796 by Thomas Pinckney, special envoy to Spain, and Don Manuel de Godoy, the effective prime minister of the king of Spain, Charles IV. The treaty resolved several issues that had been festering between the United States and Spain for more than 15 years. It clarified the southern border of the United States, moved a portion of Florida from Spanish to U.S. control, provided westerners with access to the Mississippi River (a crucial water transport route for the western half of the new republic), and granted Americans docking and storage rights at the port of New Orleans. The treaty was largely the result of good timing. Spain was in a precarious position at the time of the Pinckney Treaty negotiations. Long an ally of France, the Spanish government had abandoned the French Republic for the British during the French revolutionary wars. By 1794, exhausted by war and defeat in both Europe and the Caribbean, Spain decided to switch sides once more and renew its association with France. The Spanish government was concerned about British reprisals due to this switch in allegiance, and they were particularly worried about their American territories, given the looming and undefined threat posed by the Jay Treaty negotiations. A strong alliance between Britain and the United States that included military cooperation could seriously threaten Spanish America. Recognizing this, Spain was suddenly far more interested in settling its long-festering differences with the United States. Tensions had existed between the United States and Spain since the Revolutionary War when Spain had been an ally of France but not an outright supporter of the new American republic. After 1783, American settlers had poured into frontier settlements bordering Spanish America. In Kentucky and the

Northwest Territory (present-day Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana) the U.S. settler population went from a few hundred in 1775 to 25,000 by 1782, and more than 100,000 by 1790. These settlers needed access to the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans to move their produce to Atlantic markets, but the river and the city were currently part of the Spanish dominion and Spain denied the Americans access. A second source of tension between the United States and Spain existed on the United States’ southern border, between Georgia and Spanish Florida, where U.S. settlement was also growing rapidly. There was a stretch of land between Georgia and Florida that had long been disputed terrain. In the early 1790s, to strengthen Spain’s power in the region, the Spanish colonial authorities had held diplomatic talks with local Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees. With the Indians’ permission, the Spanish built a series of forts to strengthen their position. U.S. settlers in Georgia accused the Spanish of fomenting Indian hostility in the region and encouraging Indian attacks on the American settler communities. The Georgians saw the continuing presence of the Spanish and their forts as an unacceptable threat. By 1794, western settlers were making increasingly urgent demands for the Washington administration to start negotiations with Spain for access to the Mississippi, for a resolution of the southern border, and for action on the Southwest and Ohio Country Indian issues. Both backcountry Kentuckians and Georgia settlers also periodically threatened to launch extralegal military forays against the Spanish holdings in America, and France’s “Citizen Genêt,” during his brief career as U.S. minister, had encouraged many of these schemes. While none of the Genêt intrigues had come to fruition, they had reminded Spain of the region’s basic vulnerability, particularly should the United States be aided by a powerful European ally. As a consequence, in April 1794, Spanish minister Godoy requested that the Washington administration send someone to Spain vested with sufficient power to negotiate all the outstanding issues between the two nations. Washington decided to send Thomas Pinckney, a Federalist diplomat who was currently serving as the minister to Great Britain, as envoy extraordinary to Spain. Pinckney arrived in June 1795. Negotiations initially proceeded somewhat slowly, as Spain tried to insist on a strong commercial and military alliance with the United States as a precondition. When Pinckney refused and threatened to break off talks, however, Godoy quickly folded and agreed to almost all of the American terms. Pinckney’s Treaty was signed at San Lorenzo El Real on October 27, 1795, and the U.S. Senate ratified it on March 3, 1796. It proved a far more popular document than the Jay Treaty of the previous year. The United States achieved nearly everything it had hoped to gain from the treaty. Godoy offered the 31st N. parallel as a southern border to the United States, thus surrendering some of the contested territory, the Natchez District of Florida, and Spain renounced its protection of the Indians living within the disputed regions. Spain also granted Americans the privilege of free navigation on the Mississippi River through Spanish territory and tax-free docking and storage privileges at the port of New Orleans. These privileges were granted for a term of three years, subject to renewal. The treaty was an incredible boon to western settlers. It was particularly important to the inhabitants of Tennessee and Kentucky, for whom the Mississippi River was the only viable means of transporting their goods. In the years after the Pinckney Treaty was signed, a huge number of settlers moved into the Ohio Territory and the Kentucky and Tennessee lands. By 1803, the bulk of the produce grown by the western half of the United States flowed down the Mississippi. Commercially, the Pinckney Treaty made possible much of the growth of the West in this period. Its importance was demonstrated by developments in 1803. When Spain closed U.S. access to the Mississippi River in October 1802 in anticipation of the imminent transfer of the Louisiana Territory back into French control, it immediately prompted the U.S.French negotiations leading to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, whereby the United States purchased the entire region from Napoleonic France for $15 million.

Shannon E. Duffy See also: Citizen Genêt Affair; Jay’s Treaty

Further Reading Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Pinckney’s Treaty; America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800. rev. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960. Weeks, Charles A. Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de Las Barrancas, 1791–1795. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. Young, Raymond A. “Pinckney’s Treaty—A New Perspective.” Hispanic American Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1963): 526–535.

Pontiac (1714/1720–1769) Although little is known about Pontiac’s formative years, it is believed that he was born in an Ottawa village on the Detroit River sometime between 1714 and 1720. By the mid-1740s, he had emerged as a respected Ottawa warrior and leader. He allied himself with New France during the Seven Years’ War, participating in attacks on both Fort Duquesne and Fort William Henry in 1757. It is believed that Pontiac participated in the peace discussions led by Sir William Johnson in Detroit in September 1761 that ostensibly ended hostilities between Great Britain and the Native peoples of the Great Lakes region. Like other former allies of the French, Pontiac quickly became disillusioned with the British due to the actions of General Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of Great Britain’s forces in North America, who abandoned the traditional gift exchanges that had marked frontier diplomacy. Amherst especially limited access to gunpowder and lead, not wanting to arm potential enemies. Subsequently, Native hunters did not have the powder or lead required to hunt for the game needed to feed their communities. The resulting famine and sickness that raged through Native communities in 1762 was perceived as evidence that the British aimed to eradicate Native populations. Desperate for the return of their generous French former trade partners that still occupied portions of North America, many Native groups in the Great Lakes determined to launch an offensive against the British in the hopes that a Native American victory would entice the French to return to their former environs. While the French in Illinois did provide some supplies and armaments to the Native warriors during the so-called “Pontiac’s Rebellion,” they did not provide the military assistance in the field that Native leaders so desired. Although Pontiac has been immortalized as the primary leader of the conflict that bears his name, he was but one of a number of influential Native American leaders that helped create a loosely organized confederation. Pontiac was able by 1763 to assemble a pan-Indian force comprised of Hurons, Ottawas, Potawatomis, and Wyandots with the assistance of Neolin, the Delaware Prophet. Neolin’s religious teachings helped unite warriors from disparate Native American groups by calling for both the abandonment of intertribal warfare and the removal of the British from lands claimed by Native peoples. Pontiac launched the opening salvo of Pontiac’s Rebellion when his multitribal force attacked Fort Detroit on May 9, 1763. The initial attack failed to take the fort, so Pontiac opted to besiege the British outpost. Other Native leaders also attacked British installations and were able to either take, or force the British to evacuate, more than eight forts. Pontiac’s siege of Fort Detroit continued until October 1763, when the effort was abandoned. By that time, the conflict was effectively over as the pan-Indian confederacy had fallen apart due to a number of factors, including the successes of the British counterattacks, the effects of a smallpox epidemic that had been deliberately attempted by Amherst, a

shortage of gunpowder and lead, and the recognition that French military forces were not going to join them in the effort to overthrow British authority.

Pontiac in tribal war council during Pontiac’s Rebellion. The Ottawa chief’s significance in the pan-Indian resistance movement that bears his name has historically been somewhat exaggerated. He is depicted here bearing a crimson and purple wampum war belt he claimed to have received from the French “father” urging unified resistance to the British, illustrating his genuine importance in the effort to stop the taking of trans-Appalachian Indian lands. (North Wind Picture Archives)

Following the abandonment of the siege of Fort Detroit, Pontiac retreated west to the Illinois territory. Undaunted by the failure of the multitribal confederacy in the Great Lakes region, he began forging another pan-Indian confederacy from 1764 to 1765 along the environs of the Illinois, Mississippi, and Wabash Rivers. His search for allies led to contacts with distant Native groups such as the Osages and the Quapaws. Unfortunately for Pontiac, while he was trying to recruit warriors in his new environs, word of British actions in the Great Lakes region against his former allies began to spread. During the summer of 1764, two major expeditions were launched against the Natives of the Great Lakes. A force of 2,000 British soldiers and Iroquois warriors left Fort Niagara under the command of Colonel John Bradstreet and began attacking Native communities. Another force led by Colonel Henry Bouquet was launched from Fort Pitt. Native leaders were thus forced to sue for peace. Word of the peace treaties being signed by his former allies ultimately dissuaded members of his new confederation from following Pontiac into another conflict with the British. Pontiac subsequently determined that it was in the best interest of the Ottawas that he make peace with Great Britain. Pontiac, claiming that he spoke for all of the Indian peoples of the West, signed a peace agreement with Great Britain in July 1766 that he had negotiated with Sir William Johnson at Fort Oswego in New York. The British mistakenly believed that Pontiac wielded immense influence with other Native groups and expected him to allay Native American militancy in both the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Valley.

Although Pontiac attempted to discourage continued warfare against the British, many Native Americans, including his fellow Ottawas, began questioning his motives and loyalties. Especially problematic was the rumor that he had acquired a pension for himself as part of the treaty negotiations with Johnson. It is believed that Pontiac received multiple beatings from his own people, which led him to relocate to southern Illinois. While visiting the Illinois town of Cahokia on April 20, 1769, Pontiac was first clubbed from behind and then stabbed to death by a Peoria who was most likely avenging an Illinois chief who had died after being stabbed by Pontiac three years earlier. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Neolin; Primary Documents: Pontiac’s Speech Explaining His Reasons for Making War on the English (1763)

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Dowd, Gregory Evans. War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Middleton, Richard. Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Proclamation of 1763 At the conclusion of the French and Indian War, Great Britain determined that defending the frontier against Native American warriors with British troops would require immense expenses in personnel, weaponry, and fortifications. Even with that level of commitment, it was still highly probable that EuroAmericans in the far west would be vulnerable to Native American attack. Rather than commit to a robust military presence, King George III and his advisers determined that the best solution was to separate British citizens from Native Americans. King George III thus issued the Proclamation of 1763 on October 7, 1763. The proclamation forbade the colonists from claiming land west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, thus confining British citizens to the Atlantic Seaboard. The move proved extremely unpopular in the colonies and became one of the first decisions by the British government that helped launch the American Revolution. The French and Indian War, which was the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War, was formally concluded by the Treaty of Paris during February 1763. In that agreement, France and Spain ceded New France and all additional lands east of the Mississippi River to Britain. The British thus gained three new colonies: East Florida, Quebec, and West Florida. Due to war debt and the need to administrate new colonies, British authorities in North America began cutting expenses. Some of the savings were due to a reduction of military installations and number of troops on the frontier. Savings were also achieved by reducing traditional gifts to Native American groups, such as powder and lead. The new British policies toward Native peoples severely impacted them because they had become dependent on European goods. In the Great Lakes region, Native resentment resulted in Pontiac’s Rebellion, which raged from May to October 1763. Although the British were ultimately victorious in the conflict, it had confirmed to the king and his advisers in London that the only way that constant warfare in North America could be avoided was to separate their Euro-American citizens from Native peoples. To the victorious British colonists in North America, the end of the French and Indian War meant that all lands that had formerly belonged to New France or Spain had become British territory. Land

speculators and settlers alike began moving west to seize the available real estate. The colonists were thus stunned to learn that King George III’s Proclamation of 1763 deprived them of the spoils of war. British subjects were ordered to abandon any lands they claimed west of the Appalachian Mountains. Military officers and colonial or royal government officials were forbidden to make exceptions in any way to the terms of the proclamation. Despite the clarity of the proclamation’s terms, it was generally ignored within the colonies. Land speculators, often with the assistance of military officers and government officials, continued acquiring land, often through fraudulent land transactions with Native American groups. Settlers also poured into areas west of the Appalachian Mountains. The growing presence of colonists in supposedly Native American territory exacerbated tensions with Native peoples. Despite obvious violations of the Proclamation of 1763 by British colonists, Native American groups continued to work with British officials to separate their homelands from British territory. In the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois Confederacy settled the location of the northern boundary between British and Native territory with Sir William Johnson. The terms of the treaty included land cessions by the Iroquois of lands on the British side of the boundary line. Similar agreements were made in the south, most notably the October 1768 Treaty of Hard Labor between the Cherokees and John Stuart. Regardless of the willingness of Native peoples to establish a means of peaceful coexistence on the continent, British colonists continuously refused to acknowledge any limitation on their ability to move westward. Inevitably, conflicts between numerous Native groups and British settlers erupted throughout the western frontier. The western frontier was thus engulfed by the warfare that the Proclamation Line of 1763 had been intended to prevent.

The Crown thus had an untenable problem to address. British officials, such as Sir William Johnson and John Stuart, had negotiated treaties with powerful Native American allies whose terms were not honored by British subjects. The Crown thus began using its troops to help enforce the Proclamation of 1763. In order to do so, the British strengthened its standing army in North America. To the colonists, it appeared that the troops were there to protect the interests of the Native peoples rather than the rights of British subjects. The resulting enmity between British troops and the colonists festered until the outbreak of the American Revolution. The Native Americans had learned from their experiences in the years since 1763 that the colonists would not honor agreements and would not stop trying to seize Native lands. Not surprisingly, most Native American warriors from the western frontier subsequently allied themselves with Great Britain during the American Revolution. John R. Burch Jr. See also: American Revolution; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Hard Labor, Treaty of; Paris, Treaty of (1763); Pontiac; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Calloway, Colin G. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Campbell, William J. Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012.

Jennings, Francis. Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.

Quebec Act (1774) Parliament passed the Quebec Act on June 22, 1774, to establish a permanent government for the mainly Catholic and French-speaking subjects that Great Britain had gained as a result of the Treaty of Paris in 1763. It established an appointed governor and council to rule the territory, and mandated that while civil law matters would continue to run under French codes of civil law, criminal law would now be based on English legal doctrine. It also officially recognized the Roman Catholic Church as the established religion in the province. While modern historians generally see the act in a positive light, it provoked a storm of controversy in revolutionary America at the time of its passage, due to anti-Catholic sentiments, as well as Parliament’s remarkably bad sense of timing. As revolutionary America received word of the Quebec Act at the same time as the colonies learned of Parliament’s Coercive Acts, the general colonial assumption was that the Quebec Act was part of what rebellious Americans were coming to call the “Intolerable Acts.” The Quebec Act grew out of the British need to establish a permanent system of government in the Francophone territories that Britain had acquired as a result of the Seven Years’ War. The territory of Quebec had first been settled by people from rural France in the early 17th century. Under the French regime, the colony had long been run by an appointed governor and council, and was subject to the ecclesiastical authority of the Catholic Church. Quebec’s government was generally localized around cures, and church priests, supported by government-mandated tithes, handled a great deal of local matters. When Britain gained the colony in 1763, they also gained about 70,000 French-speaking Roman Catholics. Parliament initially assumed that the habitants would want a British-style form of representative government and promised such a governmental structure in the Treaty of Paris. However, given that Roman Catholics were denied suffrage under British law, a Parliamentary-style government in Quebec would have meant that the tiny Protestant minority of Anglo settlers who had moved into the province would wield complete control. Displacing the Catholic Church as the official religion would also have caused significant cultural disruptions. By the mid-1760s, Parliament recognized that such an arrangement would be unworkable. The Quebec Act of 1774 made permanent much of the governmental and legal structure that already existed in the province. The basic outline of the plan was first proposed by the Rockingham government in 1766, but action was delayed by political infighting within Parliament until the 1770s. As it was ultimately written, the Quebec Act was largely based on Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn’s 1771 report on Quebec, which stressed the uniqueness of the province and the need to preserve existing legal and governmental traditions. As finally passed by Lord North’s government in 1773, the Quebec Act set up an appointed governor and council to govern the colony, rather than an elected assembly. It maintained French law for civil cases, while replacing the criminal code with English law. It also confirmed the existing power of the church, setting up a system of endowments for Catholic clergy and permitting priests to hold land and take tithes. The Quebec Act recognized the French language as the legal tongue and affirmed Roman Catholicism as the established religion. King George’s rebellious 13 colonies received news of the Quebec Act in the same Parliamentary packets that brought them word of the so-called Coercive or Intolerable Acts, passed by Parliament to

punish Massachusetts for the effrontery of the Boston Tea Party. Although the Quebec Act was in fact wholly unconnected to the Coercive Acts, the overwhelming assumption in revolutionary America was that it was part and parcel of the same Parliamentary plot to destroy American liberty. One portion of the Coercive Acts, the Massachusetts Government Act, significantly altered the traditional governmental structure of Massachusetts, making previously elected positions appointed and significantly limiting popular participation in government. In conjunction with the changes planned for Massachusetts, Quebec’s proposed government structure looked particularly ominous. The Quebec Act also expanded the borders of the province of Quebec into the Lawrence River Valley, including in it land that the 13 colonies were also claiming. Revolutionary America objected to the Quebec Act as establishing a precedent for future Parliamentary interference in colonial governments, but a great deal of hostility was also motivated by strong American traditions of anti-Catholicism. The Quebec Act meant that the British government was not merely tolerating the Roman Catholic faith; they were actually establishing it as the official religion of a sizable province. Anglo America had a long anti-Catholic tradition, rooted in its English identity, which was particularly strong in the Puritan-settled New England colonies. The Catholic faith was widely seen as authoritarian, superstitious, and irrational; the religion of autocrats such as the French and Spanish kings, and their gullible masses. In New England, the English holiday Guy Fawkes Day was called “Pope’s Day” and celebrated by burning effigies of the pope and singing anti-Catholic songs. AntiCatholic doctrine was even embedded in education; the letter “A” in the New England Primer instructed pupils to “Abhor that abhorrent Whore of Rome.” Historians now generally see the Quebec Act overall as a farsighted and successful measure. The act was part of a new attempt by Parliament to honor existing legal, religious, and governmental traditions in newly acquired areas of the empire. It preserved the customary language and religion for the Quebec inhabitants and prevented a small imported minority of Anglos from dominating their government. However, for the rebellious colonies, it became one more charge against England, and it was even included in the charges against the king listed in the Declaration of Independence in 1776: “For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” Shannon E. Duffy See also: American Revolution; Paris, Treaty of (1763); Paxton Boys; Proclamation of 1763

Further Reading Lawson, Philip. The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1989. Metzger, Charles H. Catholics and the American Revolution: A Study in Religious Climate. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1962. Neatby, Hilda M. The Quebec Act: Protest and Policy. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Rush-Bagot Pact (1817) The Rush-Bagot Pact, signed in April 1817, was a key international agreement between the United States and Britain. Richard Rush, former minister to Britain and acting secretary of state, and Charles Bagot, British minister to the United States, were its principal signatories. The pact ended the naval race between the two powers by demilitarizing the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. Its passage ushered in a

period of much-needed stability following the War of 1812 and became the diplomatic origin of the longest undefended border in the world. The Great Lakes region of North America was the setting for several major naval battles between the United States and Britain during the War of 1812. Both nations supported considerable fleets and fortifications in the region at heavy financial cost. The continued presence of armed ships on the lakes after 1814 was not only expensive but also posed a threat to the security of the United States and British Canada. President James Madison was particularly desirous of neutralizing the region and had been disappointed that a similar provision had not been included in the Treaty of Ghent. The matter quickly rose to the fore in 1815 when a British warship fired on an American vessel in Lake Erie. Fearful the incident might trigger another war with Britain, in January 1816 Madison ordered his minister to Britain, John Quincy Adams, to reopen talks around disarmament. Adams understood the political, economic, and social climate that informed British diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna following the final defeat of Napoleon. Both he and the British foreign minister, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, recognized the importance of good commercial and diplomatic relations between their two nations. The United States was a major market for English manufactured goods and Britain was a chief purchaser of American exports, especially cotton. Though they agreed on the mutual benefits of such an arrangement, Castlereagh believed that Adams did not possess the authority to secure a formal deal and sent Charles Bagot to Washington as British secretary to the United States to begin formal negotiations with James Monroe, the U.S. secretary of state. Monroe proposed the two nations work toward an agreement to limit naval capability in the shared waters of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain. Negotiations progressed rapidly. On July 26, 1816, Bagot informed Monroe of the British government’s acceptance of the proposal on the basis of cost reduction and risk mitigation. Monroe’s reply, on August 2, underlined the president’s wish to avoid further naval confrontations and included specific details regarding the pact’s articles. Bagot and Monroe continued to negotiate while the proposal was discussed in London. The following year, notes were exchanged between Bagot and Acting Secretary of State Richard Rush, who replaced Monroe once he was elected president. Bagot notified Rush of the British government’s acceptance of Monroe’s terms on April 28, 1817. The pact was ratified by the U.S. Senate on April 28, 1818, followed by the British Parliament on October 2. Among the clauses were those specifying the number, tonnage, and armament of ships that each nation could deploy on the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Champlain were restricted to one vessel each, not to exceed 100 tons burden, and armed with one 18-pound cannon. The Upper Lakes were limited to two vessels of a maximum 100 tons with like force. All other armed vessels on the lakes were ordered dismantled and no others were to be built or armed. The purpose of ships operating in these waters would be to enforce revenue laws or transport troops and goods. It also stipulated that a country intent on annulling the agreement had to provide six months’ notice before it could begin rearming its ships on the lakes. Such an occurrence took place only once, in 1864, when relations between the United States and Britain became strained during the American Civil War. Secretary of State William H. Seward announced the United States’ intention to nullify the pact, but it was cancelled prior to the end of the grace period. The pact survived relatively intact until the Second World War, when the United States approached Canada regarding the application and interpretation of the 1817 agreement. Notes were exchanged between the U.S. secretary of state and the Canadian ambassador to the United States in 1939, 1940, 1942, and 1946 that addressed the nonapplicability of the pact’s original provisions. In the spirit of the Rush-Bagot Pact of 1817, the provisions were modified to allow naval reserve training vessels on the

lakes with full disclosure of the number, disposition, functions, and armament of such vessels prior to their deployment. The Rush-Bagot Pact laid the foundation for future agreements between the United States and Britain, and eventually Canada. Though the original pact only affected naval power on the lakes, thus not addressing the continued construction of land fortifications on both sides of the border, it did present a strong basis for negotiation of the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which completely demilitarized the U.S.Canadian border. It also facilitated the negotiation and diplomacy required to complete several momentous accords between the United States and Canada in the 20th century. These included the Ogdensburg Agreement of 1940, which outlined a plan for the mutual defense of both countries; the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence Basin Agreement of 1941, which enabled the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the resultant access of oceangoing ships to the heart of the continent; and the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994, which created one of the world’s largest free trade zones. One of the briefest agreements defining peace and disarmament terms ever written, the Rush-Bagot Pact has been in effect continually since its signing. It placed Britain and the United States among the very few of the world’s nations to define and implement effective arms control measures in the 19th century. The resultant lengthy period of peace with its northerly neighbor also allowed the United States to shift its expansionary focus west to the Mississippi and south to Spanish America over subsequent decades. Michael Dove See also: Adams, John Quincy; Madison, James; War of 1812

Further Reading Bernis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1956. Perkins, Bradford. Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Powell, J. H. Richard Rush: Republican Diplomat. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942.

San Juan Islands In the early 1800s, the United States, Great Britain, Spain, and Russia all laid claim to the Oregon Country. As international treaties eliminated two of the powers, the United States and Great Britain jointly claimed Oregon. By the time of James K. Polk’s administration, the two powers had agreed on a division of the Oregon Territory, with only the area between the Columbia River and the 49th parallel remaining contested. In 1846, Secretary of State James Buchanan and the British minister in Washington, Sir Richard Pakenham, negotiated the Oregon Treaty in which they agreed to extend the Transcontinental Treaty Line along the 49th parallel to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, leaving Victoria Island in British possession. The negotiators overlooked the San Juan Islands, however. With an undetermined border, tensions rose in the 1860s. The island border dispute escalated on July 27, 1860, when U.S. general William S. Harney, determined to protect U.S. settlers on the San Juan Islands and strengthen the U.S. claim, sent George E. Pickett to occupy the islands. With the arrival of troops, the United States announced the islands’ annexation. The action happened without approval or authorization from Washington, which would have helped prevent an escalation between the two rival powers. Due to the slow communications, news of the events did not reach Lord Palmerston’s government in London until mid-September. The universal impression was that the always-belligerent United States had intentionally “twisted the Lion’s Tail” and provoked a standoff. However, with four warships in the area, the British were more than ready to stand

up to any U.S. action. Since neither side desired an escalation, both forces stood down, and the islands were jointly occupied until London and Washington could agree to a permanent border. The British government was more than willing to surrender the islands based on the Royal Navy’s assessment of the area. However, the Duke of Somerset, First Lord of the Admiralty, cautioned Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell that the shipping channel to the south of the islands and the 49th parallel was of strategic importance and could not be surrendered. It would not be an easy task to bring territorial and strategic demands in line. Since Washington explained that it had not ordered Harney to take any action, the two sides settled down for discussion. These negotiations were cut short when the U.S. government was faced with secession and civil war, leaving the troops on the San Juan Islands to eye one another suspiciously for another 10 years. By the end of the Civil War, a series of questions separated the British and Canadian authorities on one side and the United States on the other. Building on the perception that the British had assisted the Confederacy by providing economic aid, by recognizing the belligerent rights of the Confederacy prematurely, and by allowing the construction of Confederate warships in British ports, the United States seemed ready for a conflict with Great Britain. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Charles Sumner, insisted that Britain should be held liable for all damages done by the British-built Confederate cruisers, most prominently the Alabama. Sumner also argued that after the Battle of Gettysburg, it was only British moral support that had kept the Confederacy afloat. Since it would be difficult to come up with the $2 billion demanded by Sumner, partial annexation of Canada to the United States was acceptable. To increase pressure on the British, the United States refused to renew the Marcy-Elgin Reciprocity Treaty with Canada, which had lapsed in 1866. As a result, Canadian custom and fishery officials started to once again enforce the Convention of 1818, which had governed fishing off Newfoundland before the Marcy-Elgin Treaty. Therefore, many New England fishers found themselves faced with fines and imprisonment by the Canadian authorities, and violence seemed likely to happen. All these issues added to the already existing San Juan Islands question. Neither side wanted war nor was willing to stand down. The retirement of Charles Sumner, William H. Seward, and Lord Russell and the emergence of new leaders like Hamilton Fish and William E. Gladstone were necessary to accomplish rapprochement between the two countries. After talks for a comprehensive settlement failed in 1869, Sir John Rose, with authority from the British foreign ministry, initiated talks with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. The talks provided a basis for the Joint High Commission meeting in Washington between February and May 1871. The talks culminated with the Treaty of Washington, which sent many of the outstanding questions to arbitration. The San Juan Islands question was given to the newly crowned German emperor Wilhelm I. He was to determine where the border was to be located. The U.S. minister to Berlin, George Bancroft, had as good a standing with Otto von Bismarck in Berlin as his British counterpart Lord Odo Russell. However, the two were unable to convince Wilhelm to make a decision in their favor. As a result, Wilhelm referred the matter to an arbitration council in Geneva. The commission decided in October 1872 that the claims of the United States had stronger validity and that the maritime border was to be located in the Haro Strait and not the British-demanded Rosario Strait. The British quickly withdrew their troops from the occupied islands and accepted the settlement. The San Juan Islands issue and the general problems in AngloAmerican relations during this time also resulted in the formation of the Dominion of Canada, a union of the various British colonies in North America. The peaceful settlement was an indication of the continued rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States, which both desired peaceful relations. Niels Eichhorn

See also: Blockade of Confederate Ports; Convention of 1818; Nootka Sound Convention

Further Reading Coleman, E. C. The Pig War: The Most Perfect War in History. Stroud, UK: History Press, 2009. Myers, Phillip E. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008. Neering, Rosemary. The Pig War: The Last Canada-US Border Conflict. Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2011.

Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) Called the Seven Years’ War in Europe and the French and Indian War in America (where it actually lasted for nine years), the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763 in America; 1756–1763 in Europe) was the last and most significant of a series of military struggles between Great Britain and France and their respective colonies. These colonial wars, spurred by European dynastic quarrels and contests over territory, raged in the Americas, India, the Caribbean, and Africa throughout the 18th century. Considered by many historians to be the first world wars, the colonial wars involved both English and French American colonists, as well as numerous Native American nations, in a great contest between the two major European rivals for control of a worldwide colonial empire. The results of the Seven Years’ War in America would completely reshape the map of the Americas and lay the political, economic, and cultural groundwork for the American Revolution two decades later. The colonial cycle of war started in 1689 with the war known in Europe as the War of the League of Augsburg and in the colonies as King William’s War (1689–1697). In America this war mainly affected settlers on the northern frontier, as Indians loyal to the French raided colonial outposts in New England and upstate New York in retaliation for earlier Iroquois attacks, killing more than 200 English colonists. The second round of warfare came in 1701 with the War of the Spanish Succession, known in the colonies as Queen Anne’s War (1701–1713). New France and New England and their respective Indian allies once again began raiding each other’s frontier settlements. In February 1704, a raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, killed 50 English settlers and saw another 100 taken prisoner, including the town minister. Border skirmishes also broke out on the southern frontier, between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. The third round of war was triggered by a quarrel between the English and the Spanish over trade rights. The War of Jenkin’s Ear (1739–1748) involved American colonists far more than the prior two engagements had, as English colonists battled residents of both the French and Spanish territories. In Georgia, English colonists launched a 1,200-man invasion of Spanish Florida; the Floridians responded with their own assault on Georgia, and also encouraged Georgia’s slaves to flee to the Spanish lines. In Central America, a combined English and colonial expedition against Spanish Cartagena, Colombia, in 1741 ended in disaster, costing the lives of almost 3,000 colonial sailors. The New Englanders had greater success. A 3,000-man provincial force backed by British warships successfully took the key French fortification at Louisbourg in 1745. New England’s pride in this victory was undercut, however, when the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, ending the conflict, returned Louisbourg to France in exchange for territory in India. The conflict commonly referred to as the Seven Years’ War began as several separate wars over territory in America and dynasty and territorial issues in Europe. They eventually merged into a single struggle, which pitted Britain and Prussia against most of the other major powers of Europe. In the North American theater, Native Americans played a crucial role in this fight, as they had in all previous conflicts. By the start of the Seven Years’ War, the English colonial population outnumbered the French by

a factor of 18 to 1. This numerical advantage was largely offset, however, by the network of Indian alliances that the French had forged in the previous century and a half. Far less land-hungry than the English and more willing to observe Native American methods of diplomacy, the French by 1754 had successfully convinced many of the Native American groups to either remain neutral or join the French forces.

The crucial issue was control of the Ohio River valley. The English settlements were growing rapidly, and as they grew, their populations lusted after the broad stretch of lands to the west of them claimed by France. In 1753, French Canadian troops began building a string of forts between Lake Erie and the Forks of the Ohio River to defend their position. In response, in 1754 the Virginia governor ordered a company of Virginia militia, under the command of 22-year-old lieutenant colonel George Washington, to halt the French fort-building. The mission was the American leader’s first command. Washington led his small party to the Forks, where they stumbled into a French party led by Ensign Jumonville. The encounter resulted in a brief skirmish called the Battle of Great Meadows, which the Anglos won, but the situation disintegrated into a diplomatic nightmare. Without first informing the whites of his intention, Washington’s Indian ally Tanaghrisson (known to the whites as the Half-King) killed and scalped Jumonville and 12 of the remaining French. This event effectively triggered the colonial phase of the Seven Years’ War. In July 1754, in retaliation for the earlier attack, a larger French party attacked the British at Washington’s makeshift Fort Necessity. Washington surrendered after losing one-third of his force.

As colonial and British leaders prepared for war on the continent in 1754, a second event took place that would have significance for the future of America. English colonial leaders met in Albany, New York, to treat with local Indians and coordinate colonial defense. During these talks, two of the colonial leaders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Hutchinson, proposed that the 13 colonies form a permanent body to coordinate their defense. The Albany Conference was the first attempt in British American history to form any sort of general alliance between all of the mainland English colonies. The proposal met with uniform hostility, however, as all the colonial governments rejected it as a threat to their autonomy. This failure would later influence British perceptions of American ability to cooperate in the years leading to the American Revolution. The battles of the next several years demonstrated both the importance of Indian alliances and the limitations of European-style combat methods in the American backcountry. At the Battle of Monongahela in 1755, also known as the Battle of the Wilderness, British forces under Edward Braddock were soundly defeated in their attempt to take Fort Duquesne, which the French had built at the juncture of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. Braddock had resisted making overtures to Native American groups in the region and insisted on marching in European-style formation, allowing his force to be easily attacked. By 1756, the colonial conflict had become a global war, one that ultimately involved the largest number of men and territory until World War I in the 20th century. In May 1756, Great Britain and France officially declared war, triggering fighting in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as the ongoing struggle in North America. For the next two years, fighting in North America continued to go poorly for the British. Fort Oswego, the key to control of the Great Lakes region, was captured by French forces under their newly appointed commander, the Marquis de Montcalm. In August 1757, Montcalm’s forces also captured Fort William Henry after a six-day siege, setting the stage for one of the more infamous episodes of the war. Despite being guaranteed safe passage by Montcalm, British troops and civilians evacuating the fort were attacked by France’s Indian allies, who had not been consulted in the surrender. Of the more than 2,000 retreating British, more than 150 were killed and 500 were taken captive to be held for ransom. While the British press used the episode to great propaganda effect to demonstrate French and Indian perfidy, the more significant factor may have been the Indian fury that had provoked the attack. British interference with French commerce had greatly damaged French Canada’s economy, and hence weakened the gift-giving abilities of the colonial leaders. Decisions made by French commanders since the start of the conflict had also eroded relations between the French and their Indian allies. Both these factors diminished Indian presence on the French side after 1757, and this would ultimately help defeat the French. The English military situation was also significantly strengthened by a change in British leadership, as William Pitt entered the prime minister’s position. Unlike previous British leaders, Pitt recognized the importance of the colonial possessions. In 1758, Pitt authorized the raising of 23,000 colonial troops. To forestall the usual quarrels over finance that had stymied prior Anglo-American military efforts, Pitt guaranteed that the British government would cover all expenses for the war, a decision that would transform Anglo-American cooperation in the Seven Years’ War, but would also bankrupt the British treasury. Pitt also sent massive funds to Britain’s ally, Prussia, to purchase German troops for the European conflict, thereby freeing British forces to concentrate on their colonial possessions worldwide. For the first time in North American history, huge numbers of British soldiers and sailors sailed to North America to fight beside colonial forces. Anglo forces began their offensive on the French line of forts in the Ohio Country at the end of 1758, after first securing the alliance of the Iroquois Confederacy, the most powerful Indian group in the region. The Treaty of Easton, signed in October 1758, promised the Iroquois that in return for their friendship, the

British would prohibit white settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains. By November, the French line of forts began to fall. The French lost Fort Duquesne, Fort Carrillion (the future Fort Ticonderoga), Crown Point, and Fort Niagara, thus surrendering control of the vital waterways and cutting off their garrisons in eastern Canada from their posts south of Lake Erie. The culminating battle of North America came in September 1759 outside the French fortress city of Quebec. After a three-month siege, British and American forces found a path up the supposedly impregnable cliffs surrounding Quebec. In the ensuing Battle on the Plains of Abraham, the British suffered fewer than 700 casualties and the French more than 1,800. The fall of Quebec marked the effective end of the French military presence in North America. The next year, France surrendered Montreal, its last North American stronghold, without firing a shot, when a British army of 17,500 British, colonials, and Indians converged on the city. Montreal’s capture ended the Seven Years’ War in North America. Elsewhere, in India, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and West Africa, British armies had also scored significant victories, signaling major changes in the colonial world. The Treaty of Paris, signed on February 10, 1763, redrew the world map. France gave Britain all of its lands east of the Mississippi. France’s lands west of the Mississippi, the Louisiana territory, were transferred from France to Spain. Spain, another loser, surrendered Florida to Britain, in return for getting back Cuba. The French also lost key territories in India, Africa, and the Mediterranean.

British troops prepare to fight the French on the Plains of Abraham, September 13, 1759. The British won the battle and captured Quebec. (North Wind Picture Archives)

For North America, the consequences of the Seven Years’ War were immense. The war removed France from the map of North America, thus eliminating English America’s biggest military rival and potentially opening up millions of acres of new land to settlement. It gave British Americans an increased sense of their own abilities and importance within the empire. However, it also left the British government massively in debt. Britain’s national debt went from around £75 million in 1756 to £133 million in 1763. Britain’s attempt to recoup this debt through taxing America would ultimately lead to the American Revolution two decades later. The war also significantly weakened the position of many of the Indian groups, whether they had allied with the French or the English. Without two rival European powers on the continent to play off against each other, the Indian groups lost an important strategic advantage and became increasingly vulnerable to English incursions into their lands. Shannon E. Duffy

See also: Neolin; Pontiac; Proclamation of 1763

Further Reading Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Knopf, 2000. Calloway, Colin G. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cave, Alfred A. The French and Indian War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Spalding, Henry (1803–1874) and Eliza Hart (1807–1851) Henry Harmon Spalding and his wife Eliza Hart Spalding were Protestant missionaries sent to the Oregon Territory by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to provide instruction to the Nez Perce. Heavily criticized by many of their fellow missionaries and generally intolerant of Native customs, they operated perhaps the most effective of the Oregon missions. The Spaldings played a significant role in the northwest expansion of the United States, for their activities directly influenced the growth and extension of federal jurisdiction and control over the region. Henry was born out of wedlock on November 26, 1803, in Bath, New York, to Howard Spalding. At 17 he moved to Prattsburg where he became associated with the Presbyterian Church through Rev. James H. Hotchkin. He attended Franklin Academy, where he met Narcissa Prentiss, later Whitman, who eventually rejected Henry’s marriage proposal. In 1831, he headed to Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, where he studied for the ministry until 1833. Prior to his departure for the college, he had met Eliza Hart, whom he married on October 13, 1833. Eliza was born on August 11, 1807, in Berlin, Connecticut, to Levi and Martha Hart. Following their marriage, the Spaldings moved to Cincinnati for Henry to attend Lane Theological Seminary. Henry approached the ABCFM two years later and asked to be appointed missionary to the Osages in western Missouri. Henry was ultimately convinced, however, to join a new mission planned for the Oregon Territory in the wake of a reconnaissance trip to the Nez Perce by Rev. Samuel Parker and Dr. Marcus Whitman. In April 1836, the Spaldings, in company with the Whitmans, two Nez Perce boys, and William H. Gray, departed Liberty, Missouri, on an overland journey across the Great Plains. The mission party was among an American Fur Company caravan commanded by Captain Thomas Fitzpatrick. The wagon on which the Spaldings traveled became the first wheeled vehicle to ply what became known as the Oregon Trail to Fort Boise, and Eliza joined Narcissa Whitman in becoming the first white women to cross the Rockies. Upon their arrival in the Columbia River valley in December, the Spaldings settled near Lapwai Creek in present-day Idaho while the Whitmans established a mission some 120 miles away at Waiilatpu. The Spaldings enthusiastically encouraged the Nez Perce to become farmers and raise livestock. Henry was certain that much of the land would become available for white settlement once the Nez Perce became farmers, and that settlement was a necessary precondition for their conversion to Christianity. The Nez Perce assisted them in their erection of a log home on the site, which was moved to the mouth of the creek in 1838. The mission underwent significant expansion to include a school, gristmill, sawmill, blacksmith shop, printing shop, and space for resident Nez Perce. Eliza was well liked by the Nez Perce women, whom she taught spinning, weaving, and sewing. In 1838, Henry wrote to the ABCFM pressing for the establishment of a string of missions from Puget Sound to the Snake River Country. He asked for the immediate dispatch of farmers, mechanics, schoolteachers, physicians, ministers, and their families. Reinforcements arrived, along with much criticism of Spalding’s techniques and decisions. Rev. Asa Bowen Smith became his fiercest critic, claiming that Spalding’s letters back east reporting on the mission’s accomplishments were highly exaggerated. In 1842, high maintenance costs, a poor record of achievement, and severe infighting among the missionaries led the ABCFM to dismiss the Spaldings and close the missions at Lapwai and at Waiilatpu. The Spaldings’ mission was saved, however, when Marcus Whitman successfully pleaded with the ABCFM to reverse its decision.

Spalding’s concern with establishing the rule of white law among his converts led to his interference with local governance. Because the Nez Perce were a loosely affiliated group of bands rather than a unified political unit, Spalding convinced federal Indian agent Elijah White to name a single head chief for purposes of land negotiation. In 1842, he worked with White to introduce new laws that condoned capital punishment, supported an agrarian economy for the Nez Perce, and granted Native leaders jurisdiction over the Indians, therefore centralizing Native authority. Largely designed by Spalding, these laws created a rift among the Nez Perce. They also set the stage for outside influence over their affairs by shifting political power to the federal government and became precursors to the terms set out in the Treaty of 1855. The Spaldings fled the area in the wake of news that the Whitmans and 12 others had been killed by the Cayuse on November 29, 1847. Their daughter, Eliza, who was resident at the Whitman school, survived and was eventually released from captivity. The “Whitman Massacre,” as it became known, led to the Cayuse War and the Treaty of 1855. The tract given to Henry for a mission by the Nez Perce became contested in the years following the Spaldings’ departure. When the ABCFM abandoned its claim, it was assumed by Judge W. G. Langford, who greatly enlarged its boundaries with hopes of establishing a town and attracting the railroad. The Spaldings relocated to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where Eliza became the first teacher at what became Pacific University before she died in 1851. Henry served as a pastor, postmaster, and commissioner of common schools, remarrying in 1853 to Rachel Smith. He returned to the Nez Perce several times and in 1871 created an Indian school under the federal government’s Peace Policy to the Indians. He continued as missionary to various Northwest tribes in the service of the Presbyterian Board of Missions until his death at Lapwai on August 3, 1874. Though the Spaldings were generally well received by the Nez Perce and more successful with their missionary activities than others, the laws crafted by Henry became institutionalized in the treaties of 1855 and 1863, serving to reduce Nez Perce landholdings by more than 13 million acres while establishing a reservation and implementing a federally directed civilizing program for the Nez Perce. Michael Dove See also: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Assimilation; Cayuse War; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Missions; Nez Perce; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Drury, Clifford Merrill, ed. The Diaries and Letters of Henry H. Spalding and Asa Bowen Smith, relating to the Nez Perce Mission, 1838–1842. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1958. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. Nez Perce Country. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Stern, Theodore. Chiefs and Change in the Oregon Country: Indian Relations at Fort Nez Percés, 1818–1855. Vol. II. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1996.

Stevens, Isaac (1818–1862) Isaac Stevens was the first governor of Washington Territory, a member of the U.S. Congress, and a brigadier general in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Born in Massachusetts, Stevens graduated at the top of the West Point class of 1839. He fought in the Mexican-American War as adjutant of the Corps of Engineers and was brevetted to the rank of major. After the war, he was placed in charge of U.S.

fortifications along the New England coast from 1841 to 1849; he then moved to Washington, D.C. to take charge of the coast survey office. Stevens was a supporter of Franklin Pierce’s candidacy in 1852; Pierce rewarded him by appointing him governor of Washington Territory on March 17, 1853. Stevens arrived at Olympia, Washington, in November 1853 after surveying the northernmost of five potential transcontinental routes considered in the creation of the Pacific Railroad Reports. In his secondary responsibility as the territory’s superintendent of Indian affairs, Stevens pressed regional Indian nations to cede their lands. In a series of treaty councils in 1854 and 1855, Stevens cajoled and threatened a number of leaders into relocating onto reservations, which were often cramped and filled with tribes that had long-standing rivalries. A number of influential leaders refused to attend the treaty councils, such as the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph and the Cayuse leader Five Crows. In late 1855, Yakima warriors killed eight American squatters on their land. This escalated into fullscale war; as American troops poured east into Yakima and Cayuse territory, the tribes of Puget Sound rose up. Stevens declared martial law but because many of the region’s settlers recognized the Indians’ anger as a reaction to Stevens’s policies as governor, they ignored his proclamation and even went so far as to try to rescue the Nisqually Indian Leschi who had been condemned to death for his role in the squatters’ deaths. It was not until the U.S. Army banned white settlement east of the Cascades that Stevens was able to reestablish an uneasy peace, shortly before leaving Washington in 1857 to serve as the territory’s congressional delegate. The peace lasted only a year before another war killed dozens of American soldiers and Indian warriors. The treaties Stevens had spent months winning were never ratified by the Senate, and squatters continued to provoke Indian resistance. By October 1858, the last hostile bands had surrendered on the basis of the 1855 agreements, although the treaties left a legacy of bitter dispute, which sparked several more Indian wars, including the Nez Perce War of 1877. Stevens remained in Washington, D.C. as Washington Territory’s congressional delegate until 1861, after which he reentered the U.S. Army. He was commissioned as a general in the Union forces and promoted to brigadier general in September 1861. He fought in several battles in South Carolina and Virginia; he was killed in the Battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862, and posthumously promoted to major general. James Erwin See also: Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Pacific Railroad Reports

Further Reading Richards, Kent D. Isaac I. Stevens: Young Man in a Hurry. Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University, 1979. Ruby, Robert H., and John A. Brown. Indians of the Pacific Northwest: A History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

Thompson, David (1770–1857) David Thompson, Canadian fur trader, explorer, and surveyor, was instrumental in transmitting geographical information about the North American West to economic and political powers on the Atlantic Seaboard. Called one of the greatest practical land geographers of all time, Thompson’s role as intermediary with Native groups as a fur trapper was foundational in the eventual colonization of the

region, and his participation in the British Boundary Commission (which established the border between Canada and the United States) would have lasting political ramifications. Thompson was born in London, England. His parents were Welsh. His father died when he was only two. When he was seven, his mother enrolled him in the “Grey Coat” charity school near Westminster Abbey. Because he showed a propensity for mathematics, his education was oriented toward preparing him for life as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. His studies included algebra, trigonometry, geography, and navigation using “practical astronomy.” He joined the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1785 as an apprentice and surveyor in western Canada. His term of service was up in July 1797. Having been dissatisfied with HBC’s emphasis on the fur trade, he went to Grand Portage near Lake Superior and joined the newly formed North West Company. His first assignment was to determine the exact location of the North West Company posts that were affected by the Jay Treaty of 1794. This treaty required the North West Company to respect the boundary between the United States of America and British North America, as established by the Treaty of Versailles following the American Revolution. This was a difficult chore because the precise location of the 49th parallel was undetermined. Later, Thompson and a party of nine men determined the location of the Missouri River and the Mandan villages. His Missouri River map was an important resource for the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Corps of Discovery) of 1804. Thompson and Alexander Mackenzie are regarded as the leading explorers of North America from 1792 to 1812. David Thompson mapped the country west of Hudson Bay and Lake Superior, across the Rocky Mountains to the source of the Columbia River, and followed the length of the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Publication of some of his journals and field notes (1916) have won him recognition as one of the greatest land geographers of the Far West. Among his achievements were the survey of the northernmost source of the Mississippi River (1798), discovery of the source of the Columbia River (1807), and a survey of the Columbia from source to mouth (1811). Henry H. Goldman See also: Corps of Discovery; Fur Trade; Hudson’s Bay Company

Further Reading Belyea, Barbara, ed. Columbia Journals of David Thompson. Montreal: McGill-Queens, 1994. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. David Thompson: Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West. Edited by Leroy Hafen. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1966. Nisbet, Jack. Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1994.

Trent Affair (1861) At the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Abraham Lincoln administration declared a blockade of all ports located in the Confederacy, and the Jefferson Davis government responded by issuing letters of marque and reprisal. To avoid being dragged into an unwanted war in North America, the European powers declared their neutrality. However, maritime questions, especially those surrounding the Trent affair, would temporarily complicate the relations between Great Britain and the United States. Early in the war, the Confederacy had dispatched William Yancey, Ambrose Dudley Mann, and Pierre Rost to Europe to gain recognition. Unfortunately, the choice of diplomats had been poor and the fire-eater

Yancey was too unpredictable for his work in Great Britain. By the fall of 1861, the Confederacy decided to replace Yancey and Rost with James Mason and John Slidell. The two were to leave from Charleston directly for Great Britain. Since their departure was an open secret and the intended ship too slow to run the blockade, the two ministers debated whether to travel to Mexico, which would have taken too long, or to run the blockade toward a Caribbean port and travel from there across the Atlantic.

Lithograph of Confederate diplomats James Mason and John Slidell being removed from the British mail ship the Trent by crew from the USS San Jacinto on November 8, 1861. The efforts of Mason and Slidell and their president Jefferson Davis to secure diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy ultimately proved a failure. The incident caused a diplomatic crisis for President Lincoln, as Great Britain accused the U.S. of violating its sovereignty. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Aware that the United States might stop a ship bound for Great Britain, Lord John Palmerston’s government requested legal advice from the Law Officers of the Queen, who indicated that the United States had a right to interrupt a vessel’s journey—and have the crew brought before a prize court—as long as the ship was found to have engaged in illegal activities. After the two ministers, their secretaries, and their families had slipped out of Charleston, they went to Havana, where the Spanish authorities welcomed them. A U.S. naval commander was also in the region, however, and hoped to capture them and regain the prestige lost by the navy for having allowed them to slip out of Charleston. Charles Wilkes thus positioned the USS San Jacinto in the narrow Bahamas Canal where he planned to capture the two ministers, claiming they were “contraband”—thus proving the ship was engaged in illegal activity. He would later claim that he believed the Trent was also carrying “highly important dispatches and were endowed with instructions inimical to the United States,” though many historians doubt his claim (Ferris, 22). On November 8, 1861, the RMS Trent came into sight. After Wilkes forced the boat to stop with shots across its bow, he ordered a Lieutenant Fairfax to board the Trent and capture Mason and Slidell. While the two diplomats formally refused to go with Fairfax, they did not resist when he escorted them to the San Jacinto. When Wilkes arrived with his captives in the United States he was given a hero’s welcome. The bleak military situation of the past months was finally counterbalanced by a success. While legal minds and politicians engaged in a frantic search of the law books to justify Wilkes’s action, the British government saw a gross violation of its neutrality and international law. Assuming war to be likely, the Palmerston government prepared for the defense of Canada should the United States use the opportunity to start the long-talked-about attack. Nevertheless, the British government was not ready to go to war over four slave-state representatives.

The cabinet ministers agreed that an apology and release of the prisoners was necessary. The belligerent demands, which sounded like an ultimatum, were toned down by Prince Consort Albert, and then sent to Washington, accompanied by additional conciliatory instructions. The demands arrived on December 18 and British minister Lord Lyons immediately informed Secretary of State William Seward about their content. Delaying the official delivery until December 23 (the cabinet ministers had demanded that the Americans respond within a week), Seward tried to work behind the scenes to release the prisoners. By the end of the year Lyons and Seward had agreed on the release of Mason and Slidell and their departure from the United States. One of the factors in Seward’s ability to get Lincoln’s cabinet to release the prisoners was a letter sent by France. In the note, Antoine Edouard Thouvenel, the French foreign minister, argued that the actions by Wilkes had violated international law and that the United States, which had always defended the rights of neutrals, had violated those rights. The French government suggested that the United States should apologize and release the prisoners. Prussia and Austria had also sent notes in support of the British demands, but only the French note arrived in time for the Christmas cabinet meeting. In fact, even within the United States, questions were arising as to the legality of Wilkes’s actions. Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the Albany Evening Journal, suggested that the capture of Mason and Slidell very closely resembled the same impressment practices used by Great Britain that had led to the War of 1812. Journalist Henry Adams compared the values of those defending Wilkes with those of his great-grandfather John Adams: What in Hell do you mean by deserting now the great principles of our fathers; by returning to the vomit of that dog Great Britain? What do you mean by asserting now principles against which every Adams yet has protested and resisted? You’re mad, all of you. (Jones, 89) As for the English, the volatile state of European affairs and French territorial ambitions decreased their need to become embroiled in a war in the United States. Despite some of the belligerent language and defensive preparations, Britain was well aware that a war with the United States was not an option. Neither did the Lincoln government, engaged in a life and death struggle with the Confederacy, desire a foreign distraction. As a result, the Trent affair was solved peacefully. Niels Eichhorn See also: Blockade of Confederate Ports

Further Reading Ferris, Norman B. The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977. Jones, Howard. Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Myers, Phillip E. Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008. Warren, Gordon H. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and the Freedom of the Seas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981.

Vancouver, George (1757–1798) George Vancouver was a British naval officer and explorer. Born June 22, 1757, in King’s Lynn, England, he went to sea at the age of 14 accompanying James Cook on his voyages to the South Seas and the Pacific Northwest coast. In 1790 he was chosen to lead a mission to explore the Pacific coast from California to

Cook Inlet, Alaska, in search of a Northwest Passage and to regain British property seized by the Spanish in Nootka Sound the previous year. His expedition was designed to achieve British imperial ambitions in the Pacific Northwest by charting the shorelines of the inland straits and islands and establishing trading relations with Indians. These activities would lay the groundwork for a possible fort, on land allegedly purchased from a Nootka chief by British captain John Meares in 1789. Possession by effective occupation would further consolidate British claims to the region, thereby depriving other countries from extending their rights there. Soon after arriving on the coast of present-day Washington State aboard the Discovery in April 1792, Vancouver encountered Robert Gray, whom he greatly admired for his explorations of Nootka Sound and the Juan de Fuca Strait. Gray reported finding the mouth of a major river further south and his failed attempts to enter it due to a high bar. Vancouver dismissed the idea that it could be the “Great River of the West” speculated about by geographers and explorers because of his own failure to locate the mouth and his trust in Meares’s claim of its nonexistence. In August he met with Spanish commander Bodega y Quadra at Nootka Sound, where aggressive British claims to the region had resulted in the seizure of British ships and crews. Though dialogue was friendly, negotiations proved unproductive and the issue of Nootka Sound became a matter for the home governments. Returning to Gray’s discovery, Vancouver sent Lieutenant Broughton of the Chatham to enter the river and survey it well upstream in hopes of extending British claims inland. Vancouver spent the summers of 1793 and 1794 further exploring and charting the coast, including the complex system of waterways and basins comprising Puget Sound, named after the lieutenant leading the survey, and the coastline of mainland British Columbia. Returning to England in 1795, he revised his journals and charts for publication, and they appeared in 1798 as A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World. Vancouver died in London on May 12, 1798. Though his failure to discover the mouth of the Columbia River weakened the British case for possession, the published account of his voyage and his nautical charts of the coastline between Baja California and Alaska were the most accurate sources of geographical information available on the region for decades. These widely available resources protected nations’ international rights to freedom of navigation on the high seas and access to the Northwest Coast, ushering in a period of intense American, European, and Russian activity in the region and exacerbating the distress of Indian cultures. Michael Dove See also: Convention of 1818; Cook, James; Gray, Robert; Nootka Sound Convention; Northwest Passage; Oregon Treaty

Further Reading Bown, Stephen R. Madness, Betrayal and the Lash: The Epic Voyage of Captain George Vancouver. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2008. Gough, Barry M. The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and Discoveries to 1812. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992. Lamb, W. Kaye, ed. The Voyage of George Vancouver 1791–1795. 4 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1984. Naish, John M. The Interwoven Lives of George Vancouver, Archibald Menzies, Joseph Whidbey and Peter Puget: Exploring the Pacific Northwest Coast. Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 1996.

Wampum

Wampum refers to shell beads derived from the shellfish that formed a key role in intercultural relations in the Northeast. The term wampum comes from the anglicization of the Algonquian word wampumpeag, which literally means white-strings or white-shells. Wampum came in two colors: white, which was manufactured from the whelk species Busycon carica (knobbed whelk) and B. canaliculatum (channeled welk); and purple, which was manufactured from the species Mercenaria mercenaria (quahog clam). These species of shellfish were abundant around the New York–Hudson River area with Long Island being a key location. Manufactured for generations before the Europeans arrived, shell beads took on a new form and greater importance after contact. Prior to contact shell beads were manufactured by Native peoples frequenting the Atlantic coast during their seasonal rounds. These early beads were cross sections of shells, round disks, or even a shell with a couple of holes drilled in either end. Holes were generally made with a bow-drill, ground stone bit, and sand for abrasion. With the introduction of European metal technology, the coastal Algonquians used metal drill bits and cutting tools to create the fairly uniform cylindrical beads that emerged sometime between the late 1580s and early 1600s. With the use of metal tools the number of beads produced increased and assumed a larger and larger role in diplomatic functions, so much so that the period from approximately 1640 to the 1830s has been referred to as the “wampum diplomacy period.” Wampum took many forms, from loose beads to strings to belts. The strings could be given as a signal stand or tied together to form a “hand.” The belts came in various sizes and elaborations, from a few hundred beads to more than 12,000 in some of the larger examples. Although the Dutch and English did attempt to manufacture it themselves in an attempt to control trade and wampum’s value, the manufacture of wampum was generally a Native specialty. Native people could tell the difference between Native and European-made wampum, which led to the creation of the term “counterfeit” wampum. While it is difficult to determine the gender roles in the manufacture of wampum, initially it was the domain of men while gathering the shellfish was the domain of women and young children. With the increase in demand for wampum after the 1640s the manufacture appears to have become less gender specific. There are also some indications that the production and trade in wampum, at least in the early 1600s and in the precontact era, was dominated by particular lineages. If this was the case, like the decline in gender-specific manufacture, it declined as the demand for wampum increased. Wampum from the contact era, often referred to as “true wampum,” became a key component of intercultural interactions between Native nations and European colonists. Because it crossed multiple cultural boundaries, wampum has many different interpretations. For Native peoples wampum was a decorative item, a political tool, a valuable object in exchanges, and a mnemonic device. Generally speaking white beads were symbolically linked to peace and truthfulness, while the purple or dark beads were linked to war and death. As a decoration it served as a marker of status in otherwise egalitarian societies. Early records that mention wampum often refer to headbands, belts, garters, and in the case of King Philip (Metacome), an entire jacket. The presence of wampum in burials, for archaeologists, serves as an indication of the deceased’s status. As such it appears that in the early 1600s the relative rarity of wampum meant it was restricted as an ornament for the elites. Woven into belts or as simple strings, wampum could carry a political message. Elaborately woven belts served to mark important agreements such as treaties. Two examples are the Hiawatha Belt and the Two-Row Wampum. Due to the nature of these belts and their importance, many have survived in museums, private collections, and in Native communities. Small belts or strings in a diplomatic setting served to convey the veracity of a speech or request as well as the overall sincerity of the speaker and his community. Failure to present wampum usually meant that an individual’s opinion counted for naught. Very few of these strings or smaller belts have survived. If one accepted the small belt, large belt, or string the presenter of the wampum assumed

that one had agreed to the request or proposal. This acceptance could be simply touching the presented wampum. As such many chiefs, if they did not wish to become entangled in the request, would touch the wampum with a stick or leave it sitting at their feet. As a medium of exchange wampum was a desired item by Native peoples in the Northeast that could be acquired only from the coastal peoples. Wampum as a mnemonic device is best seen in the diplomatic belts commemorating treaties or agreements. The various symbols, patterns, colors, and rows are all “read” to relate the history of the belt and the agreement it represents. When they encountered wampum, Europeans readily placed it within their own cultural context. It was interpreted as an “Indian currency” comparable to silver or gold. Additionally, the English and Dutch colonies short on specie passed legislation that regulated and formalized the link between wampum and currency. In 1637 Massachusetts made wampum legal tender with set exchange rates based on the value of beaver on the London exchange. This fluctuation and eventual devaluation of wampum annoyed Native peoples who expected standardized rates of exchange. It was the concept of wampum as currency that continues to influence its image in the popular imagination as well as leading to confusion among scholars concerning its meanings for Native people both pre- and postcontact. Despite wampum’s decline as a medium of intercultural diplomacy, trade, and currency, it continues to have resiliency among Native people. Native people are once again coming forward to present readings of the wampum belts. Karl Hele

Further Reading Ceci, Lynn. “The First Fiscal Crisis in New York.” Economic Development & Cultural Change 28, no. 4 (1980): 839–843. Murray, David. Indian Giving: Economics of Power in Indian-White Exchanges. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Speck, Frank Goldsmith. “The Function of Wampum Among the Eastern Algonkian.” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 6 (1919): 3–71.

War Hawks “War Hawks” was a term for a small group of vocal pro-war advocates that dominated the Twelfth Congress. The Twelfth Congress voted for America’s first formal declaration of war on June 17, 1812, by the smallest margin of any declared war in U.S. history. The War Hawks, whose name was coined by their Federalist opponents, were alleged to be a group of arrogant warmongers, mainly from the South and the West: younger men who were driven by both exuberant nationalism and a desire for territorial expansion to press for war. Older historic interpretations gave the War Hawks a great deal of credit for goading the United States into war with Great Britain in 1812. The War Hawks were depicted as desiring war with England (and possibly France) mainly to assuage their hypernationalist pride and as a pretext for military expansion into British Canada and Spanish Florida. This narrative of the War of 1812 depicts a belligerent War Hawk–dominated Congress bullying a weak and vacillating President Madison into an unnecessary, costly war. More recent historians of the period, however, have largely refuted the idea of a coherent congressional bloc of War Hawks, united by age and geography, who were primarily motivated by expansionist desires. The Twelfth Congress convened for its first session on November 4, 1811, and adjourned July 6, 1812; it convened for its second session on November 2, 1812, and adjourned March 3, 1813. Most of the representatives of this group had been elected in the summer and fall of 1810. There was a small but

coherent group, centered around John C. Calhoun and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who consistently pressed for more aggressive action with regard to Great Britain. While this group was small, Clay ensured that they held prominent committee positions. Neither the motives of this group nor their exact membership is clear-cut, however. In the House, where there was more support for war measures than in the Senate, only six members voted consistently for war measures in every instance. Voting patterns were complicated by other matters—some representatives wanted to concentrate on an army, some on a navy, and others were opposed to tax increases until war was actually declared. The War Hawks’ anger at Britain was driven by the continued impressment of American seamen and Britain’s refusal to revoke the Orders in Council. In the trans-Appalachian West, there were also increasing Indian attacks, which the British were assumed to be inciting. Rather than a rogue faction bullying Madison and the rest of the Republicans into action, voting patterns suggest that by 1811, if not earlier, there was already a broad Republican consensus for war, which was being led quietly but not ineffectively by President Madison through his secretary of state, James Monroe. Additionally, even the most aggressive War Hawks, their more bombastic public speeches notwithstanding, showed reluctance for war in their private papers. Their largest motivation seems to have been a growing conviction, echoed by their constituents back home, that economic coercion had proved a dismal failure. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Calhoun, John Caldwell; War of 1812

Further Reading Buel, Richard, Jr. America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Hatzenbuehler, Ronald L. Congress Declares War: Rhetoric, Leadership, and Partisanship in the Early Republic. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983. Silverstone, Scott A. Divided Union: The Politics of War in the Early American Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

War of 1812 (1812–1815) On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war against Great Britain, starting the four-year conflict known as the War of 1812. The official causes given by Congress were the harassment of neutral American commerce, the continuing British impressment of American sailors, and a series of increasingly belligerent British decrees called the Orders in Council, which presumed to set the conditions under which the United States could trade. There were, however, other factors at play; namely a growing panIndian resistance movement in the western territories. Although these resistance movements were actually responding to Anglo encroachment on Indian lands, frontier settlers suspected that Britain was behind the troubles. In his June 1 statement to Congress, President Madison claimed there could be no other explanation for the recent upsurge in attacks by the “savages” other than the covert encouragement of British agents working in the region to foment hostilities. Another, less trumpeted reason for war may have been the desire for territory. Some Americans had been agitating for an American attack on the British holdings in Canada, presumed to be an easy conquest, and others may have been hoping for an excuse to attack Spanish Florida. The war itself met with mixed success. While the last engagement of the war, the Battle of New Orleans, was celebrated as a great American victory, American military performance overall was decidedly less glorious. Americans met with humiliating defeats in both the attempted invasion of Canada

and in the defense of the U.S. capital. Furthermore, the war was conducted amid an atmosphere of serious political division, as large regions of the country remained opposed to hostilities and became increasingly disaffected from the national government as a result. Relations between the United States and Britain had been increasingly strained since 1806. One of the biggest issues between Britain and the United States in this period was the massive upsurge in the British navy’s impressment of sailors on American vessels. The British legal conception of nationality held it to be an inalienable quality, meaning that men born in Britain after 1783 who had become naturalized U.S. citizens were still seen as British by the British government, and hence subject to impressment. After 1806, as the British grew desperate for sailors due to the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, more American seamen were impressed than ever before. The British navy was no longer just seizing men from American ships docked in British ports—British ships were actually operating in American waters, sometimes hovering just off the U.S. coast to stop and search American ships. In the years leading up to the War of 1812, several thousand Americans were impressed into the British Navy. The most serious such incident came on June 22, 1807, when the HMS Leopard, a British warship, fired upon the USS Chesapeake after the American captain refused to allow the British to board his vessel and search for English deserters. The incident was prompted by rumors within the British navy that a high number of British seamen had deserted to the American ship while it and the British warships were docked in Chesapeake Bay. When the British warship fired on the Chesapeake, three American seamen were killed and 18 wounded. A British party boarded the ship and removed four suspected deserters, one of whom was subsequently ruled to be British by an admiralty court and hanged for desertion. The Chesapeake-Leopard affair provided many Americans with the clearest proof yet that Great Britain had no respect for the United States as a sovereign nation and no intention of ending its depredations on American shipping.

In response to the continuing British attacks on American shipping and the British ministry’s refusal to honor American trade rights as a neutral nation, President Jefferson passed an embargo in late 1807 that banned all foreign trade. American ships were not allowed to leave for foreign ports, and foreign vessels were forbidden from carrying American exports to foreign markets. The embargo, which lasted 15 months, caused considered economic pain in the United States and hurt America a great deal more than it hurt either Britain or France. It and the subsequent embargos and nonimportation tactics tried by President Madison from 1808 to 1812 failed to recognize that both European powers had other sources for raw materials. They also failed to comprehend the seriousness of the military situation in Europe, where Britain was committed to its policy of economically strangling Napoleonic Europe through commercial warfare. By early 1812, as negotiations with Great Britain to repeal the Orders in Council continued to fail, the Republican-dominated Congress prepared for war while the minority Federalist congressmen vehemently objected. On June 1, 1812, President Madison gave an address to Congress in which he strongly implied the need for more forceful action against Great Britain, although the president stopped short of actually asking for war. Madison claimed that U.S. problems with Great Britain had been worsening since 1803, and he had now concluded that Britain’s behavior presented a “series of acts, hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation.” Congress’s declaration of war came on June 18, 1812. The declaration passed by the smallest margin of any war declaration in U.S. history, reflecting the deep sectional and partisan divides over the issue. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 79 in favor to 49 against. The Senate vote on June 17 was much closer, 19 for war versus 13 opposed. The votes split not only down party lines, but also,

ominously, along sectional lines. Congressmen from the South and West were generally in favor of the war, New Englanders were resolutely opposed to it, and representatives of the Middle Atlantic were bitterly divided. Many Northeasterners would remain hostile to what they contemptuously called “Mr. Madison’s War” throughout its progress. America’s first military action was an attempted invasion of Canada in the summer of 1812. Many American leaders expected Canada to be an easy conquest. Congressional War Hawk John C. Calhoun had predicted that the entirety of Upper Canada could be taken in a matter of weeks. Even President Jefferson, a war opponent, thought that the conquest of Canada “will be a mere matter of marching,” as the mostly French-speaking population was expected to hold no real loyalty to the British Crown. Led by Michigan territorial governor William Hull, the U.S. assault on Upper Canada was an unmitigated disaster, resulting in the eventual loss of Detroit and the surrender of 2,000 American troops. A second campaign against Quebec disintegrated due to lack of cooperation among the New England militias, and two subsequent attempted invasions also failed. The U.S. Navy was somewhat more successful. In August 1812, the USS Constitution defeated the HMS Guerrière in the waters off Boston. Captain Isaac Hull won the encounter mainly due to luck, but he was lionized for his surprising victory and his ship was nicknamed “Old Ironsides.” The Constitution scored a second naval victory in December of the same year, taking down a second British frigate, the Java. While these individual battles boosted American morale, ultimately the superior size of the British navy prevailed. By 1813, the entire U.S. Atlantic coastline was blockaded, and British warships raided American seaport towns from Maine to Georgia with impunity. Despite its mixed record, the United States held an advantage in the first three years of the war. When the United States issued its declaration of war in June 1812, Napoleon’s armies were in the midst of their invasion of Russia, and Europe received the lion’s share of British attention. In 1814, with Napoleon defeated for the first time, Britain could finally concentrate its military forces on war with the United States. More than 17,000 men, mostly Continental veterans, sailed to America. They were part of a threepart invasion strategy. One prong was a downward attack from Canada, the second was a lateral attack on the Chesapeake Bay region, and the third prong was to attack through the Gulf of Mexico, targeting the city of New Orleans. While none of these offensives was ultimately successful, they exposed the United States to some of the bitterest fighting of the war. British assault forces arrived in the Chesapeake on August 15: a 4,500-man assault force supported by 20 warships. At Bladensburg, Maryland, a hastily assembled American defensive line attempted to block their advance to the capital. The three-hour battle was one of America’s most crushing defeats. The Battle of Bladensburg, which the British contemptuously called the “Bladensburg Races,” was an utter rout, as most American militia units panicked and fled. The British advance proceeded unopposed into the capital, where British troops burned the halls of Congress, the President’s Mansion, and other public buildings in revenge for the American burning of York, the Canadian capital, in 1812. The Chesapeake advance was halted, however, at the city of Baltimore, where American forces scored an unexpected victory. The British sailed for Baltimore expecting no real resistance after the collapse of Washington’s defenses. Land forces were poised to strike the city while a naval battery took out Fort McHenry, which guarded the water approach. The bombardment of Fort McHenry began in the early morning of September 13 and continued for 20 hours but failed to inflict significant damage. Facing well-fortified defenses and an intact fort in command of the harbor, the British called off the assault and withdrew. During the all-night battle, Baltimore poet Francis Scott Key, an antiwar Federalist, stood watching the bombardment from the deck of a nearby British truce vessel. The poem he wrote describing the battle, “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” would become the national anthem in 1931.

Meanwhile, the northern advance through the Great Lakes region was stopped at the Battle of Plattsburgh in upstate New York. British land forces enjoyed initial success, but decided to withdraw on September 11 when the Americans won control of Lake Champlain in a dramatic naval victory over a significantly larger force. The failed British assault cost the British more than 2,000 casualties, versus 150 on the American side. American victories in the battles of Fort McHenry and Plattsburg were crucial in convincing British negotiators in Ghent, Belgium, to agree to peace. Despite these crucial victories in 1814, the war remained deeply unpopular, particularly in the North. Talk of secession grew. The deep unhappiness of the region ultimately resulted in a meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1814. The convention was called to discuss New England’s lack of influence in the federal government. While the Hartford Convention rejected calls for secession, it eventually proposed several constitutional amendments to amend Congress’s power to make trade regulations and war. The War of 1812 came to a formal end on Christmas Eve, 1814, when U.S. and British diplomats signed the Treaty of Ghent, halting hostilities and calling for the status quo ante bellum. The most significant American victory came a month after peace was declared, at the Battle of New Orleans, where about 4,000 American troops of various origins defeated a British assault force twice their size on January 8, 1815. General Jackson’s overwhelming victory, which came as the result of an excellent American defensive position and rotten British luck, resulted in more than 2,000 British casualties, while costing the Americans less than 20. While the Battle of New Orleans occurred almost a month after the formal end of the war, Jackson’s victory ensured that the British Parliament would accept the terms of the peace treaty. It also transformed the political mood of the country, as a troubled war metamorphosized into a glorious testament to American military prowess. America’s fervent new nationalism doomed the antiwar Federalist Party, particularly when exaggerated reports of the Hartford Convention’s treasonable behavior leaked out simultaneously with the news from New Orleans. General Jackson’s victory made him a national legend, one of the few popular heroes to emerge from this difficult time, and his subsequent arrival on the national political stage would transform American politics by the 1820s. Shannon E. Duffy

U.S. Navy lieutenant Thomas Macdonough’s victory in the Battle of Lake Champlain on September 11, 1814, led the British to withdraw their land forces engaged at Plattsburg back to Canada. This event had a pronounced impact on the course of peace negotiations at Ghent to end the war. (Library of Congress)

See also: War Hawks; Primary Documents: President James Madison’s War Message (1812); “Star Spangled Banner” (1814)

Further Reading Bickham, Troy O. The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Buel, Richard, Jr. America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Stagg, J. C. A. The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Taylor, Alan. The Civil War of 1812: American Culture, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies. New York: Random House, 2010.

Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842) The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 fixed the border between the United States and British Canada, save for the Pacific Northwest. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 had left the border of the future state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick undefined because the British and American diplomats were unsure of the geography of the area. The two sides traded proposals with heavy red lines on each side’s maps but never attached a copy of a map to the final treaty. Even without the map, the treaty contained many geographical errors; a nonexistent river, for instance, was one of the defining borders. Great Britain and the United States bickered over the Canadian border for the next 40 years. Jay’s Treaty in 1794 provided a joint commission to resolve the problem. The commission agreed with the British interpretation and awarded Whitehall a small slice of the disputed territory, though the vast majority of the region was still in dispute. The Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812 attempted to solve the issue with a mixed commission that would present their arguments to a neutral third party for adjudication. Arbitration with the king of the Netherlands evenly split the territory between the United States and Great Britain, but the Senate rejected the award. While the dispute over the boundary between the new state of Maine and Canada seemed a minor issue because the rugged terrain seemed to discourage large-scale settlement and farming, in reality the area was rich in natural resources including timber. In 1837, Canadian authorities arrested a Maine state land surveyor conducting a census in the disputed northeastern regions of the state. Politicians on both sides of the border used heated political rhetoric to stir up popular passions. The Maine legislature voted $800,000 for the recruitment of a 10,000-man militia. After national politicians seized upon the issue, Congress voted $10 million and authorized raising a 50,000-man militia to defend Maine’s land claims. The almost-conflict became known as the Aroostock War, but the only casualties occurred in a Houlton barroom where both British and American troops were drinking. An American toast to Maine’s success led to a brawl that resulted in several black eyes and bloody noses. The same year, British authorities also faced a short-lived rebellion in Canada. After its suppression, many of the rebels fled to the United States. They later seized a Canadian island in the Niagara River and used the Caroline, an American-flagged merchant ship, for logistical support. British troops crossed the border and seized the ship in a New York port. One crewman was killed and the ship was cut loose to fall over Niagara Falls. Anti-British sentiment swept across the country with calls for revenge. When Canadian Alexander McLeod crossed into New York and bragged of his participation in the Caroline affair, he was arrested by local authorities. Great Britain protested his arrest and threatened war if he was convicted and executed. The Martin Van Buren administration agreed with the British government that McLeod could not be held accountable for the actions.

Despite this small concession, tension continued to plague English-American relations: in the wake of the Panic of 1837, Americans had defaulted on more than $130 million in loans from Great Britain and British creditors found it near impossible to collect on their debts; lack of a U.S. copyright law meant that American publishers printed pirated versions of the works of British authors such as Charles Dickens with no compensation; and the British government was frustrated by Washington’s unwillingness to suppress the African slave trade. With tensions high, diplomats hoped for a way to work around popular opinion in their respective countries. By 1842 Daniel Webster, secretary of state under President John Tyler, and Lord Ashburton, the British minister to the United States, knew the two countries needed to find a peaceful solution to the numerous problems plaguing Anglo-American relations. The two men eschewed traditional diplomatic practices and met privately. An American historian researching the archives of France had found a map with markings by Benjamin Franklin that seemed to support the British claims, thus allowing him to tell Congress that the final reward was actually a great diplomatic victory for him and the United States. The boundary settlement benefited both countries. The United States received 7,015 square miles while Great Britain gained 5,012 square miles. The treaty set a boundary line through the Great Lakes to the Lake of the Woods and agreed on provisions for open navigation in several bodies of water. Webster expressed regret for the McLeod incident, closing the matter. The issue over the slave trade was addressed by a joint Anglo-American patrol off the African coast that never was actively enforced. By resolving most of the difficulties between the two countries, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty had long-lasting legacies for Anglo-American relations. It set a precedent for a peaceful resolution of the Oregon Territory dispute in 1846. The creation of mutual trust between the two countries allowed for British neutrality during the American Civil War. Stephen McCullough See also: War of 1812

Further Reading Bourne, Kenneth. Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908. London: Longman, 1967. Jones, Howard. To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783–1843. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Whitman, Marcus (1802–1847) and Narcissa Prentiss (1808–1847) Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa Prentiss Whitman were Presbyterian missionaries to the Cayuse Indians on the Columbia Plateau in the service of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Avid supporters of western settlement, the Whitmans lived in the Oregon Territory for nearly 11 years before being killed by a band of Cayuse. Their deaths provoked a war and peace treaties that served to propel American expansion westward along the Oregon Trail. Marcus Whitman was born on September 4, 1802, in Rushville, New York, to Beza and Alice Whitman. Lacking the financial means for ministerial training, he attended Fairfield Medical College and practiced medicine before Reverend Samuel Parker convinced him to resume his interest in missionary work. Refused in his application to the ABCFM due to ill health, Marcus was eventually named a medical assistant missionary and accompanied Rev. Parker on a reconnaissance mission among the Nez Perce in 1835. Upon his return, Whitman convinced the ABCFM to establish missions in the Oregon Territory.

Narcissa Prentiss was born on March 14, 1808, in Prattsburg, New York, to Stephen and Clarissa Prentiss. Narcissa became inspired by the work of Harriet Boardman, an ABCFM missionary to India. She received teacher training at Prattsburg’s Franklin Academy and a female seminary before responding to Rev. Parker’s call for missionaries in 1835. Married on February 18, 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman left for Oregon in early March. Accompanied on their 10-month journey by fellow missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding and William H. Gray, the Whitmans arrived at Waiilatpu on the Walla Walla River on December 10. While the Cayuse appeared receptive to the Whitmans’ lessons on agriculture, they fiercely resisted pressure to abandon their spiritual beliefs. Personal loss followed for the Whitmans in 1839 when their only child, Alice Clarissa, drowned at the age of two. The Whitmans eventually took in seven orphans and several half-Indian children. In 1842, financial constraints, poor performance, and infighting among missions led the ABCFM to recall several missionaries and close the sites at Waiilatpu and Lapwai. Though Marcus traveled east and convinced the ABCFM to reconsider, he greatly alarmed the Cayuse when he returned leading a wagon train of 1,000 immigrants. A measles epidemic soon followed, wreaking havoc on the Cayuse while seemingly sparing the settlers under the mission’s care, further enflaming tensions. On November 29, 1847, several Cayuse attacked the mission, killing the Whitmans and 12 others. Referred to by contemporaries as the “Whitman Massacre,” the event precipitated the Cayuse War, ending with a series of treaties signed at the Walla Walla Council of 1855. The Whitmans became well known through Narcissa’s letters and diaries. Among the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains, she also mothered the first American child in the Oregon Territory. Generally credited with saving Oregon from the threat of British imperial designs, the Whitmans facilitated the growth of U.S. overland expansion. Their mission did, however, lead to the displacement of the Cayuse people and their way of life. Michael Dove

Whitman Mission at Waiilatpu, by American painter William Henry Jackson. The artist painted this edenic scene decades after the infamous 1847 massacre that occurred here in which Cayuse Indians—decimated by a measles infection they blamed on the Whitmans—killed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven others, including orphaned children. Controversial in the memory of the West, the Whitmans are martyred heroes to some, but to others represent the ethnocentric racism associated with the spirit of Manifest Destiny. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

See also: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Assimilation; Cayuse War; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Missions; Nez Perce; Spalding, Henry and Eliza Hart

Further Reading Drury, Clifford M. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the Opening of Old Oregon. 2 vols. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1973. Drury, Clifford Merrill, ed. First White Women over the Rockies: Diaries, Letters, and Biographical Sketches of the Six Women of the Oregon Mission Who Made the Overland Journey in 1836 and 1838. Vol. I. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1963. Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

XYZ Affair (1797–1798) The XYZ Affair was a diplomatic incident during the John Adams administration that nearly resulted in a U.S. war with France. When several mysterious individuals representing themselves as part of the French government demanded bribes from the U.S. delegation before treating with them, both Adams and the American public took the French insults as a direct challenge to American honor and independence. The incident resulted in an undeclared three-year naval war between the two countries before the diplomatic issues were resolved. Allies since 1778 and “sister republics” since the French Revolution of 1789, Franco-American relations gradually deteriorated in the 1790s. While the American public had initially cheered news of the French Revolution, the violence and warlike tendencies of the French Republic after 1792 tempered this enthusiasm, particularly among the more conservative Federalists. The French government also came to increasingly resent and distrust the Americans due to the generally pro-British tenor of the Washington and Adams administrations. Diplomatic tensions between the United States and France worsened in the wake of the Genêt Affair of 1793 and America’s negotiation of the Jay Treaty with Britain in 1794. By 1796– 1797, relations between France and America had soured to the point where France was attacking American ships in the Caribbean in retaliation for the Jay Treaty, which the French saw as a repudiation of their 1778 treaty with the United States. At the start of his presidency in the fall of 1797, in an attempt to improve relations, President Adams sent a three-person delegation to France, composed of Elbridge Gerry, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and John Marshall. The delegation arrived in Paris on October 4, 1797, and presented themselves to the French government. However, the ministry refused to receive them. Subsequent to this, the U.S. envoys were privately approached by several persons who volunteered to act as unofficial envoys between the American and French governments. These men, later designated “W,” “X,” “Y,” and “Z” in U.S. dispatches, demanded personal bribes as well as a large governmental loan before negotiations could begin. In addition to the money, they demanded that President Adams apologize for some prior offensive remarks he had made regarding the French state. The envoys also wanted the United States to give France a commercial agreement comparable to the one England had received. America was assured it would need to pay “a great deal of money” to earn France’s forgiveness; 120,000 French livres and 50,000 pounds were mentioned at different times as possible sums. These demands were represented as coming from the French foreign minister Talleyrand and France’s current government, the Directory, although the French envoys furnished no proof of these claims. The French envoys threatened that unless the U.S. diplomats produced the required bribes and apologies, they would be forced to leave Paris, American property in France would be confiscated, and the French would continue to harass American shipping. The French envoys also threatened to provoke civil unrest in America by appealing to America’s “French Party,” the Republicans, for support. The U.S. diplomats categorically refused these increasingly blunt demands for money and increasingly belligerent threats of war. The U.S. team eventually left France after months of futile negotiations.

Seven months after their return, on April 3, 1798, President Adams presented the entire diplomatic correspondence to Congress. The diplomats used the letters W, X, Y, and Z in place of the French gobetweens’ names because they had promised the envoys not to reveal their names. Congress ordered the entire packet published. The report effected a drastic change in American sentiments toward the French Republic. In the summer of 1798, hundreds of petitions poured into the President’s Mansion from all areas of the country, Republican territory as well as Federalist, condemning France for its insulting and perfidious behavior toward America. For the first time in his life, President Adams was a wildly popular man, as war fever gripped the country. The XYZ Affair (the name was contemporary) resulted in a threeyear undeclared naval war between the United States and France, called the Quasi-War. The surge of popular support that followed the XYZ Affair temporarily put the Federalist Party in a position of strength, which they used to significantly increase spending on military and naval forces. They also attempted to use the war fever to permanently shut down some of their most obdurate Republican critics with a series of censorship laws and changes to the naturalization process known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The High Federalists’ hopes for war were dashed, however, by their own president. President Adams was fearful not only of America’s military weakness relative to France, but also of the High Federalists’ schemes to use the French conflict as an excuse for military buildup and imperial adventures against Louisiana, Florida, and Canada. Adams was particularly concerned that Alexander Hamilton seemed destined to lead any American army assembled for the engagement, as Adams deeply distrusted Hamilton’s ambition and saw in him a “second Bounaparty.” Hamilton, in fact, was already proposing that the newly expanded army be used to intimidate the Virginia state legislature into backing away from its opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts. Adams hence stalled on the army buildup, and on February 18, 1799, he nominated a second peace envoy to France, William Vans Murray, without consulting his cabinet. Adams further bullied the Federalist-dominated Senate into approving the appointment by threatening to resign himself if Vans Murray was not confirmed, a move that would have put the Federalists’ archnemesis, Thomas Jefferson, in the President’s Mansion. After an eight-month delay, Vans Murray and two other envoys sailed for France, where they were able to negotiate peace with a suddenly much more cooperative French government. Adams’s actions in sending the second embassy enraged his own Federalist Party and most likely cost him reelection in 1800, but it prevented a war with France and, equally important from Adams’s perspective, warded off a dangerous domestic threat to the republic. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Jay’s Treaty; Quasi-War

Further Reading DeConde, Alexander. The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared Naval War with France, 1797–1801. New York: Scribner, 1966. Ray, Thomas M. “‘Not One Cent for Tribute’: The Public Addresses and American Popular Reaction to the XYZ Affair, 1798–1799.” Journal of the Early Republic 3, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 389–412. Stinchcombe, William. The XYZ Affair. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Ziesche, Philipp. Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS

Pontiac’s Speech Explaining His Reasons for Making War on the English (1763) An outgrowth of the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763 illustrated the complicated nature of Euro-Indian alliances in the 17th and 18th centuries. The uprising was a brief attempt of French-allied Native Americans to win back Canada for the French after the French had been utterly defeated in the French and Indian War. Pontiac, a Delaware Indian, delivered this speech at a meeting of French and Native Americans on May 25, 1763. My brothers, we have never had in view to do you any evil. We have never intended that any should be done you. But amongst my young men there are, as amongst you, some who, in spite of all precautions which we take, always do evil. Besides, it is not only for my revenge that I make war upon the English, it is for you, my brothers, as for us. When the English, in their councils, which we have held with them, have insulted us, they have also insulted you, without your knowing anything about it, and as I know, and all our brothers know, the English have taken from you all means of avenging yourselves, by disarming you and making you write on a paper, which they have sent to their country, which they could not make us do; therefore, I will avenge you equally with us, and I swear annihilation as long as any of them shall remain on our land. Besides, you do not know all the reasons which oblige me to act as I do. I have told you only that which regards you. You will know the rest in time. I know well that I pass amongst many of my brothers for a fool, but you will see in the future if I am such as is said, and if I am wrong. I also know well that there are amongst you, my brothers, some who take the part of the English, to make war against us, and that only pains me on their account. I know them well, and when our father shall have come, I will name them and point them out to him, and they will see whether they or we shall be the most content in the future. I doubt not, my brothers, that this war tries you, on account of the movements of our brothers, who all the time go and come to your houses. I am sorry for it but do not believe, my brothers, that I instigate the wrong which is done to you, and for proof that I do not wish it, remember the war of the Foxes, and the manner in which I have behaved in your interest. It is now seventeen years that the Sauteux and Ottawas of Michelimakinak and all the nations of the north have come with the Sacs and Foxes to annihilate you. Who has defended you? Was it not I and my people? When Mekinak, great chief of all the nations, said in his council that he would carry to his village the head of your commander, and eat his heart and drink his blood, have I not taken up your interest by going to his camp and telling him, if he wanted to kill the French, he must commence with me and my people? Have I not helped you to defeat them and drive them away? When or how came that? Would you, my brothers, believe that I to-day would turn my arms against you? No, my brothers, I am the same French Pondiak who lent you his hand seventeen years ago. I am a Frenchman, and I want to die a Frenchman! And I repeat to you they are both your interests and mine which I revenge. Let me go on. I don’t ask your assistance, because I know you cannot give it. I only ask of you provisions for me and all my people. If, however, you would like to aid me, I would not refuse you. You would cause me pleasure, and you would sooner be out of trouble. For I warrant you, when the English shall be driven from here or killed, we shall all retire to our villages according to our custom, and await the arrival of our father, the Frenchman. These, you see, my brothers, are my sentiments. Rest assured, my brothers, I will watch that no more wrong shall be done to you by my people, nor by other Indians. What I ask of you is that our women be allowed to plant our corn on the fallows of your lands. We shall [be] obliged to you for that. Source: Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan, Collections, 2nd ed. Lansing: 1907, Vol. 8, pp. 300–301.

“We Are All Equally Free”: Broadside of the New York City Workingmen Demanding a Voice in the Revolutionary Struggle (1770) In the years before the American Revolution, the proliferation of urban demonstrations and voluntary associations reflected the growing participation of ordinary men and women in politics. In May 1770, an anonymous author named “Brutus”—believed to be Alexander McDougall—wrote a broadside urging his fellow citizens of New York to reject the claims of the mercantile elite who believed it was their place to unilaterally decide economic policy for the city. Two years earlier, some of these merchants had organized boycotts against products from Great Britain in protest over taxes levied against the rebellious colonists. Brutus argued that such a decision needed to include all citizens of New York, not simply the “mercantile Dons.” To the FREE and LOYAL INHABITANTS of the City and Colony of NEW-YORK Friends, fellow Citizens, fellow Countrymen, and fellow Freemen, NOTHING can be more flagrantly wrong than the Assertion of some of our mercantile Dons, that the Mechanics have no Right to give their Sentiments about the Importation of British Commodities. For who, I would ask, is the Member of Community, that is absolutely independent of the rest? Or what particular Class among us, has an exclusive Right to decide a Question of general Concern? When the NonImportation Agreement took Place, what End was it designed to answer? Not surely the private Emolument of Merchants, but the universal Weal of the Continent. It was to redeem from Perdition, from total Perdition, that Stock of English Liberty, to which every Subject, whatever may be his Rank, is equally intitled. Amidst all the Disparity of Fortune and Honours, there is one Lot as common to all Englishmen, as Death. It is, that we are all equally free. Sufficient is it therefore, to hew the matchless Absurdity of the exclusive Claim, of which a few interested Merchants have lately attempted, in a most assuming Manner, to avail themselves, in determining on the Question, whether the Non-Importation Agreement shall be rescinded, to observe, that it was not solemnly entered into for the Good of the Merchants alone, but for the Salvation of the Liberties of us all. Of this the trading Interest of this City were convinced, when, after forming themselves into a Society for executing that Agreement, they not only requested a similar Association of the Mechanics, but by frequent Meetings, conspired with them in Support of the important Company. When the parties engaged in it, none doubted the Necessity of so salutary a Measure: Every Man saw, that between an Importation of Goods, which stern Virtue ought ever to despise as a Means to encourage luxury, and the Sacrifice of our inestimable Rights as Englishmen, there was no Medium. This View of the Subject begat and brought to Perfection, the important Resolution, which has inspired the Enemies of our Liberty on the other Side of the Atlantic, with Fear and Astonishment. We have seen the salutary Effect of this ever memorable Compact, in the Resolution to repeal all the odious Duties, but that on Tea; and this remains unrepealed for no other Reason than that a tyrannical Ministry will not stoop to it unasked; and the East India Company scorn to request it of that tyrannical Ministry. Has not our Mother Country, by solemn Act of Legislation, declared that she has a Right to impose internal Taxes on us? And is not such an imposition incompatible with our Liberty? But this Law is a meer dead Letter, unless it be carried into Exercise by some future Act. For this Purpose was the Law devised, imposing a Duty upon Tea, Paper, Glass, Painters Colours, &c. the very Articles which our Egyptian Task-Masters thought were most essential to us, as being not hitherto the Produce of this Country. And shall we nor, for our own Sakes, shew that we can live without them? What are all the Riches, the Luxuries, and even the Conveniences of Life, compared with that Liberty wherewith God and Nature have set us free, with that inestimable Jewel which is the Basis of all other Enjoyments? They are

Dross, vile contemptible Dross, unworthy the Notice of Men. Rouse then my fellow Citizen, fellow Countrymen, and fellow Freemen, of all Ranks, from the Man of Wealth, to the Man whose only Portion is Liberty: Suffer not a few interested, parricidical and treacherous Inhabitants, to gratify their Avarice at the Expence of our common Interests. Spurn at the assuming Upstart, who dares to assert, that in a Question of such universal Concern, none but the Merchants have a Right to decide. For shame! will you, can you believe that you are their Beasts of Burthen, that you must toil and sweat, that they may be filled? I know that there are many Merchants whose patriotic Hearts abhor the accursed Thought; but still of that Profession, there are some base and vile enough to estimate their private Gain above the public Weal. These are the Miscreants who dare to affirm, with an Assurance that merits public Chastisement, that the Mechanics, or in other Words, the Majority of the Community, are not to be consulted on a Point of universal, of dreadful Concern. But who has made those Wretches as Gods among us? Curse on the vile, the arrogant Usurpation. In fine, let the patriotic Merchants, the respectable Body of Mechanics, and the virtuous of all other Ranks, conspire; let them, I say, conspire, as it were with an Oath, to brand with public Infamy, and public Punishment, the Miscreants who, while the odious Power of Taxation by parliamentary Authority, is in one single Instance exercised, even dare to speak in Favour of the least Infraction of the Non-Importation Agreement, and who like accursed Villains,—would owe their Greatness to their Country’s Ruin. O! ye Betrayers of the glorious Cause, remember the Boston Importer, Rogers, I say, remember him and tremble. BRUTUS Source: Brutus. “To the Free and Loyal Inhabitants of the City and Colony of New-York.…” (New York, 1774). Broadside.

Mohawk Joseph Brant Comes to London and Addresses King George III (1776) Joseph Brant (1743–1807) was probably the most famous Indian of his day. Also known as Thayendanegea, Brant was a Mohawk war chief, interpreter, statesman, and British military leader. With the onset of the Revolutionary War crisis, Native Americans, like other residents of North America, had to choose the loyalist or patriot cause—or try to maintain a neutral stance. The Iroquois Confederacy divided but Brant and his sister led the Mohawks and most Iroquois nations into an alliance with the British. In 1776, Brant traveled to England with Indian superintendent Guy Johnson to renew his friendship with the Crown and assert Mohawk claims to their homeland. Brother Gorah, We have cross’d the great Lake and come to this kingdom with our Superintendent, Col. Johnson, from our Confederacy the Six Nations and their allies, that we might see our Father, the Great King, and joyn in informing him, his Councillors and wise men, of the good intentions of the Indians our brethren, and of their attachment to His Majesty and his Government. Brother. The Disturbances in America give great trouble to all our Nations, as many strange stories have been told to us by the people of that country. The Six Nations who always loved the king, sent a number of their Chiefs and Warriors with their Superintendent to Canada last summer, where they engaged their allies to joyn with them in the defense of that country, and when it was invaded by the New England people they alone defeated them. Brother. In that engagement we had several of our best Warriors killed and wounded, and the Indians think it very hard they should have been so deceived by the White people in that country, the enemy returning in great numbers, and no White people supporting the Indians, they were obliged to return to their villages

and sit still. We now Brother hope to see these bad children chastised, and that we may be enabled to tell the Indians who have always been faithfull and ready to assist the King, what his Majesty intends. Brother. The Mohocks [Mohawks] our particular nation, have on all occasions shewn their zeal and loyalty to the Great King; yet they have been very badly treated by the people in that country, the City of Albany laying an unjust claim to the lands on which our Lower Castle is built, as one Klock, and others do to those of Conijoharrie our Upper Village. We have often been assured by our late great friend Sr William Johnson who never deceived us, and we know he was told so that the King and wise men here would do us justice; but this notwithstanding all our applications has never been done, and it makes us very uneasie. We also feel for the distress in which our Brethren on the Susquehanna are likely to be involved by a mistake made in the Boundary we setled in 1768. This also our Superintendent has laid before the King, and we beg it may be remembered. And also concerning Religion and the want of Ministers of the Church of England, he knows the designs of those bad people and informs us he has laid the same before the King. We have only therefore to request that his Majesty will attend to this matter: it troubles our Nation & they can not sleep easie in their beds. Indeed it is very hard when we have let the Kings subjects have so much land for so little value, they should want to cheat us in this manner of the small spots we have left for our women and children to live on. We are tired out in making complaints & getting no redress. We therefore hope that the Assurances now given us by the Superintendent may take place, and that he may have it in his power to procure us justice. Brother. We shall truly report all that we hear from you, to the Six Nations on our return. We are well informed there have been many Indians in this Country who came without any authority, from their own, and gave us much trouble. We desire Brother to tell you this is not our case. We are warriors known to all the Nations, and are now here by approbation of many of them, whose sentiments we speak. Brother. We hope these things will be considered and that the King or his great men will give us such an answer as will make our hearts light and glad before we go, and strengthen our hands, so that we may joyn our Superintendent, Col. Johnson in giving satisfaction to all our Nations, when we report to them on our return, on our return; for which purpose we hope soon to be accommodated with a passage. Dictated by the Indians and taken down by Jo. Chew. Secretary Source: O’Callaghan, E. B., ed. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York. 15 vols. (Albany, 1853–1887), 8:670–671.

George Washington’s Newburgh Address (1783) In an attempt to undermine a growing rebelliousness in the Continental Army regarding a variety of issues ranging from back pay to lifetime pensions, Commander in Chief General George Washington delivered this address to his officers on March 15, 1783, calling for their patience and forbearance. His speech took much of the fire out of the protesters, who later affirmed their patriotism, their confidence in the Second Continental Congress, and above all, their loyalty to Washington. Head Quarters, Newburgh, March 15, 1783 Gentlemen: By an anonymous summons, an attempt has been made to convene you together; how inconsistent with the rules of propriety! how unmilitary! and how subversive of all order and discipline, let the good sense of the Army decide. In the moment of this Summons, another anonymous production was sent into circulation, addressed more to the feelings and passions, than to the reason and judgment of the Army. The author of the piece, is entitled to much credit for the goodness of his Pen and I could wish he had as much credit for the rectitude

of his Heart, for, as Men see thro’ different Optics, and are induced by the reflecting faculties of the Mind, to use different means, to attain the same end, the Author of the Address, should have had more charity, than to mark for Suspicion, the Man who should recommend moderation and longer forbearance, or, in other words, who should not think as he thinks, and act as he advises. But he had another plan in view, in which candor and liberality of Sentiment, regard to justice, and love of Country, have no part; and he was right, to insinuate the darkest suspicion, to effect the blackest designs. That the Address is drawn with great Art, and is designed to answer the most insidious purposes. That it is calculated to impress the Mind, with an idea of premeditated injustice in the Sovereign power of the United States, and rouse all those resentments which must unavoidably flow from such a belief. That the secret mover of this Scheme (whoever he may be) intended to take advantage of the passions, while they were warmed by the recollection of past distresses, without giving time for cool, deliberative thinking, and that composure of Mind which is so necessary to give dignity and stability to measures is rendered too obvious, by the mode of conducting the business, to need other proof than a reference to the proceeding. Thus much, Gentlemen, I have thought it incumbent on me to observe to you, to shew upon what principles I opposed the irregular and hasty meeting which was proposed to have been held on Tuesday last: and not because I wanted a disposition to give you every opportunity consistent with your own honor, and the dignity of the army, to make known your grievances. If my conduct heretofore, has not evinced to you, that I have been a faithful friend to the Army, my declaration of it at this moment wd. be equally unavailing and improper. But as I was among the first who embarked in the cause of our common Country. As I have never left your side one moment, but when called from you on public duty. As I have been the constant companion and witness of your Distresses, and not among the last to feel, and acknowledge your Merits. As I have ever considered my own Military reputation as inseperably connected with that of the Army. As my Heart has ever expanded with joy, when I have heard its praises, and my indignation has arisen, when the mouth of detraction has been opened against it, it can scarcely be supposed, at this late stage of the War, that I am indifferent to its interests. But, how are they to be promoted? The way is plain, says the anonymous Addresser. If War continues, remove into the unsettled Country; there establish yourselves, and leave an ungrateful Country to defend itself. But how are they to defend? Our Wives, our Children, our Farms, and other property which we leave behind us. Or, in this state of hostile seperation, are we to take the two first (the latter cannot be removed), to perish in a Wilderness, with hunger, cold and nakedness? If Peace takes place, never sheath your Swords Says he until you have obtained full and ample justice; this dreadful alternative, of either deserting our Country in the extremest hour of her distress, or turning our Arms against it, (which is the apparent object, unless Congress can be compelled into instant compliance) has something so shocking in it, that humanity revolts at the idea. My God! What can this writer have in view, by recommending such measures? Can he be a friend to the Army? Can he be a friend to this Country? Rather, is he not an insidious Foe? Some Emissary, perhaps from New York, plotting the ruin of both, by sowing the seeds of discord and seperation between the Civil and Military powers of the Continent? And what a Compliment does he pay to our understandings, when he recommends measures in either alternative, impracticable in their Nature? But here, Gentlemen, I will drop the curtain, because it wd. be as imprudent in me to assign my reasons for this opinion, as it would be insulting to your conception, to suppose you stood in need of them. A

moment’s reflection will convince every dispassionate Mind of the physical impossibility of carrying either proposal into execution. There might, Gentlemen, be an impropriety in my taking notice, in this Address to you, of an anonymous production, but the manner in which that performance has been introduced to the army, the effect it was intended to have, together with some other circumstances, will amply justify my observations on the tendency of that Writing. With respect to the advice given by the Author, to suspect the Man, who shall recommend moderate measures and longer forbearance, I spurn it, as every Man, who regards liberty, and reveres that justice for which we contend, undoubtedly must; for if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter. I cannot, in justice to my own belief, and what I have great reason to conceive is the intention of Congress, conclude this Address, without giving it as my decided opinion, that that Honble Body, entertain exalted sentiments of the Services of the Army; and, from a full conviction of its merits and sufferings, will do it compleat justice. That their endeavors, to discover and establish funds for this purpose, have been unwearied, and will not cease, till they have succeed, I have not a doubt. But, like all other large Bodies, where there is a variety of different Interests to reconcile, their deliberations are slow. Why then should we distrust them? and, in consequence of that distrust, adopt measures, which may cast a shade over that glory which, has been so justly acquired; and tarnish the reputation of an Army which is celebrated thro’ all Europe, for its fortitude and Patriotism? and for what is this done? to bring the object we seek nearer? No! most certainly, in my opinion, it will cast it at a greater distance. For myself (and I take no merit in giving the assurance, being induced to it from principles of gratitude, veracity and justice), a grateful sense of the confidence you have ever placed in me, a recollection of the cheerful assistance, and prompt obedience I have experienced from you, under every vicissitude of Fortune, and the sincere affection I feel for an Army, I have so long had the honor to Command, will oblige me to declare, in this public and solemn manner, that, in the attainment of compleat justice for all your toils and dangers, and in the gratification of every wish, so far as may be done consistently with the great duty I owe my Country, and those powers we are bound to respect, you may freely command my Services to the utmost of my abilities. While I give you these assurances, and pledge myself in the most unequivocal manner, to exert whatever ability I am possessed of, in your favor, let me entreat you, Gentlemen, on your part, not to take any measures, which viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity, and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained; let me request you to rely on the plighted faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress; that, previous to your dissolution as an Army they will cause all your Accts. to be fairly liquidated, as directed in their resolutions, which were published to you two days ago, and that they will adopt the most effectual measures in their power, to render ample justice to you, for your faithful and meritorious Services. And let me conjure you, in the name of our common Country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the Military and National character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our Country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood. By thus determining, and thus acting, you will pursue the plain and direct road to the attainment of your

wishes. You will defeat the insidious designs of our Enemies, who are compelled to resort from open force to secret Artifice. You will give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue, rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings; And you will, by the dignity of your Conduct, afford occasion of Posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to Mankind, “had this day been wanting, the World had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.” Source: John C. Fitzpatrick, The Writings of George Washington, Vol. 26. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931–1944, pp. 223–227.

American Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) President George Washington issued this proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the ongoing Anglo-French wars on April 22, 1793. The British and the French had been fighting each other for years, first in the wars of the French Revolution and then in the Napoleonic Wars. Although popular sentiment in the United States backed up Washington’s statement of neutrality, the American population was split between sympathy with the French and sympathy with the British. Most agreed, however, that the country was better off without getting entangled in European affairs. The proclamation set a precedent for U.S. isolationism that remained strong well into the 20th century. Whereas it appears that a state of war exists between Austria, Prussia, Sardinia, Great Britain, and the United Netherlands, of the one part, and France on the other; and the duty and interest of the United States require, that they should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers; I have therefore thought fit by these presents to declare the disposition of the United States to observe the conduct aforesaid towards those Powers respectfully; and to exhort and warn the citizens of the United States carefully to avoid all acts and proceedings whatsoever, which may in any manner tend to contravene such disposition. And I do hereby also make known, that whatsoever of the citizens of the United States shall render himself liable to punishment or forfeiture under the law of nations, by committing, aiding, or abetting hostilities against any of the said Powers, or by carrying to any of them those articles which are deemed contraband by the modern usage of nations, will not receive the protection of the United States, against such punishment or forfeiture; and further, that I have given instructions to those officers, to whom it belongs, to cause prosecutions to be instituted against all persons, who shall, within the cognizance of the courts of the United States, violate the law of nations, with respect to the Powers at war, or any of them. In testimony whereof, I have caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed to these presents, and signed the same with my hand. Done at the city of Philadelphia, the twenty-second day of April, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the seventeenth. GEORGE WASHINGTON April 22, 1793 Source: James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents Prepared under the direction of the Joint Committee on printing, of the House and Senate Pursuant to an Act of the Fifty-Second Congress of the United States. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897.

President James Madison’s War Message (1812) On June 1, 1812, President James Madison delivered this message to the U.S. Congress, an excerpt of which is presented below, asking for a declaration of war against Great Britain. Congress complied on June 18, thus initiating the War of 1812, which stemmed from a number of issues concerning primarily the relations of the two countries on the high seas. British cruisers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it, not in the exercise of a belligerent right founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal [internal] prerogative over British subjects. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels.… The practice … is so far from affecting British subjects alone that, under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American citizens, under the safeguard of public law and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them; have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation and exposed, under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren. Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself, the United States have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations. And that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance of the practice, the British government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements such as could not be rejected if the recovery of British subjects were the real and the sole object. The communication passed without effect. British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating the rights and the peace of our coasts. They hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions they have added the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors, and have wantonly spilt American blood within sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction.… Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea, the great staples of our country have been cut off from their legitimate markets, and a destructive blow aimed at our agricultural and maritime interests.… Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade, the Cabinet of Britain resorted at length to the sweeping system of blockades, under the name of Orders in Council, which has been molded and managed as might best suit its political views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.… It has become, indeed, sufficiently certain that the commerce of the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the belligerent rights of Great Britain; not as supplying the wants of her enemies, which she herself supplies; but as interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation.… In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United States, our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers—a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity. It is difficult to account for the activity and combinations which have for some time been developing themselves among tribes in constant intercourse with British traders and garrisons, without connecting

their hostility with that influence, and without recollecting the authenticated examples of such interpositions heretofore furnished by the officers and agents of that government. Source: James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume 1, Part 4, James Madison. New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897.

“Star Spangled Banner” (1814) Now hailed as the national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key on the night of September 13–14, 1814. The United States was in the midst of fighting the War of 1812 against the British when Key visited the British fleet in Chesapeake Bay to negotiate the release of an American prisoner. While onboard one of the British ships, Key watched the British guns shell nearby Fort McHenry. Convinced that the fort would collapse under such heavy shelling, Key was overjoyed to see the American flag remain aloft throughout the night, prompting him to write the “Star Spangled Banner,” which he originally composed as a poem entitled “The Defense of Fort M’Henry.” The poem became widely popular throughout the United States and was ironically put to the tune of a British song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” The U.S. government officially declared it the national anthem in 1931. O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light, What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there. O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? On the shore dimly seen thro’ the mists of the deep, Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream: ’Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion, A home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation; Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land

Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!” And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! Source: Library of Congress.

Monroe Doctrine (1823) Although the Monroe Doctrine is not an actual law, it has profoundly influenced the making of U.S. foreign policy. On December 2, 1823, President James Monroe announced this policy in an annual message to Congress that he drafted with the help of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Subsequent presidents often referred to the Monroe Doctrine as justification for U.S. intervention in hemispheric affairs. Following is the portion of Monroe’s message that is now known as the Monroe Doctrine. A precise knowledge of our relations with foreign powers as respects our negotiations and transactions with each is thought to be particularly necessary.… At the proposal of the Russian Imperial government, made through the minister of the emperor residing here, full power and instructions have been transmitted to the minister of the United States at St. Petersburg to arrange by amicable negotiation the respective rights and interests of the two nations on the northwest coast of this continent. A similar proposal had been made by His Imperial Majesty to the government of Great Britain, which has likewise been acceded to. The government of the United States has been desirous, by this friendly proceeding, of manifesting the great value which they have invariably attached to the friendship of the emperor and their solicitude to cultivate the best understanding with his government. In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.… It was stated at the commencement of the last session that great effort was then making in Spain and Portugal to improve the condition of the people of those countries and that it appeared to be conducted with extraordinary moderation. It need scarcely be remarked that the result has been so far very different from what was then anticipated. Of events in that quarter of the globe with which we have so much intercourse and from which we derive our origin, we have always been anxious and interested spectators. The citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellowmen on that side of the Atlantic. In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens,

and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. In the war between those new governments and Spain we declared our neutrality at the time of their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shall continue to adhere, provided no change shall occur which, in the judgment of the competent authorities of this government, shall make a corresponding change on the part of the United States indispensable to their security. The late events in Spain and Portugal show that Europe is still unsettled. Of this important fact no stronger proof can be adduced than that the allied powers should have thought it proper, on any principle satisfactory to themselves, to have interposed by force in the internal concerns of Spain. To what extent such interposition may be carried, on the same principle, is a question in which all independent powers whose governments differ from theirs are interested, even those most remote, and surely none more so than the United States. Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none. But in regard to those continents, circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves, in the hope that other powers will pursue the same course. Source: Richardson, James D., ed. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. 1789–1897. Washington, DC: GPO, 1898–1908.

Andrew Sherburne’s Experiences on an American Privateer During the Revolutionary War (1828) While the rebellious colonists could draw on existing state militias to fight British forces on the North American mainland during the American Revolution, no such option existed to battle the British navy. General Washington and his officers instead looked to American captains and sailors and commissioned them as private citizens, or privateers, to attack the British at sea. Though many were much less enthusiastic about their military service, Andrew Sherburne’s memoir captures the excitement of a young man eager to participate in a military campaign.

I was about nine years of age when Gen. Gage, with a land and naval force took possession of Boston, which has been termed the “cradle of American independence.” The seizure of Boston exasperated the feelings of the colonists in every section of our country. I distinctly recollect the period when the farmers of Londonderry could scarcely settle themselves to their work. They felt that their rights were invaded. Many persons of talents or influence were friendly to the measures pursued by the British parliament, they were termed “Tories.” Another class which remonstrated against those measures, received the name of “Whigs.” My uncle with whom I resided was a decided Whig. Having formed acquaintances in Boston, where he had served his time at the cabinet maker’s business, he felt a deep interest in the events which occurred there. He took the newspapers; (there were comparatively few published at that day,) his neighbors assembled about him, and the fire-side conversation turned on the rights of the people, the injustice of parliament, the detection of Tories, &c. The conflicts at Lexington and Bunker’s Hill, and the burning of Charleston, roused the Irish “Yankies” of Londonderry. The young men posted off to the battle ground, prompted by their sires who followed them with their horses laden with provisions. My ears were open to all the passing news. I wished myself old enough to take an active part in this contest. Little did I realize at that time the horrors of war. I had not yet heard the clash of arms, the groans of the dying and the shouts of the victors. Nor did I imagine at this period, when I so much abhorred swearing, that the time would arrive when I should become a profane sailor. What is man? “At his best estate he is altogether vanity.” In Londonderry the influence of Doct. Matthew Thornton, one of the signers of the declaration of independence, was exerted with great effect on the side of liberty. When I was about eleven years of age my uncle removed from Londonderry to Epsom. Here another distinguished patriot had resided, Capt. Mc’Leary. He fell with General Warren, on Bunker’s Hill. I recollect the four following lines of a dirge commemorative of the death of Warren and Mc’Leary. “My trembling hand and aching heart, O how it throbs this day; Their loss is felt in every part Of North America.” These lines indicate the spirit of the times, rather than the poetic talent of their author. A martial spirit was diffused through the little circle of my acquaintances. As the men were frequently called together for the purpose of acquiring military discipline, their example was not lost upon the boys. Lads from seven years old and upwards were formed into companies and being properly officered, armed with wooden guns and adorned with plumes, they would go through the manual exercise with as much regularity as the men. If two or three boys met, their martial ardor showed itself in exercising with sticks, instead of muskets. Many a bitter sigh and broken heart, however, testified in the end the result of this military excitement. Parents saw with pain their sons advancing from childhood to youth. My reader can but faintly imagine the feelings of an aged father or an affectionate mother, perhaps a widow, when news arrived that a son had fallen in the field of battle, or had languished and died in an hospital, or still remained a prisoner in the hands of a foe, whose tender mercies were cruel. Danger however did not deter our young men from pressing forward to the battle ground, or sailing to meet the foe upon the ocean.… Soon after this 1 returned to my parents in Portsmouth. An abundance of new objects was here presented to my view. Ships were building, prizes taken from the enemy unloading, privateers fitting out, standards waved on the forts and batteries, the exercising of soldiers, the roar of cannon, the sound of

martial music and the call for volunteers so infatuated me that I was filled with anxiety to become an actor in the scenes of war. My eldest brother, Thomas, had recently returned from a cruise on board the “General Mifflin,” of Boston, Capt. Mc’Neal. This ship had captured thirteen prizes, some of which, however, being of little value were burnt, some were sold in France, others reached Boston, and their cargoes were divided among the crew of that ship. On my brother’s return I became more eager to try my fortune at sea. My father, though a high Whig, disapproved the practice of privateering. Merchant vessels, at this period, which ran safe, made great gains, seamen’s wages were consequently very high. Through my fathers influence, Thomas was induced to enter the merchants’ service. Though not yet fourteen years of age, like other boys, I imagined myself almost a man. I had intimated to my sister, that if my father would not consent that I should go to sea, I would run away, and go on board a privateer. My mind became so infatuated with the subject, that I talked of it in my sleep and was overheard by my mother. She communicated what she had heard to my father. My parents were apprehensive that I might wander off and go on board some vessel without their consent. At this period it was not an uncommon thing for lads to come out of the country, step on board a privateer, make a cruise and return home, their friends remaining in entire ignorance of their fate until they heard it from themselves. Others would pack up their clothes, take a cheese and a loaf of bread and steer off for the army. There was a disposition in commanders of privateers and recruiting officers to encourage this spirit of enterprise in young men and boys. Though these rash young adventurers did not count the cost, or think of looking at the dark side of the picture, yet this spirit, amidst the despondency of many, enabled our country to maintain a successful struggle and finally achieve her independence. The continental ship of war, Ranger of eighteen guns, commanded by Thomas Simpson, Esq. was at this time shipping a crew in Portsmouth. This ship had been ordered to join the Boston and Providence, frigates and the Queen of France of twenty guns, upon an expedition directed by congress. My father having consented that I should go to sea, preferred the service of congress to privateering. He was acquainted with Capt. Simpson. On board the ship were my two half uncles, Timothy and James Weymouth. Accompanied by my father I visited the rendezvous of the Ranger and shipped as one of her crew. There were probably thirty boys on board this ship. As most of our principal officers belonged to the town, parents preferred this ship as a station for their sons who were about to enter the naval service. Hence most of these boys were from Portsmouth. As privateering was the order of the day, vessels of every description were employed in the business. Men were not wanting who would hazard themselves in vessels of twenty tons or less, manned by ten or fifteen hands. Placing much dependence on the protection of my uncles, I was much elated with my supposed good fortune, which had at last made me a sailor. I was not yet fourteen years of age. I had received some little moral and religious instruction, and was far from being accustomed to the habits of town boys, or the maxims or dialect of sailors. The town boys thought themselves vastly superior to country lads; and indeed in those days the distinction was much greater than at present. My diffidence and aversion to swearing, rendered me an object of ridicule to those little profane chaps. I was insulted, and frequently obliged to fight. In this I was sometimes victorious. My uncles, and others, prompted me to defend my rights. I soon began to improve in boxing, and to indulge in swearing. At first this practice occasioned some remorse of conscience. 1 however endeavored to persuade myself that there was a necessity for it. I at length became a proficient in this abominable practice. To counterbalance my guilt in this, I at the same time became more constant in praying; heretofore I had only prayed occasionally; now I prayed continually when 1 turned in at night, and vainly imagined that I prayed enough by night to atone for the sins of the day. Believing that no other person on board prayed, I was filled with pride, concluding I had as much or more religion than the whole crew besides. The boys were employed in waiting on the officers, but in time of action a boy was quartered to

each gun to carry cartridges. I was waiter to Mr. Charles Roberts, the boatswain, and was quartered at the third gun from the bow. Being ready for sea, we sailed to Boston, joined the Providence frigate, commanded by Commodore Whipple, the Boston frigate, and the Queen of France. I believe that this small squadron composed nearly the entire navy of the United States. We proceeded to sea some time in June, 1779. A considerable part of the crew of the Ranger being raw hands and the sea rough, especially in the gulf stream, many were exceedingly sick, and myself among the rest. We afforded a subject of constant ridicule to the old sailors. Our officers improved every favorable opportunity for working the ship and exercising the guns. We cruised several weeks, made the Western Islands, and at length fell in with the homeward bound Jamaica fleet on the banks of New-Foundland. It was our practice to keep a man at the mast head constantly by day, on the look out. The moment a sail was discovered a signal was given to our consorts and all possible exertion was made to come tip with the stranger, or discover what she was. About seven o’clock one morning, the man at the fore-topmast head cried out “a sail, a sail on the lee-bow; another there, and there.” Our young offices ran up the shrouds and with their glasses soon ascertained that more than fifty sail could be seen from the mast-head. It should here be observed that during the months of summer, it is extremely foggy on the banks of New-Foundland. Sometimes a ship cannot be seen at the distance of one hundred yards, and then in a few moments you may have a clear sky and bright sun for half an hour, and you are then enveloped in the fog again. The Jamaica fleet which contested of about one hundred and fifty sail, some of which were armed, was convoyed by one or two line of battle ships, several frigates and sloops of war. Our little squadron was in the rear of the fleet, and we had reason to fear that some of the heaviest armed ships were there also. If I am not mistaken the Boston frigate was not in company with us at this time. My reader may easily imagine that our minds were agitated with alternate hopes and fears. No time was to be lost. Our Commodore soon brought too one of their ships, manned and sent her off. Being to windward he edged away and spoke to our captain. We were at this time in pursuit of a large ship. The Commodore hauled his wind again and in the course of an hour we came up with the ship, which proved to be the Holderness, a three decker, mounting 22 guns. She struck after giving her several broadsides. Although she had more guns, and those of heavier mettle than ourselves, her crew was not sufficiently large to manage her guns, and at the same time work the ship. She was loaded with cotton, coffee, sugar, rum and alspice. While we were employed in manning her out, our Commodore captured another and gave her up to us to man also. When this was accomplished it was nearly night; we were however unwilling to abandon the opportunity of enriching ourselves, therefore kept along under easy sail. Some time in the night we found ourselves surrounded with ships, and supposed we were discovered. We could distinctly hear their bells on which they frequently struck a few strokes that their ships might not approach too near each other during the night. We were close on board one of their largest armed ships, and from the multitude of lights which had appeared, supposed that they had called to quarters. It being necessary to avoid their convoy we roll to leeward, and in an hour lost sight of them all. The next day the sky was overcast, and at times we had a thick fog. In the afternoon the sun shone for a short time and enabled us to see a numerous fleet a few miles to windward, in such compact order, that we thought it not best to approach them. We were however in hopes that we might pick up some single ship. We knew nothing of our consorts, but were entirely alone. Towards night we took and manned out a brig. On the third morning we gained sight of three ships to which we gave chase, and called all hands to quarters. When they discovered us in chase, they huddled together, intending, as we supposed, to fight us; they however soon made sail and ran from us; after a short lapse of time we overhauled and took one of them, which we soon found to be a dull sailor. Another, while we were manning our prize, attempted to escape, but we found that we gained upon her. While in chase, a circumstance occurred which excited some alarm. Two large ships hove in sight to windward, running

directly for us under a press of sail. One of them shaped her course for the prize we had just manned. We were unwilling to give up our chase, as we had ascertained from our prize that the two other ships were laden with sugar, rum, cotton, &c, and that they were unarmed. We soon came up with the hindmost, brought her too, and ordered her to keep under our stern while we might pursue the other, as our situation was too critical to allow us to heave to and get out our boat. The stranger in chase of us was under English colors; we however soon ascertained by her signal, that she was the Providence frigate, on board of which was our Commodore. This joyful intelligence relieved us from all fear of the enemy, and we soon came up with our chase. In the mean time the prize which we had taken, (but not boarded) sought to get under the protection of the Providence, mistaking that frigate for one of the English convoy, as he still kept their colors flying. Our prize therefore as she thought eluded us, and hailing our Commodore, informed him, “that a Yankee cruiser had taken one of the fleet!” Very well, very well, replied the Commodore, I’ll be along side of him directly. He then hauled down his English colors, hoisted the American, and ordered the ship to haul down her flag and come under his stern. This order was, immediately obeyed. We now ascertained that the strange ship, which was in chase of our first prize, was another of our consorts, the Queen of France. Having manned our prizes and secured our prisoners, we all shaped our course for Boston, where we arrived some time in the last of July or beginning of August, 1779. Source: Sherburne, Andrew. Memoirs of Andrew Sherburne; a Pensioner of the Navy of the Revolution. By Himself. Utica, NY: W. Williams, 1828, 16–23.

“For Oregon!” Settlers from Illinois Describe the Oregon Territory (1847) Between 1845 and 1846, British and American diplomats brokered a treaty that extended the existing boundary between American and British territories along “the 49th Parallel of north latitude.” Establishing the international boundary paved the way for a new round of emigration in the fertile Oregon Country. In 1847, the Illinois Journal (Springfield) published the following letters from former Illinoisans who had made the trip. The variety of responses about their experiences typified the variety of opinions about settlers’ prospects in the region. Mr. Wm. Neily writes from Oregon, under date of 11th of April last— “In my estimation, the Oregon country has been considerably over-rated in some respects. The Willamette Valley is the principal country susceptible of farming, and for this purpose the soil is very rich and handsomely situated; but as a general thing, the country is destitute of timber. The timber used for farming purposes is principally fir.—Though there is a considerable quantity of oak, it is short and scrubby,—not much of it fit for rails. The productions of Oregon have also been overrated. From the best information I could get concerning the wheat crops, they would not average over fifteen bushels to an acre, though it is true the last year was unfavorable. With the right sort of farming, 25 bushels may be raised to the acre on the average. Grass remains green all the winter in the valleys, but I do not think we can raise much corn in this country. The winter of 1845—was pleasant, but the last winter was cold and there was a good deal of snow. Some of the cattle of the last emigrants, which came into the valley poor, died last winter. The rainy season continues to the middle of April, and sometimes till May. It seldom rains during the summer.” Mr. Isaac Statts, in a letter to a friend, dated “Polk County, Oregon, April 8, 1847,” says—

“I am highly pleased with this country, and so far as I can now say, shall spend the remainder of my days in it. It has assuredly the most healthy climate in the world. Many persons now here who have removed from State to State, in search of health and found it not, are now hearty and robust, capable of performing any kind of labor.—Grass has been very fine and abundant for the last six weeks. When wheat is well put in, you can safely count on 30 bushels an acre. Hemp, tobacco and flax do well here. It is a good country for sheep. There is sufficient water power to carry on manufacturing to any extent. I have built my house in a commanding situation, and have a fine view of the country for ten miles around, and it is quite refreshing on a warm summer’s day to feel the invigorating breeze from the Cascade mountains.— We have a most excellent spring within sixty yards of our house, near which we have made our garden. I am convinced that this is as fine a country as can be found. Any man disposed to be industrious and who would be satisfied any where, would be satisfied in this country.” Mr. Hezekiah Packingham, formerly of Putnam County, in this State, thus writes to his brother under date of “Willamette Valley, March 1, 1847:” “I arrived in the Wallamette [Willamette] Valley on the 30th of September, and my calculations are all defeated about Oregon. I found it a mean, dried up, and drowned country. The Yam Hill is a small valley, destitute of timber. I soon got sick of this place, and then went to the mouth of the Columbia river. I can give Oregon credit for only one or two things, and these are, good health and plenty of salmon, and Indians; as for the farming country there is none here—wheat grows about the same as in Illinois; corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables cannot grow here without watering. The nights are too cold here in summer. The soil is not as good as in Illinois—the face of the country is hilly, and high mountains covered with snow all summer, and small valleys—the mountains and hills are covered with the heaviest timber that I ever saw. We have had a very hard winter here, snow fell two feet deep, and lay three weeks, by reason of which hundreds of cattle have died of starvation. The thermometer fell to three degrees above zero.—Prairie grass here is the same as in Illinois. There is no timothy or clover. Mechanics are very numerous here. Of the ships that sailed from New York last April, but one arrived, and she was ice bound for 50 days, in latitude 59 1–2. It is supposed the other has gone to her long home. A United States manof-war was recently wrecked at the mouth of the Columbia. Money is very scarce here—and they have a kind of currency here (orders on stores and scrip)—they value property very high, but if they would put things at cash prices, they would be about the same as they are in the States. Oregon is rapidly filling up with young men, (but no girls,) of whom two-thirds are dissatisfied, and many would return to the States if they were able, but the road is long and tedious, and it is hard for families to get back; my trip was pleasant until I got to the South Pass—after that the country was rugged, and bad roads. Tell young men if they intend coming to Oregon, to drive no teams unless it is their own. We were uninjured by the Indians, though they were very saucy—they have no manners; they worship idols, and I saw one of their gods at the mouth of the river. There is no society here except the Camelities [Carmelites?] I shall return to the States next spring. Don’t believe all that is said about Oregon, as many falsehoods are uttered respecting the country.” The following is a letter from Mr. Elijah Bristow, formerly a resident of M’Donough County, in this State. He left home in the spring of 1845, for the purpose of exploring California and Oregon in view of a future settlement. It is stated in the Monmouth Atlas (from which paper we copy his letter) that “Mr. B. was a resident of McDonough county of some twenty years, and is reputed to be a man of excellent judgement, discriminating mind, with little of the visionary. He is 60 years of age.” “Pleasant Hill, Oregon, April 4, 1847.

“On the 8th of March, 1846 we left the Sacramento, in California, and after traveling thirty-five days, we reached the head of the Willamette valley in Oregon. As soon as I had rested I commenced looking at the country. I have examined it with a jealous eye; and have come to the conclusion that the Creator has placed Oregon at that point of the globe where it will ever be healthy. It has a good soil, is well watered, and has excellent timber.—The country is not as extensive as I had anticipated, but there is much unexplored. I have settled on Pleasant Hill, in the forks of the Willamette, 150 miles above ship navigation, and 60 or 70 miles from Alsea Bay, supposed to be a ship harbor. People can live here with half the labor they can in Illinois. Stock live without corn. Wheat never fails; it will come up three years without sowing, and it is not known how much longer, but the last crop was the best. I have seen here the best that I ever saw any where: 56 bushels per acre measured. Rust is not known. We have two crops of grass a year; for as soon as the fall rain sets in the grass springs up and continues green all winter. Oats grow well; they are almost an evergreen. Turnips are raised weighing 18 lbs., and beets out of all credit. Cabbage, potatoes and other vegetables come well when it is not too dry, —Corn does but poorly, owing to the cool nights (made so by the sea breezes), but sufficient corn can be made to fatten pork, &c. Sheep, I think, will do well. Every family should bring ten ewes. They drive better than cattle. There is a plenty of bear, deer and elk near Pleasant Hill; and I could catch a plenty of fish if I had time. It does not rain as much in the winter as I anticipated. Last winter we had twenty-eight snows and fifteen times the valley was white. Many cattle of the last year’s emigration died; but those that were here before did well. The new emigrants were obliged to feed their cattle on wheat in order to winter them. I have conversed who have been here thirty-eight and forty years who never saw so hard a winter before. We can have every variety of climate, for two days’ ride will carry us from the sultry plains to the region of eternal snow. This country is not without its objections. The greatest I can see is, that it rains a little too much in winter and not quite enough in summer. The time of harvesting is very dry. The water is as pure as ever bubbled from the earth. Some people here are much dissatisfied not finding every thing they wished. The principal cause of dissatisfaction is the difficulty of obtaining such things as they need, in this new country where every thing is scarce and high. Wheat $1, cash. Sharpening prairie plow $1. Dressing gun $2, and other things in proportion. There are many claims for sale. Some are going back to the States. If you see any of them you will not hear the truth, for they exaggerate to a person’s face. There are many of the best of claims not taken and will not be for years. The Willamette is a noble river with a rapid current to the falls. I have been to the mouth of the Columbia—do not like it. It is well described by Lewis and Clark. I do not think Puget Sound a very good farming country, though some like it. I have been induced to tear myself loose from the embraces of a kind and affectionate family in order to seek an asylum where under the direction of a kind Benefactor we could better our condition: and I am the worst deceived man you ever saw, if I have not found that place. All I regret is, that I did not get my consent to it years before. No country can present a better prospect for health at least. Many here have gained their health since they left the States. There are many who were miserably poor when the[y] left the States, who could no sell their property for from $3000 to $4000. You would do well to come to Oregon if you can only get an outfit for your places; for I would not give a claim on Pleasant Hill for all three of your farms. When I look around and make full extimate [estimate] of all the prospects that are apparently eligible I can hardly enjoy myself as a christian should. My whole soul is in this thing. Tell B*** to come along, and if there are any others you have confidence in persuade them to come; for I think I am not deceived. You know I am no enthusiast. I have endeavored not to exaggerate, and you know this in my common way of writing. I have therefore said but little, but you may know from what I do that I am much pleased. It requires work to live as in other places. But we can do with less labor and responsibility, (after we get fixed,) the stock wintering without grain. The farmer

has little else to do but to reap and sow his wheat. I know I may be censured for advising you all so strongly to come to Oregon: for it would be almost a miracle if all so large a family should be pleased. But I have done what I know to be my duty: as you are all young. Your mother and myself are getting old but we shall live many years longer here no doubt than in Illinois. You may think the journey will be attended with many difficulties, but if you will fix as I advise it will be no killing job, for I tell you honestly, that if you were all here with only an outfit and two year’s clothing, with three cows per family, you would be better off than you now are with all you have. You will find the journey a summer excursion or a pleasure trip, if you are not too anxious. I have never repented for a single moment my undertaking; for it is the best effort of my life. Get good strong wagons, with five or six yoke of oxen to each, and make light yokes. Bale all your feathers, extra bedding, &c., by making a box to fit a mould: lay in an envelope, pack your feathers, &c. as closely as possible: secure by means of the envelope; knock the box about; make the bales small, so as to be easily handled. Bring all your books in trunks or light boxes, your meat and flour (not superfine) in sacks. Bring a tea-kettle, bake oven, and skillet: use tin dishes on the road. Some people have only a frying pan to keep house with on the road, live principally on beans and soup, mush and milk, with meat occasionally. Stop in the buffalo country and dry meat; waste not a particle of anything; give none to the Indians. Admit them not into your camp. Get a tin can with a small top and cap to fit, and you can have butter all the way. Rise early and keep moving. Do not push or fret your cattle by whipping them, for they will give out on the latter part of the road, where they are most needed—never get irritated. The road is the place to try men’s souls; those who are clever there will be clever anywhere. Start by the 20th of March, and be at St. Joseph’s on the first of May almost at the peril of your lives! Be up and better yourselves! Loitering will never do! Pick your company; get among Christians, if possible. Strive to be in the first company. Methinks that if I could see you all here well, I could say with Simeon of old, “Now Lord lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” Now my dear family adieu! and may the God of peace preserve you wholly till we are all permitted to meet on this distant shore, and again unite our voices in singing those solemn lays which have so often cheered our hearts whilst I was with you, and the memory of which, causes me to sigh for the society of my long absent family.—Adieu. Your’s in hope of a blessed immortality. ELIJAH BRISTOW. Source: Illinois Journal (Springfield, IL), November 11, 1847.

2. Imperial Conflicts on the SpanishMexican Rim, 1769–1855

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW The first Europeans to settle on indigenous lands in the New World were Spaniards who, in the early 16th century, began to build an American empire first in the Caribbean basin and then on the surrounding continental coastlines. The Spaniards intended to construct a Hispanic-influenced world of subordinate states whose people would live and work under the system of Spanish government promulgated by the Habsburg kings of Castile, the central kingdom of Spain that spurred the unification of Iberian kingdoms from the 1460s onward. In the Caribbean, South America, and North America, Spanish adelantados, often called conquistadors, rode forth to make claims of lands and their peoples for Spain. In the long centuries between 1521 and the rise of the United States in the late 1700s, Spanish power and culture influenced wide sections of the southern regions of North America from Florida to Louisiana, Texas to California, and areas in between and south to Mexico City. These areas form a rim of territories bordering what would become the early United States. Later, in the 19th century, American interests would collide with and overrun those of Hispanic populations and their longtime Native neighbors in what are now the southwestern states of the United States and northern Mexico. Spanish interests first developed in the Caribbean on the islands of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba, as well as other smaller islands. Havana, the port city of Cuba, became a launching point for expeditions to both Florida coasts in the early 1500s. Initial attempts to settle what the Spaniards called La Florida were repelled by Native peoples such as the Calusas, but later voyages succeeded in placing Spaniards in towns and missions among indigenous peoples farther north in what is now southern Georgia and northern Florida. Saint Augustine was the most stable settlement over the centuries following its founding in 1565. Spanish interests in Florida included many Franciscan missions to the Timucua, Apalachicola, and Guale peoples that learned from earlier failures among these peoples and the Calusas to found more stable, integrated missions to bring Native peoples within the Spanish political sphere. That imperial effort was part of the governors’ efforts in Cuba to expand Havana’s, and the king’s, influence on the North American mainland and received incentives for Spanish efforts from French and British competition to claim the land at various times. The next area of Spanish expansion into North America came via the sustained effort to conquer and control the vast Mexica, or Aztec, empire in central Mexico. Following two years of battles, intrigues, and sieges, Tenochtitlán, the capital of central Mexico’s highlands, fell to Hernán Cortes, his Spanish adelantados, and his allied indigenous armies in 1521. The Spanish quickly extended their conquests to the south, west, and north of their renamed capital, la Ciudad de México or Mexico City, and this included exploration for gold and silver deposits and the establishment of new mines well north of the controlled

area around the capital. Northern mining settlements such as Durango and Zacatecas appeared early in Mexican history and were towns from which new conquests were made. Following a similar trajectory were explorations of the northwest of Mexico where ambitious and often cruel adelantados ventured to establish their own baronial empires beyond that of Cortes. This activity launched even greater conquests following the failed voyage of Pánfilo de Narváez to Florida that in the end deposited its survivors on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1528. One result of that shipwreck was the long trek of one Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, among whom was the famous Esteban, the first person of African descent to visit that locale in North America. Nuñez, or Cabeza de Vaca as he is known by most Englishlanguage texts, led his companions from the Gulf of Mexico through lands that are now Texas, the Rio Grande region, and northern Mexico, meeting Natives in these places who told stories of other peoples to the north. These stories, which told of greater wealth among reputed cities of gold, were taken seriously by a Franciscan friar, Fray Marcos de Niza, and were the reason for a scouting expedition by him and Esteban that spawned the interest of the Spanish king and viceroys in more exploration to the region of present-day New Mexico. This exploration was realized by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, whose 1540–1542 expedition opened new vistas for Spanish imperialism in what is now the American Southwest. Within another generation, new authorized and unauthorized attempts to found a new colony among the fabled Cities of Cíbola resulted in the 1598 founding of the kingdom (colony) of New Mexico by Don Juan de Oñate, a silver magnate from Zacatecas. Later colonial efforts came to pass as New Mexico’s colony grew and, after recovering from a major revolt (the Pueblo Revolt), appeared to stabilize in the 18th century. The period from the 1670s to the 1720s was particularly restless. In 1680, following years of increasingly difficult conditions under the Spanish, multiple pueblos representing a range of linguistic groups among the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico rose up and drove out the Spaniards in their midst in a series of attacks known as the Pueblo Revolt. The Spanish and those Pueblo peoples who accompanied them to the south remained outside of northern New Mexico, crouching in communities around the Rio Bravo (the Rio Grande of today) in and downstream from El Paso. During the 1690s the Spanish reasserted political control over New Mexico and rebuilt many of the missions and Spanish towns, including parts of Santa Fe, that were destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt. At the same time, new imperialistic overtures on the parts of France and then Russia and Britain (as England and Scotland united in 1707) led Spain to expand multiple times over the long 18th century, right up to the end of the colonial era in 1821. The French foray late in the 1600s south from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi Valley and north from the Gulf of Mexico culminated in the efforts of Robert, Sieur de la Salle, to establish a new imperial foothold at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Unfortunately and unknown by the party, the attempted fort and town were on Matagorda Bay, well within the current coastline of modern Texas. Misfortune befell what was already a mutinous group of colonists before the Spanish could find and remove the colony from lands claimed by Spain. Local Natives attacked and killed the French settlers. The result of these events in 1686–1689 was a small expedition authorized by the Spanish Crown to establish missions and a presidio (fort) in east Texas among the Caddo peoples of the Hasinai Confederacy. By 1693 these missions and presidio were vacant due to pressures by the Native leaders to remove the Spanish from their lands. The growth of settlements in French Louisiana in the early 1700s compelled Spanish authorities to try again, establishing missions west of Caddo territory along the San Antonio River in hopes of keeping the region under Spanish control. Meanwhile, settlements to the west and south grew around Saltillo, Chihuahua, and in northern Sonora. Spanish efforts at Tubac and Tucumcácori in presentday Arizona were but a small number of late 17th- and early 18th-century expansions into the greater Spanish borderlands region.

As these settlements stabilized, yet more pressure built against Spanish claims to the western coastline north of Baja California. Spanish forces founded Alta California, the current U.S. state of California, in response to multiple attempts by Russian and British explorers and traders to establish outposts for their Pacific empires in territory ranging along the greater coastline from modern San Diego to Sitka, Alaska. New Spain, the colonial kingdom that became modern Mexico, underwent a watershed inspection by a royal visitor, Don José de Galvez, beginning in 1767. After removing the Jesuits from religious missions and their churches in New Spain, Galvez turned his attention to the Russian and British threats. He sent Franciscans from Baja California, where they had taken over Jesuit missions, north to lands from San Diego Bay to Monterey, and then on to San Francisco. The goal, accomplished with the help of presidial soldiers from New Spain, was to plant new missions, presidios, and, hopefully, towns of citizens to claim that long mass of land south of British and Russian interests that stretched north from the Oregon Country. In those terms the establishment of Alta California succeeded in its goal and Spain saw its last imperial expansion in the colonial era. Over the territories claimed and sparsely settled by the Spaniards, great numbers of Native peoples lived and interacted with one another, and to a lesser extent with the smaller Spanish populations in each region. In addition to the numerous Native peoples in Florida, places like Texas were home to diverse cultures that varied over the spectrum of human cultural expressions. Some, like the Caddos mentioned above, were populous, sedentary, horticultural societies with complex rituals, politics, and economic systems. Many, such as the Jumanos of the Rio Grande drainage or the Coahuiltecan tribes of south-central Texas, were hunting and gathering tribes or smaller bands of loosely affiliated families, or clans. The Pueblos of New Mexico, while grouped together as a single culture by the Spanish, in fact spoke a number of different languages, had diverse forms of social and political organization, and exhibited considerable variation in religious beliefs and economic practices. Plains peoples inhabited many a Spanish American frontier, and over time the Apache peoples (Mescaleros, Faraones, Lipans, Gileños, Jicarillas, and others) gave space to more aggressive, colonizing Shoshonean peoples from the Great Basin and their allies from the Red River and Canadian River regions. Comanches and their Wichita allies rode into history in the long 18th century, challenging Native and European peoples alike. In California, entire advanced systems of hunting and gathering were disrupted by Spanish missions, agriculture, and commerce. From the Chumash to the Miwoks, lifeways in early California adjusted drastically by the time Americans appeared in the region in the 19th century. In opposition to traditional European views of the greater Southwest and southern North American landscapes as undeveloped and open landscapes, Native peoples filled the lands in question far in excess of population estimates proposed during the colonial era, and in most places Spaniards were a minority well into the ending years of the period. In those last years of the Spanish Empire, the area that now comprises northern Mexico and the American Southwest was reorganized by reforming imperialists in Mexico City and Madrid into an entity referred to as the Provincias Internas, the Internal Provinces, of New Spain. Much of this reorganization aimed to control so-called indios bravos, those Native groups the Spanish political leaders and military recognized as a threat to continued settlement. These reform efforts and baseline organizing methods survived the emergence of an independent Mexico in the period between 1810 and 1821, when, in that latter year, Agustín de Iturbide declared himself to be the emperor of the independent Mexico. In the years that followed, old patterns of colonial governance gave way slowly to new ones as governments continued to change in Mexico City. Florida, not part of the newly created Mexico, changed hands in an imperial dance between Britain and Spain before it ended up in the control of the new and rapidly growing United States via the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. Texas, opened in the Mexican period of

independence to settlers from both Mexico and the United States, quickly became a land of foreigners seeking to carve it, and successfully doing so, from Mexico in 1835–1836. New Mexico came into the U.S. orbit via the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, which turned on the long-sought free trade with the east. One by one, the northern sections of the colonial Internal Provinces received exposure to outside influences and engaged in new relationships not known previously by its inhabitants. Between the advent of the United States in 1776 and the Mexican-American War of 1845–1848, crucial changes in the political landscape of North America occurred. Fighting Native peoples for growth in the east, the young United States sought dominion of lands where it was thought that the indigenous tribes used little of the land, or if they did so, such use was seen as inefficient and wasted. Under early presidents including Thomas Jefferson, the young nation eyed lands to the south, west, and north of the original colonies-turned-states. Following the defeat of the British in the War of 1812 and the advent of political insurrections in the Caribbean and Mexico, the United States opportunistically inserted itself in Florida, and then in the expanding west. Its 1802 deal with France for the Louisiana Purchase made the United States Spain’s largest contestant for the western part of North America in the following decades, and by the end of the period, most of that land belonged to the United States. Texas entered a troubled period during the insurrections of the last decade of colonial control by Spain, as it was the site of extended support for the rebel priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Following independence under Mexico, Texas joined with Coahuila as a state under the first national Mexican governments. As noted above, new license was extended for immigration in an effort to populate that open country, as the Mexican government viewed it, and many Anglo-Americans came in from the east. Under empresarios such as Moses and Stephen F. Austin, many new immigrants swelled the numbers of Yanquis in Mexican territory. Unstable times in central Mexico meant that Texas was left to fend for itself. After rejections of greater representation in Mexico City and the seating of a new president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, whose tendencies were dictatorial, Texas moved to revolt in 1835. In April 1836, an independent Texas appeared as its own sovereign nation following the Battle of San Jacinto. The Republic of Texas existed for nine years until it was annexed to the United States during the presidency of John Tyler. Political intrigues and maneuvering ensured that the state of Texas entered as a slave state. The state was also subject to countless boundary disputes with Mexico and served as a launching point of an American invasion of Mexican territory within the year of its annexation. California’s history during the Mexican period was similarly tumultuous; however, its Californio population, the local elites remaining at the time of Mexican independence, held much more power in that region than similar local elites had in Texas. The Californio leaders controlled most of the land via Spanish and Mexican land grants for service and for development of the region’s resources. AngloAmerican settlers began to encroach on California lands with the expansion of the United States from the east. Early Anglo-Americans interacted with Native groups in the eastern borderlands of California and had intermittent discourse with the Spanish-speaking leaders in the settled coastal areas and the Central Valley. Strained relations between these parties, and knowledge of intentions on the part of the United States to expand its view of Manifest Destiny to the west coast, encouraged the Bear Flag Revolt and an attempt to establish the California Republic early in 1846 in the San Francisco Bay area. While somewhat successful on its own, this effort was quickly overtaken by the declaration of war by the United States against Mexico months later in 1846, and U.S. Army companies came to include the Anglo-American revolutionaries in the region. The onset of the U.S. invasion of northern Mexico on the Texas border, in California, and into Santa Fe and the rest of New Mexico came to pass due to pressures in the United States to expand. Such rhetoric was the stuff of presidential candidacies at the time, wherein the fulfillment of the United States’

“Manifest Destiny” would see it filling the continent from coast to coast. Longtime interest in trade with the Mexican north coupled itself with settlers’ desire for the lands then held by Mexico. While numerous local triggers brought about actions on the ground in terms of the invasion, the overarching motive of the United States was imperialist expansion at the expense of Mexico. In April 1846, Mexican and American troops fought over disputed lands on the Rio Grande, and the skirmish marked the first action of the war. American troops moved quickly into Mexico over the Rio Grande after that event, and also were sent overland to Santa Fe and northern California. In the spring of 1847, American troops landed at Veracruz and fought their way inland to Mexico City, which they took in the fall of that year. Combat ended in 1847 and the United States and Mexico concluded the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The result was the ceding of California, Texas, and the New Mexico territory to the United States in return for a modest settlement. The history of sustained imperialism and conflicts between the peoples of the Spanish American lands in North America is indeed long and diverse. Spanish and American immigration in the Southwest and California permanently altered indigenous cultures, and yet such influences did not destroy all Native traditions or languages. Many indigenous peoples continued their cultural traditions throughout the region. Spanish families settled many of these regions, and over time these peoples intermarried with one another and indigenous groups, traded, built homes and towns, and created new cultures that generally reflect an Hispanic culture made local under the names of Tejanos, Californios, Nuevo Mexicanos, and so on. When Americans came, new forms of governance, commerce, religion, and language arrived and often became dominant. This blend of inputs to the greater southwestern region gave it a unique history as it became part of the United States in the 19th century. This section provides additional detail on the events, places, and people that are part of this larger story.

Adams-Onís Treaty (1819) The Adams-Onís Treaty, or the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, was an agreement between the United States and Spain in which Spain ceded both East and West Florida to the United States in return for a payment of $5 million. The United States also gave up its claim to Texas, and Spain gave up its claims to the Oregon Territory. The treaty established the border between Spanish America and the United States westward to the Pacific. The treaty was negotiated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Don Luis de Onís y Gonzales, the Spanish minister to the United States, and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1821. Florida was originally settled by the Spanish in the early 16th century, but the sparsely settled area changed hands several times over the course of the colonial period. By the early 19th century, Florida was administered as two territories: East Florida, with a capital at St. Augustine, and West Florida, with a capital at Pensacola. While the territory of Florida was under Spanish jurisdiction, Spain had little real governing presence in the region and the exact boundaries of the territory were in dispute. When the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, some American officials insisted that parts of Florida formerly belonging to France had also been included. As the neighboring U.S. population grew exponentially after 1800, American settlers moved into Spanish-held territory in evergreater numbers and border problems between the two countries grew. The United States had been trying to acquire the Floridas by one means or another since 1793. In addition to coveting this rich land, the United States saw Spain’s marginal control over the area as the cause of many problems. U.S. settlers in neighboring states blamed the Spanish for failing to control the

Seminole Indians who raided into Georgia. Colonies of escaped slaves living in the Spanish territories also concerned U.S. slaveholders who feared the presence of the maroon colonies would encourage their own slaves to escape or revolt. Spain’s control of Florida became more aggravating to the United States after the War of 1812, when the British navy used Florida bases to attack the United States, and allied militarily with Creek Indians in the region. In 1813, U.S. troops seized a large portion of West Florida on grounds that the land had been included in the Louisiana Purchase. By the administration of President James Monroe, U.S. control over Florida was an issue of popular concern. In 1818, Monroe assigned his new secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, to negotiate the sale or transfer of both Floridas. Adams and his Spanish counterpart, Don Luis de Onís y Gonzales, the Spanish minister, negotiated the treaty almost single-handedly. Adams was a lifelong diplomat, having previously served as minister to Russia, Holland, Great Britain, Sweden, and Germany, and had helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Adams was very much an ardent expansionist during this period of his career, his fears of Southern slavery not yet having tempered his enthusiasm for the concept of Manifest Destiny. Onís, Spain’s minister to the United States from 1809 to 1819, was also a career diplomat of considerable ability, but he was severely hampered by his nation’s debilitating weakness and political disorder. At the time of the negotiations, Spain was weakened by civil insurrection at home and the independence movements erupting across Latin America. Recognizing the weaknesses of their position, the Spanish government agreed to allow Onís to trade both Floridas for the United States’ abandonment of any claims to Texas and a resolution of the boundary between the two countries. Onís recognized that the United States was willing to go to war with Spain to acquire Florida. He wrote to Spain’s secretary of state, José García de León y Pizarro, regarding American military aggressiveness: “You cannot realize the ambition and pride of this government, nor can you believe that it might be so foolish that, without provocation, it would declare a war which might be very unfortunate for it” (Brooks, 78). In the spring of 1818, the Adams-Onís negotiations were interrupted when General Andrew Jackson, without explicit authorization, marched U.S. troops into Spanish Florida in pursuit of raiding Indians. By the end of 1818, Jackson had seized several Spanish forts and held a significant portion of Florida. Onís broke off negotiations for a few months in August 1818 due to Jackson’s actions. With the exception of Adams, President Monroe’s entire cabinet was horrified by Jackson’s actions, which they saw as an unprovoked act of war. Adams, however, defended Jackson, arguing that Jackson had acted out of military necessity: Spain had proven too weak to control the Indians within their territory, necessitating American intervention. Onís and Adams concluded negotiations in February 1819, and the treaty was quickly ratified by the U.S. Senate, but Spain’s ratification was delayed for almost two years by political turmoil. King Ferdinand VII finally signed the treaty on October 24, 1820. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty for the second time and President Monroe signed it February 22, 1821. Under the terms of the treaty, Spain transferred control of the Floridas to the United States on July 17, 1821. Andrew Jackson would go on to assume the post of provincial governor of Florida once the transfer was complete. The Adams-Onís Treaty placed the boundary between the United States and Spanish Texas as running along the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas Rivers to the Continental Divide, then turning west to the Pacific Ocean along the 42nd parallel. The United States assumed responsibility for $5 million owed to U.S. citizens by Spain for damages caused due to Spanish actions. The United States also paid about a million dollars to Spanish citizens for damages done by U.S. forces in Florida. Despite his later break with Jackson, John Quincy Adams saw the Adams-Onís treaty as the greatest diplomatic achievement of his career and one of the greatest achievements of his life. The treaty defined

the U.S. boundaries from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest and ended the Anglo-Spanish rivalry in North America. Spain finally accepted the legitimacy of the Louisiana Purchase, which that country had denied since 1803. Finally, the inclusion of the western boundary to the Pacific strengthened later U.S. claims to Oregon and opened the Oregon Trail. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Adams, John Quincy; East and West Florida; Jackson, Andrew; Seminole War (First)

Further Reading Brooks, Philip Coolidge. Diplomacy and the Borderland: The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. New York: Octagon Books, 1970. Stagg, J. C. A. Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Weeks, William Earl. John Quincy Adams and the American Global Empire. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.

Alamo, Battle of (1836) The Battle of the Alamo, fought between February 23 and March 6, 1836, was a pivotal event in the Texas War of Independence. Grossly outnumbered, a group of Texans and Tejanos perished as they attempted to defend a fortified mission near San Antonio from Mexican troops. Besides exacting a heavy toll on the Mexican army, the battle served to fuel revolutionary sentiment and set in motion a series of events that ended with the United States’ victory in the Mexican-American War. Texas’s declaration of independence by American colonists and Mexican-born Tejanos in September 1835 had its origins in the centralist measures introduced by the Mexican government led by General Antonio López de Santa Anna. In December, some 300 volunteers led by Ben Milam attacked San Antonio de Béxar and expelled the Mexican garrison. Santa Anna, whose cousin General Martín Perfecto de Cós had commanded the garrison, refused to accept the declaration and assembled an army of 5,000 to punish the rebels. The rebel force took refuge in an abandoned mission known as “the Alamo” and strengthened its defenses. General Sam Houston, commander of the Texas forces, recognized that San Antonio held no strategic value and opted to withdraw to the east. His order to evacuate went unheeded by the rebels under the leadership of Colonel William Barrett Travis. The arrival of Santa Anna’s massive army on February 23, and his announcement that no armed defenders would be spared, prompted Travis to send for reinforcements. Only 32 volunteers, arriving on the eighth day of the siege, responded. Among the 185 defenders were Jim Bowie and David Crockett. Santa Anna ordered a steady bombardment of the mission on the second day of the siege. Running out of water, the defenders became embroiled in several skirmishes attempting to obtain supplies from a nearby reservoir. By the fifth day, the main water source had been cut off. Morale was raised the following day with reports of 200 reinforcements coming from Goliad, though in fact there were only 32. Santa Anna called a three-day armistice on day seven, upon which several Tejanos left the mission. There was some celebration on day 10 with news of more than 600 reinforcements arriving, though these hopes quickly vanished. After repelling two assaults shortly after daybreak on Sunday, March 6, the defenders were finally overwhelmed by some 1,500 troops. Storming the walls of the old mission, the Mexican soldiers declared victory after nearly an hour of hand-to-hand combat. Though the Alamo was lost and all of its defenders killed, the Mexican army also suffered immense casualties of nearly one-third.

Painting depicting the Texan defenders of the Alamo fighting Mexican soldiers within the walls of the mission fortress. Already legendary in the growing lore of westward movement, Davy Crockett, pictured here with a rifle above his head, became for generations of Americans a heroic martyred figure of righteous Manifest Destiny following the Battle of the Alamo. (MPI/Getty Images)

The battle led to a spirited resistance on behalf of Texans, for word of a massacre quickly spread. “Remember the Alamo!” became a rallying cry, motivating the rebels in their victory over Santa Anna on April 21, 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto, thus fostering Texas independence. Michael Dove See also: Austin, Stephen F.; Houston, Sam; Mexican-American War; San Jacinto, Battle of; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Taylor, Zachary; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of; Primary Documents: Vicente Filisola’s Account of the Battle of the Alamo (1849)

Further Reading Brands, H. W. Lone Star Nation. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Matovina, Timothy M., ed. The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Nofi, Albert A. The Alamo and the Texas War of Independence: September 30, 1835 to April 21, 1836. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Alta California Alta California was organized in 1769 as a province of New Spain and later became a department in the newly independent Mexico. It comprised the modern U.S. state of California, as well as the states of Nevada, Arizona, and Utah and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. This vast area had a coastline of 1,200 miles and an area approaching 400,000 square miles. Its geographic diversity encouraged ethnic diversity; at the time of European contact, the region may have had a Native American population of more than 300,000, speaking more than 100 languages and 300 dialects. The province remained part of Mexico until 1846, when American settlers launched the short-lived Bear Flag Revolt and were replaced by U.S. occupation troops. The first European exploration of California was in 1542 when Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo led two Spanish ships up the California coastline. The expedition found no precious metals, large cities, or other

reasons for the Spanish to mount new missions to the north, and the ships returned to Mexico after nine months. The expedition’s reports were buried in Spanish archives as part of Spain’s long-standing effort to protect its claims from other European empires. In 1579, the English pirate and privateer Francis Drake landed near present-day San Francisco. He claimed California for England as “Nova Albion.” This unwelcome attention spurred the Spanish to send a few reconnaissance parties north, but the first real attempt to colonize California occurred in 1769. Russian traders and explorers were pushing south from their footholds in present-day Alaska. Spain, worried that Russia might establish a firm hold on the region and threaten the vital Pacific trade routes between western Mexico and the Philippines, dispatched four expeditions to settle the newly organized province of Alta California. The four exploratory parties rendezvoused at what is now San Diego on July 1, 1769. They established military outposts along the coast. Father Junípero Serra led a group of Dominican monks as part of this effort; his Mission San Diego was the first of 21 Dominican missions that would shape the development of Alta California. The missions attempted to convert California’s Indian population to Christianity and to a settled, agricultural life. Serra’s missionaries found themselves in regular conflict with the bored, lonely soldiers assigned to serve in California. As incidents of rape and harassment threatened Serra’s goals, he demanded (and received) the transfer of married soldiers and their families to California. The first families landed in 1773.

Mission San Diego de Alcalá, founded by Father Junípero Serra in 1769, was the first of the California missions. Such visual renderings as this belied the sociopolitical tensions that surrounded the development of the mission. Intensified conversion efforts, for example, triggered a revolt at the mission in 1775, just six years after its establishment. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s America’s Coastline Collection)

The Spanish population swelled to several hundred over the next few years. As the Spanish population increased and the missions became more influential, Indian opposition grew into open revolt. In 1780, the Yuma tribe rose up; raids closed the overland route to Mexico and all but stopped further immigration. By the time of Serra’s death in 1784, there were nearly 5,000 Indians in the mission system. The settler population was also growing, albeit slowly. In 1800, there were 1,200 Spanish colonists and soldiers in California. The region’s economy was centered on ranching, a choice that evolved out of the

suitability of southern California for pasture, the division of a vast region between a relatively small number of Spanish families, and the presence of a large, cheap Indian workforce. While ranching was well suited for the region, it did not provide profit margins high enough to enrich such a remote area or fill it with job-seeking settlers. The mercantilist Spanish system, which banned foreign traders, aggravated California’s poverty. The ranchers, who were already developing a Californio identity distinct from other Spanish colonists, ignored the regulations while Spanish authorities, overstretched and undermanned, were unable to stop the illegal trade. As word spread of the easy profits to be had, foreign ships began making regular stops at Californian ports. The first New England traders arrived in California in 1790. Within a decade these traders had married into Californio society and California’s trade with New England was greater than with the rest of Mexico. The foreign influence in California increased dramatically after the Russian-American Company constructed Fort Ross in 1812 north of the present location of San Francisco. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 initiated the collapse of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and in 1810, Mexican rebels declared independence. The Californios were divided by the rebellion as some wanted to join the revolution while others sent contributions to help the Spanish government. When Mexico gained its independence in 1822, California swore allegiance to the new republic (and to the short-lived Mexican Empire as well). They elected a governor from the local elite, Luís Argüello, though his governorship was brief. When a governor appointed by the central government arrived in November 1825, attitudes changed as José Maria Echeandía quickly alienated the Californios. He moved the capital to San Diego, insulted the Dominicans, and refused to pay soldiers out of his depleted treasury. This led to a brief mutiny by the garrison of Monterey in 1828, and the following year more garrisons revolted. The rebellion gained momentum under a new leader, Joaquín Solís, a former convict who gained the loyalty of the mutineers by promising pay. Solís was bankrolled by foreign merchants anxious to remove Echeandía and open California to trade. The province soon became ungovernable; rival governors were backed by shifting alliances of landowners, who were themselves mostly interested in preventing any claimant from consolidating control. By mid-1832, Echeandía had illegally agreed to divide the rule of California with Augustín Zamorano. This chaos came to an end with the arrival of a new Mexican governor, José Figueroa, in January 1833. Figueroa granted amnesty to all rebels, but his 1834 decision to secularize the missions backfired. The mission lands fell into the hands of the Californio elite, who undercut Figueroa. Already ill, he was unable to stem corruption or aid the thousands of Christian Indian converts who were expelled from the missions. When he died in 1835, Alta California was only nominally under Mexican control. Perhaps 10 percent of the province’s 5,000 non-Indians were American traders. During his governorship, American trappers also began to arrive over land routes from the Rockies. Matters became even worse in 1836 with the arrival of Governor Mariano Chico. Chico insulted and snubbed the Californio elite. As relations grew poisonous, Chico fled California to request reinforcements, leaving Nicolás Gutiérrez as interim governor. A prominent young legislator, Juan Bautista Alvarado, staged a revolt and seized control of Alta California’s government. His militia contained more than 70 Americans, led by the fur trader Isaac Graham. Graham pushed Alvarado to declare independence but Alvarado declined. Despite this, the elites of Los Angeles and San Diego refused to recognize his regime. Mexico dispatched a new Mexican governor, Carlos Carrillo, and southern California threw its support behind him. After Alvarado outmaneuvered the southern leaders in a series of battles (which cost only a single life), Mexico relented and recognized him as governor in late 1838.

Alvarado’s rule was uneasy. American immigrants continued to shift the balance of power in California’s ports, and overland traffic increased after the Oregon Trail was blazed in the early 1840s. Isaac Graham continued to agitate for independence. Alvarado arrested Graham and more than 100 other foreign residents in April 1840, fearful that they would stage another revolt. Mexican courts later acquitted the men, but Alvarado had removed most of his opponents. The political maneuvers in California were made sharper by increasing tensions between the United States and Mexico following the Texas War of Independence. The United States was also fearful that Great Britain or France might establish a foothold in California if Mexico remained unable to control the province. In 1842, Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones was given command of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron and instructed to act aggressively to prevent a third party from seizing California. Rumors, suspicious naval movements, and outdated newspaper reports led Jones to conclude in mid1842 that the United States and Mexico were at war. He set sail from Peru and arrived in Monterey Bay on October 19, 1842. The next day, he landed 150 Marines and sailors and declared that he was taking control of Alta California. In meetings with Mexican officials and American expatriates, Jones quickly realized that he was mistaken and apologized profusely before withdrawing on October 21. The incident was a further blow to the damaged relations between Mexico and the United States. Mexico’s government used it as an excuse to call off sporadic talks on an American purchase of California. The province’s politics remained unstable. In 1844, Alvarado raised a revolt against a new governor, Manuel Micheltorena, and forced him to leave for Mexico in February 1845. Pío Pico, a prominent legislator, assumed the governorship. Pico was suspicious of the growing American presence and hoped for a British protectorate over California. The pro-American party, cultivated carefully by U.S. consul Thomas Larkin, included much of the legislature and prominent military leaders. The election of James K. Polk as U.S. president marked the final phase of Alta California’s history. In early 1846, Larkin was instructed to begin encouraging a pro-American revolt among the Californio elite; he succeeded in co-opting General Mariano Vallejo, the leader of California’s Mexican garrison. At the same time, John C. Frémont arrived in the Sacramento Valley. Frémont’s small party of soldiers had left St. Louis in June 1845 with the ostensible mission of exploring the upper Arkansas River, east of the Rocky Mountains. Frémont was confronted by Mexican soldiers and forced to retire to Oregon, where he camped on the border. He was quickly joined by a large number of California’s American settlers. Governor Pico issued stern threats against a possible insurrection, which only encouraged more defections. Frémont’s presence, his brief communication with Consul Larkin, and rumors of war provoked the pro-American party to action. On June 15, 1846, a small group of Americans captured the Sonoma garrison, including General Vallejo, and declared California an independent republic. Vallejo’s bloodless surrender and his captivity allowed him to assist the rebels while ostensibly fulfilling his responsibilities as an officer. The “Bear Flag Revolt,” as it became known, spread quickly and most of California’s towns recognized the new government before Frémont returned and declared California under U.S. control. When U.S. commodore John Sloat arrived to take control of Monterey on July 7, the republic dissolved itself. The U.S. occupation forces soon alienated the Californio elite, but a brief rebellion sputtered out after the arrival of American reinforcements from New Mexico under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny. The Californios surrendered on January 13, 1847, ending effective resistance to the American occupation. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, was signed on February 2, 1848. Mexico formally ceded Alta California in the treaty, along with the rest of what is now the American Southwest and its claims to Texas, for a payment of $18 million (roughly $400 million in modern dollars). California was governed by the U.S. military, although Californios continued to serve as

alcaldes (mayors) in many local governments. However, the Californios were largely shut out of the 1849 constitutional convention. After statehood in 1850, they agitated unsuccessfully for a separate state. James Erwin See also: Bear Flag Revolt; California Missions; California Republic; Californios; Indians of California; Mexican-American War; New Spain; Russian-American Company; Serra, Junípero

Further Reading Eisenhower, John S. D. So Far from God: The US War with Mexico, 1846–1848. New York: Random House, 1989. Gonzales, Manuel G. Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Langum, David J. “The Caring Colony: Alta California’s Participation in Spain’s Foreign Affairs.” Southern California Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1980): 217–228.

Anza, Juan Bautista de (1736–1788) Juan Bautista de Anza Bezerra Nieto was a third-generation soldier-explorer of the Sonoran frontier, governor of New Mexico, and the first European to open an overland route connecting northern New Spain to Alta California. De Anza was born in Fronteras, Sonora, in 1736 to an established military family. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had been killed by Apaches on the Sonoran frontier, de Anza enlisted as a soldier at the age of 16. Within eight years he was promoted to the rank of captain. From his presidio at Tubac, de Anza was responsible for defending the frontier against Indian tribes, in particular the Seris and Apaches. During the late 18th century, Spain found itself scrambling to settle California in an effort to thwart Russian encroachment. It was well established that California could be supplied by sea, albeit a difficult task, but for colonization to take firm hold an overland route was essential. In 1772 de Anza sent a proposal to Viceroy Antonio María Bucareli to explore a possible trail to the new settlements of San Diego and Monterey. Bucareli, eager to make this sought-after trail a reality, approved de Anza’s request. In 1774 the 38-year-old de Anza departed for California with 35 mules, 65 cattle, 140 horses, 21 soldiers, and 2 priests. Along the way he received considerable help from a Cochimí Indian guide and from Yuma Indians who assisted de Anza’s group. With their assistance, de Anza successfully blazed a 600-mile trail from Tubac to San Diego, where he arrived on March 22, 1774. De Anza continued up to Monterey, arriving there on April 19. Overall, de Anza had completed a round trip of 2,000 miles in five months. Today this trail is known as the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail and is administered by the U.S. National Park Service. From 1776 to 1781 de Anza’s trail proved successful in the colonization of California. In 1776 he brought 242 civilians and soldiers over the trail, doubling the non-Indian population of California. These settlers founded a community at San Francisco Bay and established the town of San José. In addition to much needed settlers, De Anza also brought 302 head of cattle, 165 pack mules, and 340 horses with the ultimate goal of making California self-sufficient. The families who came along with de Anza formed farming communities, hence reducing the need to import grain, a major obstacle to the colonization of Alta California. Another group of more than 60 soldiers and civilians came across the trail in 1781. In 1781, however, the Yumas revolted against the Spanish, effectively cutting off the land route created by de Anza, making a sea route the only viable option. Only by reestablishing friendly relations with the Yumas would it be possible to reopen the route.

In 1778, de Anza was appointed governor of New Mexico, where he spent much of his time dealing with Comanche raids. Part of his strategy was to form alliances with the Navajos and the Apaches. De Anza remained as governor of New Mexico until 1787, when he was appointed commander of the presidio of Tucson. He died in Arizpe, Sonora, on December 19, 1788, before taking his post. Today many buildings, streets, and landmarks are named in honor of de Anza. Ignacio Martinez See also: Alta California; California Missions; Comancheria

Further Reading Bolton, Herbert Eugene. Anza’s California Expeditions. 5 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930. Garate, Donald. Juan Bautista De Anza: Basque Explorer in the New World, 1693–1740. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005. Officer, James. Hispanic Arizona, 1536–1856. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.

Austin, Moses (1761–1821) Moses Austin was a seminal figure in the early effort to colonize and settle Texas, a successful merchant in both Philadelphia and Virginia, and an early pioneer in the American lead industry. Austin was born in Durham, Connecticut, on October 4, 1761. At the age of 22 Austin moved to Philadelphia to join his brother, Stephen. Two years later he married Mary Brown, the daughter of a prominent mining family. He and Mary had five children, of which only three survived into adulthood. Austin’s business ventures took him to Virginia where he and his brother established Moses Austin and Company. Once there he successfully gained control of Virginia’s lead industry, establishing a village known as “Austinville” around the mining area. By 1796 Moses had become known as the “Lead King.” After hearing reports of rich lead mines in Missouri, then a part of Spanish Louisiana, Austin obtained permission from the Spanish Crown to mine there in 1798. Spain granted Moses one league of land for his mining venture. In return Austin promised to settle several families in Missouri, establishing the first Anglo-American settlement west of the Mississippi. Austin also pledged allegiance to the Spanish Crown, himself becoming a Spanish citizen. For more than a decade Austin profited from his mining venture in Spanish territory and later, with the Louisiana Purchase, U.S. territory. He built a lead mine, smelter, and town all on his property. Hoping to secure his expanding wealth, in 1803 Austin founded and became a principal stockholder in the Bank of St. Louis. Unfortunately, the economic collapse following the War of 1812 led to the decline of the lead industry; and during the Panic of 1819 Austin lost his fortune. Having lost everything and unable to fix his debts, Austin determined to use his experience with the Spanish and try his hand at establishing an American colony in Texas. In 1820 Austin traveled to San Antonio de Béxar with a proposal to settle 300 families in the sparsely populated province. Initially, Austin’s plan was denied by the governor of Texas, Antonio María Martínez. Austin persisted in his efforts, however, and his application to settle 300 families on 200,000 acres of land was eventually approved by the Spanish Crown. Austin traveled back east to begin recruiting American colonists. Unfortunately, during his return trip Austin became ill with pneumonia and died. Austin died on June 10, 1821, unable to see his task realized. His final wish was that his son, Stephen, carry out his plans to colonize Texas. After a change in government following the Mexican War of Independence, Stephen gained permission from the Mexican

government to fulfill his father’s ambition. Stephen succeeded in establishing an American colony in Texas. His father’s tomb is located in Potosi, Missouri. Ignacio Martinez See also: Austin, Stephen F.

Further Reading Barker, Eugene C., ed. The Austin Papers. Washington: GPO, 1924–1928. Edmondson, J. R. The Alamo Story—From History to Current Conflicts. Plano, TX: Republic of Texas Press, 2000. Gracy, David B., II. Moses Austin: His Life. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1987.

Austin, Stephen F. (1793–1836) Stephen Fuller Austin, often referred to as the “Father of Texas,” was the first successful American empresario to establish a colony in Texas. Austin was born in Wythe County, Virginia, on November 3, 1793. In 1798, Austin moved with his family to Missouri, where his father, Moses Austin, became a Spanish citizen. After only a year and a half at Transylvania University, Austin’s father requested that Stephen come home to tend to the family business while Moses traveled east in search of new investors in his mining business. Back in Missouri, which had become a territory of the United States after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Austin was elected to the Missouri Territory legislature. After going broke during the Panic of 1819, Austin moved south to the Arkansas Territory where he became a judge for the First Circuit Court. While Austin was in Arkansas in 1820, his father traveled to San Antonio de Béxar, the capital of Spanish Texas, to speak with Spanish authorities regarding his plan to bring American colonists to the sparsely populated areas of Spanish Texas. Moses hoped to acquire a land grant from Spanish authorities, which he could then sell to American colonists. Realizing that the area needed to be populated, Spanish authorities eventually approved the plan. Moses died shortly after his return home and in turn, the land grant passed to his eldest son, Stephen. Although hesitant at first, Stephen eventually took up his father’s land grant. Austin arrived in Texas in 1821, converted to Catholicism, and became a Spanish citizen. However, in September 1821, the Mexican Revolution came to a conclusion and Texas became a Mexican possession. Unsure if his land grant would be recognized by the Mexican government, Austin traveled to Mexico City to press his claim. Finally, in 1823, under the Imperial Colonization Law, Austin was given permission to bring 300 families to Texas.

Stephen Fuller Austin, under contracts with the Mexican government descended from his father Moses Austin, led hundreds of North American families into Texas to help colonize the Mexican frontier. Considered the founder of Anglo-American Texas, he found himself somewhat torn between fidelity to Mexican officials and the aggressive territorial ambitions of his fellow Americans. But as he acknowledged, “trying to stop them from coming was like trying to stop the Mississippi with a dam of straw.” (North Wind Picture Archives)

Unfortunately for Austin and those that he legally brought with him to Texas, many other Americans began illegally entering Texas, adversely affecting the relationship between Mexico and the United States. In support of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, Austin fought with Mexican forces during the Fredonian Rebellion of 1826–1827, which had been started by American colonists who had illegally emigrated to Texas. However, while leaving Mexico City on January 3, 1834, after successfully petitioning the Mexican government to repeal the immigration section of the Law of April 6, 1830, Austin was thrown in jail by the Mexican president, Antonio López de Santa Anna. After being released from jail on December 25, 1834, Austin returned to Texas and found his colonists in a state of near rebellion due to Santa Anna’s repressive, centralist measures. Although Austin initially supported the anti–Santa Anna forces during the Texas Revolution, by early in 1836, he began supporting full independence from Mexico. On March 2, 1836, Texas declared its independence and Austin became the republic’s first secretary of state. Although Austin hoped that the United States would annex Texas, which it finally did on February 19, 1846, he did not live to see it occur. Austin died of pneumonia on December 27, 1836, in West Columbia, Texas. Gregg French See also: Adams-Onís Treaty; Alamo, Battle of; Austin, Moses; Empresarios; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Houston, Sam; Mexican-American War; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Mexican Land Grants; San Jacinto, Battle of; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Santa Fe Trail; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Annexation of;

Texas, Republic of; Primary Documents: Stephen F. Austin’s Address Supporting Texas Independence (1836)

Further Reading Barker, Eugene C. The Life of Stephen F. Austin: Founder of Texas, 1793–1836. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1949. Cantrell, Gregg. Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Reséndez, Andrés. Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Winders, Richard Bruce. Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002.

Barceló, Maria Gertrudis (“Las Tules”) (1800–1852) Maria Gertrudis Barceló was born the second of three children of her family in Sonora State, Mexico, to wealthy parents. The family moved to Albuquerque in the early 1820s. Barceló’s family ensured that Maria was well educated and as a result of this instruction, she was financially shrewd. After marrying at 23, Barceló retained her name and property. Maria gave birth to two children, but neither lived longer than four months. The couple would later adopt at least one daughter. She and her husband moved to Santa Fe around 1825, where they established a profitable gambling operation. This coincided with the beginning of precious metals mining around the Santa Fe area and brought in many of the mine workers for relaxation. The profits from the gambling were invested in trade goods and a casino building in Santa Fe. As the proprietor of a gambling house specializing in the card game monte, Barceló interacted with many of the American visitors to the Santa Fe area. Soldiers, traders, merchants, and reporters all frequented the casino, as did many of the Mexican immigrants. Maria was important to the social life of the city, hosting not only the gambling games but dances and drinking as well. Her wealth gave her status in the city and some praised her determination and drive. In a relaxing location where people and money could meet, socialization and observation of the other allowed for easing some of the prejudices. Barceló continued to profit from the influx of both Americans and Mexicans to Santa Fe, which was quickly becoming an important trading hub for the Southwest. Many of the visitors to Santa Fe, especially the reporters, cast Barceló in a bad light when they published stories back East. Rumors of prostitution and disregard for religion were printed for the American public to devour. These stories failed to mention the support for merchant capitalism in New Mexico that Barceló provided. During the Mexican-American War, Barceló loaned money to the U.S. Army occupational forces so that they could procure provisions. There was also a conspiracy that was uncovered and reported to the American officials by Barceló, helping to prevent a massacre. By the time of her death, Barceló possessed three houses, livestock, and a sizable amount of cash (around $10,000). Even in death, her detractors attacked her image. Her funeral was slandered as extravagant and financed by ill-gotten gains. However, all of Santa Fe attended the ceremony and celebrated the life of one of their most famous citizens. Geoffrey Simmonds

PROSTITUTION IN THE AMERICAN WEST Unlike the romantic myth of the independent dance-hall girls of western movies, prostitutes in the 19th-century American West faced many of the same hazards and social censure as elsewhere in the country. Women from African, Native, Anglo,

Asian, European, and Anglo descent all found their way into the industry. Some entered the profession as early as age 11 or 12, though many were between the ages of 15 and 30. Quite often, these women were married and had families. They would move from town to town, changing their names as necessary. In the second half of the 19th century, it has been estimated that as many as 50,000 prostitutes worked between Kansas City and San Francisco. Economic need and limited work opportunities in the male-dominated industries contributed to the lure of prostitution. While there is limited evidence that a few famous madams gained financial rewards and independence, most prostitutes were wage-laborers in a network that included local hack drivers, landlords, hotel clerks, madams, and law enforcement. These networks were centered around informal brothel districts, such as Denver’s Market Street and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Prostitutes also frequently found their way to mining and railroad camps, as well as army outposts. While the U.S. Army distanced itself from these informal additions, prostitutes frequently traveled under military protection. Structures called hog ranches where Navajo women plied their trade were built along the perimeter of military installations at Fort Fauntleroy, New Mexico; Hispanic women entertained soldiers at Fort Union, New Mexico; and Sioux women earned a living at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory.

See also: Mexican-American War; Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Cook, Mary J. Straw. Doña Tules: Santa Fe’s Courtesan and Gambler. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. González, Deena J. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Janin, Hunt, and Ursula Carlson. Trails of Historic New Mexico: Routes Used by Indian, Spanish and American Travelers through 1886. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.

Bear Flag Revolt (1846) On May 13, 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico. This fact was not known to a group of Americans who had led the charge in capturing various Mexican settlements around the Sacramento region. The group eventually raised its own flag and claimed the territory as the Bear Flag Republic, which lasted from June to July 1846. In the early 1840s, it was estimated that there were approximately 500 Americans in California, and somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 Mexicans. José Castro, the Mexican governor, was concerned about the influx of Americans on Mexican land, especially since many had not contacted the Mexican government to inquire about land grants. As such, Castro said that any land claims by anyone who was not a Mexican citizen, by birth or naturalization, would not be recognized. Rumors about Mexican and American Indian uprisings against American settlements in the region began to fly. Concerned settlers met with John C. Frémont, an American army officer who was surveying near Sutter’s Fort. Frémont subsequently instigated others in the region to form a revolt against the Mexican government. The Bear Flag revolt officially began on June 14, 1846, when Sonoma, a Mexican outpost north of San Francisco, was taken by a party of Americans under the leadership of Ezekiel Merritt and William B. Ide. Horses en route to assist Castro’s forces were captured on June 9, followed by the capture of the Mexican general, Mariano Vallejo, on the 14th. The group gained the moniker Bear Flaggers or the Bears after they created a flag from a cotton sheet that depicted a grizzly bear and the words “California Republic” written at the bottom. It is sometimes referred to as the Todd Flag because it was designed by William L. Todd, the cousin of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. An updated version of this flag would be officially adopted as California’s state flag in 1911. By the end of June, Frémont officially joined the Bear Flaggers and led them to their next major target, an unguarded presidio in San Francisco. The Bears occupied the fort and claimed the region for the

United States. At the same time, officially sanctioned American forces were also taking over California territory for the United States. Unbeknownst to the Bears, the United States had already declared war on Mexico. Commodore John D. Sloat led a sea assault on Monterey, which was met with minimal resistance, and on July 9, the Bear Flag Sloat raised over Monterey was replaced with the Stars and Stripes. Many of the Mexican military personnel in the region actually anticipated the region becoming part of U.S. territory and offered little, if any, resistance to U.S. occupation. Los Angeles offered the most resistance to the U.S. takeover of the land, largely led by a group of Californios and lasting until January 1847. Rahima Schwenkbeck See also: Alta California; California Republic; Californios; Frémont, John Charles; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Kearny, Stephen Watts; Mexican-American War; Presidios; Primary Documents: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Account of His Imprisonment During the Bear Flag Revolt in California (1846)

Further Reading Heidenreich, Linda. This Land Was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from Northern California. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.

John C. Frémont hoists the grizzly-bear flag of the California Republic in Sonoma, California, June 10, 1846. Worried that the Mexican governor was going to limit American migration to the region, settlers took control of the small outpost of Sonoma and declared it independent of Mexico. Frémont, who was surveying for the American government in the region, joined the group and later led them to an unguarded presidio in San Francisco. (Stock Montage/Getty Images) McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973.

Becknell, William (1787–1856) William Becknell, American trader and fur trapper, was born in the Rockfish Creek region of Amherst (later Nelson) County, Virginia, in 1787 or 1788. His parents were Michael and Pheby Landrum Becknell. Following his marriage to Jane Trusler in 1807, he moved to the Missouri Country, arriving there by 1810. He settled west of St. Charles. He was a ranger on the Missouri frontier during the War of 1812, serving from July 13, 1814, to June 15, 1815, when he was honorably discharged. The family settled near

Boone’s Lick in central Missouri, where he engaged in the salt trade. He married Mary Cribbs following the death of his first wife and they had four children. In the late summer of 1821, Becknell organized an expedition “for the purpose of trading for Horses and Mules and catching Wild Animals of every description” in the southern Rockies. It was during this journey that he hoped to find a route to Santa Fe in the hope that it might be a way to open trade with the newly formed Republic of Mexico. He took a pack train via the Upper Arkansas to Taos and reached Santa Fe. His route followed the Arkansas River into what is now southeastern Colorado where his party turned south through the Raton Pass into Mexico. The party reached Santa Fe in November, and he thus won the distinction of being the “Father of the Santa Fe Trade.” Becknell’s return to Missouri with wagons and a good deal of gold and silver coins created a considerable amount of excitement, and he was able to pay off his accumulated debts with the profits he had made. By late May 1822, he again took to the trail with three wagons, a pack train, and 16 traders to resume the trade with Santa Fe. This trip would lead to the formalization of what would become the Santa Fe Trail. Leaving Missouri, the traders would trek westward, following today’s U.S. Highway 50 to the Arkansas River, about 5 miles west of present-day Dodge City, Kansas, thence down to the Cimarron River, 50 miles south. The expedition followed the Cimarron west through present-day Cimarron County, Oklahoma, in the Panhandle to the North Canadian River and into New Mexico, which was the favored of several routes to Santa Fe. Becknell made a third trip in the fall of 1824 and received a license to trap in the Green Mountains. This venture occupied him to the summer of 1825. He then joined a survey group that had been authorized by Congress to lay out an official road from Franklin and/or Independence, Missouri, to the U.S.–Mexican border. This route became known as the “Cimarron Cutoff.” Becknell, after retiring from the trade, served two terms in the Missouri Legislature and several years as justice of the peace. In 1835, he sold his property and moved to Red River County in Texas with his family and several slaves, where he became a farmer and stockman. He took an active role in the War for Texas Independence and briefly served in the first Texas Congress. He died there on April 25, 1856. Henry H. Goldman See also: Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Beachhum, Larry M. William Becknell: Father of the Santa Fe Trail. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1982. Dary, David. Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends and Lore. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2000. Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies. Edited by Milo M. Quaife. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

California Missions The mission structures still standing in parts of the U.S. state of California were part of a larger colonial effort by Spain to extend its influence and control over lands in the American West that were claimed as part of the larger Spanish American empire. Between 1769 and the early 1830s, these institutions and the smaller number of forts that protected them were the primary methods of settlement and imperial control over the long strip of coastline from San Diego to San Francisco Bay. Beginning with the first mission in San Diego, Franciscan friars founded 20 missions in total before the end of Spanish control of Mexico in 1821. One last mission at Sonoma was established in the early years of independent Mexico when California was the most northerly extension of that country. The missions represent Spain’s last attempt in

North America to grow its empire in the face of Russian and British colonization on the Pacific Coast. The Bourbon monarchy’s choice of missions as the primary way to colonize the lands of California, or Alta California as it was called, is unique in the late colonial history of the Spanish American empire. During the Bourbon reforms of the middle 18th century, the Spanish mission no longer appeared as useful an institution to enlightened Spanish colonial administrators as it had in the previous two centuries of colonial rule in New Spain (present-day Mexico). In those early centuries the missions propagated by Roman Catholic missionary religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits were key institutions in the rapid expansion of Spanish control over large parts of Central and South America as well as the Caribbean basin. With the change from the Habsburg monarchy to the new Bourbon line that began after 1700, Spain’s leadership sought to decrease the power of the Spanish church in the colonies in an effort to exert greater regal control over the region. Thus by the 1750s, the church began to decline in terms of real control in the central colonial territories, while the religious orders experienced wholesale losses of churches, convents, and doctrinas, or missionary parishes, which had been in their control for decades. This movement culminated in the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Spanish dominions in 1767, an act that left many vacancies in the remaining missions abandoned by the departing Jesuit priests.

Mission Dolores, San Francisco, California, ca. 1850–1860. Beginning with the first mission in San Diego, Franciscan friars founded twenty missions in total before the end of Spanish control of Mexico in 1821. Following Mexico’s independence, Alta California’s missions were turned over to Federal control. After the Mexican-American War, they entered a period of decay until a romanticized view of colonial Spanish lifestyles in the late 19th century led to renewed interest. (Library of Congress)

In that same year, the Spanish royal visitor, Don José de Galvez, arrived in New Spain to execute the removal of the Jesuits and to enact reforms on behalf of the Spanish king, Charles III. One of those reforms was intended to secure Spanish colonies on the Pacific coasts of the Americas. Russian expansion and British trading threatened Spain’s claims to the California coastline and the interior beyond. Because of perceived and real shortages in military personnel and willing settlers to establish populated holds on the extended California coast, Galvez turned to the apostolic colleges of the Franciscans to provide missionaries for the conquest of Alta California. A small military and civilian cohort went with the missionaries in 1769 to make good the Spanish claim to the territory. The conquest of Native lands in Alta California went forward in 1769 via land and sea. Ships of troops, supplies, and missionaries made landfall in the San Diego area after difficult passages up the coast around Baja California. Overland, supplies and missionaries traveled into the lands north of the present U.S.-Mexican border. There, and in other areas northward, the Franciscans established the first

missions in the region. Between 1769 and the end of the colonial period in 1821, 20 missions housed neophytes (newly resettled Indians living in the missions) and missionaries in a developed pattern of architecture and lifestyle that became a hallmark of early California culture. The Franciscan friars had as their leaders some of the more charismatic friars of late colonial New Spain, including Fray Junípero Serra who became the first father president in California. He received his training from the Colegio Apostólico de San Fernando de México, one of the newer Franciscan missionary colleges founded in the Spanish American colonies after 1683. This college provided the majority of the friars who founded and administered the Alta California missions. Father Serra and his companions embraced an ideal of missionary labor that focused on congregating Native peoples into mission compounds in an effort to construct new towns of Native peoples acculturated to Spanish mores, religion, lifestyle, and economy. This effort, known to historians as reducción, or reduction, contrasted with other methods of missionary labor in which missionaries lived in Native towns and villages, or traveled with more nomadic groups. Roots of the California missionaries’ approach were to be found in the experiences of fellow friars of the other apostolic colleges in New Spain that served missions in Texas, highland Guatemala, Nuevo Santander, and Sonora, among other locales. In fact, early Alta California missionaries such as Fray Pedro Font accused his brethren of following too closely what he referred to as “the Texas method,” in which friars set about constructing missions as self-sustaining agricultural estates where mission Indians lived under the control of friars. The missionary friars taught Roman Catholic doctrine and rituals to Native peoples while they engaged the Natives living in the missions in agriculture, care of grazing herds, and workshop labors to supply the needs of the missions. In addition, this labor force supplied the needs of the newly formed settlements associated with the military forts (presidios) and sparsely populated Spanish settlements nearby. Labor on the missions was typical of that on a Spanish estate, or hacienda, of the more developed regions of Spanish America. Missionaries and their civilian assistants brought grain seeds and plantings of fruit species to begin farms and gardens at the mission sites. The Spaniards also brought horses and cattle, the latter of which flourished in Alta California. This was the basis for later ranches in the region during the Mexican (1821–1848) and early U.S. periods that followed the colonial era. Historians of Alta California have shown that these changes to the regional economy wrought wholesale transformations within the local ecosystem. The Native world that preceded the Spanish conquest in Alta California was based on hunting and gathering cycles, with horticulture in some areas. With the coming of the Spanish, Native lifeways changed in the missions, though hunting and gathering continued in the hinterlands around Spanish settlements. Indigenous peoples such as the Miwoks, Diegueños, Esselens, Costanoans, and Chumash found that the cattle and seeds the Spaniards brought took over rapidly and created new landscapes of non-native grasses, trees, and animals that challenged traditional cycles of gathering. Some of these intrusions of species were not intentional. They were part of the greater exchange in the Americas of weeds and invasive plant species that came on hoofs, on rats and other vermin, and in luggage from other parts of the hemisphere. The result of such ecological changes was a loss of habitable territory for Native peoples and increased pressure to enter Spanish missions. Native peoples of Alta California experienced the same reaction to new diseases and foods as indigenous peoples elsewhere. In the missions, neophytes and their families shared germs with Spanish friars and their lay assistants, and in turn experienced frequent epidemics and persistent exposure to Old World microbes that made them ill. Germs multiplied and were easily transferred in the close quarters in the missions or in the Native camps just outside. High rates of disease and death followed over the decades of Spanish missions in California, and by the turn of the 19th century friars were well aware of this trend in their respective locales. After more than three decades of missions, Alta California

missionaries wrote soul-searching reports to their superiors to the south in Mexico City about their inability to sustain mission populations without constant replenishment from outside the compounds. Those three decades witnessed high mortality of Natives within the missions and repeated attempts to resettle, or reduce, new bands of Native peoples to the missions. In addition to the diseases present among the general population, researchers in recent years argued that venereal diseases also limited population growth in missions by making more indigenous women sterile and unable to procreate. The reduction of populations by disease was accompanied by malnutrition. Native diets did not adjust easily to the grains and meat of a European diet. Stories among the Franciscan missionaries about Indians leaving to find different foods among their relatives in the hills or to gather seeds and marine foods are common in the archival records. The missions often were not a place of comfort for Native peoples, but rather had to be supplemented by a return to older lifeways if they hoped to survive. Typical days in Franciscan missions began and ended with the tolling of the church bell. Early in the morning the neophytes of the mission gathered to hear the Catholic ritual of mass and to receive teaching in doctrine. When that finished, the community would eat and workers would be sent to their assigned duties in the fields, among the herds, or in the workshops. Others might be assigned to work at the presidios or among settlers on loan from the Franciscan fathers. Children were instructed in the mornings in further doctrine, prayers, and singing. Many missions saw Native people engaged in Catholic ritual by playing instruments or assisting the sacristan in the preparation for the mass. Indians who showed much promise would be taught to catechize, or instruct in doctrine, their families and acquaintances. Work each day halted for lunch and more religious ritual and instruction before resuming for the afternoon. The evening was a time given to rest and an early retirement to bed. On certain church and Spanish holidays, the mission residents received the friars’ blessings to hold their own festivities. These were times for Native peoples to visit relatives, perform courtship, and establish political relations among the peoples in the mission and those remaining outside. Local Spaniards and foreigners would often mingle among the mission population at these times. Some of the best pictorial representations of Alta California missions were made as a result of these visits by English, Russian, French, and later, Anglo-American travelers on layover in one of the nearby ports. As many as 70,000 Native persons received the Catholic rite of baptism in mission churches. Many more lived in the missions and within their economic hinterlands. Nearly 130 missionaries served from the founding of Alta California in 1769 to the ending of the missions under Mexico in the 1830s. Following Mexico’s independence in 1821, the Alta California missions came under increasing pressure to turn the compounds over to federal control. Because of the dominance of the missions as cultural bastions in the region, the California missions continued to operate on a declining basis until the decade before the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. Following the war, the missions entered a period of decay until the late 19th-century revival of interest in Spanish institutions, largely due to a romanticized view of colonial Spanish lifestyles in the region. Because of this and interest from outside California, many of the structures have been preserved as historical sites for tourism and study. Jay T. Harrison See also: Alta California; Californios; Indians of California; Missions; Presidios; Serra, Junípero; Primary Documents: Junípero Serra’s Report on the Missions of California (1773)

Further Reading Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Sandos, James A. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Tibesar, Antonine, ed., Writings of Junípero Serra. 4 vols. Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955–1966. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

California Republic (1846) The California Republic, also known as the Bear Flag Republic, refers to the briefly autonomous period in California’s history won by American settlers in California who staged a revolt against Mexican authorities during the spring and summer of 1846. Though largely inconsequential in its long-term importance, the rebellion and resulting period of independence reflect the prevailing expansionist mood of the United States during the 1840s. U.S. control of California was used as justification by expansionists who argued it was America’s Manifest Destiny to control North America from coast to coast. This was formally accomplished after the United States’ acquisition of California at the end of the MexicanAmerican War. Americans, in their quest to fulfill their perceived Manifest Destiny, greatly desired to control the Pacific Coast of North America. California was a highly sought prize for several decades prior to the formation of the California Republic. American politicians and merchants were attracted to the Pacific ports and the access to the Asian markets that they provided. Accounts of California’s mild and healthful climate, sea access, beautiful landscapes, and abundant resources captured the American imagination and inspired thousands of settlers to consider relocating to California’s edenic shores. As early as 1812, Thomas Jefferson wrote to fur magnate John Jacob Astor that he looked forward to the time when the entire Pacific Coast would be inhabited by “free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest, and employing like us the rights of selfgovernment” (Boorstin, 270). In 1845, it was the opinion of many Oregonians and Californians that the American settlers in those regions should break free from their respective civil authorities and establish their own Pacific republic. The prevalence of this opinion caused the Mexican government to ask the U.S. minister to Mexico, Waddy Thompson Jr., if the United States would consent to surrendering Oregon for this purpose. It was the preference, however, of the United States and the American public to maintain Oregon as an American possession and expand U.S. territory to include California. As a means to this end, President Andrew Jackson offered to buy the harbor at San Francisco from Mexico in 1835, an offer that was repeated by President James K. Polk a decade later when he sent an unsuccessful John Slidell to Mexico with offers to purchase California and New Mexico for $15, $20, or $40 million. The threat of American domination of California inspired Mexico to consider colonizing California with German, Swiss, or Spanish settlers as a means of stemming the tide of American settlement in the early 1840s. By 1845, an estimated 1,000 American settlers were living in California, despite Mexican limitations on American land ownership there. A year later, the Bear Flag Revolt, which grew in large part from the persistent fears that Americans in California would be removed by the Mexican government, took root. Rumors had been widely circulated about Mexico’s intentions to implement Governor José Castro’s declaration that foreigners could be expelled from California if they had not become naturalized Mexican citizens. These stories were largely spread by American colonel John C. Frémont, who had drawn the suspicion of Mexican officials while on a survey expedition for the U.S. Army. Believing he was inciting rebellion among settlers, officials ordered his departure from Mexican territory (Frémont was married to Jessie Benton,

daughter of the influential expansionist senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and speculation remains about the role that Frémont’s father-in-law played in the orchestration of the Bear Flag Revolt). Initially resisting Mexican demands to leave California, Frémont eventually complied and made his way northward toward Oregon. At Upper Klamath, Frémont encountered Lieutenant Archibald H. Gillespie, who had traveled through Mexico disguised as a merchant, transporting information from Secretary of State James Buchanan to Thomas Oliver Larkin, the U.S. consul at Monterey, California. Gillespie delivered a packet of letters to Frémont from Senator Benton, and also shared with him the dispatches from Buchanan to Larkin, believed to intimate the United States’ intentions to go to war with Mexico. After years of increasing tensions between Mexican authorities and American settlers, in June 1846, Americans in California perceived Mexican lieutenant Francisco Arce’s movement of 170 horses as an indication that Mexico was mobilizing to evict Americans from the territory. American Californians, under the leadership of Ezekiel Merritt, assembled to prevent Arce’s actions, and Frémont was consulted. Frémont encouraged resistance to Mexican authorities, though he could offer no formal Americansanctioned support for the rebels, who became known as osos, or bears. On June 14, 1846, the rebels descended upon Sonoma, California, capturing Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, the Mexican military official in charge of the Mexican army’s northern headquarters. Having secured Vallejo as a prisoner, the independence of the California Republic was declared by American William Ide, and the famous bear flag, comprised of a red star, primitively drawn bear, and the words “California Republic” on a white background, was raised. News of the outbreak of the Mexican-American War reached the California Republic a few weeks later, and U.S. Naval forces under the command of Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag at Monterey on July 7, 1846. Thus, the land that had encompassed the Bear Flag Republic was claimed for the United States just a few days after Frémont was named leader of the fledgling government. Expansionist actions in California demonstrated Americans’ belief in the United States’ right to become a truly transcontinental nation. Even without explicit support from the U.S. government, American settlers were willing to exert power over the Mexican-controlled province of California to realize the dream of Manifest Destiny. Olivia Stauffer Good See also: Alta California; Bear Flag Revolt; Californios; Frémont, John Charles; Gold Rush, California; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican-American War; Presidios; Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe

Further Reading Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Vintage, 1967. Harlow, Neal. California Conquered: The Annexation of a Mexican Province, 1846–1850. Berkeley: University of California, 1989. Robinson, W. W. Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters, Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land Scrip, Homesteads. Berkeley: University of California, 1979.

Californios Californios, most broadly considered, were Spanish-speaking residents who originated from Spain or Mexico and lived in Alta California, a territory created in 1769 comprised of the modern-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Later, Californios would be

known as a powerful group who dominated politics in the region from the 1820s until 1848. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1848 gold rush, Californios would largely lose their power. The first Spanish settlement began in 1769, although it was predated by Spanish land claims in the area beginning in 1542. Missions and presidios were built by Spain spanning the majority of California, from San Diego all the way up to San Francisco. The installations were built mostly to protect their claim from British and Russian ventures, as few were able or willing to emigrate to the region. Many American Indian tribes—specifically the Miwok, Luiseno, and Chumash tribes—were displaced by the Californios, who used the mission system to coerce American Indians into cultivating the land. The year 1821 brought Mexican independence and changes to the status quo. In 1834, the mission system was dissolved, with the land going to the Mexican government. While the missions were dissolved, the unequal relationship established between American Indians and Californios continued, as the former provided the bulk of labor for the latter. Many Californios petitioned the Mexican government for land grants. Grants typically offered between 10,000 and 100,000 acres of land to anyone who promised to remain in the region and defend the land for Mexico. Some families were able to turn their holdings into empires. These ranchos traded meat, tallow, and hides of cattle. In 1848, when the land became part of the United States, it was found that 200 Californio families held more than 14 million acres of land. These elite families enjoyed a lavish life and were particularly known for throwing spectacular parties. However, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which transferred the region to U.S. control, coupled with the discovery of gold near Sacramento later that year, caused nearly 250,000 Americans to pour into the region. Their presence challenged the ownership of vast tracts of land, and the U.S. government’s difficult legal process to prove ownership of land further eroded Californio land claims. Furthermore, the Foreign Miners Tax Law passed in 1850 called for miners not considered to be American to be subject to a monthly $20 fee. This applied to Californios, Chileans, Mexicans, and Chinese, among others. Californios did benefit to a large degree from the racial hierarchy that developed in the region, particularly after the United States took ownership of it. Many Californios adopted the position of being free white citizens to gain rights. However, this was complicated by notions of class, ancestry, and language. The Land Law of 1851 offered a stark reminder that Californios were not considered American citizens. It called for the land ownership of Californios to be taken up in court when someone attempted to settle on the land. The lengthy legal proceedings drained most of the resources of many Californios, forcing them from their land. In some regions, such as Los Angeles, Californios would retain power by becoming involved with politics, whereas in other regions, such as San Diego, the power of Californios was quickly replaced by that of incoming European Americans. Rahima Schwenkbeck See also: Alta California; California Missions; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Indians of California; Mexican-American War; Mexican Land Grants; Presidios

Further Reading Benavides, José Luis. “‘Californios! Whom Do You Support?’: El Clamor Público’s Contradictory Role in the Racial Formation Process in Early California.” California History 84, no. 2, El Clamor Público (2006/2007): 54–66. Haas, Lisbeth. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pitt, Leonard. Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Comancheria Comancheria was the homeland established by the Comanches as they migrated south from the northern Plains during the 18th century. At its apex in the 19th century, it encompassed portions of the present-day states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, as well as territory in northern Mexico. The Comanches are a Shoshone-speaking people who refer to themselves as the Nemene, which means “our people.” It is believed that they were dubbed “Comanche” by the Utes, which translates to “anyone who wants to fight all the time.” The Comanches originally resided in parts or all of the presentday states of Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming. During the 16th century, they were loosely organized into autonomous bands, some of which depended primarily on hunting game for sustenance while others were agriculturalists. When horses arrived on the Great Plains during the early 1700s, the Comanches were among the first to adopt them as their primary source of transportation, and they changed their lifestyle to one centered on hunting buffalo. Comanche warriors also became extremely proficient at warfare and raiding on horseback, which allowed them to expand their territory quickly. The movement of the respective Comanche bands southward, most notably the Kwahadis, Kotsotekas, Penatekas, and Yamparikas, was motivated by a desire to trade with the Europeans who resided in present-day New Mexico and Texas. In exchange for horses, European traders provided the Comanches pistols, rifles, and ammunition. The firearms were greatly desired because the migration of the Comanches required them to displace the Apaches in the region. The Spanish were the primary trade partners of the Comanches, although they also traded with the French. Periodically, Comanche warriors attacked Spanish settlements with the very weapons that the Spanish provided, but this did not affect trade relations between the two groups because the Spanish knew that if they did not supply the Comanches with the goods they desired, then their French rivals would supplant them as the primary trade partners. As the Comanches secured their new homeland of Comancheria, they were forced to once again change their manner of subsistence. Buffalo were scarce in the Southwest so most of the Comanche bands opted to trade for the goods they required to live. Comancheria thus became the center of trade in the Southwest. Comanches would raid or trade horses from Spanish settlements to the south, while receiving ammunition and other goods from Indian groups to the north and east. Between 1740 and 1830 Comancheria was “the nexus point of an extensive trade network that stretched from the Rio Grande to the Mississippi River and from central Texas to the Missouri River” (Hämäläinen, 1998, 487). This trading culture allowed the Comanches to dominate the southern Plains Indians and imperial residents for nearly 100 years. The primary reason that Spain could not effectively threaten Comancheria was that the influx of U.S. citizens into Texas changed the balance of power in Comancheria, especially after Mexico became an independent country in 1821. When the Texas Revolution began in 1835 between citizens of the United States and Mexico, Comanches could be found on both sides of the conflict. Recognizing the Comanches would be useful allies against Mexico, Sam Houston in 1836 used trade goods to secure their goodwill. To secure the alliance between the two peoples in 1838, Houston, who was then president of Texas, signed a treaty with the Comanches that recognized a formal border between Texas and Comancheria. Although the Comanches in the southern portion of Comancheria were desirous of peace with their neighbors, Comanche bands from the northern part of the region refused to stop raids into Texas. Another treaty was signed in 1841 between the Comanches and Texas but it too failed to bring peace due to the northern Comanche bands. The absorption of Texas into the United States required the negotiation of a third treaty, which proved more successful than its two predecessors. The agreement, signed on May 15, 1846, recognized that the southern, or “lower,” Comanches were good neighbors and trade partners of the

United States and could not be held responsible for the actions of the northern, or “upper,” Comanche bands. Although the distinction between the two groups was recognized on paper, that distinction meant little to most of the people in Texas who wanted all Native peoples removed from their territory. All Comanches would, in practice, be punished for the depredations committed by their kinsmen. What peace existed was shattered by attacks on settlers traveling the Santa Fe Trail during the early 1860s by Comanche and Kiowa warriors. The U.S. Army launched a campaign to protect its citizens in 1864 that forced the Comanches to sue for peace. The resulting 1865 Treaty of the Little Arkansas granted the Comanches and Kiowas a reservation that comprised most of the Texas Panhandle in exchange for Comancheria and peace. Just two years later, the U.S. government took approximately 95 percent of the reservation away from the Natives in the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty of 1867. Although the Comanches and Kiowas got to keep a small portion of their land, they were forced in the same agreement to share it with the Plains Apaches. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty

Further Reading Betty, Gerald. Comanche Society: Before the Reservation. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Western Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System.” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1998), 485–513. Kavanagh, Thomas W. Comanche Political History: An Ethnographical Perspective, 1706–1875. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno (1824–1894) Juan Nepomuceno Cortina was a mid-19th-century Mexican hero and Texan outlaw who fought for the rights of Mexicans living in Texas. After struggling against Anglo-Americans along the Rio Grande River, he issued two proclamations on the rights of Mexican Texans that were never accepted in the state capital. Unfortunately, his political influence among the Texans was not as strong as his legend among the Mexicans. Juan was born on May 16, 1824, in Camargo, Tamaulipas, the son of Estéfana and Trinidad Cortina. His mother was among the heirs to a sizable grant of land in the Rio Grande Valley that included the area around Brownsville, Texas, where the family moved when Juan was young.

Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, a Mexican rancher who became a legendary hero for dispossessed Mexican Americans in Texas and throughout the Southwest. His celebrated raid on Brownsville, Texas, in 1859, and proclamation of the Republic of Rio Grande, launched “Cortina’s War”—a brief armed struggle with Texas Rangers that helped to inspire a much longer fight for dignity and justice for Mexican Americans. (Library of Congress)

After fighting for Mexico in the Mexican-American War, Cortina returned to the north bank of the Rio Grande, where he was twice indicted by a Cameron County grand jury for stealing cattle. However, because of his influence among Mexicans on both sides of the river, he avoided arrest. The first of the so-called Cortina Wars began on July 13, 1859, when Cortina witnessed the brutal arrest by the Brownsville city marshal of a Mexican American who had once worked for him. Cortina shot the marshal and rode off with the prisoner. Early on the morning of September 28, 1859, Cortina entered Brownsville with a force that may have numbered as many as 40 to 80 men and took over the town, shouting “Death to the Americans” and “Viva Mexico.” Working through a Mexican negotiator, Cortina agreed to evacuate the town. He retreated to his family’s ranch at Santa Rita in Cameron County, where on September 30, 1859, he issued a proclamation demanding the punishment of anyone who violated the rights of Mexican Americans. About 20 citizens of the town formed a group called the Brownsville Tigers, who, with the assistance of a militia company, attacked Cortina, but were easily defeated. Joined now by many of the poorer Mexicans living on both sides of the border, who fervently supported his cause, Cortina issued a second proclamation on November 23, 1859. This proclamation asked Texas governor Sam Houston to defend the legal interests of Mexican residents of his state. In December 1859, Cortina engaged a force of American regulars under Major Samuel P. Heintzelman at the Battle of Rio Grande City. Although Heintzelman’s force was less than half the size of Cortina’s, the regulars won a decisive victory, killing or capturing 60 of Cortina’s men and seizing all his equipment. After retreating into Mexico, Cortina attempted to capture the steamboat Ranchero as it negotiated a large bend on the Rio Grande below Rio Grande City. Colonel Robert E. Lee, now in command of the

American Eighth Military District, arrived in the lower Rio Grande Valley and sought to restore peace to the region by threatening to invade Mexico, if necessary. Cortina had fled to the Burgos Mountains, where he remained for more than a year. With the secession of Texas from the Union in early 1861, Cortina reappeared on the border and initiated the second Cortina War. Confederate captain Santos Benavides defeated Cortina, forcing him to retreat into Mexico, where he fought for the Mexican government against the French in the defense of San Lorenzo. He next fought against the French in central Mexico and was promoted to general of the Mexican Army of the North. In 1870, Cortina returned to the border, where he submitted a petition asking to be pardoned for his past crimes because of his service to the Union during the Civil War. In 1871, this petition failed in the Texas legislature. In July 1875, U.S. diplomatic pressure led to Cortina’s arrest and removal to Mexico City. He died in Atzcapozalco on October 30, 1894. Traci Heitschmidt See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican Land Grants

Further Reading Castillo, Pedro, and Alberto Camarillo, eds. Furia y Muerte: Los Bandidos Chicanos. Los Angeles: Aztlán Publications, 1973. Thompson, Jerry. Fifty Miles and a Fight: Major Samuel Peter Heintzelman’s Journal of Texas and the Cortina War. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1998.

East and West Florida East and West Florida were the two colonies into which Britain divided the Spanish colony of La Florida in 1763. After the American Revolutionary War, a second Spanish occupation, and the War of 1812, the colonies passed into American hands in 1819. The area encompasses today’s state of Florida as well as parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The region that would become East and West Florida had been inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years when explorer Juan Ponce de León claimed it for Spain in 1513. Spanish occupation began several decades later and lasted until the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Spain sided with France against Britain in that conflict and agreed, under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, to surrender La Florida in return for Havana, Cuba, which Britain had seized from it in 1762. Finding their new territory too large to administer easily, the British divided it along the course of the Apalachicola River. East Florida, with its capital at St. Augustine, lay within the boundaries of the modern state of Florida. But West Florida, with its capital at Pensacola, extended beyond those boundaries, stretching westward to the Mississippi River. After some time its northern boundary was set at 31 degrees north latitude. As largely undeveloped territories dependent upon the mother country, the two colonies remained loyal during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). What little fighting occurred in East Florida involved skirmishes with American forces crossing the border from Georgia. West Florida, however, experienced heavy fighting when Spanish troops from Louisiana invaded it with the entry of Spain into the war on the side of the American rebels in 1779. Spain completed West Florida’s recapture in 1781 and resumed uneasy control of East Florida under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Most British inhabitants of East Florida chose to emigrate, but some of those who remained proved invaluable to their new Spanish masters. The Native American population had become dependent upon the rich variety of British trade goods and were disappointed with what little Spain (whose manufacturing

sector remained undeveloped) could offer. Grasping the situation in which newly arrived governor Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes found himself, the British firm of Panton, Leslie and Co. offered its inventory on credit. As time went by and the Spanish government could not pay its bills, it granted the company complete control of trade with the Native Americans and allowed it to set up warehouses and trading posts in the most advantageous locations. The Spanish hoped to strengthen their uncertain hold on Florida by granting land to immigrants and thus creating a population that would regard their rule positively. The only condition was that the new settlers swear allegiance to the Spanish monarch and allow their children to be baptized into the Catholic Church. However, most of those taking advantage of the offer were Americans, who naturally favored their new country’s territorial expansion. Before long the situation in Florida, already unruly thanks in part to the presence of escaped American slaves and attacks by Native Americans across its border into American territory, began to deteriorate further. Having purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, the United States disputed Spanish control of westernmost Florida, but negotiations proved inconclusive. Then French emperor Napoleon’s conquest of Spain in 1808 led him to claim Florida for France—a claim that the United States strongly repudiated. In 1810, British and American settlers declared their independence as the Republic of West Florida. The declaration prompted President James Madison, who had encouraged American penetration, to claim the territory between the Mississippi and Pearl rivers, a move at first resisted by the leaders of the republic but eventually accepted. Three years later Madison extended the claim eastward to the Perdido River, which today remains the boundary between Florida and Alabama. Witnessing the actions of their counterparts in the west, American settlers in the east staged several insurrections of their own against the Spanish. One group seized Amelia Island off the northeast Atlantic coast, but with the commencement of the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, the American government withdrew its support. In 1814, British forces occupied Pensacola with the tacit approval of the Spanish governor but were soon driven out by Major General Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia. The following year Jackson defeated another contingent of British invaders at the Battle of New Orleans. Although the Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the war, left boundaries much as they had been, British dreams of seizing Florida and the Louisiana Territory had been dashed. Jackson invaded Florida again in 1818 to put down a rebellion by Seminole Indians and proceeded to seize Pensacola as well. Realizing that they could not maintain order in their colony or police its boundaries, the Spanish ceded Florida to the Americans under the terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819. In return the United States assumed all Spanish debts to Americans and withdrew its claims to the Spanish territory of Texas. The annexation of Florida (which officially became a territory in 1822) was a logical extension of territorial ambitions that had already resulted in the Louisiana Purchase, and allowed the United States to deal directly with an unruly region on its frontier. Ironically, Napoleon’s actions in 1808 would later play a role in America’s own expansionist policies. The French emperor’s bid for Florida contributed in 1823 to the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that further attempts at colonization by European powers in the Americas would be resisted by the United States. Grove Koger See also: Osceola; Seminole War (First); Seminole War (Second)

Further Reading Davis, William C. The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Gannon, Michael. The New History of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Stagg, J. C. A. Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Starr, J. Barton. Tories, Dons, and Rebels: The American Revolution in British West Florida. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1976.

Empresarios Empresarios were individuals given the right to settle Mexican land. They acted as an agent between the Mexican government and those interested in settling land. Empresarios agreed to recruit settlers, lead a colony, and act as the intermediary between the settlers and the Mexican government. Some of the most well-known empresarios include Stephen F. Austin, Green DeWitt, Haden Edwards, and Martín De León. The national law of August 18, 1824, allowed Mexican states to make their own laws regarding their development. As such, the March 24, 1825, colonization law of the state of Coahuila y Tejas was later passed. While preference was given to Mexican citizens, foreigners were also allowed to colonize the land. The majority of empresarios were from the United States, often directly as a result of the Panic of 1819, which left many Americans looking for other opportunities. Empresarios had to scout the land to ensure that it was a viable place for a settlement. After the site was selected, then the process of recruiting settlers would begin. Empresarios agreed to bring a specified number of settlers to the land within six years. Under the 1825 law, married male settlers were granted 177 acres—or a labor—if they intended to farm the land, 4,251 acres for ranching. Most settlers applied to receive both land types for a total of 4,428 acres, otherwise known as a league. Unmarried males were granted 25 percent of those amounts. For every 100 families successfully introduced to the colony, the empresario would receive five leagues and five labors, or 23,025 acres of land. Grants allowed the applicants to make settlements of different amounts. Empresarios would be compensated for settling up to 800 families. Contrary to popular belief, the empresario did not own the land, but would be entitled to land only after helping others settle it successfully. Many settlers were interested in colonizing the region, but were not fluent in Spanish and thus unable to negotiate the paperwork with the Mexican government. Empresarios acted as the intermediary, offering the Mexican government quality citizens who would contribute to the growth of their country, while offering settlers quality land without needing to deal with government bureaucracy. Settlers had to be Catholic or willing to convert, of good character, have committed no crimes, and ideally work to learn Spanish. Additionally, settlers had to help participate in the growth and defense of the settlement. Tensions surrounding slavery ultimately led to the closing of the land colonization program by 1835. Slavery was outlawed in Mexico in 1829, but settlers argued that it was integral to the Texas economy so the region was allowed one additional year to operate outside the law. This led to practices such as converting slaves to indentured servants serving indefinite terms, which would be barred by the Mexican government in 1832. The government of Coahuila y Tejas ceased issuing grants after 1832, as the program returned to federal control. The offices were completely closed in 1835, helping to spur the Texas Revolution. Rahima Schwenkbeck

See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Houston, Sam; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Barr, Alwyn. Black Texans: A History of African-Americans in Texas, 1528–1995. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Rodriguez O., Jaime E., and Kathyrn Vincent. Myths, Misdeeds, and Misunderstandings: The Roots of Conflict in US-Mexican Relations. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.

First Seminole War. See Seminole War (First) Franciscans. See California Missions Fredonian Rebellion (1826–1827) By the time Mexico secured its independence from Spain in 1821, a number of American settlers had already filtered into eastern Texas. Anxious to gain control of the region, the brief Empire of Mexico under Agustín de Iturbide granted an empresario contract to Stephen Austin in 1823, allowing him to develop a colony of American immigrants on the Brazos River. In 1824, the new Republic of Mexico passed the General Colonization Law, a new version of Iturbide’s colonization program. It was expected that Austin’s colony at Washington-on-the-Brazos would become the blueprint for future American empresarios. The economic boost from their arrival was only part of their appeal to the state government of Coahuila y Tejas. Mexican authorities were deeply concerned over the lawlessness of the so-called “Sabine Free State,” a region along the Sabine River that had been disputed by the United States and Spain and that had therefore attracted a large population of squatters. In April 1825, Mexico granted an empresario contract to Haden Edwards, a Mississippian speculator who had lobbied alongside Austin to allow American immigration. Edwards recruited a number of settlers to join him at Nacogdoches, the seat of his grant. When he arrived in September 1825, he found a number of American squatters, many of whom held fraudulent titles sold to them by impostors. Many of the Spanish families in the region lacked official land deeds. Edwards, anxious to assert his authority and ensure that his settlers had land, ordered local authorities not to certify titles for existing residents. On September 25, Edwards informed the area’s landowners they would have to present official deeds or forfeit their lands. He further declared himself head of the local militia. With tensions already running high, Edwards manipulated the December 1825 vote for Nacogdoches’s alcalde or mayor. Edwards declared one of his allies, Chichester Chaplin, the winner of the election over Samuel Norris, the choice of the older settlers. The town’s residents appealed to state authorities who agreed that the election had been fixed and removed Chaplin from office in favor of Norris in March 1826. Edwards returned to the United States to recruit more settlers, leaving his brother Benjamin to administer the land grant in his absence. Benjamin Edwards proved a poor administrator, as did Norris, and the deteriorating situation led Coahuila to revoke the grant in October 1826. The Edwards brothers remained, as did their colonists. On

November 22, 40 members of Edwards’s militia entered Nacogdoches and held an illegal trial for the alcalde and several other local officials, forcing them to resign their positions. Edwards installed loyalists in their places. News of the coup spread quickly; on December 11, Mexico’s Lieutenant Colonel Mateo Ahumada departed San Antonio with 130 soldiers to restore order in Nacogdoches. Having spent $50,000 of his own money developing the land grant (a sum roughly equivalent to a million current dollars), Edwards was determined not to give up his investment. On December 16, Edwards returned to Nacogdoches, which he declared the capital of the Republic of Fredonia on December 21, under the motto of “Independence, Liberty, Justice.” Stephen Austin and his colonists refused to join the rebellion, however, and in fact dispatched about 250 militia to join Ahumada’s expedition after Fredonia’s declaration of independence. The U.S. Army also refused to send help to Edwards. Edwards did conclude an alliance with two Cherokee leaders, John Dunn Hunter and Richard Fields, who had been trying to gain title to land in northern Texas for years. Hunter and Fields agreed to provide warriors to Fredonia, which would in turn cede all of Texas north of Nacogdoches to the Cherokees. On January 4, 1827, Edwards repelled a brief attack on Nacogdoches by loyalist settlers. It quickly became apparent that the Cherokees were not coming to his rescue. About 100 of his militia surrendered to the loyalists after a brief skirmish. On January 28, Edwards and his followers fled to the United States. Loyalists and some of Austin’s militia assumed control of Nacogdoches on February 1. Ahumada and Austin arrived on February 8; on Austin’s advice, Ahumada pardoned the prisoners. Norris was restored as alcalde, but Mexican authorities were unwilling to maintain him in office at gunpoint and replaced him. Rather than live among some of the settlers who had toppled him, Norris returned to Louisiana. The legacy of the Fredonian Rebellion was that Ahumada left a permanent garrison in Nacogdoches, irritating American settlers in the area. Coahuila placed heavy restrictions on future immigrants and treated American settlers with deep suspicion. The Mexican government dispatched General Manuel de Mier y Terán in November 1827 on a fact-finding mission; Mier y Terán recommended a series of measures intended to halt the growth of American influence in Texas. His recommendations further inflamed tensions. It is likely that a crisis would have occurred in the near future, given the tempo of American immigration, but the Fredonian Rebellion triggered changes that helped to speed its arrival. James Erwin See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Cherokees; Empresarios; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Neutral Ground (Louisiana)/Sabine Free State

Further Reading Brands, H. W. Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence—and Changed America. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Davis, William C. Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic. New York: Free Press, 2004. Reid, Stuart. The Secret War for Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007.

Gadsden Purchase (1854) The Gadsden Purchase, also known as the Venta de la Mesilla (Sale of la Mesilla), involved the purchase of a large section of land in northern Mexico by the United States under the terms of the Gadsden Treaty of

1854. Measuring 29,670 square miles, the territory is divided today between the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which concluded the Mexican-American War (1846–1847), Mexico ceded a large section of its northern territory to the United States. The latter country paid Mexico $15 million, assumed responsibility for many of the claims of Americans against Mexico, and undertook to prevent the predations of Native Americans crossing the new border. However, Mexico soon charged that its neighbor was failing in its obligations to protect Mexican citizens living near the border. At the same time, southern railroad magnates, including James Gadsden, then president of the South Carolina Railroad Company, were anxious to lay rails to the Pacific Ocean along a southern route. Their hope was that such a line would not only open new markets but also bind California (which had passed into American hands under the terms of the 1848 treaty) to the South and secure at least part of the region as a slave-holding territory. However, the best route for such a railroad passed through the large Mesilla Valley, which due to the faulty maps upon which the treaty had been based, left its ownership unclear. Under the circumstances, Gadsden’s friend Jefferson Davis, who was then American secretary of war (and who would later become president of the Confederate States of America), saw an opportunity to acquire even more territory for the United States that could be opened to slavery. Two more factors complicated the already difficult relations between the two countries. The owners of American concessions in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico were complaining of official Mexican perfidy involving their agreements. In addition, in 1853 Mexican officials had begun evicting Americans who had settled in the disputed Mesilla Valley. In response, New Mexico territorial governor William C. Lane declared the area part of New Mexico, prompting Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna to dispatch troops to the valley. Moving quickly to defuse the immediate situation, American president Franklin Pierce recalled Lane and appointed David Meriwether in his place. Hoping to resolve the larger issues, Pierce also took Davis’s advice in appointing Gadsden minister to Mexico in 1853 and delegating him to open negotiations with the Mexican government. Gadsden’s instructions gave him wide latitude. He was authorized to pay as much as $50 million for several large sections of northern Mexico, including Lower (Baja) California. At the other extreme, he could offer $15 million for a much smaller section. Santa Anna was reluctant to part with a large portion of Mexican territory but was in need of money to pay his troops. In addition, he was uneasy over the recent attempt of American filibusterer William Walker to seize Baja California and the Mexican state of Sonora, and feared that more such attempts, possibly with official American backing, were likely in the future. After appealing in vain to Britain for help in the negotiations, Santa Anna agreed to sell a small section of land lying south of the Gila River and west of the Rio Grande River. Under this arrangement the United States gained some 45,000 square miles of territory, including the route through which the proposed railway would pass, and assumed the claims of all its citizens against Mexico.

Santa Anna signed the treaty on December 30, 1853, but the U.S. Senate balked at some of the document’s provisions. In particular, northern senators objected to any move that would open more territory to slavery. Thus the first vote, on April 17, fell three votes short of the two-thirds required for ratification of a treaty. In response the Pierce administration modified the proposal by reducing the extent of the land to be purchased, decreasing the amount to be paid to $10 million, and dropping the provision that the American government pay American claims. A new section provided for protection for the most recent of the American concessions. Upon its passage by the Senate on April 25, 1854, President Pierce signed the treaty. Santa Anna added his signature on June 8, and the treaty went into effect on June 30. The U.S. Army proceeded to occupy the Mesilla Valley and the new lands were added to the New Mexico Territory. However, a survey to establish the exact border between Mexico and the United States would not be completed until 1857. The Gadsden Purchase represents the last significant addition of land to the continental United States. However, the treaty failed to provide satisfactory solutions to many of the problems—Native American raids, filibustering, and so on—that had plagued the border regions, and it created several new ones. Under the Guadalupe Hidalgo and Gadsden treaties, Mexico had given up half its territory, and its citizens grew so angry at Santa Anna that he was forced out of office in 1855; civil war ensued. Hundreds of Mexican citizens who had moved after the passage of the earlier treaty in an effort to remain in Mexican territory once again found themselves in American territory. Accused of meddling in internal Mexican affairs, Gadsden was recalled as American minister upon the request of Mexican officials in 1856 and died in 1858. The bitter debate over the Gadsden Treaty and the underlying issue of slavery had so inflamed opinion in Congress and among the American public that the southern railroad that Gadsden had envisioned was not built until after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Grove Koger

See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican-American War

Further Reading Davis, William C. “The Gadsden Purchase.” American History Illustrated 4, no. 2 (February 1969): 41–48. Garber, Paul N. The Gadsden Treaty. Philadelphia: Press of the University of Pennsylvania, 1923. Kiser, William S. Turmoil on the Rio Grande: The Territorial History of the Mesilla Valley, 1846–1865. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011.

Gregg, Josiah (1806–1850) The Santa Fe trader, historian, and author was born in Overton County, Tennessee. He was a strong supporter of American efforts to free the west from Mexican control, whose administrators he believed to be lazy and corrupt, and his book, Commerce of the Prairies, is seen by many historians as one of the most important influences on the rush by merchants and settlers to gain wealth along the Santa Fe Trail. His account, therefore, is an important example of Anglo imperialism, racism, and faith in America’s Manifest Destiny in the middle of the 19th century. Gregg was born and raised on a farm in Missouri. His early schooling was minimal, but he was widely read and had acute powers of observation. In his twenties, he joined a merchant train bound for Santa Fe. Between 1831 and 1841, Gregg made several trips from Franklin and Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, on which he closely observed the animals and plants along the route and took samples. He kept copious notes of everything that interested him. These notes were compiled into a book, Commerce of the Prairies, published in 1844, that enjoyed immediate success and is a classic in frontier literature. It also included a map that became one of the most widely circulated graphic depictions of the region. Gregg joined John Ellis Wool’s army at San Antonio in 1846 as a member of the Arkansas Volunteers and saw service in Mexico. He made his last trip to Santa Fe in 1849 and continued on to California and the Trinity mines. He practiced medicine in Saltillo, Mexico, then joined a botanical expedition to western Mexico and California. Gregg died of hunger and exposure after crossing the Coast Range with the exploring party at Humboldt Bay. Henry H. Goldman See also: Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Chittenden, Hiram Martin. A History of the American Fur Trade of the Far West: A History of the … Missouri Valley … and of the Overland Commerce with Santa Fe. 2 vols. Sanford, CA: Academic Reprints, 1954. Dary, David. The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies or The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader, 1831–1839: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830s and 1840s. 2 vols. 1844.

Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the1846–1848 war between the United States and Mexico. As a result of the treaty, Mexico lost one-half of its territory. The United States acquired what are today the states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah for the sum of $15 million, which is roughly $65 million in today’s dollars. The treaty ratified what had been the decades-long effort by the U.S. government and citizens to extend the national borders westward through what was then northern Mexico. The process began in the 1820s when U.S. settlers imported cotton production and slavery into the Mexican province of Tejas. In 1829 Mexico, which had obtained its independence from Spain in 1821, abolished slavery. Nonetheless, Mexico permitted the settlers to enter its territory if they agreed to respect Mexican sovereignty, be or become Catholics, and not employ slave labor. The settlers broke their promises and, in the early 1830s,

initiated a war against Mexico that ended in 1836 with Mexico’s defeat and led to the annexation of Texas in 1845.

In 1846, the U.S. government provoked war against Mexico when President Polk sent troops under the command of General Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande River in southern Texas, thus violating the treaty that had established the border at the Nueces River, 150 miles to the north. Mexico considered the military action an invasion of its territory and engaged the troops, killing or wounding 16 of them. President Polk seized upon their deaths to demand a declaration of war from the U.S. Congress, which he swiftly received. The U.S. Army proceeded to invade Mexico while the U.S. Navy bombarded the Mexican city of Veracruz. Despite appeals from Mexican officials and foreign consuls, General Scott, the military commander, refused to halt the bombing. The attack resulted in the death of more than 1,000 Mexicans, most of them civilians, and the city’s surrender. U.S. troops, which numbered 10,000 men, then marched inland to capture the nation’s capital, Mexico City. Some 12,000 Mexicans died in the fighting. The wellarmed and trained U.S. troops overcame the Mexican military and, on September 13, 1846, defeated the last fighters at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo derived its name from the small village close to Mexico City where the document was signed. The resounding military defeat and the substantial loss of land and the resources it contained represented significant blows to the Mexican economy and national pride. They also produced disastrous consequences for Mexicans living in the newly conquered territories. The treaty had guaranteed rights to Mexicans, such as land titles, religious freedom, and citizenship. However, neither the U.S. settlers that took up residence in what now became known as the U.S. Southwest nor the governments they established honored these provisions. Margaret Power See also: Mexican-American War; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America. A History of Chicanos. 3rd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1988. Greenberg, Amy S. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 US Invasion of Mexico. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Meyer, Michael C., and William L. Sherman. The Course of Mexican History. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Herrera, José Joaquín de (1792–1854) José Joaquín de Herrera was a distinguished military leader and politician who served as president of Mexico three times: first in September 1844; then from December 1844 to December 1845; and finally from June 1848 to January 1851. Born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Herrera entered military service as a teenager. At that time, Mexico was a part of the Spanish Empire known as New Spain. In 1821, Herrera defected with Agustín de Iturbide from the cause of Spain to that of an independent Mexico. Mexico won its independence, but in 1822 soldiers loyal to Iturbide proclaimed him Emperor Agustín I and forced the Mexican Congress to approve. During his brief authoritarian rule, Iturbide signed the first permit for the settlement of U.S. immigrants in Stephen F. Austin’s Texas colony. Herrera took part in the overthrow of Iturbide in 1823, which led to the proclamation of the Mexican Republic under the Constitution of 1824. When Santa Anna resigned the presidency of Mexico in September 1844, Herrera took charge of the country for several days while awaiting the arrival of the provisional president, General Valentín Canalizo. Canalizo was deposed a few months later, leaving Herrera to take charge of a politically unstable and economically insecure Mexico, of which he was eventually elected president. When the United States offered Texas statehood in 1845, the Herrera administration responded by breaking off diplomatic relations. Mexicans had stated repeatedly that the U.S. annexation of Texas would be considered an act of war. In December 1845, Texas became the 28th U.S. state. The Polk administration sent thousands of soldiers to Texas to uphold U.S. annexation. Correctly anticipating that the Polk administration would invade Mexico to gain disputed territory, the Herrera administration responded by ordering General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga to take additional soldiers to the border. Rather than marching soldiers to Texas, however, Paredes marched into Mexico City and overthrew Herrera. Paredes then led Mexico into war with the United States. With Mexico’s military losses increasing and its treasury nearing bankruptcy, Paredes lasted only seven months in office before he himself was overthrown. During the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), Herrera served in the Mexican Congress and Mexican army. After U.S. forces captured Mexico City, Herrera became a member of the commission that negotiated an end to the war. In February 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by which Mexico lost nearly one-half of its territory, giving up all claims from Texas to the Pacific Ocean. The Mexican Congress elected Herrera to serve as president of Mexico again in May 1848. In the aftermath of Mexico’s devastating defeat in the war, Herrera inherited a meager treasury and confronted a disillusioned public. He oversaw the evacuation of U.S. forces from Mexico City. Seeking to bring order to the country, Herrera quelled several rebellions and uprisings until the completion of his term in January 1851. Herrera died in his home in Mexico City in 1854 at the age of 62. David M. Carletta

See also: Austin, Stephen F.; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Polk, James Knox; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Christensen, Carol and Thomas. The US-Mexican War. San Francisco: Bay Books, 1998. DePalo Jr., William A. The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Santoni, Pedro. Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845–1848. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996.

Houston, Sam (1793–1863) Sam Houston was an American politician and military leader who played a vital role in the founding of Texas during the early 19th century. He was also known as the hero of the Battle of San Jacinto, which established Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836. Houston was born on March 2, 1793, in Rockbridge County near Lexington, Virginia. In 1807, Houston and his family moved to Tennessee. At the age of 16, Houston ran away from home, and he lived with the Cherokee Indians for several years. After fighting in the War of 1812, Houston returned to Tennessee where he became involved in local politics. In 1827, Houston was elected governor of Tennessee. Two years later, Houston resigned from office, and he returned to live with the Cherokee Indians. By 1832, Houston had moved to Texas, where he sought a new life as well as new economic opportunities.

The first elected president of the Lone Star Republic of Texas, Sam Houston helped establish Texas’ independent status and led the republic through its first few tumultuous years. (Library of Congress)

During the early 19th century, thousands of Anglo-American settlers migrated to Texas, which was a Mexican province. By the late 1820s, Anglo-American immigrants had expressed discontent over the Mexican rule of Texas as government authorities restricted Anglo-American immigration and prohibited the importation of African American slaves. With growing tensions between Mexican government officials and Anglo-American settlers in Texas, a military conflict erupted in October 1835. In December 1835, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who served as the president of Mexico, marched a 6,500-man army into Texas, where he attempted to suppress the revolt as well as reassert Mexico’s control over the northern borderlands. During the Texas Revolution, Santa Anna achieved early victories at the Alamo and Goliad. On April 21, 1836, Houston, who served as the commander of the Texan army, led a force of 900 men against General Santa Anna’s troops near the San Jacinto River in southeast Texas. Known as the Battle of San Jacinto, the military engagement lasted only 18 minutes as the Texan army won a decisive victory over Santa Anna’s forces. Following the battle, Santa Anna, who was taken prisoner by the Texans, signed the Treaty of Velasco, which called for an end to the hostilities as well as recognition of Texas’s independence. Santa Anna also agreed to withdraw the Mexican army south of the Rio Grande River. Despite the Texan army’s victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Mexican government rejected the Treaty of Velasco by maintaining that Santa Anna had signed it under duress. In the fall of 1836, Houston was elected as the first president of the Republic of Texas. During his presidential term, Houston sought the annexation of Texas to the United States. However, President Andrew Jackson opposed the annexation of Texas by saying that it might provoke a war with Mexico as well as heighten sectional issues over the expansion of slavery. While President Jackson remained hesitant over Texas joining the Union, he officially recognized Texas’s independence on March 3, 1837. When Houston became the governor of Texas in 1859, he attempted to suppress the secessionist movement in the Lone Star State. After South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, Houston opposed the idea of secession and warned Texans that a military conflict with the North would result in a Southern defeat. On March 18, 1861, delegates of the Texas Secession Convention removed Houston from office when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to the newly established Confederate States of America. Houston vacated the Texas Governor’s Mansion, and he and his family moved to Galveston, Texas, where he retired from politics. On July 26, 1863, Houston died in Huntsville, Texas. Kevin M. Brady See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Mexican-American War; San Jacinto, Battle of; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Campbell, Randolph B. Sam Houston and the American Southwest. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Friend, Llerena. Sam Houston: The Great Designer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1954. Hardin, Stephen L. Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Siegel, Stanley. A Political History of the Texas Republic. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1956.

Indians of California Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, present-day California was inhabited by more than 250,000 Natives. They were culturally and ethnically diverse and were adapted to their local environs. Communication was limited because the respective populations spoke one of more than 60 different

languages. The people were organized into more than 500 communities, each of which was politically independent. Most relied on hunting and gathering to subsist. Fish, seals, and other marine animals were part of the diet of those that had access to the Pacific Coast. Salmon was consumed by many, as they spawned in a majority of the local rivers. The groups that resided in California’s interior hunted for bears, deer, and elk. Farming was virtually nonexistent in most of California due to the abundance of natural vegetation. Women made food from the seeds of numerous grasses and from acorns. The only area where agriculture was practiced was the Mojave Desert, where the people resided on the floodplains of rivers whose waters they utilized to irrigate their crops. The first Spaniards to explore portions of California were the members of an expedition led by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542. They were followed by Sebastian Vizcaino, who explored the California coastline in 1602. It was not until the 1760s that the Spanish began searching for locations to plant permanent settlements. Franciscan father Junípero Serra joined a military expedition led by Captain Gaspar de Portolá in 1769 in the hopes of establishing missions to the California Indians. That year he founded Mission San Diego, the first of 21 Franciscan missions to be established. The Franciscans had two goals: to convert the Natives to Catholicism and to make them adopt Spanish-style agriculture. Since the missions also had military garrisons, the Franciscans were well positioned to impose their will on the region’s Native peoples. The Spaniards forced the Natives to move to the missions to work the farms and ranches that they constructed, which destroyed Native communities and concentrated Native peoples. The density of Native populations around the missions made them particularly susceptible to the diseases introduced by the Spaniards to which they had no immunity. Unsanitary living conditions further aided the spread of lethal biological agents. Many of those who survived the diseases died from causes related to the work they were forced to do by their Spanish oppressors. By the time that the Spanish mission system was secularized by Mexico in the early 1830s, the Native population of California had been reduced to less than 100,000. The surviving populations were further devastated by a malaria outbreak in 1833 and a smallpox epidemic four years later.

Indian women at a mission near San Francisco, California, 1822. Spaniards forced natives to move to missions, adopt Christianity, and support the mission through manual labor. By the time that the Spanish mission system was secularized by Mexico in the early 1830s, the native population of California had been reduced to less than 100,000. (Library of Congress)

The end of the mission system was accompanied by the supposed end of the enslavement of Native Americans. Mexico also called for reparations to be paid to them in the form of a plot of land culled from all of the property previously owned by the Franciscans. Since the Mexican government did not have the

military ability at the time to enforce its edicts, local elites instead parsed out the lands among themselves as ranches and once again enslaved many of the Native Californians to serve as their labor force. In 1846, the onset of the Mexican-American War allowed U.S. citizens to seize control of California. One of the atrocities committed during the American coup was the massacre of approximately 300 of the Maidus by an army led by Captain John C. Frémont during June 1846. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 sparked a massive migration by Americans to California that quickly led to a petition for statehood. The influx of settlers led to the deaths of thousands of Native Americans as militias were formed to prosecute “wars” against peaceful Native Americans. Once California was admitted to the Union in 1850, federal officials began negotiating treaties with various Native groups promising them reservations comprised of more than 18 million acres of land for them to live on. The U.S. Congress refused to ratify the respective treaties because they feared the lands set aside for reservations might contain gold. In 1854, the federal government created six reservations in California on lands that were barely habitable. They were initially occupied by approximately 3,000 Natives, but all but one was abandoned within a decade.

WITH AND WITHOUT REASON As soon as Europeans landed in the New World, indigenous populations were as often defined by what they were not as by what they were. This phenomenon continued well into the 20th century and was perhaps best articulated in Spanish and Mexican California. Between 1769, when the territory of Alta California was formed under Spanish authority, and 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the region to American control, what separated the largely mestizo and mulatto land grantees from the indigenous inhabitants was the concept of reason. During the Inquisition, Spaniards had created the concept of sin razón, or “without reason,” to release Indians from culpability for their heretical actions. This concept was transferred to North America to justify the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of Native people in the mission system. Rather than the complex and diverse lifeways they actually maintained, indigenous people were classified by what they did not have, according to Californios. Put in the positive, the classification of gente de razón, or “people with reason,” came to refer to anyone who was Catholic, Spanish-speaking, and who worked for the betterment of the Crown. This distinction between those with and those without reason became the primary caste distinction in Alta California. After the mission system in California ended in 1834, the possibility emerged that Indians could become free and independent citizens. Yet Californios still needed Native labor to continue to run what were now ranchos. To ensure their dominance and justify keeping the ex-mission Indians subservient, Californios continued to believe that it was razón that separated them from the Indians.

California’s Native peoples were also being oppressed by the newly created state government. In 1850, two laws were passed that made it easy for U.S. citizens to claim property belonging to Native Americans. First, American citizens could go to court and gain custodial rights over a Native American of any age. Second, Natives were not allowed to testify in court or use the legal system to protect their property. These laws not only enabled, but also encouraged U.S. citizens to seize whatever Native lands and other properties they desired. In less than a decade, citizens of the United States had killed tens of thousands of Native Americans. Those that survived were left homeless and starving. By 1855, the total Native population of California stood at approximately 55,000 individuals. Desperate, in the 1870s many of the Natives in central and northern California embraced the Ghost Dance religion that had originated in the Great Basin among the Northern Paiutes. Although the religion did not result in the disappearance of their white oppressors, the resurrection of their ancestors, or the return to traditional cultures as promised by its proponents, it did bring solace and hope to peoples on the brink of extinction.

By the dawn of the 20th century, there were approximately 17,000 California Natives. The federal government attempted to assimilate them into Euro-American society by educating the children at Indian schools that trained them in the culture of their conquerors. For Natives who did not wish to abandon their traditional cultures, special homesteads were created in the northern part of the state on lands that were marginally suitable for habitation. The 20th century saw the Native population of California grow despite the challenges posed by the U.S. government and its policies. Although California today is the home of one of the largest Native American populations in the United States, very few live on reservations. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Alta California; California Missions; Californios; Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe; Primary Documents: Junípero Serra’s Report on the Missions of California (1773)

Further Reading Heizer, Robert F., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 8: California. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978. Hurtado, Alberto. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Trigger, Bruce G., and Wilcomb E. Washburn, eds. The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. Volume 1: North America. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Indians of the Southwest Throughout the colonial period, the Indians of the Southwest (lumped together by Spanish explorers as the Pueblos, a reference to their chosen form of dwelling) fought to maintain a modicum of independence in the face of European incursions either by rejecting European influences entirely or by accepting only as many European cultural practices as were necessary to convince colonizers that they were not a threat. These methods of resisting the tendrils of European expansionism would set the stage for many such attempts by the Pueblos and other Indians of the Southwest well into the 19th century. The endurance of such techniques can be at least somewhat explained by their partial success. For much of the colonial period, the Pueblos were able to carefully tread the line between repression and active rebellion. As the geopolitical landscape began to shift in the late 18th century outside the Southwest, however, the Pueblos found their lives increasingly dependent upon Spanish support for their survival. The change most responsible for this turn of events was the increasing threat of the Plains Indians to the north. With the introduction of guns and horses by European colonizers, the Plains Indians had revolutionized their way of life. Because of these tools, Indian groups like the Lakotas, Wichitas, and Pawnees were able to aggressively expand their areas of influence as they hunted buffalo across the Great Plains. These groups would eventually push ones like the Apaches (a Pueblo term meaning “enemy”) and Comanches southward. There they attacked other indigenous groups like the Utes (speakers of a Numic dialect with ties to Aztec Nahuatl) and the Diné (an Athabascan group with linguistic ties to the northern Inuit that the Spanish termed the “Apachu de Nabajo” or “enemies that farm,” a term that was later shortened to “Navajo”). These conflicts in turn caused such groups—the Diné in particular—to begin raiding along the Spanish frontier to augment their flagging populations, feed their endangered communities, and secure military supplies for the fight against the Apaches and Comanches. This common threat forced the Spanish colonial government and the Pueblos to establish a cautious alliance to ensure their own survival. This peace lasted throughout the remainder of the 18th century until the Spanish government’s ouster during the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821).

With the successful bid of the Mexican people for independence in the early 19th century, the delicate balance of power that had been established in the Southwest became decidedly more sensitive as the Pueblos and the newly minted Mexican government warily tested each other’s defenses in a new political landscape. This situation was further complicated by the arrival of settlers from the United States and Indian groups being pushed westward as Mexico’s northern neighbor expanded across the Mississippi River. As the 19th century progressed, Mexico’s northern frontier became the arena for a rising series of conflicts between Mexican and American imperialist visions for the North American continent. Fueled by a fervent nationalism that emphasized Mexico’s perceived right to all of Spain’s former territorial holdings as recompense for the centuries of “oppression” it had suffered, the newly founded Mexican government worked to cement its hold over its mercurial northern frontier. It did so primarily by granting generous tracts of land to new settlers and requiring the incorporation of foreign-born residents into the Catholic Church. For immigrants from the United States imbibed with a nascent form of the Manifest Destiny philosophy, however, a strong Mexican government capable of restricting the growth of their birth nation and limiting what they considered to be their natural-born rights was simply intolerable. Given the relatively small number of colonists, the Pueblos made up by far the largest portion of the area’s population. As such, they were often at the center of this series of growing conflicts as Mexican officials vied for their support (which they considered essential to their efforts to maintain power in the region in the face of American incursions). The Pueblos found such attempts preferable to the violence that was increasingly perpetrated by American settlers over the course of the early 19th century. Still, they did not wholly embrace Mexico’s efforts. Instead, they worked to preserve a modicum of independence in the face of continued American and Mexican expansion on the North American continent by allowing neither party to upset the balance of power in the region.

This illustration of Hosta, the governor of Jemez Pueblo, was made by Richard Kern in 1850. During his trip through the Southwest, the artist also sketched the inside of a kiva (a subterranean religious chamber common in Southwestern pueblos) and

watercolors of kiva wall paintings, perhaps the first ever reproduced by a non-Indian. Until the Mexican-American War, the groups classified by the Spanish as Pueblos made up the largest portion of the population in the region. (Library of Congress)

As the number of American settlers increased, however, their position became increasingly untenable. With the advent of the Texas Revolution (1835–1836) and the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the area came under the sway of governments that were decidedly unfriendly to indigenous attempts to resist what the Texan and American people considered their “destiny.” As these governments expanded their spheres of influence, they clashed with Indian groups throughout the Southwest. Many of these groups (like the Apaches and Comanches) were recent arrivals, driven into the area by the changes wrought through European, Mexican, and American expansionism. These groups—along with existing ones like the Diné and Utes—would eventually adopt many of the resistance methods developed by the Pueblos and others during the colonial period. As the United States expanded westward, it increasingly came into contact with such groups. Indeed, as early as November 1846—only a few months after the United States had declared war on its southern neighbor—representatives of the Diné had concluded a peace treaty with the American military at the site of what would later become Fort Wingate, New Mexico (near what is now Gallup, New Mexico). Because Diné leaders—like those of many Indian groups—had little coercive power within their communities, few Diné warriors chose to honor the treaty, instead preferring to continue the raiding practices established during the era of Spanish colonialism. The settlers of New Mexico—former Mexican and new American ones alike—retaliated in turn. Over the course of the next decade tensions between the Diné and Mexican and American settlers continued to rise, resulting in a number of small, but increasingly violent conflicts. By 1861, the time of the American Civil War, such conflicts had convinced the region’s military governor (General James Carleton) that the position of the United States in the Southwest would be untenable while the Diné remained in his district. With an expeditionary force of federal troops and local militia volunteers under Colonel Kit Carson, Carleton orchestrated a scorched earth campaign in Diné territory that left most without food or shelter. By 1863, the last group of Diné fighters had been captured and taken for imprisonment to Fort Defiance in what is now the state of Arizona. From there, the Diné (9,000 men, women, and children) were forced on a 300-mile-long march— known to the Diné as the “Long Walk”—to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, for internment at Bosque Redondo. There, persistent crop failure, endemic disease, and violent conflict with nearby groups of Apache Indians (also interned by the American military) caused death to run rampant through the Diné camp. The Diné would remain at Bosque Redondo for another five years before American military leaders proved willing to negotiate their return to a reservation on a small portion of their former homelands. Like the Diné, the Apaches of the Southwest concluded a treaty with American military leaders shortly after their arrival in the region during the Mexican-American War. For almost a decade, the Apaches maintained an uneasy peace with the United States as American settlements inched closer and closer to their lands. With the discovery of gold in the 1850s in portions of the Santa Rita mountain range located in Apache territory, however, this entente quickly evaporated. The escalating series of conflicts between the Apaches and American settlers eager to strike it rich rapidly translated into generalized violence along the entire Apache frontier. The “Apache Wars” that followed soon engulfed the entire region (and even portions of the Great Plains) in a devastating conflict that resulted in the capture and imprisonment of the large majority of Apache Indians in the Rio Verde Indian Reserve in what is now Fort Verde, Arizona. From there, the 1,500 Apache men, women, and children were—like the Diné—forced to march hundreds of miles away

from their homelands to a reservation in San Carlos, Arizona. Hundreds of Apaches died during the trek. Even more died in the face of substandard living conditions in San Carlos. In an effort to fend off starvation and support their families, many Apache men volunteered to act as auxiliary scouts for the American military. This partial cooperation with the forces that had violently removed them from their lands ensured both their own survival and that of their cultural lifeways. Impressed by the apparent willingness of the Apaches to cooperate with its invasion of the Southwest, the American military became increasingly tolerant of Apache cultural independence. So, like the Pueblos a century earlier, the Apaches worked to preserve a modicum of independence through an accommodation with the expansionist forces that had disrupted their lives. Thus, it was a combined force of American soldiers and Apache scouts that would finally secure the surrender of the last group of Apache Indians still resisting the American invasion of the Southwest. This group—led by the famous Chiricahua warrior Geronimo—had openly defied the accommodationist policies of their nation’s leader, Cochise, by continuing to attack encroaching American settlements. After one of the largest manhunts in American history, federal cavalrymen under Captain Henry Lawton cornered Geronimo and his exhausted followers in Skeleton Canyon northeast of what is now Douglas, Arizona. After his surrender, Geronimo, his followers, and the Apache scouts that had helped capture them were sent to a series of prison camps throughout Texas and Florida. Geronimo was never allowed to return to his former homelands in the Southwest. It is uncertain, however, whether he would have fared any better had he returned. Like the Diné and Apaches, the Comanches were slowly forced out of much of their territory (a region known as Comancheria) through a series of violent clashes with the American military. Meanwhile, the smaller Ute nation was rewarded for its efforts to accommodate American settlers and support federal troops as auxiliary scouts by being pushed into a rapidly shrinking parcel of land on the borders of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the Southwest Geronimo and his counterparts had once known had become something almost unrecognizable in the face of American expansionism. As the social and political landscape of their lives rapidly transformed, the Indians of the Southwest —like their Pueblo antecedents—slowly began to partially adopt American agricultural practices and nominally convert to Christianity in an effort to fend off the further restriction of their territorial and cultural sovereignty. Unfortunately, they did so at counter purposes to the designs of corrupt federal officials on their reservations who were eager to exploit the natural wealth that continued to be discovered on Indian lands over the course of the next several decades. Throughout the period, the Indians of the Southwest faced increasing threats to what little independence remained to them. Of these threats, the Dawes Act of 1887 is perhaps the most famous. In this act, the federal government privatized Indian lands in an effort to allow private corporations the opportunity to avoid dealing with collective indigenous bodies that might better resist their attempts to profit from the resources on their lands. In the wake of the act, such corporations were able to coerce large numbers of individual Indians into ceding their right to the resources on their holdings. Often, the disease, starvation, and poverty that ran rampant on their reservations made the Indians of the Southwest unable to resist these threats as they struggled merely to survive. It would not be until the (frequently misguided) reforms of the Indian New Deal under Secretary of Indian Affairs John Collier that such threats became less common. Nathan Wuertenberg See also: Bosque Redondo; Cochise; Comancheria; Dawes Severalty Act; Geronimo; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Reservation System; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Lewis, David Rich. Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Reséndez, Andrés. Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Spicer, Edward Holland. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962.

Kearny, Stephen Watts (1794–1848) Stephen Watts Kearny was a U.S. military officer who served for many years in the western part of the country, helping to establish the U.S. cavalry. Kearny fought in the Mexican-American War where he teamed with Commodore Robert Stockton to conquer California. Stephen Kearny was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 30, 1794. A merchant’s son, Kearny attended public schools, then enrolled in Columbia College. He left college in 1812 to serve as a first lieutenant in the Thirteenth Infantry. He fought in the War of 1812 at the Battle of Queenston Heights, where he was captured. After his release, he was promoted to captain. Kearny remained in the army and in 1825 participated in an expedition to explore the Yellowstone River. In 1829, Kearny was promoted to major in the Third Infantry. In 1833, he was appointed lieutenant colonel of the First Regiment of Dragoons (later known as the First Cavalry) and ordered to devise cavalry tactics for the new unit. Kearny was promoted to colonel in 1836 and stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In the 1840s he provided troops to escort travelers along the Oregon Trail. After the war with Mexico began in 1846, Kearny received orders to march his approximately 2,000man Army of the West from Fort Leavenworth down the 1,000-mile-long Santa Fe Trail to capture the New Mexico Territory. Kearney’s men completed the journey in 34 days, arriving in Santa Fe on August 18, 1846. The army took Santa Fe without firing a shot, and Kearny set up a civil government and made peace with the citizens. He received a promotion to brigadier general. Kearny’s orders now were to capture the California Territory. It was another 1,000 miles overland to Monterey, where he was to support U.S. naval forces under the command of Commodore Robert Stockton. On September 25, Kearny began the trek with only 300 dragoons mounted on mules. Two weeks later, Kearny’s column met the scout Kit Carson, who was headed to Washington with news of the U.S. conquest of California by Stockton and Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont. This altered Kearny’s need for support, so he ordered 200 dragoons to return to Santa Fe. Kearny forced Carson to guide his remaining 100 dragoons to meet Stockton so that Kearny could set up the civil government. However, the Californios had revolted and the only place of safety was the port of San Diego. Kearny agreed to meet Stockton there. On December 6, upon entering the San Pasqual Valley 30 miles north of San Diego, Kearny ran into the forces of Californio captain Andres Pico. Kearny was wounded in battle and his dragoons were surrounded on a spot of land named “Mule Hill.” The next day, reinforcements arrived from San Diego and the Californios departed. Kearny and Stockton marched toward Los Angeles in early January 1847, gaining victories at San Gabriel and La Mesa before taking Los Angeles on January 10. After hostilities in California ended, Kearny assumed the governorship of California in 1847. In 1848, he served as governor of Mexico City and was brevetted major general for his gallantry at San Pasqual. He contracted an illness in Mexico and died on October 31, 1848. Jeff Ewen

See also: Bear Flag Revolt; Californios; Frémont, John Charles; Mexican-American War

Further Reading Clark, Dwight L. Stephen Watts Kearny: Soldier of the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. Groom, Winston. Kearny’s March: The Epic Creation of the American West, 1846–1847. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.

Kirker, James (1793–1852) James Kirker was a mercenary, frontiersman, and Indian fighter who fought for both Mexico and the United States. Kirker was born on December 2, 1793, to Gilbert Kirker and Rose Anderson in Carnaghlis, Ireland, where his father ran a grocery business. The young Kirker received a formal education, as well as training in several trades, including merchandising. In 1810, Kirker fled Ireland to avoid being conscripted into the British Royal Navy. He arrived in New York City and got a job working as a clerk at a grocery store. Despite facing impressment if the English caught him, Kirker enlisted aboard the privateer Black Joke during the War of 1812 and received immediate American citizenship. In 1822, Kirker accompanied a fur trapping expedition up the Missouri River, after which he became involved in the Santa Fe trade and spent winters trapping for furs. In 1826, he began working for Robert McKnight at the Santa Rita Copper Mine, where he served as an escort for the copper ore trains to protect them from ambush by hostile Indian tribes. During one escort trip to Mexico in 1833, Kirker met and married Rita Garcia, even though he had legally never divorced his first wife, Catharine Dunigan. In 1835, Kirker became a Mexican citizen and was known as Don Santiago Querquer. Kirker spoke fluent Spanish as well as several Indian languages. He traded with the Apaches for livestock, but he was also a well-known Indian fighter. In 1839, Kirker entered into a series of lucrative contracts with the governors of Chihuahua to fight the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche Indians. Kirker started his own security company that employed, among others, Delaware and Shawnee Indians. Between his government contracts and trade with the Apaches and others, Kirker gained a group of followers, becoming so well ensconced along the border that he earned the nickname “King of New Mexico.” The Chihuahua government stopped paying for scalps in 1846 and instead, with the MexicanAmerican War in progress, offered Kirker a colonelship in the Mexican Army. When Kirker refused he was labeled an enemy of the state and he fled Mexico. Kirker went to Missouri and joined the First Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers, serving as a scout and interpreter. In 1848, Kirker served as an interpreter and spy for the Third Regiment of Missouri Volunteers. After the war, Kirker escorted miners to New Mexico in 1849 and then continued west, reaching California in 1850 and settling in Contra Costa County. Kirker died in 1852 or 1853 and was buried in Somersville Cemetery. Karen S. Garvin See also: Indians of the Southwest; Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading McGaw, William. Savage Scene: The Life and Times of James Kirker, Frontier King. New York: Hastings House, 1972. Smith, Ralph Adam. Borderlander: The Life of James Kirker, 1793–1852. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

La Amistad Schooner (1839–1841) In 1839, a Spanish-flagged slave ship, the Amistad, was seized by 39 slaves in an uprising and sailed to the United States. The resulting court case over the freedom of the slaves originally kidnapped in presentday Sierra Leone marked the first time that the freedom of Africans was argued in a U.S. federal court. The case, United States v. the Amistad (1841), became a symbol in the movement to abolish slavery. While the slave trade had become illegal by the 1830s under international law, slave ships continued to sail from Africa to Spanish Cuba with their illicit cargoes. Avoiding Royal Navy antislave patrols, slavers found a thriving market in Cuba because Spanish authorities turned a blind eye to the trade. Once in Cuba, the kidnapped Africans would be labeled as native-born and thus made legal for sale. In 1839, 53 Africans were kidnapped from West Africa and brought to Cuba aboard the Portuguese slave vessel Tecora. They were then purchased by Spanish planters Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez and loaded aboard the schooner La Amistad for shipment across the island. After three days, the slaves revolted, led by 25year-old Joseph Cinque. They seized the ship, killing the captain and the cook. They spared Ruiz and Montez because they needed them to navigate and sail the ship to Africa. Instead, the two men deceived their captors by sailing north. After 63 days at sea, the ship was seized by the USS Washington near Montauk Point, Long Island, and towed to the New London, Connecticut, harbor. Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, who led the Washington boarding party aboard the Amistad, filed suit in federal court claiming salvage rights to the ship and its cargo, including the Africans. The freed slaves, however, were also the object of attention. Because of their activities on the ship, the U.S. government charged them with murder and held them in a New Haven, Connecticut, jail. Abolitionists seized upon the Amistad case as a chance to attack slavery in the federal courts. They filed charges against Ruiz and Montez for assault, kidnapping, and false imprisonment. Both eventually fled to Cuba to escape the charges.

Newspaper illustration shows Africans aboard the Amistad killing Captain Ferrer in 1839. In 1840, abolitionists from the United States filed suit on behalf of the now-recaptured slaves. The 1841 Supreme Court decision that sent the remaining 35 former slaves back to Africa marked the first time that the freedom of Africans was argued in a U.S. federal court. (Barber, John W. A History of the Amistad Captives, 1840)

Spain pressured the U.S. government to release the ship and all of its passengers to the Spanish government, arguing that the United States had no jurisdiction because any possible crimes had been committed in international waters and aboard a Spanish vessel. The Pinckney Treaty of 1796, according to Madrid, prevented Gedney from filing salvage claims. The Martin Van Buren administration, wanting to placate Southern Democrats, sided with the Spanish and attempted to send the Africans back to Cuba before the courts could decide their fate. The U.S. District Court ruled in January 1840 for the freedom of the Africans. The U.S. government appealed the case before the Supreme Court. Former president John Quincy Adams represented the Africans before the Supreme Court, successfully arguing that the captives were never legally slaves

because they had been illegally kidnapped from Africa. The Supreme Court agreed and ordered that they be set free. In 1841, the 35 surviving Africans were returned to Africa; their fates there are unknown. Stephen McCullough

Further Reading Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Rediker, Marcus. The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. New York: Viking Press, 2012.

Las Gorras Blancas Las Gorras Blancas (The White Caps) was a secret vigilante group in San Miguel County in northern New Mexico that protested Anglo-American encroachment into the Southwest. The group was the first of many vigilante groups in that region and was one of many resistance groups that formed in response to the redistribution of land in the Southwest after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty (1848). The gang became known as Las Gorras Blancas because members wore white hoods when they rode on their night raids, derailing trains and cutting fences. After the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the modern Southwest from Mexico to the United States. The land in the Southwest had originally been divided into land grants by the Spanish government. The Mexican government recognized the grants as communal property, as was the custom of land use in that area. Groups like Las Gorras Blancas believed that the Mexican Americans did not understand U.S. culture, laws, and government and were easily taken advantage of. As Anglo-Americans began to settle in the area, the original Las Vegas Land Grant, one of the largest in New Mexico with almost 500,000 acres, was divided into different sections and fenced off as private land. The division of land threatened the local small farmers who used the land communally to raise their stock. From the late 1880s to the early 1890s, the sheep and wool market became depressed and the division of land hurt the small farmers of the area. In 1888, in reaction to the division of land, Juan José Herrera, who was also an organizer for the Knights of Labor, and his brothers Nicanor and Pablo organized Las Gorras Blancas. The group cut fences, derailed trains, burned barns and haystacks, and scattered livestock. It targeted the property of Anglo ranchers and wealthy Spaniards who supported the Anglos. The group members disguised themselves by wearing trench coats and white hoods and rode through Las Vegas, New Mexico, at night. They also protested perceived injustices and sometimes resorted to violence and intimidation threats. In May 1889, the county sheriff began serving warrants and indictments against Las Gorras Blancas. On November 1, 1889, before the first trial of Las Gorras Blancas members, 63 Gorras Blancas surrounded the courthouse in Las Vegas in a show of intimidation and support for their incarcerated comrades. They then surrounded the county jail and the home of the district attorney. Las Gorras Blancas warned people not to sell their land without the group’s approval, and it often targeted people who did not support them. Although many were sympathetic to its cause, the group was criticized as a gang of bandits. In response, in March 1890, about 300 Gorras Blancas posted a flier in a public area of Las Vegas that stated: “Our purpose is to protect the rights and interests of the people in general and especially of the helpless classes. We want the Las Vegas Grant settled to the interest of all concerned.… If the fact that we are law abiding citizens is questioned come out to our houses and see the hunger, and desolation we are suffering, and this is the result of the deceitful and corrupt methods of bossism. Be fair and just and we are with you, do otherwise and take the consequences.”

Las Gorras Blancas claimed 1,500 members at one point. The group disappeared by the end of 1891. Another gang, led by Vicente Silva, was established from the ranks of Las Gorras Blancas. Silva and his 40-man gang terrorized San Miguel County by robbing, murdering, and burning property. No one from Las Gorras Blancas was ever convicted of a crime. Philip J. MacFarlane See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican Land Grants

Further Reading Acuña, Rudolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 8th ed. New York: Pearson, 2014. Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, and David R. Maciel, eds. The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Rosenbaum, Robert J. Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998.

Lisa, Manuel (1772–1820) Manuel Lisa, American fur trapper, trader, and entrepreneur, was born in New Orleans of Cuban or Spanish parents. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri, about 1790. He became active in the fur trade by 1799 and held a Spanish patent for a monopoly of trade with several Indian tribes, including the Osages. He led an expedition up the Missouri River in 1807–1808, during which he built a trading post at the mouth of the Big Horn River and later built a fort at that place named Fort Manuel Lisa, north of present-day Omaha, the first structure of its kind on the Upper Missouri. Trouble with the Indians ensued and together with the War of 1812, British traders temporarily dominated the fur trade in the upper Missouri Basin. Lisa joined forces with Andrew Henry, Pierre Chouteau, and others to form the Missouri Fur Company in 1808. The disruption of the trade caused the Missouri Fur Company to restrict their activities to the lower reaches of the river and led, after internal disputes, to a reorganization of the firm in 1812. Lisa, who by then had married into the Osage tribe, worked effectively to reduce British influence in the region during and after the war. Lisa was appointed to the post of subagent for Indian tribes on the Missouri above the mouth of the Kansas River in 1814. He made at least 13 trips on the Missouri between 1807 and his death in 1820. It was said that he amassed more than 26,000 miles of river travel. Henry H. Goldman See also: Louisiana Purchase; Mountain Men

Further Reading Dolin, Eric Jay. Fur Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010. Douglas, Walter Bond. Manuel Lisa. Edited by Abraham P. Nasatir. New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, 1964. Oglesby, Richard E. Manuel Lisa and the Opening of the Missouri Fur Trade. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

Maxwell, Lucien Bonaparte (1818–1875) Lucien B. Maxwell, frontiersman, rancher, grandson of Pierre Menard, friend of Kit Carson, and hunter for John C. Frémont’s first expedition, was born in Kaskaskia, Illinois. He married, in 1844, the heiress of the huge Beaubien-Miranda tract in New Mexico, Maria de la Luz Beaubien. This land became known

as the Maxwell Land Grant and made up more than two million acres from Springer, New Mexico, to the southern portions of Colorado, the largest single property in the United States. Maxwell left Illinois in 1840 to become a part of the American Fur Company on a two-year fur trapping expedition. In 1842, he became a friend and adviser to Kit Carson, who had been an active participant in John C. Frémont’s force that led the conquest of California, in 1845–1846, and its annexation to the United States. Following that adventure, Maxwell returned to New Mexico and undertook the management of his father-in-law’s estate. He became the sole owner of the estate in 1864 in what became known as the Maxwell Grant, covering three counties in New Mexico and centered near present-day Fort Sumner. Maxwell’s ranch was located near the Santa Fe Trail and thus served as a hotel for many of the Santa Fe traders. Gold was discovered on the western part of the grant in 1867, near Baldy Mountain, and the town of Elizabethtown was founded to take care of the newly arrived miners. Maxwell was described as brave and self-reliant as a hunter and Indian fighter, but he proved to be improvident and unwise in handling the grant’s business affairs. Eventually, the pressures of managing such a huge estate and the speculation in gold mining became overwhelming, and the Maxwells sold the estate to a group of European investors in 1870 for what was then the huge amount of $1,350,000. His poor business sense caused the funds to be dissipated and forced Maxwell back into ranching to maintain his family’s comfort. He died at Rayado, near the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico, in 1875. Henry H. Goldman See also: Carson, Kit; Frémont, John Charles; Mexican Land Grants

Further Reading Chaffin, Tom. Pathfinder: John Charles Fremont and the Course of American Empire. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Murphy, Lawrence W. “Lucien B. Maxwell: The Making of a Western Legend.” Arizona and the West 22 (Summer, 1980): 109–124. Rittenhouse, Jack D. The Man Who Owned Too Much. Houston: Stagecoach Press, 1957.

Mestizos The racial category of “mestizo” originated from Spain’s colonization of much of North America (New Spain), and the term itself commonly refers to a person of mixed racial background. The racial groups most commonly referenced are Spanish and various indigenous tribes, followed by African slaves and, to a lesser degree, Chinese. The term mestizo originated from the casta system in New Spain—a social and economic hierarchy based on race—and referred to the offspring of one Spanish and one Indian parent. Mestizos occupied an intermediate position in the racial hierarchy, with higher social standing and more economic and political rights than an unmixed Indian or African person, but lower standing and fewer rights than an unmixed Spanish person. The casta system was incredibly intricate, with terminology and social positions for individuals with any of numerous possible mixed backgrounds. These various labels and differentiated positions in the hierarchy would eventually be subsumed into one broad category of mestizo. To more successfully colonize New Spain, leaders strategized to intentionally create a mestizo population, and this population later played an important role in extending New Spain’s territory. Marriages between Spanish military personnel and indigenous women were encouraged early after the conquest, creating a new population that was racially and thus culturally mixed. The first antimiscegenation laws would be passed 50 years later, limiting officially sanctioned interracial unions to

men of only certain military ranks. Nonetheless, by the late 1700s mestizos comprised much of Mexico’s population. As soldier-settlers, mestizos helped colonize much of what is now the southwestern United States. In doing so, they extended the racially mixed Mexican-descent population into, and formed new interracial unions with local indigenous peoples in, land that would become part of the United States. Through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, a significant population of mestizos became U.S. citizens. This had both immediate and long-lasting implications for them and for the United States. First, after the treaty, in law and in daily practice, mestizos were largely racialized as people of color, often finding themselves less respected and with fewer rights than before. As in colonial Mexico, most occupied an intermediate position in the U.S. racial hierarchy, between whites on the one hand and African Americans and American Indians on the other. Specific treatment often differed according to skin color; for example, Afro-mestizos became enslaved in some southwestern U.S. states. This type of racialization set mestizos apart from other communities in the United States, in many cases solidifying a sense of racial identity and community. Such treatment continues to have social, political, and economic impacts on this population today. Second, the demographics of the U.S. frontier changed, with mestizos contributing their cultural and racial identities to the United States. Such an early presence and contribution demonstrates that much of the present-day mestizo population in the U.S. Southwest has a very long history in the region. Because of the annexation of a large part of Mexico, the history of this mestizo population became a part of U.S. history. Jessie D. Turner See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican-American War; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824

Further Reading Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 8th ed. New York: Pearson, 2014. Martínez, María Elena. “Social Order in the Spanish New World.” Public Broadcasting Service, United States, 2010. Menchaca, Martha. Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica. Translated and introduction by Didier T. Jaén. Los Angeles: California State University, 1979.

Mexican-American War (1846–1848) In 1846, the United States declared war on the Republic of Mexico. The conflict between Mexico and the United States finds its origins in Texas’s struggle for independence. The war that integrated Texas into the United States eventually created a political crisis that brought about another, far more deadly war. Even as Secretary of State John Q. Adams in 1819 agreed to the Sabine and Red Rivers as borders between the United States and the province of Texas, settlers from the United States started to take an interest in what would soon be Mexico’s northern provinces. With Mexico’s independence in 1821, the territory was opened for American settlers. This migration increased with the Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 that gave individual Mexican state governments control over immigration policies. As more settlers arrived from the north, the federal Mexican government became concerned about its northern provinces and closed the border to immigration. Settlers continued to flock illegally to Texas and violate Mexican law, however, and Mexican authorities were unable to strengthen their hold on the northern borderland.

At the same time as this growing international tension, Mexico was facing its own domestic unrest. In the early 1830s, Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna attempted to centralize the young Mexican state, and secession movements appeared all over the country. Yucatán and Texas were the most successful and resisted attempts of reconquest. Part of the reason for Texas’s success was the sheer number of Anglo immigrants who had recently settled in the Mexican province. At the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston’s army defeated the Mexicans and captured Santa Anna, after which Houston declared Texan independence. The Mexican Congress, however, refused the treaty and tensions mounted. Mexican public opinion opposed Texan independence, but the war-torn country was also incapable of launching an invasion. Because Texas was overwhelmingly settled by U.S. citizens, the new country hoped for annexation by the United States. Coming at a time of sectional strife and an economic depression, the Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations refused to risk sectional peace at home by engaging in a foreign war against Mexico. Most concerning, particularly for slavery-related expansionists, were rumors that Great Britain might recognize and support the infant Texan republic against Mexico in return for the abolition of slavery. Further rumors inflamed fears that Great Britain might push for the independence of California under European protection. The former case would have provided Great Britain with a free-labor source of cotton, making Texas a competitor with the U.S. South. Southerners could not accept an emancipated republic at the southern border protected by Great Britain. Because of the growing tensions and many unfounded rumors, the U.S. Pacific fleet commander, Thomas ap Catesby Jones, caused an unfortunate incident when he seized the Californian port city of Monterey under the assumption that war had been declared. He returned the fort once he realized his mistake. Many commercial expansionists demanded the acquisition of Monterey and access to the Santa Fe Trail and the Matamoros trade. Both sides continued to inch closer toward war. While the Whigs intended to keep the topic of Texas out of the 1844 election, sectional conflicts within the Democratic party gave prominence to Texan annexation. Under the assumption that he would run against Martin Van Buren, Whig candidate Henry Clay declared his opposition to the annexation of Texas. To the surprise of Clay and the Whigs, the Democrats turned to the dark horse candidate James K. Polk. Polk’s platform promised the annexation of Texas, claiming that Adams’s 1819 agreement had mistakenly ceded territory that should have been claimed under the Louisiana Purchase. Polk also demanded the reoccupation of Oregon, which Polk claimed in its entirety from Great Britain. Neither issue was as significant as Polk made them out to be. Texas was never part of the Louisiana Territory, and the disputed territory in Oregon was limited to the area between the 49th parallel and the Columbia River. Polk won the election, sending a clear expansionist message. Lame-duck president John Tyler asked Congress to annex Texas with a joint resolution, which only required a simple majority. In February 1845, Congress passed the resolution, opening the door for Texan statehood. Aware of the uncertain Mexican-Texan border and contested independence of Texas, Polk sent John Slidell as an “envoy extraordinaire and minister plenipotentiary,” the second highest rank a diplomat could have, to negotiate with the Mexicans. Slidell was authorized to offer $25 million for California and an additional $5 million for New Mexico, and demanded the Rio Grande as the border between Mexico and Texas, which defied accepted border claims along the Nueces River on Spanish and Mexican maps. Mexico, meanwhile, faced its own internal problems. After Santa Anna resigned the presidency of Mexico in September 1844, José Joaquín de Herrera took charge of the country for several days while awaiting the arrival of the provisional president, General Valentín Canalizo. Canalizo was deposed a few months later, leaving Herrera to take charge of a politically unstable and economically insecure Mexico.

While militarily stronger, Mexico remained internally paralyzed, unable to adequately prepare for a war it promised would occur if the United States annexed Texas. To increase the pressure on Mexico and lay claim to the Rio Grande border, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to move his army into the contested area. Herrera sent General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga to the contested border region. Paredes instead marched on Mexico City, overthrew Herrera, and declared himself president. Paredes then sent General Mariano Arista to the Rio Grande to engage Taylor and on April 25, 1846, Arista crossed the river and attacked. When news of the incident reached Washington two weeks later, Polk requested and received a declaration of war from Congress. Because many viewed the war as an unjustified war of aggression, Democrats began a publicity campaign to increase the war’s popularity. To this end, Democratic Review editor John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” Americans had a right to annex Texas, O’Sullivan argued, because it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (O’Sullivan, 5). Once war was declared, the U.S. government had to develop a strategy to bring victory. After securing $10 million for the invasion and calling up 50,000 volunteers, President Polk, Secretary of War William L. Marcy, and General Winfield Scott agreed that their first objective was the capture of Monterrey to gain control of northern Mexico. By September 25, Taylor accomplished his first objective and continued southward. By the end of 1846, northeastern Mexico was under U.S. control in large part because of Mexico’s inability to mount an effective defense and the lack of strong Mexican nationalism. Destabilized, Mexico nevertheless refused to negotiate and Santa Anna, back in the fray as a general, promised he would end the war. Taylor’s defeat of Santa Anna’s forces at Buena Vista on February 22, 1847, has been called the most important engagement of the war as it essentially ended the campaign in northeastern Mexico. While Taylor advanced, another army under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny marched against Santa Fe and California. Aware that his army was no match for Kearney’s troops, Governor Manuel Armijo fled Santa Fe for Chihuahua after disbanding his army. In Santa Fe, U.S. troops faced a short-lived uprising that they quickly suppressed. When Kearny left Santa Fe for California, another army under Colonel Alexander Doniphan marched to El Paso and Chihuahua from where they linked up with Taylor.

Lithograph depicting the Battle of Buena Vista, fought on February 23, 1847, between General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s Army of the North and General Zachary Taylor’s Army of Occupation. The final battle in northern Mexico and a demoralizing loss for the Mexican Army, it was a significant turning point in the Mexican-American War. (Library of Congress)

Meanwhile, in California, John C. Frémont prepared an uprising by U.S. settlers, which culminated in the Bear Flag Revolt. When news of the war reached California, Frémont adjusted the Bear Flag Revolt’s cause from independence to incorporation into the United States. With assistance from the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, Frémont attacked Los Angeles and southern California. On December 6, 1846, Kearny arrived on the scene after having defeated a Mexican army. All of these successes in 1846 did nothing to change the situation because Mexico remained unwilling to negotiate. To force Mexico to negotiate, Polk ordered Winfield Scott to attack Mexico City by way of Veracruz. After the landing on March 9, 1847, Scott needed 20 days to bring Veracruz to its knees. After the success, Scott defeated the Mexicans at Cerro Gordo on April 18 and marched on Mexico City. After another series of victories at Contreras and Churubusco, Scott offered Santa Anna a truce. The Mexican refused and Scott launched a renewed attack, first on the fortress of Chapultepec Castle, which fell on September 13, and finally on Mexico City itself. On September 14, 1847, American forces marched into the Grand Plaza of Mexico City and for the first time in U.S. history, the American flag was raised over a foreign capital. To reopen the peace negotiations, Polk sent Undersecretary of State Nicholas Trist to Mexico in April 1847. He was to obtain, like Slidell, California, New Mexico, and the Rio Grande border. The initial attempts to talk with the Mexicans broke down and Polk decided to recall Trist. While Polk debated an increase in the demands, Scott and Trist agreed to ignore the recall order and used the opportunity of Mexican willingness to bring peace. In the end, Trist gave up the crossing of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec but was able to obtain all of the other demands from his outdated, pre-recall instructions. On February 2, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed and turned large parts of Mexican territory over to the United States for the small sum of $15 million. When Polk received Trist’s treaty, he was angry that Trist did not get more territory. With growing discontent at home and in Congress, Polk had little choice but to dispatch the treaty to Congress. He recommended that Article X be eliminated, which declared that the United States would respect land grants given by the Spanish and Mexican governments to residents of the ceded territories. The Senate followed the president’s suggestion and ratified the treaty on March 10, 1848. The new lands had the unintended effect of increasing sectional rivalry and eventually caused another war. Niels Eichhorn See also: Bear Flag Revolt; California Republic; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Kearny, Stephen Watts; Manifest Destiny; Polk, James Knox; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Tyler, John; Primary Documents: Samuel Chamberlain’s Recollections of the Mexican War (1846)

Further Reading Greenberg, Amy S. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 US Invasion of Mexico. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Merry, Robert W. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. O’Sullivan, John. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845): 5–10.

Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 The Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 provided foreign settlers with sizable tracts of land in Texas and an exemption from taxes for four years. The Mexican policy would serve as the basis for all colonization

contracts in Texas during the early 19th century. By 1830, the Mexican Colonization Law of 1824, which placed few restrictions on foreign settlers, had attracted thousands of Anglo-American immigrants to Texas, where they grew cotton and raised cattle. With the Anglo-American settlers far outnumbering the local Mexican residents, the Mexican government established military garrisons and passed new colonization laws that restricted immigration into Texas from the United States. During the mid-1830s, Anglo-American settlers in Texas responded to these new measures with military action that led to the onset of the Texas Revolution.

After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexican government officials wanted to develop their northern borderlands by opening up lands in Texas to foreign settlers and trade. Mexican authorities believed that building up the population of Texas would serve as a buffer zone against Indian raids and encroaching foreign powers. During the early 1820s, the governor of Spanish Texas, Antonio María Martínez, had awarded Moses Austin a land grant as well as permission to settle 300 families in Texas. Upon the death of Moses Austin in June 1821, Stephen F. Austin, who was Moses Austin’s son, assumed control of his father’s colonization enterprise in Texas. With the availability of fertile and inexpensive land in Texas, thousands of Anglo-American settlers, along with their African American slaves, migrated to east Texas where they sought new lives and economic opportunities. On August 18, 1824, the Mexican government passed the Mexican Colonization Law of 1824, which established regulations for colonizing unappropriated public lands within Mexican

territory. The Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 gave the individual Mexican state governments control over immigration policies as well as the settlement of their public lands. However, the new legislation stipulated that all Mexican state colonization laws had to conform to the national constitution, which prohibited foreigners from settling within 30 miles of the Mexican coast or 60 miles of a national boundary. Despite these restrictions, the Mexican Colonization Law of 1824 did not require foreign settlers to become Mexican citizens nor did it prohibit the importation of African American slaves into Mexico’s northern borderlands. By 1830, nearly 10,000 Anglo-Americans had poured into Texas, where they became subsistence farmers who were growing cotton as well as raising a few cattle. With the growing Anglo-American presence in Texas, Mexican officials wanted to curtail Americans from settling in any Mexican territory adjacent to the United States. By the 1830s, the Mexican government had approved a series of laws that forbade emigrants from the United States from settling in Texas, suspended all outstanding colonization contracts, and prohibited the introduction of African American slaves into Texas. The newly established provisions would lead to increased tensions between the Mexican government and the Anglo-American settlers in Texas during the mid-1830s. Accordingly, the discontent among the Anglo-American immigrants would serve as one of the contributing causes of the Texas Revolution, which would enable American settlers in Texas to gain their independence from Mexico. Kevin M. Brady See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Empresarios; Mexican Land Grants; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Cantrell, Gregg. Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Fehrenbach, T. R. Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. New York: American Legacy Press, 1968. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

Mexican Land Grants Spain began using land grants to attract settlers to its territory of Mexico toward the end of the 16th century, and after Mexico gained its independence in the early 19th century, the new nation maintained the same practice. With time, an increasing number of grants were made to foreigners, and U.S. citizens quickly took advantage of the opportunity, leading to a large and ultimately destabilizing influx of Americans into Mexico’s northern frontier regions. When formerly Mexican territory became part of the United States, legal difficulties frequently arose over the validity of many of the grants. Land grants were of three general types—pueblo (communal), empresario (entrepreneur), and individual—and could be awarded by the governors of Mexican states as well as the central government. Communal grants were intended to encourage new settlements, and in such cases most of the land was held in common, with settlers being given title to small plots of farmland as well. These grants were generally made in what are today’s states of Colorado and New Mexico, the latter of which was the site of more than 150 such grants for an area of 9.3 million acres. Empresario land grants were available to agents or contractors who arranged settlement by others. Most empresario grants—some 300 of them—were made in what would eventually become the state of Texas, as this method seemed to be the most practical way of settling the large and sparsely populated territory.

In the case of grants to individuals, which were often awarded for meritorious public or military service, settlers were expected to live on the land and improve it for four years. These grants were most common in what would become the American states of California, New Mexico, and Texas, and sometimes involved total amounts of land rather than tracts with specifically described boundaries. Individual rancho grants intended to promote large-scale cattle and sheep raising were awarded in the large Mexican state of Alta California, with Mexico making more than 700 such grants. Of these, a handful were located in what is today Arizona. Although the practice subsequently became commonplace, land grants to foreigners were unusual at first. One of the earliest and most significant was to Connecticut native Moses Austin, who received an empresario grant in 1821 allowing him to establish a settlement of 300 families in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Austin died the same year, but his son Stephen F. Austin carried on the plan, although he found it necessary to petition the new Mexican government to revalidate the grant. The first families to take advantage of Austin’s scheme, known as the Old Three Hundred, settled along the Brazos River. Subsequently Austin went on to obtain additional grants allowing him to settle several more hundred families, and he is remembered today as the “Father of Texas.” With the passage of the General Colonization Law of 1824, which was designed to encourage further immigration and which initially left administration of grants to individual Mexican states, grants to nonMexican citizens became routine. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of grant-seekers were Americans, as the population of the United States was burgeoning. In Texas, for instance, as many as 15,000 Americans had settled under the provisions of the program by the end of the 1820s. While many Mexicans welcomed such immigrants, believing that they would help secure the frontier regions from depredations by Native Americans, others feared eventual loss of their sovereign territory. Such was the result in Texas where, despite tardy Mexican attempts to limit immigration, American settlers fought to establish an independent republic, which in turn became part of the United States in 1845. Although fewer Americans had claimed grants in Alta California, they led a similar rebellion in 1846. The U.S. military occupied the territory during the Mexican-American War, which had broken out a short time before. In signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the war in 1848, the United States agreed to recognize the land grants that had been made by Spain and Mexico. But American legal practices differed from those of Spain and Mexico, and grant recipients often found themselves at odds with their new federal, territorial, and state governments. Lack of records, imprecise descriptions of the land in question, and frequent transfers of ownership cast doubts on the validity of otherwise legitimate claims. In addition, cases of outright fraud involving land grants became increasingly common after American annexation. Two of the largest and most notorious fraudulent claims—those made by Robert Finley Hunter and James Addison Reavis—involved millions of acres in Arizona and New Mexico. Adjudication practices differed throughout the newly annexed lands. Operating under rights retained when it became a state, Texas reviewed the grants within its borders and confirmed more than 80 percent of them. A Board of Commissioners eventually recognized about 75 percent of claims in California, but since cases normally took years to resolve, many claimants were forced to sell or sign over their land to pay for their lengthy legal battles. A federal Court of Private Land Claims rejected a majority of the claims in Arizona and New Mexico. For whatever reason, Mexican American claimants were often the losers, with their land frequently ending up in the hands of Anglo-Americans. Grove Koger See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Empresarios; Mestizos; Mexican-American War; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Annexation of; Texas,

Republic of

Further Reading Cheever, Federico M. “A New Approach to Mexican Land Grants and the Public Trust Doctrine: Defining the Property Interest Protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.” UCLA Law Review 33 (1986): 1364–1409. Ebright, Malcolm, ed. Spanish and Mexican Land Grants and the Law. Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1989. Engstrand, Iris Wilson. “Land Grant Problems in the Southwest: The Spanish and Mexican Heritage.” New Mexico Historical Review 53, no. 4 (Fall 1978): 317–336. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

Missions. See California Missions Neutral Ground (Louisiana)/Sabine Free State (1806–1821) After President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, France ceded approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River to the United States. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was ratified on October 20, 1803, and doubled the size of the United States. However, Spain contested the U.S. claims to the boundary between Louisiana and Spanish-controlled Texas. The United States claimed the Sabine River was the border while the Spanish claimed the border was at Arroyo Hondo (Calcasieu River). In an effort to avoid war, on November 5, 1806, U.S. general James Wilkinson and Spanish lieutenant colonel Simon de Herrera entered into an agreement designating the disputed area as Neutral Ground. This agreement would last from 1806 to 1821. For these 15 years, the disputed territory was settled by both Spanish and American interests, even though Spanish and American settlement was prohibited in the 1806 agreement. The Adams-Onís Treaty (also known as the Transcontinental Treaty) was signed on February 22, 1819, and was negotiated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and the Spanish minister to the United States, Don Luis de Onís y Gonzales. The main tenets of the treaty relinquished Spanish control of Florida and established the border between Spanish Texas and Louisiana. The treaty went into effect on February 19, 1821. Kristen Brill See also: Adams-Onís Treaty; Louisiana Purchase; Manifest Destiny; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Haggard, John V. “Neutral Ground.” In Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/nbn02). Texas State Historical Association. Kastor, Peter J. The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Townes, J. Edward. “The Neutral Strip.” In Knowla Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by David Johnson (http://www.knowla.org/entry/754/). Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2010.

New Spain

Nueva España, or New Spain, was the formal designation of the colonial territory formed from the successful conquest of the Valley of Mexico by Spaniards and allied Native peoples led by the conquistador Hernán Cortes and completed in 1521. The core region was that of the former Mexica (Aztec) empire centered on Tenochtitlán, later renamed the Ciudad de México, or Mexico City, by the Spaniards. The colony itself received formal recognition in 1535 with the establishment of colonial rule by a viceroy and audiencia, or high court, which advised the viceroy. New Spain quickly expanded with efforts to subdue and settle areas to the east, west, north, and south of Mexico City. The official designation of new gobiernos, or subject areas each with its own governance under the viceroy, followed to the east in Yucatán and the west and north in Nueva Galicia. In the south, early explorations connected the region of Guatemala to the viceroyalty. To the north, additional kingdoms were added in Nueva Vizcaya (1562), Nueva León (1580), and Nuevo México, or New Mexico, in 1598. Additional territory would be added in the next two centuries as New Spain continued to expand. The first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, established royal rule to replace the more feudal governance of the conquistadors. From the beginning of Spanish rule in New Spain, the encomienda tribute system existed as a reward of Native labor and products to those Spaniards who came with Cortes on his venture to the highlands of Mexico. This system, which exploited Native peoples and resources, was replaced (with some exceptions) during Viceroy Mendoza’s rule with a labor rotation system, the repartimiento, which was intended to lessen instances of Native exploitation by encomenderos, the landlords who received encomienda rights. The repartimiento was only partly successful in its intent and was subject to additional restrictions over the 16th and 17th centuries. The resulting problems with these labor systems led to changes in the colonial laws, the Leyes de las Indias, in 1542 and again in 1681. Additional impetus for alterations in the colonial laws came from the Roman Catholic religious orders that made up much of the Spanish religious leadership in the first two centuries in New Spain. The first religious arrived shortly after the conquest and were comprised of missionary friars and priests from the Observant Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian, and Mercedarian orders. Jesuits arrived in 1572 and became heavily involved in colonial education and missions. The Franciscans had the largest influence on the colonial Mexican church in terms of direct communication with key Mexica and other Nahuatlspeaking peoples of central Mexico. The first bishop of Mexico was Fray Juan de Zumárraga, a Franciscan who established Catholic parishes in New Spain. The religious orders sought to congregate Native persons in larger groups throughout New Spain and its satellite gobiernos, building the impressive colonial-era convents and churches that dot the Mexican landscape. As protectors of the Native peoples in their trust, religious orders petitioned the viceroys and the Spanish court for changes in the laws governing Native peoples. The vast majority of the colonial population of New Spain was the indigenous peoples representing a spectrum of cultures. From the central highlands to the coasts, Native cultures shared many attributes, including those common to the Aztecs and their predecessors. Mayan cultures remained in the Yucatán and areas south, while Zapotec, Mixtec, and Tarascan cultures ran south to north inland from the Pacific coast. In the north, colonial wars of subjugation were common throughout the Sierra Madre ranges, especially into the 17th century between Mexico City and the silver mining regions. Throughout the colonial period Spaniards, enslaved and free Africans, and Native peoples produced offspring separately and together, which resulted in an ethnic array of persons that was categorized in the casta system assigned by New Spain’s governing elites. New Spain’s social makeup was extremely diverse and yet hierarchical, with peninsular-born Spaniards holding top rank. Next were American-born Spaniards, criollos, whose role in colonial affairs grew stronger over the centuries and eventually became critical to Mexican independence in 1821. Of equal importance was the continuance of mestizaje, the mixing of races that characterized

Mexican life during and after the colonial period. Mestizos, the offspring of Spaniards and Natives, would form a large contingent of New Spain’s social structure as the colonial era progressed. Expansion of New Spain and its subordinate kingdoms continued up to the early 19th century. Spanish expansion into indigenous regions of the north opened silver mining and ranching areas such as Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi. Later exploration by Spaniards in search of similar opportunities created other towns north of Durango. Spanish culture and colonial administration followed these expansions. In the era before 1700, Spanish adelantados (later conquistadors) and missionaries alike ventured far from these northern bases to settle, create missions, and incorporate indigenous peoples into the viceroyalty. Jesuit missionaries reached present-day southern Arizona in the late 17th century, while Franciscans continued to push into the northeastern regions. The founding of missions in eastern Texas occurred as early as 1690 and led to a push into that area again in the 1710s against the plans of French colonists. In 1769 the Franciscans ventured north from Baja California, first settling with Jesuit missions in the 1690s to found new missions, and later towns, from San Diego to San Francisco in present-day California. By the 1810s when the first rumblings of Mexican independence appeared, New Spain stretched from Guatemala to northern California, northeast to Spanish Texas, and into the Yucatán peninsula. The administrative structure of the 18th-century Spanish rulers embraced one of the largest colonial regions in the Americas under one government until the end of the colony in 1821. Jay T. Harrison

One in a series of 16 paintings by Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz depicting a family group with parents and children of different races, ca. 1760. Each of the 16 paintings depicts a family group with parents of different races and one of their children. During the colonial period, Indians, Spaniards born in Spain as well as the New World (the latter known as Creoles), and Africans brought over as slaves, all populated Mexico. The result was that a large percentage of the population became mixed, known collectively as castas (or “castes” in English) from where the pictorial genre derives its name. Casta paintings were largely produced for a European audience to classify and create order out of an increasingly mixed society. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

See also: Alta California; California Missions; Indians of California; Indians of the Southwest; Mestizos; Serra, Junípero

Further Reading Knight, Alan. Mexico: The Colonial Era. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Osages The Osages refer to themselves as the Wa-zha-ze, which translates as “Children of the Middle Waters.” They speak a Dhegiha Siouan dialect and were living along the Osage River and its tributaries in presentday Missouri during the 17th century. By the 18th century, their territory had expanded to include portions of the present-day states of Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The first contact between the Osages and Europeans came in 1683 while Father Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit, and his party explored the Mississippi River Valley. Soon thereafter, the Osages and the French became trade partners. The flow of French goods allowed the Osages to dominate Native trade on the Missouri River and its tributaries. The French provided the Osages with horses, metal axes, knives, muskets, and brass cookware and in return received Native American slaves. To procure the necessary slaves, the Osages launched attacks on various Caddoan-speaking peoples, most notably the Pawnees and Wichitas, who did not have access to European weaponry. Slaves ceased being an acceptable currency during the 1760s, with furs taking their place. By that time, the Spanish had supplanted the French as the Osages’ primary trade partner. Prior to the arrival of the French, the Osages were living in permanent communities. The women grew agricultural crops, primarily beans, maize, and squash. They also gathered foodstuffs that grew wild locally. Although the men hunted for buffalo, deer, and rabbits, they did not range far from their homes. The need for furs to trade to the French resulted in the Osages abandoning their traditional lifestyle. They expanded their territory and began migrating year round as they followed the available game. This included trips to the Great Plains to hunt the large herds of buffalo that resided there. When the Seven Years’ War erupted in 1754, Osage warriors fought alongside the French. They were engaged in locales as far north as Pennsylvania, where they helped defeat British general Edward Braddock in 1755. The French defeat in the conflict resulted in the end of the mutually beneficial economic and military relationship between the two groups. Despite the setback, the Osages continued to hold the French in high regard. Four Osage men and two women visited Paris, France, in 1827. Although the French viewed their former allies as “noble savages,” they greeted them warmly. The Natives even got to meet the French king, Charles X. The French sponsored the Osages on a tour of Europe that included stops in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland. They were paraded through Europe until people stopped coming to view them, and then they were abandoned. The Osages made their way back to Paris but were penniless and forced to beg for food. They also did not have the means to pay for passage back to North America. The Marquis de Lafayette and Bishop William du Bourg came to their aid. They raised the money for some of the Osages to return to the United States in 1829 and got the remainder home the following year. By the late 1700s, the Osages began to be impacted by the growth of the fledgling United States. The expansion of the new country was forcing other Native American groups to migrate westward. The Osages soon had such varied groups as the Delawares, Foxes, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Sauks, and Shawnees encroaching on their eastern hunting grounds. The displacement of Native American groups increased following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, which also forced the Osages to look westward for their future. On November 10, 1808, the Osages signed their first treaty with the United States. It set boundaries for the Osage homeland and established a trade relationship with the United States that included the construction of a fort on Osage territory. Many of the Osages refused to recognize the

legitimacy of the agreement and continued living and hunting on lands outside of the new boundaries. This created conflicts with Native American groups that had been given the lands by the U.S. government previously belonging to the Osages. In 1808, a war began with relocated Cherokees when Osage warriors began attacking Cherokee hunting parties, spawning retaliatory raids. The fighting resulted in significant losses on both sides. To stem the fighting, the U.S. government constructed Fort Gibson in 1824 to serve as a buffer between the warring parties. The second treaty between the United States and the Osages was signed on September 25, 1818. It required the Osages to cede some of their territory. Another treaty with the United States followed on June 2, 1825, that saw the Osages relinquish their remaining holdings in Arkansas, Missouri, and present-day Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory, and most of their holdings in Kansas. In exchange for the land, the federal government granted the Osages a reservation consisting of a 50-mile-wide swath of land between Dodge and Fort Scott. There were soon problems between the Osages and travelers who were passing through the reservation, which required yet another treaty on August 10, 1825, that saw the United States buy passage for all future travelers for $500. Following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States began rapidly removing Native American groups from the east and assigning them to reservations in the Indian Territory. These new reservations often overlapped with reservations already in existence, such as the one occupied by the Osages. In the January 11, 1839, treaty between the Osages and the United States, a new boundary was established for the Osage reservation that saw its overall size shrink significantly. In exchange, the Osages received some money as compensation. They required the money to purchase needed food and supplies, because they were in desperate straits. With more than 50,000 Natives forced into Kansas and the Indian Territory since 1830, the competition for food was fierce. Most of the game on the land in the vicinity of their reservation had been killed, forcing Osage hunters to move further onto the plains. Fighting with other groups increased as competing groups moved further onto the plains in search of buffalo. Relations with the Kiowas and Comanches improved significantly by 1840, as trade ties were made. The Osages began supplying the two groups with weaponry that they utilized in their war with American settlers in Texas in exchange for buffalo pelts, horses, and the right to hunt buffalo on the plains in peace. The early 1840s found the U.S. government trying to “civilize” the Osages. They wanted them to give up their traditional culture and adopt Euro-American–style agriculture. This meant abandoning traditional gender roles, as the Osages considered agriculture to be the domain of women. The U.S. government supplied the Osages with metal farming implements and farm animals, such as cows. The effort proved a failure as most of the Osages opted to eat the animals and trade away the metal tools. When the Civil War began in 1860, the Osages opted to support the Union. Osage warriors served as both soldiers and scouts. After the war was over, the Osages continued their service on the Great Plains, helping the United States in its efforts to defeat other Native peoples like the Lakota Sioux and the Cheyennes. Among the U.S. commanders aided by the Osages was Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who depended on their scouting at the Battle of the Washita River on November 27, 1868. Despite the service of their warriors during the Civil War, the Osages continued to feel population pressures from the east. The passage of the 1862 Homestead Act saw significant migrations of American settlers west. Among the areas they desired to permanently settle was Kansas. On September 29, 1865, eight Osage chiefs signed a treaty with the United States that relinquished a significant portion of their reservation for settlement by Americans. The settlers not only occupied the ceded land, but began settling on the reservation itself. In staking their claims, they fenced lands belonging to the Osages, burned the

crops that the Osages were growing, and even stole the horses that they found. Federal Indian agents were unable, even unwilling, to protect Osage homes and property. In 1870, the Osages gave permission to the U.S. government to sell their reservation lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Some of the revenue from the sales was used to buy a 1,500,000-acre reservation from the Cherokees in Indian Country. When the Osages moved onto the reservation in 1871, they divided into two groups: “full-bloods” and “mixedbloods.” John R. Burch Jr. See also: Cherokees; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Indian Territory; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Raymond J. DeMallie. Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775– 1979. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. DeMallie, Raymond J., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 13: Plains. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004. Heat-Moon, William Least, and James K. Wallace, eds. and trans. An Osage Journey to Europe 1827–1830: Three French Accounts. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Rollings, Willard H. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992.

Pike, Zebulon (1779–1813) Zebulon Pike was a U.S. soldier and explorer who led explorations into Spanish borderlands that facilitated U.S. expansionism into the southwest of the North American continent. Born on the frontier of revolutionary Pennsylvania, Pike joined the military, earned high merits, and spearheaded two expeditions into the upper Mississippi Valley and northern New Spain. Although his superiors’ political scandals tarnished his reputation, he died a national hero during the War of 1812. At the dawn of the 19th century, Americans sent their new nation’s growing population farther west to spread the country’s domain. With the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, France ceded to the United States an immense territory, but Spain disputed the size of the Louisiana Purchase and argued that France’s grant had included only modern Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri. Furthermore, the western border between the Louisiana Purchase and New Spain remained vague, for Spain limited outsiders’ knowledge of the Spanish borderlands to control lands and indigenous alliances. Thomas Jefferson ordered the Corps of Discovery and other expeditions to map these regions. In the summer of 1805, General James Wilkinson deployed Pike along the upper Mississippi. On September 23, he negotiated with the Sioux for a land deal of 100,000 acres to build Fort Snelling. While Indians benefited from trading with the British, Pike and American officials contested the British presence around the Great Lakes. At one point, Pike threatened the Sioux with war. “If the chiefs do not listen to the voice of their father [the U.S. government],” Pike warned, “they will call down the vengeance of the Americans” (Harris and Buckley, 67). He even demanded that British traders in the upper Mississippi accept U.S. policies and customs and stop trading independently with Native Americans. In July 1806, Wilkinson deployed Pike to the borders of New Spain. Leaving St. Louis with 20 U.S. soldiers and guided by Osage Indians ransomed from Potawatomi tribes, Pike met Kansas, Pawnee, and Comanche peoples. In establishing U.S. relations with these groups, he asserted America’s imperial vision. Pike demanded that the Pawnees no longer acknowledge Spain and recognize only the United States: “it was impossible for the nation to have two fathers; that they must either be the children of the

Spaniards or acknowledge their American father” (Hyslop, 7). On February 1807, Spanish forces arrested Pike and brought him to Santa Fe, though he was later released. His published notes helped Americans move into the upper Mississippi and Texas and expand westward at the expense of Native Americans, the British, and the Spanish. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Corps of Discovery; Louisiana Purchase; New Spain; Osages; Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Harris, Matthew L., and Jay H. Buckley, eds. Zebulon Pike, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Hyslop, Stephen G. Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest, 1806–1848. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Presidios Presidios were garrisoned forts built by the Spanish in Mexico beginning in the late 1500s to protect their interests in the New World. Originally they were constructed to protect Spanish silver prospectors from the fierce Chichimeca Indian tribes, who waged constant war on the miners. By 1600 there were several presidios in the Provincias Internas, which would become the modern states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as in the coastal states of California and Florida. Established in hostile terrain, presidios were used for extending the Spanish frontier. Strategically situated, located along main roads, presidios helped to protect the Spanish Crown’s economic interests and functioned as an enclave of Spanish civilization and Christianity in the New World. They not only ensured the Spanish colonials a secure area to live, but provided a meeting place for peace negotiations with the Indian tribes and were instrumental in Spain’s program of Indian pacification. As Spain sought to expand its influence and colonies in the Americas, it sent Catholic priests to pacify the Native peoples and instruct them in the ways of Christianity. The priests built missions to serve their purposes, which included a church as well as housing for both the missionaries and the Indians who lived at the mission. Presidios were part of this mission system and presided over a military district that might include several missions. Presidios were both offensive and defensive. Offensively, they were used to stake a land claim for Spain as well as guard against attacks from Indians or other Europeans. Presidios were frontier symbols of the Spanish king’s authority at a time when imperial ambitions ran high. Defensively, presidios protected missions in their district as well as settlers or friendly Indians. Each presidio was expected to provide soldiers for guard duty at the missions in its district, which might consist of four to six missions per presidio. In northern areas, presidios might provide temporary confinement for Indian prisoners of war or provide a place for convicted felons to work off their sentences. The early presidios were small structures that were little more than guard posts, designed to house soldiers and often built in stages, with each successive structure being larger than the previous one. The first structure might be crude, consisting of a stockade with dirt floors and flat roofs that gave way under heavy rains. Later, adobe and stone might replace the dirt and wooden structure. The builders made use of local materials, including brea, a natural asphalt found in California. Presidios were laid out similar to a European castle, with a central open area surrounded by a defensive wall punctuated by cannon embrasures. At the corners of the presidio were tall cylindrical towers, and there were embrasures for cannon along its outer walls. Some presidios had dry moats, and like castles, they were intended to withstand siege warfare. However, the presidios proved to be less than effective in defending the Spanish and their friendly Indians against the guerrilla warfare tactics used by hostile Natives, but they were never seriously threatened by either Indian or European aggressors. Although a 1772 decree had tried to standardize the design of presidios, not all of them conformed to regulations. Some presidios had defensive walls on all sides, while others were not fully enclosed. The surrounding walls could be upwards of 10 feet high, and the presidios ranged in size from small forts measuring 200 feet on a side to larger ones that measured 800 feet on a side. Inside the presidio’s walls were living spaces for the officers, barracks for the soldiers, a church, a prison, storerooms, and the governor’s headquarters. In the center was the parade ground, and some

presidios had corrals for the soldiers’ horses. Beyond the presidio wall was the rancho del rey, the king’s farm, where animals were pastured and a small amount of crops grown for the fort’s inhabitants. Each mission in a presidio’s district had large tracts of land for pasture and farming. Typically these crops would be tended by Hispanicized Indians, who had been taught agricultural techniques by the Franciscan priests and who did most of the work for the mission. The mission priests taught the Indians about Christianity and Spanish culture, including the Spanish language. Politics was also part of the indoctrination. As missionaries gained more influence over the Native peoples, they began to suppress the observances of traditional religious practices and even began destroying cultural objects. This produced friction and a growing unrest, which eventually resulted in revolts, which was especially problematic because the Indians were often trained in the ways of European fighting.

Presidio (Spanish-built fortress) near San Francisco, 1822. As Spain sought to expand its influence and colonies in the Americas, it sent Catholic priests to pacify the native peoples and instruct them in the ways of Christianity. The priests built missions to serve their purposes, which included a church as well as housing for both the missionaries and the Indians who lived at the mission. Presidios were part of this mission system and presided over a military district that might include several missions. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

The soldiers manning the presidios were semiregular troops. They were often recruited from the areas surrounding the presidios rather than being from Spain, and they received little in the way of wages, although they were paid from the royal treasury. Until the 18th century the presidios were run independently according to each captain’s wishes, but later regulations sought to formalize the presidio system. It was difficult to maintain military formality and discipline in the frontier conditions, however. Soldiers were tasked with guard duty as well as helping the missionaries find suitable locations for building new missions, which might include surveying for water and assessing the area’s value for farming and pasture land. Most soldiers and other men at the presidios were unmarried, as there were few Spanish women available to those who wished to marry. Inevitably, the soldiers became abusive to Indian women, which earned them the distrust of the Indians and the ire of the missionaries. However, both the Spanish church and government were in favor of marriage, as this would increase the stability of the colony and add to Spain’s coffers, so interracial marriages were not unheard of. As presidios grew, the garrison was reinforced by the Spanish Crown, making the presidios more attractive to merchants who wished to sell goods to the soldiers and their families. Enticed by money,

civilians were also reassured by the promise of military protection. As they settled the area around the presidio, the population swelled until the presidio became the center of a small town. Today, many of these towns still survive. Karen S. Garvin See also: Alta California; Indians of California; Indians of the Southwest; Missions; New Spain

Further Reading Field, Ron. Forts of the American Frontier 1776–1891: California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Botley, UK: Osprey, 2011. Moorhead, Max L. The Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Russian-American Company The Russian-American Company (Rossiisko-Amerikanskaia kompaniia), or Russian-American Fur Company, was a monopoly created from several smaller companies in 1799 to trade in furs and establish Russian colonies in North America. Through periodic renewals of its monopoly over the following decades, the company governed Alaska and nearby islands until the United States bought the territory in 1867. Russia had claimed Alaska after a Danish seaman in its pay, Vitus Bering, reconnoitered the coast on the peninsula in 1741. Subsequently, small-scale independent traders known as promyshlenniki began obtaining furs from Native Americans, frequently by means of force or intimidation. In time, the promyshlenniki were replaced by larger trading companies. One of the most successful of these was the Shelikhov-Golikov Company, which operated from Kodiak Island and which was headed from 1795 to 1807 by a member of the minor Russian nobility named Nikolay Rezanov. Rezanov succeeded in convincing Czar Paul I that Russia’s long-term goals in North America were ill-served by small, feuding groups, particularly since the British and the Americans were showing increasing interest in the region. The result was the creation in 1799 of the RussianAmerican Company, which received a renewable 20-year trading monopoly and which absorbed its remaining competitors. The new company was patterned on the British East India Company and included the czar and other members of the royal family among its stockholders. The southern limit of its operation in Alaska was set at 55 degrees north latitude. The manager of the Russian-American Company was Aleksandr Baranov, whom Rezanov had hired in 1790 to manage the Shelikhov-Golikov Company’s operations in North America. Baranov oversaw the construction of a settlement on Yakutat Bay and, four years later, a settlement named Mikhailovsk (Redoubt St. Michael) on Sitka Sound. However, the Russian settlers treated the Native American Tlingit peoples in the region as poorly as the earlier traders had done, and in 1802 Tlingit warriors attacked and overpowered the settlers at Mikhailovsk. It was more than two years before Baranov assembled a small flotilla to recapture the settlement, an effort in which he and his men were supported by a large Russian frigate. But at the end of a short siege, which became known as the Battle of Sitka, the Russians found that the Tlingits had slipped away. Baranov proceeded to build a new fortress, Novo-Arkhangel’sk (New Archangel), near the site of Mikhailovsk, and in 1808 he moved the capital of Russian America there. Although he had been wary of working with the traders from other nations who had begun frequenting the region, he now began cooperating with the Americans, as they had access to Chinese ports denied to Russian ships. Baranov

also moved to expand the scope of his company’s operations. In 1812 his assistant Ivan Kuskov established a settlement (later known as Fort Ross) far to the south in what is now California. The surrounding seas were rich in fur-bearing sea otters, but the Russians also anticipated that the milder climate would allow them to raise crops to provision their northern settlements. However, the Russians were inexperienced farmers, and when the Russian-American Company later contracted with British traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company to supply food, the settlement was rendered superfluous and was sold. Baranov had also hoped to establish a source for food and supplies in the Hawaiian Islands, but the attempt was abandoned after several years. In the meantime, the Russian government had grown concerned over interlopers in what it viewed as Russian territory and moved to assert its authority more broadly. In 1821 Czar Alexander I extended Russian claims in America, originally set at 55 degrees north latitude, southward to 51 degrees. However, the United States and Britain immediately challenged the move, and in treaties negotiated in 1824 and 1825 the boundary was reset at 54 degrees 40 minutes. By the mid-19th century, the Russian-American Company had overexploited Alaska’s fur-bearing mammals, particularly sea otters, and was searching in vain for other sources of revenue and raw materials. Deposits of coal were discovered in Kenai Bay northwest of Sitka, and for a time the Russians hoped to mine it for shipment to California, but their hopes were undercut when coal deposits were discovered near San Francisco. Whaling was considered, but the Russians proved unskilled in the practice. Trade in ice proceeded somewhat better, but again developments in California—in this case a business downturn—limited the enterprise’s success. When the Russian-American Company’s charter came due for a third renewal in 1862, the terms offered by the Russian government were less than the company was willing to accept, and the government itself was reluctant to take over what was clearly a failing enterprise. The American government had anticipated the situation for some time, and as a result purchased the territory in 1867 after brief negotiations. The history of the Russian-American Company is synonymous with the later history of Russia in North America, and the eventual failure of the one was the failure of the other. The company never managed to become self-sufficient, and Russia was never able to supply its colony with enough food and supplies. In fact, the number of Russians actually living in Russian America never numbered more than 700 or 800, due in large part to the region’s harsh climate. The failure of Czar Alexander’s attempt to extend Russian territory merely underscored the strength of the rapidly expanding American nation and prompted President James Monroe’s proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine articulating American opposition to further Old World claims in the New World. Grove Koger See also: Baring, Alexander

Further Reading Black, Lydia. Russians in Alaska: 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska, 2004. Borneman, Walter R. Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Gibson, James R. Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784 to 1867. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Tikhmenev, Petr Aleksandrovich. A History of the Russian-American Company. Translated and edited by Richard A. Pierce and Alton S. Donnelly. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978.

San Ildefonso, Treaty of (1800) The third Treaty of San Ildefonso was secretly signed by representatives of the French Republic and the Spanish monarchy on October 1, 1800. The treaty, which was encouraged by Napoleon Bonaparte, stated that Spain would retrocede the territory of Louisiana to France in exchange for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Although Napoleon hoped that the treaty would remain a secret until he could formally occupy Louisiana and begin to rebuild the French empire in North America, within a few months word had reached Washington that Louisiana had been ceded back to the French. President Thomas Jefferson was alarmed because unlike his view of the French, he did not see Spain as an obstacle to America’s westward expansion. Jefferson quickly sent his secretary of state, James Madison, to France to meet with the U.S. minister to France, Robert R. Livingston. The two men were instructed to inquire if the French government would be interested in selling the city of New Orleans to the United States, so that the United States could continue to use the Mississippi River as a major trade route. Initially, Napoleon showed no interest in the offer. However, after the French army had been decimated in Saint-Domingue, Napoleon quickly realized that he could not control an empire in North America and that he could use the money to finance his future military campaigns in Europe. Therefore, Napoleon ignored his promise to the Spanish that he would not sell the territory of Louisiana and sold not just the city of New Orleans, but the entire territory of Louisiana for the cost of $15 million. Exceeding their authority, Madison and Livingston signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty on April 30, 1803, adding 828,000 square miles to America’s transcontinental empire. Ignoring the Indian population in the area, Jefferson believed that the Louisiana Purchase would allow America’s movement westward across the continent of North America to be uninhibited by a European power. At the completion of the Seven Years’ War, the territory of Louisiana was ceded by the French to Spain. While the Spanish struggled to inhabit the area, they were content with retaining possession of it as a buffer between Mexico and the American colonies. It also offered them access to the Gulf of Mexico from the interior of the continent. After the completion of the American Revolution, Americans began moving into the area. Frustrated with the cost of administrating Louisiana (approximately $337,000 annually), King Charles IV hoped to alleviate some of the financial burden facing the Spanish Empire by retroceding Louisiana to the French, who had wanted to reacquire the area since the completion of the American Revolution in 1783. Spain preferred France, over the United States, as a geographic neighbor, and in turn, saw the French as a buffer between Mexico and the United States. However, once France sold Louisiana to the United States, the Spanish were infuriated but lacked the military power to respond to Napoleon’s betrayal. Gregg French See also: Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana Purchase; Madison, James; New Spain; Paris, Treaty of (1763); Paris, Treaty of (1783); Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Goodwin, Cardinal. “The Louisiana Territory from 1682–1803.” In Robert B. Holtman and Glenn R. Conrad, eds. French Louisiana: Commemorating the French Revolution Bicentennial. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1989, pp. 1–18. Kukla, Jon. A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

San Jacinto, Battle of (1836)

The Battle of San Jacinto was fought April 21, 1836, near the modern-day city of La Porte, Texas, and resulted in the final decisive defeat of Mexican forces during the Texian (Texan) War of Independence. Led by Sam Houston, the Texian force of about 900 men attacked 1,200 Mexicans at their encampment along the San Jacinto River. Although the battle only lasted a few minutes, the killing of Mexican soldiers continued after formal resistance collapsed. By nightfall around 630 Mexicans lay dead, 200 were wounded, and another 750 had been captured. Texian casualties counted 7 dead and 30 wounded. Attempting to flee the carnage of the battle, Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna was captured the following day and ultimately forced to sign a peace treaty, which led to Texian independence. The previous month’s engagements gave little indication that the Texians would be able to defeat Santa Anna. On March 6, Santa Anna ordered his men to assault the dilapidated Spanish mission-turnedfort known as the Alamo. Although the 187 Texian defenders fought bravely, they were all killed in the early-morning attack. After pacifying the city of San Antonio, Santa Anna then marched toward Texian forces near Goliad. Outnumbered and outgunned, Texian commander James Fannin surrendered, hoping to spare his men the same fate as the Alamo defenders. On March 27, 1836, in an attempt to intimidate the remaining Texian holdouts, Santa Anna ordered the execution of Fannin and his 400 men. Flush with his recent victories and supremely confident in his own abilities, Santa Anna pressed deeper into Texas in search of Houston and the bulk of the Texian troops. When news of the March defeats reached the Texian provisional government, chaos ensued. The provisional capital, Washington on the Brazos, was abandoned and many of the officials fled. Santa Anna, convinced that he had cornered Houston, ordered his men to pursue the fleeing government officials. Although they failed to capture the officials, Santa Anna decided to rest his men before delivering the final blow to Houston and the fledgling Texian Republic.

General López de Santa Anna surrenders to General Sam Houston on April 22, 1836, following the Battle of San Jacinto. A dramatic and lopsided victory, the battle resulted in the deaths of 650 Mexican soldiers and just nine Texians. This painting by William Henry Huddle accurately depicts Santa Anna disguised in a private’s uniform being brought before the wounded Houston lying in repose. (AP Photo/Harry Cabluck)

For much of the campaign and against the wishes and advice of many of his men, Sam Houston ordered the army to avoid direct confrontation with the Mexicans. With the abandonment of the provisional capital, Houston was forced to act. On April 18, Houston’s scouts captured some Mexican couriers. The documents turned out to be Santa Anna’s official correspondence, including his recent orders. Thanks to this windfall of intelligence Houston knew where the Mexican army was encamped and

that Santa Anna had divided his forces. Houston hoped to surprise and defeat Santa Anna before additional Mexican units could link up. On April 20, the two sides met and fought an inconclusive skirmish. Neither side committed the bulk of their forces and by nightfall the engagement had broken off. Santa Anna continued to await his reinforcements. When they arrived on the morning of April 21, they were not what Santa Anna was expecting. Instead of seasoned veterans ready for battle, the new recruits were exhausted and green. Most had never seen combat and had just endured a 24-hour forced march. Santa Anna, convinced that Houston would continue to avoid direct engagement, ordered his now reinforced command to rest for the day and attack on April 22. Houston, taking much criticism for his previous timidity, ordered an all-out assault. The attack commenced around 4:30 p.m. The Texian troops, for the most part, fought in their civilian clothes. The only available artillery were the “twin sisters,” two iron cannons cast in Cincinnati, Ohio, and donated by its citizens to the Texian cause. The cannons offered much needed fire support and helped instill confidence in the Texian troops. Also accompanying the Texians were a contingent of Tejanos led by Juan Seguín. Tejanos were individuals of Mexican descent who lived in Texas and sided with the Americanborn Texans. The cannons reinforced the relationship between Texas and the United States while the participation of Tejano troops reiterated the notion that Texians were fighting oppression under Santa Anna rather than Mexico itself. The blatant assault launched in broad daylight shocked Santa Anna and the Mexican army. Most of the soldiers, including Santa Anna, had been sleeping and were caught completely unprepared. Cries of “Remember Goliad” and “Remember the Alamo” echoed across the battlefield. In less than 20 minutes the Mexican lines had collapsed and a general rout ensued. Many of the fleeing Mexican soldiers were caught in a bog outside the encampment and were slaughtered by Texians on shore. The fleeing Mexican soldiers were shot down with impunity as illustrated by Deaf Smith, a Texian officer and scout, who shouted to his men, “Take prisoners like the Meskins do!” This was in reference to Santa Anna’s preference to give no quarter to the rebelling Texians. By nightfall, the magnitude of the victory became evident to both Texians and Mexicans. Although the Mexican army was now in ruins, Santa Anna had escaped. The next morning as more prisoners were being escorted back under Texian guard, many of the Mexican soldiers began addressing a soldier in a private’s uniform as “El Presidente.” Santa Anna, in an unsuccessful attempt to flee, had changed clothes and sought to remain anonymous. Once identified, he was brought before Sam Houston. The Texian commander, who had been shot in the ankle during the battle, met with the defeated Mexican president and forced him to sign a cease-fire. In addition to the cessation of hostilities, Mexican forces had to leave Texas and Santa Anna was forced to lobby for full Texan independence in Mexico City. Although fighting had ceased, the border between the two nations was bitterly contested for the next 10 years. The Mexican government claimed the Nueces River was the border while Texians and later Americans insisted it was the more southerly Rio Grande. This dispute would be used by American president James Polk as a leading catalyst for the Mexican-American War. Matthew D. McDonough See also: Alamo, Battle of; Houston, Sam; Mexican-American War; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Hardin, Stephen. Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835–1836. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Houston, Sam. The Autobiography of Sam Houston. Edited by Donald Day and Harry Ullom. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. Moore, Stephen. Eighteen Minutes: The Battle of San Jacinto and the Texas Independence Campaign. Dallas: Republic of Texas Press, 2004. Seguin, Juan. A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan Seguin. Edited by Jesus de la Teja. Austin: State House Press, 1991. Tijerina, Andres. Tejanos & Texas under the Mexican Flag 1821–1836. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1994.

San Lorenzo, Treaty of (Pinckney Treaty) (1795) The Treaty of San Lorenzo is one of the most important and least known treaties in the history of the United States. This treaty not only created a working relationship for the United States and Spain along their common borders in North America, but would play a role in securing the American West (the regions from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River) for the U.S. government and laid the groundwork for the American expansion beyond the Mississippi River. The Senate ratified the treaty by a 26–0 vote with 4 not voting on March 3, 1796. The treaty solved a number of problems by setting the border between the two countries, expanding U.S. trade opportunities with Spain, and making movement of goods from the American West to the East easier, further connecting the two regions. The first major provisions of the treaty set the boundaries between the United States and Spain, an issue that had not been resolved since the end of the American Revolution. Section 2 set the southern border along the 31st parallel from the Mississippi River to modern Georgia and included a promise to withdraw any troops stationed in the areas controlled by the other country within six months. In Section 3 both sides agreed to have a joint survey to establish the southern border, and Section 4 established the western border down the middle of the Mississippi from the 31st parallel to Canada. In Section 5, both countries agreed to endeavor to keep the peace with Native populations, and they also promised not to make any new treaties of alliance with the Native Americans in the other’s territory. Sections 6 through 21 deal with ships and the treatment of citizens of one country in the territory of the other. Section 22 created the right of deposit, which allowed Americans sending goods up and down the Mississippi River to drop off goods for transshipment at New Orleans or some other location after three years, without having to pay duties. The right of deposit was critical for the economic viability of the western United States as it was cheaper and easier to move goods over the water than over the mountains, thus strengthening the economic ties between the two regions. The relationship between the United States and Spain had been problematic from the beginning of the Revolution. The Spanish had no interest in the establishment of an independent United States, seeing it as a threat to their possessions in North America. Efforts to find a balance in the relationship began during the Confederation period. John Jay, secretary of foreign affairs, tried to make a deal in which the United States would trade the American right to navigation on the Mississippi River for a set number of years in exchange for improved trade access to the Spanish Empire. This effort caused enough concern in the states with large western territories that when the new constitution was created it would require a two-thirds majority as opposed to a simple majority for approval of treaties. Spanish efforts to limit the growth of the U.S. West caused concerns for the United States. In 1789 the Spanish opened up Louisiana to expand legal migration from the United States. This was seen as a serious threat to the American West. The Washington administration had reason to fear efforts by either Spain or France to detach the West from the Atlantic. But circumstances changed with the advent of the French Revolution.

Spanish fear of the long-term development of the American West was less of a concern than the potential impact of a hostile France. The Spanish came to believe it was in their best interests to remove the potential threat of an American invasion of their North American territories. At Spain’s request the United States sent Thomas Pinckney to negotiate a new treaty.

STEAMBOATS When Thomas Pinckney secured the right of the United States to send goods up and down the Mississippi River through the port of New Orleans in 1795, he likely did not foresee how quickly technology would transform what that right would entail. In 1807, Robert Fulton put a steam engine to work turning a giant wheel on a boat on the Hudson River, demonstrating the possibility of bringing goods not only in the direction the current flows, but against it as well. In the spring of 1817, the economic feasibility of such a trip on the Mississippi River was confirmed when the Washington made a historic run upstream against an April current, reaching Louisville in just 25 days. The trip convinced a skeptical public that Americans had conquered the willful river. By the 1820s, 60 such boats were making the trip, bringing goods and immigrants to the western frontier. By the 1850s, hundreds of steamboats were plying the Mississippi as cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis became centers of commerce, pushing expansionist impulses. Fifty boats ran regularly between St. Louis and Independence, St. Joseph, and Council Bluff, delivering tens of thousands of people to stagecoach terminals to begin their long overland trek.

The Pinckney Treaty was, for the Washington administration, a welcome tonic to the controversial Jay Treaty. The treaty was massively unpopular, especially in the South and West. It barely got through the Senate (20 to 10) with 7 of the 10 nay votes coming from the West and South. Americans saw the Jay Treaty as a failure, getting virtually nothing of value for the United States. On the other hand, the Pinckney Treaty was an important diplomatic success for the United States as the Washington administration was able to get what the country wanted: set boundaries, trade openings, and promises to encourage the Native population to keep the peace. The Pinckney Treaty changed the course of U.S. history and helped lay the groundwork for the Louisiana Purchase. The treaty ameliorated many of the concerns of those living in the American West, and with it the concern that they might choose to associate with another country by—most importantly— guaranteeing their ability to use the Mississippi River for trade, as the use of the river was much more economically viable than travel over the mountains. The treaty can also be seen as the beginning of the period in which both Spain and the United States realized that the Spanish were really caretakers of the Floridas and Louisiana. The increased security in the West allowed for the continued growth of the U.S. population and placed pressure on the Spanish possessions in the region. Donald E. Heidenreich Jr. See also: Jay’s Treaty

Further Reading Bemis, Samuel Flagg. Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1873–1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960. DeConde, Alexander. This Affair of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Giraud, Marcel. History of French Louisiana. 5 vols. Translations. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974–1990.

Santa Anna, Antonio López de (1794–1876)

Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexican military leader and politician, was born on February 21, 1794, in Xalapa, Veracruz. A charismatic leader and president of Mexico on six separate occasions until 1855, he received widespread support from the Mexican people and the army through most of his time in power. His misdirected policies and military miscalculations, however, ultimately brought much harm to the country and resulted in his exile. Under his direction, Mexico lost half of its national territory to the United States. Joining the royalist army at 16 as a cadet, Santa Anna quickly ascended through the ranks and became a colonel at the age of 26. He switched sides from the Spanish army to the Mexican rebels during the Mexican War of Independence for which he was awarded the rank of general by Agustín de Iturbide. The 1820s marked a tumultuous period for the newly independent country as there was a rapid succession of revolts and leaders. In an effort to regain its lost colony, Spain invaded Mexico in the summer of 1829. Santa Anna’s exploits in the Mexican army’s victory over Spanish forces at Tampico, thus ending Spain’s reconquest campaign, made him a national hero. Though he made his burgeoning political aspirations clear, he was not offered a post in President Vicente Guerrero’s government. In the intervening years, Santa Anna became convinced that a change at the top was necessary and ran for president in 1832. Despite his victory, he refused to take office and instead installed Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías at the helm. Policies designed to limit the power of the Catholic Church and reform the army proved unpopular, however, and the threat of a Mexican civil war forced Santa Anna to assume power by staging a military coup against his own government. Initially favoring a liberal agenda and the introduction of democratic reforms, Santa Anna shifted to a more centralist approach. In addition to repealing the country’s constitution of 1824, he employed measures to restrict American settlement in the Mexican province of Texas, dissolve its elected legislature, and enforce the Mexican prohibition on slavery. These moves triggered revolts in several Mexican provinces, which were quickly and ruthlessly put down.

One of Mexico’s most influential leaders of all time, Antonio López de Santa Anna was president of Mexico on six separate occasions. It was his overconfidence following the Mexican victory at the Alamo, however, for which he is perhaps best remembered. Underestimating the strength of the rebels, Santa Anna divided his force and was subsequently defeated by Sam Houston at the San Jacinto River. (Library of Congress)

Santa Anna’s main foes over the following decade became the secessionist government of Texas, followed by the United States. In September 1835, a majority of American colonists and Mexican-born Tejanos declared their independence from Mexico. In December, a rebel force attacked San Antonio and ousted the Mexican garrison that was under the command of Santa Anna’s cousin de Cós. Santa Anna continued his strategy of a swift and heavy response and marched his 5,000-strong army into Texas. He followed a scorch-and-burn policy, which decimated crops and livestock, and treated all prisoners as traitors. His campaigns distanced Texans further, especially once news circulated of a heroic band of Texans hopelessly outnumbered and holed up in an old mission known as “the Alamo.” Between February 23 and March 6, Santa Anna’s army of some 1,500 troops lay siege to the mission, which was defended by about 185 rebels including famed knife-maker Jim Bowie and legendary frontiersman and three-time congressman from Tennessee Davy Crockett. He ordered that no quarter be granted to the rebels, who were either killed in battle or executed shortly thereafter. Though he attained victory over the rebels, his actions served to fuel Texan resistance by creating martyrs and the popular rallying cry of “Remember the Alamo!” Overconfident and underestimating the strength of the opposing force, Santa Anna divided his army to round up the remainder of the rebels. Less than a month after the Battle of the Alamo, Santa Anna was defeated at the San Jacinto River by an army commanded by Sam Houston. By the Treaty of Velasco, the captured Santa Anna recognized Texas’s independence and agreed to withdraw his troops south of the Rio Grande in return for his safe return to Mexico. Disgraced, Santa Anna withdrew from politics until 1838, when he was called upon to help defend Mexico against an invading French army in a short-lived conflict referred to as the Pastry War. Though he lost part of his leg in battle, Santa Anna regained some of his heroic status and spent much of the following six years in and out of power. When war broke out between Mexico and the United States in 1846, following its annexation of Texas the previous year, Santa Anna convinced the Americans to allow him passage into Mexico to help broker a peace agreement. Once there, he took control of the military. Overmatched and poorly commanded, the Mexican army was defeated in the fall of 1847. By the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico agreed to cede Alta California and New Mexico to the United States in exchange for $15 million. The forced cession thus extended America’s boundaries south to the Rio Grande and west to the Pacific Ocean. Exiled once again, Santa Anna made one last return to power in 1853. In 1854, he agreed to the Gadsden Purchase, which provided debt-ridden Mexico with a desperately needed $2 billion in return for a large tract of present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. This transfer of territory particularly enraged Mexicans, who drove Santa Anna from power, exiled him, tried him for treason in absentia, and confiscated his estate. He spent his remaining years living in the Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, attempting to regain a foothold in Mexico. Given amnesty in 1874, Santa Anna returned to Mexico City where he died impoverished on June 21, 1876. Once beloved by many for his bravery, leadership, service, and ability to provide a measure of security and stability for Mexico during a particularly turbulent period in its history, Santa Anna gradually played the role of a despotic dictator. He could not match the military success he had experienced earlier in his career in his war against the Americans, which resulted in the loss or eventual sale of massive tracts of Mexican territory to an ever-expanding United States. Michael Dove

See also: Alamo, Battle of; Austin, Stephen F.; California Republic; Gadsden Purchase; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Houston, Sam; Mexican-American War; San Jacinto, Battle of; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Costeloe, Michael P. The Central Republic of Mexico, 1835–1846: Hombres de Bien in the Age of Santa Anna. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Olivera, Ruth, and Liliane Crété. Life in Mexico under Santa Anna, 1822–1855. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Santa Fe Trail The Santa Fe Trail was an important route for trade and cultural exchange between America and Mexico during the early 19th century. William Becknell, a Missouri trader and trapper who traveled west in the summer of 1821, is generally credited as being the “Father of the Santa Fe Trail.” The Santa Fe Trail began in Independence, Missouri, and ran through five states to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was not a single path, but two separate major routes and a number of shorter offshoots. The trail length varied from 800 to 900 miles depending on the route, and travel time averaged two months. Travelers took different routes depending on weather conditions and other factors, such as fear of Indian attacks. The trail ran through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. Pueblo Indians, including the Tewas, lived in the area of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in presentday Colorado for more than 600 years prior to the arrival of the Spanish. In the late 16th century, the Spanish began to colonize the area, and in 1607, Don Pedro de Peralta, the second governor of New Mexico, established the town of Santa Fe. In 1610, Don Peralta moved the provincial capital from San Juan Pueblo to Santa Fe. New Mexico remained a Spanish possession for more than 200 years. During that time, the government of Spain prohibited Americans from settling in any of its colonies, including New Mexico and Old Mexico, and it forbade Mexicans from trading with the United States or with the Native Americans— all Mexican trade had to be through Spanish government channels so the Crown could collect its taxes. Because of its remote location, and as a result of Spain’s trade restrictions, merchandise that reached New Mexico was prohibitively expensive. Traders saw ample opportunity for making a profit, and as rumors of gold and silver reached the populous eastern United States, Santa Fe became an attractive destination for merchants and explorers alike. In 1739, the French traders Pierre and Paul Mallet reached Santa Fe. The brothers had lost their goods en route, but on returning east they spread the word about Santa Fe. As a result, other French traders made their way to the provincial capital, but were arrested when they arrived because the trade was still illegal. In 1806, Zebulon Pike led an expedition to map the Red River when he and his men were arrested by Spanish authorities.

Traders cross a dry tributary of the Gila River, ca. 1846. While portions had been used by Native people for generations, American trader and trapper William Becknell is credited as being the first Euro-American to travel from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, Mexico, in 1821, thus becoming the “father of the Santa Fe Trail.” (Library of Congress)

The New Mexicans resented the colonial trade restrictions that Spain placed on them and attempted to establish a trade route between Santa Fe and San Antonio, Texas. In the 1760s, Pedro Vial led several pathfinding expeditions on behalf of the colony, but nothing became of them. Mexico also had issues with Spanish rule, and on September 16, 1810, armed conflict broke out, starting the Mexican War for Independence. The war lasted 11 years, and on August 24, 1821, the Treaty of Córdoba was signed, ending Spanish rule of Mexico. The change was an important one for the colonies. Achieving independence, Mexico was free to trade with the United States and the surrounding Native Americans. In September 1821, William Becknell and five other men set out from Franklin, Missouri, carrying about $300 worth of merchandise for trade with the Indians. The men followed Indian trails and met with a group of soldiers outside of Santa Fe, who told them that Mexico had gained its independence and that international trade was now legal. The soldiers escorted Becknell’s group into town, where the men sold their goods for a large profit. Becknell’s first trip to Santa Fe was via the Mountain Route, which took his group through the Raton mountain pass at an altitude of 7,835 feet on the Colorado–New Mexico border. The total distance of the Mountain Route from Franklin, Missouri, to Santa Fe was 934 miles. Becknell skirted the mountains on his way back east in favor of a more direct path, which became known as the Cimarron Route. Becknell wasted no time returning to Missouri. He left most of his group to continue trapping while a smaller group made the two-month trip back to Franklin, arriving in January 1822. They gathered more goods for a second trip to Santa Fe. Meanwhile, word of the group’s profit spread and other traders took to the trail. The first use of wagon trains was on the Santa Fe Trail. Oxen were preferred to horses because they were less desirable to the Indians and so less likely to be stolen. The most wanted items that were traded on the Santa Fe Trail included cloth, sewing notions, hardware, and tools of all sorts, such as knives and axes. Western goods that were taken back to Missouri included wool, furs, mules, and gold and silver. The Santa Fe trade was lucrative: one wagon train returned east from New Mexico laden with more than $200,000 worth of gold, silver, and furs. Imported items from Europe also made their way west via the Santa Fe Trail. Trade also employed thousands of men to drive the wagons and handle animals and goods. In 1846, trade along the Santa Fe Trail was estimated at less than half a million dollars, but just a few years later

the total trade was valued at five million dollars. The Cimarron Route was the only road to Santa Fe that could accommodate wagons until 1840, and at a length of 890 miles it cut 10 days of travel off the journey compared with the Mountain Route. But travelers along the Cimarron Route were more likely to be attacked by Indians, and one segment of the route, called the Jornada, included a waterless 90-mile stretch of the trail between the Arkansas River and Wagon Bed Spring, Kansas. Nearly three-quarters of the traffic heading west went along the Cimarron Route. It remained the most popular road until the mid-1820s, when a series of floods of the Missouri River made Franklin an undesirable location for travelers. New embarkation points for wagon trains included Fayette and Independence, shortening the length of the Santa Fe Trail to approximately 837 miles. In 1825, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton requested a survey of the Santa Fe Trail. George Champlain Sibley was assigned the task of surveying the route and negotiating with the Indian tribes for safe passage for traders. But a growing number of Indian attacks led President Andrew Jackson to call for a military escort for a Santa Fe wagon train. The Santa Fe Trail ran through land inhabited by many Indian tribes, including the Apaches, Cheyennes, and Comanches. While many travelers had only the natural elements to face, the wagon trains and their load of supplies were tempting targets for the Native Americans, many of whom raided as a way of life. A number of forts were established along the Santa Fe Trail to protect travelers, including Bent’s Fort, Colorado, and Forts Atkinson, Larned, and Leavenworth in Kansas. By 1831, Independence had replaced most rival towns in importance in the Santa Fe trade. The distance to Santa Fe from Independence was 800 miles via the Cimarron Route, and this route remained the most heavily traveled despite a growing number of Indian attacks. Then, in May 1846, the U.S. Congress declared war on Mexico. Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny led the Army of the West to Santa Fe via Bent’s Fort, which became a staging area for the army and a waypoint for wagon trains on the trail. Kearny was tasked with dealing with the Indian hostilities and establishing military posts, as well as dealing with invasions from Mexico. During this time, the Mountain Route became more popular than the Cimarron Route because the army used it for supply wagons. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed between the United States and Mexico on February 2, 1848, bringing the war to an end. Under the treaty, America purchased large tracts of land from Mexico and the Rio Grande River was established as the boundary between the two countries. Arizona, California, and New Mexico were now American territories, which removed barriers to trade and boosted the traffic along the Santa Fe Trail. In 1849, the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California set off a gold rush. Prospectors and fortune hunters, as well as journalists and explorers, took the Santa Fe Trail west, and again the Cimarron Trail became the most traveled route. Kansas City replaced Independence as the eastern trailhead, shrinking the route to 788 miles. The growing number of travelers along the trail made it instrumental in the expansion of the United States. In 1850, monthly mail service was established along the Santa Fe Trail. With the war with Mexico over, the army began using civilian contractors to haul goods and many private companies were established. Alexander Majors, William Russell, and William Waddell were experienced freighters and businessmen who had government contracts to deliver supplies. They proposed a mail delivery service using relay riders, and in 1860 they established the Pony Express with an initial 120 riders and 400 horses. During the early 1860s an eastern part of the trail became unsafe because of raiders, and travelers used Fort Leavenworth as a departure point. As more travelers went through Indian territory, hostilities

increased. The Mountain Route again became the preferred road until after the Civil War. In the 1860s, several railroads began building lines heading toward Santa Fe. The Union Pacific Railroad’s Eastern Division (Kansas Pacific) began construction on a rail line in 1863 that ran from Kansas City, Missouri, to Santa Fe. The train tracks ran alongside the Santa Fe Trail and travelers began to use the train for part of the journey. The eastern trailhead moved slowly west along with the rails, and by summer 1866, westward travelers were able to ride the train as far west as Junction City, about 130 miles west of Kansas City. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (Santa Fe) reached eastern Colorado in 1873, and in September 1875 it reached Las Animas, just over 300 miles from Santa Fe. The Kansas Pacific Railway reached Las Animas just a month later. For several months, travelers had their choice of two railroads to get them to Las Animas, but in 1878 the Royal Gorge Railroad War between the Santa Fe and the Denver and Rio Grande railways erupted, as both railroads wanted the right to build through the Raton Pass. The Santa Fe hired gunfighters, but the competition eventually faded and the Santa Fe built its rail without firing a shot. By September 1878, the Santa Fe railroad reached Trinidad, 202 miles from Santa Fe. Rail building continued through 1879, reaching Las Vegas, New Mexico, on July 1, 1879. The railroad was less than 100 miles from Santa Fe. On February 9, 1880, the Santa Fe railroad completed a spur into Santa Fe, and the first train rolled into town on February 16, 1880. The entire journey from Kansas City to Santa Fe could now be taken by train. The arrival of the railroad made the Santa Fe Trail obsolete, and it fell into disuse. In the early 20th century, the Daughters of the American Revolution began the task of placing historical markers along the trail. In 1987, Congress declared the Santa Fe Trail a National Historic Trail. Modern highways parallel the route of the Santa Fe Trail in many places, and wagon-wheel ruts can still be found today. Karen S. Garvin See also: Becknell, William; Gold Rush, California; Great American Desert; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Jackson, Andrew; Pike, Zebulon; Smith, Jedediah Strong; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Dary, David. The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore. New York: Knopf, 2000. Hyslop, Stephen G. Bound for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest, 1806–1848. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. O’Brien, William Patrick. Merchants of Independence: International Trade on the Santa Fe Trail, 1827–1860. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2014. Simmons, Marc. On the Santa Fe Trail. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986.

Seguín, Juan (1806–1890) Juan Nepomuceno Seguín was a 19th-century Texas political and military figure. Seguín was born in San Fernando de Béxar (now San Antonio, Texas) on October 27, 1806, to a prominent Mexican family. His father, Erasmo, played a significant role in helping settle Anglo families in the then Mexican territory of Coahuila y Tejas, meeting with Moses Austin and his son Stephen on several occasions. It was during this time that Seguín became politicized, learning to juggle the Mexican political climate during a time of transition and change. Throughout his lifetime, this penchant for politics positioned Seguín in several important public service positions.

When tensions between Anglo settlers and the Mexican government rose during the 1830s, Seguín became caught in the middle of two opposing political factions. In 1835 his loyalty to Mexico was put to the test when President Antonio López de Santa Anna, a former federalist turned centralist, suspended the liberal Mexican Constitution of 1824, which supported individual states’ rights. Santa Anna replaced the constitution with the Seven Constitutional Laws, centralizing national power in Mexico City, and converted the state of Coahuila y Tejas into separate departments. Seguín, an adamant federalist, vehemently opposed this political move at centralization and joined Anglo settlers in a widespread separatist rebellion against Mexico known as the Texas Revolution (1835–1836). Several other northern states also adopted a similar separatist agenda in their efforts to disjoin from Mexico. In response to such aggressive acts, and so as not to allow Coahuila y Tejas to set a precedent, Santa Anna sent a military force to put down the rebellion. Seguín and other Texas Mexicans and Anglo settlers banded together to fight against Santa Anna’s Mexican troops. During the Texas Revolution, Seguín became a major contributor in the fight for Texas independence, playing important roles at the Alamo and San Jacinto, for which he received high praise from Sam Houston. After the Texas Revolution, Seguín was elected to several important political positions. He became the only Mexican to serve in the Texas Senate and in 1840, after he resigned from this influential post, he was elected mayor of San Antonio. During his tenure as mayor, however, Seguín began to encounter growing racial tension between Anglos and Texas Mexicans. He too felt the sting of discrimination, being repeatedly accused by Anglos of disloyalty and of helping Mexico to regain Texas. After continued conflict with Anglos, Seguín wrote that he now felt like “a foreigner in my native land.” Because of this hostility, Seguín ultimately resigned as mayor and departed with his family for Mexico. In Mexico the dubious Mexican government offered Seguín a choice between imprisonment or serving in the Mexican Army; he chose the latter, seeing action in several battles including the Mexican-American War (1846– 1848). After six years in Mexico, Seguín returned to Texas where he once again took an active role in politics. After several years in Texas, Seguín returned to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where he died on August 27, 1890. Seguín’s remains were returned to Texas in 1976 and currently reside in Seguin, Texas. Ignacio Martinez See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Houston, Sam; Mexican-American War; San Jacinto, Battle of; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of; Primary Documents: “A Foreigner in My Own Land”: Juan Nepomuceno Seguín Flees Texas (1842)

Further Reading De la Teja, Jesús F. A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguin. Austin: State House Press, 1991. Lozano, Ruben Rendon. Viva Texas: The Story of Tejanos, the Mexican-born Patriots of the Texas Revolution. San Antonio, TX: The Alamo Press, 1985. Matovina, Timothy. The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

Seminole War (First) (1817–1818) The First Seminole War was one of three conflicts fought between the United States and the Seminoles between 1817 and 1858. It began on November 12, 1817, when the Seminole town of Fowlton in Georgia was razed by U.S. militia forces led by Major David Twiggs. The Seminoles retaliated by launching raids

into Georgia. Determined to defend the United States’ southern border from continued Seminole attacks, President James Monroe ordered Major General Andrew Jackson to advance on Seminole towns in Florida. Sporadic violence between Georgians and Seminoles predated the outbreak of war by decades. EuroAmerican settlers had been gradually moving onto lands claimed by the Seminoles, fueling confrontations between the groups. The Georgians viewed the Seminoles as threats to their economic well-being, as they welcomed escaped slaves into their communities, even adopting them into their families. The War of 1812 provided an excuse for Georgia militiamen to invade Spanish Florida to attack Seminole towns in hopes of recapturing former slaves. During the early years of the War of 1812, there may have been as many as 4,000 Seminoles. After the Creek War of 1813–1814, their numbers swelled to approximately 6,000 as they were joined by Red Stick Creeks that had survived the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Some of the Red Stick Creeks chose to live with African and African American freedmen at the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River. The fort’s defenders were attacked and defeated by American forces in 1816. Under orders from President Monroe, Major General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in March 1818 with approximately 4,500 men, including roughly 1,500 Creek Indian warriors. After establishing a base of operations at the remains of the Negro Fort, he captured Fort San Marcos, which was a Spanish military outpost. Jackson’s forces then moved on a number of Seminole communities during the months of April and May. Most of the towns Jackson encountered were abandoned by the Seminoles, so Jackson’s forces opted to burn them to the ground, along with the surrounding crops. Instead of defending their homes, the Seminoles and their allies had chosen to oppose the Americans using guerrilla tactics. Unsatisfied with the result of his campaign against the Seminoles, Major General Jackson attacked the Spanish garrison at Pensacola. The fort’s commander surrendered the installation on May 24. Before leaving Pensacola, Jackson ordered that Hillis Hadjo, Himollemico, Alexander Arbuthnot, and Robert Armbrister be court-martialed for their roles in the conflict. Hillis Hadjo, a Seminole religious leader, and Himollemico, a Red Stick Creek, were found guilty of starting the war and were executed. Arbuthnot, a Scottish trader, was found guilty of encouraging the Indians to go to war with the United States and was hanged. Armbrister was accused of arming and leading the Seminoles and their allies against the U.S. forces. Although he was found guilty of the charges, the court’s sentence was one year in prison. Despite the court’s decision, Jackson had him shot. Jackson’s forces withdrew from Florida during June 1818. The seizure of Pensacola and the executions of Arbuthnot and Armbrister drew howls of protest from Spain and Great Britain, who claimed the United States had violated Spain’s sovereignty. Monroe attempted to avoid blame for the international incident by claiming that Jackson had not been authorized to attack Spanish interests. Despite the rhetoric, Jackson’s actions had convinced Spain that it could no longer defend Florida. The following year, Spain sold Florida to the United States as part of the AdamsOnís Treaty. The Spanish withdrawal from Florida caused military and economic hardships for the Seminoles, as the Spaniards had provided them many of the war materials that had enabled the Seminoles to launch raids on Georgia and Alabama. As conditions continued to deteriorate in Seminole communities, some of their leaders determined that the solution to their problems was to move to a reservation. U.S. negotiators met with representatives of the Seminoles and negotiated the 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek, which established a reservation from Lake Okeechobee to present-day Gainesville, Florida. The land included in the reservation did not include land on the Atlantic Coast, to ensure that the Seminoles did not begin trading with the Spaniards in Cuba. The reservation did not satisfy the federal government for long, as they negotiated the Treaty of Payne’s Landing in 1832. The terms of the treaty called for the Seminoles to relocate to Oklahoma. Since it was signed by Seminoles hand-picked by the United States who had no

real authority among their people, the majority of Seminoles repudiated its terms, setting the stage for the Second Seminole War, which was fought between 1835 and 1842. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Adams-Onís Treaty; East and West Florida; Horseshoe Bend, Battle of; Jackson, Andrew; Osceola; Seminole War (Second)

Further Reading Fogelson, Raymond J., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 14: Southeast. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004. Heidler, David S., and Jeanne T. Heidler. Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996. O’Brien, Sean Michael. In Bitterness and in Tears: Andrew Jackson’s Destruction of the Creeks and Seminoles. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001.

Serra, Junípero (1713–1784) Fray Junípero Serra was an 18th-century Franciscan priest, popularly known as the founding father of the California mission system for having established 9 of California’s first 21 missions. Born Miguel Joseph Serra on November 24, 1713, in Majorca, Spain, Serra was raised in an extremely devout household, resulting in an early pretension toward religious thought. At 16 he entered the Alcantarine Franciscans, a reformist branch of the Franciscan Order, becoming a monk and taking on the name Junípero after Saint Juniper, companion to Saint Francis. As a novice, Serra excelled in his studies, achieving the distinguished title of lecturer of philosophy prior to his ordination as a priest in 1738. Because of his highly erudite nature, at age 30 Serra was appointed professor of theology at Lullian University, occupying the Duns Scotus chair of philosophy. Though Serra was an extremely accomplished scholar, his lifelong dream was to become a missionary to the New World. On April 13, 1749, Serra left his appointment as professor of theology and departed for New Spain. In December of that year, after three rigorous months at sea, Serra arrived at Veracruz. Within days, he and another companion set out for the missionary College of San Fernando (his base for the next 18 years) located in Mexico City, traveling an average of 15 miles a day for close to three weeks. Serra’s impatience and hard-edged zeal was again on display after arriving in Mexico City; he and seven other Franciscans soon set out for the Sierra Gorda, located 150 miles northeast of Mexico City, to work and missionize among the local Indians. With assistance from the College of San Fernando, Serra spent eight years among the Indians of the region.

Franciscan friar Junípero Serra led the establishment of 21 Spanish missions throughout the area of Alta California, which was then part of the Spanish Empire. This legacy has made him a controversial historical figure for many indigenous groups in California. (Bettmann/Corbis)

While Serra was hard at work in the Sierra Gorda, Bourbon king Carlos III was preoccupied with the potential threat of French, British, and Russian colonization of the California coast. A two-pronged campaign to thwart such efforts was launched by Inspector General José de Gálvez: Captain Gaspar de Portolà would oversee a military occupation of California; Fray Junípero Serra would win the hearts and minds of the Natives living there. With a contingent of 15 Franciscans, Serra was given the order to build and administer a chain of missions along the coast. On March 14, 1768, Serra, now 54, and 15 fellow missionaries left the port of San Blas en route to California. In May 1769, Serra established Misión San Fernando Rey de España de Velicatá, Baja California’s only Franciscan mission. Serra reached San Diego late that year where he founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá in honor of Saint Didacus. Over the next several years Serra founded eight more missions, overseeing them from Monterey, which acted as his base of operations and from where Serra presided as “Father Presidente.” Under his presidency, the Franciscans founded Mission San Antonio de Padua, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Mission San Francisco de Asís, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and Mission San Buenaventura. Serra’s legacy in California is mixed. While he is venerated for having founded many of California’s missions, his commitment to the often-brutal practices of the mission system has remained a source of constant criticism. Like most Franciscans, Serra viewed the Natives of California as children in need of direction and spiritual guidance, which the mission system was partially designed to foster. To that end, corporal punishment was commonly employed. The missions were also designed to convert the Indians to Catholicism, initiate them into Spanish society, and utilize Native labor for economic profit, often against their will. Under the direction of Serra the mission community became incredibly self-sufficient; Indians

built houses, spun wool, raised crops, practiced animal husbandry, and were trained as masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and millers. At the same time, Serra saw himself as a defender of Indians. Because the Indians of California were isolated from access to French weapons—unlike their Texan counterparts who were able to challenge Spanish military force—Spaniards were able to inflict incredible abuses on them, not the least of which was raping indigenous women. Serra traveled to Mexico City in 1773 to argue before Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli for the removal of Pedro de Fages, a military commander responsible for many crimes against Indians. Fages was summarily removed from his post. Throughout his time in New Spain, Serra suffered greatly from an ulcerated leg, the result of an injury he sustained during his initial trip to the capital. Despite the incredible pain caused by his condition, Serra insisted on walking everywhere he went. His zeal frequently led him to pound his chest with a stone while in the pulpit, scourge himself, and apply a lit torch to his bare chest. These extreme practices were designed to showcase his absolute devotion to God, which he hoped would inspire and serve as an example to the Indians. Serra died at Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel, near Monterey, on August 28, 1784, at age 71. On September 25, 1988, Pope John Paul II beatified Serra but was unable to complete the canonization process because of vehement opposition from several segments of California’s indigenous population. Despite indigenous opposition to Serra’s canonization, he has become one of California’s most venerated figures and is scheduled to be canonized in September 2015. In addition to a sculpture at the National Statuary Hall, Serra has a multitude of streets, building, parks, and other physical and environmental features named after him. Ignacio Martinez See also: Alta California; Primary Documents: Junípero Serra’s Report on the Missions of California (1773)

Further Reading Hackel, Steven. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hackel, Steven. Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013. Sandos, James. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Smith, Jedediah Strong (1799–1831) Jedediah Strong Smith was an explorer, mapmaker, and trapper. He was the first Euro-American to cross the Sierra Nevada and reach California. Smith was born on January 6, 1799, in Jericho, New York. As a young man, Smith hunted and trapped in the eastern forests and developed an interest in the western frontier. In 1822, he answered a newspaper advertisement placed by William H. Ashley for men willing to join a beaver trapping expedition up the Missouri River. Ashley’s first expedition set out on May 8, 1822, but within 300 miles the riverboat sank, and the men were forced to wait for another before they could continue. Meanwhile, Smith busied himself ashore by hunting to provide food for the expedition. The expedition reached the mouth of the Yellowstone River at the beginning of October and broke into small groups. Smith’s group continued along the Missouri River and eventually reached Montana. That winter, short of horses, the expedition camped in the Rockies where it was attacked by Blackfoot Indians.

Smith headed back downriver to meet Ashley at the Arikara Indian village to negotiate for horses. Ashley’s men camped along the river, and one morning before dawn the Arikaras began firing at them, pinning them down on a sandbar in the Missouri River. At least a dozen of Ashley’s men were killed, and the survivors swam for safety. Later, Smith was promoted to a captain by Ashley for his leadership during the attack. In 1823, Smith headed into the mountains of the Black Hills in search of beaver pelts. As the group pushed through underbrush along the Cheyenne River, a grizzly bear attacked him. It took Smith’s whole head into its mouth, shredding his scalp and almost severing his left ear. Smith remained conscious while fellow expedition member James Clyman sewed up his wounds and spent 10 days in camp recovering from the ordeal. Smith’s group pushed on and wintered in the Wind River valley in Wyoming with friendly Crow Indians. Following the directions given to him by the Crows, in early 1824 Smith crossed the Continental Divide, having made his way through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains. He spent the next two years trapping and exploring the Rockies. In 1826, Smith, David E. Jackson, and William Sublette, who were now business partners, headed through the Mojave Desert into California. Mexican authorities thought they were spies and told them to leave the way they had come, but they headed north to avoid another desert crossing. By the spring of 1827, the partners had more than 1,500 pounds of beaver pelts. Smith made his way back across the Great Basin to a rendezvous at Bear Lake. On a second trip to California later that year, Smith’s group was attacked by Mojave Indians. In 1828, Smith headed to Oregon. On July 13, his men were attacked along the Umpqua River and forced to take shelter at Fort Vancouver, where they remained until March 1829. Smith led trapping parties for another year, but in 1830 he sold his business shares and bought a house in St. Louis. Smith entered the Santa Fe trade but was killed on his first trip in 1831 by Comanche Indians. Karen S. Garvin See also: Ashley, William Henry; Factory System; Great American Desert; Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Barbour, Barton H. Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Dale, Harrison Clifford. The Explorations of William H. Ashley and Jedediah Smith, 1822–1829. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Morgan, Dale L. Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

Taylor, Zachary (1784–1850) Zachary Taylor was a hero in the Mexican War who became the Whig Party nominee for president in 1848. While Taylor spent 40 years in the army, mostly protecting frontier posts and fighting Indians, he was the first president to come to office with no previous political experience. Known as “Old Rough and Ready” for his blunt demeanor and distaste for formal attire, Taylor became president at a time of increasingly divisive national issues. Taylor was born the third son of nine children to farmers in today’s Orange County, Virginia. While he was an infant, Taylor’s parents took him west near Louisville, Kentucky. Like many children on the frontier, Taylor did not have access to school and received a basic education from tutors hired by his colonel father. At the age of 23 he married Margaret Smith, with whom he would have six children. That same year, Taylor entered the U.S. Army. He received a commission as lieutenant through the influence of

Secretary of State James Madison, a family relative. He quickly was promoted to captain. He fought against Tecumseh during the War of 1812 and was promoted to major. After 13 years, he achieved the rank of full colonel during the so-called Black Hawk Wars. He was soon sent to Florida to fight the Seminoles and upon victory was promoted to brigadier general. In 1841 he was named commander of the southern army and settled on a large plantation in Louisiana. Early in Taylor’s presidency a new conflict between North and South erupted over whether slavery should be allowed in the territories from Mexico. In 1849 California applied for admission as a free state. Southerners protested since the addition of another free state would upset the balance in the Senate with slave states. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and action stalled. Taylor urged the admission of California, even though he was a Southern slaveholder. Meanwhile, the slave state of Texas claimed the New Mexico territory as its own in an effort to prevent the territory seeking admission as a free state. President Taylor argued that the federal government had purchased the territory and therefore reserved the right to administer it. Meanwhile, Taylor urged Congress to develop a transcontinental railroad and provide aid to farmers in the western territories. He suggested that the government undertake the careful study of several proposed routes for the railway to best estimate the feasibility and cost of construction. However, all such issues quickly became eclipsed by the continuing dispute over the spread of slavery. In January 1850, Taylor delivered special messages to Congress urging that the people in the territories of California and New Mexico be allowed to determine whether they became free or slave states. Several key senators began constructing the Compromise of 1850, but the president did not support compromise. If he had lived, he likely would have vetoed the bill. On July 4, 1850, the portly 65-year-old Taylor spent hours in the heat laying the cornerstone for the Washington monument. That afternoon he took ill and died five days later in the White House. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: Compromise of 1850; Mexican-American War; Seminole War (First); War of 1812

Further Reading Eisenhower, John S. Zachary Taylor. New York: Times Books, 2008. Smith, Elbert B. The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Texas, Annexation of (1845) The annexation of Texas represents one of the most significant developments in the expansion of the United States throughout the 19th century. While Texas annexation helped neutralize Great Britain’s influence in North America, advanced America’s ideals of Manifest Destiny, and offered American settlers new economic opportunities in the American West, the annexation of Texas also heightened sectional issues over the expansion of slavery and led to increased tensions between the United States and Mexico during the early 19th century. Following the annexation of Texas to the United States, diplomatic relations between Mexico and the United States rapidly deteriorated during the mid-1840s. By April 1846, a military conflict erupted between American forces and Mexican troops along the Rio Grande. U.S. president James K. Polk responded to these hostilities by declaring war against Mexico in May 1846. Accordingly, America’s war with Mexico enabled the United States to acquire vast western territory in North America, stretching from the southwestern border of Texas to the Pacific Ocean.

Texas annexation can be traced back to the early 19th century when Mexican government officials opened their lands in Texas to foreign settlers and trade. During the late 1820s, thousands of AngloAmericans took advantage of this new economic opportunity by migrating to Texas, where they grew cotton and raised cattle.

Officers inspect Texan troops in January 1845. The United States’ annexation of Texas that year led Mexico to sever its diplomatic relations. Most Texans favored annexation, but Mexico refused to recognize the Treaties of Velasco, which granted Texas its independence. (Corbis)

By the mid-1830s, Anglo-American settlers expressed frustration over the Mexican rule of Texas as government authorities passed new colonization laws and prohibited the importation of African American slaves into Mexico’s northern borderlands. With growing tensions between the Mexican government and Anglo-American settlers in Texas, an open military conflict erupted in October 1835. The Texas Revolution culminated at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, when Sam Houston and the Texan army defeated Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna’s troops. Following the Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Anna, who had been taken prisoner by the Texans, signed the Treaty of Velasco, which recognized Texas’s independence. The treaty also stipulated that Texas’s southwestern boundary could not lie south of the Rio Grande. Despite the Texan army’s decisive victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Mexican government rejected the Treaty of Velasco by maintaining that Santa Anna had signed it under duress. Following the Texas Revolution, general elections were held in Texas to select national and county officials for the newly established republic. The general elections also offered Texans an opportunity to voice their opinion about the possibility of the United States annexing Texas. In September 1836, Sam Houston was elected as the first president of the Republic of Texas, and a majority of the Texas population voted in favor of annexation to the United States. During his presidential term, Sam Houston sought to attain foreign diplomatic recognition for the Republic of Texas as a way of legitimizing the newly established nation. Additionally, Houston lobbied for annexation to the United States. In December 1836, Houston sent William H. Wharton, who served as Texas minister to the United States, to Washington, D.C., where he proposed the issue of annexation to U.S. president Andrew Jackson. The Texas minister believed that Jackson would favor the annexation of Texas to the United States because the president had previously offered Mexico $5 million to purchase Texas when it was a Mexican province. However, President Jackson opposed the annexation of Texas by maintaining that it might provoke a war with Mexico. Additionally, Jackson recognized that Texas would enter the Union as a slave state. Therefore, Jackson rejected Wharton’s proposal by stating that the

annexation of Texas would heighten America’s sectional issues over the expansion of slavery. While President Jackson remained hesitant over Texas joining the Union, he officially recognized Texas’s independence on March 3, 1837. In August 1837, Memucan Hunt Jr., who had replaced Wharton as Texas minister to the United States, submitted another annexation proposal to the newly elected U.S. president, Martin Van Buren. When the president received Hunt’s proposal, Van Buren noted that he did not favor Texas annexation because hostilities still existed between the Republic of Texas and Mexico. Thus, he asserted that the acquisition of Texas by the United States would lead to a direct military conflict with Mexico. Undeterred by the Americans’ unwillingness to acquire the Republic of Texas, Texas officials and American expansionists continued to support the idea of Texas annexation. In the summer of 1843, the American public renewed their interest in the annexation of Texas when rumors began circulating about the growing British influence in North America. During the 1840s, southern expansionists maintained that Great Britain had agreed to mediate a peace between the Republic of Texas and Mexico as well as offered financial loans to the newly established republic in exchange for the abolition of slavery in Texas. If Texas representatives agreed to abolish slavery in the Republic of Texas, some Americans feared that the independent republic would serve as a haven for runaway slaves and undermine the institution of slavery in the South. Although these rumors about the growing British influence in North America were later proved to be unfounded, they had shifted American sentiment toward favoring the annexation of Texas. With a sense of urgency about acquiring the Republic of Texas, U.S. president John Tyler and Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur renewed negotiations with Texas representatives about the issue of annexation. While Tyler asserted that annexing Texas to the United States would help reduce the British influence in North America, he also believed that acquiring the Republic of Texas would provide him with a solid base of support for the upcoming presidential election of 1844. However, before Upshur could negotiate an annexation treaty between the United States and the Republic of Texas, he was killed in an explosion aboard the USS Princeton. In the spring of 1844, newly appointed secretary of state John C. Calhoun entered into treaty negotiations with Isaac Van Zandt, who served as Texas’s chargé d’affaires to the United States, and Texas lawyer James Pinckney Henderson. On April 12, 1844, Calhoun and the Texas officials signed a treaty of annexation, which stipulated that Texas would be admitted to the Union as a territory. The treaty also stipulated that Texas would surrender its public lands in exchange for the United States assuming the republic’s financial debt of up to $10 million. Calhoun proceeded to submit the annexation treaty to the U.S. Senate for their approval. During the summer of 1844, the annexation of Texas to the United States became a heated issue within the U.S. Senate as northern Democrats opposed the treaty because they believed that the annexation of Texas would expand slavery into the western territories as well as increase the power of the slaveholding states in Congress, while northern Whigs maintained that the acquisition of Texas would lead to a war with Mexico. Accordingly, the Senate rejected the annexation treaty by a vote of 35 to 16 on June 8, 1844. Despite the U.S. Senate rejecting the annexation treaty, the annexation of Texas became a key issue in the presidential election of 1844. During the election, Whig candidate Henry Clay remained uncommitted on the issue of annexation while Democratic candidate James K. Polk, who campaigned on an expansionist platform, called for the immediate annexation of Texas. Following a closely contested election, Polk won the presidency. With the election of James K. Polk, outgoing president John Tyler continued to strive to incorporate Texas into the Union. Even though Tyler viewed Polk’s victory as a mandate for the annexation of Texas

to the United States, the president faced solid resistance from northern Whigs and northern Democrats who opposed the expansion of slavery. Therefore, Tyler recommended that Texas be admitted to the Union through a joint resolution of Congress. Tyler believed that this strategy would help secure the annexation of Texas as a joint resolution required only the majority approval of both houses of Congress rather than the two-thirds majority approval of the Senate. Under the terms of the joint resolution, Texas would join the Union as a state and retain its public land as well as its financial debt. The joint resolution also placed Texas’s southwestern boundary at the Rio Grande instead of the Nueces River, which historically had been considered Texas’s southern border. On January 25, 1845, the House of Representatives voted in favor of the joint resolution to annex Texas while the Senate passed the measure by a narrow margin on February 27, 1845. On March 3, 1845, President Tyler signed the annexation bill into law. During the summer of 1845, President of the Republic of Texas Anson Jones called for a special session of Congress, where Texas representatives ratified the annexation resolution. After the U.S. Congress approved Texas’s newly established state constitution, President Polk signed the Texas Admission Act, which allowed Texas to join the Union as a slave state on December 29, 1845. Following the annexation of Texas, an international crisis developed between Mexico and the United States as Mexican authorities contested Texas’s southwestern boundary along the Rio Grande. Additionally, the Mexican government claimed that the United States coveted Mexico’s northern borderlands, which included California and New Mexico. Accordingly, Mexican authorities broke diplomatic relations with the United States in March 1845. After a military clash erupted between American troops and Mexican forces along the Rio Grande, President Polk secured a congressional declaration of war on May 13, 1846. Known as the Mexican-American War, the military conflict enabled the United States to expand its western borders by acquiring additional Mexican territory, which included the present-day states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Kevin M. Brady See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Kearny, Stephen Watts; Manifest Destiny; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Polk, James Knox; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Tyler, John

Further Reading Campbell, Randolph B. Sam Houston and the American Southwest. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Haynes, Sam W. James K. Polk and the Expansionist Impulse. New York: Longman, 1997. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Winders, Richard Bruce. Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002.

Texas Rangers The Texas Rangers, established in 1835, is the oldest state law enforcement agency in America. The duty of a Ranger was to protect Texas frontier families from Indians and the Mexican army, and maintain civil law. The Texas Rangers operated independently until they were brought under Texas state control during the 1930s. In 1820, Moses Austin (1761–1821) petitioned the Mexican government for a land grant with the intention to settle 300 American families in Texas, which was a Mexican province. The Spanish

authorities agreed to Moses’s proposal because they wished to develop the area and prevent it from falling into the hands of the American government, but lacked enough Mexican colonists. In 1821, the Spanish granted Moses 200,000 acres of prime land. Moses died shortly after settling the terms of the contract but had entrusted his son, Stephen Fuller Austin (1793–1836), to carry out the colonization plan. Colonists were offered their choice of 177 acres of farmland or 4,428 acres of rangeland, and within two years there were between 600 and 700 people living in Texas. The frontier territory was in dispute between Mexico and the United States, and Austin approached the Mexican government for permission to hire men to protect his settlers. On August 10, 1823, Austin employed 10 men whom he named Rangers. The first duty of this semiofficial law enforcement group included “ranging” across the Texas territory to keep an eye on hostile Indians. On October 17, 1835, Daniel Parker (1781–1844), a member of Austin’s council, submitted a resolution to create an official Texas Ranger corps and add additional manpower. The Rangers were formally organized and placed under the command of the commander in chief of the forces of Texas. The Rangers’ official duties were expanded to include protecting settlers from outlaws and Mexican bandits. In the early years, the Rangers consisted of government employees as well as unpaid volunteers. Recruits were expected to enlist for at least one year. It was not until November 1835 that they received a salary of $1.25 per day to cover their expenses, which included equipping themselves with a horse and weapons. The men did not wear uniforms and the Rangers appointed their own officers. In 1836, the corps became better organized, and in 1838, Mirabeau B. Lamar (1798–1859), president of the Republic of Texas, expanded the Rangers’ role and petitioned Congress to allow him to enlarge the force. During Lamar’s presidency, the Rangers proved to be effective Indian fighters, engaging in the Cherokee War in 1839 and the Battle of Plum Creek in 1840. Mexico’s continuing refusal to recognize the independence of Texas resulted in a series of Mexican invasions beginning in 1842. Under the able leadership of John Coffee “Jack” Hays (1817–1883) and armed with the revolutionary new Colt revolver as their weapon of choice, the Texas Rangers successfully fought Mexicans and Indians despite being outnumbered. In 1846, the Rangers joined with Zachary Taylor’s Army of Occupation to fight in the MexicanAmerican War. With Hays and Samuel Walker (1817–1847) in command, the Rangers earned international recognition for their bravery, horsemanship, and fighting skills and enabled Taylor to capture Monterrey. When the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War, Mexicans living in the land transferred to the United States could opt to remain Mexican citizens or become American citizens. But even for those who chose to become Americans, social tensions remained high; ethnic Mexicans often lost their land and some turned to banditry to eke out a living. The Rangers remained active in trying to eradicate banditry. In 1861, Texas seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. Many Rangers fought in the Civil War under Colonel Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Terry (1821–1861) until Texas was readmitted to the Union in 1870. During Reconstruction, the Texas Rangers were reorganized into a state police force, but a lack of qualified recruits, unpopular laws, and political corruption caused the force to lose support. The Texas legislature appropriated money in 1874 to reorganize the Texas Rangers and created six companies of 75 men comprising the Frontier Battalion, a fully civilian force. The companies answered to captains who in turn reported to Ranger headquarters, located in Austin. The Frontier Battalion was charged with protecting settlers from Indian attacks and maintaining peace along the border with Mexico. A second Ranger force was also established in 1874, the Special Forces Rangers. Led by Captain Leander H. McNelly (1844–1877), this force was tasked with restoring the peace in Texas after

Reconstruction. The Special Forces Rangers dealt with a variety of problems, including bandits, murderers, train robbers, and cattle rustlers. The Texas Rangers were often criticized for being too violent in their attempts to restore order. In 1859, Tejano Juan Nepomuceno Cortina had witnessed a marshal pistol-whipping an old man. Cortina fired at the marshal and rescued the man, but hostilities increased when Cortina returned to town with supporters and freed the jail inmates, shooting four town residents in the process. During the “Cortina Wars” that ensued, ethnic unrest along the border erupted into warfare. In 1875, McNelly responded to the death of a Ranger by stacking dead cattle rustlers in a heap in the Brownsville town square to send a message to would-be lawbreakers. McNelly also violated international law by crossing into Mexico without permission to recover stolen cattle, and as a result, his Special Forces Rangers were disbanded in 1881. The Frontier Battalion was reorganized in 1901 to form the Texas Ranger Force, which was molded into a modern law enforcement organization. The Texas Rangers had to contend with continuing border issues, such as the 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, by Pancho Villa. Their other duties included protecting property from smugglers and raiders, maintaining public order in Texas oil boomtowns, and catching tequila smugglers during Prohibition. During the early 20th century the issue of brutality reemerged, leading to a reduction in the number of men per unit and the creation of official complaint procedures for citizens. The Texas Rangers increasingly took on detective duties as they handled cases of animal theft and fence cutting. In 1935, the Rangers became part of the Texas Department of Public Safety and the entrance requirements were changed to an exam-based format to reduce political favoritism. The Texas Rangers were formed into six companies and generally operated as individual officers working from small towns, although they might be assigned cases throughout the state. Today the Texas Rangers remain active plainclothes law enforcement officers, but wear a hat and boots to mark their status. Karen S. Garvin See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican-American War; Mexican Colonization Law of 1824; Mexican Land Grants; Taylor, Zachary; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Cox, Mike. The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821–1900. New York: Forge, 2008. Smith, David Paul. Frontier Defense in the Civil War: Texas Rangers and Rebels. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992. Utley, Robert M. Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Texas, Republic of (1836–1845) The Republic of Texas existed as an independent country from 1836, when it gained independence from Mexico, until 1845 when it was annexed to the United States and incorporated into the Union as the State of Texas. During its nine-year existence, the republic struggled with debt and Indian problems, and its political system was divided over the question of whether to remain independent or seek U.S. statehood. The republic’s fate caused equal dissension within the United States, where the issue of annexation seriously heightened tensions over slavery that would ultimately lead to the Civil War.

Settlers from the United States began moving into northern Mexico when the territory was still under Spanish control. After declaring its independence in 1821, Mexico encouraged settlement from both the United States and Europe to fill its sparsely populated northern territories. The Mexican government initially intended immigration to be controlled by empresarios such as Stephen F. Austin, who would carefully screen settlers. He would make sure that recruits agreed to obey Mexican laws, practice the Catholic faith (at least outwardly), and respect the existing ban on slavery. By the mid-1820s, however, American settlers were pouring into Texas. The settlements were no longer completely under the control of either the empresarios or the Mexican government. The U.S. settlers overwhelmed the indigenous inhabitants, and by the early 1830s, there were more than 20,000 Anglo settlers in Texas versus around 4,000 Tejano, or Spanish-speaking, inhabitants. Many of these newly arrived settlers were admittedly unhappy with the Mexican government under the 1824 constitution, which lumped Texas together with neighboring Coahuila to form Coahuila y Texas, significantly diluting the Texans’ power in government. Despite intermittent local revolts, however (most famously Hayden Edwards’s abortive attempt to establish the Republic of Fredonia in 1826), the majority of Texans remained loyal to the Mexican government until it began moving to restrict further U.S. immigration and enforce the ban on slavery in the early 1830s. The law of April 6, 1830, forbade further U.S. immigration, nullified all unfinished empresario contracts except a select list including Austin, and stripped the province of tax exemptions. It also banned any further importation of slaves. Sentiments in favor of a break with Mexico were strengthened by the political instability that gripped Mexico after 1832. In 1832 and 1833, Texans met in national conventions to prepare a list of demands for the Mexican government. By mid-1833, many of the convention’s delegates leaned toward separation. In 1835, General Santa Anna seized control of the national government and revoked the 1824 constitution, effectively establishing a military dictatorship that further heightened separatist sentiment. The Texas War of Independence began October 2, 1835, with the Battle of Gonzales. The war lasted for seven months, from October 1835 to April 1836. After an early victory at Gonzales, the Texas rebels suffered two famous losses in March 1836. On March 6, 1836, 187 men died defending the Alamo. Two weeks later, 342 men under Colonel James W. Fannin Jr. were massacred at Goliad after they had formally surrendered with a promise of fair treatment. Although the Alamo and Goliad were military defeats, they proved potent weapons in spurring U.S. support for the revolt. On April 21, 1836, Texan forces under General Sam Houston routed a larger Mexican force in less than 20 minutes, due to the Texans’ superior tactical position and artillery. General Santa Anna, disguised as a private soldier, was captured a day later. On May 14, 1836, under duress, Santa Anna signed the Treaty of Velasco. The treaty, which Santa Anna later repudiated, recognized Texas’s independence and put the border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande River. In March 1837, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Texas as an independent country. The republic’s constitution, which was written in both Spanish and English, was passed by the convention on March 2, 1836. The republic established its first independent government in September 1836, and Sam Houston defeated Stephen Austin to become the first president. While many in Texas hoped for eventual annexation into the United States as a state, growing sectional tensions over slavery and fear of Mexican reprisals slowed U.S. enthusiasm for annexation until the mid-1840s. As an independent country, the republic struggled with debt from its war for independence, problems with the Cherokee Indians, and ongoing problems with Mexico. In 1838, Houston, who favored annexation, was replaced as governor by Mirabeau Lamar, a champion of independence. Sam Houston returned to the governor’s office in late 1844, at the same time that political trends in the United States were also moving in favor of annexation. In April 1844, U.S. president John Tyler, an ardent expansionist,

signed a treaty to annex Texas, but the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it. During the presidential campaign of late 1844, James K. Polk made the annexation of Texas a major campaign item. When Polk narrowly beat anti-annexation candidate Henry Clay, Texas’s statehood became a foregone conclusion. Congress approved an annexation treaty on February 28, 1845, a few days before Tyler left office, and Texas became the 28th state on December 29, 1845.

TEXAN SANTA FE EXPEDITION Between 1836 when it gained its independence from Mexico, and 1845 when it was annexed by the United States, the Republic of Texas was a divided country. For many, independence was a step toward eventual annexation by the United States. Others, including Texas vice president Mirabeau B. Lamar, believed Texas should remain a sovereign nation, extending its reach toward the Pacific. This platform helped him defeat Sam Houston in 1838 to become the second president of the Republic of Texas, a position that allowed him to pursue his goal of territorial expansion. In 1840, Lamar sent three representatives into New Mexico, which was still under Mexican rule, with a letter to the people of Santa Fe outlining the benefits they would receive if they joined the Republic of Texas. Then, without congressional approval, he took nearly $90,000 from the Texas treasury to fund an expedition into New Mexico. Five infantry companies and one artillery company protected merchants, traders, and their 21 ox-drawn wagons of merchandise, valued at $200,000. The 321 people of the expedition were officially designated the Santa Fe Pioneers. Learning of the expedition, New Mexican governor Manuel Armijo sent military detachments to wait at the settlements for an advance party of Pioneers who had separated from the main group. After a long and dangerous trek, the advance group had little strength for a fight and surrendered to the Mexican troops. Not long after, the rest of the expedition were captured by Armijo’s men. The Pioneers were marched to Mexico City where they became the subject of heated diplomatic debates before they were released in 1842.

Once America formally accepted Texas as a state, Mexico severed diplomatic relations with the United States. Mexico was reluctant to accept the loss of Texas and insisted the border was at the Nueces River, rather than the Rio Grande. In early 1845, shortly after his inauguration, Polk sent U.S. troops under General Zachary Taylor to patrol the border area. Polk was determined that the United States would act as Texas’s protector against Mexico, and also coveted Mexico’s territory in modern-day California and New Mexico, which he hoped to add to the United States in the event of a war. The Mexican-American War began on April 25, 1846, when Mexican troops engaged with Taylor’s troops. After an exchange of fire, Taylor telegraphed Washington informing the president that “hostilities may now be considered as commenced.” Polk’s May 12 declaration to Congress accused Mexico of unprovoked aggression against the United States. In response, the Mexican government did not declare war on the United States; their government issued a statement saying that Mexico recognized that a state of war already existed between the two countries. Militarily, the Mexican-American War was fairly one-sided, as the United States in the 1840s had a population of more than 20 million, while Mexico’s population numbered slightly more than 7 million. Mexico was also politically unstable and bankrupt, with a poorly trained and unpaid army of only around 30,000 men. Veracruz surrendered in April 1847, and the capital, Mexico City, fell after six days of fighting in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, was signed on February 2, 1848. In addition to confirming Texas’s border at the Rio Grande River, the United States gained territory in present-day California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. Between the territory lost to Texas and the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded around one million square miles to the United States, half its pre-1836 territory. The end of the war initially produced euphoria in the United

States, but both Texas’s annexation and victory in the Mexican-American War ultimately heightened sectional tension over slavery in the decade before the Civil War. Shannon E. Duffy See also: Austin, Moses; Austin, Stephen F.; Mexican-American War; San Jacinto, Battle of; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Annexation of; Primary Documents: Stephen F. Austin’s Address Supporting Texas Independence (1836)

Further Reading Campbell, Randolph B. Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. De la Teja, Jesús F., ed. Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010. Francaviglia, Richard V., and Douglas W. Richmond, eds. Dueling Eagles: Reinterpreting the US-Mexican War, 1846–1848. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2000. Silbey, Joel H. Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe (1808–1890) Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was a military leader and statesman in early California history. Vallejo served in the Mexican army and held the position of commanding general, charged with protecting Alta California. Vallejo supported American interests in California, and after the territory was ceded to the United States he served as state senator. Vallejo was born July 7, 1808, in Monterey, California, then the capital of Alta California. He was the eighth of 13 children born to Ignatio Vallejo and Maria Antonio Lugo, wealthy upper-class California Mexicans (Californios). Vallejo’s father served in the colonial Mexican army and achieved the rank of distinguished sergeant. Vallejo began his education in 1808 and was a quick learner. At age 15, Vallejo decided he wanted to enroll as a cadet in the provincial army and submitted a request to Governor Luis Arguello. In 1824, Vallejo enrolled at the presidio of Monterey and was appointed to the governor’s staff, where he worked as the governor’s personal secretary until Arguello left office in November 1825. In 1827, Vallejo became a member of the Provincial Legislature when he was appointed to replace a retiring delegate. The next year, Vallejo was promoted in the Mexican army to the rank of alferez, which allowed him to give orders to his own father. In 1829, Vallejo successfully led a small force against the Mikow Indians who had been accused of horse theft. In May, he saw his first military action when he defeated Chief Estanislao, a Lakisamni Indian who had taken to raiding the Spanish missions. Three previous expeditions had been unsuccessful in defeating the raiders, but Vallejo’s forces vanquished them. Vallejo married Francisca Benicia Carrillo on March 6, 1832. The couple had 16 children, plus two adopted children born to Vallejo out of wedlock. Vallejo began to amass large amounts of land, some of which he purchased while others were gifts or payment for services rendered.

During the 1830s, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was commander of military forces in California under Governor José María Echeandía and Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado. He also established two colonies of settlers in Petaluma and Santa Rosa under Governor Jose Figueroa. Vallejo was in favor of U.S. annexation of California, but was arrested by William B. Ide during the Bear Flag Revolt. His contributions to the territory were recognized when he became a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention of 1849. (California Historical Society)

Vallejo was made commander of the San Francisco presidio in 1833, and in 1834 he was promoted to lieutenant in the Mexican army and became an alternate delegate to the Mexico City National Congress. That same year, control of the missions was removed from the Spanish church and turned over to the Mexican state, thus becoming secularized. Vallejo became the military commander and director of colonization for the northern frontier. Vallejo was given the task of administrator for Mission San Francisco Solano (Sonoma), which had been founded in 1823 to stop Russian encroachment into Alta California. Vallejo helped build the town of Sonoma and supervised the construction of the presidio of Sonoma in 1836. He was charged with keeping an eye on the Russians at Fort Ross as well as maintaining friendly relations with Indian tribes and American immigrants. Relations with the increasing number of Americans began to sour after California governor Mariano Chico fled to Mexico after angering the people of Alta California. His departure created a power vacuum and three rivals attempted to take power, believing that Vallejo would join them in a revolt against Mexico. Vallejo declined to participate in a revolt, but once Juan Alvarado had seized Monterey and appointed himself governor of California, Vallejo accepted a position as military commandant. On November 29, 1836, Vallejo went to Monterey and swore an oath of loyalty to the new California government. He was appointed colonel of the cavalry and organized a California militia to replace the Mexican troops. Vallejo, along with his brother Salvador and Governor Alvarado, marched against a rival government in Los Angeles and established control of the territory.

Vallejo continued to take his orders from Mexico City. He spent his own money to maintain troops for the northern frontier and was unable to get reimbursed from Alvarado despite sending a show of force. Vallejo then presented his claims to the Mexican government, resulting in Alvarado being replaced. The new governor issued land to Vallejo as payment, and Vallejo eventually owned more than 150,000 acres of land. In June 1846, a group of 33 American settlers captured the garrison at Sonoma and declared their independence from Mexico. Captain John C. Frémont, leader of the so-called Bear Flag Revolt, had Vallejo and his brother arrested and sent to Sutter’s Fort, where they were imprisoned for two months. Vallejo and his brother were poorly treated and their health endangered, and much of Vallejo’s property was stolen or damaged during the revolt. Nevertheless, Vallejo was an advocate of American annexation of California and gave assistance to Anglo-Americans when he could. He was critical of the Mexican upper class and the strong central government, which restricted voting rights of Mexicans, and saw America as having a model form of government. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave California to the United States, and the next year Vallejo became a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention. During the 1850s, Vallejo donated land and money for the development of a port at Benecia and for construction of public buildings that included a university. In 1855, Vallejo received less than $50,000 from the U.S. government for damage done to his property during the war with Mexico, but he never recovered the entire amount of his losses, which was estimated at more than $100,000. Vallejo built a home on land northwest of Sonoma. The estate was named Lachryma Montis, and construction on the main house began in 1851. The home was a two-story Victorian mansion with marble fireplaces in every room, and the estate included outbuildings and houses for staff, as well as a large barn and warehouse. By the 1860s, Vallejo was struggling financially. The legal fees he spent fighting challenges to land titles nearly bankrupted him, and in 1866 he lost the title to his house. Several years later his son-in-law bought the property and deeded it to Vallejo’s wife. During the last few years of his life, Vallejo engaged in public speaking and focused on collecting and preserving California history. He died at his home on January 18, 1890, and is buried at Mountain Cemetery, Sonoma. Karen S. Garvin See also: Alta California; Bear Flag Revolt; California Republic; Californios; Frémont, John Charles; Gold Rush, California; Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican-American War; Presidios; Primary Documents: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Account of His Imprisonment During the Bear Flag Revolt in California (1846)

Further Reading Harlow, Neal. California Conquered: The Annexation of a Mexican Province, 1846–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Pitt, Leonard. The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Rosenus, Alan. General Vallejo and the Advent of the Americans: A Biography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Walker, Robert J. (1801–1869) Robert John Walker practiced law, served in the U.S. Senate, and was a champion of Texas annexation following the Texas Revolution of the 1830s. Born into an affluent Pennsylvania family in 1801, Walker entered politics soon after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania at the head of his class in 1819. In 1825 he acquired a prime political asset by marrying Mary Blechenden Bache, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin and granddaughter of President James Monroe’s secretary of war. Following his older brother and a number of other moderately prominent Pennsylvanians who had moved to Mississippi to make their fortunes, Walker relocated to Natchez in 1826. He practiced law with his brother for years and became involved in land speculation and other business dealings. In 1836, the Mississippi legislature chose Walker to represent the state as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate. During his nine-year tenure he became one of that body’s more influential members, including chairing the Committee on Public Lands. Walker had a special interest in western expansion, and particularly in the annexation of Texas, where he owned property. After the Texas Revolution, Walker argued that bringing Texas into the Union was a vital matter of national security. He believed that if Texas did not become part of the United States, the British might be able to spread their influence into the region, thus blocking further American efforts to move west. Walker was an ardent supporter of Democrat James K. Polk, who won the 1844 campaign for the presidency on an expansionist platform. Polk subsequently appointed Walker secretary of the Treasury. During his time at the head of the Treasury Department, Walker argued against high protective tariffs, helping to pass the so-called “Walker Tariff” in 1846 that set tariff rates at record lows. Walker left the executive branch after Polk’s term ended and opened a successful law practice in Washington, D.C., though he remained a fixture on the national political scene. In 1857, James Buchanan appointment Walker the governor of the Kansas Territory. Though a defender of slavery and at one time a slaveholder himself, Walker alienated fellow Southerners by opposing the establishment of a pro-slavery government in Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution and was forced to resign in 1858. As the Civil War approached Walker established himself as a strong Unionist, opposing secession and working for the U.S. government during the war years. He coedited the New York Continental Monthly and in 1863 went to Europe representing the U.S. Treasury Department in an effort to discourage European support for the Confederate cause. After the war he remained in Washington where he practiced law and continued to dabble in political affairs. An expansionist to the end, one of his last projects involved helping Secretary of State William Seward negotiate the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1868. Walker died on November 11, 1869 in Washington. Ben Wynne See also: Mexican-American War; Polk, James Knox; Texas, Annexation of

Further Reading Hietala, Thomas. Manifest Design, American Exceptionalism and Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shenton, James P. Robert John Walker: A Politician from Jackson to Lincoln. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.

Wilkinson, James (1757–1825)

James Wilkinson was a soldier, politician, and land speculator. He was born March 24, 1757, in Benedict, Maryland. He then attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Continental Army in 1775. Wilkinson was a natural opportunist. When Colonel Hardin entrusted him with relaying intelligence about the British force prior to the Second Battle of Saratoga, he took credit for it on its delivery to General Gates. Wilkinson was eventually forced to resign his commission when he unintentionally revealed a plot to replace George Washington with Horatio Gates as commander in chief. His marriage that year to Anne Biddle, daughter of a prominent Philadelphia family, bolstered his career prospects and in 1779 Congress appointed him clothier general of the army. As brigadier general in the Pennsylvania Militia in 1782, Wilkinson moved to Kentucky where he pursued activities that ran counter to American foreign policy. His scheme to secure exclusive shipping rights along the Spanish-controlled Lower Mississippi River led to his bribing Spanish officials including the New Orleans governor. Restrictions on shipping prompted western Kentucky settlers to consider forming a new republic aligned with Spain. The deal fell apart in 1788 despite Wilkinson’s support of the proposal, which was heavily financed by Spain. Congress granted Wilkinson’s request for reinstatement to the army in 1791 and sent him to the Western Department where he continued his covert dealings with Spain. In 1796 he became military governor of the Southwest Territory and the commanding general of the army. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Wilkinson agreed to promote Spanish interests in return for trading privileges and a pension. He became involved in Aaron Burr’s plan to establish an independent nation in the Southwest and to seize New Orleans. In 1805, as the first governor of Louisiana, Wilkinson sent Zebulon Pike on an expedition to locate the source of the Mississippi and informed Spanish officials of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Sensing a lack of support for Burr’s plan and being commanded to defend the frontier, he revealed Burr’s plan to President Jefferson. Questions about Wilkinson’s role in the “conspiracy” and allegations relating to his Spanish dealings resulted in his removal from office in 1807. A court martial followed but he was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. A major general in the War of 1812, Wilkinson led a force to occupy Spanish West Florida before commanding two campaigns in Canada. His lack of success resulted in a court of inquiry in 1815. Though he was exonerated, Wilkinson became a major critic of President Madison, which led to his recall and dismissal from the army. Wilkinson published his memoirs in 1816 in an effort to defend his reputation. He turned his attention to Texas land grants and died in Mexico on December 28, 1825. Frederick Jackson Turner referred to Wilkinson as “the most consummate artist in treason that the nation ever possessed” (Linklater, 3). Indeed, his actions were designed to stunt the expansion of the United States while enhancing his personal wealth and influence. Michael Dove See also: Louisiana Purchase; New Spain; Pike, Zebulon; War of 1812

Further Reading Leckie, Robert. From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Linklater, Andro. An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson. New York: Walker, 2009. Malcomson, Robert. Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812–1814. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998. Wilkinson, James. Memoirs of My Own Times. 4 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1973 [orig. 1816].

Wilmot, David (1814—1868)

David Wilmot was a U.S. politician who sponsored the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful legislative attempt to ban slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War. Born in Bethany, Pennsylvania, on January 20, 1814, the son of a wealthy merchant, Wilmot studied at the Beech Woods Academy in Bethany and attended the Cayuga Lake Academy in Aurora, New York. He was an apprentice in a legal firm in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, from 1832 to 1834. He was admitted to the bar in 1834 and practiced law in Towanda, Pennsylvania. Wilmot took an interest in politics and was an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson and the newly formed Democratic Party. He was elected to Congress for the Twelfth District of Pennsylvania, serving from 1845 to 1851. Initially viewed by his peers as a Democratic Party loyalist and strong supporter of President James K. Polk, Wilmot supported the annexation of Texas as a slave state in 1845. Because slavery already existed in Texas, the action did not, in Wilmot’s opinion, contradict his Free-Soil sympathies. Wilmot also supported Polk’s declaration of war against Mexico in 1846. Wilmot, who did not support the abolitionist movement, believed that the extension of slavery into new areas would be detrimental to the Union. He argued that slavery should be restricted to the American South. Therefore, on August 8, 1846, when a war appropriations bill for $2 million was introduced into the House of Representatives, Wilmot proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill that subsequently became known as the Wilmot Proviso. Basing his ideas on Thomas Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which effectively banned the extension of slavery into the Northwest Territories, Wilmot proposed that slavery be banned in any territories that the United States might win from Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. The House of Representatives promptly passed the measure by a vote of 84 to 64, which largely reflected the sectarian nature of the proposed bill. Congressmen from the North, who were numerically superior in the House, tended to support the bill while congressmen from the South opposed it. The Senate, however, adjourned rather than vote on the bill. In the next congressional session, the appropriations bill, which was expanded to $3 million, was reintroduced. The Wilmot Proviso was also expanded to include any territory that the United States might acquire in the future. The House passed the bill, with the amendment, by a vote of 115 to 105. The Senate, however, refused to accept the Wilmot Proviso and passed the appropriations bill without the amendment. Several prominent Democrats in the Senate subsequently convinced enough members in the House to accept the bill without the amendment. Therefore, the territory acquired from Mexico in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was not subject to any federal legislation regulating slavery. In the 1848 presidential election, the Democratic Party strongly rejected the content of the Wilmot Proviso and supported a platform based on popular sovereignty. Wilmot supported the Free-Soil Party platform, which was based on restricting slavery to the South. He believed that the containment of slavery would eventually lead to the gradual end of the institution. Finding himself at odds with mainstream Pennsylvania Democrats led by James Buchanan, Wilmot did not run in the 1850 elections. During 1851– 1861, he served as a district court judge in Pennsylvania. While on the bench, he became an advocate of the Republican Party and was instrumental in establishing the Republican Party in Pennsylvania. Wilmot was a delegate to the 1856 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia and strongly supported John C. Frémont in the 1856 presidential election. He unsuccessfully ran as the first Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania in 1857. Wilmot was also a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860, and he strongly supported the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. He declined a cabinet position in Lincoln’s first administration, preferring to fill the Senate seat vacated by Senator Simon Cameron, who resigned to serve as Lincoln’s first secretary of war. Wilmot served in the Senate until 1863, when he was defeated by Democrat Charles Buckalew. Wilmot served on the Peace Convention of 1861, which unsuccessfully

attempted to find a peaceful solution to the impending Civil War. In 1863, Lincoln appointed Wilmot a judge of the U.S. Court of Claims, where he served until his death on March 16, 1868, in Towanda, Pennsylvania. Michael R. Hall See also: Free-Soil Movement; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Northwest Ordinance; Polk, James Knox

Further Reading Morrison, Chaplain W. Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014 (1967).

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Junípero Serra’s Report on the Missions of California (1773) The colonization of California was the logical culmination of Spain’s expansion to North America, but it might have been deferred even longer had not Spain become suddenly alarmed over possible Russian incursions on the Pacific Seaboard south of Alaska. Spain had been casually aware of upper California for more than two centuries prior to 1769, but only the threat of Russian rivalry nudged it into action. José de Gálvez, visitor-general to Mexico City on behalf of the Crown, commissioned the opening of the new colony in 1769. The two leaders of the settlement party were Captain Gaspar de Portolá, appointed governor of the province, and Fray Junípero Serra, a Franciscan missionary who had been in Mexico since 1749 and in Baja California during most of 1768. The San Diego mission was founded on July 16, 1769, the first of 21 that the Franciscans would build by 1823. Father Serra spent the first years in California opening and supervising missions from San Diego to Monterey. Four years after the founding of San Diego, he was back in Mexico City seeking support for the new missions and helping to plan the overland expedition under Juan Bautista de Anza that would found the city of San Francisco. While at the capital, Father Serra prepared an extensive “Report on the general condition and needs of the missions of Upper California” for the viceroy, Antonio Maria de Bucareli y Ursua, from which the following paragraphs are reprinted. The report was dated March 13, 1773. It is of the utmost importance that the missions be provided with laborers, to till the land, and so raise the crops for their maintenance and progress. We would already have made a start in so doing, were it not for the opposition of the Officer at the presidio—a situation I have described recently in a letter to the Reverend Father Guardian of our College, written about the middle of October, from San Diego. The original of that letter was turned over to the government offices of Your Excellency, where you may see it. The easiest method seems to me the one we have presented from the beginning. I explained it in the said letter. It is this. Along with the sailors aboard ship, there should be a number of young men from the vicinity of San Blas. I should think that it would not be hard to find among them day laborers, cowboys and mule drivers. These should be divided among the missions—six to each, or four at least. But a rule should be made that the Officer of the presidio has no right to change them for a whole year; and that stipulation will inspire confidence in their minds. Otherwise, not a single one will be found to be willing

to stay, especially as matters go now. Also, during the year their pay should be on the same basis as that of the sailors at San Blas; and in the missions they should receive free rations. And if at the end of the first year they wish to stay a second year, the same treatment should be continued. If they prefer to return to San Blas, by boat, they should be granted their request, and others should be provided to take their place. It is of no less importance that, when the livestock arrives, which Your Excellency, in virtue of your decree, orders to be forwarded from California for the equipment of the Monterey missions, some Indian families from the said California should come, of their own free will, with the expedition, and that they should receive every consideration from the officials. They should be distributed, at least two or three being placed in each mission. By taking such measures two purposes will be accomplished. The first will be that there will be an additional two or three Indians for work. The second, and the one I have most in mind, is that the Indians may realize that, till now, they have been much mistaken when they saw all men, and no women, among us; that there are marriages, also, among Christians. Last year, when one of the San Diego Fathers went to California to get provisions, which had run short in that mission, he brought back with him, along with the rest of his company, two of the said families. At his arrival, there was quite a commotion among the new Christians, and even among the gentiles; they did not know what to make of these families, so great was their delight. Just to see these families was a lesson as useful to them as was their happiness at their arrival. So if families other than Indian come from there, it will serve the same purpose very well—that is, if we can provide for them.… As regards our food supply—to last us a year, and to leave something over to give, at least, to the little Christian boys and girls—I intended to say a great deal, but will limit myself to this: that our sufferings are great; never have we, the religious, been in such dire straits, and never has the said Officer been living in such plenty, as since the time he and we arrived in Monterey. May our poverty be accepted for the love of God, and may his plenty—I do not envy him it—do him good. What I do want and ask for is, that the missions be maintained, that there should be a mouthful over and above to give to our Christians and catechumens, and that Christianity be extended. Only two Indians from California still remain at my San Carlos Mission. The rest I distributed among the other missions. When the Officer was partitioning out what was brought by pack train, and marked for Monterey, I asked him to make an entry in his accounts for the two said Indians, to which he replied that he would not give anything to any Indian, and that if I wanted to chase them away, I should do so. To sum up the whole situation, my op[i]nion is that, without a doubt, whatever, in your goodness, Your Excellency, or the King—whom God keep—sends us—and without it at the present time we could not keep going, nor could the missions be kept in existence—should be sent from here marked and addressed separately. I have already mentioned in the letter referred to, that this year the Missions of San Diego and San Gabriel are in poorer condition than last year, even though two boats arrived, while there was only one the year before. The explanation is that last year there was sent from here the full quota of supplies for San Diego, on the supposition that the packet boat San José had never reached there. And, in point of fact, it never did arrive.… In view of what I have just told you, I earnestly ask Your Excellency for an additional forge and blacksmith. If it were set up at the Carmel Mission it could also serve the Missions of San Antonio and San Luis. Not only would we get better service, but we would be able to have some of the newly converted youths learn the trade. This the Fathers of said missions, in their last letters, are most insistent upon. They are tired of dealing with the presidio, where the Officer does not absolutely refuse, but where repairs are done very slowly, and, all too frequently, a bad job is made of them. With a blacksmith in San Diego, the missions nearby can be served from there, and the one in Carmel can serve those of San Antonio and San Luis.

I beg of Your Excellency that, for the setting up of the two said forges, you order that there be sent and delivered to the two missions a goodly supply of iron—mostly in bars, partly in sheets—and that it be clearly stated that it be sent for the missions. In that way, so as to get possession of it, we will avoid any further difficulties or counterclaims on the part of the presidio. We are in as much need of two carpenters as we are of two blacksmiths, one for the missions near Monterey, and the other to be located at Mission San Gabriel de los Temblores, where San Diego and San Buenaventura can make use of him. Both of them should come equipped with the tools of their trade. All of these matters could easily be attended to, if Your Excellency would give whatever orders seem suitable to you to someone in Guadalaxara. There could easily be sent from there the two blacksmiths, the two carpenters, and all of their equipment. But they should be clearly given to understand that the equipment is not their own, but the property of the respective missions.… It seems to me that it would be most helpful if Your Excellency were to give strict orders to the said Commissary at San Blas, that he take greater care than he has till now taken in the packing of provisions forwarded for the maintenance of these missions and presidio. If the corn is put on board when it has already been attacked by grubs, and is full of maggots—and the same goes for the rest of the supplies— what will be its state when it arrives at its destination, and what condition will it be in when the time comes to eat it? The corn that has been on board fresh and in good condition has arrived there in the same good condition. But sometimes, when we received it with the kernels empty, the Captain of the boat answered that that was the way it was loaded in San Blas. Last year there was no meat; and this year, what did come, besides being small in quantity, was so maggoty and putrid that very reasonably it was said to be the same that was to have come the year before; and not having much room in the boat, our meat supply was neither much, nor little, but nil. There is nothing in greater abundance in the countryside around San Blas than herds of cows. Counting this year, it will now be two years since our poor men have been promised—ever since we got there—as part of their daily ration, half a pound or six ounces of meat. They have practically not tasted any other meat than what they have obtained from the gentiles or from hunting. But, this last year the greatest pity of all has been concerning the flour, which is, of all the things that are sent us, or may be sent, the most helpful and most basic for the sustenance of life. It was put in plain sacks of poor material made of burlap or hemp, and consequently ran out at every motion or contact; and so the assignments arrived minus much that should have been there. And it is not hard to picture how much more they would be diminished when, after a lengthy journey, they arrived at their respective missions. How much money is thus thrown to the winds, both for what is lost—of the better quality—and for what is saved! If Your Excellency would kindly order the said article to be sent under the same stipulations that the Most Excellent Marqués de Croix laid down, such great losses would be avoided; and, with the same number of boatloads, there would be food to eat for a much longer time.… I also ask Your Excellency that you allow a bounty for those, be they soldiers or not, who enter into the state of marriage with girls of that faraway country, new Christian converts. On that point, the Most Illustrious Inspector General gave repeated orders to Don Pedro Fages, but I was not able to ascertain the exact terms and conditions. However, whatever the case may be, it seems to me that anyone who marries after this fashion should be allowed to stay permanently attached to his wife’s mission, without being removed to another; that he should be allowed an animal, immediately for his own use, if he is without one; and that, after he has worked a year or more on the mission farms, he be given from the royal herd two cows and a mule, or whatever may appear most suitable to Your Excellency. Lastly that, as time goes on, he might be assigned a piece of land for his own personal use provided he has nothing else to fall back upon.

Source: From Antonine Tibesar, ed., Writings of Junípero Serra, Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955. Vol. I, pp. 295–327.

Stephen F. Austin’s Address Supporting Texas Independence (1836) Considered the founder of Anglo-American Texas, Stephen F. Austin led hundreds of North American families into Texas to help colonize the Mexican frontier. In 1836, during the Texas Revolution, Austin delivered this address advocating Texas’s independence from Mexico. It is with the most unfeigned and heartfelt gratitude that I appear before this enlightened audience, to thank the citizens of Louisville, as I do in the name of the people of Texas, for the kind and generous sympathy they have manifested in favor of the cause of that struggling country; and to make a plain statement of facts explanatory of the contest in which Texas is engaged with the Mexican Government. The public has been informed, through the medium of the newspapers, that war exists between the people of Texas and the present government of Mexico. There are, however, many circumstances connected with this contest, its origin, its principles and objects which, perhaps, are not so generally known, and are indispensable to a full and proper elucidation of this subject. When a people consider themselves compelled by circumstances or by oppression, to appeal to arms and resort to their natural rights, they necessarily submit their cause to the great tribunal of public opinion. The people of Texas, confident in the justice of their cause, fearlessly and cheerfully appeal to this tribunal. In doing this the first step is to show, as I trust I shall be able to do by a succinct statement of facts, that our cause is just, and is the cause of light and liberty:—the same holy cause for which our forefathers fought and bled:—the same that has an advocate in the bosom of every freeman, no matter in what country, or by what people it may be contended for. But a few years back Texas was a wilderness, the home of the uncivilized and wandering Comanche and other tribes of Indians, who waged a constant warfare against the Spanish settlements. These settlements at that time were limited to the small towns of Bexar, (commonly called San Antonio) and Goliad, situated on the western limits. The incursions of the Indians also extended beyond the Rio Bravo del Norta, and desolated that part of the country. In order to restrain these savages and bring them into subjection, the government opened Texas for settlement. Foreign emigrants were invited and called to that country. American enterprise accepted the invitation and promptly responded to the call. The first colony of Americans or foreigners ever settled in Texas was by myself. It was commenced in 1821, under a permission to my father, Moses Austin, from the Spanish government previous to the Independence of Mexico, and has succeeded by surmounting those difficulties and dangers incident to all new and wilderness countries infested with hostile Indians. These difficulties were many and at times appalling, and can only be appreciated by the hardy pioneers of this western country, who have passed through similar scenes. The question here naturally occurs, what inducements, what prospects, what hopes could have stimulated us, the pioneers and settlers of Texas, to remove from the midst of civilized society, to expatriate ourselves from this land of liberty, from this our native country, endeared to us as it was, and still is, and ever will be, by the ties of nativity, the reminiscences of childhood and youth and local attachments, of friendship and kindred? Can it for a moment be supposed that we severed all these ties— the ties of nature and of education, and went to Texas to grapple with the wilderness and with savage foes, merely from a spirit of wild and visionary adventure, without guarantees of protection for our persons and property and political rights? No, it cannot be believed. No American, no Englishman, no one of any nation who has a knowledge of the people of the United States, or of the prominent characteristics

of the Anglo-Saxon race to which we belong—a race that in all ages and in all countries wherever it has appeared has been marked for a jealous and tenacious watchfulness of its liberties, and for a cautious and calculating view of the probable events of the future—no one who has a knowledge of this race can or will believe that we removed to Texas without such guarantees, as free born, and, enterprising men naturally expect and require. The fact is, we had such guaranteed; for, in the first place the government bound itself to protect us by the mere act of admitting us as citizens, on the general and long established principle, even in the dark ages, that protection and allegiance are reciprocal—a principle which in this enlightened age has been extended much further; for its received interpretation now is, that the object of government is the well being, security, and happiness of the governed, and that allegiance ceases whenever it is clear, evident, and palpable, that this object is in no respect effected. But besides this general guarantee, we had others of a special, definite, and positive character—the colonization laws of 1823, ’24, and ’25, inviting emigrants generally to that country, especially guaranteed protection for person and property, and the right of citizenship. When the federal system and constitution were adopted in 1824, and the former provinces became states, Texas, by her representative in the constituent congress, exercised the right which was claimed and exercised by all the provinces, of retaining within her own control, the rights and powers which appertained to her as one of the unities or distinct societies, which confederated together to form the federal republic of Mexico. But not possessing at that time sufficient population to become a state by herself, she was with her own consent, united provisionally with Coahuila, a neighbouring province or society, to form the state of COAHUILA AND TEXAS, “until Texas possessed the necessary elements to form a separate state of herself.” I quote the words of the constitutional or organic act passed by the constituent congress of Mexico, on the 7th of May, 1824, which establishes the state of Coahuila and Texas. This law, and the principles on which the Mexican federal compact was formed, gave to Texas a specific political existence, and vested in her inhabitants the special and well defined rights of selfgovernment as a state of the Mexican confederation, so soon as she “possessed the necessary elements.” Texas consented to the provisional union with Coahuila on the faith of this guarantee. It was therefore a solemn compact, which neither the state of Coahuila and Texas, nor the general government of Mexico, can change without the consent of the people of Texas. In 1833 the people of Texas, after a full examination of their population and resources, and of the law and constitution, decided, in general convention elected for that purpose, that the period had arrived contemplated by said law and compact of 7th May, 1824, and that the country possessed the necessary elements to form a state separate from Coahuila. A respectful and humble petition was accordingly drawn up by this convention, addressed to the general congress of Mexico, praying for the admission of Texas into the Mexican confederation as a state. I had the honor of being appointed by the convention the commissioner or agent of Texas to take this petition to the city of Mexico, and present it to the government. I discharged this duty to the best of my feeble abilities, and, as I believed, in a respectful manner. Many months passed and nothing was done with the petition, except to refer it to a committee of congress, where it slept and was likely to sleep. I finally urged the just and constitutional claims of Texas to become a state in the most pressing manner, as I believed it to be my duty to do; representing also the necessity and good policy of this measure, owning to the almost total want of local government of any kind, the absolute want of a judiciary, the evident impossibility of being governed any longer by Coahuila, (for three fourths of the legislature were from there,) and the consequent anarchy and discontent that existed in Texas. It was my misfortune to offend the high authorities of the nation—my frank and honest exposition of the truth was construed into threats.

At this time (September and October, 1833,) a revolution was raging in many parts of the nation, and especially in the vicinity of the city of Mexico. I despaired of obtaining anything, and wrote to Texas, recommending to the people there to organize as a state de facto without waiting any longer. This letter may have been imprudent, as respects the injury it might do me personally, but how far it was criminal or treasonable, considering the revolutionary state of the whole nation, and the peculiar claims and necessities of Texas, impartial men must decide. It merely expressed an opinion. This letter found its way from San Antonio de Bexar, (where it was directed) to the government. I was arrested at Saltillo, two hundred leagues from Mexico, on my way home, taken back to that city and imprisoned one year, three months of the time in solitary confinement, without books or writing materials, in a dark dungeon of the former inquisition prison. At the close of the year I was released from confinement, but detained six months in the city on heavy [bail]. It was nine months after my arrest before I was officially informed of the charges against me, or furnished with a copy of them. The constitutional requisites were not observed, my constitutional rights as a citizen were violated, the people of Texas were outraged by this treatment of their commissioner, and their respectful, humble and just petition was disregarded. These acts of the Mexican government, taken in connexion with many others and with the general revolutionary situation of the interior of the republic, and the absolute want of local government in Texas, would have justified the people of Texas in organizing themselves as a State of the Mexican confederation, and if attacked for so doing in separating from Mexico. They would have been justifiable in doing this, because such acts were unjust, ruinous and oppressive, and because self-preservation required a local government in Texas suited to the situation and necessities of the country, and the character of its inhabitants. Our forefathers in ’76 flew to arms for much less. They resisted a principle, “the theory of oppression,” but in our case it was the reality—it was a denial of justice and of our guarantied rights—it was oppression itself. Texas, however, even under these aggravated circumstances forbore and remained quiet. The constitution, although outraged and the sport of faction and revolution, still existed in name, and the people of Texas still looked to it with the hope that it would be sustained and executed, and the vested rights of Texas respected. I will now proceed to show how this hope was defeated by the total prostration of the constitution, the destruction of the federal system, and the dissolution of the federal compact. It is well know[n] that Mexico has been in constant revolutions and confusion, with only a few short intervals, ever since its separation [from] Spain in 1821. This unfortunate state of things has been produced by the effects of the ecclesiastical and aristocratical party to oppose republicanism, overturn the federal system and constitution, and establish a monarchy, or a consolidated government of some kind. In 1834, the President of the Republic, Gen. Santa Anna, who heretofore was the leader and champion of the republican party and system, became the head and leader of his former antagonists—the aristocratic and church party. With this accession of strength, this party triumphed. The constitutional general Congress of 1834, which was decidedly republican and federal, was dissolved in May of that year by a military order of the President before its constitutional term had expired. The council of government composed of half the Senate which, agreeably to the constitution, ought to have been installed the day after closing the session of Congress, was also dissolved; and a new, revolutionary, and unconstitutional Congress was convened by another military order of the President. This Congress met on the 1st of January, 1835. It was decidedly aristocratic, ecclesiastical and central in its politics. A number of petitions were presented to it from several towns and villages, praying that it would change the federal form of government and establish a central form. These petitions were all of a revolutionary character, and were called “pronunciamientos,” or prenouncements for centralism. They were formed by partial and revolutionary meetings gotten up by the military and priests. Petitions in favour of the federal system and

constitution, and protests against such revolutionary measures, were also sent in by the people and by some of the State Legislatures, who still retained firmness to express their opinions. The latter were disregarded and their authors persecuted and imprisoned. The former were considered sufficient to invest Congress with plenary powers. It accordingly, by a decree, deposed the constitutional Vice President, Gomez Farias, who was a leading federalist, without any impeachment or trial, or even the form of a trial, and elected another of their own party, Gen. Barragan, in his place. By another decree it united the Senate with the House of Representatives in one chamber, and thus constituted, it declared itself invested with full powers as a national convention. In accordance with these usurped powers, it proceeded to annul the federal constitution and system, and to establish a central or consolidated government. How far it has progressed in the details of this new system is unknown to us. The decree of the 3d of October last, which fixes the outlines of the new government, is however sufficient to show that the federal system and compact is dissolved and centralism established. The States are converted into departments. This decree is as follows as translated: Office of the First Secretary of State, Interior Department. His Excellency the President pro tem. of the Mexican United States to the inhabitants of the Republic. Know ye, that the General Congress has decreed the following: ART. 1. The present Governors of the States shall continue, notwithstanding the time fixed by the Constitution may have expired; but they shall be dependent for their continuance in the exercise of their attributes upon the supreme government of the nation. ART. 2. The Legislatures shall immediately cease to exercise their legislative functions; but before dissolving (and those which may be in recess meeting for the purpose) they shall appoint a department council, composed for the present of five individuals, chosen either within or without their own body, to act as a council to the governor; and in case of a vacancy in that office, they shall propose to the supreme general government three persons, possessing the qualifications hitherto required; and until an appointment be made, the gubernatorial powers shall be exercised by the first on the list, who is not an ecclesiastic. ART. 3. In those States where the Legislatures cannot be assembled within eight days, the ayuntamientos of the capital shall act in its place, only for the purpose of electing the five individuals of the department council. ART. 4. All the judges and tribunals of the States, and the administration of justice, shall continue as hitherto, until the organic law relative to the branch be formed. The responsibilities of the functionaries which could only be investigated before Congress, shall be referred to and concluded before the supreme count of the nation. ART. 5. All the subaltern officers of the State shall also continue for the present, (the places which are vacant, or which may be vacated, not to be filled,) but they, as well as the offices, and branches under their charge, shall be subject to and at the disposal of the supreme government of the nation, by means of their respective governors. City of Mexico, Oct. 3d, 1835. MIQUEL BARRAGAN, President, pro. tem.

Manuel Dias De Bonilla, Secretary of State. For the information of those who are not acquainted with the organization of the Mexican Republic under the federal system and constitution of 1824, it may be necessary to state that this constitution is copied, as to its general principles, from that of the United States. The general Congress had the same organization in substance and was elected in the same manner. A Senate elected by the State Legislatures for four years, and a House of Representatives elected by the people for two years. A President and Vice President elected for four years, and removable only by impeachment and trial. The mode of amending the constitution was clearly fixed. The powers of the States were the same in substance as the States of the United States, and in some instances greater. In addition to this, during the recess of Congress, half the Senate formed the council of government. By keeping these facts in view, and then supposing the case that the President and Congress of these United States were to do, what the President and Congress of Mexico have done, and that one of the states was to resist, and insist on sustaining the federal constitution and state rights, and a parallel case would be presented of the present contest between Texas and the revolutionary government of Mexico. In further elucidation of this subject, I will present an extract from a report made by me to the provisional government of Texas on the 30th of November last, communicating the said decree of 3d October. That every people have the right to change their government, is unquestionable; but it is equally certain and true, that this change, to be morally or politically obligatory, must be effected by the free expression of the community, and by legal and constitutional means; for otherwise, the stability of governments and the rights of the people, would be at the mercy of fortunate revolutionists, of violence, or faction. Admitting, therefore, that a central and despotic, or strong government, is best adapted is the education and habits of a portion of the Mexican people, and that they wish it; this does not, and cannot, give to them the right to dictate, by unconstitutional means and force, to the other portion who have equal rights, and differ in opinion. Had the change been affected by constitutional means, or had a national convention been convened, and every member of the confederacy been fairly represented, and a majority agreed to the change, it would have placed the matter on different ground; but, even then, it would be monstrous to admit the principle, that a majority have the right to destroy the minority, for the reason, that self-preservation is superior to all political obligations. That such a government as is contemplated by the before mentioned decree of the 3d of October, would destroy the people of Texas, must be evident to all, when they consider its geographical situation, so remote from the contemplated centre of legislation and power; populated as it is, by a people who are so different in education, habits, customs, languages, and local wants, from all the rest of the nation; and especially when a position of the central party have manifested violent religious and other prejudices and jealousies against them. But no national convention was convened, and the constitution has been, and now is, violated and disregarded. The constitutional authorities of the State of Coahuilla and Texas, solemnly protested against the change of government, for which act they were driven by military force from office, and imprisoned. The people of Texas protested against it, so they had a right to do, for which they have been declared rebels by the government in Mexico. However necessary, then, the basis established by the decree of the 3d of October, may be to prevent civil wars and anarchy in other parts of Mexico, it is to be effected by force and unconstitutional means. However beneficial it may be to some parts of Mexico, it would be ruinous in Texas. This view presents

the whole subject to the people. If they submit in a forcible and unconstitutional destruction of the social compact, which they have sworn to support, they disregard their duty to themselves, and violate the first law which God stamped upon the heart of men, civilized or savage; which is the law or the right of selfpreservation. The decree of the 3d October, therefore, if carried into effect, evidently leaves no remedy for Texas but resistance, secession from Mexico, and a direct to natural rights. These revolutionary measures of the party who had usurped the government of Mexico, were resisted by the people in the states of Puebla, Oaxaca, Mexico, Jalisco, and other parts of the nation. The state of Zacatecas took up arms, but its efforts were crushed by an army, headed by the president, General Santa Anna, in person; and the people of that state were disarmed, and subjected to a military government. In October last, a military force was sent to Texas, under Gen. Cos, for the purpose of enforcing these unconstitutional and revolutionary measures, as had been done in Zacatecas, and other parts of the nation. This act roused the people of Texas, and the war commenced. Without exhausting the patience by a detail of numerous other vexatious circumstances, and violations of our rights, I trust that what I have said on this point, is sufficient to show that the federal social compact of Mexico is dissolved; that we have just and sufficient cause to take arms against the revolutionary government which has been established; that we have forborne until the cup was full to overflowing; and that further forbearance or submission on our part would have been both ruinous and degrading; and that it was due to the great cause of liberty, to ourselves, to our posterity, and to the free blood which I am proud to say, fills our veins, to resist and proclaim war against such acts of usurpation and oppression. The justice of our cause being clearly shown, the next important question that naturally presents itself to the intelligent and inquiring mind, is, what are the objects and intentions of the people of Texas? To this we reply, that our object is freedom—civil and religious freedom—emancipation from that government, and that people, who, after fifteen years experiment, since they have been separated from Spain, have shown that they are incapable of self-government, and that all hopes of any thing like stability or rational liberty in their political institutions, at least for many years, are vain and fallacious. This object we expect to obtain, by a total separation from Mexico, as an independent community, a new republic, or by becoming a state of the United States. Texas would have been satisfied to have been a state of the Mexican Confederation, and she made every constitutional effort in her power to become one. But that is no longer practicable, for that confederation no longer exists. One of the two alternatives above mentioned, therefore, is the only resource which the revolutionary government of Mexico has left her. Either will secure the liberties and prosperity of Texas, for either will secure to us the right of selfgovernment over a country which we have redeemed from the wilderness, and conquered without any aid or protection whatever from the Mexican government, (for we never received any,) and which is clearly ours. Ours, by every principle on which original titles to countries are, and ever have been founded. We have explored and pioneered it, developed its resources, made it known to the world, and given to it a high and rapidly increasing value. The federal republic of Mexico had a constitutional right to participate generally in this value, but it had not, and cannot have any other; and this one has evidently been forfeited and destroyed by unconstitutional acts and usurpation, and by the total dissolution of the social compact. Consequently, the true and legal owners of Texas, the only legitimate sovereigns of that country, are the people of Texas. It is also asked, what is the present situation of Texas, and what are our resources to effect our objects, and defend our rights? The present position of Texas is an absolute Declaration of Independence—a total separation from Mexico. This declaration was made on the 7th of November last. It is as follows:

Whereas Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, and other military chieftains, have by force of arms, overthrown the federal institutions of Mexico, and dissolved the social compact which existed between Texas and the other members of the Mexican Confederacy, now the good people of Texas, availing themselves of their natural rights, SOLEMNLY DECLARE, 1st. That they have taken up arms in defence of their rights and liberties, which were threatened by encroachments of military despots, and in defence of the republican principles of the federal constitution of Mexico, of 1824. 2d. That Texas is no longer morally or civilly bound by the compact of union; yet stimulated by the generosity and sympathy common to a free people, they offer their support and assistance to such of the members of the Mexican Confederacy as will take up arms against military despotism. 3d. That they do not acknowledge that the present authorities of the nominal Mexican Republic, have the right to govern within the limits of Texas. 4th. That they will not cease to carry on war against the said authorities, whilst their troops are within the limits of Texas. 5th. That they hold it to be their right, during the disorganization of the federal system, and the reign of despotism to withdraw from the union, to establish an independent government, or to adopt such measures as they may deem best calculated to protect their rights and liberties; but that they will continue faithful to the Mexican government so long as that nation is governed by the constitution and laws, that were framed for the government of the political association. 6th. That Texas is responsible for the expenses of her armies, now in the field. 7th. That the public faith of Texas is pledged for the payment of any debts contracted by her agents. 8th. That she will reward by donations in land, all who volunteer their services in her present struggle, and receive them as citizens. These declarations we solemnly avow to the world, and call God to witness their truth and sincerity, and invoke defeat and disgrace upon our heads, should we prove guilty of duplicity. It is worthy of particular attention that this declaration affords another and unanswerable proof of the forbearance of the Texians [Texans], and of their firm adherence, even to the last moment, to the constitution which they had sworn to support, and to their political obligations as Mexican citizens. For, although at this very time the federal system and constitution of 1824, had been overturned and trampled under foot by military usurpation, in all other parts of the republic, and although our country was actually invaded by the usurpers for the purpose of subjecting us to the military rule, the people of Texas still said to the Mexican nation—restore the federal constitution and govern in conformity to the social compact, which we are all bound by our oaths to sustain, and we will continue to be a member of the Mexican Confederation. This noble and generous act, for such it certainly was, under the circumstances, is of itself sufficient to repel and silence the false charges which the priests and despots of Mexico have made of the ingratitude of the Texians. In what does this ingratitude consist? I cannot see, unless it be in our enterprise and

perseverance, in giving value to a country that the Mexicans considered valueless, and thus exciting their jealousy and cupidity. To show more strongly the absurdity of this charge of ingratitude, &c. made by the general government of Mexico, and of the pretended claims to liberality, which they set up, for having given fortunes in land to the settlers of Texas, it must be remembered, that with the exception of the first three hundred families, settled by myself, the general government have never granted or given one foot of land in Texas. The vacant land belonged to the state of Coahuila and Texas, so long as they remained united, and to Texas so soon as she was a state, separate from Coahuila. Since the adoption of the federal system in 1824, the general government have never had any power or authority whatever to grant, sell, or give any land in Texas, nor in any other state. This power was vested in the respective states. The lands of Texas have therefore been distributed by the state of Coahuila and Texas (with the exception of the three hundred families above mentioned) and not by the general government, and, consequently, it is truly absurd for that government to assume any credit for an act in which it had no participation, and more especially when it has for years past thrown every obstacle in the way, to impede the progress of Texas, as is evident from the 11th article of the law of the 6th April, 1830, which absolutely prohibited the emigration to Texas of citizens of the United States; and many other acts of a similar nature—such as vexatious custom-house regulations, passports, and garrisoning the settled parts of the country where troops were not needed to protect it from the Indians, nor from any other enemy. It is therefore clear that if any credit for liberality is due, it is to the state government, and how far it is entitled to this credit, men of judgment must decide, with the knowledge of the fact that it sold the lands of Texas, at from thirty to fifty dollars per square league, Mexican measure, which is four thousand four hundred and twenty-eight acres English, and considered they were getting a high price and full value for it. The true interpretation of this charge of ingratitude is as follows:—The Mexican government have at last discovered that the enterprising people who were induced to remove to Texas by certain promises and guaranties, have by their labours given value to Texas and its lands. An attempt is therefore now made to take them from us and to annul all those guaranties, and we are ungrateful because we are not sufficiently “docile” to submit to this usurpation and injustice as the “docile” Mexicans have in other parts of the nation. To close this matter about ingratitude, I will ask—if it was not ingratitude in the people of the United States to resist the “theory of oppression” and separate from England?—can it be ingratitude in the people of Texas to resist oppression and usurpation by separating from Mexico? To return to the declaration of the 7th of November last, it will be observed that it is a total separation from Mexico—an absolute declaration of independence—in the event of the destruction of the federal compact or system, and the establishment of centralism. This event has taken place. The federal compact is dissolved, and a central or consolidated government is established. I therefore repeat that the present position of Texas is absolute independence:—a position in which we have been placed by the unconstitutional and revolutionary acts of the Mexican government. The people of Texas firmly adhered to the last moment, to the constitution which they and the whole nation had sworn to support. The government of Mexico have not—the party now in power have overturned the constitutional government and violated their oaths—they have separated from their obligations, from their duty and from the people of Texas; and, consequently, they are the true rebels. So far from being grateful, as they ought to be, to the people of Texas for having given value to that country, and for having adhered to their duty and constitutional obligations, the Mexicans charge us with these very acts as evidence of ingratitude. Men of judgment and impartiality must decide this point, and determine who has been, and now is ungrateful, and who are the true rebels.

In order to make the position of Texas more clear to the world, a convention has been called to meet the first of March, and is no doubt, now in session, for the express purpose of publishing a positive and unqualified declaration of independence, and organizing a permanent government. Under the declaration of 7th November, a provisional government has been organized, composed of an executive head or governor, a legislative council and a judiciary. A regular army has been formed, which is now on the western frontiers prepared to repel an invasion, should one be attempted. A naval force has been fitted out, which is sufficient to protect our coast. We have met the invading force that entered Texas in October, under Gen. Cos, and beaten him in every contest and skirmish, and driven every hostile soldier out of Texas. In San Antonio de Bexar, he was entrenched in strong fortifications, defended by heavy cannon, and a strong force of regular troops, greatly superior to ours in number, which was of undisciplined militia without any experienced officer. This place was besieged by the militia of Texas. The enemy was driven into his works; his provisions cut off, and the spirits and energies of his soldiers worn down, with the loss of only one man to the Texans, and the place was then taken by storm. A son of Kentucky, a noble and brave spirit from this land of liberty and of chivalry, led the storm. [H]e conquered, and died, as such a spirit wished to die, in the cause of liberty, and in the arms of victory. Texas weeps for her Milam; Kentucky has cause to be proud of her son. His free spirit appeals to his countrymen to embark in the holy cause of liberty for which he died, and to avenge his death. I pass to an examination of the resources of Texas. We consider them sufficient to effect and sustain our independence. We have one of the finest countries in the world, a soil surpassed by none for agriculture and pasturage, not even by the fairest portions of Kentucky—a climate that my be compared to Italy; within the cotton or sugar region, intersected by navigable rivers, and bounded by the Gulf of Mexico, on which there are several fine bays and harbors suitable for all the purposes of commerce—a population of about seventy thousand, which is rapidly increasing, and is composed of men of very reputable education and property, enterprising, bold and energetic, devotedly attached to liberty and their country, inured to the exercise of arms, and at all times ready to use them, and defend their homes inch by inch if necessary. The exportations of cotton are large. Cattle, sheep and hogs are very abundant and cheap. The revenue from importations and direct taxes will be considerable, and rapidly increasing; the vacant lands are very extensive and valuable, and may be safely relied upon as a great source of revenue and as bounties to emigrants. The credit of Texas is good, as is proven by the extensive loans already negotiated. The country and army are generally well supplied with arms and ammunition, and the organized force in February last in the field exceeded two thousand, and is rapidly increasing. But besides these resources, we have one which ought not, and certainly will not fail us—it is our cause—the cause of light and liberty, of religious toleration and pure religion. To suppose that such a cause will fail, when defended by Anglo-Saxon blood, by Americans, and on the limits, and at the very door of this free and philanthropic and magnanimous nation, would be calumny against republicanism and freedom, against a noble race, and against the philanthropic principles of the people of the United States. I therefore repeat that we consider our resources sufficient to effect our independence against the Mexicans, who are disorganized and enfeebled by revolutions, and almost destitute of funds or credit. Another interesting question which naturally occurs to every one is, what great benefits and advantages are to result to philanthropy and religion, or to the people of these United States from the emancipation of Texas? To this we reply, that ours is most truly and emphatically the cause of liberty, which is the cause of philanthropy, of religion, of mankind; for in its train follow freedom of conscience, pure morality, enterprise, the arts and sciences, all that is dear to the noble minded and the free, all that renders life precious. On this principle, the Greeks and the Poles, and all others who have struggled for

liberty, have received the sympathies or aid of the people of the United States; on this principle the liberal party in priest-ridden Spain, is now receiving the aid of high-minded and free born Englishmen; on this same principle Texas expects to receive the sympathies and aid of their brethren, the people of the United States, and of the freemen of all nations. But the Greeks and the Poles are not parallel same with ours— they are not the sons and daughters of Anglo-Americans. We are. We look to this happy land as to a fond mother from whose bosom we have imbibed those great principles of liberty which are now nerving us, although comparatively few in numbers and weak in resources, to content against the whole Mexican nation in defence of our rights. The emancipation of Texas will extend the principles of self-government, over a rich and neighbouring country, and open a vast field there for enterprise, wealth, and happiness, and for those who wish to escape from the frozen blasts of a northern climate, by removing to a more congenial one. It will promote and accelerate the march of the present age, for it will open a door through which a bright and constant stream of light and intelligence will flow from this great northern fountain over the benighted regions of Mexico. That nation of our continent will be regenerated; freedom of conscience and rational liberty will take root in that distant and, by nature, much favoured land, where for ages past the banner of the inquisition, of intolerance, and of despotism has paralized, and sickened, and deadened every effort in favour of civil and religious liberty. But apart from these great principles of philanthropy, and narrowing down this question to the contracted limits of cold and prudent political calculation, a view may be taken of it, which doubtless has not escaped the penetration of the sagacious and cautious politicians of the United States. It is the great importance of Americanizing Texas, by filling it with a population from this country, who will harmonize in language, in political education, in common origin, in every thing, with their neighbours to the east and north. By this means, Texas will become a great outwork on the west, to protect the outlet of this western world, the mouths of the Mississippi, as Alabama and Florida are on the east; and to keep far away from the southwester[n] frontier—the weakest and most vulnerable in the nation—all enemies who might make Texas a door for invasion, or use it as a theatre from which mistaken philanthropists and wild fanatics, might attempt a system of intervention in the domestic concerns of the south, which might lead to a servile war, or at least jeopardize the tranquility of Louisiana and the neighbouring states. This view of the subject is a very important one, so much so that a bare allusion to it is sufficient to direct the mind to the various interests and results, immediate and remote, that are involved. To conclude, I have shown that our cause is just and righteous, that it is the great cause of mankind, and as such merits the approbation and moral support of this magnanimous and free people. That our object is independence, as a new republic, or to become a state of these United States; that our resources are sufficient to sustain the principles we are defending; that the results will be the promotion of the great cause of liberty, of philanthropy, and religion, and the protection of a great and important interest to the people of the United States. With these claims to the approbation and moral support of the free of all nations, the people of Texas have taken up arms in self-defence, and they submit their cause to the judgement of an impartial world, and to the protection of a just and omnipotent God. Source: The Avalon Project. Available online at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/texind01.asp.

“A Foreigner in My Own Land”: Juan Nepomuceno Seguín Flees Texas (1842)

Juan Nepomuceno Seguín was born into a prominent Tejano family and had close ties with Stephen Austin, leader of the first American settlers in Texas. As Anglos began to gain control in the region, however, Seguín began to recognize Tejanos’ tenuous situation. This fear was manifest when Seguín’s enemies denounced him as a spy and he was forced to flee to Mexico in 1842. Those Tejanos who remained in Texas often found their livestock and corn stolen; others had their land taken in disputes. Seguín returned north after the Mexican War and wrote his memoirs in part to clear his name, and also to explain the conflicted position of Mexican Texans. The tokens of esteem, arid evidences of trust and confidence, repeatedly bestowed upon me by the Supreme Magistrate, General Rusk, and other dignitaries of the Republic, could not fail to arouse against me much invidious and malignant feeling. The jealousy evinced against me by several officers of the companies recently arrived at San Antonio, from the United States, soon spread amongst the American straggling adventurers, who were already beginning to work their dark intrigues against the native families, whose only crime was, that they owned large tracts of land and desirable property. John W. Smith, a bitter enemy of several of the richest families of San Antonio, by whom he had been covered with favors, joined the conspiracy which was organized to ruin me. I will also point out the origin of another enmity which on several occasions, endangered my life. In those evil days, San Antonio was swarming with adventurers from every quarter of the globe. Many a noble heart grasped the sword in the defence of the liberty of Texas, cheerfully pouring out their blood for our cause, and to them everlasting public gratitude is due; but there were also many bad men, fugitives from their country, who found in this land an open field for their criminal designs. San Antonio claimed then, as it claims now, to be the first city of Texas; it was also the receptacle of the scum of society. My political and social situation, brought me into continual contact with that class of people. At every hour of the day and night, my countrymen ran to me for protection against the assaults or exactions of those adventurers. Sometimes, by persuasion, I prevailed on them to desist; some times, also, force had to be resorted to. How could I have done other wise? Were not the victims my own countrymen, friends and associates? Could I leave them defenceless, exposed to the assaults of foreigners, who, on the pretext that they were Mexicans, treated them worse than brutes. Sound reason and the dictates, of humanity would, have precluded a different conduct on my part.… 1842. After the retreat of the Mexican army under Santa Anna, until [the] Vasquez invasion in 1842, the war between Texas and Mexico ceased to be carried on actively. Although open commercial intercourse did not exist, it was carried on by smuggling, at which the Mexican authorities used to wink, provided it was not carried on too openly, so as to oblige them to notice it, or so extensively as to arouse their avarice. In the beginning of this year, I was elected Mayor of San Antonio. Two years previously a gunsmith, named Goodman, had taken possession of certain houses situated on the Military Plaza, which were the property of the city. He used to shoe the horses of the volunteers who passed, through San Antonio, and thus accumulated a debt against the Republic, for the payment of which he applied to the President to give him possession of the buildings referred to, which had always been known as city property. The board of Aldermen passed a resolution to the effect, that Goodman should be compelled to leave the premises; Goodman resisted, alleging that the houses had been given to him by the President, in payment for public services. The Board could not, of course, acknowledge in the President any power to dispose of the city property, and consequently directed me to carry the resolution into effect. My compliance with the instructions of the Board caused Goodman to become my most bitter and inveterate enemy in the city.

The term for the mortgage that Messrs. Ogden and Howard held on my property, had run out. In order to raise money and comply with my engagements, I determined to go to Mexico for a drove of sheep. But fearful that this new trip would prove as fatal as the one already alluded to, I wrote to General Vasquez, who was then in command of the Mexican frontier, requesting him to give me a pass. The tenor of Vasquez’ answer caused me to apprehend that an expedition was preparing against Texas, for the following month of March. I called, a session of the Board of Aldermen, (of which the Hon. S. A. Maverick was a member,) and laid before them the communication of General Vasquez, stating, that according to my construction of the letter we might soon [see] the approach of the Mexicans. A few days afterwards, Don Jose Maria Garcia, of Laredo, came to San Antonio; his report was so circumstantial, as to preclude all possible doubts as to the near approach of Vasquez to San Antonio[.] Notice was immediately sent to the Government of the impending danger. In the various meetings held to devise means of defence, I expressed my candid opinion as to the impossibility of defending San Antonio. I observed, that for myself; I was going to the town of Seguin, and advised every one to do the same. On leaving the city, I passed through a street where some men were making breastworks; I stated to them that I was going to my ranch, and thence to Seguin, in case the Mexican forces should take possession of San Antonio. From the Nueces river, Vasquez forwarded a proclamation by Arista, to the inhabitants of Texas. I received at my ranch, a bundle of those proclamations, which I transmitted at once to the Corporation of San Antonio. As soon as Vasquez entered the city, those who had determined upon defending the place, withdrew to Seguin. Amongst them were Dunn and Chevallie, who had succeeded in escaping from the hands of the Mexicans, into which they had fallen while on a reconnoitering expedition on the Medina. The latter told me that Vasquez and his officers stated that I was in favor of the Mexicans; and Chevallie further added that, one day as he was talking with Vasquez, a man, named Sanchez, came within sight, whereupon the General observed: “You see that man! Well, Colonel Seguin sent him to me, when he was at Rio Grande. Seguin is with us.” He then drew a letter from his pocket, stating that it was from me. Chevallie asked to be allowed to see it, as he knew my handwriting, but the General refused and cut short the interview. On my return to San Antonio, several person[s] told me that the Mexican officers had declared that I was in their favor. This rumor, and some threats uttered against me by Goodman, left me but little doubt that my enemies would try to ruin me. Some of the citizens of San Antonio had taken up arms in favor of the enemy. Judge Hemphill advised me to have them arrested and tried, but as I started out with the party who went in pursuit of the Mexicans, I could not follow his advice. Having observed that Vasquez gained ground on us, we fell back on the Nueces river. When we came back, to San Antonio, reports were widely spreading about my pretended treason. Captain Manuel Flores, Lieutenant Ambrosio Rodriguez, Matias Curbier, and five or six other Mexicans, dismounted with me to find out the origin of the imposture. I went out with several friends leaving Curbier in my house. 1 had reached the Main Plaza, when several persons came running to inform me, that some Americans were murdering Curbier. We ran back to the house, where we found poor Curbier covered with blood. On being asked who assaulted him, he answered, that the gunsmith. Goodman, in company with several Americans, had struck him with a rifle. A few minutes afterwards, Goodman returned to my house, with about thirty volunteers, but, observing that we were prepared to meet them, they did not attempt to attack us. We went out of the house and then to Mr. Guilbeau’s, who offered me his protection. He went out into the street, pistol in hand, and succeeded in dispersing the mob, which had formed in front of my house. Mr. John

Twohig offered me a shelter for that night; on the next morning, I went under disguise to Mr. Van Ness’ house; Twohig, who recognised me in the street, warned me to “open my eyes.” I remained one day at Mr. Van Ness’; next day General Burleson arrived at San Antonio, commanding a respectable force of volunteers. I presented myself to him, asking for a Court of Inquiry; he answered, that there were no grounds for such proceedings. In the evening I went to the camp, and jointly with Colonel Patton, received a commission to forage for provisions in the lower ranchos. I complied with this trust. I remained, hiding from rancho to rancho, for over fifteen days. Every party, of volunteers en route to San Antonio declared, “they wanted to kill Seguin.” I could no longer go from farm to farm, and determined to go to my own farm and raise fortifications, &c. Several of my relatives and friends joined me. Hardly a day elapsed without receiving notice that a party was preparing to attack me; we were constantly kept under arms. Several parties came in sight, but, probably seeing that we were prepared to receive them, refrained from attacking. On the 30th of April, a friend from San Antonio sent me word that Captain Scott, and his company, were coming down by the river, burning the ranchos on their way. The inhabitants of the lower ranchos called on us for aid against Scott. With those in my house, and others to the number of about 100, I started to lend them aid, I proceeded, observing the movements of Scott, from the function of the Medina to Pajaritos. At that place we dispersed and I returned to my wretched life. In those days I could not go to San Antonio without peril of my life. Matters being in this state, I saw that it was necessary to take some step which would place me in security, and save my family from constant wretchedness. I had to leave Texas, abandon all, for which I had fought and spent my fortune, to become a wanderer. The ingratitude of those, who had assumed to themselves the right of convicting me; their credulity in declaring me a traitor, on mere rumors, when I had to plead, in my favor the loyal patriotism with which I had always served Texas, wounded me deeply. But, before leaving my country, perhaps fo[r] ever, I determined to consult with all those interested in my welfare. I held, a family council. All were in favor of my removing for some time to the interior of Texas. But, to accomplish this, there were some unavoidable obstacles. I could not take one step, from my ranch towards the Brazos, without being exposed to the rifle of the first person who might meet me, for, through the whole country, credit had been given to the rumors against me. To emigrate with my family was impossible, as I was a ruined man, from the time of the invasion of Santa Anna and our flight to Nacogdoches, furthermore, the country of the Brazos was unhealthier than that of Nacogdoches, and what might, we not expect to suffer from disease in a new country, and without friends or means. Seeing that all these plans were impracticable, I resolved to seek a refuge amongst my enemies, braving all dangers. But before taking this step, I sent in my resignation to the Corporation of San Antonio, as Mayor of the city, stating to them, that, unable any longer to suffer the persecutions of some ungrateful Americans, who strove to murder me, I had determined to free my family and friends from their continual misery on my account; and go and live peaceably in Mexico. That for these reason’s I resigned my office, with all my privileges and honors as a Texan. I left Bexar without any engagements towards Texas, my services paid by persecutions, exiled and deprived of my privileges as a Texan citizen, I was in this country a being out of the pale of society, and when she could not protect the [r]ights of her citizens, they seek protection elsewhere. I had been tried by a rabble, condemned without a hearing, and consequently was at liberty to provide for my own safety.… REMARKS

After the expeditions of General Woll, I did not return to Texas till the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. During my absence nothing appeared that could stamp me as a traitor. My enemies had accomplished their object; they had killed me politically in Texas, and the less they spoke of me, the less risk they incurred of being exposed in the infamous means they had used to accomplish my ruin.… The rumor, that I was a traitor, was seized with avidity; by my enemies in San Antonio. Some envied my position, as held by a Mexican; others found in me an obstacle to the accomplishment of their villainous plans. The number of land suits which still encumbers the docket of Bexar county would indicate the nature of plans, and any one, who has listened to the evidence elicited in cases of this description, will readily discover the base means adopted to deprive rightful owners of their property.… I have finished my memoirs; I neither have the capacity nor the desire to adorn my acts with literary phrases. I have attempted a short and clear narrative of my public life, in relation to Texas. I give it publicity, without omi[t]ting or suppressing anything that I thought of the least interest, and confidently I submit to the public verdict. Several of those who witnessed the facts which I have related, are still alive and amongst us; they can state whether I have in any way falsified the record. Source: Seguin, Juan Nepomuceno. Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin (San Antonio, TX: Ledger Book and Job Office, 1858), 18– 27, 29–32.

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s Account of His Imprisonment During the Bear Flag Revolt in California (1846) In June 1846, a group of 33 American settlers captured the garrison at Sonoma and declared their independence from Mexico. Captain John C. Frémont, leader of the so-called Bear Flag Revolt, had Vallejo and his brother arrested and sent to Sutter’s Fort, where they were imprisoned for two months. Vallejo and his brother were poorly treated and their health endangered, and much of Vallejo’s property was stolen or damaged during the revolt. Nevertheless, Vallejo was an advocate of American annexation of California and gave assistance to Anglo-Americans when he could. Despite this assistance, Vallejo was eventually stripped of nearly all of his fortune and influence. He wrote his “true history” of California in part to counter a previous history that glorified Frémont and his men. All during the first week of the month of June various interviews took place between Captain Fremont and his compatriots. What passed between them is not public knowledge, but if the antecedents may be drawn from what followed, it is easy to presume that they were perfecting the plans they thought most appropriate for seizing Alta California and devising the means to come off victorious in their undertaking. That such may have been the object of their frequent meeting is proved by the fact that on the afternoon of June 11th Fremont and his men, without a previous declaration of war and under no other pretext than their own caprice or necessity, seized the three hundred horses (two hundred of which belonged to the Indians emancipated from San Rafael exmission, the interests of whom were managed by Timothy Murphy) which on the account and by the order of Commanding General Castro were grazing to the north of the Cosumnes River in charge of Lieutenant Francisco Arce and several soldiers. This was the first hostile act that Captain Fremont committed against the property of the inhabitants of California, and although the enormity of his conduct is somewhat mitigated by the fact of his having allowed the cowboys to return to San Jose mounted upon the horses, the impartial historian should not for that reason [f]ail to censure in severe terms a soldier who belies his glorious mission and becomes a leader of thieves. In spite of my desire to palliate as much as I can the conduct of the individuals who

participated in the theft of the Indians horses, I cannot but stigmatize them with the anathema which society fulminates against those who without legal right to do so appropriate the property of others. After distributing the horses as they thought most advantageous to their plans, gentlemen under Captain Fremonts command took the road leading through the Napa Hills to Sonoma and at dawn on the fourteenth of June they surrounded my house located on the plaza at Sonoma. At daybreak they raised the shout of alarm and when I heard it, I looked out of my bedroom window. To my great surprise, I made out groups of armed men scattered to the right and left of my residence. The recent arrivals were not in uniform, but were all armed and presented a fierce aspect. Some of them wore on their heads a visorless cap of coyote skin, some a low-crowned plush hat, [and] some a red cotton handkerchief. As for the balance of the clothing of the assaulters of my residence, I shall not attempt to describe it, for I acknowledge that I am incapable of doing the task justice. I suspected that the intruders had intentions harmful not to my [property] interests alone, but to my life and that of the members [o]f my family. I realized that my situation was desperate. My wife advised me to try and flee by the rear door, but I told her that such a step was unworthy and that under no circumstances could I decide to desert my young family at such a critical time. I had my uniform brought, dressed quickly and then ordered the large vestibule door thrown open. The house was immediately filled with armed men. I went with them into the parlor of my residence. I asked them what the trouble was and who was heading the party, but had to repeat that question a second time, because almost all of those who were in the parlor replied at once, “Here we are all heads.” When I again asked with whom I should take the matter up, they pointed out William B. Ide who was the eldest of all. I then addressed that gentleman and informed him that I wanted to know to what happy circumstance I owed the visit of so many individuals. In reply he stated that both Captain Merritt and the other gentlemen who were in his company had decided not to continue living any longer under the Mexican government, whose representatives, Castro and Pio Pico, did not respect the rights of American citizens living in the Departamento; that Castro was every once in a while issuing proclamations treating them all as bandits and, in a desire to put a stop to all these insults, they had decided to declare California independent; that while he held none but sentiments of regard for me, he would be forced to take me prisoner along with all my family. We were at this point when there appeared in the room don Salvador Vallejo, don Pepe de la Rosa, Jacob P. Leese, and don Victor Prudon, all friends of mine for whom an order of arrest was suggested until it was decided what should be my fate. I thought for a moment that through some sacrifice on my part I might get rid of so many and such little desired guests, but my hopes were frustrated by the unworthy action of the Canadian, Olivier Beaulieu, who, knowing from his own experiences that liquor is an incentive for all kinds of villainous acts, had gone to his house and procured there a barrel full of brandy, which he distributed among the companions of Merritt and Ide. Once under the influence of the liquor, they forgot the chief object of their mission and broke into shouts of “Get the loot, get the loot!” Fortunately, these seditious cries emitted by Scott, Beaulieu, Sears and others attracted the attention of Doctor Semple who stepped very angrily to the door of the entrance vestibule and by means of a speech of much feeling, in which there were not threats, gave them to understand that he would kill the first man who by committing robbery would cast a blot upon the expedition he had helped organize to advance a political end and that, so long as he was alive, he would not allow it to be turned into a looting expedition.… Shortly after Lieutenant Misroons arrival at Sonoma, he endeavored to enter into extra-official relations with William B. Ide and the companions of that impoverished commander, but his advances met with no response, because Ide and the others sheltered under the fateful “Bear Flag” did not leave the barracks, the entrance to which was protected by nine cannon of different calibers that they had taken

away from me at dawn on June 14th and which they kept loaded to the muzzle. These were all in charge of their respective gunners (the artillerymen did not know their business, for they had been improvised) who never for a single instant relaxed their vigilance over the war materials of which they had been left in charge. When Lieutenant Misroon had arranged everything as best he could, he left instructions for his subordinate and returned on board the frigate “Portsmouth,” where it is to be presumed that he submitted to Captain Montgomery an account of all he had heard and witnessed at Sonoma. Shortly after Doctor Semple had set out for the Sacramento, the plaza at Sonoma was taken in charge by William B. Ide, whom the rest of the force that had invaded my residence had agreed to obey. The number of those who along with William B. Ide remained in charge of the Sonoma garrison was at least fifty. I am aware that various historians have fixed the number at eighteen, but I absolutely know that they are in error. It only remains to determine whether the mistake has been accidental or intentional. I am of the opinion that it has been intentional, for it seems that a hidden but powerful hand has taken great pains to garble all the facts relative to the capture of the Sonoma plaza by the group of adventurers to whom history has given the name of “The Bear Flag Party.” I, who was made the chief victim those patriotic gentlemen sacrificed upon the altar of their well-laid plans, have no interest whatsoever in bespattering them with mud, nor do I aspire to ennoble myself at the expense of their reputation. All I desire is that the impartial public may know what took place at Sonoma on fateful June 14th, 1846, and that it may, after learning all there is to know in regard to this scandalous violation of law that deprived of liberty those who for years had been making countless sacrifices to redeem from the hands of the barbarous heathen the territory known as the Sonoma Frontier, decide in favor of one or the other of the participants in the events I have just related. All I demand is that the decision arrived at may be upon a basis of fact. On the fourth day that Mr. Ide was in command at the Sonoma plaza and when he saw that a great number of Americans and foreigners had hurried in to place themselves under his protection, being fearful lest the Californians would attack them on their ranchos should they continue to live scattered over the country, he issued a document in which he set forth the reasons that had impelled him to refuse to recognize the authority of the Mexican government. The original proclamation, which was very brief, merely stated that, since the lives of foreigners were in imminent danger, he had felt it his duty to declare Alta California independent and that, counting as he did upon the definite support and cooperation of the “fighting men” who had rallied around him, he aimed to do all he could to prevent the Californians or the Mexicans from recovering the military post and arms which the valor of his men had seized from them. This is approximately what “Captain” Ide read aloud before the flagpole in the Sonoma plaza. I am fully aware that the original proclamation was destroyed and that a few weeks later another was drawn up which, it was said, contained a list of the wrongs which the Mexican authorities had perpetrated against United States citizens. After the reading of the Commander-in-chiefs proclamation, they proceeded with great ceremony to hoist the flag by virtue of which those who had assaulted my home and who had by that time appropriated to themselves two hundred fifty muskets and nine cannon proposed to carry on their campaign. This flag was nothing more nor less than a strip of white cotton stuff with a red edge and upon the white part, almost in the center, were written the words “California Republic.” Also on the white part, almost in the center, there was painted a bear with lowered head. The bear was so badly painted, however, that it looked more like [a] pig than a bear. The material for the flag was furnished, according to some, by Mrs. Elliot; according to others by Mrs. Sears. I also heard it said that Mrs. Grigsby furnished it.

Those who helped to prepare, sew and paint the flag were the following young men: Alexander Todd, Thomas Cowie and Benjamin Duell. The latter was the one who suggested that a star be painted near the mouth of the bear. Of course, both the bear and the star were very badly drawn, but that should not be wondered at, if one takes into consideration the fact that they lacked brushes and suitable colors. The running up of this queer flag caused much fear to the families of the Californians established in the neighborhood of Sonoma, Petaluma and San Rafael, for they realized that the instigators of the uprising that had disturbed the tranquility of the frontier had made up their minds to rule, come what might, and, as the rumor had been spread far and wide that Ide and his associates had raised the bear flag in order to enjoy complete liberty and not be obliged to render any account of their activities to any civilized governments, the ranchers, who would have remained unperturbed should the American flag have been run up in Sonoma and who would have considered it as the harbinger of a period of progress and enlightenment, seized their machetes and guns and fled to the woods, determined to await a propitious moment for getting rid of the disturbers of the peace. Strange to relate, the first victim that the ranchers sacrificed was the painter of the “Bear Flag,” young Thomas Cowie who, along with P. Fowler, was on his way to Fitchs ranch to get one-eyed Moses Carson (brother of the famous explorer Colonel Kit Carson), who was employed as an overseer by Captain Henry Fitch, to give them a half barrel of powder he had locked up [in] one of the storage closets of his farmhouse. Fowler and Cowie were taken by surprise at the Yulupa Rancho by the party operating under the command of Captains Padilla and Ramon Carrillo, who at the request of the people had assumed direction of the hostilities it had been decided to undertake against “the Bears.” Neither of the two extemporaneous commanders thought it right to take the lives of their young captives, upon whom there had been found letters that proved beyond any doubt that Moses Carson and certain others of the Americans employed at the Fitch Ranch were in accord with Ide, Merritt and others of those who had made up their minds to put at end to Mexican domination in California; so they decided to tie them up to a couple of trees while they deliberated as to what should be done with the captives, whose fate was to be decided at the meeting that night to which had been summoned all the ranchers who by their votes had shared in entrusting command of the Californian forces to those wealthy citizens, Padilla and Carrillo. I am of the opinion that the lives of Cowie and Fowler would have been spared, had it not been that a certain Bernardo Garcia, better known under the name of “Three-fingered Jack,” taken advantage of the darkness of the night, approached the trees to which the captives were tied and put an end to their existence with his well-sharpened dagger. After committing the two murders I have just told about, Bernardo Garcia entered the lonely hut in which Padilla, Carrillo and others had met and were discussing as to what disposition should be made of the prisoners. Without waiting for them to ask him any questions, he said to his compatriots, “I thought you here were going to decide to free the prisoners and, as that is not for the good of my country, I got ahead of you and took the lives of the Americans who were tied to the trees.” Those few words, spoken with the greatest of sangfroid by the wickedest man that California had produced up to that time, caused all who heard him to shudder. No one dared to object to what had been done, however, for they knew that such a step would have exposed them to falling under the knife of the dreaded Bernardo Garcia, who for years past had been the terror of the Sonoma frontier. Equally with the relatives of the unfortunate youths, Cowie and Fowler, I regretted their premature death, for, in spite of the fact that they belonged to a group of audacious men who had torn me from the bosom of my family and done as they pleased with my horses, saddles and arms, I did not consider that the simple fact that they were the bearers of a few letters made them deserving of the supreme penalty. Until that fatal June 21st, neither they nor their companions had shed any Mexican blood and it was not

right for the Mexicans to begin a war a outrance, that could not help but bring very grievous consequences upon them and their families.… When we reached New Helvetia, the Canadian, Alexis, who was heading our escort, gave three knocks upon the main gate with his lance and it was immediately thrown open by Captain Sutter, who, feigning surprise at seeing us as prisoners, led us into his living quarters. He then promised to comply with the orders that Captain Fremont had delivered to him by the mouth of his lieutenant, Alexis, who had said in our presence, “Captain Fremont is turning these gentlemen over to you for you to keep as prisoners behind these walls and upon your own responsibility.” “All right,” said Sutter, and without any further ceremony he turned to us and suggested that we accompany him to a large room situated on the second floor where the only furniture was a kind of rude benches. When we were all inside this room, Sutter locked the door and thought no more about us that night. I leave my readers to imagine how we cursed at finding ourselves locked up in a narrow room and forced to sleep upon the floor, without a mattress and without a blanket, even without water with which to quench our burning thirst. There, seated upon a bench, I ran over in my mind all that I had witnessed since that fatal June 14th and I assure you I regretted very much not having accepted the offer of that brave captain of militia, don Cayetano Juarez, had ordered made to me through his brother Vicente Juarez. On June 14, 1846, Captain Juarez was at his Tulcay hacienda, when he learned that a group of adventurers had assaulted the Sonoma plaza. No sooner did he learn of it than, arming himself, he came to an understanding with Citizens Victorino Altamirano, Antonio Wilson, Vicente and Francisco Juarez, Andres Vaca, Pancho Cibrian and others. He went and took up a position in Portezuelo Pass, where he awaited the reply that was to be brought to him by a brother of his whom he had sent, disguised as a woman, to take up a position where I was to pass and ask me if I desired that he (Cayetano Juarez) should make an effort to snatch me from the hands of my guards. I do not recall what it was that caused me to refuse the generous offer of that devoted soldier who had made up his mind to risk his life to procure my freedom. I think that I was influenced above all by the thought I held as to the misfortunes that would inevitably overtake my family, if Captain Juarez and his friends had killed the comrades of those who had remained behind in Sonoma in possession of the plaza and war materials. My repentance came too late, for I was in the hands of a foresworn man, a foreigner who had received many favors from me and mine, [but] who had deliberately forgotten them all and, to cap the climax of [his] infamy, had consented to become my jailor, in order to curry favor with a lot of men who had nothing to their names but an extraordinary dose of boldness, who were not fighting under any recognized flag, and who apparently had no other object than robbery and looting. After a sleepless night, I greeted the dawn of the new day with enthusiasm, for we were by then beginning to experience the urge of a voracious appetite. Our jailor, however, who had doubtless made up his mind to make us drain the last drop of gall which a perverse fate had meted out to us, sent us no food until eleven oclock in the morning, at which time he came and opened the door to permit the entrance of an Indian carrying a jar filled with broth and pieces of meat. He did not send us a spoon, knives and forks, for Captain Sutter no doubt thought that since we had lost our liberty we had also ceased to retain our dignity. Such behavior on the part of a companion in arms (at that time Captain Sutter was still an official of the Mexican Government) could not help but inspire our disgust, for we all recognized the insult that he was inflicting upon us by taking advantage of the circumstances. There are times in life, however, when man should resign himself to suffering every kind of adversity. Doubtless, God had decreed that the month of June, 1846, should be the blackest month of my life.

Four days after our arrival at New Helvetia, Citizen Julio Carrillo appeared at that place. Furnished with a passport issued to him by Lieutenant Misroon, he had undertaken the journey to bring me news of my family. Inasmuch as my jailors did not have any great respect for officials of the United States, they paid no attention to the passport and locked senor Carrillo up in the same room in which I was enjoying Captain Sutters hospitality, along with Victor Prudon, Jacob Leese and Salvador Vallejo. I regretted very much the imprisonment of that friend who, moved by a desire to put an end to my wifes worry, had undertaken the dangerous mission of entering the enemys camp.… Some years ago (in 1868) when I was in Monterey, my friend, David Spence, showed me a book entitled “History of California,” written by an author of recognized merit by the name of Franklin Tuthill, and called my attention to that part of the gentlemans narrative where he expresses the assurance that the guerrilla men whom Captain Fremont sent in pursuit of the Californian, Joaquin de la Torre, took nine field pieces from the latter. I could not help but be surprised when I read such a story, for I know for a fact that Captain de la Torre had only thirty cavalrymen under his command who as their only weapons carried a lance, carbine, saber and pistol. I think that Mr. Tuthill would have done better if, instead of inventing the capture of nine cannon, he had devoted a few lines to describing the vandal-like manner in which the “Bear” soldiers sacked the Olompalí Rancho and maltreated the eighty year old Damaso Rodriguez, alférez retired, whom they beat so badly as to cause his death in the presence of his daughters and granddaughters. Filled with dismay, they gathered into their arms the body of the venerable old man who had fallen as a victim of the thirst for blood that was the prime mover of the guerrilla men headed by Mr. Ford. I should indeed like to draw a veil over such a black deed, but the inexorable impartiality that is the guiding light of the historian prevents me from passing over a fact that so helps to reveal the true character of the men who on June 14, 1846, assaulted the plaza at Sonoma at a time when its garrison was in the central part of the Departamento busy curbing raids by the barbarous heathen. Let my readers not think that it is my desire to open up wounds that have healed over by now. I am very far from harboring any such thought, for ever since Alta California became a part of the great federation of the United States of North [America], I have spared no effort to establish upon a solid and enduring basis those sentiments of union and concord which are so indispensible for the progress and advancement of all those who dwell in my native land, and, so long as I live, I propose to use all the means at my command to see to it that both races cast a stigma upon the disagreeable events that took place on the Sonoma frontier in 1846. If before I pass on to render an account of my acts to the Supreme Creator, I succeed in being a witness to a reconciliation between victor and vanquished, conquerors and conquered, I shall die with the conviction of not having striven in vain. In bringing this chapter to a close, I will remark that, if the men who hoisted the “Bear Flag” had raised the flag that Washington sanctified by his abnegation and patriotism, there would have been no war on the Sonoma frontier, for all our minds were prepared to give a brotherly embrace to the sons of the Great Republic, whose enterprising spirit had filled us with admiration. Illadvisedly, however, as some say, or dominated by a desire to rule without let or hindrance, as others say, they placed themselves under the shelter of a flag that pictured a bear, an animal that we took as the emblem of rapine and force. This mistake was the cause of all the trouble, for when the Californians saw parties of men running over their plains and forests under the “Bear Flag,” they thought that they were dealing with robbers and took the steps they thought most effective for the protection of their lives and property. Source: Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe. Historical and Personal Memoirs Relating to Alta California [Recuerdos Historicos y Personales Tocante a la Alta California (1875)]. Translated by Earl R. Hewitt. Vol. 5: 1845–1848, 87–90, 93–98, 101–103, 106–107.

Samuel Chamberlain’s Recollections of the Mexican War (1846) When the United States initiated a war with Mexico in hopes of acquiring territory, the country was divided about both its legitimacy and its ramifications. Some Southerners desired the war to bring additional slave territory into the Union, but others worried that the inclusion of new territories with “inferior races” would complicate the social hierarchy. Many Northerners viewed the war as an unjustified act of aggression intended to increase the power of Southern slaveholders while others saw the positive benefits an inclusion of California could have on the trade with Asia. As New Englander Samuel Chamberlain’s recollections of his participation in General Zachary Taylor’s pursuit of retreating Mexican forces in 1846 reveal, the belief in an American empire was not limited to a particular geographic region. THE FALL OF MONTEREY. At daylight on the morning of the 23rd. the column to assault the northern part of the town was formed inside the “Half Moon Battery.” They presented a strange and terrific appearance, faces, and clothes all covered with a mixture of mud, morter, powder and blood, eyes bloodshot, with a hungery savage look which was truly fearful. Their costumes and arms added to the Banditti like effect of the command. There was Rangers dressed in the mountain-man suits of buckskin, in Red shirts, Blue shirts, Mexican leather jackets, and serapas; Louisiana volunteers, each clothed as his fancy dictated, regular Dragoons, Artillery, and Infantry armed with “Kentucky Rifles,” double-barrelled shot Guns, Winsor Rifles, Harper’s Ferry Muskets, Carbines, Revolvers, Holster Pistols, Sabres, Swords, Axes, and Bowie Knives. A look of determination was on each countenance, as they gazed on the City lying so quiet below. Rumors had reached us of defeat and disaster to our forces that attacked the eastern part of town, that we had met with terrible loss, and that Gen Taylor was even in full retreat for Camargo, leaving us to our Fate. What gave apparrent credence to this rumor, was the quietness that reigned in town and non-appearence of our army toward Walnut Springs. Not a tent or a wagon was in sight. The green, white and red Banner of Mexico floated over the Black Fort, the Cathedral and other places. In the plain to our left near the Rancho San Jeromino we could see a large force of the Enemy’s Lancers, and their pickets extended as far as we could see beyond the Citadel. All remained quiet for hours! waiting, waiting, hungry and savage. Gen. Worth appeared anxious and nervious; he ascended the tower of the Palace, and with his glass scanned the defiant stronghold below. About nine o’cl’k A.M., the nine Pounder captured in Fort Soldado opened on the town, and at ten o’clock a heavy firing that commenced on the eastern side of Monterey informed us that rumor lied! that Taylor was still there! We were organized in two columns, one to take the right hand street Calle de Monterey under the command of Col. Hays, the other to enter the city to the left by the Calle de Iturbide under Lieut Col. Walker. I was with the latter. Finally the word was given and with a roar like that of wild beasts, the two columns dashed down the hill and entered the city. Our column penetrated as far as the square “Plazuela de la Came,” and then we found ourselves in a hornet’s nest; every house was a fort that belched forth a hurricane of ball; the flat roofs surmounted by breastworks of sand bags were covered with soldiers who could pour down a distructive fire in safety; the windows of iron barred “Rejas” were each vomiting forth fire and death. On we went at a run, stung to madness at not being able to retaliate on our hidden foes, we gained a large square, the “Plaza de la Capella,” when artillery opened on us with canester! The heavy stone wall of a churchyard was embrasured for their guns, while a scaffold was erected from which infantry were posted who kept up a constant fire. Our men were falling fast, and not a Mexican hit; they were all under cover, our fire was only waisted on their stone walls. I was close to Col. Walker when a column of Mexican Infantry came round the corner of the church

and at double quick charged us with the bayonet. We were in a tight fix, not twenty rangers were in the square. Fortuneatly our arms were all loaded and we made every shot tell, but we were compelled to give ground; our men flocked in, and two six P’drs of McCall’s Battery came up at a gal-lop, unlimbered within twenty yard[s] of the Mexican line, and gave them double doses of canister. This proved too much for our brave foes; they gave back and soon run, we close at their heels, and in the rush we captured the church of Santer Maria and the fortified yard. The enemy succeeded in hauling off their guns, their infantry charge was probably made to cover this movement. We halted under shelter of the walls of the church, and could hear the explosion of firearms and shouts on the street to our right, giving us to understand the resistance that the other column was meeting with. Our wounded were taken care of by surgeons who kept with us, the Mexican’s were quietly disposed of by those humane fellows, the Texan Rangers. Reforming, we dashed around the church, and found the street barracaded, and the same infernal fire was again poured in to us; we rushed over the breast-work, and wild yells charged up the street, men dropping every moment. It would have required Salamanders to withstand the fire that scorch[ed] us on every side. Our run came down to a walk, our walk to a general seeking of shelter in doors and passages. I stuck to Walker, who had gained my boyish esteem in speaking a kind and cheerful word to me in the terrible storming of Independence Hill. About a dozzen of us with Col. Walker were hugging a door mighty close, when a volly was fired through it from the inside. Three of our party fell. By order of the Colonel, two men with axes hewed away at the stout oak plank. Another volly was fired, when one of the axemen with a deep curse dropped his axe, a ball had broke the bone of his arm. Walker took his place, and soon the barrier gave way, and we rushed in. Some eight or ten hard looking “hombres” tried to escape through a back way, but they were cut down to a man. No quarter was given. In a back room we found some women and children who were not molested. Pickaxes and Crowbars were sent to us, also some six P’dr shells. A house on the other side of the street was forced and our men were all soon under cover. Our advance was now systematized; one party composed of the best shots ascended to the roof, and now on equal terms renewed the fight. The rest tore holes in the limestone partitions that divided the blocks into houses, then a lighted shell was thrown in, an explosion would follow, when we would rush and we generaly left from two to six dead greassers. We found plenty of eatables and large quantities of wine, and one house was a “Pulque” Fonda, or liquor store. To pre-vent us from getting drunk, the liquor was reported as poisoned, but we were not to be beat in that way; we would make a greasser drink some of each kind, no ill effects appearing, we would imbibe, while the “assayer” would be dispatched by a sabre thrust. When Mexicans were scarce, we used a Dutch artilleryman whose imperfect knowledge of our language prevented him from understanding why we gave him the first drink! and why we watched his countenance with so much anxiety. But the only bad effect it had was to get the Dutchman dead drunk, and the glorious so-so.… We reached a corner house of a block, as usual it was a “corner grocery” full of wine, aquadenta and Mescal. On the opposite side of the street we had to cross, was another of those infernal fortified stone walls, enclosing a house a fort in its self. It was now 3. P.M., all firing had ceased in the eastern part of the town, and from the loud cries of defiance, and increased boldness of our foes, we were sattisfied that they had been largely re-enforced. Things were getting desperate, the men were all getting crazy drunk and unmanagble. With words of cheer, Walker orderd the door of the Shop to be thrown open and a dash made for the wall. The fire was so blinding that we held our heads down and shut our eyes, “going it blind.” One fine young fellow, a Texan named Lockridge, had been with me all day, in this affair he wraped a Mexican blanket around his head, and Bowieknife in hand led the charge. Our foes met the rush with so heavy a fire that the air seemd to rain balls. Bullets striking on the stone pavements and walls,

ricochet and glancing from side to side, as we staggerd on. At least a regiment of infantry came up a side street, poured their fire in our flank, and then charged us with the bayonet. All fought now on his own hook, and fought more like devils, than human beings, with axes, club’d rifles, sabre and Bowieknife. We held them for a moment, then, inch-by-inch we gave ground. My Carbine and Hoster pistol were lost in the Bishop’s Palace, and I fought with my sabre alone. I was no doubt badly scarte, but I laid about me in great fury, yelling like a fiend, and when a soldier run on to the point of my weapon, which came out at his back, I considered myself quite a hero. Lockridge, whose huge knife was driping with gore, noticing the act, cried out “Well done honey! nothing like the cold steel for greassers.” I had now that tiger thirst for blood that will take possession of a man when engaged in close conflict, a desire to slay, to destroy life, that is a frenzy amounting almost to insanity, making men demons, indifferent alike to danger, wounds and death. I was in this state when a severe blow, dealt by a Mexican on my head with his clubbed musket, brought me to the ground and somewhat cooled my ardour. I with other wounded were dragged in to the “Fonda” in which all that was left of our party retreated, leaving over fifty of our men “toes up” in the street. The door was hastily barred, and a fire opened from the windows on the black devils, who were bayoneting our wounded left in the street. My head was coverd with blood, it was bathed in “muscal” which made it smart as if fire had been put on it, and bound up in a “rebosa.” I soon felt better and full of fight. The cries of our wounded as they were butcherd drove the men perfectly frantic. They howled like wild beasts, such oaths! such fearful imprecations! Walker cried out “My hoses! I have sworn to sleep in the Post office tonight or in hell! Thar is no time to spare, try them again.” The door was thrown open, when tremendous explosions of artillery shook the house and the street was swept by a tempest. Canister and bags of musket balls were fired into the ranks of our foes by our two six pounders, one of which had been brought along and mounted on the roof of the house in which we were; the other gun was unlimberd in the street, while a twelve P’dr, with the other column in the “Calle de Monterey” had been mounted on a roof of a tower facing on the “Plazuela de la Carne,” and threw shells in to the fortified yard in our front. The enemy fire soon slackened, and we gained their position without further loss. The other column advanced no farther then the church of Sante Maria, where they entrenched and sent us re-enforcements. For four hours untill dark, Hell reigned in this part of the city. The air was filled with the roar of artillery, the rattle of musketry, the bursting of shells, the dull heavy blows on doors and walls, the shouts and yells of the Rangers, mingled with cries of children and shrieks of women, made it a scene in which a Demon would delight. House after house we gained, cutting through the longitudinal walls, bursting in to the presence of terrified groups of feamales and children. We must have seemd to them like fiends from another world, our appearence was certainly terrific enough to daunt the boldest, with faces and bare arms encrusted with black blood, hair and beards mattened and stuck full of bits of mortar, garments torn, with a variety of articles found in the houses fastened on their person, weapons all smeared with gore, and all yelling and shouting. What fearful apparitions to meet the gaze of a quite nervous family! In one house showing unmistakeable sign of wealth, I came upon a group of laides before a crucifix on a small alter situated in an alcove; three were young and quite beautiful, and dressed in pure white, two middle-aged women, their companions, rent the air with their shrill cries. Lockridge who was with me spoke Spanish like a native. He tried to calm them, but they threw themselves on the floor rolling over and over, the younger ones made no outcries but remained with their eyes fixed on the cross. One of the rollers sat up and in Spanish begged us to “spare the Senoreitas, and use them as we wished.” This drove us out and Col. Walker, placed an old mountain man as a safeguard over them. In another house lay a mother killed by a random shot, with a little child crying beside her. In every house fearful sights told of the horrors of a town taken by storm! To add to the woe of the defenceless

inhabitants, the garison in the Black Fort, finding that we were in possession of the northwestern part of the city, opened with morters, throwing huge bombs high in air that fell in the streets and crashed through houses exploding with great violence. We pushed on, and one hour after dark, Walker with some fifty others gained a lodgement in the Post Office, a high stone building within one hundred yards and overlooking the Grande Plaza. Walker, when a “Meer prisoner,” was confined in this house, and the knowledge then acquired, was of great benefit to him now. Among those who staid by Walker was Lockridge and myself, and we ascended to the top of the builden with the gallant Ranger, who had accomplished his oath. The scene from the roof was magnificent, the rattle of small arms, the shouts and cries of combatants had ceased, darkness had settled over the city and shrouded its scenes of carnage in deep gloom, the dead horses and men laying in the streets looked black and uncanny in the darkness; to the north camp fires mapped out the position of our reserve, Gen. Worth’s Head Quarters, the Bishop’s Palace, was one blaze of light from the fires built inside. The occasional shout of a drunken stormer or the bray of Donkeys in the Plaza was the only sounds we heard. Silence fell on city and camp. Our wounded were stupefied with stimulants and lay unconscious of their pains. This silence was broken by a roar in our rear, and a stream of fire shot up from the “Plaza de la Capella” showing in bold relief the dark towers of the Church of Sante Maria, and rushed over our heads with a strange roaring scream, and burst in the Grande Plaza beyond. Old Maj. Munroe had got his nine inch Morter in position and was trying its range! Another Bomb followed and broke through the roof of the Cathedral, and exploded inside. Tons and tons of ammunition were stored in the Church, and we were not two hundred yards off! The Major only fired these two, but the Black Fort opened and fired at intervals for hours. I made a bed of clothes found in the house, and slept sound until! daylight on the 24th. Source: Chamberlain, Samuel. My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue. Edited by William H. Goetzmann (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1965), 92–98. Used by permission of the West Point Museum, United States Military Academy.

Vicente Filisola’s Account of the Battle of the Alamo (1849) The Battle of the Alamo, in 1836, was the beginning of the end of Mexico’s rule over Texas and was viewed by Texans as a heroic effort in the struggle for independence. Understandably, President Antonio López de Santa Anna of Mexico took a markedly different view. He considered the Texans to be traitors, with only the rights due to those who initiate revolution. The Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 was the outgrowth of a number of grievances against Mexico, but its foremost cause was the subversion by Santa Anna of the 1824 constitution and his assumption of dictatorial powers. The first battle went to the Texans at San Antonio, with the defeat of General Martín Perfecto de Cos on December 10, 1835—an insult that Santa Anna immediately set out to avenge. The Mexican forces, numbering more than 6,000, appeared at San Antonio on February 23, 1836, and laid siege to the Alamo, a fortress near the town. A force of 187 Texans led by William Barrett Travis, and including Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, defended the post. On March 6, the Mexicans made an overwhelming assault, captured the Alamo, and killed all of its defenders. Texas had meanwhile, on March 1, declared its independence from Mexico; the declaration became a reality in April, when the Texas forces under General Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna’s army. The following short narrative is a reminiscence written in 1849 by Vicente Filisola, who had been present among the Mexican attackers on March 6, 1836. His account gives little credit to Santa Anna’s judgment at the time.

On this same evening, a little before nightfall, it is said that Barrett Travis, commander of the enemy, had offered to the general-in-chief, by a woman messenger, to surrender his arms and the fort with all the materials upon the sole condition that his own life and the lives of his men be spared. But the answer was that they must surrender at discretion, without any guarantee, even of life, which traitors did not deserve. It is evident, that after such an answer, they all prepared to sell their lives as dearly as possible. Consequently, they exercised the greatest vigilance day and night to avoid surprise. On the morning of March 6, the Mexican troops were stationed at 4 o’clock, a.m., in accord with Santa Anna’s instructions. The artillery, as appears from these same instructions, was to remain inactive, as it received no order; and furthermore, darkness and the disposition made of the troops which were to attack the four fronts at the same time, prevented its firing without mowing down our own ranks. Thus the enemy was not to suffer from our artillery during the attack. Their own artillery was in readiness. At the sound of the bugle they could no longer doubt that the time had come for them to conquer or to die. Had they still doubted, the imprudent shouts for Santa Anna given by our columns of attack must have opened their eyes. As soon as our troops were in sight, a shower of grape and musket balls was poured upon them from the fort, the garrison of which at the sound of the bugle, had rushed to arms and to their posts. The three columns that attacked the west, the north, and the east fronts, fell back, or rather, wavered at the first discharge from the enemy, but the example and the efforts of the officers soon caused them to return to the attack. The columns of the western and eastern attacks, meeting with some difficulties in reaching the tops of the small houses which formed the walls of the fort, did, by a simultaneous movement to the right and to left, swing northward till the three columns formed one dense mass, which under the guidance of their officers, endeavored to climb the parapet on that side. This obstacle was at length overcome, the gallant General Juan V. Amador being among the foremost. Meantime the column attacking the southern front under Colonels José Vicente Miñon and José Morales, availing themselves of a shelter, formed by some stone houses near the western salient of that front, boldly took the guns defending it, and penetrated through the embrasures into the square formed by the barracks. There they assisted General Amador, who having captured the enemy’s pieces turned them against the doors of the interior houses where the rebels had sought shelter, and from which they fired upon our men in the act of jumping down onto the square or court of the fort. At last they were all destroyed by grape, musket shot and the bayonet. Our loss was very heavy. Colonel Francisco Duque was mortally wounded at the very beginning, as he lay dying on the ground where he was being trampled by his own men, he still ordered them on to the slaughter. This attack was extremely injudicious and in opposition to military rules, for our own men were exposed not only to the fire of the enemy but also to that of our own columns attacking the other fronts; and our soldiers being formed in close columns, all shots that were aimed too low, struck the backs of our foremost men. The greatest number of our casualties took place in that manner; it may even be affirmed that not one-fourth of our wounded were struck by the enemy’s fire, because their cannon, owing to their elevated position, could not be sufficiently lowered to injure our troops after they had reached the foot of the walls. Nor could the defenders use their muskets with accuracy, because the wall having no inner banquette, they had, in order to deliver their fire, to stand on top where they could not live one second. The official list of casualties, made by General Juan de Andrade, shows: officers 8 killed, 18 wounded; enlisted men 52 killed, 233 wounded. Total 311 killed and wounded. A great many of the wounded died for want of medical attention, beds, shelter, and surgical instruments. The whole garrison were killed except an old woman and a negro slave for whom the soldiers felt compassion, knowing that they had remained from compulsion alone. There were 150 volunteers, 32

citizens of Gonzales who had introduced themselves into the fort the night previous to the storming, and about 20 citizens or merchants of Bexar. Considering the disposition made for attack, our loss should have been still greater if all the cannon in the fort could have been placed on the walls, but the houses inside prevented it, and from their situation they could only fire in front. Furthermore, they had not a sufficient number of gunners. Indeed, artillery cannot be improvised as readily as rebellions. Also our movement from the right and the left upon the north front, and the movement executed by Miñón and Morales with their column on the western salient, changing the direction from the southern front as instructed, rendered unavailable the pieces of artillery which the enemy had established on the three other fronts. Finally, the place remained in the power of the Mexicans, and all the defenders were killed. It is a source of deep regret, that after the excitement of the combat, many acts of atrocity were allowed which are unworthy of the gallantry and resolution with which this operation had been executed, and stamp it with an indelible stain in the annals of history. These acts were reproved at the time by those who had the sorrow to witness them, and subsequently by the whole army, who certainly were not habitually animated by such feelings, and who heard with disgust and horror, as becomes brave and generous Mexicans who feel none but noble and lofty sentiments, of certain facts which I forebear to mention, and wish for the honor of the Mexican Republic had never taken place. In our opinion the blood of our soldiers as well as that of the enemy was shed in vain, for the mere gratification of the inconsiderate, pu[e]rile, and guilty vanity of reconquering Bexar by force of arms, and through a bloody contest. As we have said, the defenders of the Alamo, were disposed to surrender, upon the sole condition that their lives should be spared. Let us even grant that they were not so disposed— what could the wretches do, being surrounded by 5,000 men, without proper means of resistance, no possibility of retreating, nor any hope of receiving proper and sufficient reinforcements to compel the Mexicans to raise the siege? Had they been supplied with all the resources needed, that weak enclosure could not have withstood for one hour the fire of our twenty pieces of artillery which if properly directed would have crushed it to atoms and leveled down the inner buildings.… The massacres of the Alamo, of Goliad, of Refugio, convinced the rebels that no peac[e]able settlement could be expected, and that they must conquer, or die, or abandon the fruits of ten years of sweat and labor, together with their fondest hopes for the future. Source: Williams, Amelia. “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of Its Defenders.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly (July 1933). Used by permission of the Texas State Historical Association.

José Antonio Navarro’s Letter to the Editor, San Antonio Ledger (1853) Many Tejano Mexican (those of Mexican heritage living in Texas) notables were sympathetic to European American migration because of the benefits they received from an increase in trade and land values spurred by European American settlement. One of the leaders of the Tejano elite was José Antonio Navarro, a conservative. He was the leader of a faction loyal to European American colonists. Navarro, a second-generation Tejano born at San Antonio de Béxar in Texas on February 27, 1795, was a criollo, a full-blooded Spaniard born in the Americas. He flaunted the fact that his father was a native of Corsica and claimed that his mother was from a noble Spanish family. A strong advocate of states’ rights during the U.S. Civil War, he supported the Confederacy. He wrote the following letter, dated October 30, 1853, in Spanish to the editor of the San Antonio, Texas, Ledger. In it Navarro bitterly criticizes the Mexican government and speaks of the War of Independence from Mexico in Texas.

Dear Sir: In the issue of September 17th last, I read some historical memoirs concerning the foundation and ancient history of San Antonio de Bexar. Since I was an eye-witness of all the events described in that work, I cannot resist the temptation to correct certain substantial errors contained in that narrative. Undoubtedly, they are the result of inaccurate reports which were perhaps taken from mutilated and incomplete documents from which it is difficult to maintain chronological sequence. I have always wanted to obtain the most exact report of those events so that the customs, character, abilities and moral traits of the men and events of that epoch might be presented to posterity. In 1813, the author of this letter was eighteen years old; he was then in San Antonio and he still retains fresh memories of that time. This act and his concern for everything pertaining to San Antonio, beloved for thousands of reasons, are the result of the present emanation and should be narrated with due respect to the truth. You will not discover in this writing flowers of speech nor the persistence of excellence of its style but an unreserved narrative of bloody and revolutionary times. The Mexican priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, illustrious by a thousand titles, actually was the first to utter the cry of Independence in the Pueblo of Dolores. The priest José María Morelos was famous from that time to this for his military talents. He was also another one of the heroes of Mexican Independence and who later after the execution of the priest Hidalgo, convoked the first Mexican Congress of Apacigen. General Felix María Calleja, later Viceroy of Mexico, was particularly distinguished of his bloody persecutions and iniquities against the patriots Hidalgo, Guerrero, Morelos, Bravo, and others. Calleja was the most dangerous enemy of the Mexicans. Morelos was captured, treated with ignominy and was finally shot in the old castle of San Christobal one-fourth league distance from the capital of Mexico. José Bernardo Gutíerrez, a native of Revilla, Tamaulipas, fled to the United States immediately after the capture and imprisonment of the patriot heroes in Acatita de Bajan near Monclova, in the year 1811. He visited Washington and other cities in the United States and finally in the state of Louisiana enlisted 450 American volunteers with whom he again invaded Texas in the month of October 1812. Nacogdoches, a military fortification on the Trinity River, was captured by him without resistance and subsequently he took La Bahía del Espiritu Santo, known today as Goliad. Manuel Salcedo, military Governor of Texas, and Simon de Herrera of Nuevo Leon, went out with more than 2,000 men and besieged La Bahía, November 15, 1812. Generals Gutíerrez [sic], McGee, Kemper, Perry and Ross sustained the siege for the better of three months. In desperation the besieged finally went out from the wall of Goliad with almost all their force composed of American volunteers and some Mexicans. They fought the enemy and returned to the fort leaving 200 of the enemy dead and wounded and they suffered scarcely any losses. After twenty-seven regular encounters, Salcedo and Herrera discontinued the siege and retired to San Antonio towards the end of March 1813. Gutíerrez, Kemper and the others, stimulated by the forced retreat of the enemy, followed them day by day. Salcedo had not arrived at San Antonio with his army when he was ordered by Simon de Herrera to abandon the city and march to the Salado, where, at the place called “Rosilla,” he encountered the army of Gutíerrez, if a band of 900 patriots could be called an army. The two armies fought to the end of March. It was a bloody battle. Herrera lost 400 men, dead and wounded, and Gutíerrez lost only five dead and fourteen wounded. The royal army fled in disorder in the direction of San Antonio which Salcedo and Herrera had begun to fortify for the purpose of resisting Gutíerrez.

Kemper and others, after collecting the spoils of battle and burying the dead, pursued Salcedo with their victorious army and took possession of Concepción Mission, southeast of San Antonio. The following day they marched to San Antonio. The army of patriots formed in double columns in the lower labor where at present stand the private residences of Devine, Callaghan and Gilbeau. From that memorable place, Bernardo Gutíerrez demanded the unconditional surrender of Governors Salcedo and Herrera. Surrender took place March 30, 1813. On the evening of the 31st these same persons with their entire staff and other officers of high rank left Bexar on foot and met Gutíerrez and his victorious army. It was clear that nothing was known of what had happened to the conference between the victors and the conquered except that the request that their lives be spared had been guaranteed. Gutíerrez replied evasively but gave them to understand that they were in no danger of losing their lives. Those unfortunate Spanish officers surrendered at the discretion of the enemy and so by their cowardice sealed their own doom. They surrendered their swords and were placed between two files of soldiers. Gutíerrez and his army returned to the eastern side of the river compelling their prisoners to march in front to the sound of martial music, and they entered within the walls of the Alamo, the same Alamo which in March 1836 was to become the cradle of the liberty of Texas and the scene of the marvel of valor. There, the valiant patriot[s], Gutíerrez, Kemper, Ross and their brave companions enjoyed the first sleep since the triumph of March 31st. There, they sealed the mysterious bond of those terrible events which happened in the year of 1836. On April 1st at nine in the morning, the republican army marched to the beating of drums from the Alamo to Main Plaza of San Antonio. They crossed the river of Commerce street. The Spanish-Mexican army had disbanded and retired the preceding night and could not be seen in any part of the city. Only a few who were overcome with terror and a few citizens of San Antonio remained. Gutíerrez took possession of all the houses of Government where the beautiful store of the Mesdames Bances now stands, and immediately called an administrative Junta [committee] of civil council of those citizens who with great ardor had opposed Spanish rule and who consequently had favored Mexican Independence. This Junta was composed of from eight to ten members, a President, and a Secretary. From the writings of Gutíerrez it seems that he signed it with the sole object of court-martialing and sentencing the Spanish prisoners. The secretary of this Junta, Mariano Rodrigues, is still living. At that time he was a youth, active and jolly. Today he is an antiquated septuagenarian who merely exists in San Antonio with a very limited recollection of the past and an extreme indifference for the future. On the fourth day of April, or possibly on the night of the fifth, a company of sixty Mexican men under the command of Antonio Delgado led out of San Antonio fourteen Spanish prisoners, including four of Mexican birth, to the eastern bank of the Salado near the same spot on which occurred the battle of Rosilla. There they alighted from their fine horses, and with no other arms than the large, dull machetes which each of those monsters carried hanging from their belts. After having heaped offensive words and insulting epithets upon them, they beheaded them with inhuman irony, some of those assassins sharpened their machetes on the soles of their boots in the presence of their defenseless victims. Oh, shame of the human race! What a disgrace for the descendants of a Christian nation! What blood can coolly suffer in silence an act unparalleled in the annals of the history of San Antonio de Bexar? But we owe an impartial history to posterity that such horrible deeds may be known to the future generations so that through their own good conduct of the future, they may eradicate such horrible stains from our benign soil. One day after the slaughter, I myself saw that horde of assassins arrive with their officer, Antonio Delgado, who halted in front of the houses of Government to inform Bernardo Gutíerrez that the fourteen

victims had been disposed of. On that morning of ominous glory, a large number of other young spectators and I stood at the door of the Palace of the Governor and watched Captain Delgado’s entrance into the hall. He doffed his hat in the presence of General Gutíerrez and stuttering, he proffered some words mingled with shame. He handed Gutíerrez a paper which, I believe, contained a list of the beheaded ones, and whose names I give below: SPANIARDS: Manuel Salcedo, Governor Simon de Herrera, Colonel Geronimo Herrera, Colonel Juan Echevarria, Captain José Mateos, Lieutenant José Goescochea, Lieutenant Juan Ignacio Arrambide, Lieutenant Gregorio Amador, Lieutenant Antonio López, Lieutenant Francisco Perciva, Captain MEXICANS: Miguel de Arcos, Lieutenant Luis Hijo y Francisco, Lieutenant Juan Caso, Lieutenant I myself saw the clothing and the blood-stained jewels which those tigers carried hanging from their saddle horns, making public festival of their crime and of having divided the spoils among themselves pro rata. As I have said, it is certain that Gutíerrez received in the Palace of the Governor an account of that cruel affair although later he disavowed taking part in the execution of the prisoners. Gutíerrez says in a manuscript which he wrote and printed in Monterey May 6, 1827, that he had never given the order to execute those unfortunate fourteen prisoners, but that a great number of citizens who were greatly excited provoked against the Spanish Governors, induced a majority of the Junta to pass a formal order so that the guard who had custody of the prisoners should hand them over could avoid such a scandal, much less relinquish his command on seeing his cause blackened by the most infamous action that could be authorized by a leader of vandals. Consequently, Gutíerrez shared in the atrocity. He was a hypocrite; he pronounced sentence and like Pilate, washed his hands. It was not a court martial which passed sentence as has been erroneously stated. Kemper and his American auxiliaries were horrified by so barbarous a deed and they prepared to leave the country, demanding of Gutíerrez that they be justified in the name of the Mexican Republic but due to the pleadings in chorus of Miguel Menchaca and other Mexican leaders, they consented to remain in San Antonio to help the cause of Mexican Independence. Some days after these events, it became known with certainty that Colonel Ignacio Elizondo was marching from the Rio Grande to San Antonio with an army of more than 2,000 men. Elizondo was furious on receiving the news of the murder of the governors and by forced marches arrived at the place known as Alazan about two miles west of San Antonio. Gutíerrez and Perry met him there June 3, 1813, and from

the towers of the Catholic Parish Church, a number of curious youths, including myself, watched the conflict of shining weapons through our field glasses and listened to the deep thunder of the cannons. Elizondo, after a combat of four hours was defeated and he abandoned the field of battle, leaving 400 men dead, wounded and prisoners. Gutíerrez lost 22 men and 42 wounded. Among the dead was the aidede-camp Maricos, a French youth, skillful, learned, with a personal valor and such bravery that not even the marshals of Napoleon could rival. Scarcely had the victors, Gutíerrez and Perry, returned to San Antonio when it was learned that the Commander in Chief of the province, Joaquín de Arredondo, was in Laredo on his way to San Antonio with more than 3,000 of the best troops of Mexico, united with the fugitives of the battles of Alazan who with the defeated Colonel Elizondo had joined them on the road. At this time, Gutíerrez, despite his victories, began to lose the confidence of his officers and soldiers. Either the barbarous and abnormal conduct of Gutíerrez towards the murdered Spaniards or the political tricks of José Alvarez de Toledo, a Spaniard who had been sent by the Cortes of Cadiz to the island of San Domingo, a liberal opposed to the rule of the King of Spain, who came from the state of Louisiana to dismiss Gutíerrez from office, all effected the feeling of the Republican officers and the army. But what is absolutely certain is that Gutíerrez’ influence diminished with the same rapidity as that with which he had triumphed in a thousand battles. Discouraged on seeing himself abandoned, Gutíerrez left Be[x]ar with some of his intimate friends for the United States. And a few days later, General Toledo took command of the army. Gutíerrez, in his proclamation of May 25, 1827, said that General Alvares de Toledo was only a hypocritical patriot of Mexican independence and that when he came to Texas to take command of the Republican troops, he was in secret correspondence with the King of Spain in an attempt to hinder the progress and the success of the patriots. As proof of his assertion it is said that some time after the year 1813, Alvares de Toledo had returned to Spain and he was not only received by Fernando VII, but he was even rewarded with the appointment of Ambassador to one of the European Courts. Whether this is true o[r] not is the mystery hidden in the misty twilight of time long passed. There is further proof of Toledo’s having been a sincere patriot in 1813, after which he suffered the weakness of taking refuge in the amnesty and favor of the King. But if we may judge by reputation and appearances, we must confess that the assertions of Gutíerrez are confirmed by the epithets that his own countrymen have hurled in his face, “He was a politician without principles, an unlettered judge, an undisciplined soldier and cruel to the marrow.” On the other hand, Toledo was apparently a young man of 32 years, of liberal principles, affluent in speech, pleasing personality, skillful, of gentle manly demeanor and very obsequious. With this multitude of fascinating qualities, he immediately captured the hearts and goodwill of the army and the inhabitants of San Antonio, and later, he became the commanding officer. Finally, General Arredondo became furious and impatient to pacify the minds of the people and to avenge the death of his countrymen, the Governors. On the 18th of August and not on the 13th, as it has been stated, Toledo opened battle at Medina. This general had 1,500 men including 600 American volunteers. Arredondo had 4,000 men. The battle was fought with great military skill on both sides. The American volunteers formed the regiment of infantry and the company of artillery was composed of nine cannon[s] from four to eight inches in caliber. The cavalry consisted of inhabitants of San Antonio and vicinity and of certain individuals from Tamaulipas and the Rio Grande. By a strategic movement Arredondo caused his army to raise a unanimous cry of Long live the King! Victory is ours! At the same time the band played their notes of victory, causing the cavalry of terrorized patriots to flee from the field. However, the phlegmatic America Infantry, and its artilleries sustained the deadly fire from the eighteen heavy-calibered cannon[s] of Arredondo for more than four hours.

No one can overcome impossibilities, nor is it natural for one to combat a disproportionately large force. The America Infantry finally abandoned the artillery and hurriedly fled from the field of battle, breaking their files against the oak and mesquite trees, rather than leave them as trophies for the enemy and resolutely they gave themselves up to fate. Arredondo’s cavalry pursued them with saber in hand and lance prepared, inflicting terrible slaughter upon them for six long miles, and so perished the better part of those brave compatriots. On the following day, Arredondo entered the city triumphantly, with his carts laden with wounded and dying. At this point my hand trembles in recording the scenes of horror with which they spurred one of the bitterest enemies of Gutíerrez in requital for the previous atrocities of Gutíerrez. Arredondo avenged himself in the most infamous manner and without distinction, and he ordered the imprisonment of 700 of the most peaceful inhabitants of San Antonio. At the same time, he imprisoned 300 unfortunate people in the cells of the Catholic priests on the night of the 20th of August. They were crowded in like sheep in the fold in the hottest months of summer. On the morning of the following day, 18 of them had perished from suffocation. The remainder were placed before the firing squad from day to day for no more response than that they had been accused of being in favor of Independence. By a[n] unexplicable [sic] coincidence, it appears that in San Antonio, in those same places where so many cruelties were committed, reserved for providence so that in happier times they might serve as lessons in devotion, justice, education and recreation, there today stands the courthouse, and facing Main Plaza is the balustrade of the hotel; the former is the sanctuary of the law, and the latter a lodging place that affords the most delicious food the gastronomist can possibly procure. In those times, daily executions took place and often the laments of the dying were heard where now stands the Post Office through which the inner thoughts are communicated in writing, and through which knowledge and policies are diffused through the community. Arredondo erected a large prison for women known as La Quinta. There, they suffered agony. More than 500 married and single women whose husbands and fathers were known as insurgents! For four months, an insolent guard compelled them to convert twenty-four bushels of corn into tortillas daily to feed the officers and soldiers of Arredondo. There, the modest and gentle wives and daughters were exposed to the insults of those depraved undisciplined troops and frequently they suffered the defiled and lewd gazes and endearing remarks of officers and soldiers who enjoyed that detestable and repugnant pastime. Juana Leal de Tarín and Concepción Leal de Garza, who then lived on their farms on the banks of the San Antonio River, were among those innocent and unfortunate prisoners of La Quinta. They endured their defaming captivity with a spirited courage before submitting to the shameful proposals of their jailers. After the battle of Medina, Col. Elizondo left San Antonio with 500 men in pursuit of the fugitives, who were on the road to the United States. At the Trinity River on the old road from San Antonio he overtook a body of men and families, and at that point 105 persons were shot. Perhaps I shall be excused of exaggerating in giving details of the manner in which those captives were condemned and executed on the Trinity. Elizondo had for a chaplain a despicable priest known as Padre Camacho and when some of the fugitive insurgents were captured, Elizondo brought them to the confessional and ordered the said clergyman to confess them according to the rites of the Catholic Church. Belief in Christianity and hope of eternity compelled those unfortunate men to confess without reserve the part they had taken in the revolution. Padre Camacho, in the conviction of these confessions, gave a prearranged signal to the officers of the guard so that they might lead the victims immediately to the place of execution.

One other aggravating circumstance may fill the readers with horror. Padre Camacho by chance had been wounded by a spent bullet which broke the muscles of his leg at the battle of Alazan. More than once on the Trinity River, where some unfortunate condemned to death pleaded aloud for mercy, the priest, raising his clerical garments said to him, “Move on my son, and suffer the penalty in the name of God, because perhaps the bullet which wounded me may have come from your gun.” After these executions on the Trinity River, Elizondo took as prisoners all the broken families, many ladies, black eyed and beautiful. They were handcuffed and were compelled to cross the San Antonio River on foot at the very place which now is the pleasant bathing place of Mr. Hall, and Elizondo himself invited the weaker sex to bathe their delicate forms. Who could have foretold that the heads of the famous spies of Gen. Gutíerrez, Gulas, Botas Negras and Ayamontes, whom Arredondo had had executed in San Antonio, would be crated and placed on the sharp end of a pike at the very spot where now the American flag proudly waves on Military Plaza. Who could have foretold that thirty-three years later an emblem of terror feared by the tyrants, a flag respected by the world, would mark the place where their lifeless heads had been exhibited. After the independence of Mexico was gained, Gov. Trespalacios crossed the Medina River towards San Antonio and upon viewing the prairies sprinkled with human skeletons, he had them collected and buried with full military honors. I distinctly remember the following Inscription written on a square of wood which was on the trunk of an oak tree: Here lie the Mexican heroes who followed the example of Leonides Who sacrificed their wealth and lives Ceaselessly fighting against tyrants. This is an imperfect but truthful history of the events of that period. San Antonio remained quiet and subjected to the dominion of the King of Spain after the arrival of Arredondo. He confiscated and sold the property of the patriots known as rebels who never recovered their goods, not even after the consummation of Mexico[’s] Independence in the year of 1821. The noble citizens of Bexar sacrificed their lives and property, performing prodigies of valor in the year 1813. They left to their descendants no other inheritance than the indifference and ingratitude of the Mexican Republic. They never received my recompense of indemnity, not even the due respect and gratitude of their fellow citizens of Mexico. Our courage and heroism were cast into complete oblivion by the government of an ancient and respected country. For that reason, I do not believe that anyone will be surprised that the germ of discontent which the people of Texas nurtured and for which reason they adhere to the new order of things that is offered to us by the institutions of a great, powerful, and growing Republic. Such is the source an opportunity for the Independence of Texas which State is separated from that Government forever. Maybe this condition will continue indefinitely. Source: Robert Durham, A Mexican View of the War in Texas: Memoirs of a Veteran of the Two Battles of the Alamo, transcribed for the Second Flying Company of Alamo de Parras, The Library Chronicle, vol. IV, no. 2, June 1936. Used by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Elfido López Recalls Rural Mexican-American Life in the Late 19th Century (1870s)

In the early 1870s, the arrival of the railroad transformed the lives of those living in the southwestern part of the United States. Longtime residents of the area were quickly drawn into the region’s expanding wage economy. In this selection from his handwritten memoir from 1937 Elfido López recalled his childhood on his family’s modest homestead and his father’s decision to move the family to a small railroad town, and a life of wages, in southern Colorado in 1876. I was born in Trinidad, Colorado on January 11, 1869. My father’s name was Damacio López. He came from New Mexico and was born in Santa Cruz near where Espanola is now. I don’t know in what year he came to Trinidad but it must have been in 1866 or 1867. The first baby born to my parents was a boy named Miguel López. He only lived about two years and then I was born. My father’s father was Spanish and his mother I believe had some Indian blood in her. I knew both of them and they were good people. My mother’s father came from Spain and her mother also. I did not know either one of them. All I know about them is what my mother told us. She said that her father was a school teacher. His name was Juan DeArce, but mother always said that his name was Juan DeArcia. We have found out since that his name was Juan DeArce and that he was First Secretary in Santa Fe under Governor Perry. This is in history so I have found out. I have not seen the history but I am going to get a copy as soon as I can. My mother’s name was Lareta DeArcia as she called herself but she could not read and I found out that her right name was Laretta DeArce. In those days among the Spanish people it was not thought necessary to teach the girls to read and write. It was only necessary to teach them not to talk to boys at a dance and it was the order of the parents that a girl never refuse to dance with any man who asked for a dance. I think it was a good idea. I remember that my mother used to tell us kids about the people in her time. Most of them were rather poor but they never let anyone do without something to eat. She said the people used to tell the neighbors to come and get food when they needed it and they would go to the neighbors and get food when they needed to. In those days a man that had a wagon and team was considered a rich man. There were quite a few that had 6 or 7 wagons and 8 or 10 ox teams and in the fall of the year the ones with wagons would ask the others to go with them to about where Colorado is now to kill buffalo. They killed buffalo with a spear on horseback. They would run into the buffalo herd and stick the spear in behind the buffalo’s shoulder. Each man would try to kill 3 or 4. Other men would be on hand to do the skinning and cut up the mea[t] and take it to camp and make sesinar or jerked meat. They dried the meat on ropes strung between posts. The next day they would kill more buffalo and sometimes the men would get killed themselves and a horse had to be a good one to catch a buffalo. When they got enough meat they would start for home in New Mexico. The poor men that went with wagons would get 2 or 3 sacks of dried meat and bing bone from the hind leg. They would take the bone home to season the food. This bone was called El Gueso Gisandero and the woman of the family would cook a pot of beans with the bone in it, and then lend it to another woman who did not have a bone for her beans. The next day it would go to another woman and so on. Maybe it would be 8 or 10 days before it would get back to the owner. Then it would make the rounds again. My mother said she knew of one bone that went around the neighborhood for two years. So I guess you could call that sure enough hard times but mother said she never did know of anyone to starve to death. For shoes they made mocassins and they had very few clothes and sometimes they would have 3 or 4 patches in almost the same place. Usually they didn’t have money to buy thread and so they would tear a flour sack and pull out threads and twist 2 or 3 together to sew with. The children had to work more than play. The children were taught to respect the older people. When my father would send me on an errand

and I happened to meet an old man that wanted me to do something for him I would do it. When I got back my father would say why didn’t you come quick and I would tell him about the old man and he would be pleased. I think it is good for children to work and keep busy as this keeps them out of devilment. The children today do not keep busy enough and do alot of mischief. Also if they had more to do they would learn how to work. When I was 2 years old my father and eleven more men went to Red Rock to file on homesteads. They had ox teams. Of the twelve men only six could afford to buy shovels, the other six made shovels out of wood. The shovels were needed to make a irrigation ditch. They had no way to survey the ditch so they just started digging. The men that had good shovels broke the ground and the ones that had wood shovels threw the loose dirt out. The ditch was very crooked and about 9 or 10 feet deep and 3 feet wide. They would let the water run behind them and bank it up and dig in front. Then they would let the water run ahead in the ditch to see if they needed to dig the ditch deeper and in this way they made their ditch and it took them four months. After finishing the irrigation ditch they had to plow their fields. They had no plows, but they made them out of forks of trees. The plows have only one handle, and the points were made out of pieces of iron that the men had sharpened on a rock and nailed to the wood. It was very hard to plow with these plows as they would go every way but straight. They did manage to farm in this way, and they raised good crops of wheat, melons, beans, pumkins, chili, and almost anything they had to plant. Each man would not plant more than 3 or 4 acres of wheat as they had no way to cut the wheat except by hand scyths. I still have a scar on my finger that I got trying to learn to cut wheat. When the wheat got ripe the men would get together and cut one field at a time and all of the women would gather to cook for the men. The women would grind blue corn for tortillas as they had no wheat flour. All of the cooking was done on fireplaces as they had no stoves. Tables were buffalo hides spread on the floor. They did not have many dishes mostly only saucers and teaspoons. Some of the spoons were made out of wood. After you got through eating there weren’t many dishes to wash. I remember the women were very happy, they would sing songs and talk and just be jolly. After they would finish cutting one man’s wheat they would go to the next until they had finished the last one. The people would always work together and they never thought that they were doing too much for each other. When a child went to another house the women always gave them something to eat. It was that way with all of them. They did not really have much of anything but they always had something to eat. You would never hear people complain about anything. Whatever happened seemed to be alright with them. They had dances and some of the women had no shoes and others had mocassins. They danced just as happy as they do today but the girls couldn’t talk to the boys while they danced. I remember going to dances. I never talked to the girls, and they never talked to me as the parents of the girls would tell them not to talk before they left home for the dances. Also the girls were told not to refuse to dance with anyone that asked them as that was the custom, and we all got along very well. To thrash the wheat some of them used goats and sheep and there was always plenty of children. They would fix a place near the wheat stack which they called “era”. This place was levelled good with hoes and then water was put on to get it good and wet. They would stomp the mud down and let it dry hard and sweep it clean with cedar brooms. One man would get up on the stack and pitch the wheat on this hard place and all the children would make the goats and sheep go around and around the stack until the wheat was thrashed. They would throw the straw away and put on more wheat until all was thrashed, and then they would wait for the wind to blow. This was the way they thrashed the wheat in those days. In the fall of the year they would take their wheat to Trinidad and if I remember right the mill used to be about where John Marty has his grain house now. At the mill there was a ditch with lots of water in it

and a big wooden wheel. The water would turn the wheel and the wheel did the work. The mill man took so much wheat for payment of grinding. I do not know how much he took but I do know he took wheat for the grinding payment for the men didn’t have any money at that time. We camped the wagons where the Nichols hide house is now close to the river. There was good grass right there and lots of trees and bushes. I remember the first time my father took me with him to grind wheat. We camped close to the river, and I did not sleep very much on account of so many buggies going to El Moro and back. They had lights on the corners of the buggies. The lights were the prettiest sight I had ever seen and it is still in my mind today and will be there until I am gone. I didn’t sleep much that night. I had never seen anything like that and it sure looked good to me. After this first trip I went many times with my father to sell watermelons. We had good size melons and some small ones. The big melons sold for 25¢ and the small ones for as low as 5¢. We could not sell all of them in town so we would go on up the river and trade them for wheat. They had a [m]easure for the wheat called Almude; it was about a foot square and about 4 inches high. My father would trade so many melons for so many measures of wheat. Sometimes they would say level full of wheat and some times “heaped full.” We would go by the mill in Trinidad and grind our wheat on the way home. This way we managed to have flour on hand until the next year. When my father first moved to Red Rock he said that when he turned the oxen out to graze they would sometimes lay down in the high blue stem grass and he would have a time finding them. He would cut enough hay in the summer with a scyth to feed the ox in the winter time. We had a good size meadow and my father would clean it out by setting it on fire.… When I was six or seven years old my father moved to West Las Animas as they used to call it but what is Las Animas now. He went there to work on the railroad grade. There were several hundred men working. My father had 10 or 15 cows and after we moved to Las Animas I herded the town cows for $1 a head a month. We also sold some milk. There must have been 15 or 20 head besides my father’s cows. I herded them on foot and bare footed. I didn’t think anything much about the work but I did think alot about my $1 a head. I would go through town in the morning picking up the cows and come through town in the evening leaving the cows where they belonged. At this time Las Animas was the end of the railroad. It sure was fun for me to see the trains. I would see them come from the east and go right back. I could not figure out how the engine could turn on that narrow track. I wanted to find out so I followed the railroad up and found they had a round house and they would run the engine in that place and push the track around by hand. It sure looked easy the way they would do it. There are lots of wagons with ox teams coming to Las Animas to haul freight to New Mexico. Some wagons had as many as six teams of oxen. At about this time the people of Las Animas were making the town jail. Freighters hauled the rock from a place called Tar Box Arroyo. The jail is still there but they don’t use it for a jail anymore. I went back to Las Animas about a year ago. The town isn’t anything like it used to be. I could not find any house that I used to know. It is a whole lot begger [bigger] now and there are lots of big buildings. We lived in Las Animas for two years and then we went back to Red Rock to our old home. My father had more cows now and a little store. My father also had the Post Office (Bent Canyon) and he made a good living. I herded my father’s cows on foot until my father bought a black pacing mare. She was a dandy but wild. My father had about 30 or 40 head of cows at this time. When I was 21 years old I married Miss Rebecca Richards at Higbee, Colorado. She was 18 years old and a sweeter woman never was and I think alot more about this than she thinks I do. We met when I was about 12 years old and she came to visit some friends close to my home. I lost my handkerchief and

she found it and wrapped it up in a piece of paper with a little red ribbon very nice and wrote a little note saying she had found it and was returning it. I could not read at all so I just copied her same note and sent it back to her. I tho[u]ght I was doing something pretty good and that was the beginning of our corresponding. So from then on I tried my best to learn how to write. I can’t spell much but I make people understand me alright. My wife’s father was W. G. Richards and he came to Higbee about the same time that my father came to Red Rock. He was one of the old timers and he had a big family of 7 boys and 4 girls. They were good people. And speaking of families my father had 6 boys and 5 girls. A while after I got married I took down with pneumonia and after I got well I could not work for over a year. I lived on credit and after I could work the doctor bill and all came to $500 and at $30 a month it took me 3 years to come clear. At that time it was hard to get work except in the summer or about seven months out of the year and working this way I could make just about enough to live on the rest of the winter. It so happened that H. B. Brown from Trinidad where he used to own a hardware store had a cow ranch in Plum Canyon. He gave me $30 a month the year around to work for him. I boarded myself and when he was at the ranch he gave me 50¢ for three meals. After about a year he sold out to William Green who was the father of W. H. Green, County Commissioner. I worked for the Greens about five years a[t] $30 a month and boarded myself. Out of the $30 I had my wife and 2 children and we kept having more children. We raised 8 children all together. We always had comers and goers but we managed to save $15 a month. We did not live high but we lived pretty good on $15 a month. I would go to town with $75 in the spring and would buy enough supplies for all summer and then I would go again in the fall and buy enough for the winter. In the spring I would buy 12 or 15 yearling heifers. This way I got up to 250 head of cattle and I had $800 in the bank. Then the bank advised me to buy more cattle with their money and this was the worst mistake I ever made. After I took their advice against my wife’s advice I just worked for the bank all the time until they closed me out. I will tell any man to keep out of debt. If you have a cow don’t put her against a note. As long as you have anything the bank will encourage you to use their money but when you have hard luck and go down they will say well we can’t see how we can let you have anymore money. I would of been in good shape if I had stayed with my 250 head that I had clear and that I made at $1 a day but I let them talk me into a loan and when I really needed money they wouldn’t let me have any. They are not there for anyone’s benefit but their own. What I made by working for $1 a day they got quicker than I could think. It was nobody’s fault bu[t] my own. But just the same that is what they will do. Now I am 68 years old and my health is not good. I’m just like any other old man. We raised 8 children and there are seven living today. The oldest died when he was 20 years old. I always tried to teach my children right to be truthful and not steal. I will tell any man or woman to be careful who they let their children run with. I was a boy once and I know by experience that when I was with a good boy I was just as good as he was but when I was with a bad boy I was a little worse than he was. I never did anything so awful bad that I couldn’t tell about it but still I know that I did do some wrong. Well I’ve had good times and bad times in this world but I would not trade my reputation for the First National Bank of Trinidad. I could write a whole lot more that I’ve not told but I will quit for now. Source: Elfido López, “Autobiography,” 1937. Elfido López, Sr. Collection. Mss. 00813, History Colorado, Denver, CO. Used by permission.

3. Beyond the Continent, 1798–1898

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington urged that the country remain free of entangling alliances and foreign wars. This neutrality was quickly tested as the United States fell into an undeclared Quasi-War along its eastern coast and in the Caribbean Sea in 1798 with its former ally, France—a conflict that led to the creation of the Department of the Navy. President Thomas Jefferson expected to reduce the Navy’s budget when peace was declared in 1800, but was not able to do so, as America went to war with the Barbary States of North Africa—Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—the following year over their demands for tribute and acts of piracy. This First Barbary War (the first war fought abroad by the new country) concluded with a peace treaty in 1805, with the United States paying a ransom to Tripoli for the return of American citizens. By 1807, however, Algiers had once again begun attacking American shipping, and in retaliation the United States went to war in 1815 in the Second Barbary War. Concluded by treaty in 1816, the conflict was marked by one of the earliest instances of “gunboat diplomacy”—the use of naval might to coerce weaker opponents. This approach would be used with increasing frequency as the strength of the American navy grew. It was this growing military strength combined with strong commercial interests that, by the end of the 19th century, created a far-reaching American empire.

“OPENING” THE FAR EAST Although American merchants had traded with the countries of the Far East since the late 18th century, the United States had made no move to open formal relations until 1833 when Edmund Roberts sailed the first of two missions to South and East Asia. As an official American representative, Roberts had been instructed to negotiate treaties of peace and amity with Muscat, Siam, Cochin China (today part of Vietnam), and Japan. While he was successful in the first two cases, Japan posed a particular problem. The country had imposed a series of severe edicts, sakoku, limiting contact with the outside world. As a result, the Japanese had grown deeply suspicious of foreigners and their kurofune, or “black ships.” But by the middle of the 19th century, the American government had grown equally determined to break through the barriers that the Japanese had imposed. Sailing in command of four ships, including two imposingly large steamships, Commodore Matthew Perry managed, largely through intimidation, to negotiate a Treaty of Peace and Amity (the Treaty of Kanagawa) in 1854. Perry’s display of gunboat diplomacy succeeded in “opening” Japan to American trade. At the same time, it exacerbated Japanese distrust of foreigners and sowed the seeds of later discord. One early example of the difficulties to come was the Battle of Shimonoseki Straits, a result of Japanese emperor Kōmei’s 1863 order to his subjects to expel foreign “barbarians” from the country. In response, the leader

of a clan living on the straits separating the islands of Honshu and Kyushu ordered his men to fire on all non-Japanese ships within range. One of the vessels, the USS Wyoming, retaliated by sinking two of the Japanese ships and damaging a third. This battle turned out to be a prelude to the larger Shimonoseki Campaign (1863–1864), which pitted Japan against Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. While these conflicts had no clear victor, they propelled Japan to imitate the strategies that the Americans used so skillfully against them. In 1875, the successful use of force by Captain Inoue Yoshika (1845–1929) would open Korea to Japanese trade as Commodore Perry had opened Japan to trade with the United States. American commercial interests in the Far East did not stop with Japan. Unable to get a foothold in China, the previous decades had seen American traders frustrated by their British counterparts who they believed enjoyed an unfair advantage in the country after Britain’s defeat of China in the First Opium War (1839–1842). American frustration with its inferior trading position led to the 1844 Treaty of Peace, Amity, and Commerce, otherwise known as the Treaty of Wanghia. As negotiated by Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing, the treaty established formal relations between the two countries, extended trading and other rights in the treaty ports to American merchants, and guaranteed that American citizens accused of crimes in China would be tried only by American officials. The subsequent BurlingameSeward Treaty of 1868 cemented relations between China and the United States and, by easing Chinese immigration into the United States and ensuring greater Chinese control over its internal affairs, alleviated Chinese perceptions that they had been treated unfairly in the earlier agreement. At the same time the treaty gave Americans access to cheap, “imported” labor. Building on its success in China, in 1871 the United States launched what became known as the Korean Expedition. Aiming to establish formal diplomatic relations, open trade, and ensure the humane treatment of shipwrecked American sailors, ships of America’s Asiatic Squadron accompanied an American diplomatic delegation to Korean waters. However, Korean batteries fired on the squadron, which had anchored near the island of Kanghwa, and when Korean representatives refused to apologize for the incident, American forces overwhelmed the Korean positions. Despite its military defeat, Korea refused negotiations with the United States and claimed victory. While Koreans regarded the incident as a defeat for the United States, it created severe repercussions for the Korean government. Progressives within the country challenged the isolationist government, forcing the resignation of the regent Taewon’gun, who had refused to negotiate with the Americans. In 1876, Korea signed the Treaty of Kanghwa with Japan, opening the country up for the first time to foreign trade. Japan’s influence within Korea would only grow over the quarter of a century before the Japanese Empire annexed the country.

ANNEXING THE PACIFIC While American “gunboat diplomacy” had drastic ramifications for Japan, China, and Korea, none of the interventions resulted in the taking of territory. The same cannot be said of the United States’ activities in other parts of the Pacific. By the middle of the 19th century, fertilizer and gunpowder manufacturers had come to recognize guano (dried bird droppings) as a valuable source of saltpeter, a component of their products. Passed in 1856, the Guano Islands Act empowered American citizens who discovered deposits of the substance on any uninhabited island not claimed by another nation to occupy it in the name of the United States. An island and two banks (elevated portions of the ocean floor) in the Caribbean Sea were claimed at one time or another under the provisions of the act, although in each case disputes arose as to national ownership. However, most of the islands ultimately affected by the act lie in the Pacific Ocean. Thus a small number of remote Pacific islands, atolls, and reefs, including Midway Atoll, passed into the

possession of the United States in the years following the passage of the act. While there had once been hopes that the uninhabited atoll might be utilized as a mid-Pacific coaling station, when Midway proved unsuitable, the prospect of controlling the major islands became almost irresistible. American missionaries and traders had begun settling in Hawai‘i in the 1820s, and American sugarcane plantation owners and managers shortly afterward. With time the groups assumed important roles in the kingdom’s economic affairs and began to dominate its political affairs as well. The ratification of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 marked a significant turning point in the island’s economy. Under its provisions the United States took possession of the land around Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in return for allowing the duty-free importation of Hawaiian products. The islands produced 13,000 tons of sugar the year the treaty was signed, but by 1898 the total had risen to 225,000 tons. Besides offering financial advantages to plantation owners, the treaty led to increased American control over Hawai‘i’s political and economic affairs while forestalling European designs on the islands. For a time plantation owners found their price advantage undercut when the U.S. Congress passed the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 subsidizing sugar produced on American soil. Sentiment for annexation of the islands among American settlers was already strong, and the realization that they would regain their advantage should Hawai‘i become an American territory naturally increased their ardor. Then on January 17, 1893, American settlers, many of them connected with sugar production and most of them allied with a political organization called the Hawaiian League, carried out a coup d’état. After removing Queen Lili‘uokalani, they set up a provisional government and appealed to the U.S. government for annexation. When this latter step was not forthcoming, the settlers established their own republic on July 4, 1894. Shortly afterward the McKinley Tariff Act was repealed, to be replaced by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff, and as a result the Hawaiian sugar market rebounded. Ultimately the United States annexed Hawai‘i in 1898. Only in 1993 did the U.S. Congress officially apologize for what it called the “illegal overthrow” of the Hawaiian monarchy.

FILIBUSTERING IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN The combination of economic interests and concern over national security also helped drive American imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Trade with the islands of the West Indies had long been important in American commerce. However, piracy had flourished at the same time, and an 1821 attack in the region prompted the United States to dispatch the 14-ship West Indies Squadron the following year to deal with the situation. Although piratical activity declined after 1825, the region remained of strategic concern to the United States due to its proximity to the North American mainland and its location in what became a vital sea-and-land route linking the continent’s east and west coasts. As early as 1825, officials of the newly independent Federal Republic of Central America (made up of what are today Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) gave careful consideration to the possibility of digging a canal across the peninsula through what is now Nicaragua. Although the plan attracted proponents in both Central America and the United States, a number of factors led to its abandonment in favor of constructing a canal through Panama in the early 20th century. It was in the form of filibusters that American imperialism found its most vocal proponents in the region. The filibusterers of the mid-19th century were adventurers operating beyond the boundaries of the United States in search of territory and political power. Although sometimes proceeding with tacit official authorization, they generally acted (filibustered) in defiance of the Neutrality Act of 1818, which forbade Americans from waging war against any country with which the United States was at peace. Despite such legal concerns, the filibusterers organized small armies and threatened the stability of several North and

South American countries. Their followers had often served in the U.S. military, and although these veterans frequently involved themselves for financial gain, they generally professed to believe in the worthiness of their endeavors. The filibusterers were widely celebrated in the press, and in addition to appealing to the expansionist mood of the American public, they enjoyed the same widespread fame as Western outlaws. The terms derive most directly from the Spanish word filibustero, meaning “freebooter” or “pirate”— an appropriate derivation given the fact that most filibusterers were involved in Spanish-speaking countries. The concept’s first widespread application seems to have been to Narciso López. The Venezuelan-born López had relocated to Cuba, but after becoming involved with an anti-Spanish faction on the island, he had fled to the United States in 1848. Subsequently he allied himself with the American expansionist cause, befriending opinion-makers such as John L. O’Sullivan (who had popularized the concept of “Manifest Destiny”) and gathering several successive armies of volunteers, many of them Cuban exiles like himself. Among his American followers were such figures as Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, a native of Virginia who had served in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). López’s attempts were stymied on the first two occasions by the American government but he succeeded in invading Cuba in 1850 and again in 1851. On this last occasion López’s troops were all killed or captured and he himself was executed. The most prominent filibusterer was Tennessee-born William Walker, who hoped—like many fellow filibusterers—to establish American colonies in Latin America that would be open to slavery. In 1855 Walker invaded the Central American nation of Nicaragua, where he actually succeeded in gaining that nation’s presidency. Reluctant though it was, official recognition of Walker’s regime by the Pierce administration in 1856 confirmed the fears of many Latin Americans that other filibusterers were operating with official sanction. However, Walker was deposed the following year by a coalition of Central American forces operating with the backing of American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, who himself had significant holdings in the country. After his repatriation to the United States, Walker attempted two further filibusters—a second one in Nicaragua and one in Honduras—before being executed in the latter country in 1860. Whether “opening” the Far East to trade, annexing Hawai‘i, or attempting to claim new territory for the expansion of the institution of slavery, economics and security were closely linked in America’s imperial claims beyond the continent in the 19th century.

Algerine War. See Barbary War (Second) American Colonization Society The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 to send emancipated African Americans to Africa. Underscoring the society’s actions was the belief that whites and freed African Americans could never coexist peacefully. They supported the establishment of settlements on the western coast of Africa that led to the creation of the nation of Liberia in 1847. The abolitionist movement eventually split over colonization as many rejected it because of its economic infeasibility and the inherently racist assumption of its mission. Reverend Robert Finely, a white Presbyterian minister from New Jersey, believed that whites and blacks were incapable of living harmoniously together. Unless freed from white influence, Finely thought,

African Americans would never reach their potential because of the racism in American society. He convinced his brother-in-law Elias B. Caldwell, clerk of the Supreme Court, and Francis Scott Key, author of the “Star Spangled Banner,” to gauge the support in Washington for his colonization proposal. After finding enough support to move forward, they founded the “American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States.” They elected Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, as president of the new society. Among the founders were Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, two of the towering figures in American politics for more than 40 years. Clay, a slaveholder who dominated Kentucky politics, and Webster worried that slavery threatened to tear the union apart. Having rejected the notion that African Americans were the equal of whites, they therefore supported “returning” them to Africa. Due to the influence of Clay and Webster, the society received $100,000 from Congress in 1819 to support a colony in Africa. The first colonists were sent out in January 1820 to the British colony of Sierra Leone. After exploring the coastline, the colonists settled in what would become the nation of Liberia. The first attempt, however, failed when yellow fever swept through the colony killing 25, including the three whites who had accompanied the freedmen. Jehudi Ashmun, an early leader of the ACS colony, acquired tribal lands along the coast and along major rivers leading inland through purchase, threats, or tricks. In one instance, he negotiated a treaty with a gun pointed at a tribal chief’s head. Over the next 10 years, more than 2,600 freed African Americans made the passage to Africa to settle in what became known as Liberia. Over the next 20 years, the colony slowly grew. It was governed until 1842 by white agents. In that year, Joseph Jenkins Roberts became the first nonwhite governor of Liberia. He became Liberia’s first president when the legislature of Liberia declared its independence in 1847. Liberia gained recognition from many European nations, but ironically, the United States refused to recognize the new nation because of Southern distaste for relations with a black nation. Not until 1862, after Southern states had seceded from the Union, did the United States establish relations with Liberia. The new nation had its own racial issues. It became a racially divided country with “AmericoLiberians,” who were of mixed African and European ancestry and lighter skinned than the native tribes, dominating Liberian politics. Natives faced discrimination, higher taxes, and exclusion from political life. The society received initial widespread support in both Northern and Southern states. Its message of separation of the races was far more popular to Americans than the abolitionists’ call for racial equality. Many white Southerners embraced colonization because they could see no other way to end slavery. In 1832, the Maryland Assembly set aside $20,000 for 1832 and up to $200,000 over the next 20 years to repatriate “all free Negroes who were willing to return to Africa.” Even those Southerners who supported colonization feared the rhetorical artillery of abolitionists could ignite the passions of Southern slaves, inciting riots and massacres of white masters. The fear of a repeat of the Haitian revolution, where slaves won their freedom by slaughtering whites, weighed heavily upon the minds of Southern leaders. As abolitionist leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison became more strident in their efforts to end slavery, Southern leaders feared they heralded a bloody racial revolution. African American leaders overwhelmingly rejected the notion of colonization. They argued that they were Americans. They had no connection to Africa other than ancestry. Black abolitionists instead focused on increasing support in the North for the abolition of slavery as they feared African colonization could threaten that goal and reinforce the racial prejudice of black inferiority. Most of the blacks who went to Africa were recently freed Southern slaves who had been manumitted in exchange for agreeing to emigrate. Free African Americans simply were not interested in emigration.

Abolitionists came to regard the American Colonization Society as a threat to their own actions. Religious leaders backed away from their support of colonization and by the 1830s, its support faded. The idea, however, refused to die. As the tensions between the sections rose in the 1850s, colonization attracted a new wave of supporters. This time, instead of Africa, the ACS turned to the Caribbean basin. Abraham Lincoln was a strong supporter of colonization before becoming president. Once in office, he convinced Congress to appropriate $600,000 to explore likely spots in Latin America and the Caribbean. A small colony was planted in Haiti in 1862 but quickly failed. Lincoln soon came to realize the impracticality of colonization as there were not enough ships to transport every African American overseas. Furthermore, with the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, the Civil War became a war of abolition. The ACS experienced a revival in the 1870s because many black leaders had been disappointed that Reconstruction failed to grant them full citizenship rights. Two thousand African Americans emigrated to Liberia in that decade, and the society continued to send settlers to Liberia until 1904. The society then transformed itself by promoting educational and missionary efforts rather than emigration. It dissolved in 1964 and donated its papers to the Library of Congress. Stephen McCullough See also: Liberia

Further Reading Burin, Eric. Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

American Exceptionalism, Roots of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States, its people, and its institutions are politically and culturally exceptional in the world. Such a belief has been an influential agent in American history. It has influenced both domestic and international affairs. This is particularly evident in regard to U.S. expansionism during the 19th century. The intellectual basis of American exceptionalism dates back to early colonial history. Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay area in the 17th century believed themselves to be founding a model and thus exceptional settlement of the Christian faith. Having fled what they believed to be a corrupt and misguided Church of England, the Puritans set forth to create a godly settlement that would serve as an example to the world. It was to be, as Puritan leader John Winthrop proclaimed in his sermon “Model of Christian Charity,” as a “city on a hill” for all to gaze upon and emulate. By the American Revolution, some of the overt religiosity was gone from claims of exceptionalism, replaced by a faith in the new American political system. The Declaration of Independence, through its eloquent prose of rights and equality, indicated a break with traditional European forms of statehood. This new nation, forged through revolution, emerged as proof that republican, representative government based on virtuous citizenry and natural rights could light the path for future society. Thomas Jefferson later proclaimed that this new nation stood poised as the world’s “empire of liberty.” The idea of the virtuous citizen of the American republic figured heavily into beliefs concerning the basis of American exceptionalism. Influential voices of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, such as those of Thomas Jefferson, J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, and Alexis de Tocqueville, found the basis

of the exceptional American democratic system and virtuous citizenry to be rooted in the American agrarian landscape. Simply put, availability of land allowed for widespread land ownership and lack of subservience to the elite. Widespread property ownership promoted self-sufficiency and gave Americans a stake in the future of the nation. Thus, according to the agrarian ethos that emerged, the small farmer was more likely to put the nation’s interests above his immediate interests and thus became the foundation of an exceptional body politic. Further, this availability of land offered unprecedented upward mobility. Such considerations certainly influenced the government’s decision to expand the nation’s territory westward in 1803 with the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory. It also played into the government’s actions regarding the taking of Native American lands and their removal westward during the 1830s. Belief in American exceptionalism became more pronounced by the mid-19th century. Rooted as it was in ownership and transformation of the land, belief in American exceptionalism rendered the allure of the vast lands to the west impossible to ignore. Many argued that it was America’s God-given destiny to spread its superior political system, culture, and values across the entire expanse of North America. Americans commonly referred to this widespread belief as the nation’s Manifest Destiny. An unyielding belief in Manifest Destiny shaped the nation during the mid-19th century. It was a central theme in the presidential election of 1844, with Democratic nominee and eventual winner James K. Polk proclaiming “Fifty-Four Forty or fight!” as a common, expansionist campaign slogan. This referred to the intention of taking sole control over the Oregon Country, which since 1818 had been jointly administered by the United States and Great Britain, to its northernmost border of 54 degrees, 40 minutes latitude. If the British refused, the slogan indicated that war would be the consequence. While compromise at the threat of war was initially reached with the British, no compromise could be reached when the popular tide of Manifest Destiny swept against the unyielding determination of Mexico to retain its northern territories from American expansion. Here, the result was war between Mexico and the United States from 1846 to 1848. As a result of this war, Americans gained control of what today is the southwestern quarter of the United States. Once the far west was under American political control, Americans wasted no time settling and pacifying the vast region. Between the 1860s and 1890s, the U.S. government waged wars of pacification against the various Native American nations of the western territories. During the process, Native Americans were forced to give up lands and ultimately parts of their cultures, as Americans forced them onto reservations and attempted to assimilation them. The policies that founded the latter process of forced assimilation were rooted in the supposed supremacy of Euro-American cultural values, economic practices, and society. Americans pacified the West with surprising rapidity. A mere 41 years after the initiation of the California gold rush of 1849, the U.S. Census declared that the nation no longer contained an identifiable western frontier. This came as a great shock to many Americans who, by 1890, believed the western frontier to be the source of American exceptionalism. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner summed up the case for the relationship between American exceptionalism and the frontier in the influential essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1892). Turner explained that, over time, interaction with what he considered a frontier of free and unsettled wilderness resulted in the development of a fiercely individualistic, pragmatic, resourceful, and democratic people. These characteristics, according to Turner, served as the basis for an exceptional citizenry and nation. The closing of the frontier, however, worried both Turner and the American people, as they considered how the nation could maintain its exceptional characteristics without the all-important interaction with the frontier. Ultimately, the nation found new frontiers. Expansionism and empire building beyond North America gained steam in the 19th century’s waning years. Primary examples of this process can be found in the

year 1898. That year, the United States waged war against Spain in an effort to end what the nation viewed as inhumane treatment of Cubans by the Spanish in the Caribbean colony. As a result of the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War, Cuba received its independence, albeit limited by U.S. intervention, and the United States gained control over far-flung remnants of the Spanish Empire. These included Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The latter possession required a bloody two-year war to pacify. Also in 1898, the United States officially annexed the formerly independent kingdom of Hawai‘i. The belief that Americans and the nation they created were exceptional directly contributed to the nation’s expansion across the North American continent and beyond. Through treaty, dispossession, and open warfare, Americans spread their institutions and values rapidly throughout the 19th century. The idea of American exceptionalism played a central role in this process. Jonathan Foster See also: American Century/American Exceptionalism; American Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Oregon Treaty; Polk, James Knox; Taylor, Zachary; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of

Further Reading Hietala, Thomas R. Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Hodgson, Godfrey. The Myth of American Exceptionalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Nugent, Walter. Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.

Amity and Commerce, Treaty of (1858) The Japanese had traded with Europeans since the arrival of the Portuguese at Tanegashima Island in 1543. In what became known as the Nanban trade, the Portuguese brought desirable Chinese goods to isolated Japan as well as new products from the West, including tobacco. The establishment of Nagasaki as a port for the Portuguese ships facilitated trade. Catholic missionaries soon followed and in 1549 the Roman Catholic priest Francis Xavier established the first Christian ministry. Dutch traders arrived in Japan in 1600. Initially the Japanese were curious about the Europeans and their Christian religion, and they welcomed the new foods, clothing, and military technology such as muskets. But the worship of a single god did not sit well with the Japanese, who believed that their emperor was a god. By the late 1500s the Japanese were asking Catholic missionaries to stop proselytizing and leave the country. In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) was invested as shogun, the hereditary military governor of Japan and head of the feudal Japanese military bureaucracy. This began the Edo period, which lasted until 1867. The era was marked by political stability maintained by a strict rule of law. However, perceptions that Portuguese missionaries were interfering in Japanese politics, combined with fears that Spain and Portugal were intent on colonial domination of Japan, led to calls for expulsion of all foreigners. Between 1633 and 1639 the shogunate issued five seclusion edicts. Under the Sakoku Edict of 1635, foreigners were forbidden to enter Japan under penalty of death and Japanese citizens were prohibited from leaving the country. Christianity was proscribed. Foreign trade was not abolished, but was severely restricted: the Portuguese were told to leave, while Dutch and Chinese traders were allowed to continue trading, but only from the single port of Nagasaki. By 1639, most foreigners had been expelled from Japan and the country remained effectively closed for 200 years.

In the mid-19th century, after it had successfully gotten China to open its ports to regular trade, America became interested in opening trade negotiations with Japan. The annexation of California had provided America with access to the Pacific Ocean, and as more American shipping plied the Pacific there was a greater need for a somewhere they could take on fresh water and provisions. And as sailing ships were replaced with steamers they needed to obtain coal. Japan was both ideally located as a stopover and was rumored to have extensive coal deposits. During the 1830s, several U.S. Navy ships approached Japan but were refused access. Tales of shipwrecked American sailors being mistreated by the Japanese also gave the American government concern. In 1851, President Millard Fillmore sent an expedition to return Japanese sailors to Japan in exchange for American sailors. Under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry, a fleet of four ships arrived in Edo (Tokyo), Japan, on July 8, 1853. Perry had a letter from the president for the Japanese emperor as well as gifts, including a working model of a steam locomotive. He had prepared for the trip by learning as much as he could about the Japanese and demanded to be received. Perry was also willing to use force to get his point across and fired on some buildings to demonstrate American weaponry. The Japanese relented. Perry delivered his missive on July 14 and then left to allow the Japanese to decide on their response. Perry returned in February 1854 with a larger fleet of ships. Ii Naosuke, the chief policymaker for the shogun, believed that Japan was not strong enough to resist Perry’s forces and recommended establishing relations with the United States. However, factions within Japan thought Naosuke was a traitor, and so a schism opened between seclusionists and those who believed in kaikoku, opening Japan to foreign trade. Naosuke took it upon himself to accept most of the terms in the treaty, and on March 31, 1854, Japan and the United States signed the Treaty of Kanagawa. The treaty did not provide for trade, but it allowed the United States to use the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate for refueling, and granted American consuls the right to live in those cities. Additionally, stranded American seamen would be protected and returned safely. Perhaps most important, the treaty contained a most-favored-nation clause so that when Japan granted other nations favors the United States would also benefit. Meanwhile, Japanese internal politics became openly hostile. Naosuke decided to neutralize his opposition by arresting them. This consisted of antiforeign daimyo (feudal barons who acted as military governors) and other officials, as well as young radical samurai known as shishi, “men of high purpose,” who advocated violent opposition to foreigners. Using the slogan sonnō jōi, “Revere the Heavenly Sovereign, Expel the Barbarian,” the antiforeigner radicals attacked both foreigners and Japanese officials who tolerated their presence. In March 1860, shishi assassinated Naosuke. On July 29, 1858, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (Harris Treaty) was negotiated by Townsend Harris, the United States’ consul-general in Shimoda, for trading rights with Japan. The treaty also provided for the formal exchange of representatives and was similar to the unequal treaties signed with China after the Opium Wars. The effect of those treaties was to forcibly open Japan to the Western countries, which included Britain, France, the Netherlands, Russia, and America. Karen S. Garvin See also: Bakumatsu; Black Ships; Gunboat Diplomacy; Japan, Opening of; Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of; Perry, Matthew Calbraith; Sakoku; Tianjin, Treaty of

Further Reading

Auslin, Michael R. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Jones, Howard. Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Laver, Michael S. The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011.

Bakumatsu The Bakumatsu period refers to the last 15 years of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan (1853–1868). The era was marked by high inflation rates, a currency crisis, vitriolic political debates over the adoption of Western ideas and technology, and revolution that culminated in the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate. During this time the Japanese policy of seclusion, sakoku, came to an end. Japan was first visited by Europeans in the mid-16th century, when Portuguese ships arrived at Tanegashima Island in 1543. Dutch, Spanish, English, and Italian traders soon followed, and in 1549, the Portuguese Roman Catholic Francis Xavier established the first Christian mission in Japan. The Japanese initially welcomed Europeans and Nagasaki was set aside as a port for foreign trade. Novel fruits and vegetables, such as watermelon and sweet potatoes, became favorite foods, and the Europeans’ knowledge of geography and cartography, navigation, and shipbuilding techniques were highly sought after. For the daimyo (feudal barons who acted as military governors), access to muskets and other military technology enabled them to maintain their political clout in Japan’s turbulent political climate. Despite the initial interest in Christianity, by the late 16th century the changing political climate within Japan meant that Christianity was perceived by those in power as a potential destabilizing influence. The daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) knew of the Spanish conquest of the Philippine Islands and feared that Europeans might try to colonize Japan. In 1587, he issued a decree that demanded all Jesuits leave the island. The decree was vague and so was largely ignored, but in 1597, Hideyoshi had 9 missionaries and 17 Japanese converts publicly executed. In 1603, the Heavenly Sovereign (emperor) appointed Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) as shogun. Ieyasu normalized relations with Korea and maintained a friendly relationship with other southeastern Asian countries and with European traders. In 1614, he ordered all Catholic missionaries to leave Japan. Ieyasu mercilessly hunted down all priests and their converts, and by the late 1630s Christianity was all but eradicated in Japan. Ieyasu’s grandson Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651) became shogun in 1623 and continued the persecution of Christianity. But Iemitsu expanded the ban on Christians to become a ban on all foreigners. Ieyasu believed Christianity was synonymous with the West, and he recognized that trade with foreigners had strengthened the southwestern daimyo at the expense of Tokugawa power. Unrestrained foreign trade had also drained Japan’s treasury of silver. Iemitsu’s government issued five seclusion orders between 1633 and 1639, of which the sakoku edicts of 1635 were the most restrictive. The edicts consisted of 17 articles that prohibited Christianity, banned Portuguese ships from entering Japanese waters, and tightly regulated foreign trade. The isolationist policies of sakoku did not completely seal the country but gave the Tokugawa shogunate control of foreign policy. The sakoku edicts would remain in force until the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. In 1852, President Millard Fillmore authorized a naval expedition to Japan with three requests. The first was that Japan open itself to trade with the West; the second request called for Japan to give fair treatment to American sailors who had been shipwrecked off its shores; and the third request was for access to coal, provisions, and water for American steamships.

Perry’s fleet of “black ships” arrived at Edo (Tokyo) Bay on July 8, 1853. Six days later, Perry went ashore to meet with an assembly of shogunal representatives and deliver Fillmore’s message. Perry told the Japanese he hoped they would respond favorably, and that he would leave Japanese waters and return the next spring—with a much larger force—to hear their reply. Perry’s arrival coincided with a period of unease in Japan. The country wrestled with a series of problems from within and from without, and the shogunate vied with the daimyo for political power. Abe Masahiro (1819–1857), chief counselor to the shogun, had Fillmore’s message translated and sent to all the daimyo, but his effort to build a consensus was unsuccessful because the daimyo were split on whether or not to sign a treaty with America. On February 14, 1854, Perry returned to Japan and presented gifts that included a telegraph and miniature steam locomotive. On March 31, 1854, representatives of the two countries signed the Treaty of Peace and Amity, an unequal treaty that included a most-favored-nations clause. Perry’s high-pressure tactics, or “gunboat diplomacy,” generated heated arguments between daimyo who would rather fight the foreigners than bow to their demands, and daimyo who believed it was better for Japan to accept the treaty terms and avoid a fight with a superior military force. On July 29, 1858, the United States’ consul-general Townsend Harris (1804–1878) and Ii Naosuke (1815–1860), the shogun’s chief policymaker, signed the United States–Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce (the Harris Treaty). In the next few years, Japan signed similar treaties with Great Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. The political situation in Japan deteriorated rapidly, in part due to pressures by the unequal treaties. Young radical samurai known as shishi (men of high purpose) violently opposed dealing with Westerners. Between 1859 and 1860 they terrorized foreigners and committed a number of murders. Naosuke was assassinated in 1860 for his support of the treaty with America and, in 1861, the shishi murdered Harris’s translator, Henry Heusken. High inflation rates ravaged Japan’s economy and many officials saw Westerners as the source of their problems. In March 1863, Emperor Kōmei (1831–1867) gave an order to expel all foreigners from Japan, but the shogunate ignored his order. This led to attacks on the Tokugawa shogunate and split the daimyo into pro- and antiforeigner factions. Attacks against foreigners escalated. In the fall of 1862, merchant Charles Richardson was killed, and in May 1863, the American legation in Edo was burned to the ground. Daimyo Mori Takachika, head of the Chōshū clan, led rebel forces who fired on American ships under the command of David Stockton McDougal. The resulting Battle of Shimonoseki Straits on July 16, 1863, lasted only one hour and 10 minutes and resulted in an American victory. The Japanese became convinced fighting the Westerners was not worthwhile, but political upheavals and mass uprisings continued throughout the 1860s, precipitated in part by American pursuit of Manifest Destiny.

A group of samurai, ca. 1860. While the samurai had made up the warrior class of Japanese society since the 13th century, they became particularly active during the Bakumatsu period when a radical group known as shishi (men of purpose) violently opposed unequal treaties with the West. (Felice Beato/Henry Guttmann/Getty Images)

On January 3, 1868, the office of the shogun was abolished and Emperor Meiji took the throne. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 changed Japan from a feudal state into a modern nation and brought an end to Japan’s policy of seclusion. Karen S. Garvin See also: Amity and Commerce, Treaty of; Black Ships; Gunboat Diplomacy; Japan, Opening of; Perry, Matthew Calbraith; Sakoku; Shimonoseki Straits, Battle of

Further Reading Auslin, Michael R. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Feifer, George. Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853. New York: Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2006. Laver, Michael S. The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011. McClain, James L. Japan: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Barbary War (First) (1801–1805) The First Barbary War, also known as the Tripolitan War, was a naval conflict between the United States and Tripoli between 1801 and 1805. Located in North Africa, the Barbary States included Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunis (present-day Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) and were, with the exception of the independent Sultanate of Morocco, officially part of the Ottoman Empire but conducted semi-independent foreign policies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To generate revenue, these states sent out corsairs to capture foreign merchant vessels and seize their cargo and sailors (the latter would then be sold or held for ransom). By paying tribute to the Barbary States, nations could protect their shipping fleets from piracy. In 1801, however, President Thomas Jefferson—with congressional

support—refused to continue making tribute payments and instead sent the U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean to protect American ships and to seize vessels of the pasha of Tripoli. Hostilities ceased in 1805 when the United States agreed to pay ransom for American hostages taken during the war. While Great Britain paid annual tributes to the Barbary States to protect its ships (and the ships of its colonies) from piracy, American vessels became targets for Barbary corsairs once the United States became an independent nation. The first attack occurred in 1784 when Moroccan pirates captured the American brigantine Betsey and its crew. Two years later, American diplomats negotiated a treaty with Morocco that ended Moroccan attacks against U.S. merchantmen. In 1785, however, American ships were again attacked when Algerian pirates seized two U.S. vessels—Maria and Dauphin—and imprisoned the sailors on board. The United States lacked both the financial resources to pay for the sailors’ return (it still had substantial outstanding debts from the War of Independence) and the naval power to thwart piracy in the Mediterranean, so the American seamen remained in captivity for years. In 1793, nine more U.S. merchant ships were seized. Two years later, the United States—after having established its credit and a steady flow of revenue from tariffs—finally agreed to pay Algiers more than $1 million annually for the release of enslaved American sailors and for future protection of American shipping. In the years that followed, the United States also concluded treaties with Tripoli (1796) and Tunis (1797). The treaties, however, were ineffectual in preventing further piracy and the annual tributes amounted to almost 20 percent of the federal government’s annual revenues. In the 1780s, the enduring threat posed by the Barbary States gave support to those voices wishing to replace the Articles of Confederation with a constitution, thereby giving the central government more power to handle foreign policy issues. In the 1790s, the number of voices calling for the establishment of a U.S. Navy also increased as the Barbary States escalated their assaults on American commercial shipping. In 1794, Congress authorized the construction of six frigates in the hopes of protecting American shipping militarily rather than monetarily. As the United States made peace with Algiers in 1796, Congress discontinued the funding for three frigates such that only the USS United States, the USS Constitution, and the USS Constellation were launched in 1797. In 1798, however, with a naval war with France pending, Congress appropriated the funds for the completion of the three remaining frigates— the USS President, Congress, and Chesapeake—and established the Department of the Navy to manage the young navy. Upon Jefferson’s election to the presidency, Yusuf Karamanali, the pasha of Tripoli, raised the price of protection payments ($225,000). When the United States refused to meet Karamanali’s demands, he declared war on the United States on May 30, 1801. In response, Jefferson sent a small naval fleet consisting of four ships—the frigates USS Essex, President, and Philadelphia and the sloop Enterprise —under the command of Commodore Richard Dale to the Mediterranean to protect American shipping (but with instructions to avoid combat except to defend American merchantmen from capture). It was only after Congress empowered Jefferson to use the navy to also attack the vessels of Tripoli generally that the president deployed a larger part of the U.S. Navy to the war scene in 1802. Commodore Edward Preble, in command of the squadron, ordered a blockade of Tripoli and attacked its fleet in 1803. In March 1805, moreover, America’s former consul to Tunis, William Eaton, along with several hundred men, advanced from Egypt toward Tripoli to depose Yusuf and install his brother Hamet Karamanali as pasha instead. Fearing his position was vulnerable, the pasha was willing to negotiate an agreement. On June 4, 1805, both sides signed a treaty ending U.S. tribute payments. According to the terms of the treaty, however, the United States would pay a $60,000 ransom in exchange for the release of the nearly 300 USS Philadelphia sailors who had been taken captive after the ship had run aground near Tripoli in October 1803.

The peace treaty did not effectively stop piracy in the Mediterranean. Other geopolitical concerns took precedence, however, and as Anglo-American relations deteriorated in subsequent years, the Barbary threat lost its relative importance. It was only after the War of 1812 that Commodore Stephen Decatur was dispatched to the Mediterranean to defeat the Barbary States and put an end to their piracy once and for all in the Second Barbary War. The significance of the conflicts with the Barbary States is twofold: they contributed to a revision of the Articles of Confederation in the 1780s and led to the creation of the U.S. Navy in the 1790s. Not only did the young U.S. Navy earn a good reputation through its successful exploits, but American mariners also acquired combat experience that would prove invaluable in America’s naval war with Great Britain in 1812. Jasper M. Trautsch See also: American Revolution; Articles of Confederation; Barbary War (Second); Jefferson, Thomas; XYZ Affair

Further Reading Kitzen, Michael L. S. Tripoli and the United States at War: A History of American Relations with the Barbary States, 1785–1805. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. Sofka, James R. “The Jeffersonian Idea of National Security: Commerce, the Atlantic Balance of Power, and the Barbary War, 1786–1805.” Diplomatic History 21, no. 4 (1997): 519–544. Toll, Ian W. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Barbary War (Second) (1815) The Second Barbary War, also known as the Algerine War, was a naval conflict between the United States and Algiers in 1815. It was the second of two wars the United States waged against the so-called Barbary States of Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunis (present-day Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) in North Africa, which sent out corsairs to capture merchant vessels to generate revenue. They would seize the cargo and sailors and either sell them or hold them for ransom. By paying tribute to the Barbary States, nations could protect their shipping fleets from piracy. With the exception of Morocco, which was an independent sultanate, the so-called Barbary States were officially part of the Ottoman Empire and paid an annual tribute to Constantinople, but they conducted semi-independent foreign policies. After the failure of the First Barbary War, fought between 1801 and 1805, to end piracy in the Mediterranean, President James Madison, with the backing of Congress, sent a naval squadron to the region immediately following the end of the Anglo-American War of 1812. The short naval war between the United States and Algiers ended in treaties that would permanently protect American shipping from piracy in the Mediterranean. After the United States gained independence and its merchant ships no longer enjoyed the protection Great Britain provided by paying tributes to the Barbary States, Barbary corsairs began assaulting American vessels in the mid-1780s. Lacking a powerful navy to fight the Barbary States, the U.S. government was forced to pay tributes to shield its merchants and goods from being seized. Congress soon took steps to create a navy that would put the United States in a position where it could protect American shipping by military means. It was President Thomas Jefferson who ultimately decided to end the tribute payments and to use America’s young navy to protect American shipping in the Mediterranean.

While the First Barbary War ended in a treaty whereby the pasha of Tripoli agreed to stop capturing American vessels, the peace agreement did not effectively end piracy either by Tripoli or the other Barbary States in the Mediterranean. The federal government’s and the American public’s attention, however, was diverted from the problems with the Barbary States after the First Barbary War. Anglo-American relations deteriorated as a result of the British practice of impressing seamen from American merchant ships on the high seas and the British government’s interference with American foreign trade as part of its war efforts against Napoleonic France. In 1807, President Jefferson therefore withdrew the American warships from the Mediterranean. It was only after the War of 1812 ended that the United States could refocus its naval forces on piracy in the Mediterranean. With increased public pressure to eliminate the Barbary threat, on March 3, 1815, Congress authorized President Madison to deploy the U.S. Navy against Algiers. Although two squadrons were to be sent to the Mediterranean, it was only Commodore Stephen Decatur’s squadron that saw military action, as Commodore William Bainbridge’s squadron arrived on the scene only after the conflict had already ended. Decatur’s squadron, which departed New York Harbor on May 20, 1815, consisted of the frigates USS Guerrière, Constellation, and Macedonia as well as the sloops-of-war Eperyie and Ontario; the brigs Firefly, Spark, and Flambeau; and the schooners Torch and Spitfire. In June, the American squadron captured the Algerian flagship Meshuda and the Algerian brig Estedio. After the squadron arrived at Algiers Harbor on June 28, diplomatic negotiations were undertaken, which culminated in a treaty, signed on July 3, 1815, in which the dey of Algiers agreed to the following terms: Algiers would end piracy against American shipping (without any future demands for tributes), it would return all American captives (as well as a number of European prisoners), and it would pay indemnities of $10,000 for seizures of American ships. In exchange, the United States returned the two captured Algerian vessels and their crews. The Algerian treaty in hand, Decatur sailed on to Tripoli and Tunis demanding treaties on similar terms. As the United States had defeated the most powerful of the Barbary States, both Tripoli and Tunis agreed to Decatur’s terms, thus ending depredations on American commerce in the Mediterranean that had been dragging on ever since 1784.

USS Constellation engages Mashuda, the Algerian flagship, near Cape de Gat, June 17, 1815. The treaties signed at the end of the war permanently protected American shipping interests from piracy in the Mediterranean. (U.S. Navy)

The American victory over the Barbary States bolstered the U.S. Navy’s international reputation and signaled to European states that armed conflict with the young republic would be a risky endeavor. The Barbary Wars thus contributed to the fact that European states would not chance another war against the United States throughout most of the 19th century. Jasper M. Trautsch See also: Barbary War (First); Jefferson, Thomas; Madison, James; War of 1812

Further Reading Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. Leiner, Frederick C. The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War against the Pirates of North Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Parker, Richard B. Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

Bayonet Constitution (1887) The Bayonet Constitution is the common name given to the 1887 constitution of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, forced upon the Hawaiian monarch Kalākaua by a small group of unruly haole (white) subjects. The term “Bayonet Constitution” refers to the fact that the Hawaiian monarch was forced to approve the new constitution under duress. Hawai‘i became a constitutional monarchy in 1840. Fearing annexation by any of three Western powers—Britain, France, or the United States—Hawai‘i’s third monarch, Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III), approved of Hawai‘i’s first constitution as a way to demonstrate to the world his kingdom’s status as a modern nation-state. The 1840 constitution called for the division of government into three branches: executive, legislative, and judiciary. The legislature was bicameral, consisting of a House of Nobles (comprised of ali‘i, members of Hawai‘i’s traditional ruling class) and a House of Representatives elected by the people. By the end of that decade, most Western powers at least tacitly recognized Hawaiian sovereignty. During the same time, haole subjects of the king began to serve in the monarch’s cabinet as well as in the legislature. Under the growing influence of these foreigners, King Kauikeaouli enacted the Māhele, a series of land reforms in the late 1840s that allowed residents (including foreigners) the right to purchase and alienate Hawaiian land as private property. Land ownership was soon consolidated in the hands of ali‘i and haole who, in 1864, benefited when Hawai‘i’s fifth monarch, Lot Kapuāiwa (Kamehameha V), pushed through a new constitution giving himself greater powers. This constitution also limited the voting franchise to property-holding males. Upon his death in 1872, King Kamehameha V had designated no heir, so the legislature chose the next monarch, Lunalilo. However, when Lunalilo succumbed to illness just one year later, the legislature was forced again to elect a new king. In 1874 they chose Kalākaua. Known colloquially as the “Merrie Monarch,” King Kalākaua oversaw a renaissance of traditional Hawaiian arts and culture during his reign (1874–1891). He also spent lavishly on projects to legitimize his rule, upsetting haole ministers and legislators both within his government as well as from rival political factions. As sovereign, he oversaw the construction of ‘Iolani Palace (1879–1882) and became the first monarch to circumnavigate the globe during a world tour in 1881. He held a lavish coronation ceremony for himself in 1883, despite having already ruled as monarch for nine years. He also sometimes

appointed controversial haole to serve in his cabinet, none more so than Walter Murray Gibson, a disgraced Mormon church leader and opportunist whom Kalākaua appointed minister of foreign affairs in 1882. Facing the continued threat of foreign imperialism, Kalākaua, with Gibson’s support, sought to establish a Polynesian Confederacy that would have included Hawai‘i, Samoa, and potentially other Pacific Island states. European empires expressed outrage at Kalākaua’s own brand of “imperialism,” perceiving Hawai‘i’s regional diplomacy as a threat to their own imperial designs in the South Pacific. In opposition to King Kalākaua and Gibson (who was elevated to the position of prime minister in 1886), a coalition of haole descendents of Hawai‘i’s early Christian missionaries, many of them members of the Hawaiian legislature and some of them stakeholders in the islands’ burgeoning sugar economy, rose up in rebellion on July 1, 1887, and arrested Gibson. They took control of Kalākaua’s cabinet and began to write a new constitution for the kingdom. They hastily presented this new constitution to the king on July 6. The Honolulu Rifles, an armed militia that supported the rebels, carried rifles fixed with bayonets. Kalākaua’s sister, Lili‘uokalani, later speculated that Kalākaua would have been assassinated if he had not signed the document. Hence, the new constitution, which Kalākaua had no choice but to sign, was known as the “Bayonet Constitution.” The new constitution effectively stripped the monarch of some powers, gave greater powers to the legislature, and further restricted the franchise. Members of Kalākaua’s haole opposition resented the way he appointed and removed cabinet ministers, so the Bayonet Constitution mandated that cabinet members could only be removed from office by consent of the legislature. The new constitution also gave the legislature the power to override a king’s veto by passing disputed legislation by a two-thirds margin. The new constitution furthermore revoked the king’s privilege to appoint members of the House of Nobles, in effect making the upper house an elected body for the first time. The constitution restricted eligibility to the House of Nobles to subjects of the kingdom possessing at least $3,000 in property or receiving an annual income of no less than $600 per year, and those eligible to vote for a member of the upper house were restricted to men of “Hawaiian, American or European birth or descent” owning at least $3,000 in property or receiving an annual income of at least $600. In effect, the property requirements for both election of and election to the House of Nobles were set so high that they privileged Hawai‘i’s haole landowning class over Native Hawaiians. New property requirements were also established for those seeking to serve in the House of Representatives. Candidates were required to possess no less than $500 in accumulated property or an annual income of at least $250. And, while all Hawaiian subjects of “Hawaiian, American or European birth or descent,” regardless of wealth or property, were given the right to vote for members of the lower house, these rules still excluded Hawai‘i’s Asian population—comprising over 25 percent of the kingdom—from the franchise. The Bayonet Constitution had the immediate effect of granting King Kalākaua’s haole opponents control over the upper house of the Hawaiian legislature and de facto control over the executive branch. A counterrevolution in 1889 led by Robert Wilcox, a Hawaiian who had studied military arts in Italy, sought to force Kalākaua to reinstate Hawai‘i’s earlier 1864 constitution, but his uprising was suppressed by the Honolulu Rifles. Kalākaua died in 1891, and his sister, Lili‘uokalani, took the throne. As queen, she fervently hoped to replace the Bayonet Constitution. In early 1893 she proposed a new constitution to this effect. This led to a second uprising, culminating in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i on January 17, 1893. A provisional government was formed, and annexation by the United States followed in 1898. Although the 1887 Bayonet Constitution was authored and forced upon Kalākaua by citizens of Hawai‘i, the fact that these men were of Euro-American descent as well as supportive of U.S. annexation makes the Bayonet Constitution a seminal event in the history of American empire. Gregory Rosenthal

See also: Hawai‘i, Annexation of; Hawaiian League; Queen Lili‘uokalani

Further Reading Lili‘uokalani. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1898. Osorio, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo‘ole. Dismembering Lāhui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. Silva, Noenoe. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Black Ships The Portuguese called their large sailing ships—three- and four-masted carracks—naus, but to the Japanese in whose waters the ships began appearing in the 16th century, they were kurofune, or “black ships.” The reference was to the ominous black color of the carracks’ hulls, which would have been waterproofed with tar or pitch. Subsequently, all large foreign vessels venturing into the region were labeled “black ships.” In the mid-19th century, the term was applied more specifically to the imposing ships of Commodore Matthew Perry, whose American fleet first reached Japan in 1853. Perry’s mission delivered a shock to the proud nation, with the result that Japan threw off more than two centuries of isolation and in time became a world power that would go to war with the United States. The first contact between Portuguese and Japanese appears to have been in 1542 or 1543, when a Portuguese ship sailing between China and Okinawa wrecked on a small Japanese island. The trade that the Portuguese subsequently established benefited from the fact that while the Chinese were prohibited from trading directly with Japan at the time, the Portuguese were able to carry Chinese goods without hindrance to Japan, where they were in great demand. The Portuguese were followed by the Spanish and, in 1600, by the Dutch. In the beginning the foreigners, although often perceived as uncivilized, had been welcomed and had even been allowed to proselytize, but by the end of the 16th century distrust of their political motives had begun to set in. A series of edicts (collectively known as sakoku) forbade Japanese citizens from leaving the country and limited trade with (and, over time, knowledge of) the outside world. Among Europeans, only the Dutch— strictly confined to the tiny island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor—were tolerated. The isolationist policy established by the sakoku edicts would remain in effect until 1858 but trade, albeit restricted to particular ports and particular countries, continued. While ships flying the American flag did not participate, American ships did visit the island nation from time to time. Although the evidence is ambiguous, an American ship may have been seen off the island of Honshu as early as 1790. The following year, however, definitely saw two American vessels in Japanese waters: the Boston brigantine Lady Washington and the New York sloop Grace. The ships did not linger and their intent remains unclear.

PAIXHANS GUNS (BLACK SHIPS) Until the middle of the 16th century, most naval battles were decided by galley tactics in which the boat itself would be used as a battering ram, followed by a melee of small arms. The battle would be won after one crew boarded their rival’s ship and defeated the other crew in hand-to-hand combat. The next 100 years brought an increasing number of cannons on warships but because explosive shells were too dangerous to handle on wooden ships, the cannons fired only inert cannonballs that inflicted damage only to the area that was directly struck. No one had figured out how to combine the explosive power of shells (which were already being used in ground warfare) with the flatter trajectory and higher power needed to be useful in ship-to-ship combat.

In 1823, French artillery officer Henri-Joseph Paixhans developed a timing mechanism that allowed the crew to load and fire the shell in relative safety. Rather than lighting the shell and then launching it through the gun, the shell’s fuse would be lit automatically at the same time that the gun was fired. The shell would then be safely lodged in an enemy’s wooden hull before exploding. In 1845, the U.S. Navy adopted Paixhans’s design, fitting several ships with cannons capable of firing 8and 10-inch shells. Ten such guns were placed on the USS Mississippi and six more on the USS Susquehanna, part of the fleet under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry responsible for coercing Japan into signing the Treaty of Kanagawa. While the design continued to be modified throughout the 19th century, it was Paixhans’s initial implementation that brought an end to wooden battleships and ushered in the age of ironclads.

In 1797, the Eliza became the first of eight American ships chartered by the Dutch East India Company to trade with Japan. However, when William Robert Stewart (who had commanded several of the chartered ships) appeared aboard a ship flying the American flag in 1803 with hopes of establishing an American trading post, he was rejected. The American brig Morrison made a generous attempt to repatriate seven shipwrecked Japanese seamen in 1837, but so severe was Japanese xenophobia at the time that the ship was driven off repeatedly with cannon fire. A similar humanitarian attempt by the American whaler Manhattan in 1845 was successful—a change perhaps due to the growing presence of American whaling ships in the western Pacific—but Japanese officials nevertheless ordered the Americans not to return. As the 19th century progressed, American interests in Pacific and Far Eastern trade continued to grow. In 1846, Commodore James Biddle, in command of the warships Columbus and Vincennes, attempted to negotiate a treaty of commerce with the Japanese but was rebuffed. Three years later James Glynn visited Nagasaki on the sloop Preble in hopes of securing the release of a party of American and Hawaiian seamen who had deserted the whaler Lagoda. While Glynn was successful in his mission, Japanese officials were blunt in their insistence that laws forbidding the landing of small craft (such as the deserters had appeared in) would continue to be strictly enforced.

A Japanese portrayal of an American naval vessel in a Japanese harbor. Though the term initially referred to Portuguese sailing ships due to the color of the pitch used to waterproof their hulls, in the middle of the 19th-century “black ships” referred specifically to the American fleet commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry. (Library of Congress)

It was against this background of increasingly frequent but generally hostile interaction that Commodore Matthew Perry reached Japan in 1853. His fleet consisted of four black-hulled vessels, two of which—the Plymouth and the Saratoga—were three-masted sailing ships. But while Perry’s other two ships—the Mississippi and the Susquehanna—also carried three masts, they were coal-burning paddlewheel steamships. At 229 feet and 257 feet in length respectively, they were among the largest and most formidable warships of their kind ever built, and the Japanese likened them to “giant dragons puffing smoke.” Perry carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the emperor of Japan urging the Japanese to treat shipwrecked American seamen with greater respect in the future and to open at least one of their ports to trade and to the provisioning of foreign ships. If the Japanese were not receptive to these requests, the commodore had instructions to press the issue. After a show of force by Perry and numerous misunderstandings on both sides, Perry departed on a short mission to China, declaring that he would return the next year. In 1854, Perry found the Japanese ready to agree to the American demands—but now insisted that greater concessions were required. After due deliberation, Americans and Japanese signed a Treaty of Peace and Amity (the Treaty of Kanagawa) on March 31, 1854. In the decades that followed Perry’s visits to Japan, his fellow countrymen would perceive his mission as the culmination of American efforts to “open” the country to trade. But for the Japanese themselves, the commodore’s black ships would function as a powerful metaphor for outside interference in Japanese affairs. Grove Koger See also: Amity and Commerce, Treaty of; Bakumatsu; Japan, Opening of; Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of; Sakoku

Further Reading Boxer, Charles Ralph. The Christian Century in Japan: 1549–1650. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Hones, Sheila, and Yasuo Endo. “History, Distance and Text: Narratives of the 1853–1854 Perry Expedition to Japan.” Journal of Historical Geography 32, no. 3 (July 2006): 563–578. Wiley, Peter Booth, with Korogi Ichiro. Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan. New York: Viking, 1990.

Burlingame-Seward Treaty (1868) This agreement between the United States and the Ta-Tsing Empire (China) represented a major shift in Sino-American relations. The treaty sought to remove barriers to reciprocal travel, study, and immigration. Additional terms of the treaty addressed China’s wish to curb external influence, including from America, on domestic matters. The treaty consisted of eight articles asserting the equality between nations and was signed in Washington, D.C., on July 28, 1868. This was the same day that the secretary of state formally proclaimed the Fourteenth Amendment part of the Constitution. China ratified the treaty on November 23, 1869, in Peking. The U.S. president issued a public proclamation of the ratified Burlingame-Seward Treaty on

February 5, 1870. The document bore the signatures of four “plenipotentiaries” or statesmen: Anson Burlingame, William H. Seward, Chih-Kang, and Sun Chia-Ku. This measure, intended to strengthen U.S.-China relations, took its name from two individuals who helped shape the countries’ relations during the 19th century. Anson Burlingame (1820–1870) became America’s minister to China in 1861. Prior to this time, Burlingame had served as a lawyer and Massachusetts congressman. He received his orders from William H. Seward (1801–1872), U.S. secretary of state for presidents Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and Andrew Johnson (1808–1875). Seward wished to promote a U.S. presence in the East, particularly for purposes of increased trade. Burlingame proved effective in extending international diplomacy and promoting cooperation between the United States and China as he advanced respectful Sino-Western relations by recognizing Chinese sovereignty. Along with Chinese officials Zhigang and Sun Jiagu, he served as envoy and led the first Chinese embassy to Western nations between 1868 and 1870. This initiative became known as the Burlingame Mission. The effort drew support from such Americans as writer Mark Twain (1835–1910), who praised Burlingame’s statecraft and humanitarianism. In the United States, fellow Republicans supported the Burlingame Mission while Democrats proved less supportive of it. Chinese visitors arrived in San Francisco on March 31, 1868, and remained in the United States through September, making visits to New York, Washington, and Boston. Both houses of Congress held receptions for the Burlingame Mission, and General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) welcomed the group to his home. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873) received the delegates at his home, as well. Burlingame’s major speech in conjunction with the mission was delivered in New York during June 1868. Burlingame was a powerful orator and he brought those skills to bear in promoting Sino-American relations. He eschewed language and views that exoticized China, instead treating the nation as another on the world stage. He emphasized common values between the nations and advocated a cooperative policy. Burlingame ultimately stepped back from his role as American minister to China to assist Chinese negotiations with Seward. The Burlingame Mission led to treaties negotiated with several other nations, including Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and Prussia. Burlingame died in St. Petersburg negotiating a Chinese treaty with Russia. The Burlingame-Seward Treaty extended previous agreements, particularly the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. The 1868 treaty represented the first equal treaty between a Western nation and China since the Opium Wars. The agreement addressed a variety of issues ranging from immigration to commerce. For example, the terms of the treaty prevented the parties from battle on Chinese soil. They also prevented foreign territorial concessions over China. Through this agreement, the two nations affirmed that reciprocal travel would be unrestricted. Furthermore, visitors to either nation would find unfettered access to schooling and education while residing abroad. The language of the treaty was explicit about the notion that the United States would refrain from exercising undue influence on Chinese internal affairs, particularly with regard to telegraphs, railroads, or other improvements. That is, enhanced U.S.-China foreign relations would nonetheless respect the Chinese government’s right to self-determination in such matters. The treaty also encouraged commerce between the United States and China. Through its provisions, the two states received most-favored-nation status, an arrangement that removes restrictions and tariffs on international commerce. The treaty also allowed China to name consuls to port cities in the United States. The treaty guaranteed religious freedom and banned persecution on the basis of religion. Americans also considered the possibility that such a treaty might aid the spread of the Christian faith in the East. The treaty promoted immigration from China and reframed the previous anti-“coolie” laws bilaterally. In

doing so, the agreement’s sixth article allowed Chinese individuals to become naturalized U.S. citizens. In fact, the treaty helped mobilize an immigrant labor force for American employers. Because these Chinese immigrants to the United States worked for modest pay, the Burlingame-Seward Treaty garnered some support from owners of American business concerns, at least at the outset. Chinese migrants had worked in the United States since the days of the California gold rush, including participating in construction of the first continental railroad. Americans were ambivalent about this influx of workers from China, however, concerned chiefly with how Chinese labor might affect the financial interests of Americans. Economic factors, such as Chinese workers’ willingness to work for low wages and without access to community services such as schools, led to some acceptance of Chinese laborers. When economic downturns took place and Americans sensed any economic disadvantage, however, prejudice toward Chinese immigrants would reassert itself. Despite the diplomatic and fiscal effects it achieved, the Burlingame-Seward Treaty did not endure. A rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States during the 1870s rendered the original terms of the treaty a matter of contention in America. By November 17, 1880, the agreement had been modified. Under the direction of President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893), James Burrill Angell (1829–1916) changed the treaty such that further Chinese immigration would be suspended. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act then reversed its impact on Chinese-U.S. diplomacy, particularly in terms of Chinese immigration. As its title would suggest, the Exclusion Act ushered in a new era of marked and public discrimination against Chinese immigrants. Linda S. Watts See also: Cushing, Caleb; Gunboat Diplomacy; Japan, Opening of; Opium Wars; Tianjin, Treaty of

Further Reading Dennett, Tyler. Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of United States’ Policy in the Far East in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963. Haddad, John Rogers. America’s First Adventure in China: Grade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Schrecker, John. “‘For the Equality of Men—For the Equality of Nations’: Anson Burlingame and China’s First Embassy to the United States, 1868.” Journal of American–East Asian Relations 17, no. 1 (201): 9–34.

Convention of Kanagawa. See Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of Cushing, Caleb (1800–1879) In a long political career, Cushing served as a congressman, diplomat, and attorney general of the United States. The Harvard-educated Cushing was elected to Congress in 1834 as a Whig from Massachusetts. President John Tyler selected Cushing in 1843 to be U.S. minister to China. He arrived in China after its humiliating defeat to Great Britain in the First Opium War. As a result of the peace treaty, all Western nations were granted most-favored-nation status for purposes of trade. Determined to protect and expand U.S. trade to China through actions of the U.S. government, Cushing negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia) with the Chinese government. The United States gained the right of extraterritoriality, establishing that American citizens accused of a crime in China would be tried by U.S. authorities, rather than Chinese. The tariff on U.S. imports into five treaty ports was fixed, and Americans gained the right to

buy and own property in China. The U.S. government pledged to end U.S. trade in opium with China. While the Chinese government offered the United States nothing that the peace treaty with Great Britain provided for all Western nations, the treaty helped spur increased trade between the two countries and placed the United States equal to other Western nations in trade and commerce in China. After his return home, Cushing entered Massachusetts politics, serving in the legislature and state supreme court. In 1853 he became the attorney general of the Franklin Pierce presidency. He reentered the diplomatic service in 1868 when President Andrew Johnson sent him to Colombia to negotiate a treaty on the possible building of a canal across the Colombian province of Panama. He was appointed in 1870 by the Grant administration to be part of the U.S. legal team arguing before the Geneva Tribunal of Arbitration for claims against Great Britain. He helped secure an award of over $15 million in damages for the United States for British assistance given to the Confederate states during the American Civil War.

Caleb Cushing was a lawyer and politician who, as U.S. minister to China, pushed through the Treaty of Wanghia (Wangxia), helping to establish an American foothold in the region. He served as attorney general from 1853 until 1857 in the Franklin Pierce administration and was a trusted adviser to presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. (Library of Congress)

Cushing was appointed U.S. minister to Spain in 1874 after which he urged Secretary of State Hamilton Fish to help find a peaceful solution to the Cuban insurgency before the United States found it necessary to intervene. Fish, who was adamantly against U.S. intervention in Cuba, accepted Cushing’s recommendation of proposing increased Cuban autonomy within the Spanish Empire as a basis for peace. As talks stalled, Cushing warned Spain that Washington’s patience was dwindling, and the U.S. government might find it necessary to adopt a new policy. When unveiled, Fish’s peace proposal of 1874 was revolutionary because he intended to invite European powers to participate in a joint mediation to end the war. He deemed it unlikely that Germany or Russia would take part, but hoped that Great Britain might participate because of its extensive trade interests in the Caribbean. He reassured the European governments that the United States did not seek to annex Cuba, but merely to end the fighting. Fish’s truly

bold plan broke new ground in that for the first time the U.S. government was willing to undertake multinational diplomacy. The peace initiative ultimately failed, but it provided the Grant administration the ability to defeat congressional calls for Cuban recognition. Cushing returned to the United States in 1877 and died two years later. Stephen McCullough See also: Blockade of Confederate Ports; Opium Wars; Wanghia (Wangxia), Treaty of

Further Reading Belohlavek, John M. Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005. Dolin, Eric J. When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. New York: Liveright, 2012.

Filibusterers The filibusterers of the mid-19th century were adventurers operating beyond the boundaries of the United States in search of territory and political power. Although sometimes proceeding with tacit official authorization, they generally acted (filibustered) in defiance of the Neutrality Act of 1818, which forbade Americans from waging war against any country with which the United States was at peace. Despite such legal concerns, the filibusterers organized small armies and threatened the stability of several North and South American countries. Their followers had often served in the U.S. military, and although these veterans frequently involved themselves for financial gain, they generally professed to believe in the worthiness of their endeavors. The filibusterers were widely celebrated in the press, and in addition to appealing to the expansionist mood of the American public, they enjoyed the same widespread fame as Western outlaws. The Texas Revolution of 1835, in which a majority of the troops fighting on the side of the rebels were American volunteers, was essentially a filibuster. Other early filibusters—the Upper and Lower Canada rebellions, or Patriot Uprisings of 1837–1841—were fought in the north. These were conflicts in which anti-British Canadian rebels fled across the border into the United States but returned to Canada after enlisting the active support of numerous American volunteers. In a pattern that would be duplicated in most subsequent such situations, the American government acted to quash the movement, in this case entrusting the mission to General Winfield Scott. Despite these early instances, however, the terms “filibuster” and “filibusterer” became common in the United States only in the later 1840s. The terms derive most directly from the Spanish word filibustero, meaning “freebooter” or “pirate”—an appropriate derivation given the fact that most filibusterers were involved in Spanish-speaking countries. The concept’s first widespread application seems to have been to Narciso López. The Venezuelanborn López had relocated to Cuba, but after becoming involved with an anti-Spanish faction on the island, he had fled to the United States in 1848. Subsequently he allied himself with the American expansionist cause, befriending opinion-makers such as John L. O’Sullivan (who had popularized the concept of Manifest Destiny) and gathering several successive armies of volunteers, many of them Cuban exiles like himself. Among his American followers were such figures as Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, a native of Virginia who had served in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). López’s attempts were stymied on the first two occasions by the American government but he succeeded in invading Cuba in 1850 and again in 1851. On this last occasion López’s troops were all killed or captured and he himself was executed.

John L. Quitman of Virginia was a veteran of both the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War and offered López assistance in fighting the Cuban government. As a result, he was charged with violating the Neutrality Act in 1850 (along with López himself, Wheat, O’Sullivan, and numerous others) but was acquitted. Subsequently President Franklin Pierce appears to have encouraged Quitman to mount his own Cuban campaign but later reversed himself. The most prominent filibusterer was Tennessee-born William Walker, who hoped—like many fellow filibusterers—to establish American colonies in Latin America that would be open to slavery. Having failed to gain Mexican support in setting up an American settlement in Sonora, he instead invaded the Mexican state of Baja California with a small army in 1853 in hopes of establishing a “Republic of Sonora.” Foiled by both Mexican and American authorities, Walker was tried in San Francisco for violating the Neutrality Act but found not guilty. In 1855, Walker invaded the Central American nation of Nicaragua, where he actually succeeded in gaining that nation’s presidency. Reluctant though it was, official recognition of Walker’s regime by the Pierce administration in 1856 confirmed the fears of many Latin Americans that other filibusterers were operating with official sanction. However, Walker was deposed the following year by a coalition of Central American forces operating with the backing of American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, who himself had significant holdings in the country. After his repatriation to the United States, Walker attempted two further filibusters—a second one in Nicaragua and one in Honduras—before being executed in the latter country in 1860. Henry Alexander Crabb, a boyhood friend of Walker, mounted his own disastrous filibuster in Sonora in March 1857. Along with some six dozen members of his Arizona Colonization Company, Crabb was captured near the northern Sonoran town of Caborca the following month and executed. Four other members of the group who had remained in the United States were nevertheless captured and killed by Mexican soldiers raiding across the border. Mexican-American war veteran Henry L. Kinney was a filibustering rival of Walker, and, like Quitman, appeared to enjoy the support of the Pierce administration for a time. Backed by a group of investors, he laid claim in 1854 to vast holdings on the Mosquito Coast, a British protectorate on the Caribbean coasts of what are now Honduras and Nicaragua. Opposed by the British and arrested by American authorities for violation of the Neutrality Act, Kinney nevertheless escaped to Nicaragua, where he struggled unsuccessfully for several years to establish his own regime. Many filibusterers were Southerners, and a large number of them lost their lives (like Wheat) or dissipated their energies in the Confederate States army during the American Civil War. Nevertheless, there were a number of filibusters after the war, including those of the Fenian Brotherhood, whose members hoped to conquer parts of Canada to force Great Britain into granting independence to Ireland. Others filibusterers made repeated attempts on Cuba, but such efforts ended when the United States briefly took control of Cuba after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Grove Koger See also: López, Narciso; Manifest Destiny; Nicaragua, Republic of; Quitman, John A.; Walker, William

Further Reading Bonthius, Andrew. “The Patriot War of 1837–1838: Locofocoism with a Gun?” Labour/Le Travail no. 52 (Fall 2003): 9–43. Brown, Charles H. Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Stout, Joseph Allen. Schemers and Dreamers: Filibustering in Mexico, 1848–1921. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2002.

First Barbary War. See Barbary War (First) Gray, Robert (1755–1806) Robert Gray, American merchant sea captain and explorer, was born May 10, 1755, in Tiverton, Rhode Island. Serving in the Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War, Gray commanded vessels in the triangular trade before being contracted by a consortium of merchants interested in opening a fur trade between New England and the Northwest Coast. Gray’s two trading voyages to the region led to the establishment of a maritime fur trade and ultimately to the expansion of the country’s territory to the North Pacific coast. Gray also became the first American captain to circumnavigate the globe, expressive of the increased capability and influence of the young republic. Gray’s first voyage was inspired by James Cook’s narrative of his expeditions, which underlined the potential value of a maritime fur trade in sea otters on the Pacific Coast. Gray’s Lady Washington and John Kendrick’s Columbia Rediviva sailed for the Pacific Northwest on September 30, 1787, with orders to examine the coast, begin a fur trade with the Indians, and sail to China to exchange furs for tea and silks. Upon entering Nootka Sound in September 1788, Gray met a British expedition sent to take possession of the region. Declining to heed Captain Meares’s warnings of hazardous navigation and hostile Indians, Gray and Kendrick wintered at Friendly Cove, securing trade alliances with the Indians and compiling a vocabulary of their language. Trading continued the following summer while tensions intensified between Britain and Spain. Gray witnessed the Nootka Sound Incident and sided with the Nootka chief against Meares’s acts of possession. While Kendrick proceeded to China, Gray sailed to Hawai‘i in the Columbia, making it the first American vessel to visit the islands. He completed the first American circumnavigation of the world when he returned to Boston on August 9, 1790, via Canton. Impressed with the voyage, investors almost immediately sent Gray back to the Pacific aboard the Columbia. In April 1792, he met George Vancouver of the British ship Discovery. Though Gray reported finding the mouth of a large river further south, Vancouver doubted his claim that it might be the “Great River of the West” leading to the Northwest Passage. Gray returned to the area on May 11 and entered the river later named for his ship Columbia. Spending nine days exploring and trading, Gray thought it a strategic location for a future post and lay claim to it for the United States, five months before the British declared possession of the river. Gray embarked on his third voyage to the Pacific around 1798 but was captured by French privateers. He returned to merchant trading and died at sea near Charleston in July 1806. Gray’s voyages opened the Pacific Coast to American trade, exploration, and eventual settlement. His discovery of the Columbia River and establishment of peaceful relations with the Indians prompted the Lewis and Clark Expedition and figured as a key event in support of the United States’ land claims over the future states of Oregon and Washington. Michael Dove See also: Convention of 1818; Cook, James; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Nootka Sound Convention; Oregon Treaty; Vancouver, George

Further Reading Nokes, J. Richard. Columbia’s River: The Voyages of Robert Gray, 1787–1793. Tacoma, WA: Washington State Historical Society, 1991. Pethick, Derek. The Nootka Connection: Europe and the Northwest Coast 1790–1795. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1980. Scofield, John. Hail Columbia! Robert Gray, John Kendrick, and the Pacific Fur Trade. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1993.

Guano Islands Act (1856) The Guano Islands Act of August 18, 1856, represented a departure in American imperialism. Previously the U.S. government focused its expansionist efforts westward toward the North American Pacific Coast while filibusterers and transnational firms unofficially operated in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. The act signaled one of the earliest attempts of the government to officially expand overseas beyond the North American continent. With the act, the United States claimed more than 100 islands. Guano is dried bird excrement that piles up on islands. Before artificial fertilizers, farmers used guano to return nitrogen, an essential nutrient for photosynthesis, into exhausted soil. The first discovery of large amounts of guano was off the coast of Peru on the Chincha Islands where nesting seabirds created large guano mounds. Some guano islands held tons of guano reaching more than 100 feet in height. In the mid-1800s, Europe and Atlantic Coast states desired guano due to repeated harvests of food crops and nitrogen-depleting tobacco and cotton. The Peruvian government nationalized the deposits on the islands and worked with British import-export firms to sell guano. With its monopoly and high international demand, Peru raised prices to fund roads and education projects. American farmers resented Peru’s control over its guano deposits and its relationship with British firms. Except for notable exceptions, such as that of William R. Grace, few U.S. firms prospered. In his annual message to Congress in 1850, President Millard Fillmore declared, “Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interest of the United States that it is the duty of the Government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.” This message hinted at the lengths America would go to ensure a steady supply of guano. American citizens and firms made the first efforts to lay claim to overseas islands of guano. In the early 1850s, Alfred Grenville Benson requested the U.S. Navy’s protection to mine guano on Peru’s Lobos Islands, yet the Peruvian government and British firms stopped him. With reports of unclaimed Pacific guano islands, Benson formed the United States Guano Company to acquire Palmyra Island. In the Caribbean, Philo S. Shelton sent Captain Nathan Gibbs to explore Aves Island, less than a mile long, off Venezuela. Gibbs claimed the island in April 1854, but Venezuela’s Domingo Díaz sent armed soldiers and on December 30 ordered both firms off the island. In 1856, the U.S. Navy ordered explorations of Baker and Jarvis Islands in the Pacific. That spring, Shelton sent bill proposals to the U.S. Congress to seize uninhabited guano islands, and Benson lobbied Senator William H. Seward to sponsor the Guano Islands Act. Recorded as U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, the Guano Islands Act of 1856 brought together American firms and the U.S. government. “Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any [unoccupied] island … and takes peaceable possession,” the act states, the guano island is “considered as appertaining to the United States.” To enforce claims, the “President is authorized, at his discretion, to employ the land and naval forces of the United States.” The act thus allowed any citizen to declare unclaimed islands as U.S. possessions and the U.S. government to use military force to defend such claims. The next year, the U.S. government claimed Baker Island. In 1867, the U.S. Navy took Midway under the act. Within a decade of the act’s passing, the U.S. government claimed 59 overseas

possessions, keeping some into the 21st century. The U.S. government even tried taking Cayo Verde, despite the British considering Cayo Verde as part of the Bahamas. Conflicts arose over the act. On November 18, 1857, Baltimore sea captain Peter Duncan and his employer Edward K. Cooper used the act to claim Navassa, a two-square-mile island 30 miles west of Haiti in the Caribbean Sea. The Haitian government argued that Navassa was its dependency and deployed two naval vessels in 1858 to halt Duncan and Cooper’s mining ventures. Informed by the miners, the U.S. government sent an armed naval vessel on July 7, 1858, to intimidate the Haitian vessels into leaving. On November 13, 1858, a Haitian commercial agent told U.S. secretary of state Lewis Cass that Haiti’s independence from France guaranteed its sovereignty over Navassa. On November 17, 1858, the U.S. government replied that the island had been abandoned. On December 8, 1859, Secretary of State Cass reaffirmed that Navassa was a U.S. “possession.” The act shaped U.S. imperialism. Baltimore’s Navassa Phosphate Company sent African Americans to Navassa to mine guano in miserable and dangerous conditions and ignored any complaints. In 1889, after constant abuse by white employers, some black workers rebelled and killed some of their employers. Lawyers for the black workers disputed the right of the state of Maryland to hear a case of murder from Navassa, for the act labeled guano islands as “possessions” and “insular areas” rather than official “territories” of the U.S. government. In fact, the United States could relinquish any “possession” after depleting its guano. In the case Jones v. United States (1890), the Supreme Court ruled the act constitutional and U.S. law extended into U.S. “possessions.” Consequently, the Guano Islands Act provided a foundational basis for later imperial acts when the U.S. government laid claims to numerous territories at the turn of the 20th century and circumvented constitutional questions regarding conquered peoples’ citizenship and islands’ sovereignty. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Filibusterers; Gunboat Diplomacy; Manifest Destiny; Midway Atoll

Further Reading Clayton, Lawrence A. Grace: W. R. Grace & Co., the Formative Years, 1850–1930. Ottawa: Jameson, 1985. Cushman, Gregory T. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gootenberg, Paul. Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru’s “Fictitious Prosperity” of Guano, 1840–1880. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Skaggs, Jimmy M. The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Gunboat Diplomacy Gunboat diplomacy refers to the deployment of American naval power to intimidate weaker nations. Circumventing diplomatic channels to address grievances, U.S. officials appeared to view these nations and their peoples as inferior to “respectable” nations and cultures. The frequent use of overt military force in Asia and Latin America bolstered anti-American sentiments. Whereas official diplomacy involved negotiations, gunboat diplomacy served as one of the most blatant forms of American imperialism. In the early 1800s, U.S. officials applied gunboat diplomacy sporadically. In the Second Barbary War of 1815, Congress authorized Stephen Decatur’s naval expedition to attack Algiers. However, Decatur then used his forces to demand reparations from Tunis and Tripoli for assaults on American vessels

during the War of 1812 and to give warnings against future attacks. In 1817, President James Monroe ordered the navy to assist the Luis-Michel Aury invasion of Amelia Island. Between 1820 and 1823, some naval forces targeted slave-trading bases in Africa. In Cuba, U.S. naval forces burned a pirate base in 1822, deployed five expeditions in 1823, and occupied the waters at Matanzas in 1824. Officials’ haphazard use of gunboat diplomacy reflected the nation’s own various attempts to determine its international goals. Fighting piracy emerged as one of the goals of gunboat diplomacy. With the 1819 Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy, Congress authorized naval expeditions against pirates around Cuba and Puerto Rico, at Fajardo in 1824, and on the Greek islands of Argenteire, Miconi, and Androse in 1827. In 1831, President Andrew Jackson ordered the Potomac into West Sumatra after Malayan pirates attacked the trade ship Friendship, pillaged $20,00 in cargo, and caused casualties. Captain John Downes claimed that the leaders refused his demands, so his forces killed between 150 and 200 villagers at Quallah Battoo and burned down four villages. These events were repeated in 1838 and 1839. Congress even considered authorizing commanders to pursue pirates into Cuba and the West Indies, blatantly disregarding Spain’s territorial rights. Officials directed naval forces to protect American trade and citizens, asserting their nation’s sovereignty. During insurrections threatening U.S. trade, naval officers initiated two landings in 1835 and 1836 at the Falkland Islands, at Callao and Lima in 1836, and at the Ivory Coast in 1843. In 1843, the St. Louis landed after a trade argument at Canton. In 1851, the Dale demanded reparations from Johanns Island for imprisoning a whaling captain. After the murder of Americans, naval vessels arrived in Fiji in 1840, burned towns in Samoa in 1841, and intimidated Jaffa in 1851. When Austrian officials arrested Martin Koszta, American vessels aided U.S. diplomats in 1849 in securing his release. Gunboat diplomacy helped define the reach of the United States in the mid-1800s. Gunboat diplomacy heavily shaped U.S.-Pacific relations. Instructed by President Millard Fillmore, Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 threatened naval force if Japan did not violate its own laws, trade with Americans, and allow coaling stations for U.S. ships. In 1864, naval forces helped U.S. diplomats obtain favorable negotiations and open the Straits of Shimonoseki. Japan was not an isolated case. In 1854, marines landed twice to obtain coaling stations at Okinawa and open commerce at the Bonin Islands. In 1871, almost a dozen naval vessels attacked five forts after attacks on American vessels in Korea. Naval forces were further utilized in 1882 to force Korea to trade with American vessels. U.S. vessels demanded reparations from the Fiji Islands in 1855 and returned in 1858 after natives at Waya killed two Americans. In 1867, naval forces burned huts at Formosa after the crew of a shipwrecked vessel was killed. China especially felt the brunt of gunboat diplomacy. U.S. vessels arrived at Shanghai in 1854, 1855, and 1859 during political unrest and to pursue pirates. After 1858, the American navy remained a constant presence around China’s coast. American gunboat diplomacy achieved infamy in Latin America. U.S. forces arrived at Buenos Aires and Nicaragua twice in 1852 and 1853 during political disturbances, Montevideo in 1858 and 1868, and Panama nine times between 1856 and 1895. In 1854, a Nicaraguan hit U.S. diplomat Solon Borland with a bottle for protecting an American wanted for murder. When local officials refused to pay reparations, the Cyane bombarded the town, causing $3 million in damages. In 1855, when the Water Witch navigated the Paraná River, illegal under Paraguayan law, a fort fired, killing one and wounding three sailors. In 1859, 19 warships arrived at Asunción, forcing an apology. In 1856, an inebriated American bit a watermelon and refused to pay the Panamanian vendor. When the vendor chased the American, who then drew a gun, the Watermelon Riot erupted as Panamanians attacked U.S. businesses and killed 15 Americans. U.S. forces occupied Panama City’s railroad station and demanded compensation. Officials

even justified their actions based upon Panamanians and Colombians’ supposed racial inferiority. In 1891, members from the Baltimore quarreled with Chileans at the True Blue Saloon, resulting in 2 Americans dead, 17 wounded, and 36 jailed. President Benjamin Harrison alerted the navy, thus forcing an apology and reparations. During the 1879–1884 War of the Pacific, U.S. forces arrived to discourage European involvement. When British vessels arrived on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, U.S. warships encouraged their departure. As the 20th century began, gunboat diplomacy seemed linked to the Monroe Doctrine and American imperialism in Latin America. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Barbary War (Second); Bayonet Constitution; Japan, Opening of; Korean Expedition of 1871; Koszta Affair; Monroe Doctrine; Perry, Matthew Calbraith; Shimonoseki Straits, Battle of

Further Reading Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Loveman, Brian. No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Schoultz, Lars. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Hawai‘i, Annexation of (1898) Ruled as a united kingdom since 1810, the Hawaiian Islands began attracting European and particularly American missionaries and traders during the 1820s. Over the following decades the number of American settlers grew, as did their involvement in the kingdom’s affairs. Impatient with the islands’ government, they eventually overthrew the monarchy and pressed for annexation by the United States. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 marked a significant step in the growth of American influence in the kingdom. Under the provisions of this document, Hawai‘i ceded the port of Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu to the United States. While the latter country officially recognized the islands’ independence, the treaty nevertheless increased the flow of American capital into Hawai‘i’s sugar and rice plantations and contributed to the consolidation of American economic power. Although King Kalākaua, who had ascended to the throne in 1874, was at first popular with both Native Hawaiians and foreigners, he eventually lost the support of the latter group and was forced to accept a new constitution in 1887. Known as the “Bayonet Constitution,” this new document further empowered the island’s non-Native population. Upon Kalākaua’s death in 1891, his sister, Lili‘uokalani, became queen. However, her attempts to restore the privileges of the monarchy and the rights of native-born Hawaiians resulted in a coup d’état led by a small group of dissidents calling themselves the Committee of Safety. Lili‘uokalani was deposed in mid-January 1893, upon which the committee formed a provisional government and appointed jurist Sanford Dole as president. American State Department minister John L. Stevens had already sanctioned posting sailors from the USS Boston in several locations in Honolulu and went on to recognize the new regime, directing that the American flag be raised over the city’s government buildings. Within a short time the provisional government appointed five commissioners to approach the administration of American president Benjamin Harrison regarding annexation. A treaty was drafted, but before the Senate could ratify the document, Harrison’s term came to an end and he was succeeded by

Grover Cleveland. Seeking further information, the new president sent James H. Blount on a secret mission to investigate the circumstances under which Queen Lili‘uokalani had been deposed. Blount reported to Cleveland that the coup d’état had apparently been carried out with the encouragement of Stevens, upon which the president dispatched a new minister, Albert S. Willis, to the islands. Willis urged the provisional government to restore the queen to her throne, but to no avail. Instead, the government convened a constitutional convention on May 30, 1894. Delegates included Dole, members of various councils of the provisional government, and 18 residents selected by voters from a carefully screened slate of candidates. The convention proceeded to create a governmental structure resembling that of the United States, after which the Republic of Hawai‘i was proclaimed on July 4, 1894. Although the queen continued to enjoy wide popularity, a rebellion by her supporters in January 1895 was put down quickly and effectively. When William McKinley took office as U.S. president in March 1897, proponents of annexation renewed their efforts. However, there were not enough votes in the Senate to meet the required two-thirds necessary for the ratification of a treaty. Trying a different approach, strategists introduced joint resolutions (which would require only simple majorities) in the Senate and the House of Representatives the following year.

The Hawaiian flag being lowered at Iolani Palace in Honolulu upon Hawai‘i’s annexation by the United States in 1898. In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 103–150, officially apologizing to native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. (Library of Congress)

Before either house could act on its resolution, however, the question of annexation took on an added dimension. The Spanish-American War broke out in April 1898, and in May an American fleet attacked and destroyed its Spanish counterpart in the Philippine Islands. Given that many Americans in and out of government favored maintaining control of the Philippines, the idea of annexing Hawai‘i as a mid-Pacific way station had obvious merit. Well aware of this mood, the leaders of the Republic of Hawai‘i allied themselves with the American cause and began welcoming American troop ships. Another factor involved the Empire of Japan, which had sent the warship Naniwa to Hawai‘i the previous year to protest limitations on the number of Japanese contract laborers who could enter the islands. It is not clear whether Japan actually had territorial designs upon Hawai‘i, but the visit was a stark reminder that the empire was intent on increasing its power and prestige throughout the Pacific.

Aside from these considerations, there were obvious commercial advantages to annexing Hawai‘i. Besides constituting an increasingly important market in themselves, the islands would be as practical a stopover for American ships trading with China as they would be for American warships headed for the Philippines. (Uninhabited Midway Atoll, which lies near the end of the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, had been annexed in 1867, but its use as a coaling station had proven impractical.) Although the vast majority of native Hawaiians opposed annexation, their wishes counted for little against the combined commercial, political, and now military interests arrayed against them. The joint resolutions would probably have passed before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, but their success was certain afterward; the House approved the measure on June 15, 1898, by a vote of 209 to 91, and the Senate on July 6 by a vote of 42 to 21. President McKinley signed the document on July 7, and on August 12 a formal ceremony was held in Honolulu during which the flag of the United States replaced that of Hawai‘i. Subsequently the Hawaiian Organic Act, signed by McKinley on April 30, 1900, established the islands’ new territorial government. Grove Koger See also: Bayonet Constitution; Hawaiian League; Queen Lili‘uokalani; Sugar Plantations, Hawai‘i

Further Reading Daws, Gavan. Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom. Vol. 3: 1874–1893: The Kalakaua Dynasty. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967. Osborne, Thomas J. “Trade or War? America’s Annexation of Hawaii Reconsidered.” Pacific Historical Review 50, no. 3 (August 1981): 285–307. Siler, Julia Flynn. Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012.

Hawaiian League The Hawaiian League was a secret political organization created by Lorrin A. Thurston in January 1887 during the reign of Hawaiian king David Kalākaua (1836–1891). The league’s goal was the curtailment of the powers of the islands’ monarch. Some members argued for the abdication or even assassination of the king, while others hoped to limit the monarch’s freedom of action through the imposition of a new constitution. Still others favored the abolition of the monarchy and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States. Within little more than a decade, the league succeeded in most of its aims. The league’s membership never exceeded 405, but its members were among the most influential on the islands. While the league eventually included American, British, German, and Portuguese citizens, very few could boast any native Hawaiian ancestry. A number of members also belonged to the Honolulu Rifles, an armed group of volunteers ostensibly serving the Hawaiian government but commanded by annexationist Volney V. Ashford and operating as the league’s military wing. The league itself was run by a core group known as the Committee (or Council) of Thirteen. United for the first time under a single monarch in 1810, Hawaiians had maintained their independence during a period in which most other Pacific islands had been annexed into one or another of the European empires. Hawai‘i was of great interest to the United States, however, as American missionaries had begun proselytizing there in 1820 and the islands promised to be an important source of raw materials. As a result, Americans came to dominate the islands’ commerce during the middle decade of the 19th century. Then in 1875 the United States signed a reciprocal treaty with King Kalākaua that

recognized the islands’ independence but ceded the area around Pearl Harbor on Oahu to the United States. In addition, the treaty allowed Hawaiian sugar and rice to be imported into the United States dutyfree—a step that greatly increased the flow of American capital into the islands. It also resulted in an influx of immigrant laborers from China, Japan, and Portugal to work on sugarcane and rice plantations. King Kalākaua was popular among native Hawaiians, but his autocratic manner of governing— particularly his habit of dismissing cabinets and appointing new ones—antagonized many of the Europeans and Americans who had settled in his kingdom. They were also unhappy with what they saw as his extravagant spending, with his ill-advised attempts to form a Polynesian confederation with other island groups, and with his unpredictable prime minister, American adventurer Walter Murray Gibson. An 1887 scandal involving the improper sale of opium licensing proved to be the overt provocation that the league had been waiting for. Sensing the growing public distrust, the members of Kalākaua’s cabinet, including Gibson, resigned on June 28, but their move did not quell the crisis of confidence in which the king found himself. The following day the Hawaiian League posted notices advertising a public meeting to be held on June 30 in the armory of the Honolulu Rifles. The king himself subsequently called out the Honolulu Rifles to guard his government’s buildings—a move that, of course, fell in with the league’s plans. Following a number of angry speeches, the attendees voted unanimously to present a series of resolutions to the king. Among other requirements, the resolutions called for the selection, under the guidance of an adviser of the group’s choosing, of a new cabinet “committed to the policy of securing a new constitution.” The resolutions also demanded the removal of Gibson (who had, in fact, already resigned) and the abstention by the king from interference in affairs of government. Having no real choice, Kalākaua agreed to the demands and on July 1 a new cabinet, including Thurston and Clarence W. Ashford (Volney’s younger brother), took office. All were members of the Hawaiian League. The league’s next step was drafting a new constitution, a task that was completed in less than a week. Its text was presented on July 6 to the new cabinet ministers who approved it, presenting it to King Kalākaua. After a sometimes heated discussion, the king, again having no real choice, signed the document and took an oath to uphold it. Due to the circumstances under which the document was enacted into law, it became known as the Bayonet Constitution. The Bayonet Constitution revised the existing constitution of 1864, transforming the monarch into a ceremonial figure. Executive decisions were placed in the hands of a cabinet responsible only to the legislature. The monarch could still veto legislation but the veto could be overturned by a two-thirds vote of legislators. The general right to vote was extended to all adult male residents of the islands, whether of Hawaiian, American, or European nationality or descent. Those of Asian nationality or descent were excluded from voting unless they had been born in the islands. Members of the upper house of the legislature, once appointed by the monarch, would now be elected but only by those earning a significant income or owning a sizable piece of land—a provision disqualifying two-thirds of native Hawaiian voters. In depriving the king of his traditional and legally sanctioned powers, the Hawaiian League and its supporters had taken control of the Hawaiian Islands. What is more, by adding so many non-Hawaiian voters to the rolls and restricting the manner in which the House of Nobles was elected, the Bayonet Constitution had greatly diminished the ability of Hawaiians to manage their own affairs. The constitution’s unpopularity among the Native Hawaiian population made it unworkable, leading ultimately to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and the islands’ annexation by the United States in 1898. Grove Koger

See also: Bayonet Constitution; Hawai‘i, Annexation of; Queen Lili‘uokalani

Further Reading Daws, Gavan. Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom. Vol. 3: 1874–1893: The Kalakaua Dynasty. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967. Siler, Julia Flynn. Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012.

Japan, Opening of (1853–1860) With the changing balance of power in East Asia in the wake of Britain’s victory over China in the Opium Wars, Japan’s policy of relative isolation from the outside world was successfully challenged by American gunboat diplomacy. The initial concessions gained by Matthew Calbraith Perry’s diplomatic mission were later followed by successful efforts to bring Japan into a series of treaties that brought it into a global trading economy. The humiliation of ending a policy of over 200 years of seclusion weakened the prestige of the Tokugawa shogunate, eventually culminating in the success of emperor loyalists in its overthrow and beginning a period of modernization that would lead Japan down the path of industrialization, colonialism, and militarism, ending in an unsuccessful challenge against the United States’ position as an Asian Pacific power. Japan’s policy of isolation (sakoku) began under the shogunate of Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651) and involved a series of edicts written from 1633 to 1639 to control Japanese interactions with foreigners. The edicts governed trade agreements limiting interactions with Europeans to the Dutch, but also governed trade with Korea, China, and the Ainu in a similarly restrictive manner. During this time, commercial contacts were limited to Nagasaki for the Dutch, Chinese, and Koreans, and Matsumae Domain on Hokkaido for the Ainu. Besides the above-mentioned trading relationships, Satsuma Domain managed trade with the Ryukyu kingdom. The edicts provided for the death penalty for foreigners coming to Japan and Japanese leaving Japan in violation of the stipulated regulations. In 1825 the edicts were interpreted in a more aggressive manner when the shogunate issued orders to repel foreign ships as they approached Japanese shores, but this policy was relaxed in 1842 to make allowances for provisioning and refueling foreign ships. American interest in Asia is as old as the founding of the American republic. Northeastern merchants sought wealth in China’s markets and Yankee whalers tracked their prey into the waters around Japan. During the Napoleonic Wars, American ships conducted trade for the Dutch with Japan, but in general, American efforts to further relations with Japan ran unsuccessfully into the isolation edicts. Charles King’s attempts to return three Japanese castaways aboard the unarmed American merchant ship Morrison in 1837 met with cannon fire. In 1847, the Manhattan, an American whaling ship under the direction of Captain Mercator Cooper, succeeded in returning 22 shipwrecked Japanese sailors. Cooper received several gifts but was instructed never to return. In 1846, Captain James Biddle, after concluding a successful trade agreement between the United States and China, failed to establish a similar agreement with Japan. The shipwreck of the whaling ship Lagoda in that same year laid the foundation for the first successful negotiation with the shogunate. In 1849, Captain James Glynn of the USS Preble forced his way into Nagasaki Bay and negotiated, with the aid of the Dutch delegation, the release and return of the Lagoda’s crew. Upon returning to the United States, Glynn advocated for the United States to establish diplomatic relations with Japan and suggested that force might be an important part of such negotiations.

In 1852, President Millard Fillmore (1800–1874) commissioned Commodore Matthew Perry (1794– 1858) to open Japan to trade with the United States. Perry arrived in Uraga Harbor on July 8, 1853, with four American warships, the Mississippi, the Plymouth, the Saratoga, and the Susquehanna, called by the Japanese “black ships.” When confronted by demands that he proceed to the port of Nagasaki, Perry refused. He steamed past a line of Japanese ships in Uraga Harbor and threatened to use force if they interfered with his vessels’ movements and his mission to present a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the Japanese emperor. By sending two white flags and instructions on how to use them to get the Americans to cease bombardment of the shore, Perry made it clear that he was willing to use devastating violent force to back up his mission. The shelling of some buildings in the harbor reinforced the impression that his ships’ Paixhans guns would be able to back up his threats effectively. Under duress, Japanese officials agreed to receive the letter. On July 14, 1853, Perry delivered the letter with full pomp and ceremony to impress upon the Japanese the importance of his person and mission. He departed for the coast, promising to return. Abe Masahiro (1819–1857), chair of the shogunate’s advisory council, entered into a complex balancing act addressing this threat to national security. Abe was faced by the problems of an inadequate military to meet the threat posed by Perry, conservative daimyo (feudal lords) dedicated to waging war against the Americans to preserve the honor of the emperor, the emperor’s resistance to opening the country, and weak leadership in transition within the shogunate. Using great diplomatic skill, Abe maneuvered toward an acceptance of Perry’s demands while committing the nation to an effort to strengthen its military capabilities through the Ansei Reforms.

U.S. commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet arrive in Japan as part of a U.S. naval expedition on July 8, 1853. The following year, Perry returned, forcing the emperor to sign the Treaty of Peace and Amity which gave American ships the right to call at two Japanese ports. (Library of Congress)

When Perry returned with twice the number of ships with which he originally arrived in February 1854, negotiations began that ended the more than 200-year-old policy of seclusion that had defined Japanese foreign policy to that point. Hayashi Akira (1800–1859) represented the shogunate and concluded an agreement that opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to the United States for refueling and provisioning its ships, guaranteed the safety of shipwrecked American sailors, and allowed for the establishment of a permanent American counsel in Shimoda. These concessions, which came to be called the Kanagawa Treaty (March 31, 1854), led some Japanese conservatives to call for the ritual suicide of the negotiators. Perry’s vision of the United States’ increasing profile in Asia led him to advocate for bringing the Ryukyu Islands and Formosa under American protection and occupation to better manage American

trading interests within the region. American president Franklin Pierce (1804–1869), far more concerned with American domestic issues including the pressing issue of slavery and deterred by the potential costs of such enterprises, rejected the commodore’s suggestions. Nevertheless, Perry’s ambition demonstrated the potential for the United States to be engaged in a pursuit of its Manifest Destiny in Asia. Despite his diplomatic success, Perry had failed to initiate a normalized trading regime with the Empire of Japan. The first consul general of the United States to Japan, Townsend Harris (1804–1878), managed the negotiations that would bring Japan reluctantly into the world of Western commercial relations. Harris’s first challenge when he arrived in Japan involved an 18-month negotiation to meet the shogun. After overcoming this obstacle, Harris engaged in a strategy of using the Second Opium War then raging in China and the forceful and successful actions of European colonial powers as a goad to get the Japanese to negotiate and accept American efforts to establish peaceable trading relations with the Empire of Japan. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858, also known as the Harris Treaty, contained within it provisions providing for the exchange of diplomatic representatives; the opening of Kanagawa, Kobe, Nagasaki, Niigata, and Yokohama to foreign trade; the right of American citizens to reside in these ports and to be tried by American as opposed to Japanese law; externally set low tariffs; an obligation of mutual religious toleration; the ability for the Japanese to purchase American weapons and ships; and a most-favored-nation provision giving the Americans any concessions made with any other power. Harris’s treaty was far more humiliating than the conditions imposed by Perry, but the shogunate feared imitating the fate of China more than the domestic ramifications of making obnoxious concessions to the Americans. Similar concessions were later made to the Dutch, Russians, English, and French. The effects of the American opening had a tremendous impact on the domestic politics of the shogunate. Initially, Abe Masahiro and his successor, Hotta Masayoshi (1810–1864), pursued a policy of attempting to bring great lords from outside the traditional shogunate into an alliance to strengthen the regime and its policy toward foreigners. The failure of this policy led to efforts by Ii Naosuke (1815– 1860) to crush dissent, resulting in his assassination by those professing loyalty to daimyo determined to resist foreign incursions. Ii’s policy of trading with the foreigners and building military strength would become the policy Japan would eventually adopt toward the West after substantial political turmoil and eventual regime change during the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Ando Nobuyuki, Ii’s successor, temporarily was able to pursue a strategy of reconciling the shogunate with the court of the emperor and some of the great daimyo and pursued a failing strategy of delay with the European powers, but a failed assassination attempt crippled him, preventing the shogunate from exerting anything but a regional influence until its final demise during the Boshin War (1868–1869). Violence against foreigners punctuated the shogunal policy of appeasement. As ports became open to foreigners, clashes with samurai multiplied, resulting in the deaths of Russian, Dutch, French, American, and English citizens as well as Japanese working with foreigners. These attacks were fueled by both economic disruption that produced a large number of impoverished samurai and the sonno joi ideology, an ideology that focused on revering the emperor and expelling the barbarians as the key to solving Japan’s economic, social, and political problems. Emperor Komei (1831–1867) issued an order to expel the barbarians even as the shogunate refused to support this policy. Confronted by hostility to commercial treaties, the European and American powers undertook punitive expeditions against the great daimyo that appeared to embrace this hostile stance toward treaty obligations. In the end numerous rebellions and European interventions produced a complicated network of alliances among the daimyo of Choshu and Satsuma domains that would eventually prove decisive in taking power and authority away from the Tokugawa shogunate and shifting it toward Emperor Meiji and his allies.

The race toward modernization, industrialization, and military reform that occurred as Japan confronted the tensions unleashed by the breaking of seclusion propelled Japan to become the first nonEuropean power to join the ranks of great powers and eventually led Japan to imitate the strategies that the Americans used so skillfully against Japan. In 1875, the Ganghwa Island incident and the successful use of force by Captain Inoue Yoshika (1845–1929) would open Korea to trade as Commodore Perry had opened Japan to trade with the United States. Japan would go on to defeat China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). In consequence of these conflicts, Japan would claim Formosa and Korea as formal colonies. With the United States’ determination to play a prominent role in Asia with its acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, a clash with Japan became a major possibility. When tensions between the countries rose to a boiling point as the United States opposed Japanese expansion in China, banishing the evil spirits of Commodore Perry’s black ships played a role in inspiring the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The eventual military defeat of the Empire of Japan by the United States and the imposition of an American shogun on the island has continued the drama of a nation forced to submit to superior might, and this special relationship is an important part of understanding why the world views the United States as an imperial power. Todd Eric Myers See also: Bakumatsu; Gunboat Diplomacy; Manifest Destiny; Sakoku; Primary Documents: Matthew Perry’s Account of His Landing in Japan (1853)

Further Reading Auslin, Michael. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Feifer, George. Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Totman, Conrad. The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu 1862–1868. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980.

Kamehameha (ca. 1758–1819) Kamehameha, sometimes referred to as Kamehameha the Great, became the founder and first sovereign of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i (ca. 1795–1893). He reigned from 1795 to 1819. Kamehameha’s quest began in 1782 when he forcibly deposed his cousin, Kiwala‘o, to take control of Hawai‘i Island’s leeward moku (governing districts). A five-year period from 1790 to 1795 witnessed unending military campaigns to unite the archipelago. His success in this period was due in part to advantageous and sometimes exploitative relationships with foreign merchants and traders, including Americans. In 1790 he captured an American ship, Fair American, and its mate, Isaac Davis; he also took under his wing an Englishman, John Young, boatswain of the American ship Eleanor. Both men became advisers to Kamehameha, what some scholars have called his “white ali‘i” (chiefs). In the spring of 1791, Davis, Young, and the captured ship Fair American provided Kamehameha with the military advantage he needed to conquer his rivals and assume control of all of Hawai‘i Island, the largest island in the archipelago. Over the next three years, Kamehameha cultivated other foreign alliances, including an important one with British captain George Vancouver. Kamehameha requested Vancouver’s help with battle against his enemies on other islands, but Vancouver refused to provide Kamehameha with any soldiers or ammunition. Instead, he offered his carpenters to demonstrate how to build European-style sailing ships. Vancouver also provided Kamehameha with cattle and other livestock. Kamehameha placed a kapu (“taboo”) on the animals, allowing them to grow wildly for the benefit of future provisions trade with foreign ships. By early 1795, Kamehameha was ready to rise against his rivals on the islands of Maui and Oahu. After taking Maui easily, he attacked Oahu later that spring. His rival on Oahu, Kalanikūpule, had recently taken control of the island with the assistance of a British captain, William Brown. But on New Year’s Day, 1795, Kalanikūpule turned on Brown, killing him along with another British captain and seizing their ships and foreign crews for use against Kamehameha. When Kamehameha’s forces reached Oahu in the spring of 1795 his army pushed back Kalanikūpule’s, leading to the climatic Battle of Nu‘uanu in which hundreds of Kalanikūpule’s men fell or leaped to their deaths off the steep pali (cliffs). Kamehameha then sought to militarily subdue the two remaining islands of the archipelago, Kauai and Niihau, but in this he persistently failed. Only in 1810 was he able to persuade Kaumuali‘i, the ruler of Kauai and Niihau, to submit to Kamehameha as a vassal state. As mō‘ī (ruler), Kamehameha pursued a policy of collaboration, rather than conflict, with foreigners. By the turn of the 19th century, the Hawaiian archipelago had moved to the center of transpacific trade, with American, English, and Russian ships frequently seeking fresh fruits, vegetables, water, and sometimes even the recruitment of Hawaiian labor. Kamehameha hoped to centralize control over trade by claiming a monopoly on the islands’ resources. Due to the marketability of Hawaiian sandalwood in Guangzhou (Canton), emporium of the Qing Empire in China, Kamehameha contracted with three American merchants from Boston to whom he granted the exclusive rights to sell the wood in China. But when the British-American War of 1812 broke out and spilled into the Pacific Ocean in 1813, Kamehameha promptly cancelled the contract, seeking to assure both the British and American parties of his kingdom’s neutrality. Following the end of the war, transpacific trade in Hawaiian sandalwood resumed and gained even greater significance in the Hawaiian economy. Kamehameha used the profits from the sandalwood trade to purchase luxury items of European, American, and Chinese manufacture. He most enjoyed purchasing foreign ships, of which he owned perhaps as many as 40 by 1810. One of Kamehameha’s most audacious projects of the 1810s was to send a Hawaiian vessel, the Ka‘ahumanu,

directly to Guangzhou to trade with the Qing. Bypassing American middlemen upon whom he often relied to ferry goods between Hawai‘i and the Chinese market, Kamehameha sought to project Hawaiian sovereignty in the Pacific as well as demonstrate the feasibility of bilateral economic relations between Hawai‘i and China. At the same time, Kamehameha hoped to convert Honolulu Harbor into a mirror image of Guangzhou. He not only ordered the construction of a fort at the mouth of the harbor but also established a harbor tax and pilotage fee for all ships. Over the fort flew the Hawaiian kingdom’s newly designed flag. Adopting the Union Jack of the British ensign alongside alternating colored stripes reminiscent of the flag of the United States, Kamehameha’s kingdom once again asserted its close, yet carefully balanced, relationship with these two rival foreign powers. In 1812, Kamehameha left Honolulu to return to live on the quieter leeward coast of Hawai‘i Island. There he died in 1819, leaving behind several progeny including the future mō‘ī Liholiho (Kamehameha II) and Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III). From an American perspective, Kamehameha’s legacy rests upon his enduring economic cooperation with American transpacific business. Indeed, the Hawaiian sandalwood trade provided the material support necessary for American trade with China in the decades leading up to the Opium War (1839–1842). Following Kamehameha’s death, the Hawaiian kingdom continued to struggle in its balancing act between Great Britain and the United States. Early economic relationships between Hawai‘i and the United States, however, eventually blossomed into U.S. economic hegemony in Hawaiian affairs in the late 19th century. Kamehameha could not have predicted the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, but the economic relationships he fostered with the United States in the early 19th century perhaps laid the foundation for the revolutions to come. Gregory Rosenthal See also: Cook, James; Opium Wars; Vancouver, George; War of 1812

Further Reading Kamakau, Samuel Manaiakalani. Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii. Honolulu: Kamehameha Schools Press, 1961. Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom: 1778–1854, Foundation and Transformation. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1938.

Kanghwa, Battle of (1871) The Battle of Kanghwa was fought between U.S. and Korean troops from June 10 to 11, 1871. It occurred during an American expedition to Korea led by the U.S. minister to China, Frederick F. Low, and Rear Admiral John Rodgers, commander of the U.S. Asiatic Squadron. While ostensibly peaceful in purpose, the Low-Rodgers expedition resulted in a bloody clash: three Americans and hundreds of Korean soldiers died in the fighting. One of the largest American military engagements abroad during the late 19th century, the 1871 battle not only marked an important event in early U.S.-Korean relations, but also reflected the United States’ willingness to employ force in its involvement across the Pacific. Contact between the United States and Chosŏn Korea dated back to at least the 1850s, when American ships occasionally reached the shores of the peninsular kingdom. Unlike neighboring China and Japan, Korea in the mid-19th century held no formal relations with the United States, but responded to the growing Western intrusion into the region by adhering to its longstanding self-sufficient policy of seclusion. Early interactions between Koreans and Americans were thus informal yet also amicable, a pattern that was to change in 1866. In the summer of that year, an armed American-owned schooner named the General Sherman voyaged up the Taedong River and was eventually destroyed in a confrontation with

local residents. Though two American fact-finding missions followed, led by captains Robert W. Shufeldt (1867) and John C. Febiger (1868), neither produced satisfactory accounts of the schooner’s fate. It was in the wake of the General Sherman incident that the U.S. government sent its first official mission to Korea. In 1870, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish authorized Minister Low to go to Korea and negotiate a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked Americans and to establish commercial trade, if the opportunity arose. Low was to be accompanied by Admiral Rodgers, a distinguished Civil War veteran with previous experience in East Asia. Modeled after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s earlier mission to Japan (1853–1854), the Low-Rodgers expedition assembled a sizable naval fleet: the squadron included the flagship USS Colorado, four additional warships (the Alaska, Benicia, Monocacy, and Palos), and more than 1,000 men. The American fleet entered Korean waters in May 1871 and anchored off the western coast of the peninsula near Inchon. On June 1, Admiral Rodgers dispatched a party to explore the Han River, the waterway leading directly to the kingdom’s capital, Seoul. As the surveying gunboats moved upstream and passed the southern end of Kanghwa Island, they received fire from protective forts lining the channel between Kanghwa and the mainland. This was not only a crucial zone of defense for the Koreans, but also the same area where, four years earlier, French troops had launched a punitive invasion for the deaths of Catholic missionaries secretly residing in Korea. The Americans returned fire on the forts before rejoining their squadron at the anchorage, with no casualties and minimal damage to their vessels. News of the exchange elicited a strong response from Low and Rodgers. In messages sent over the next several days, Korean officials questioned the Americans’ violation of a sensitive waterway and contended that the surveying party had caused the incident. They also informed the Americans that a treaty was unnecessary, since Korean policy already provided for the kindly treatment of shipwrecked foreigners. Low and Rodgers nevertheless decided on a forceful course. At 10 a.m. on June 10, 1871, a retaliatory mission departed for Kanghwa Island with orders to destroy the fortifications that had fired on the Americans. According to Rodgers’s instructions, the forts were also to be occupied long enough to demonstrate the Americans’ ability to punish such an offense. Captain Homer C. Blake commanded the mission, which along with the Monocacy, Palos, and four steam launches included 20 boats and a contingent of 759 men, 651 of whom comprised a landing battalion. The battle commenced the same day. From its lead position, the Monocacy opened fire with mounted cannon as the lower forts on Kanghwa came into range. The bombardment drove back Korean defenders from their batteries, and under artillery cover, American marines secured the first fort, Ch’ojijin, burning Korean supplies and spiking or rolling guns into the water. A second major fort, Tŏkjin, fell on the early morning of June 11. Continuing their advance, the Americans marched north toward their primary target, Kwangsŏngjin, where Korean troops had regrouped following the initial assaults. Though more strongly garrisoned and armed than the other forts, Kwangsŏngjin’s defense was also outmatched by the superior weaponry of the Americans. Here the battle’s main and final engagement took place. Massive shelling by the Monocacy and howitzers positioned on land made way for American forces to storm the fort; inside the parapet, they met a determined but outpowered resistance, the Korean soldiers fighting in hand-tohand combat against the Americans’ more efficient rifles and pistols. Field artillery cut off Korean reinforcements in the flank, while Americans completed destruction of the fort by breaking weapons, leveling walls, and burning buildings to the ground. Hostilities ceased by the afternoon of June 11. American losses numbered three killed and nine wounded. Approximately 250 Koreans were counted dead, though their casualties were likely higher. Those killed included the Korean chief commander, Ŏ Chae-yŏn, and his brother, Ŏ Chae-sun. During the two-day conflict, the Americans captured 5 forts, 50 flags, 481 ordnances, and a handful of prisoners.

Despite the disproportionate military outcome, however, both sides claimed victory in the battle. Americans viewed their retaliatory campaign as vindication for the June 1 firing. To Korean authorities, the aggressive actions of the Americans throughout their expedition served as further evidence of the Western threat. When the Low-Rodgers fleet finally left Korean waters in early July 1871, having failed in its original objectives, the Korean government hailed the departure as another triumph over foreign invaders. Not for another decade would formal relations be opened between the two countries. Andrea Kwon See also: Japan, Opening of

Further Reading Chang, Gordon H. “Whose ‘Barbarism’? Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilization in the Unknown United States–Korea War of 1871.” Journal of American History 89 (March 2003): 1331–1365. Chay, Jongsuk. Diplomacy of Asymmetry: Korean-American Relations to 1910. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990. Lee, Yur-Bok. Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Korea, 1866–1887. New York: Humanities Press, 1970.

Korean Expedition of 1871 In 1871, the U.S. minister to China, Frederick Low, reported to Washington that U.S. commerce to China, Japan, and Russian Manchuria passed close to the coast of Korea. The hermit kingdom posed a threat to navigation because its uncharted waters contained numerous rock and reef formations. Shipwrecked American sailors were either murdered or left to die of starvation and exposure by the Koreans. Even more importantly, Low pointed out to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish that Korea was an untapped market, perhaps the last, in Asia. European nations were currently carving out concessions in China, and the U.S. government worried that American exports would be shut out of the Chinese market. Korea offered an opportunity for U.S. merchants to be first into a country. The United States also sought an explanation of the fate of the General Sherman, a U.S. trading schooner that disappeared off the Korean coast in August 1866. The ship had been overrun by villagers and the crew massacred after it became stranded in a Korean port by high tides. After an investigation by then captain (later rear admiral) Robert Shufeldt, the United States suspected, but could not prove, that the massacre had occurred because the local populace suspected the ship of piracy. Left unanswered by the 1867 investigation was the complicity, if any, of the Korean government in Pyongyang. Shufeldt recommended that the United States engage in gunboat diplomacy and dispatch a naval squadron to punish the Koreans. Because a French expedition in 1866 had attacked Korea for similar reasons, the Korean government would view any use of U.S. force as an act of war. Fish ordered Low to go to Korea with the U.S. Asiatic Squadron under Rear Admiral John Rodgers to secure a commercial treaty and for the protection of U.S. sailors. He was told to avoid a conflict if at all possible. Fish was deeply interested in expanding U.S. commercial interests around the globe but also desired to avoid war. Fish believed U.S. commerce and influence could bring peace more effectively than war and conquest. The Navy Department ordered Rodgers to take a force of five ships and 1,200 sailors and marines with Low to Korea. Low either misunderstood or deliberately ignored his orders to seek a peaceful solution before considering the use of force. Low and Rodgers claimed that when they sailed into Korean waters in May 1871, forts opened fire upon them. Low had met with Korean diplomats and assured them of the expedition’s peaceful intent, but their assurances failed to placate the Korean government’s fear of foreign adventurism. Well aware of the Chinese experience where foreign powers were carving up the country

into economic and military spheres of influences, the Korean government was determined to avoid all foreign influence. When the squadron sent in small boats to chart the coastline and possible ports, Korean forts opened fire without hitting any American craft. The Koreans insisted that the U.S. ships acted aggressively while Rodgers and Low protested that the small squadron was just engaging in basic seamanship by trying to discover navigable waters. They insisted that the Korean government apologize for the incident, including firing a salute to the American flag. After 10 days and with no reply from the Korean government, Rodgers and Low decided to punish the country by seizing the forts that had opened fire.

GENERAL SHERMAN INCIDENT One of the primary rationales for the Korean Expedition of 1871 was retribution for the sacking of the General Sherman five years earlier. Yet exactly what initiated the violence has remained difficult to determine. It is clear that due to unusually high waters, the General Sherman was able to anchor much closer to the city of Pyongyang than Korean officials were comfortable with. It is also documented that the Korean leader, Heungseon Daewongun, allowed the ship to be provided with food but ordered that it leave immediately. It is at this point that accounts differ. Perhaps the Americans seized a Korean military official who had attempted to stop a small boat from going ashore. Another report indicated the Americans took the military official hostage only after the General Sherman became stranded due to receding water and Governor Park Kyoo Soo ordered troops to attack the ship. It is also debated whether Governor Park ordered his troops to attack before or after the General Sherman fired its cannons into the crowd of civilians on the shore. The order in which these events took place certainly changes the interpretation of the incident. However, there also may have been cultural conflicts that contributed to the fate of the General Sherman. The official Korean reports document that the only Korean speaker, Robert Jermain Thomas, promised to bring a new Christian religion that was even more powerful than the already-banned Catholicism. This declaration, along with the rumor that the General Sherman was attempting to raid the sacred tombs in Pyongyang to seize the golden coffins, may have been enough to precipitate violence.

Six hundred and fifty-one sailors and marines were landed on June 9, 1871. They found the first two targets deserted and proceeded to dissemble the forts. They then attacked the main fort, Kwangsonchin (called the Citadel by the Americans and renamed, after its capture, Fort McKee). More than 240 Koreans were killed in the assault with just three U.S. casualties. More than 460 pieces of artillery were captured by the U.S. force. The Koreans were handicapped by obsolete technology with the defenders using smoothbore muskets while the Americans possessed modern rifles and carbines. Fifteen sailors and marines were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their heroics during the attack. For the next month, the U.S. forces remained in Korea and off the coast. Rodgers and Low hoped that the numerous prisoners captured in the attack could be used as bargaining chips, but the Korean government was not interested in getting the defeated forces back. The U.S. squadron finally departed in July 1871 for China, still unable to get the Korean government to engage in diplomatic talks. While Koreans regarded the incident as a defeat for the United States, it created severe repercussions for the Korean government. Progressives within the country challenged the isolationist government, forcing the resignation of the regent, Taewon’gun, who had refused to negotiate with the Americans. In 1876, Korea signed the Treaty of Kanghwa with Japan, opening the country up for the first time to foreign trade. Japan’s influence within Korea would only grow over the quarter of a century before the Japanese Empire annexed the country. The Korean expedition of 1871 showed that the United States was as willing as European colonial powers to engage in gunboat diplomacy to further its economic interests. The failure of the mission and the lack of a follow-up mission illustrated that Washington was not comfortable with this truth. The Grant administration desired to avoid foreign conflict though it was not above flexing U.S. muscle. Fish sought

new markets for U.S. commercial goods and crops and the Korean expedition of 1871 fit into this worldview. The next time U.S. marines would be landing in Korea to fight would be in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War. Stephen McCullough See also: Gunboat Diplomacy

Further Reading Lee, Yur-Bok, and Wayne Patterson, eds. Korean-American Relations: 1866–1997. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Nevins, Allan. Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936.

Koszta Affair (1853) At the end of the 1848 uprising in Hungary, as Russian and Austrian troops swept through the eastern European states, many Hungarian rebels sought refuge from capture and death. Some fled to the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam to gain the sultan’s protection, others emigrated to the United States or western Europe. Among those who left the region for the United States was Martin Koszta. As a refugee, Koszta would provoke a standoff between a U.S. and an Austrian gunboat in a neutral port shortly before the Crimean War and in so doing, challenge the legal definition of American citizenship abroad. After having declared his intention to become a U.S. citizen in New York in July 1852, Koszta departed the country on an unspecified business trip to the Ottoman Empire. Through their elaborate spy network, the Austrian authorities were soon aware of the refugee’s presence in the region. On June 21, 1853, thugs paid by the Austrian consul general, Peter Ritter von Weckbecker, captured Koszta in Smyrna and removed him to the Austrian brig of war E. K. Hussar. Because Koszta claimed to be a U.S. citizen, he asked for protection from Edward S. Offley, the U.S. consul in Smyrna. Offley would have been unable to overcome Weckbecker’s resistance if not for the arrival of a U.S. warship in port. Having only a few days earlier assisted the U.S. minister to Constantinople in another matter in Athens, the USS St. Louis under Captain Duncan N. Ingraham visited Smyrna. Offley immediately boarded the warship and informed Ingraham of the abduction. Both determined to interview Koszta and hear his claims. However, because Koszta had no passport and only a declaration of intent to become a citizen, they were unsure if they could assist him. They decided to let the minister in Constantinople deal with the situation. The Austrian minister in Constantinople, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Bruck, argued that Koszta had been, and would always be, an Austrian subject and he therefore did not have the protection of the United States. The arrest of U.S. immigrants upon their return to their home was a common feature of relations between the United States and various European states. U.S. citizenship provided these immigrants with no protection. While these cases were mostly related to unserved military duty, the Koszta affair was different in that the Austrians wanted Koszta because of his revolutionary involvement in Hungary five years earlier. The status of Koszta’s citizenship had far more political implications. The Koszta affair continued to escalate when the Austrian minister in Constantinople authorized the removal of Koszta on the next steamer to Trieste, making U.S. threats irrelevant. When these orders became known, Captain Ingraham decided to take action. He moved the USS St. Louis between the steamer and the Hussar, where Koszta was kept. He even loaded his cannons and threatened to remove

Koszta forcefully from the Austrian ship. Loaded guns in a neutral port were a clear violation of international law. At the last minute, Offley and Weckbecker worked out an agreement that placed Koszta in the custody of the French consul in Smyrna until an agreement could be reached. On August 4, 1853, George Perkins Marsh, the U.S. minister resident in the Ottoman Empire, suggested that Koszta board the next ship leaving for the United States with the stipulation that if he left the ship in any European port, he would forfeit the protection of the United States. Von Bruck submitted the proposal to Vienna, which was accepted. Shortly after the acceptance arrived on September 14, Koszta left for the United States. He soon disappeared from the historical record. The Austrians had been in a precarious situation during these months. The escalation of Russo-Turkish relations had brought European attention to the region. The outbreak of the Crimean War required Austria’s attention, and the empire could not be concerned with a relatively insignificant revolutionary. In addition, the activities of U.S. warships in Greece in support of missionary Jonas King and then in Smyrna in support of Martin Koszta raised European worries that the United States was becoming an active participant in the eastern Mediterranean and might even obtain a permanent naval base there. In the United States, Ingraham’s actions were greeted with applause, much to the disgust of European observers who worried about the violation of international law. For the relations between Austria and the United States, the Koszta incident came at an unfortunate moment. The Austrian minister, Dr. Johannes Georg Ritter von Hülsemann, had only recently returned after relations had been ruptured by the warm welcome granted to the Hungarian Lajos Kossuth. Vienna did not take the incident, once it had been solved, seriously anymore and its attention was diverted to the more pressing issues surrounding the Crimean War. Nevertheless, Secretary of State William L. Marcy responded to the protest note from Hülsemann on September 26, 1853. Marcy stood fast on the claim that Koszta was a U.S. citizen who deserved protection from his adopted country, despite having only declared his intentions, which meant that the officials in the region had acted correctly. The United States continued to defend the rights of its citizenship. The issue of citizenship would not be resolved until after the American Civil War, during which citizenship once more became a contested issue as immigrants used their old citizenships to avoid military service or prison terms, much to the dismay of the Lincoln government. In the Koszta affair, these questions almost caused an unprecedented violation of international law with unpredictable consequences. Niels Eichhorn

Further Reading Klay, Andor. Daring Diplomacy: The Case of the First American Ultimatum. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957.

Liberia The Republic of Liberia, a nation in West Africa, became the first independent country in Africa in 1847 after approximately 14,000 Africans and African Americans from the United States began emigrating there in 1816. The idea of colonization by African Americans was born out of the sentiment that blacks and whites, for reasons of racial difference and widespread racism, could not coexist peacefully in the same country. During the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century, when Americans were experiencing a

renewed sense of enthusiasm for religion and doing good deeds, colonization seemed to be a compromise between holding people of African descent in unceasing slavery and the total abolition of slavery in the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS), formed in late 1816, began sending black volunteers to the Pepper Coast to establish a colony for freed blacks. The society sought territory near the west African British colony of Sierra Leone, established in 1787 as a residence for African American Loyalists who had aided the British during the War for American Independence, and later for Africans rescued from Atlantic Ocean–bound slave trade ships. In 1822 the U.S. government helped establish Liberia as another place to settle Africans “recaptured” from slave ships. Auxiliaries of the American Colonization Society were established in several states. Many of them set up small settlements and colonies in Africa that were later merged into Liberia. The 19th-century U.S. politicians Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, along with U.S. presidents James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, were proponents of the American Colonization Society. Madison, in correspondence with the writer Robert J. Evans in 1819, suggested that “[t]o be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the US the freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to by a White population.… The Society proposes to transport to the African Coast all free & freed blacks who may be willing to remove thither.” The American Colonization Society promoted colonization generally as a way to ease tension in the United States over sectionalism—debate over the extent to which slavery should be spread to newly acquired territory. To slave owners, colonization was marketed as a way to remove potentially troublesome free blacks from those still enslaved. Kentucky representative Henry Clay, Speaker of the U.S. Congress, asserted this viewpoint by asking, at the first meeting of the Society in 1816, “Can there be a nobler cause than that which, … proposes to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population …?” To free blacks, Liberia could be a place to exercise freedom far more fully than they could in the United States. Clay also suggested that the arrival of Americans, albeit of African descent, could have a positive influence on Africa, “spreading the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe.” Local tribes of Africans frequently lashed out at American émigrés, however, killing many. Acclimation for American African émigrés from the United States to residency in Liberia could be jarring, with the tropical climate and malaria as major annoyances. By the 1840s, the American Colonization Society had largely yielded control of Liberia to its residents. On July 26, 1847, Liberians declared their country independent—the first in Africa and the only until the early 20th century, and after Haiti, the only black-ruled republic in the world. Their declaration, drafted by the politician and journalist Hilary Teague, was inspired strongly by the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Recognizing their tenuous place in the world as a black-governed nation, Liberians replaced the U.S. founding fathers’ emphasis on the right to the “pursuit of happiness” with the assertion that all men had the natural and inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the right to acquire, possess, enjoy and defend property.” And, similar to the North American colonists’ list of complaints about the tyranny of the king of Great Britain in the 18th century, Liberians listed complaints about their lives in the United States that drove them to emigrate to Africa:

A watercolor of the Senate of Liberia, ca. 1856, by Robert Griffin. In 1847, Liberia became the first independent nation in Africa after nearly 15,000 Africans and African Americans emigrated there in the first half of the 19th century. (Library of Congress)

In some parts of that country, we were debarred by law from all rights and privileges of men—in other parts, public sentiment, more powerful than law, frowned us down. We were every where shut out from all civil office. We were excluded from all participation in the government. We were taxed without our consent. We were compelled to contribute to the resources of a country which gave us no protection. We were made a separate and distinct class, and against us every avenue to improvement was effectually closed. Strangers from all lands of a color different from ours, were preferred before us. We uttered our complaints, but they were unattended to. Further, Liberians asserted that their declaration of independence was not an attempt to usurp territory and beseeched other nations to treat them with “that comity which marks the friendly intercourse of civilized and independent communities.” When the Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War did not radically alter race relations in the United States, Liberia still had appeal to African Americans. Yet it was expensive to cross the Atlantic Ocean and Liberia could not have easily absorbed the millions of freedmen and freedwomen. As such, it competed with western U.S. states as a destination for blacks troubled by the deplorable social conditions in the U.S. South. Controversially the American Colonization Society continued to oppose equal rights and citizenship for blacks. It finally dissolved in 1964. Donald W. Maxwell See also: American Colonization Society

Further Reading Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Clegg, Claude A., III. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Life upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Lili’uokalani. See Queen Lili‘uokalani

López, Narciso (1797–1851) Narciso López (1797–1851) was a prominent filibusterer whose expeditions received widespread U.S. publicity and support. Though born in Venezuela, he led Americans in multiple unsuccessful filibustering expeditions into Cuba. Despite internal divisions over slavery, numerous northern and southern U.S. citizens championed López and the prospect of annexing Cuba. From Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, U.S. expansionists repeatedly considered acquiring Cuba for national security, increased trade, national aggrandizement, or the expansion of slavery. Similarly, many Cuban Creoles (“white” persons born in Cuba) considered joining the United States, for they identified with America’s liberty for white men, anticolonialism, and guarantees of slavery. Those in the Club de la Habana, or Havana Club, conspired against Spanish rule and encouraged MexicanAmerican War heroes to support López’s first expeditions. John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review and promoter of the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” lobbied the Polk administration to aid the Havana Club. Such actions violated neutrality laws, so U.S. officials warned Spanish officials, forcing López to flee to New York in 1848. With the Havana Club, López approached Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, President James K. Polk, and Colonel Robert E. Lee. All expressed sympathy for López’s expeditions, but none provided material support. Prominent New Yorkers, such as O’Sullivan, promoted López’s plans, and South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun even claimed some additional southern states could be carved out of Cuba. In 1849, however, the U.S. Navy detained a filibustering contingent of between 450 and 600 men off Mississippi’s coast, ending López’s initial plans. With the support of Mississippi governor John Anthony Quitman, López spent 1850 recruiting Americans from New York and Ohio to Kentucky and Louisiana. On May 19, about 520 filibusterers under López landed at Cárdenas, Cuba, seizing the city. Notified of the filibusterers’ landing, Spanish officials deployed around 2,000 troops. The Spanish vessel Pizarro ultimately chased López all the way to Key West, Florida. In New Orleans in 1851, López heard news of an anti-Spanish uprising in Cuba. With just over 400 filibusterers, López landed at Morrillo, to the west of Havana. Over the month, Spanish troops contained the filibusterers, capturing and executing Kentucky’s John J. Crittenden and about 50 filibusterers by firing squad on September 1. That night, Spanish officials garroted López at the Plaza of the Punta. Despite these failures, some of the survivors and López’s associates, such as Quitman, continued filibustering in the 1850s and 1860s. Yet López’s larger legacy may be the discouragement of southern politicians to look toward Central America and the Caribbean as fertile ground for a “safety valve” for the expansion of slavery. Instead, they turned their attention toward secession and an eventual Civil War. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Filibusterers; Manifest Destiny; Ostend Manifesto; Quitman, John A; Walker, William

Further Reading Chaffin, Tom. Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pérez, Louis A. Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy. 3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.

Midway Atoll

Midway Atoll is an unincorporated American territory lying in the North Pacific Ocean near the tip of the northwestern (leeward) Hawaiian Islands. Taking its name from its position at a point midway between North America and Asia, the atoll covers an area of nearly 15,000 acres and encloses two small islands —Sand and Eastern (also known as Green)—and several islets. In all likelihood Native Hawaiians knew of Midway’s existence, although no clear evidence of such knowledge has been found. N. C. Brooks (or Westbrooks), captain of the bark Gambia out of Honolulu, sighted the atoll in early July 1859, becoming the first non-Polynesian in our knowledge to do so. He referred to his discovery variously as Brooks Islands and Shoal or Middlebrook Islands. Brooks took rudimentary steps to occupy the atoll, but within a few years the owner of the Gambia was making his own claims to the remote atoll. During the 1860s the Pacific Mail Steamship Company was searching for a mid-Pacific site upon which to set up a coal depot and encouraged the American government to send out a ship, the USS Lackawanna, to survey the atoll. The ship’s commander, Captain William Reynolds, took formal possession on August 28, 1867, declaring that it was the “first island [sic] ever added to the dominion of the United States” beyond its shores. It was apparently at this time that the name “Midway” was given to the atoll. To facilitate Pacific Mail’s use of Midway, the American government appropriated $50,000 to pay for digging a channel through the reef large enough to allow the passage of ships. However, after several months of effort in 1870 the project was abandoned. Over the following years the low-lying atoll became the scene of several shipwrecks and maroonings, deliberate and otherwise, and was utilized as a setting by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne for their 1892 novel The Wrecker. Although the United States had taken formal possession of Midway in 1867, concerns about Japanese territorial designs and the predations of Japanese bird hunters led U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt to place it under the direct control of the navy on January 20, 1903. Later that year, on April 29, workers for the Commercial Pacific Cable Company arrived, and by July 4 the final section of cable between Honolulu (on the Hawaiian island of Oahu) and Midway was laid. This step linked San Francisco and the Philippines and completed a connection that allowed President Roosevelt to cable an Independence Day message to American territories around the world. Soon after their arrival on Midway, Commercial Pacific’s agents had also arranged for the transport of tons of soil and the introduction of hundreds of varieties of plants and animals, forever altering the ecology of the atoll and its islands. Between 1904 and 1908 a detachment of marines was garrisoned on Midway, and in the 1920s members of the American military surveyed the atoll for possible use as a base for seaplanes. In the wake of World War I, the United States, France, Italy, Japan, and Britain had signed the Washington Naval Treaty of 1921–1922, under one of whose provisions the United States had undertaken not to establish any naval bases in the Pacific. In light of growing Japanese belligerence, however, the Marine Corps conducted exercises on Midway in 1935. That same year Pan American Airways negotiated rights to set up a seaplane base and land its China Clipper flying boats on the atoll’s lagoon. This step—along with the establishment of similar bases on other American territories across the Pacific—allowed the United States to make preliminary preparations for a potential conflict without violating the letter of the treaty. The first China Clipper flight from San Francisco to Manila took place November 26, 1935, with a stopover at Midway. While that flight carried mail under a Post Office contract, passenger service over the same route was introduced the following year on October 21. Mounting fears of Japanese aggression led to the dredging of a submarine basin and a deeper channel between Midway’s two islands, as well as the construction of several runways. On August 18, 1941,

Naval Air Station Midway Islands was commissioned, and less than four months later, on December 7, 1941, American fears were realized when the Japanese attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. That same evening, two Japanese destroyers shelled Midway. Over the following months enemy submarines shelled Midway several more times, but in early June 1942 a large, widely dispersed Japanese fleet approached Midway, planning to lure American ships into a trap and subsequently seize the atoll. However, the Americans had broken the Japanese code and were prepared to intercept the invading forces, which were spotted by a patrol plane on June 3. In the ensuing Battle of Midway the next day, the enemy lost four carriers and hundreds of aircraft. The battle constituted a major defeat for Japan and marked a turning point in the six-month-old war in the Pacific. Decommissioned in 1950, the atoll’s Naval Air Station was recommissioned during the Korean War, only to be downgraded to a Naval Air Facility in 1978. Although still under the jurisdiction of the navy, Midway became a National Wildlife Refuge in 1988. The Naval Air Facility closed in 1993, coinciding with a major environmental cleanup of the atoll and its surrounding waters. In 1996 the administration of Midway was transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of the Interior, and today the atoll is a part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. Grove Koger See also: Pacific Mail Steamship Company; Washington Naval Conference

Further Reading Cohen, Stan. Wings to the Orient: Pan American Clipper Planes, 1935–1945: A Pictorial History. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories, 1985. Grover, Gretchen G. “The Coast Guard’s Pacific Colonizers.” Naval History 16, no. 4 (August 2002): 43–47. Rauzon, Mark J. Isles of Refuge: Wildlife and History of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Symonds, Craig L. The Battle of Midway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Missionaries, Hawai‘i American missionaries to Hawai‘i in the 19th century served as agents of American imperialism for almost a century. With the first arrivals in 1820, Protestant missionaries presented Hawaiians as backward, ignorant savages requiring American tutelage in supposedly superior ideals of Christianity and Western civilization. These missionaries spread American concepts of Christian morality, private property, and labor. Since Captain James Cook’s 1778 arrival, religious groups claimed a responsibility to uplift allegedly inferior Hawaiians. ‘Ōpūkaha’ia and some Native Hawaiians arrived in New England in the early 1800s. Focused on civilizing Native Americans, the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) began educating and converting Hawaiians at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, as missionaries to spread American influence. In 1819, the ABCFM sent seven missionary couples and three Cornwall Hawaiian students to Hawai‘i. Holding a paternalistic attitude of racial and cultural superiority over Native Hawaiians, one missionary wrote, “Darkness covered the earth and gross darkness the people” (Silva, 30). Predominantly Congregationalists and Presbyterians, the first missionaries spread American ideals through reading and writing. Between 1820 and 1850, almost 200 missionaries arrived who characterized Natives as “savage” due to their animist religions and lack of a written alphabet. By the 1840s, 79 Protestant mission houses, such as the Lahainaluna Seminary, trained thousands of Native pupils to evangelize among their own people and write. Lahainaluna produced the Ka Lama Hawaii newspaper to

“supply the means of useful knowledge in the arts and sciences, history, morals, and religion; to point out existing evils, their character, seat, extent and consequences” (Silva, 34). With two printing houses churning out numerous texts, missionaries used writing and language to reshape Native ideas. The word pono originally described Native ideals of proper behavior and an idea of balance and completeness, but missionaries translated and taught pono to mean Christian righteousness and morality. Certain Hawaiians manipulated and contested missionaries’ goals. Hawaiian chiefs utilized Christianity to present themselves as legitimate rulers over the Natives and intermediaries to material benefits from foreign countries. White sailors and merchants demanded access to Hawaiian women, alcohol, and gambling. Basing their actions on Christian laws and morality, chiefs could tax prostitution for revenue, combat sexual promiscuity and heavy drinking, and assert a degree of authority over white men engaged in these acts. Although Kamehameha and Keōpūolani welcomed missionaries, their children Liholiho and Kauikeaouli opposed them. Where missionaries utilized newspapers to spread American imperialism, Kamehameha III and other chiefs used Ka Nonanona and other titles to disseminate general information. Hawaiians also retained control of the paper Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika, and castigated Americans for violating Hawaiian sovereignty and independence. Chiefs Paki and Liliha even encouraged an 1831 rebellion against missionaries and their ally Ka’ahumanu. In the first half of the 19th century, some disputes arose between missionaries and business interests in Hawai‘i. Sugar planters demanded cheap labor and access to communal lands, and the first missionaries feared that the licentiousness and drunkenness of sailors and merchants pushed Hawaiians away from Christian teachings. As chiefs debated between working with missionaries or traders, the first traders provided poor-quality goods, so by the mid-1800s the majority of chiefs allied with Protestant missionaries, causing resentment among business interests. Planters, sailors, and merchants blamed missionaries for laws against sexual misbehavior and gambling. In October 1825, American sailors protested the Maui mission house due to a new ban on prostitution and drinking, and sailors from the USS Dolphin protested a Honolulu mission house in February 1826 for the same reasons. The French and British despised American missionaries for spreading U.S. interests over the islands and opposing European missionaries. In October 1827, the Maui chief Hoapili demanded the return of Hawaiian women who had boarded the British ship John Palmer. When Captain Elisha Clarke refused, Hoapili seized Clarke. In retaliation, the British ship fired six or seven shots at American mission houses in Lahaina. In July 1839, French captain Cyrille Laplace threatened force and gunboats against Chief Miriam Kekauluohi to accept a European Catholic mission.

EDUCATION AND IMPERIALISM While there is little doubt that missionaries helped destroy traditional Hawaiian lifeways, they also made significant contributions to secular life on the islands. Since personal salvation could only be reached through an understanding of the Bible, New England missionaries stressed the importance of literacy. They brought with them a printing press and in 1822 the first Hawaiian imprint was issued. By the 1830s, 50,000 of the island’s inhabitants, or nearly 40 percent of the population were learning to read their native language (the missionaries created a syllabary of Hawaiian speech). Compulsory education, conducted in the Hawaiian language until the end of the 19th century, was established in 1840 for everyone under the age of 14. By 1848, 80 percent of the population was literate, making it one of the most highly literate nations in the world. Despite their impact, missionaries continued to have low estimates of their students and designed an educational system that was based in vocational training. The one exception was the Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children School, founded in 1839. Unique in the annals of American education, it was founded at the request of Hawai‘i’s high chiefs with the sole purpose of training future monarchs, including the last five rulers of the Hawaiian kingdom. The curriculum included reading, arithmetic, geography, composition, spelling, handwriting, singing, drawing, and religion, all with an eye toward creating “civilized” ali’i. The missionaries eventually gave up the school, convinced that the children’s “depravity” would make it impossible to transform them.

Nevertheless, missionaries were active agents of American imperialism. Missionaries such as William Richards served as advisers and shaped Hawai‘i’s policies to favor American interests. Kamehameha III believed Christianity would help Hawai‘i expand its influence and assert sovereignty in international policies, so he sent Richards and Chief Timoteo Ha’alilio to obtain President John Tyler’s acknowledgment of Hawaiian sovereignty. This 1843 Tyler doctrine actually extended the Monroe Doctrine to include Hawaii and oppose any European influence that challenged U.S. economic interests. With government subsidies through the Department of Public Instruction, the missionary Richard Armstrong disseminated the Ka Hae Hawaii newspaper, full of racist allegations against native Hawaiians and nonwhites. The Hawaiian Evangelical Association tried from 1857 to 1859 to ban the hula, claiming Natives should work “by the sweat of the brow … in digging taro or planting potatoes” rather than dancing (Silva, 52). Through their positions, missionaries obtained the best lands and contracts. Missionary Edward Bailey started a sugar plantation in 1850. While still a missionary in 1840, Richard Armstrong began a sugar operation. William P. Alexander surveyed lands while a missionary and began Alexander & Baldwin, one of the “Big Five” sugar operations that dominated Hawai‘i’s economy. Missionary and school director Amos Starr Cooke convinced former student Kamehameha III to give Natives’ communal lands to planters and missionaries and built the “Big Five” operation Castle & Cooke in 1851. Grandson of four missionaries, Lorrin Thurston helped overthrow Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893 and facilitated annexation in 1898. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; Cook, James; Hawai‘i, Annexation of; Hawaiian League; Kamehameha; Queen Lili‘uokalani; Sugar Plantations, Hawai‘i

Further Reading Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York: Henry Holt, 2006. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Monroe Doctrine (1823) The Monroe Doctrine represented a unilateral declaration by the administration of President James Monroe to assert American leadership in the Western Hemisphere. At its core, the doctrine included anticolonial sentiments, a defense of the union of the American states as a single nation independent from Europe, and a vision of America’s future leadership in the international community. Issued during Monroe’s annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823, the doctrine declared that the United States opposed any future colonization attempts by European nations in the Western Hemisphere. Initially ignored by European powers, the Monroe Doctrine evolved into a foundational tenet of American foreign policy that legitimated U.S. expansionism and imperialism from the 19th century into the 20th century. From the nation’s founding, many Americans defined their nation as an example of republican virtue and governance in contradistinction to Europe’s monarchical forms of government. Beginning with French, British, and Spanish interventions in the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804, Americans feared European nations would sabotage or exploit newly independent countries in the Western

Hemisphere to expand Europe’s influence and weaken the United States. By the early 1820s, the majority of Spanish American territories in the Caribbean Basin and South America achieved independence. On one hand, Americans welcomed these events as anticolonial, anti-European, and commercial opportunities to expand U.S. influence. On the other, Americans described these peoples as “backward” due to their indigenous populations, African heritage, and Catholic religion. Until 1821, U.S. officials hesitated to extend recognition to emerging Latin American nations, citing their political immaturity, racial inferiority, and inability to maintain independence. In 1823, the Monroe administration witnessed potential European encroachments in the Western Hemisphere. In April, as Spanish influence in the region dwindled, U.S. officials feared Spain would not uphold its “no-transfer” agreement regarding Cuba whereby the United States would respect Spain’s sovereignty of the island, so long as Spain did not pass control to a stronger power such as Britain or France. The same month, France sent more than 100,000 troops into Spain to help monarchists install Ferdinand VII on the throne. Czar Alexander I claimed Russian control over Pacific Northwest territory on the North American continent. Americans heard rumors that an alliance of France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia would then help Spain retake its former colonies in the Western Hemisphere, reinserting monarchical control. Also fearing an alliance of European rivals and seeking greater influence in the region, British foreign minister George Canning suggested a joint British-American message opposing any European or American expansion in Spanish America. However, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and others preferred an independent message to secure international prominence and allow U.S. annexation of certain Spanish American territories, such as Cuba and Texas. In the December 2, 1823, message of 6,397 words, only 954 of those made up the Monroe Doctrine. The message against European colonization in the Western Hemisphere was direct: “the American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for colonization by any European powers.” The doctrine explicitly differentiated European monarchy and expansionism against American republicanism and national security. “[W]e should consider any attempt on [Europe’s] part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety,” the doctrine stated. Due to their hopes of acquiring Cuba and Texas, U.S. officials did not warn against future American expansion, only European.

President James Monroe explains the Monroe Doctrine, ca. 1823. The doctrine was designed to deter European countries from future colonization in the Western Hemisphere. (MPI/Getty Images)

Because of limited U.S. military and naval capabilities, European powers ignored and mocked the Monroe Doctrine in the mid-1800s. In 1833, Britain took from the government of Buenos Aires the Falkland Islands (which Argentines still call the Malvinas Islands). Buenos Aires referenced the doctrine and requested U.S. assistance, but the Jackson administration refused to intervene. Britain took San Juan in 1848, Tigre Island in the Gulf of Fonseca in 1849, and occupied Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast and British Honduras (modern Belize). British and French military interventions in the Rio de la Plata region from 1837 to 1838 and 1843 to 1851 further demonstrated America’s inability to enforce the doctrine. Even when Colombia and Brazil proposed mutual defense treaties, U.S. officials preferred noninterference and avoided military entanglements. As U.S. envoy to South America and minister to Mexico Joel Poinsett warned, “we ought to be slow to adopt any measure which might involve us in a war, except where those great interests are concerned” (Loveman, 49). In the mid-1800s, new geopolitical concerns brought about reinterpretations of the Monroe Doctrine. Some U.S. officials feared the Mayan Caste War in Mexico’s Yucatán—which began as a revolt of native Maya people against the population of European descent—would give European governments an excuse to intervene in the Western Hemisphere, ultimately leading to annexation of Cuba by one of the monarchies. Though the revolt ended without U.S. intervention, President James Polk invoked the Monroe Doctrine in April 1848. In addition to defense against European aggression, the doctrine was used as a rationale for American expansion. Facing Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, Latin American abolitionism, and a growing U.S. abolitionist movement, some proslavery ideologues advocated acquiring Texas and Cuba. When British officials approached Texas to obtain non-U.S. cotton, proslavery advocates claimed Britain sought to free slaves in Texas and invoked the Monroe Doctrine in support of acquiring Texas. President James Polk explicitly used the Monroe Doctrine to rationalize the aggressive acquisition of Texas and California from Mexico during the Mexican-American War, writing in his diary, “In reasserting Mr. Monroe’s doctrine I had California and the fine bay of San Francisco as much in view as Oregon” (Sexton, 104). At the same time, a new generation of U.S. officials began applying the Monroe Doctrine outside of North America and the Caribbean. Future secretary of state William H. Seward articulated the sentiment of many Americans in 1846 when he declared, “Our population is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific” (Bailey, 360). It was in the Pacific that President John Tyler utilized the Monroe Doctrine to defend U.S. interests in and deploy naval vessels to Hawai‘i. Sometimes other countries would cite the doctrine, hoping to engage American support. In 1848, fearing British encroachments, Colombian officials lobbied the United States for assistance. America and Colombia quickly ratified the Bidlack-Mallarino Treaty authorizing the deployment of U.S. forces to ensure Colombian sovereignty over the Panamanian Isthmus. Colombians were not so sanguine the following decade, however, when U.S. officials and newspapers cited both the treaty and the doctrine to legitimate U.S. troop deployments onto Colombian territory without Colombian approval. With the Civil War, U.S. officials turned their attention inward and rarely utilized the Monroe Doctrine. When British, French, and Spanish warships blockaded Veracruz after Mexico’s Benito Juárez government halted payments on its foreign loans in 1861, Secretary of State Seward refused European invitations to assist. Although America castigated France’s 1862–1867 occupation of Mexico as a blatant violation of the Monroe Doctrine and Mexican minister to the United States Matías Romero pleaded for assistance, U.S. officials hesitated. Spain reoccupied Santo Domingo between 1861 and 1865 and bombarded Peru and Chile during the 1865–1866 Guano War, and Sweden sold St. Bartholomew to

France. Again, these European nations challenged the Monroe Doctrine and the “No Transfer” policy, but U.S. officials never acted. After the Civil War, however, officials once again applied the doctrine vociferously to strengthen U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. In 1870, President Ulysses Grant invoked the doctrine when suggesting the annexation of Santo Domingo, though the U.S. Senate rebuffed the idea. Fearing Cuban independence or European intervention during Cuba’s Ten Years’ War, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish reminded both Spanish officials and Cuban insurgents about the doctrine. When France’s Ferdinand de Lesseps began construction of a canal in Panama in 1880, the American press cited the Monroe Doctrine and demanded U.S. control over any Central American canal. To those ends, Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen claimed the Monroe Doctrine nullified the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain. Similarly, Secretary of State James Blaine utilized the doctrine in an attempt to settle the War of the Pacific in South America and prevent any British involvement. The Monroe Doctrine also served as an instrument of U.S. cultural imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. officials targeted not simply European territorial expansionism but European commercial and cultural influences as well. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish used the doctrine in support of reciprocal trade agreements, cultural interactions, and diplomatic exchanges. Fish argued that, with Latin America’s alleged cultural immaturity and racial inferiority, the United States held a responsibility to spread its culture and interests in the region. Such blatant insults encouraged Latin American antiAmericanism and fears of U.S. hegemony. When U.S. officials proposed pan-American conferences and questioned Latin America’s relationships with various European powers, numerous Latin American officials refused, arguing that they had no desire to exchange European influences for U.S. imperialism. One of the most notable applications of the Monroe Doctrine occurred in the 1890s. During a dispute with England over the eastern border with British Guiana, Venezuelan officials encouraged the United States to intervene and support Venezuelan claims. To lobby U.S. officials and newspaper editors, the Venezuelan government hired the publicist William Lindsay Scruggs, who produced British Aggressions in Venezuela, or the Monroe Doctrine on Trial, a direct reference to the policy. President Grover Cleveland told Secretary of State Richard Olney to pursue arbitration of the border dispute based upon the Monroe Doctrine. However, Cleveland and Olney sidestepped Venezuelan popular opinion and supported British claims. With the refusal to consult Venezuela on the matter, the case demonstrated the role of the Monroe Doctrine in U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century. Just as Cleveland claimed the Monroe Doctrine was an essential component of international law, Democrats in the 1896 election affirmed, “The Monroe doctrine … is a permanent part of the foreign policy of the United States, and must at all times be maintained” (Loveman, 162). U.S. officials would use the Monroe Doctrine as a foundation for numerous acts of U.S. interventionism and gunboat diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere over the next decades. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Filibusterers; Guano Islands Act; Gunboat Diplomacy; Manifest Destiny

Further Reading Bailey, Thomas A. A Diplomatic History of the American People. 10th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980. Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Loveman, Brian. No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Sexton, Jay. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Nicaragua, Republic of (1856–1857) The “Republic of Nicaragua” refers to the government imposed by the filibusterer William Walker in Nicaragua. Originally invited by Nicaraguan Liberals to defeat their Conservative opposition and develop Nicaraguan lands, Walker’s filibusterers quickly pursued their own goals. From resuscitating slavery to confiscating lands, Walker’s projects as the self-proclaimed president of the “Republic of Nicaragua” revealed the racist and paternalistic dimensions of U.S. imperialism and expansionism in the 19th century. On June 16, 1855, Nicaraguan Liberals welcomed the arrival of Walker’s filibusterers. Many Nicaraguans believed that American immigrants would serve as useful laborers, develop uncultivated lands, and disseminate American ideals of liberty and democracy. In contracts with Walker, Liberals promised each filibusterer a farm of 250 acres from lands in the nation’s undeveloped regions. Nicaraguans even allowed the Access Transit Company, which transported filibusterers and American immigrants into Nicaragua, to establish American agricultural colonies alongside transportation routes. In their own words, Liberals hoped U.S. filibusterers would “establish liberty and order” and “develop [Nicaragua’s] resources by industry” (Gobat, 28). Walker’s filibusterers, however, had a different take on spreading that “liberty and order.” Sharing the racist sentiments of many Euro-Americans, the filibusterers alleged that African, indigenous, and other nonwhite persons were not capable of independence or self-government. In fact, the filibusterers argued that Nicaragua’s political and economic instability resulted from Nicaragua’s “mixed race” (Pike, 147). Walker presented his filibusterers as “the advance guard of American civilization” (Gobat, 26). In officially establishing his “Republic of Nicaragua,” Walker demonstrated his imperialist intentions. To secure power, Walker appointed himself commander of the Nicaraguan army, dismissed Nicaraguan soldiers, and retained his filibusterers. To control the government, he mandated that every Nicaraguan minister of government must hire a filibusterer as a deputy. Despite constitutional prohibitions against electing a foreigner, Walker fraudulently won the June 29, 1856, election. Whereas filibusterers voted multiple times, Walker only counted the votes of Nicaraguans from the filibusterers’ base at Granada. These measures allowed Walker to begin realizing the filibusterers’ vision of American imperialism in the “Republic of Nicaragua.” As president of the “Republic of Nicaragua,” Walker began crafting labor systems that favored white filibusterers at the expense of Nicaraguans. On September 5, 1856, Walker mandated forced labor contracts in which anyone appearing “idle” or “vagrant” had to work for a landowner or the U.S.operated Access Transit Company for one to six months. On September 6, Walker legalized indentured servitude and forced labor penalties for any laborer who opposed or violated labor contracts. These decrees did not apply to filibusterers and American immigrants, only to Nicaraguans. To appease the U.S. South, Walker revoked the 1824 Edict of Emancipation and reinstituted slavery on September 22, 1856. The proslavery laws especially appealed to slave owners such as the U.S. minister in Nicaragua, John Hill Wheeler. Walker also initiated a land system that benefited the filibusterers and American immigrants at the expense of Nicaraguans. With between 3,000 and 12,000 Americans arriving, Walker sought to provide Americans with the best lands. Though Nicaraguans already owned such lands, Walker ordered all lands to be registered in English. If “official” land titles were not established, non-English-speaking Nicaraguans would lose their land, which Walker would then redistribute. Contradicting the intentions of the Nicaraguan Liberals to improve undeveloped lands, filibusterers obtained more than 100 estates from

80 Nicaraguan families, including the most valuable cacao plantations in southern Granada and the cattle ranches in Chontales. Such actions instilled fear among Nicaraguans and Central Americans. Opposed to the reimposition of slavery, Central American officials ordered their armies into Nicaragua and initiated the National War in September 1856. In May 1857, the filibusterers surrendered to U.S. officials, signaling the end of Walker’s “Republic of Nicaragua.” Even his expulsion, failed expeditions, and execution by firing squad in 1860 did not diminish U.S. support for American imperialism and expansionism. Americans bought Walker’s writings, attended spectacles in Walker’s name, and cheered other filibustering expeditions. Even in disavowing filibustering expeditions, President James Buchanan insisted that eventually “Central America will contain an American population which will confer blessings and benefits … upon the natives” (Leonard, 30). Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Filibusterers; López, Narciso; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Walker, William; Primary Documents: Excerpt from William Walker’s The War in Nicaragua (1860)

Further Reading Bermann, Karl. Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States since 1848. Boston: South End, 1986. Gobat, Michel. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Johnson, John J. Latin America in Caricature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Leonard, Thomas M. Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pike, Fredrick B. The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

Opium Wars The Opium Wars were a series of conflicts in the mid-19th century between China and a number of foreign nation-states over the importation of opium into the Chinese Empire. A number of global factors drove the sale of opium within the borders of China. The Chinese Qing government established the Cohong system in the southern city of Guangzhou, known to foreigners as Canton. This system was created as a means to limit foreign interaction in China by restricting where, with whom, and for what foreign merchants could trade. In particular, the Chinese government required that foreigners pay for all goods in silver coinage, or specie, thereby prohibiting the exchange of foreign goods for desirable items such as silk or porcelain. The result was a massive influx of silver into China and away from Europe, and to a lesser extent the United States, as foreign demand for these luxury goods persisted. Americans attempted to entice the Chinese into trading for goods beginning with the departure of Samuel Shaw and a cargo ship full of ginseng. Shaw was tasked by President George Washington during his first administration with establishing consular relations with the Chinese, but he was unable to gain any special access beyond the Cohong system, and this status continued until the outbreak of war in 1839. As a means of bypassing these trade restrictions and as a way to address the rising global silver imbalance, many foreigners—particularly the British—began importing opium and selling it illegally in China in exchange for goods. Throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries, shipments of opium from British plantations in India and from other sources in the Ottoman Empire steadily increased despite the

Chinese government’s ban on the product. As such, by the late 1830s China faced the dual problem of decreasing silver supplies and a rising number of opium addicts. In 1834, the British East India Company lost its trade monopoly in the region. Private firms flocked to the region to take part in the profitable opium trade, resulting in a drastic increase in opium importation. While British merchants continued to control the majority of the trade, after 1834 Americans became the second largest group importing opium to the Chinese. Because of this increased influx of opium, the emperor sent Lin Zexu as his representative to Canton. Commissioner Lin confiscated and then destroyed the opium supplies stored in foreign ships docked along the southern coast. As British citizens were the primary suppliers of opium, and therefore suffered the largest financial damage because of the confiscation, the British government demanded compensation for the destroyed property. The refusal of the Chinese government to compensate the British resulted in the First Opium War (1839–1842) between Great Britain and Qing China. As the armies of the Qing government vastly outnumbered British forces in the area, there were no large-scale land battles during the war. The British primarily used their naval advantage to temporarily control, disrupt, or influence important trading centers along China’s coast. During this conflict the United States remained neutral despite the confiscation of opium owned by American companies. The incorporation of new technologies in the form of the steamship The Nemesis into their fleet gave British forces improved movement as they became less dependent on the wind for strategic maneuvers. The approach of the British forces near the city of Nanjing posed a serious threat to China. The city’s location near the entrance to the Grand Canal, a man-made water route leading to the outskirts of the imperial capital at Beijing, provided a dangerous avenue of which the British navy could take advantage. As such, the Chinese and British agreed to peace negotiations, and in 1842 the two sides approved the Treaty of Nanjing. The treaty provided a number of new benefits for British merchants in China. Included in the treaty were agreements that expanded foreign trade outside of Canton, adding the cities of Amoy (Xiamen), Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai to the list of cities open to foreigners. In addition, the treaty eliminated the Cohong system and allowed the British to openly interact with all Chinese subjects in the ports. The British also received a perpetual colonial claim for the island of Hong Kong, a territory over which they gained control during the conflict, as a new hub for trade. And perhaps the longest lasting result of the treaty negotiations was that China agreed to pay an indemnity of $21 million to the British for the value of lost opium and the cost of the war. The financial burden of the indemnity coupled with the realization that the treaty did not prohibit the continued importation of opium meant that the dual issues of rising opium addiction and reduced silver supplies in China persisted.

British ships Nemesis, Sulphur, Calliope, Larne, and Starling destroy Chinese war junks at Anson’s Bay during the First Opium War. The first of two major wars that forced China to extend trading privileges to Europeans on their terms, the Opium War grew out of the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress the importation of opium. (Hulton Archive)

Seeing an opportunity to secure its own treaty with China, in 1843 the United States sent former Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing as the first full American diplomatic envoy to China as news of the end of the Opium War spread. In 1844 the United States and China ratified the Treaty of Wangxia. The American treaty mirrored much of the benefits the British received in the Treaty of Nanjing. Americans could now trade at the five treaty ports opened to the British, as well as at Hong Kong. In addition, the Qing government permitted the government of the United States to set up consular outposts in the treaty port cities to represent the political and economic interests of Americans in the region. The United States also gained extraterritorial protection for American citizens, meaning any crimes committed by Americans in China or by Chinese subjects against Americans would be tried in consular courts rather than under Chinese jurisdiction. But most importantly from the perspective of the Chinese, as a means of creating a better relationship with the Chinese than other foreign nations, Cushing agreed in Article 23 of the treaty that Americans would enforce Chinese restrictions on the importation of contraband materials: namely opium. What would eventually cause increased tensions between the United States and China was a final clause that stated both parties would renegotiate the treaty in 12 years. The result of the Treaty of Wangxia was a marked increase in American involvement in China. Americans and other foreign nationals established foreign communities in the treaty ports, spurring improved trade and creating openings for missionaries to attempt to spread Christianity to the Chinese. Despite Article 23, opium smuggling continued in China by foreign merchants because it remained highly profitable, and many Chinese and foreign smugglers used ships flying the flag of the United States as a way to bypass the suspicions of Chinese customs agents. American merchants attempted to create markets for American products such as ginseng and cotton in China to correct trade imbalances, but it was not until 1849 that economic exchanges changed in favor of the United States. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 not only encouraged a massive migration of American settlers to move across the continent, but it also spurred the movement of Chinese laborers across the Pacific Ocean. Flowing out of the treaty ports, particularly Hong Kong, these settlers worked primarily in the mining industry and in various service jobs meant to supply Chinese immigrants with goods and services they were familiar with from their home country, including facilitating access to opium. Many in California viewed the influx of Chinese negatively as a source of competing labor, and as such throughout the latter half of the 19th

century anti-Chinese sentiment increased in the West, but Chinese emigration to the United States continued unabated until 1882 and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. By the 1850s, persistent calls from foreigners to expand trade access to cities beyond the treaty ports resulted in increasingly tense relations between China and foreign representatives. The United States, France, and Great Britain invoked treaty clauses calling for renegotiation of their agreements to expand their rights within China. In 1856 Chinese officials captured an opium smuggling ship, the Arrow, off the coast of China and confiscated its cargo. The Arrow was owned by a Hong Kong firm and was sailed by a primarily Chinese crew, but its captain was English and it sailed under the British flag. The confiscation of this ship sparked the existing tensions over the rights of foreigners in the treaty ports, with the opium trade again a central focus of contention. The Second Opium War, or the Arrow War as it is alternately known, was primarily fought by the Chinese and the British—including a sizable number of colonial troops from India—this time joined by the French, who were also attempting to expand their rights in China. While the United States was officially neutral in the conflict, American naval forces occasionally aided British and French military actions. Unlike the previous conflict, Great Britain and France mobilized ground forces and began the war by seizing control of Canton in the south, and proceeded north attacking key forts and ports along the way. As with the previous conflict, as the foreign forces reached Tientsin (Tianjin) an agreement was made to end the conflict in 1858 before foreigners could approach the capital. Signatories to the Treaty of Tianjin included the Chinese, British, and French, as well as the United States and Russia. In the treaty the foreign nations gained expanded trade rights to 11 new ports along China’s coast, including access to trade along the Yangzi River; merchants and Christian missionaries gained special protections allowing them to travel freely within China’s borders; foreigners were given permanent diplomatic access to the capital; and the Chinese were forced to pay £1.3 million to Britain and 660,000 francs to the French as compensation for the losses they sustained during the conflict. The Treaty of Tianjin, however, did not mark the end of the conflict. Disagreements over the enforcement and the meaning of different articles of the treaty resulted in a resumption of the conflict. Further military conflict ending in a joint British-French attack on Beijing resulted in a final agreement to end the war in 1860 through the Convention of Peking (Beijing). The convention reasserted the agreements made in the Treaty of Tianjin; it established a timetable for payments by the Chinese to the British; and it formally ceded Kowloon Peninsula—the area across from the island of Hong Kong—to British colonial control. The Second Opium War set the stage for continued international cooperation to extract benefits from the Chinese for the remainder of the 19th century. Treaty renegotiations and occasional conflicts resulted in spreading foreign influence throughout the region, culminating in the Boxer Uprising in 1899, a movement aimed at expelling foreigners from China, but one that ultimately failed. Because of the Opium Wars, and because of the negative perceptions of Americans in California, the Chinese became synonymous with accusations of immoral behavior through opium smoking and the use of opium dens. The Opium Wars would result in persistent American negotiations to ensure that foreigners could maintain equal access to the China market and that no one foreign nation would gain advantage over another, which would eventually be codified in the Open Door policy. Mathew Brundage See also: Manifest Destiny; Open Door Policy; Wanghia (Wangxia), Treaty of

Further Reading Beeching, Jack. The Chinese Opium Wars. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Sinn, Elizabeth. Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. Wong, J. Y. Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War, 1856–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Ostend Manifesto (1854) The Ostend Manifesto encapsulated American desires to annex the island of Cuba in the 19th century. As Spain rejected repeated offers from the U.S. government to purchase Cuba, the Pierce administration ordered a commission of U.S. foreign ministers to outline a new annexation policy. In bold and stringent language, the Ostend Manifesto opposed both European control over Cuba and Cuban independence. Though the document was quickly and officially rebuked, its ideas continued shaping U.S. imperialism and expansionism toward Cuba into the 1890s. Since their nation’s founding, Americans repeatedly sought to acquire Cuba. In 1823, John Quincy Adams wrote, “The annexation of Cuba to our federal republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself” (Pérez, 25). Some Americans claimed the island’s location next to Florida ensured Cuba’s eventual absorption into the United States. Using racist ideas prevalent in the era, other Americans argued that Cuba could not be independent due to its people’s African heritage and Catholic religion. During the first half of the 19th century, however, the U.S. government lacked the resources and manpower to directly challenge European powers over Cuba and other territories. Instead, U.S. officials issued doctrines and principles justifying America’s self-proclaimed responsibility over the Western Hemisphere, such as the Monroe Doctrine. The “No Transfer” policy supported Spanish control over Cuba to discourage other European powers from claiming the island. If Spain were to relinquish control of Cuba, the United States would annex the island. Events in the 1840s and 1850s ignited new debates over Cuba. U.S. officials feared English and French expansionism into Africa would draw more European powers into the Western Hemisphere. Some Cuban Creoles (“white” persons born in Cuba) organized the Havana Club and other pro-annexationist groups, lobbied U.S. officials, and received public support from devotees of Manifest Destiny such as John L. O’Sullivan. Filibusterers, most notably Narciso López, gained national attention for trying to seize Cuba by force. Americans also divided over the expansion of slavery into newly acquired western territories following the Mexican-American War. Proslavery advocates desired new lands in Central America and the Caribbean, but Free-Soilers opposed slavery’s growth. Expansionists, including President Franklin Pierce, hoped the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act would end such divisions. On April 3, 1854, Pierce and Secretary of State William Learned Marcy had U.S. minister to Spain Pierre Soulé offer Spain $130 million for Cuba. Rejected, Marcy instructed U.S. officials to discuss the annexation of Cuba in August 1854 while European powers focused on their own affairs and the Crimean War. Three U.S. foreign ministers convened at Ostend, Belgium, beginning on October 9, 1854, to discuss the annexation of Cuba. Alongside Soulé were U.S. minister to France John Young Mason and U.S. minister to Great Britain (and future president) James Buchanan. All three officials were ardent expansionists with proslavery and pro-Southern sentiments. In 1849, Buchanan declared, “We must have Cuba. We can’t do without Cuba.” Imperialist and racist ideas influenced the ministers, for Buchanan told Marcy the year before the Ostend convention that if a nonwhite government were established there, “it would endanger the peace and domestic security of a large and important portion of our people” (Pérez, 26, 36). Such ideas shaped the writing of the Ostend Manifesto, completed in October 1854. The Ostend Manifesto presented U.S. expansionist claims to Cuba. The document explicitly stated, “Cuba is as necessary to the North American Republic as any of its present members.” Reflecting

Adams’s and Buchanan’s concerns about American security, the document reiterated, “Indeed, the Union can never enjoy repose, nor possess reliable security, as long as Cuba is not embraced within its boundaries.” With American offers to purchase Cuba increasing, the manifesto capped future offers at $120 million. Should Spain keep refusing these offers and appear unable to maintain control over the island, the manifesto declared, “by every law human and Divine, we shall be justified in wresting [Cuba] from Spain, if we possess the power.” Imperialist ideas overwhelmed the document. The authors insisted upon America’s supposed righteous authority, alleging, “[Cuba’s] immediate acquisition by our Government is of paramount importance … devoutly wished for by its inhabitants.” Anticolonial sentiments appeared throughout the manifesto as well as it warned, “the tyranny and oppression which characterize [Cuba’s] immediate rulers [and] threaten an insurrection … may result in direful consequences to the American People.” Racism too shaped this logic. Fearing a nation near the United States led by persons of African descent, the authors opposed allowing “Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant horrors to the white race.” Secretly written, the document was leaked in November 1854. Believing opposition to the spread of slavery undermined their party’s congressional elections, the Pierce administration disavowed the Ostend Manifesto, Soulé resigned, and official annexation attempts halted. However, unofficial filibustering continued. Elected president in 1856, Buchanan never stopped considering Cuba’s annexation, nor did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rejected as a public document, the Ostend Manifesto’s ideas persisted into the turn of the century as Americans opposed Cuba’s independence or acquisition by another country. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Filibusterers; Free-Soil Movement; Gunboat Diplomacy; López, Narciso; Manifest Destiny; Monroe Doctrine; Primary Documents: Ostend Manifesto (1854)

Further Reading Holden, Robert H., and Eric Zolov, eds. “The Ostend Manifesto.” In Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 36–38. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Schoultz, Lars. That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Pacific Mail Steamship Company The Pacific Mail Steamship Company was established in New York State in April 1848 by merchant William H. Aspinwall and several associates to carry mail, freight, and passengers between the Pacific coast of the Isthmus of Panama and American settlements in the Oregon Country. Because it was believed that side-wheel merchant steamships could be readily transformed into warships, the U.S. Navy rather than the Post Office administered the contract. Thanks to a combination of luck and farsighted management, the company went on to dominate transportation routes between the East and West Coasts and across the Pacific Basin. The original intent of the Post Office contract was to provide mail service to Astoria, near the mouth of the Columbia River. However, Aspinwall and his associates realized that they would need to shorten

their ships’ routes to meet a monthly schedule. This requirement happened to coincide with the end of the Mexican-American War and the occupation of Alta (Upper) California by the United States. As a result, Pacific Mail received permission from the navy to deliver to ports in California instead. Under the terms of a subsequent appropriations act, the American government loaned the company money to help cover the costs of its ships. In early October 1848 the first of these small side-wheelers, the SS California, set sail from New York City. By the time it had taken the lengthy voyage around South America and reached Panama City, another fortuitous coincidence had taken place. Gold had been discovered in California, and hundreds of miners had journeyed to Panama City in hopes of boarding the ship. Crowded with passengers as a result, the California entered San Francisco Harbor on February 28, 1849, becoming the first steamship to do so. Thanks to the California gold rush, Pacific Mail began turning substantial profits immediately, and by the time California became a state in 1850 the company had set up a depot and foundry on San Francisco Bay. Two more steamships had been launched in 1848, and by 1853 the company’s fleet had grown to 18 vessels. In 1850, Pacific Mail went into competition with the U.S. Mail Steamship Company, which carried the mail from the East Coast to Chagres on the Caribbean coast of the Isthmus of Panama. When Pacific Mail began running three ships on the same route, U.S. Mail retaliated by putting four of its ships into service in the Pacific. However, the two companies came to an agreement in 1851 to end the rivalry. With the completion of a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama (another venture in which Aspinwall was involved) in 1855, the overall trip from New York City to San Francisco was shortened to 21 days. Then in 1865, Pacific Mail purchased the Atlantic Mail Steamship Company, which had replaced U.S. Mail in handling most of the maritime traffic between the East Coast and Panama. With this step, Pacific Mail realized its long-standing ambition of controlling the sea-land route between the East and West Coasts. In 1867, Pacific Mail inaugurated an important new service carrying mail (again under government contract), freight, and passengers across the North Pacific Ocean. The route connected San Francisco with the Japanese port of Yokohama, the Chinese port of Shanghai, and the British colony of Hong Kong. The first ship to make the trip, the Colorado, had been used regularly on Pacific Mail’s other routes, but was refitted for the much longer voyage. In the meantime Pacific Mail added four new side-wheelers to the service. By 1869, Pacific Mail had 23 ships in operation, but changes were on the way. That same year the completion of the transcontinental railroad reduced the time needed to travel from the East Coast to California by two-thirds, rendering the sea-and-land route obsolete. And although the new ships that the company had ordered for its transpacific line were some of the largest side-wheelers ever built, they were also some of the last. More efficient propeller-driven vessels were then being introduced, but the company was slow to adopt them. In 1873, the Pacific Mail fleet numbered 40 vessels, but the company’s profits were shrinking, and its fleet soon followed. By 1880 it had only 23 ships in service, and by 1893 the number was 20. That year the Southern Pacific Railroad acquired Pacific Mail, and Rennie P. Schwerin was appointed general manager of the shipping company. Schwerin began a successful program of revitalization that included adding new ships to the transpacific route and carrying Central American fruit and coffee. However, well-meaning legislation eventually forced Pacific Mail out of business. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 created a direct water route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but the antimonopoly Panama Canal Act had prohibited shipping companies owned by railroads from using it. Then the La Follette Seamen’s Act of 1915 limited the number of Chinese crew members working on American ships.

Pacific Mail had relied on the use of these cheaper laborers, and in 1915 chose to sell its ships. Most were bought by the Grace Line, which ran the company as a subsidiary until 1925. Although it had been founded in New York City, Pacific Mail was based for most of its life in San Francisco and played an essential role in the development of that city, the state of California, and the rapidly expanding nation. It also pioneered the lucrative transpacific shipping service, carrying not only mail and freight but also the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who would work on America’s railroads and in its fields and mines. Grove Koger

Further Reading Chandler, Robert J., and Stephen J. Potash. Gold, Silk, Pioneers & Mail: The Story of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. San Francisco: Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library, 2007. Greenfield, Mary C. “Benevolent Desires and Dark Dominations: The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s SS City of Peking and the United States in the Pacific 1874–1910.” Southern California Quarterly 94, no. 4 (2012): 423–478. Kemble, John H. The Panama Route, 1848–1869. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943. Niven, John. The American President Lines and Its Forebears, 1848–1984: From Paddlewheelers to Containerships. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987.

Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of (1854) Signed near the entrance of Edo (Tokyo) Bay on March 31, 1854, the treaty between the United States and the Tokugawa shogunate opened two Japanese ports to American mariners for resupply and provisioning. While these privileges were limited, their consequences were not: the agreement marked the beginning of the end of Japan’s policy of isolation that had been sustained for over two centuries. Like the “opening” of China to Western penetration 12 years earlier, force played a major role in the treaty’s creation. However, unlike the British in China, the leader of the American expedition, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, only used the threat of violence (in the form of his heavily armed fleet of “black ships”) to extract concessions. This “gunboat diplomacy” had limits, however; the Japanese commissioners representing the bakufu, the shogun’s government, resisted Perry’s efforts to gain full commercial access. Only in later years, after additional treaties and the revolution in government known as the Meiji Restoration, did Japan become more open to the West. Americans’ prior contacts with Japan were limited. Their knowledge of the island nation came from 16th- and 17th-century Portuguese accounts, the annual trading voyages conducted by the Dutch at their concession at Nagasaki, and the stories told by shipwrecked sailors. Several times during the Napoleonic wars, when embargoes or blockades prevented the free operation of their fleets, the Dutch East India Company hired neutral American ships to make the annual voyage to their trading station. The private missionary voyage of the ship Morrison, funded by an American China-trading firm, fared less well. Attempting contact in 1837, the Morrison was fired upon when it approached the coast. An American whaling ship received better treatment when returning stranded Japanese sailors in 1845, but the vessel was still only permitted to remain a few days. As American commerce in Asian waters grew, the American government became increasingly interested in Japan. Beginning with Edmund Roberts’s diplomatic tour in 1832, American diplomats and naval commanders active in Asia were given power to treat with the Japanese. In July 1846, Commodore James Biddle attempted to open trade but was firmly refused. Due to a miscommunication, the commodore was shoved backward by a Japanese soldier after he tried to enter a landing craft. Interpreted by the American government as a humiliation and by the Japanese as a sign of weakness, Biddle’s voyage

ensured that Perry’s later expedition would be warier and conducted using greater displays of military force. Interest in an aggressive approach to Japan gained further currency as reports of the poor treatment received by American survivors of shipwrecks began to circulate in the 1840s and 1850s. These tales of whalers imprisoned and starved helped to determine some of the key goals of the Kanagawa Treaty: guarantees of humane treatment, aid, and repatriation for American mariners and their vessels. Textile manufacturers seeking new markets and steamship line planners interested in Pacific coal depots also strongly supported plans for a diplomatic mission. Amplified by renewed interest in Asia after the “opening” of China in 1842, and buttressed by growing confidence in American power, arguments in favor of an expedition led the Fillmore administration in June 1851 to charge the commander of the U.S. East India Squadron, Commodore J. H. Aulick, with the task of opening discussions with the Japanese. Illness and accusations of misconduct prevented Aulick from proceeding, and his commission was instead given to Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry. A career naval officer who had served successfully in several different operations, most recently supporting the siege of Mexico’s ports during the Mexican-American War, Perry worked to shape the mission’s components and aims. Seeking to overawe the Japanese, Perry requested a large fleet of modern ships outfitted with the latest weapons, steam engines, and other examples of technology. Reasoning on the basis of an orientalist interpretation of American relations with China, Perry and other officials in Washington thought that arguments in favor of free commerce would fail with the Japanese “unless they be seconded by some imposing manifestation of power.” Not everything went according to plan. Perry left Norfolk, Virginia, with only one ship, joining a reduced squadron in East Asia. After visiting China and Okinawa, his fleet reached the Uraga channel at the entrance to Tokyo Bay on July 2, 1853, with four ships (two steamers and two sailing vessels) carrying 61 guns and 967 men. Aiming to project an air of importance and exclusivity, Perry demanded an audience with a high-ranking official who could receive a letter from President Fillmore addressed to the emperor. Refusing to follow established protocols by visiting Nagasaki, Perry employed his men in surveying the coastline near Tokyo and its defenses while waiting for the response he wanted. The Japanese relented, and in a formal ceremony received Fillmore’s letter requesting a treaty. Satisfied his methods had succeeded, Perry pushed on, declaring that he would return the next spring to begin treaty negotiations, and then departed on July 17, 1853. Returning to Tokyo Bay on February 13, 1854, with a larger fleet of seven ships and a cargo of gifts, Perry began negotiations with the shogunate’s representatives at Kanagawa, near the capital. Led by Hayashi Daigaku, the delegation was directed by the shogun’s chief councilor, Abe Masahiro. Having long anticipated an incursion from a Western power, the bakufu was prepared to open a limited number of ports to provide ship supplies and coaling stations. Perry, however, wanted more, desiring an agreement like 1844’s Treaty of Wanghia, which gave Americans expansive access to five Chinese ports. The Japanese commissioners remained firm, however, drawing the line at opening the country to commerce. Perry relented, later explaining that he regarded his treaty as merely a first step in the process of breaking down Japan’s barriers. The agreement signed at Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opened one minor port, Shimoda, immediately and another, Hakodate, a year later. Americans could visit either for “wood, water, provisions, and coal,” to be purchased from Japanese officials in exchange for gold or silver coin. Ships in distress and “shipwrecked persons” would be well treated. The United States was granted the right to appoint resident consuls or other agents at either port, and received most-favored-nation status, ensuring that American citizens would share in any privileges extended to other nations. In contrast to the

agreements China had signed over the previous decade with Western powers, the treaty did not grant Americans any extraterritorial rights, though these concessions would come in later. The document was not a commercial treaty, and it did not make the United States and Japan major trading partners, but it did pave the way for major changes. Though neither side was entirely ignorant of each other (the Japanese knew more of the world than the Americans originally suspected they did), the expedition was an intense cross-cultural exchange. The banquets, entertainments, gift-giving, scientific observations, and displays of technology that accompanied the negotiations provided both sides with a wealth of new information and a basis for an ongoing relationship; Japanese officials were particularly taken with a model train Americans had brought. Events moved quickly; the agreement was quickly superseded by the more substantive Treaty of Edo (1858) negotiated by the first American consul general in Japan, Townsend Harris. Dael A. Norwood See also: Japan, Opening of; Opium Wars; Perry, Matthew Calbraith; Wanghia (Wangxia), Treaty of

Further Reading Perry, Matthew Calbraith. Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy. Edited by Francis L. Hawks. 3 vols. Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856. Wiley, Peter Booth. Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan. New York: Viking, 1990.

Perry, Matthew Calbraith (1794–1858) Perry was a commodore in the U.S. Navy. Son of navy captain Christopher Perry and younger brother of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, Matthew Perry served in several major wars of the period including the War of 1812, the Second Barbary War, and the Mexican-American War. He played a leading role in other significant events in American imperial history such as the claiming of Key West for the establishment of a naval base, commanding the African Squadron tasked with upholding the terms of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, and the opening of Japan to American trade. An advocate for improved naval education, Perry was also an ardent proponent for modernizing the navy through the adoption of steampowered vessels, which earned him the title “The Father of the Steam Navy.” Perry’s numerous exploits in the service of the U.S. Navy profoundly contributed to the projection of American economic influence, military power, and political diplomacy in the West and the Far East. Entering the navy as a midshipman in 1809 under his older brother’s command, Matthew Perry would develop his own particular leadership style and distinguished naval career. A participant in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, he served in the Mediterranean, Africa, and the West Indies before being given command of a sloop in home waters. On March 22, 1822, in a demonstration of American imperial control, Perry sailed to the strategically located yet virtually lawless island of Key West on the main route to the Gulf of Mexico and took formal possession of it for the United States. Perry also promoted American naval interests through educational reform. Much of his peacetime service was devoted to improving both an apprentice system for training seamen and the curriculum for the U.S. Naval Academy. In addition to organizing the first corps of U.S. naval engineers, Perry ran the first U.S. naval gunnery school. As commodore in June 1843, Perry took command of the African Squadron. Among his duties was to enforce the terms of the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty in suppressing the slave trade and to protect

American citizens engaged in commerce on the west coast of Africa. By 1845, with war against Mexico looming, Perry was made second-in-command of the Home Squadron. His numerous operations, including the capture of Frontera and Tampico and the siege of Veracruz, severely damaged Mexican infrastructure and morale. Perry brought the full capability of American naval power to bear on Mexican port cities. He assembled the Mosquito Fleet to capture Tuxpan in April 1847 and three months later led a force of nearly 1,200 on Tabasco. Victory in the Mexican-American War virtually doubled the size of the United States, thereby feeding the expansionist cries of Manifest Destiny. The federal government looked to extend the nation’s influence westward across the continent and well into the Pacific.

The long career of U.S. Navy commodore Matthew Perry was distinguished in several ways. Perry pioneered innovations in steam naval power and seized Key West, Florida, for use as an American naval-military outpost. Most notably, in 1853 Perry, champion of a global American Manifest Destiny, launched U.S. relations with the “weak and semi-barbarous people” of Japan by firing a 13-gun salute from four American warships in Edo (Tokyo) Bay. (Library of Congress)

Perhaps Perry’s greatest achievement was his central role in establishing American trade with the “locked country” of Japan on his expedition between 1852 and 1855. Accessing the riches of the Far East had long been an objective of the young republic. Foreigners faced tight restrictions, for the policy of sakoku forbade outsiders from entering Japan and inhabitants from leaving it on penalty of death. Limited trade did exist; it was permitted only with the Dutch and Chinese and through the port of Nagasaki. Though American vessels operating under the Dutch flag had traded with Japan for more than 10 years until 1809, it was a temporary arrangement while the Dutch and British remained adversaries during the Napoleonic Wars. Recent attempts by the United States to negotiate a trade agreement prior to Perry’s mission appeared promising. In 1846, Commander James Biddle entered Tokyo Bay with two armed ships. While his requests to open trade were unsuccessful, his show of force did elicit serious attention. Three years later, Captain James Glynn successfully negotiated with Japanese officials in Nagasaki and advised Congress that a combined approach of thoughtful negotiation and veiled threats of force would

probably result in a formal agreement between nations. Perry’s calm and deliberate nature proved well suited for such diplomacy. On November 24, 1852, Perry sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, for Japan via the Cape of Good Hope aboard the black-hulled steam frigate Mississippi. On July 8, 1853, his four-vessel squadron sailed toward Edo (Tokyo) Bay with guns pointed toward the town. Refusing to go to Nagasaki as demanded by representatives of the Tokugawa shogunate, Perry threatened to fire on Japanese vessels and insisted on delivering a letter from President Fillmore to the emperor of Japan requesting “friendship” and “commercial intercourse” between their nations. Perry’s fleet, referred to by the Japanese as “black ships,” later symbolized the threat to Japan posed by American military force. Presenting the letter to delegates of the emperor at Kurihama on July 14, Perry declared his planned return the following year for the emperor’s reply and departed for China. Perry returned in February 1854 with a much larger squadron and a significant supply of presents for the emperor, the empress, councilors, and commissioners, as well as those for general distribution. He signed the Convention of Kanagawa (Treaty of Peace and Amity) on March 31, which provided for American diplomatic representation; the right of American streamships to call at two Japanese ports to take on supplies of coal, provisions, and water; and humane treatment for shipwrecked American whalers. Perry’s achievement was widely recognized upon his return to the United States in 1855. Congress granted him a reward of $20,000 and the U.S. Navy promoted him to rear admiral. In 1856 he published his Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, which became a valuable account of both Pacific navigation and Japanese customs, thereby laying the groundwork for future trading and exploratory expeditions to the region. Regardless of his command, be it the East India Squadron, the African Squadron, or the Home Squadron, the underlying objective behind all of Perry’s actions was the protection and promotion of American economic and military influence. Michael Dove See also: Amity and Commerce, Treaty of; Bakumatsu; Black Ships; Japan, Opening of; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Peace and Amity, Treaty of Kanagawa, Treaty of; Primary Documents: Matthew Perry’s Account of His Landing in Japan (1853)

Further Reading Morison, Samuel Eliot. “Old Bruin”: The Life of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794–1858. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Perry, Matthew Calbraith. The Japan Expedition, 1852–1854: The Personal Journal of Matthew C. Perry. Edited by Roger Pineau. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968. Wiley, Peter Booth, and Korogi Ichiro. Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan. New York: Viking, 1990. Wright, Donald R. “Matthew Perry and the African Squadron.” In Clayton Barrow Jr., ed. America Spreads Her Sails: US Seapower in the 19th Century. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1973, pp. 80–99.

Quasi-War The Quasi-War, also known as the Franco-American War, was an undeclared war between the United States and France fought at sea from 1798 to 1801. Fueled by French perceptions of American betrayal, which in turn led the French government to authorize attacks on American shipping, the conflict prompted the United States to rebuild its navy. France had been an important ally to the colonists during their fight for independence, signing a Treaty of Alliance in 1778 and generously providing money, munitions, soldiers, and warships to the American

cause. However, France suffered heavy financial losses during the conflict, which grew into a world war. These losses ultimately contributed to the French Revolution (1789–1799) and the toppling of the French monarchy in 1792. To the dismay of the French, the United States subsequently declared that the debt it had incurred was owed to the monarchy, not the new French Republic, and was therefore void. Two further developments contributed to deteriorating relations with France. In 1793 and again in 1794, the United States declared itself neutral in the French revolutionary wars then being waged between France and several other European powers, including Great Britain. When President George Washington went on to sign Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain in 1795, avoiding a second conflict between the two nations and initiating an era of peaceful Anglo-American trade, France interpreted the move as a violation of its own 1778 treaty with the United States. As a result of these developments, French authorities issued a decree authorizing attacks on American merchant vessels in 1797. Although envoys sent by President John Adams were unable to settle the matter with French revolutionary leaders who demanded bribes before opening negotiations, Adams attempted to downplay the gravity of the situation in hopes of avoiding open hostilities. Forced to release copies of the dispatches from his envoys in April 1798, he substituted the letters W, X, Y, and Z for the names of several of the offending French officials—an act that led to the exchange being dubbed the XYZ Affair. Upon learning details of the envoys’ treatment, Congress reacted aggressively, authorizing American merchant ships to use force in resisting seizure and to operate as privateers—that is, to raid and plunder their enemy counterparts. In addition, the tiny American navy was directed to attack any French vessels in the vicinity of the American coast. After completely disbanding its navy at the conclusion of American Revolution, the United States had put three new frigates—the USS Constellation, the USS Constitution, and the USS United States—into service in 1797. Now, with the threat of actual warfare looming, Congress authorized President Adams to build, buy, or charter more warships and other navy vessels. Congress also created the Department of the Navy, established the Marine Corps, and authorized the expenditure of funds to strengthen port and harbor fortifications. Adams nominated, and the Senate confirmed, former president George Washington as commander in chief of the army. The United States rescinded the Treaty of Alliance with France on July 7, 1798—the date usually regarded as the beginning of the Quasi-War. The first American capture of a French ship occurred shortly afterward, when the sloop Delaware overpowered the French privateer La Croyable off the coast of New Jersey. However, the most crucial engagements of the war took place in the West Indies. It was there that the majority of French warships were active, and it was there that the secretary of the new American navy, Benjamin Stoddert, deployed most of his vessels to escort merchant shipping. The first major American victory of the war took place off the West Indian island of Nevis, where the USS Constellation captured the French frigate L’Insurgente in February 1799. A year later the Constellation defeated another more heavily armed French frigate, La Vengeance, off the island of Guadeloupe. Badly damaged, La Vengeance escaped to the Dutch-controlled island of Curaçao, where the captain managed to save his vessel by grounding it. Angered by the Dutch refusal to render assistance, a French force invaded the island shortly afterward, only to be repulsed by a combined force of hastily landed American and British marines. It is estimated that over the course of the two-year war, French naval vessels and privateers captured or plundered approximately 2,300 American merchant ships of varying sizes. In the process, the ships’ crews were either abandoned to their own devices or imprisoned. However, American ships managed to capture some 90 armed French vessels—a significant number in view of the U.S. Navy’s infancy. By contrast, the French managed to take only one American naval vessel, the schooner Retaliation.

Remarkably enough, this was originally La Croyable, which the Americans had captured earlier in the conflict and which they would recapture in 1799.

USS Constellation battles the French frigate l’Insurgente in the waters of the West Indies, during the French-American Quasi-War on February 9, 1799. The war helped grow the size of the American Navy to over 50 ships. (Naval Historical Foundation)

Surprised by the sailing skill and unexpected aggressiveness of their American opponents, and under continuing pressure as well from the British, French officials began restraining the efforts of their navy in late 1800 and suggested to President Adams that they would be willing to meet with American representatives. On September 26, 1800, negotiators from the two countries reached a temporary accord, and on October 1 they signed a document known as the Convention of 1800 in Paris. Signed again in a revised version two days later at the castle of Mortefontaine (hence the convention’s alternate name, the Treaty of Mortefontaine), the treaty concluded hostilities between the United States and France, in effect ending the Quasi-War. Under Stoddert’s highly effective leadership, the American navy had grown to some 50 ships by the end of the Quasi-War. Although Thomas Jefferson, who defeated Adams in the presidential election of 1800, expected to reduce the size of the navy’s budget in light of peace with France, war with the Barbary States precluded his doing so. Grove Koger See also: American Revolution; Jay’s Treaty; XYZ Affair

Further Reading DeConde, Alexander. The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797–1801. New York: Scribner, 1966. Fehlings, Gregory E. “America’s First Limited War.” Naval War College Review 53, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 101–143. Hickey, Ronald R. “The Quasi-War: America’s First Limited War, 1798–1801.” Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 18, nos. 3/4 (July– October 2008): 67–77. Palmer, Michael A. Stoddert’s War: Naval Operations during the Quasi-War with France, 1798–1801. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.

Queen Lili’uokalani (1838–1917) The woman who would serve as Hawai‘i’s last monarch was born September 2, 1838, into an aristocratic family living near the city of Honolulu on the island of Oahu. She married John Owen Dominis, governor of Oahu and Maui, in 1862. When her biological brother, David Kalākaua, became king in 1874, he named his sisters princesses. Subsequently he designated Lili‘uokalani his heir and upon his death in 1891 she became queen. Intent upon restoring the rights of her fellow Hawaiians, Lili‘uokalani was deposed in 1893. The later decades of the Hawaiian monarchy had been marked by the usurpation of Hawaiian rights by foreign, predominantly American, settlers. While the United States recognized Hawaiian independence in the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, the move actually contributed to the consolidation of American power. The so-called Bayonet Constitution of 1887, which was forced upon King Kalākaua, resulted in a further erosion of Native Hawaiian rights so that by the time Lili‘uokalani ascended the throne on January 29, 1891, most economic and many political affairs were under the control of the settlers. King David Kalākaua died January 20, 1891, while visiting San Francisco and it was only after his body reached the islands by ship that Lili‘uokalani took the oath of office. As soon as the period of mourning had ended the new queen proceeded to assert her independence by asking the members of her brother’s cabinet for their resignations. This act met with strong opposition, as it seemed contrary to the provision of the Bayonet Constitution requiring legislative approval for all cabinet appointments. Although Hawai‘i’s Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Lili‘uokalani’s favor, her move created a sense of uncertainty regarding the future course of the monarchy. A number of other factors contributed to the unrest that would plague Lili‘uokalani’s short reign. The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which had reduced the demand for Hawaiian sugar in the United States, had thrown the islands into a depression. In turn, tax revenues had fallen dramatically. Legislative elections held in 1892 resulted in a stalemate, leading to a long and divisive legislative session as well as frequent changes of cabinet. After the legislature approved two ill-advised revenue-raising measures—the establishment of a lottery and the legalization (and licensing) of opium sales—Lili‘uokalani ended the session by royal decree. By now rumors of revolution, to be followed by either the establishment of a republic or outright American annexation, had become common. Meanwhile Lili‘uokalani had secretly drawn up the text of a new constitution designed to strengthen the monarchy, restore the right to vote to all Native Hawaiians, and withdraw that right from foreigners. Under the queen’s direction, a committee presented the document to her on the same day—January 14— that she had terminated the legislative session. Those who had argued that Lili‘uokalani was intent on usurping the privileges of Europeans and Americans now had clear proof. Fearing that the queen was about to precipitate an uprising, her advisers convinced her to postpone the proclamation of the new constitution. However, it proved to be too late. Thirteen of the queen’s opponents (many of whom had been involved in a dissident group known as the Hawaiian League) formed a Committee of Safety and appealed to U.S. State Department minister John L. Stevens for his support. An ardent annexationist, Stevens indicated that he would be ready to grant official recognition to a provisional government. He also agreed that the captain of the USS Boston, then docked in port, should land contingents of American sailors to safeguard American lives and property. The committee then persuaded Sanford Dole, a member of the kingdom’s Supreme Court, to act as president of a new government. On the afternoon of January 17, 1893, the Committee of Safety proclaimed a provisional government to last until such time as “terms of union with the United States of America” could be negotiated.

Members of the former Honolulu Rifles, which had operated as the military wing of the Hawaiian League, and the Committee of Safety, accompanied by Dole, took possession of the government buildings. In the face of such determined opposition, Lili‘uokalani surrendered under protest. Although American president Benjamin Harrison looked favorably upon annexation, his successor, Grover Cleveland, hesitated. After learning from secret envoy James H. Blount that the coup d’état had been carried out with the blessing of the American minister, the new president attacked what he called the “lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts” and sent Albert S. Willis in an effort to persuade the rebels to restore Lili‘uokalani to her throne. Instead, they moved to establish their own republic on July 4, 1894. In January 1895 several of Lili‘uokalani’s supporters attempted to overthrow the new republic. However, the rebellion was short-lived and the queen and a number of rebels were arrested and tried for treason. Lili‘uokalani formally abdicated on January 25, and while she received a prison sentence of five years, it was subsequently reduced to house arrest; she was granted a full pardon in 1896. Although she continued to protest the actions of the Committee of Safety, Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898. Lili‘uokalani died on November 11, 1917. Not surprisingly, most native-born Hawaiians supported their former queen and opposed American annexation, which they viewed as the final step in their loss of autonomy. In 1993 the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution apologizing for its participation in what it called the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarch a century before, an act that had resulted in the “suppression of the inherent sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people” and the “deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.” Grove Koger See also: Bayonet Constitution; Hawai‘i, Annexation of; Hawaiian League; Sugar Plantations, Hawai‘i

Further Reading Allen, Helena G. The Betrayal of Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii, 1838–1917. Glendale, CA: Clark, 1982. Daws, Gavan. Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom. Vol. 3: 1874–1893: The Kalakaua Dynasty. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1967. Proto, Neil Thomas. The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1893–1917. New York: Algora, 2009.

Quitman, John A. (1799–1858) The son of a Lutheran minister, John Anthony Quitman was born in Rhinebeck, New York on September 1, 1799. He studied law and in his early twenties moved to Natchez, about 170 miles north of New Orleans. Determined to make a name for himself, he established a law practice there and rapidly ascended the region’s social ladder. Within a decade his law practice and successful efforts in land speculation made Quitman a member of the prominent planter class. He entered politics, securing a place in the state legislature in 1827, and the following year he was elected chancellor of the state, a position he held until he entered the state senate in 1834. He was elected president of the senate the following year and quickly established himself as a dominant political force in Mississippi. Quitman supported the nullification movement during the early 1830s and in so doing became one of the first fervent states’ rights activists among Mississippi’s political elite. Like many other Mississippians of the era, Quitman had a keen interest in activities in Texas and in 1836 recruited a company of men to venture west and take part in the Texas Revolution. Once the revolution ended, he returned to Mississippi after having turned down a commission as a brigadier general in the Texas army as well as a judicial appointment in the new republic. Arriving back in Natchez, he reestablished his law practice and accepted an appointment as a brigadier general in the Mississippi state forces. An advocate of western expansion, Quitman made a number of speeches around the state pushing for Texas annexation. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846 he volunteered for service and ended up as a brigade commander under Zachary Taylor in northern Mexico. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Monterrey and his men were the first to enter Mexico City after the city surrendered. Flush with success and notoriety after the war, Quitman was elected governor of Mississippi in 1849, and he made no secret of the fact that he believed in secession as a logical solution to any attacks by the federal government on the institution of slavery. As governor he also openly promoted the idea that the United States should liberate Cuba from Spanish rule and take control of the island. After he allegedly conspired with Venezuelan filibuster leader Narciso López with regard to liberating Cuba, federal authorities indicted Quitman for violating American neutrality laws. He resigned as governor and was later acquitted of the charges. If anything, Quitman’s conflict with the federal government enhanced his reputation with fellow Mississippians. A states’ rights advocate to the end, Quitman argued for the protection of slavery and limitations on federal authority in most areas. He won election to the U.S. Congress on that platform in 1855 and was reelected in 1857 by a wide margin. On a visit to Natchez not long after his reelection he fell ill, and eventually died at his plantation home on July 17, 1858. Ben Wynne See also: López, Narciso; Mexican-American War; Texas, Annexation of

Further Reading May, Robert E. John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. McLendon, James H. “John A. Quitman in the Texas Revolution.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 52 (October 1948).

Roberts, Edmund (1784–1836)

Edmund Roberts was an American merchant with extensive experience trading overseas. Before his death in 1836, he sailed as an official envoy to several countries in Southwest and Southeast Asia, concluding treaties with Siam (Thailand) and Muscat (today part of Oman). Roberts was born on June 29, 1784, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Orphaned at the age of 16, he was apprenticed in 1800 to an uncle making his living as a merchant in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Roberts inherited the business upon his uncle’s death and returned to Portsmouth in 1808 to marry. Subsequently he lost much of his fortune when his ships were seized by French and Spanish privateers in the West Indies during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Roberts was appointed American consul to the British territory of Demerara (today part of Guyana) in 1823, but it is not clear whether he actually served in that capacity. In 1827 he sailed aboard a chartered ship to Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa, where his poor treatment led him to write a letter to the island’s Arab ruler, the sultan of Muscat. Roberts pointed out that improved relations with the United States and its citizens would be advantageous to the sultan, as the United States, unlike European countries, would never try to annex his territories as colonies. Roberts went on to visit the Indian port of Bombay (Mumbai) before returning home. Thanks in large part to Roberts’s experiences in Asia, President Andrew Jackson authorized him to negotiate treaties with Siam, Muscat, Cochin China (today part of Vietnam), and Japan. Sailing aboard the sloop Peacock in 1833, he was successful in both Siam and Muscat. Roberts returned home the following year, but in 1835 was sent back aboard the Peacock to complete the negotiations he had initiated and to renew his efforts in Cochin China and, in particular, Japan. The possibility of opening trade with the latter country was regarded as being so important that the ship carried several valuable gifts to be presented to the Japanese emperor. However, Roberts became ill after leaving Siam and died on June 12, 1836, in the Portuguese colony of Macau on the coast of China. American merchants had been active in East Asia since 1784, but Roberts was the first official American envoy to visit the region. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce that he negotiated with Siam was the first such document between the United States and an East Asian country, while the similar treaty with Muscat was the first with an Arab Gulf country. Grove Koger See also: Amity and Commerce, Treaty of

Further Reading Dennett, Tyler. Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States with Reference to China, Japan and Korea in the 19th Century. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Greenhut, Frederic A. “Edmund Roberts: Early American Diplomat.” Manuscripts 35, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 273–280. Roberts, Edmund. Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam and Muscat in the U.S. Sloop-of-War Peacock, David Geisinger, Commander, during the Years 1832–3–4. New York: Harper, 1837.

Sakoku Sakoku was the Japanese policy of national isolation adopted during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate. In the 1630s, a series of seclusion edicts were issued that prohibited Japanese citizens from traveling abroad, banned the practice of Christianity in Japan, and placed all foreign trade under Tokugawa control.

When Portuguese ships arrived at Tanegashima Island in 1543, Japan was an open country. Catholic missionaries from Spain and Portugal reached the Japanese islands in 1549, and in 1600 Dutch traders arrived. Nagasaki was set aside as a port for the Portuguese ships, and what became known as the Nanban trade flourished as the Portuguese brought valuable Chinese and Western goods to Japanese markets. In July 1549, the Jesuit priest Francis Xavier (1506–1552) arrived at Kagoshima in Satsuma province, at the southwestern edge of Kyushu Island. He established the first Christian ministry in Japan. At first the Japanese were intrigued by Europeans’ Christianity, but their aggressive style of proselytizing angered many Japanese officials. Within a year of Xavier’s arrival, the daimyo (a feudal baron who acted as a military governor) of Satsuma, Shimazu Takahisa (1514–1571), prohibited his people from converting to Christianity. Opposition to the Christian religion increased and by the end of the century the Japanese were asking missionaries to leave the country. In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) became shogun, ushering in the Edo period. Ieyasu welcomed foreigners to his court, including the Portuguese, Dutch, and English merchants. He also sought to establish friendly relations with Korea and other southeastern Asian nations. Most important, Ieyasu allowed his government, the bakufu, to issue the shuinsen (official “red seal” trading passes) to both Japanese and foreign merchants who wished to trade overseas. The shuinsen system was designed to reduce piracy and allow the Tokugawa to control trade, thus preventing competing feudal lords from gaining revenue at the shogun’s expense. Japan was politically stable under Ieyasu’s rule, but mounting concerns that Christian missionaries were interfering in internal affairs, coupled with growing fears of colonization by the aggressive countries of Spain and Portugal, led many influential Japanese to call for the expulsion of foreigners. In 1634, the artificial island Dejima was constructed in Nagasaki Bay and the Portuguese traders were confined to the island in an effort to restrict Christianity. Ieyasu’s grandson, Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651), became shogun in 1623. Iemitsu did not like Christianity and between 1633 and 1639 his government issued five seclusion orders. The Sakoku Edicts of 1635 were the third and most restrictive of the edicts and, unlike previous versions, the 1635 edicts were signed by all of the shogun’s counselors, demonstrating unanimous opinion on the political course that Japan should take. The 1635 edicts included a list of 17 articles that were legally binding as soon as they were published. The first article forbade any Japanese ship from going to a foreign country. The second and third articles proclaimed the death penalty for any Japanese who traveled to a foreign country or any Japanese who returned after having lived overseas. Additionally, ship captains were held accountable and liable to be imprisoned if they harbored travelers who had been abroad. Articles 4 through 8 concerned eradicating Christianity from Japan. Edict 4 called for authorities to investigate areas where Christianity was practiced so it might be halted. Edict 5 established rewards of up to 100 pieces of silver to be offered to individuals who informed against high-ranking priests, while smaller rewards for lower ranking priests were to be offered at the authority’s discretion. Edicts 7 and 8 called for all ships to be searched in case priests were hiding from the authorities, and any who were caught teaching Christianity were to be imprisoned at Ōmura. The policy of sakoku did not completely cut Japan off from the rest of the world, nor was it intended to do so. The primary purpose of the Sakoku Edicts was to allow the Tokugawa government to maintain its control over trade, and the rest of the articles, 9 through 17, were concerned with trade and establishing the price of raw silk to disrupt the Portuguese monopoly on silk from China.

Additionally, the edicts prohibited samurai from purchasing merchandise directly from Chinese or other foreign ships. All foreign ships had to provide a complete list of the goods they had for sale and any unsold merchandise could not be left in Japan. Another set of Sakoku Edicts, consisting of 18 articles, was published in 1636. The reward for informers who reported on Christians was increased to 200 or 300 pieces of silver, and a new edict called for expulsion of the children of foreigners under penalty of death, including those born to Japanese women by Dutch or Portuguese men. In 1637–1638, the Shimabara Rebellion erupted in southwestern Japan when peasants protested a massive tax increase their daimyo Matsukura Katsuie (1598–1638) had imposed on them. Many peasants had converted to Christianity, and religious suppression as well as food shortages fed their anger. They were joined by rōnin (masterless samurai), and the rebellion became so intense the shogun had to send troops to quell the revolt. As a result of the rebellion, in 1639 the Portuguese were expelled from Japan and banned from trading with the country. Any Portuguese galeota (ship with triangular sails) caught in Japanese waters would be destroyed and its occupants beheaded. Only the Dutch East India Company was allowed to remain in Nagasaki. Japan rejected efforts of foreigners to establish trade relations for more than 200 years. The Sakoku Edicts remained in effect until the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s (1794–1858) “black ships” at Edo (Tokyo) Bay on July 8, 1853. Perry’s fleet consisted of two paddle-wheel steamers and two sailing ships. Perry presented a trade proposal, but it was rejected and he left Japan, only to return the next year with a larger fleet comprised of seven ships. On March 31, 1854, Perry signed the Treaty of Kanagawa, which established a policy of friendship and trade and provided for fair treatment of American shipwrecked sailors taken in by the Japanese. On July 29, 1858, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed between Japan and the United States. The countries exchanged representatives and Japan was required to open trade with other Western countries, including Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. In 1868, the Meiji government came into power and Japan abandoned sakoku and began a policy of modernization. Karen S. Garvin See also: Amity and Commerce, Treaty of; Bakumatsu; Black Ships; Gunboat Diplomacy; Japan, Opening of; Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of; Perry, Matthew Calbraith; Shimonoseki Straits, Battle of

Further Reading Feifer, George. Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853. New York: Smithsonian Books/Collins, 2006. Hellyer, Robert. Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640–1868. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Laver, Michael S. The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011.

Santo Domingo, Annexation of (1869–1871) In the decade after the Civil War, many Americans expected that the United States would continue its efforts at territorial appropriation with the Caribbean as expansionists’ next target. Although debates initially focused on Cuba, U.S. expansionists, led by President Ulysses S. Grant, turned to Santo

Domingo, the present-day Dominican Republic. Grant made Santo Domingo’s annexation his primary foreign policy initiative. His campaign garnered substantial support from influential politicians and newspapers, but also provoked considerable opposition, triggering what one historian has described as “the most dramatic political controversy over American foreign relations between the Civil War and the crisis with Spain after 1895” (Holbo, 91). At first glance, the controversy over annexing Santo Domingo is surprising. The United States had long sought a Caribbean foothold, and expansionists had unsuccessfully attempted to annex parts of Santo Domingo in the 1850s and 1866. From 1869 to 1871, expansionists described the benefits of acquiring Santo Domingo by citing traditionally popular concerns: developing the agricultural wealth of a fertile tropical island; enhancing U.S. military strength in a strategic area destined to become even more important after the construction of the trans-isthmian canal; and upholding the Monroe Doctrine by signaling to European powers that the United States was determined to control the Caribbean. The controversy becomes more understandable when one appreciates the upheaval the Civil War caused in U.S. institutions and partisan alignments on foreign policy. In the 1850s, slaveholders concentrated in the Democratic Party were the most aggressive advocates of acquiring Caribbean territory. They hoped to seize Cuba and its slave plantations and eventually reenslave black-majority populations on other Caribbean islands. The Republican Party, adamantly opposed to extending slavery, defeated Democrats’ plans. After the war, Reconstruction created a new context for Caribbean expansion. Between 1865 and 1870, Republicans, driven by electoral concerns and idealism, abolished slavery, granted citizenship to African Americans, and made African American men voters. Republicans also became the party most in favor of Caribbean territorial expansion because they believed it would advance their party’s antislavery mission by undermining slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico. When Americans began discussing Santo Domingo’s annexation in 1869, many asked how Republicans’ attempt to build a multiracial democracy in the United States would affect the status of potential Caribbean acquisitions. Would expansionists incorporate black-majority Caribbean peoples into the American nation as citizens, as African Americans had been? Or would Santo Domingo become a colony under U.S. control but with no role in the U.S. government? The treaty Grant negotiated with the Dominican government was clear: Santo Domingo would enter the Union as a territory on a path to statehood, with Dominicans becoming U.S. citizens. Newspapers referred to the “State of Santo Domingo.” One senator explained in the Congressional Globe that the “colored people” of Santo Domingo would possess “all the liberties of American citizens … [and] enjoy the same rights and privileges that we do.” Expansionists dismissed claims that Dominicans were racially incapable of responsible U.S. citizenship by arguing that the transformative power of American democratic institutions would forge diverse races into a unified American nation. Expansionists asserted that Dominicans favored annexation, relying on dubious information from Dominican leader Buenaventura Baez. By invoking economic and military benefits, the Monroe Doctrine, antislavery concerns, and partisan loyalty from Republicans, Grant and his allies secured the support of a majority of Congress, many national newspapers, as well as Frederick Douglass and other African American leaders. But annexation faced formidable opposition in Congress, the national press, and probably a majority of Americans. Democrats overwhelmingly rejected annexation, largely because of antiblack racism. They desired absolute white supremacy in the United States and feared that black Dominicans would elect “carpetbagger” Republicans to Congress and ensure the perpetuation of multiracial democracy. Many Republicans also opposed annexation. Some did so because of racism toward Dominicans. Others focused on corruption in Grant’s administration, argued annexation would only benefit business elites, and

opposed the creation of a large military, which they believed annexation would require. Former abolitionists led by Senator Charles Sumner criticized annexation because they feared Americans would oppress Dominicans. The annexation debate’s stakes were heightened because participants expected that if Santo Domingo joined the Union, other Caribbean islands would follow. Antiannexationists argued that Americans faced annexing not simply one black-majority Caribbean state, but four or five, all of which would undermine American democracy. Annexationists agreed that annexing Santo Domingo would lead to other Caribbean states joining the Union, but cast wider expansion as a benefit that would bring new wealth and power to the United States and argued that American institutions were powerful enough to assimilate Caribbean peoples. Antiexpansionists, driven primarily by doubts concerning nonwhites’ fitness for U.S. citizenship, defeated an annexation treaty in the Senate in June 1870 by a 28–28 vote, far short of the two-thirds majority ratification required. Expansionists revived their campaign in 1871, but the strength of antiexpansionist sentiment forced them to abandon their efforts. The debate over annexing Santo Domingo highlights the important overlap between race relations within the United States and U.S. foreign policy. The annexation debate also marks an important turning point in the history of the form that the expansion of U.S. power took in the late 19th century. The formal annexation and incorporation of nonwhite foreign nations in North America into American democracy, which seemed possible in the late 1860s and early 1870s because of the upheaval in racial ideologies that accompanied Reconstruction, was decisively rejected. After 1871, expansionists targeting the Caribbean sought informal economic and political influence, until the conquest of Caribbean territory during the Spanish-American War again raised the prospect of annexation. By the 1890s, white Americans’ views of nonwhite races’ fitness for U.S. citizenship were dramatically more negative than during Reconstruction, and any prospect of citizenship for conquered peoples was swiftly dismissed. Instead, Americans debated whether to control Caribbean peoples as colonial subjects or through informal empire. Christopher Wilkins See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Propaganda, Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars; see volume 3 for relations in the 20th century

Further Reading Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Guyatt, Nicholas. “America’s Conservatory: Race, Reconstruction, and the Santo Domingo Debate.” Journal of American History 97, no. 4 (March 2011): 974–1000. Holbo, Paul. Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, the Press, and Congress, 1867–1871. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Tansill, Charles C. The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798–1873. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938.

Second Barbary War. See Barbary War (Second) Shimonoseki Straits, Battle of (1863) The Battle of Shimonoseki Straits took place on July 16, 1863, between the American forces aboard the USS Wyoming under the command of David Stockton McDougal and Japanese rebel forces under the

leadership of daimyo Mori Takachika, head of the Chōshū clan. The entire battle lasted for only an hour and 10 minutes. During the 1860s, Japan experienced high inflation rates that impacted the entire country and caused many Japanese to believe that the sources of their economic woes were previous treaties with the Western powers. Many of the daimyo, powerful territorial lords, saw foreigners as the problem and were outraged by the shogun’s continued policy of toleration toward foreigners. Breaking with tradition, Emperor Kōmei issued an imperial edict in March that ordered all foreigners to leave Japan by June 25, 1863. Normally the Japanese emperor was a figurehead, but Kōmei’s actions split the ruling daimyo into a proshogun faction that favored trade and an antiforeign faction. Among those who wanted the foreigners out was Mori Takachika, head of the Chōshū clan and ruler of Nagato Province in the southern part of Honshu, one of Japan’s four main islands. The narrow Straits of Shimonoseki separated Honshu from Kyushu to the south. All ships bound for Japan’s inland sea passed through the straits, which made them strategically important. Mori Takachika used the straits to his advantage. He placed six cannon batteries on the hills above the straits and outfitted several of his ships with guns. The ships had been acquired from the Americans and included the Daniel Webster, a bark; the Lanrick (Kosei), a brig; and the Lancefield (Koshin), a steamer. The American consul was moved to Yokohama after the consulate building in Edo was burned by arsonists. In May 1863, Commander David McDougal of the USS Wyoming was ordered to Japan to help protect American interests. As the June 25 deadline approached, an American merchant ship, the Pembroke, was anchored in the Straits of Shimonoseki while waiting for the tide to turn. At one o’clock in the morning, two of the Chōshū ships opened fire on the Pembroke, causing slight damage. The ship managed to escape without casualties and headed for Shanghai. The Americans in Yokohama did not learn of the incident until July 10, when news of the attack reached them through the mail from Shanghai. Robert H. Pruyn, the American minister in Japan, sent for the Japanese minister of foreign affairs and warned him that the American government considered the incident to be serious and would expect the Japanese government to issue a statement concerning the attack. The minister asked the Americans to wait until he had a reply from his superiors in Edo, but rather than wait, McDougal told Pruyn that the incident was serious enough that he would proceed directly to the Shimonoseki Straits instead of returning to America. McDougal and Pruyn were concerned that a failure to respond to the attack on the Pembroke would encourage further hostilities on American vessels. Other vessels in the straits had also been attacked, including a French ship that was nearly sunk. The Dutch became involved when the frigate Medusa, under the command of Captain Casembroot, sailed into Shimonoseki with the intent of using the Netherlands’ friendship with the Japanese to help pacify the situation. Japanese forces fired their cannon on the Medusa, which sustained heavy damage. The Dutch lost four men and another five were wounded in the attack.

Painting of the Dutch frigate Medusa forcing passage through the Shimonoseki Straits. Attempting to use the Netherlands’ friendship with Japan to pacify the situation, the Medusa sustained heavy damage after the Japanese forces fired upon it. In 1864, a joint force of British, French, Dutch, and American ships overtook the Japanese defense, forcing their surrender. (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

At 4:45 a.m. on the morning of July 13, McDougal called all hands on deck and within a quarter of an hour the ship was underway. Two days later, as the Wyoming made its way through the Bungo Channel, McDougal ordered his men to prepare for action. The ship’s cannon were loaded with shot and the men prepped their muskets and revolvers. The Wyoming arrived at Himeshima around 5 o’clock in the evening and dropped anchor on the southern side of the island. At five the next morning McDougal made for the Straits of Shimonoseki. The Wyoming arrived at 10:45 a.m., ready for action. Signal guns were fired, and as soon as the ship came into range of the shore batteries the Chōshū forces fired upon it. The opening salvo was fired at about 11:15 a.m., and McDougal responded by raising his ship’s flag and returning fire from its two 11-inch guns. But McDougal spotted the Daniel Webster, Kosei, and Koshin at anchor and decided that they were a bigger threat to the Wyoming than the shore batteries. He issued the order to sail between the steamer Koshin and the two other Chōshū vessels. This unexpected maneuver took the Chōshū by surprise. The Koshin had all of its guns mounted on one side, anticipating firing into the straits. But McDougal’s tactics made the Koshin’s cannon useless, and the ship’s crew had to resort to using small arms against the Wyoming. McDougal also noticed a row of wooden stakes in the middle of the channel that the Japanese were using to aim their shore guns. He had the Wyoming steer close to shore, nearer the batteries. Because of this the shore gunners aimed high to avoid hitting their own ships, and the guns did minor damage to the Wyoming’s rigging and sails. But the hull was undamaged and there were no casualties. As the Wyoming sailed between the Japanese ships, a fresh volley of fire from the shore battery rained down, but the ship was still close enough to shore that most of the shots sailed harmlessly overhead. The Wyoming fired a single well-placed shot at the shore battery and destroyed it. The Wyoming approached the Daniel Webster and Kosei, which both fired on the Wyoming’s forward gun in close quarters. The Wyoming sustained heavy damage. Four men were wounded and two killed in the forward part of the ship, and elsewhere aboard ship a marine was killed by shrapnel. Despite the damage, the Wyoming’s port battery targeted the Koshin and fired two shells at the steamer, which then weighed anchor and made to ram the Wyoming. Meanwhile, the Daniel Webster kept firing and the Wyoming was targeted by six land batteries.

The tide grounded the Wyoming’s bow, but within a few minutes the ship’s engines were able to pull it off. The Wyoming turned to face the Koshin and fired its port batteries at the steamer. The second shot hit the Chōshū vessel’s boilers and the Koshin began to sink. Its crew abandoned ship. McDougal turned his attention on the Kosei and opened fire, quickly sinking it. The Daniel Webster and shore batteries continued to pummel the Wyoming. McDougal put the Kosei out of commission, then destroyed all of the shore batteries. At 12:20 p.m. the Wyoming ceased fire. The entire battle had lasted an hour and 10 minutes. Japanese losses were estimated at 40 casualties. McDougal returned triumphantly to Yokohama. Four days after the battle a French ship attacked the straits, but the damage to the shore batteries was repaired and Mori Takachika continued to attack foreign vessels until September 5, 1864, when a joint force of British, French, Dutch, and American ships shelled and destroyed the shore batteries and landed a 2,000-man force, causing Mori Takachika to finally surrender. Karen S. Garvin See also: Bakumatsu; Black Ships; Gunboat Diplomacy; Japan, Opening of; Peace and Amity, Treaty of/Kanagawa, Treaty of; Perry, Matthew Calbraith; Sakoku; Tianjin, Treaty of

Further Reading Auslin, Michael R. Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Jones, Howard. Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Laver, Michael S. The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011.

Shufeldt, Robert W. (1822–1895) Rear Admiral Robert Shufeldt opened Asia to American commerce and influence with a two-year voyage starting in 1878. Shufeldt entered the U.S. Navy in 1839 and served until 1853 when he resigned to enter the merchant marine. In 1861 he was named U.S. consul general in Havana, Cuba. He reentered the navy in 1862 as a captain commanding a blockade ship off the southern coast. He was promoted to commodore in 1865 and given command of the U.S. Asiatic squadron. He attempted to open relations with Korea in 1867, but was rebuffed twice. In 1870 he was ordered to study the feasibility of an isthmian canal. Because of Shufeldt’s diplomatic and naval experience, in 1878 Secretary of State William M. Evarts selected him to command a mission to Africa and Asia to open up new markets for commerce. He would show the U.S. flag in Africa, Asia, and the Persian Gulf. Shufeldt believed the future of U.S. expansion and trade was in the Pacific. Shufeldt first sailed for Liberia where he successfully arbitrated the boundary dispute with British Sierra Leone. He then sailed south along the coast of Africa toward Cape Town, making numerous stops and recommending the establishment of consulates in key ports along the African coast. He warned the U.S. government that European colonialism in Africa threatened any future trade with the continent. He also noted the same threat in the Persian Gulf where British imperialism stymied U.S. interests. Shufeldt recommended establishing relations with Persia (present-day Iran). Once in Asia, Shufeldt reached out to the Japanese government to help open relations with the hermit kingdom of Korea. Traditionally, Korea had been a tributary nation of China, but the Japanese, sensing the possibility of expanding their own influence, agreed to help establish U.S.-Korean relations. Washington was eager to open Korea to U.S. commerce because it was the last untapped market in Asia. The Korean

government, however, refused to meet with Shufeldt. They were upset that a diplomatic mission had been sent on U.S. warships. When the Japanese government forwarded a message from Shufeldt to the Korean government, it was rejected because the word Korea had been misspelled. The Chinese government, worried about the increasing Japanese influence in Korea, invited Schufeldt to China for diplomatic talks. The Chinese government hoped to use the United States to blunt Japanese and Russian expansion while Shufeldt hoped to further open up the Chinese market for U.S. commerce. Ironically, the Chinese actually weakened their position in Korea when Schufeldt negotiated a treaty with Korea in 1882. The Treaty of Chemulpo provided for the United States to be granted most-favored-nation status and for U.S. citizens to be allowed to live in Korean port cities while being protected by extraterritoriality. The treaty opened relations between the two countries as the Korean government realized that the United States might be a possible protector against Chinese, Russian, and Japanese influence. These hopes were dashed, however, as Korea was soon relegated to a minor concern by the State Department. Stephen McCullough See also: Korean Expedition of 1871

Further Reading Drake, Frederick C. The Empire of the Seas: A Biography of Rear Admiral Robert Wilson Shufeldt, USN. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984.

Strong, Josiah (1847–1916) Josiah Strong was a Congregationalist minister, a pioneer in the social gospel movement, and an advocate of Christian involvement in American expansionism. Born in Napierville, Illinois, Strong spent his childhood in Illinois and Hudson, Ohio. He studied at Western Reserve College and then attended Lane Seminary but never finished. In 1871, Strong left Lane Seminary and was ordained by the Ministerial Association of Cincinnati. In the same year, Strong married Alice Brisbee. They had four children. After ordination, Strong took a church in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, as a home missionary for the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS), a Congregational organization. While there, Strong sought to reform the town. Thereafter, the conversion of society to Christian values became an ever-increasing part of Strong’s ministry. In 1873, Strong returned to Hudson to work at Western Reserve College and in 1876, Strong became a pastor in Sandusky, Ohio. Strong’s experience in Wyoming and his continued focus on missions led to his becoming the secretary of the Ohio Home Missionary Society (OHMS), a branch of the AHMS, in 1881. Three years later Strong left Sandusky for the Central Congregational Church in Cincinnati. Strong’s involvement with the OHMS brought him into contact with other Congregational leaders. As a result, the AHMS approached Strong to revise its key work on home missions, Our Country. The new edition was Strong’s most popular work: Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885). Strong’s updated revision of Our Country reflected a post–Civil War United States. While previous editions of Our Country identified slavery as a major problem for mission work, Strong identified the perceived threats to be Catholicism, Mormonism, immigration, alcohol, socialism, wealth, and the city. Strong believed in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon (English-speaking) peoples. He thought that this superiority was reflected in the strength and territory of the United States and the British Empire. Strong

concluded that Anglo-Saxons, and specifically Americans, had been chosen to spread the Christian religion and culture throughout the United States and the world. Strong’s message resonated with many Americans and infused imperialism and expansionism with a religious aspect. Between 1886 and 1898, Strong was the general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States, a major interdenominational organization in the United States. Strong actively sought to use the resources of the Evangelical Alliance to further his vision of the social gospel and missions. His activities brought Strong into conflict with board members of the Evangelical Alliance who believed that Strong’s actions were outside the focus of the organization. Strong left the Evangelical Alliance and formed the League for Social Service in 1899 with William H. Tolman. The organization became known as the American Institute for Social Service in 1903. This organization continued Strong’s social and mission efforts. His alma mater, Western Reserve University, presented Strong with an honorary doctorate in 1886. Strong died in 1916 after an illness. The main collection of Strong’s papers is located at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Nathan V. Lentfer See also: Anglo-Saxonism; Manifest Destiny

Further Reading Deichmann Edwards, Wendy J. “Forging an Ideology for American Missions: Josiah Strong and Manifest Destiny.” In Wilbert R. Shenk, ed. North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914. Studies in the History of Christian Missions. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004, pp. 163–191. Jordan, Philip D. “Josiah Strong and a Scientific Social Gospel.” Iliff Review 42, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 21–31. Strong, Josiah. Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. New York: Baker & Taylor, 1885.

Sugar Plantations, Hawai‘i Although sugarcane was apparently introduced into the Hawaiian Islands in the 7th century CE by Polynesian settlers, the use of its juice as a sweetener remained limited until the early 19th century. With time, sugar production became a mainstay of the Hawaiian economy, drawing large numbers of immigrant workers and contributing to the transformation of the islands’ environment. Foreign-born plantation owners, many of them American, came to dominate Hawai‘i’s economic and political life and eventually precipitated the kingdom’s transformation into a republic and ultimately into an American territory. The first successful commercial cultivation of sugarcane dates to 1835, when the American firm of Ladd & Company established a plantation at Koloa on the island of Kauai. Although the plantation was small and its oxen-driven mill (for extracting juice from the cane) was primitive, the company was able to ship two tons of sugar and 700 gallons of molasses to the United States in 1837. The California gold rush of the 1840s created a ready market for Hawaiian products, while at the same time Hawaiian authorities relaxed restrictions on the purchase of land by Americans and Europeans. This combination of developments led to land speculation and the establishment of more plantations, but the collapse of the gold rush early in the following decade plunged the islands into a depression. The opening of the American Civil War resulted in renewed demand for Hawaiian sugar among the Union states, and by the end of the conflict there were nearly three dozen companies growing and milling cane. Peace, however, brought yet another depression. Subsequently plantation owners and mainland buyers experimented with a quota system that guaranteed set prices for set quantities of sugar.

Lack of water was a key factor limiting the growth of sugarcane plantations. Owners had begun experimenting with irrigation as early as 1856, when William Harrison Rice arranged to have 10 miles of ditches and tunnels dug to water his plantation on Kauai. The experiment proved to be a success, and planters on the island of Maui followed suit within a few years. Another important factor was a shortage of willing laborers. Dissatisfied with Native Hawaiian workers, who generally saw little point in laboring for foreigners, planters began importing workers, primarily from China, to harvest the cane. Eventually other workers came from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. However, many viewed the contract system under which the workers entered the islands as akin to slavery, and a drawn-out debate over the practice would simmer for decades. In the meantime a number of workers chose to remain in Hawai‘i after their contracts expired, often leading to ethnic tensions but adding to the islands’ increasingly rich racial mix as well. The ratification of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 marked a significant turning point in the island’s economy. Under its provisions the United States took possession of the land around Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in return for allowing the duty-free importation of Hawaiian products. The islands produced 13,000 tons of sugar the year the treaty was signed, but by 1898 the total had risen to 225,000 tons. Besides offering financial advantages to plantation owners, the treaty led to increased American control over Hawai‘i’s political and economic affairs while forestalling European designs on the islands. Control of the growing Hawaiian sugar industry was exercised by a handful of companies that came to be known as the Big Five. The oldest of these, C. Brewer & Company, was founded in 1826 but became involved in the sugar industry only in 1863. Others included Alexander & Baldwin, American Factors (originally H. Hackfield & Co. and subsequently Amfac), Castle & Cooke (which eventually became the Dole Food Co.), and Theo H. Davies & Co. Owned and operated by foreign nationals, many of them American, these companies came to wield far-reaching power over virtually every aspect of life in the islands. For a time plantation owners found their price advantage undercut when the U.S. Congress passed the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 subsidizing sugar produced on American soil. Sentiment for annexation of the islands among American settlers was already strong, and the realization that they would regain their advantage should Hawai‘i become an American territory naturally increased their ardor. Then on January 17, 1893, American settlers, many of them connected with sugar production and most of them allied with a political organization called the Hawaiian League, carried out a coup d’état. After removing Queen Lili‘uokalani, they set up a provisional government and appealed to the U.S. government for annexation. When this latter step was not forthcoming, the settlers established their own republic on July 4, 1894. Shortly afterward the McKinley Tariff Act was repealed, to be replaced by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff, and as a result the Hawaiian sugar market rebounded. The annexation that so many American settlers had longed for finally took place in 1898 during the administration of President William McKinley. Afterward, the Big Five sugar producers continued to dominate the islands’ economic affairs. By 1910 they controlled three-fourths of Hawai‘i’s sugar production, and two decades later their dominance of the market was nearly total. The fact that the islands had few other products to offer the world only increased the companies’ pervasive influence, and in time they branched out to dominate Hawai‘i’s banking and transportation infrastructure. Given their power in the economic sphere, the companies exercised effective control of political affairs as well. Over time, sentiment for statehood grew, but as the Big Five feared that such a change would spell the legal end of the contract labor system, Hawai‘i did not become a state until 1959. Grove Koger

See also: Bayonet Constitution; Hawai‘i, Annexation of; Hawaiian League; Queen Lili‘uokalani

Further Reading Daws, Gavan. Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Dorrance, William H., and Francis Swanzy Morgan. Sugar Islands: The 165-Year Story of Sugar in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: Mutual, 2000. Kuykendall, Ralph S. The Hawaiian Kingdom. 3 vols. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1938–1967. Siler, Julia Flynn. Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012.

Tianjin, Treaty of (1858) The Treaty of Tianjin (Tien-tsin) was signed between the United States and China on June 18, 1858, putting an official end to the first phase of the Second Opium War (1856–1860). It was ratified by the U.S. Senate and signed by President James Buchanan on December 21, 1858. The Treaty of Tianjin signed between China and the United States consisted of 30 articles, in which the United States was granted a number of privileges by the Qing (Ching) emperor. The first few articles declared peace and friendship between the two nations and the intent to publish the treaty terms in both countries. Other articles provided for Americans to enjoy full access to the Chinese interior for trade; the ability to legally rent or build houses, hospitals, and cemeteries; and protection from persecution or harassment for the American missionaries working in China as well as their Chinese converts. The Treaty of Tianjin was one of four treaties signed between the Qing Empire and Western powers. During June 1858, China also signed separate agreements with Great Britain, France, and Russia. Together, the four treaties have been called unequal treaties because the terms called for China to make concessions to the West that included reparations and the ceding of territory. The earliest American contacts with China were private trade. American trade with other nations was at a low point after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, signed with Great Britain in 1783, the United States did not have access to the British West Indies or to products it traded in from the East.

The Treaty of Tianjin is signed in 1858 by representatives of China, Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States, ending the Arrow War, the second conflict of the Opium Wars. The most-favored-nation clause of what was actually a series of treaties granted all Western powers generous economic rights and privileges in China. Despite the Chinese signature on the treaties,

armed resistance as well as U.S. diplomacy would be required to compel the Chinese government to fully accept the terms. (Library of Congress)

Banker Robert Morris saw an opportunity in trading directly with China for tea. In late February 1784, his ship, the Empress of China, left New York harbor laden with furs, cotton, lead, and ginseng. The ship arrived at Guanghzhou (Canton) on August 28, 1784, where it remained until late December. Samuel Shaw was aboard ship to manage the cargo and had been appointed by the U.S. government as an unofficial consul, but Shaw did not manage to establish diplomatic relations with China during his time in Guanghzhou. The ship returned to New York on May 11, 1785, with a cargo of Chinese tea, silk, and spices. The successful voyage marked the United States’ entry into direct trade with China, which proved to be lucrative. Soon, other American traders were venturing to China with sea otter pelts and sandalwood from Hawaii. At the time, China maintained a closed-door policy with the West. In 1757, Emperor Qianlong had closed China to foreigners to maintain control of the empire, leaving only the port treaty of Guanghzhou open for trade. Qianlong wanted to restrict the influence of foreigners on the Chinese people, fearing the effect of foreign contact on the already restive Chinese population. In Guanghzhou, a group of Chinese merchants known as the Cohong held monopoly status to trade with Westerners in what was known as the Canton system of trade. The Cohong set prices and collected duties and fees. Westerners were prevented from interacting directly with Chinese merchants and were prohibited from learning the Chinese language. The Canton system became problematic as an unequal balance of trade developed between Great Britain and China. Opium had been traded in China since the 1730s under the monopoly power of the English East India Company. It became widely popular only after 1820, when prices dropped. When it was outlawed in 1796, the British began to smuggle Indian opium into China. American traders saw the trade as profitable and also began to deal in opium, which they obtained from Persia. In 1838, the Chinese government decided to eradicate the opium trade. Lin Zexu was appointed by the emperor to force the British to give up their supply of opium so it could be destroyed. Initially, the British complied with Lin Zexu’s orders, but the next year hostilities broke out in the First Opium War, which began in March 1839. The British won, and the Treaty of Nanjing was signed between Britain and China on August 29, 1842. The treaty forced the Chinese to pay reparations for opium that had been seized from British ships, but it opened five more Chinese ports to trade and allowed the British to deal directly with local Chinese officials.

MISSIONARIES AND THE OPIUM TRADE In the decade before the Opium War, the small band of Protestant missionaries allowed in China openly castigated Western powers for their involvement in the opium trade. E. C. Bridgman, for example, wrote that only after Western nations admitted the “dire evils” of the trade “to which they have long been accessory” would they be able to “repair the desolations already made.” Following the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844, however, these attitudes drastically changed. Because the treaty codified American extraterritoriality, Chinese officials had little ability to stop American merchants from engaging in the trade. As the drug trade flourished, its addictive characteristics left a devastating impact on Chinese society, leading many to believe that moral degradation was brought about by all Westerners, including the missionaries. “Are not your Jesus Christ’s men engaged in selling [opium] to us[?]” missionary Lyman Peet was asked. Missionaries, unable to pursue their primary agenda of converting Chinese to Christianity, decided that they needed a new tactic. Rather than increasing efforts to have the American government eradicate trade, many missionaries pushed for the legalization and regulation of the drug to remove the stigma of lawlessness it brought. By the middle of the 1850s, humanitarian concerns about the impact of opium on the health and welfare of Chinese had been supplanted by the desire to

increase the number of Christian converts. It was American missionaries, therefore, highly regarded as moral authorities— and without whom the American diplomatic representative “could not have advanced one step in the discharge of his duties” of securing the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin—who ensured that the opium trade would remain legal in China.

In 1843, President John Tyler sent Caleb Cushing to China as minister plenipotentiary. Cushing’s mission was to negotiate similar treaty terms for the United States. In 1844, the Chinese signed the Treaty of Wangxia, the first formal treaty with the United States, which gave America a most-favored-nation status. In return, America agreed to outlaw the opium trade. Other terms included fixed tariffs on trade, the right to learn Chinese, extraterritoriality, protection for American missionaries, and the right to modify the treaty after a 12-year period. During the 1850s, the Western nations became increasingly frustrated with the Chinese as the Qing government failed to live up to the treaties it considered unfair. Opium smuggling continued to be problematic. On October 8, 1856, Chinese officials searching for a pirate boarded the ship Arrow, took down the British flag, and arrested several crew members. The British demanded the release of the prisoners and claimed insult, and used the Arrow incident as an excuse to start the Second Opium War. British and French forces attacked Guangzhou in 1857 and captured the forts near the port of Tianjin in May 1858. After the war was won, Britain sought a number of concessions, and under the terms of most-favored-nation status, France, Russia, and the United States were allowed the same concessions that China granted to Great Britain. In June 1858, the four Western nations signed independent treaties with China. However, none of the treaties was ratified immediately by the Chinese, and the British continued to attack Chinese forts. In October 1860, British and French forces reached Beijing and looted and burned the Summer Palace. American diplomat John Elliott Ward, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the Qing Empire, was ultimately successful in negotiating an exchange of treaty ratifications in 1859 and helped put an end to the Second Opium War. Karen S. Garvin See also: Cushing, Caleb; Gunboat Diplomacy; Hawai‘i, Annexation of; Japan, Opening of; Opium Wars

Further Reading Dollin, Eric Jay. When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. New York: Liveright, 2012. Haddad, John R. America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Lovell, Julia. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China. London: Picador, 2011.

Tripolitan War. See Barbary War (First) Tyler, John (1790–1862) John Tyler was the 10th president of the United States (1841 to 1845). Dismissed as the “Accidental President” or “His Accidency,” Tyler promoted American expansion in the 1840s, laying the groundwork that transformed the United States into a continental power. Born in Charles City County, Virginia, on March 29, 1790, Tyler graduated from William and Mary in 1807 and began practicing law in Richmond. After serving in the War of 1812, Tyler won election to the

House of Representatives in 1816. Tyler supported Southern interests throughout his political career, including the expansion of slavery. He shifted from the Democratic Party to the Whigs in the 1840 election and became president after William Henry Harrison died in office. Tyler wasted no time putting forth an expansionist agenda for his administration. While he hoped it would win him a term on his own merits, his promotion of expansion also reflected a personal ideology common to Jefferson and Madison that western expansion went hand-in-hand with American liberty. Specifically, Tyler actively promoted the annexation of Texas and the expansion of American influence in the Pacific Ocean. Tyler envisioned an American empire characterized by commercial and territorial expansion; he wanted to see the Stars and Stripes flying “over every sea.” As the 10th president, John Tyler did not fully realize all that he wanted in constructing an American empire, partly due to catastrophes in his administration that removed some of the most talented members of his cabinet. On Tyler’s becoming president, nearly all of Harrison’s cabinet resigned. Most devastating to Tyler was the explosion on board the USS Princeton in 1844 that killed his secretary of state, Abel Parker Upshur, and secretary of the navy, Thomas Gilmer. Upshur was close to concluding a treaty of annexation with Texas when the disaster derailed the administration’s momentum. Tyler nevertheless had several successes as president that either expanded the territory of the United States or promoted its long-term interests. Tyler’s administration settled some long-running border disputes between Maine and British Canada, and he reached an agreement on the boundary running to the Rocky Mountains. Tyler also extended the Monroe Doctrine into the Pacific Ocean with his “Doctrine of 1842.” Fearing that Hawai‘i would fall into either the British or French spheres of influence, Tyler proclaimed before Congress America’s special interests in the islands as part of its commercial ambitions in Asia. In announcing an end to U.S. indifference in the Pacific Ocean and checking British expansion, Tyler also sent the first official United States Commission to China as part of his efforts to enlarge American commercial exchanges with Asia. Finally, Tyler also made Texas part of the United States after learning the outcome of the 1844 election. Though often given less credit than his successor, James K. Polk, in expanding the territory of the United States and its commercial interests, President John Tyler built much of the foundation that characterized the period of expansion under James K. Polk. Eugene Van Sickle See also: Manifest Destiny; Polk, James Knox; Texas, Annexation of; Upshur, Abel Parker

Further Reading Crapol, Edward P. John Tyler: The Accidental President. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Monroe, Dan. The Republican Vision of John Tyler. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Weeks, William Earl. The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754– 1865. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Upshur, Abel Parker (1790–1844) Abel Parker Upshur filled multiple roles in the cabinet of President John Tyler, promoting American expansion and imperialism through the enlargement of the U.S. Navy, the acquisition of the Oregon Territory, and the annexation of Texas. One of the least recognized members of a small group of expansion-minded Americans filling Tyler’s administration, Upshur was arguably one of its most important, though he is generally more famous for his death than his contributions in fostering an American empire.

Born in Northampton County, Virginia, on June 17, 1790, Upshur came from a similar background as President John Tyler. In fact, the two men were lifelong friends. He was the son of a plantation owner and attended some of the finest colleges in the United States. Upshur attended Yale College before moving on to Princeton College. He failed to finish his education there because he was expelled from Princeton for his participation in a riot on the campus. Upshur finished his formal education studying law at the University of Virginia; he was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1810. He ventured into politics in 1812, winning a seat in the state House of Delegates. Upshur served only one term and moved to Richmond to establish his own law practice. In 1816 he became a commonwealth attorney for the city of Richmond, a position he filled until 1823. He served one more term in the state legislature and won election to the General Court of Virginia in 1826, a post he held until he joined President Tyler’s cabinet as secretary of the navy in 1841. Upshur’s greatest contributions to promoting an American empire arguably came while he held the post of secretary of the navy. Upshur believed that a strong navy was an essential component of U.S. foreign policy as well as vital for its economic future. He began by promoting and lobbying for significant naval reforms and an expansion of the service to protect American interests and citizens abroad. A meticulous man, Upshur gave Congress hard data to support higher levels of funding for the navy. He statistically demonstrated the relationship between a strong navy and American trade, which convinced Congress to increase funding by nearly 50 percent. He used these funds to enlarge and modernize the fleet. Without it, the United States had no hopes of “exciting” lawful commerce or checking Great Britain’s creeping monopoly in other parts of the globe. As secretary of the navy, Upshur oversaw the construction of new vessels such as the first screwpropelled vessel, the USS Princeton. It was one of the most technologically advanced ships of the period. He also instructed fleet commodores to actively protect American traders and to check British influence. Upshur believed that Americans, no matter where they were, should be able to reliably call on their government for protection. Moreover, he argued that the United States needed bases all along the Pacific Coast from the Columbia River to Guayaquil, Ecuador. Like President Tyler, Upshur saw Manifest Destiny as extending beyond continental boundaries. He lobbied for an American base in the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i) as the “central point” of the transpacific trade with Asia. Expansionists like Upshur wanted to check Great Britain’s claims to territory along the western coast of North America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Thus, Upshur charged naval officers with securing bases “by lawful means” at San Francisco and Hawai‘i without arousing the ire or jealousy of Mexico or Great Britain. Upshur effectively made the U.S. Navy an agent of American foreign policy. Upshur’s stint as secretary of the navy ended with the resignation of Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Upshur stepped in as interim secretary after the death of Hugh Legare, who had taken over for Webster. Upshur’s success as secretary of the navy made it easy for the Senate to confirm him as the permanent replacement for Webster. Once fixed as Tyler’s new statesman, Upshur set his mind to joining Texas with the United States. The annexation of Texas had been a topic of immense controversy from its first proposal, and it was the centerpiece of President Tyler’s agenda. Upshur made annexation more palatable to Americans by marrying it to the acquisition of the Oregon Territory. Had Upshur and the Tyler administration succeeded, they would have pulled off the most significant diplomatic achievement of the 19th century in the Western Hemisphere, effectively shifting the balance of power away from Great Britain. Oregon, instead, was left to James K. Polk’s administration. Upshur was quite successful in leading Texas into the Union. Early in his tenure as secretary of state, Upshur began lobbying senators, lining up support for annexation; he also began secret negotiations with Texas and asked a close friend, Beverly Tucker, to draft part of the treaty of annexation. Tucker, a law

professor at William and Mary, was a valuable informal confidant for Upshur. Secretary Upshur nearly pulled off Texas annexation while Tyler was president, but fate again brought tragedy to Tyler’s presidency. Before a treaty could be signed with Texas and presented to the Senate, Upshur along with several others was killed on the deck of the USS Princeton on February 28, 1844. The vessel was the product of Upshur’s efforts as secretary of the navy and Commodore Robert Stockton. During a demonstration of the massive new guns that outfitted the Princeton, one of the 225-pound weapons exploded, killing five people immediately; among them was Abel P. Upshur. Though Upshur did not live to see it, he played an instrumental role in American expansion as the succeeding administration of James K. Polk completed what Upshur started as secretary of state. Under Polk, the United States annexed Texas, formally claimed the Oregon Territory up to the 49th parallel, won California and its fine ports, and shifted the balance of power in North America to set the stage for an American empire in the Pacific Ocean. Eugene Van Sickle See also: Manifest Destiny; Texas, Annexation of; Tyler, John

Further Reading Crapol, Edward P. John Tyler: The Accidental President. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Hall, Claude H. Abel Parker Upshur, Conservative Virginian, 1790–1844. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1964. Jones, Howard. Crucible of Power A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Weeks, William Earl. The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754– 1865. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Walker, William (1824–1860) William Walker was the most infamous filibusterer in U.S. and Latin American history. Considered a young prodigy, he graduated from the University of Tennessee at age 14, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, studied medicine in Paris, and edited the New Orleans Daily Crescent. Beginning in 1853, Walker led four filibustering expeditions into Mexico and Central America, proclaiming himself president of the “Republic of Lower California” and the “Republic of Nicaragua.” Defeated by Central American armies and executed by a Honduran firing squad, Walker embodied the threat of U.S. imperialism and expansionism to Central American and Caribbean nations in the mid-19th century. In the early 1850s, Walker requested the Mexican government’s permission to lead an expedition into Sonora to create a U.S. colony. Denied, Walker organized 45 filibusterers to attempt to take the territory by force, calling himself the colonel of the “First Independence Battalion.” Arriving in La Paz, the capital of the less-populated Mexican territory of Baja California, the filibusterers captured the city and its governor on November 3, 1853. Walker declared himself president of the “Republic of Lower California” and set his sights on adding this territory to the larger “Republic of Sonora.” Mexican landowners, troops, and local citizens eventually organized and forced his retreat to the United States. In California he was tried for violating the 1794 Neutrality Act but, demonstrating the popularity of his imperial attempt, it took a jury only minutes to acquit him. In the 1850s, battles between Conservatives, supported by Guatemala, and Liberals, backed by Honduras, divided Nicaragua. In 1854, Liberal leader Francisco Castellón and Byron Cole of the Honduras Mining and Trading Company asked Walker to bring “colonists”—actually mercenaries—to

help their cause. Walker arrived in Realejo on June 16, 1855, with 56 self-titled “Immortal” filibusterers and was soon joined by 170 locals and 100 additional Americans. Now a colonel in the Nicaraguan army, Walker captured Granada on October 13, 1855, leveraging the city and future casualties for a peace with the Conservatives. In October 1855, Conservatives and Liberals established a provisional government, and Walker installed Liberal Patricio Rivas as the puppet president.

Portrait of Tennessee-native William Walker, self-proclaimed president of Nicaragua from 1856 to 1857. The “grey-eyed man of destiny” enjoyed a colorful career as a filibustering imperialist until his death by Honduran firing squad. (Library of Congress)

Now commander of the Nicaraguan army, Walker removed Nicaraguan soldiers and kept American filibusterers. With the Accessory Transit Company, Walker welcomed between 3,000 and 12,000 Americans from Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Flagrantly violating the Nicaraguan constitution, Walker took the presidency through a fraudulent election in June 1856. As Nicaragua’s “president,” he legalized indentured servitude and reinstituted slavery, revoking the 1824 Edict of Emancipation. In courts staffed by English-speaking lawyers and judges, Americans stole lands from native and Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans. These actions, Walker wrote, “were intended to place a large portion of the land in the hands of the white race” (Bermann, 65). Despite opposition and fraud, U.S. minister in Nicaragua and North Carolina slave owner John Hill Wheeler immediately recognized Walker’s government. Fearing U.S. support for future filibustering ventures and other illegitimate governments, Patricio Rivas and Nicaraguan Liberals allied with their former Conservative foes. Also wary of Walker’s growing power was railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who opposed Walker’s alliance with the Accessory Transit Company. When U.S. secretary of state William Marcy refused to intervene, Vanderbilt contacted Central American governments. With a loan from Vanderbilt and munitions from Britain, Costa Rican president Juan Rafael Mora deployed Costa Rica’s army and captured the cities of La Virgin and

Rivas. By July 1856, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador too declared their opposition against Walker’s filibusterers in neighboring Nicaragua. In September 1856, Central American armies invaded Nicaragua to expel Walker’s filibusterers in the “National War.” On September 14, 1856, Walker’s filibusterers targeted the base of Nicaragua’s opposition at San Jacinto. At the battle, 160 Nicaraguans repelled 300 filibusterers; Sergeant Andrés Castro became a Nicaraguan hero when he killed an attacking American with a rock after the Nicaraguan’s gun jammed. In May 1857, Walker and more than 400 filibusterers surrendered to the U.S. Navy. While the U.S. government officially opposed filibustering, New Orleans welcomed Walker as a hero, and on July 21, 1856, the musical Nicaragua, or General Walker’s Victories with “General Walker, the Hope of Freedom” opened on Broadway. Debates over slavery, decreased interest in California, and the opening of the Panama railroad limited potential recruits for Walker’s next expeditions. In 1858, his third filibustering attempt was cut short when he was caught at Greytown, Nicaragua, by U.S. Navy commodore Hiram Paulding. Despite Walker’s failure, popular opinion behind Walker hastened the end of Paulding’s military career. In 1860, Walker’s fourth filibustering expedition took him to Roatán, Honduras, but the British navy detained him and handed him to the Honduran government. After a quick trial, a Honduran firing squad executed Walker. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Filibusterers; López, Narciso; Manifest Destiny; Nicaragua, Republic of; Primary Documents: Excerpt from William Walker’s The War in Nicaragua (1860)

Further Reading Bermann, Karl. Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States since 1848. Boston: South End, 1986. Leonard, Thomas M. Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Wanghia (Wangxia), Treaty of (1844) The first formal treaty between the United States of America and China was signed on July 3, 1844. Formalizing Sino-American relations in the aftermath of Great Britain’s victory in the First Opium War (1839–1842), the accord significantly expanded the economic, legal, and religious privileges of Americans in China. Though American officials emphasized the shared benefits, the treaty’s provisions for extraterritorial rights and other limits on Chinese sovereignty were characteristic of the unequal treaties between China and Western imperial powers in the second half of the 19th century. Citizens of the United States had been visiting the open Chinese port of Guangzhou (Canton) to trade since the end of the American Revolution. Like other maritime visitors to the Qing Empire, Americans were constrained by the laws and customs of the “Old Canton system”: when in China, they lived and worked primarily in the confined space of the foreign quarter of Guangzhou (the so-called “golden ghetto”) with occasional excursions to river islands or to nearby Macau, a Portuguese colony. American trade in China expanded quickly. Though British firms dominated China’s trade with Europe and the Americas, by the 1820s, Americans had become the next most active merchants in all the licit and illicit trades of the Pearl River Delta, chief among them tea and smuggled opium. While Americans’ commercial contacts with China were of long standing, official interest in sustained diplomatic relations was negligible. Only after Great Britain used its victory over the Qing to radically

alter its terms of trade with China did Washington and then Beijing begin to chart a new course. The first in a series of agreements with aggressive Western powers, the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue (1843) together opened new ports to British traders (Xiamen, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Shanghai were added to Guangzhou) and ceded Hong Kong to Queen Victoria. The treaties also destroyed the Cohong system of certified merchants that had governed trade at Guangzhou for decades, replacing it with a new fixed tariff, and granted Britain most-favored-nation status. Most notoriously of the new concessions, British subjects were granted extraterritoriality, exempting them from the legal jurisdiction of Chinese authorities. In this new world, the Tyler administration argued that it was necessary for every nation trading with China to secure its own diplomatic guidelines. Congress agreed and on August 5, 1843, former congressman Caleb Cushing set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, aboard the USS Missouri with a small flotilla of other navy vessels. The aim of this new diplomacy and display of maritime power was, according to Secretary of State Daniel Webster’s instructions, to secure the entry of American ships on terms as favorable as those enjoyed by the English. The American delegation hoped to begin trading arms with the Chinese, something the British had failed to secure. Qing imperial officials were at first unwilling to negotiate. As Cushing learned upon his arrival at Macau in late February 1844, the Chinese had already extended the new trading privileges to Americans, eliminating the need for a separate treaty. The envoy also faced opposition from American merchants in China, who feared that attempts to negotiate further would only anger the authorities. Undeterred, Cushing continued in his original mission. To exert pressure on the imperial bureaucracy, he orchestrated displays of naval force, offering a 21-gun salute at Guangzhou’s anchorage. He also insisted on a secondary goal of his mission—a personal interview with the emperor in Beijing—going so far as to threaten to use his military escort to approach Beijing. Unsure how far Cushing would go, and increasingly inclined to view a treaty with the United States as a useful hedge against further aggression from Great Britain, the Chinese rewarded Cushing’s unsubtle bluffs. On June 18, 1844, after several months of delay, Imperial Commissioner Qiying (Keying) arrived at Cushing’s residence to open negotiations. An experienced Manchu statesman, Qiying negotiated the Treaty of Nanjing. Quickly ascertaining that Cushing’s interest in meeting with the Daoguang emperor was an attempt on the American’s part to outdo Great Britain, not collude with it, Qiying countered with his own proposal. Promising generous terms in return for dropping the demand to visit Beijing, Qiying earned Cushing’s trust and helped to bring their negotiations to a quick conclusion. The treaty codified Americans’ access to the new “treaty ports” and full participation in the new tariff and port regulations. Throughout the negotiations, three missionaries resident in China, all later prominent sinologists, served as Cushing’s translators and advisers: Samuel Wells Williams, Elijah Bridgman, and the medical missionary Peter Parker. Several treaty articles bear their mark. Article 17 guaranteed U.S. citizens the right to lease private land for business as well as “churches, hospitals, and cemeteries”; and Article 18 legalized the hiring of language teachers and the purchase of books (formerly forbidden), easing communication with potential converts. The treaty reserved extraterritorial rights for U.S. citizens but made one important exception: Americans smuggling opium and other contraband. While Qiying rejected the Americans’ offers of military training and hardware, the negotiations as a whole were marked by the outward appearance of friendliness. Pledging good faith, the plenipotentiaries attached their signatures to eight copies of the treaty, four each in Chinese and English, on July 3, 1844, at a temple in Wanghia on the outskirts of Macau.

The treaty widened the opening in China’s sovereignty made by British guns and built on a Qing policy of appeasement of “barbarian” powers. Through the mechanism of most-favored-nation status, it expanded Westerners’ privileges in China, and its embrace of extraterritoriality helped to cement it at the core of China’s increasingly problematic relations with the West. At the same time, the treaty’s anti-opium clause represented a sincere American gesture toward cooperation, though not a selfless one. Cushing and his successors regarded the sale of opium as primarily a British crime, even as Americans continued to smuggle the drug. By opposing it, they sought to portray themselves as representatives of a different, friendlier, and avowedly anti-British imperialist nation in East Asia. Perhaps the most important legacy of the treaty was how it linked the United States and China together geopolitically. Though weaker in China than other powers, the American diplomatic establishment the treaty created provided the U.S. government with a permanent stake in Americans’ activities in China and the means to survey it. No longer only the province of individual merchants and isolated missionaries, China was brought within the sphere of U.S. foreign policy, and vice versa. Dael A. Norwood See also: Cushing, Caleb; Opium Wars; Tyler, John

Further Reading Haddad, John Rogers. America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Keliher, Macabe. “Anglo-American Rivalry and the Origins of U.S. China Policy.” Diplomatic History 31, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 227–257.

West Indies Squadron The West Indies Squadron was a U.S. Navy fleet that operated in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico from 1822 to 1842. The original role of the squadron was to rid the area of pirates and slave traders, but it later saw action during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). The West Indies Squadron was later merged with the Home Squadron and continued to patrol coastal waters until the start of the Civil War. The U.S. Navy was created in 1794 with an initial fleet of six frigates, warships built for speed and maneuverability. The ships were the Chesapeake, Constellation, Constitution, Congress, President, and United States. One of the navy’s primary functions was to deal with piracy, which had a tremendously negative impact on the economy of the new nation. The waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico were especially attractive to privateers and pirates at the end of the 18th century. Privateers were raiders with government contracts known as letters of marque, who were authorized to attack and plunder ships throughout the Caribbean on behalf of a government. Conflicts in both the New and Old Worlds, including revolutions in Latin America and the Napoleonic Wars, required vast amounts of material and human resources, leaving colonial governments with little military strength to deal effectively with pirates and privateers. Additionally, Spanish authorities were known to harbor pirates, some of whom attacked American merchantmen. With few legal restraints on their raiding, the number of pirate attacks increased during the first two decades of the 19th century and numbered several thousand by the end of 1823. With only a few ships at its disposal, the United States at first tried to maintain neutrality, although a number of American warships had operated independently in the area as early as 1817, patrolling the

shores and taking pirates when they were able. However, single ships had little lasting effect on pirate activity. American merchant ships in the West Indies and Cuba were attractive targets for pirates because they carried gold shipments from Central America bound for the United States and Spain. At the time, the United States was negotiating with Spain over the purchase of Florida, and the continuing pirate raids threatened diplomatic negotiations between the two countries. Pirates also engaged in the lucrative slave trade. It was not just a matter of plundering treasure—pirate attacks could be horrific affairs, ending in the death of ships’ crews. The brigands might also slaughter their captives, as happened in September 1821, when three American ships were captured by pirates off the coast of Matanzas, Cuba. Two ships were burned, and the crew of one was tortured, with the pirates gutting the sailors and hanging their bodies from the masts before setting the ship on fire. Only a few American survivors managed to escape. In 1819, Congress authorized an act to protect American commerce that gave President James Monroe (1758–1831) authority to use the navy against pirates. Monroe expanded the navy into five squadrons with theaters of operation around the world. Commodore James Biddle (1783–1848), a hero of the War of 1812, was appointed as first commander of the West Indies Squadron. The squadron initially consisted of 14 ships, which included the frigates Congress and Macedonian; the brigs Spark and Enterprise; the sloops Cyane, John Adams, Hornet, and Peacock; the schooners Alligator, Grampus, Porpoise, and Shark; and two gunboats, known simply as Number 158 and Number 168. In April 1821, Lieutenant Lawrence Kearny (1789–1868), aboard the Enterprise, captured eight pirate ships off the coast of Cuba in a single day. Kearney’s successes led to the formation of a task force with the Enterprise as the main vessel. The next year, the West Indies Squadron acquired 15 more ships, including five barges, a riverboat, and eight schooners, the Beagle, Ferret, Fox, Greyhound, Jackal, Terrier, Weasel, and Wild Cat. Additionally, the Decoy, a combat stores ship, was assigned to the fleet and brought food, clothing, and other supplies from New York to the West Indies. The West Indies Squadron performed well but commanders were hampered by legal restrictions. They were not allowed to detain pirates captured in Spanish waters but instead were required to turn them over to Spanish authorities. It was understood that the Spanish often took bribes and set the pirates free, however, allowing them to continue raiding and thwarting attempts by the Americans to put an end to pirate raids. American naval commanders were also prohibited from setting foot on Spanish territory, including the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, making it impossible to pursue pirates inland. One commander who ignored this restriction at his own peril was David Porter (1780–1843), another veteran of the War of 1812, who took command from 1823 to 1825. In the spring of 1823, Porter intensified the antipirate campaign. Determined to eradicate pirates at any cost, Porter added five shallow-draft boats that could navigate close to shore and operate in the swamps of Florida. In a month and a half of vicious fighting, Porter destroyed most of the pirates in the West Indies. Porter contracted yellow fever, and against orders he returned to Washington at the beginning of summer. In October 1824, Porter sailed for Puerto Rico. He sent a 200-man landing party ashore to pursue pirates, which violated the terms of the Monroe Doctrine and threatened the sovereignty of other nations. Porter was court-martialed for his actions when he returned to America, and in 1826 he retired. The West Indies Squadron saw great success, but it was not until the British Royal Navy joined the fight with its North America and West Indies Station that the fleets, working together, were able to entirely rid the area of pirates.

The West Indies Squadron was disbanded in 1842 and its ships were incorporated into the Home Squadron. Organized in 1838, the Home Squadron performed surveys and gave assistance to ships in distress as well as mounted patrols against pirates and slave traders. Karen S. Garvin See also: Barbary War (First); Blockade of Confederate Ports; Monroe Doctrine; War of 1812

Further Reading Toll, Ian W. Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Wombwell, James A. The Long War against Pirates: Historical Trends. Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010.

Whaling Industry Whaling is the process of capturing whales to process their bodies into products usable by humans. Whaling has existed in human populations for millennia, but it existed as an industry from the late 17th to the early 20th centuries. Americans engaged in the act of whaling brought important capital investment to the United States, and an oceangoing presence that preceded American naval ventures. Whale products helped power the American economy of the early and middle 19th century. The oil produced by baleen whales and sperm whales was important to the growing industrial economy. Oil lamps lit homes and businesses. Sperm oil lamps were especially valued because they burned brighter and with less smell. The oil was also important as a lubricant in machinery from large locomotive engines to pocket watches. Sperm oil had a long shelf life and withstood vast temperature variations without alteration to its viscosity. Baleen whale oil was also a popular lubrication as it was less expensive than sperm oil. Other whale-derived products could be found on the American market as well. Ambergris, a product from the sperm whale’s stomach, could be found in perfumes, soaps, and other places where chemical stability was desired. Products derived from the baleen whale included fashion items such as corsets and collar stays. Many sailors supplemented their income by selling whale ivory that had been scrimshawed, or carved into decorative pieces that could be sold once ashore. Prior to 1815, whaling had expanded slowly along the coast of Massachusetts, specifically on Nantucket Island. Whalers on Nantucket looked for whales from towers built onshore and once they were spotted, took whaleboats from the shore to intercept and harpoon the animals. These captured whales were then brought back to Nantucket to complete the process. It was a laborious and inefficient process. After 1815 whaling expanded as vessels from the United States moved further afield in search of whales. American whalers had been traveling to whaling grounds in the South Atlantic since the mid-18th century, but these efforts were similar to the early coastal efforts that had been taking place near Nantucket and therefore relatively inefficient. By 1818, two- and three-masted sailing ships began replacing the smaller coastal schooners of the early Nantucket fleet, marking a large increase in the number of captured whales. By 1830 200 vessels were registered in the United States and by 1835 the number had reached 400. The number of American-flagged oceangoing whalers peaked in 1846 at 736 but remained high for the rest of the century. These American whalers plied the waters of the South Pacific, the northwest Pacific Ocean near Japan, and by the 1850s were sailing as far north as the inhospitable Bering Sea. Yankee whalers, as Americans were known in the global industry, were the vanguard of the American presence in the Pacific just as fur traders were often the vanguard on land. As the century wore on, the distance and time required to find suitable prey continued to grow.

Whaling was a labor-intensive process and the men involved in the industry led difficult lives. During the peak of American whaling, voyages to the Pacific and Arctic were common, so whaling ships routinely spent years at sea away from their home ports. The unique needs of whalers made their life more difficult than that of ordinary seamen. The most common targets of the industry were baleen whales. These whales were prized for the purity of their refined oil. The most prized targets, however, were sperm whales due to the large reservoir of spermaceti oil located in their heads. Sperm whales could weigh up to 63 tons, making them approximately the same weight as the whaling ship itself and making their capture a dangerous prospect. To catch a whale, whalers rowed out from the ship in smaller whaleboats to harpoon the animal and secure lines to their boats. The animal then fled, leading to what was known as the “Nantucket sleigh ride,” waiting for the animal to tire as it pulled the whaleboats away from the whaling ship. Eventually, the whale became exhausted and slow, allowing the crew of the whaleboats to kill the animal and tow it back to the whaling ship. Here the final process of rendering the whale into usable products began. The whale’s blubber was stripped off the animal in long sections and placed into pots on the ship known as “try-pots”; the blubber was boiled into whale oil; and the oil was stored in casks on the ship. This process was hot, filthy, and potentially dangerous to the wooden-hulled vessels. When it was completed, what was left of the carcass was allowed to drift away, and the process was repeated for years until the ship was filled to capacity. The American whaling industry began to decline in the mid-19th century as the American Civil War hampered an already declining market. As whales became harder to find, the financial return on whale oil decreased. Combined with the growing availability of petrochemicals and their relatively easy and inexpensive production, whaling became a less lucrative venture. Yankee whalers also ceased to be the vanguard of the American presence in the world by the end of the 19th century when the SpanishAmerican War gave the United States a real place on the world stage, as well as a colonial empire. Without financial incentive and without purpose, the American whaling industry essentially ended by the 1930s. Whaling continues in the United States among Native American populations, but less than 100 whales are taken each year. Stephen Griffin See also: Indians of the Pacific Northwest

Further Reading Allen, Everett S. Children of the Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1978. Bockstoce, John. Whales, Ice, & Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

Wilkes Expedition (1838–1842) The Wilkes Expedition, also known as the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition, was a landmark U.S. Navy–sponsored mission to explore and survey the Pacific Ocean. Led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the fleet of six naval ships and nearly 350 men including scientists and artists spent four years at sea between 1838 and 1842 on what proved to be one of the most ambitious and triumphant undertakings of the period. In addition to making profound contributions to the development of American naval sciences, including navigation, oceanography, cartography, and hydrography, the expedition served as a model for no less than 14 subsequent naval exploring expeditions conducted prior to the Civil War.

Moreover, its widely publicized achievements were a demonstration to European nations that the young republic was fully capable of such logistically and scientifically sophisticated overseas operations. The expedition had its origins in the “Holes in the Poles Theory” of the early 19th century that contended that an inner world could be accessed via entrances located at the North and South Poles. Though the theory was not widely accepted, the idea of sending an American exploratory expedition to the South Seas did enlist much support, particularly from New England whaling merchants searching for new fishing grounds. The navy also welcomed the proposal, for it would enhance its firsthand navigational knowledge of these waters and advance American influence to new regions of the globe to counter the increased presence of other nations. As early as 1828, President John Quincy Adams convinced Congress to pass a resolution permitting such a mission. Eight years passed before Congress revisited the idea and authorized a new, bolder plan that reflected the ambitions for imperial expansion espoused in the Jacksonian era. Initially placed under the leadership of Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, the expedition would eventually sail with U.S. Navy lieutenant Charles Wilkes in command. The secretary’s orders to Wilkes were explicit: “The expedition is not for conquest but discovery. Its objects are all peaceful. They are to extend the empire of Commerce and Science.” The expedition finally put to sea on August 18, 1838, from Hampton Roads, Virginia. Among the fleet’s initial undertakings was to visit Porto Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, which would become the site of Commodore Matthew Perry’s African Squadron headquarters. In February 1839, Wilkes embarked on his month-long First Antarctic Expedition near Palmers Land, named after the American sea captain Nat Palmer who visited the peninsula in 1820. The expedition reached Chile in May, before which it was presumed that the Sea Gull and all hands had been lost. The Survey of the Western Pacific began in July and by late December Wilkes prepared to leave Sydney on his Second Antarctic Expedition. Following in the wake of Captain James Cook’s voyage to the southern continent, Wilkes spent two months charting a 1,500-mile stretch of coastline in the region now named Wilkes Land. Upon reaching the Fiji island group in May 1840, Wilkes became embroiled in hostilities with the natives. These encounters would partially taint the overall mission. When natives stole property of his scientists, Wilkes had the local village burned as punishment. After he took a Fijian leader prisoner for the murder of 10 American sailors in 1834, the natives of Malolo attacked and killed two officers including Wilkes’s nephew. In retaliation, Wilkes ordered the burning of the island’s two villages and the killing of more than 50 natives under the direction of Commander Cadwalader Ringgold. The fleet sailed north to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i), where it divided to examine various parts of the whaling grounds before reassembling the following March on a course for the Pacific Northwest Coast of America. Between April and October 1841, the fleet completed detailed surveys of the coast from Juan de Fuca Strait to San Francisco Bay. Encountering navigational difficulties similar to those experienced by Captain Robert Gray a half century earlier, the expedition lost its second ship, the Peacock, on the bar of the Columbia River with no loss of life. Completing its circumnavigation by way of Hawai‘i, Manila, Singapore, Cape Town, and St. Helena, the fleet returned to the United States in early June 1842. The expedition was greeted with mixed sentiments. Though its scientific and navigational exploits were worthy of praise, accounts of alleged atrocities against the natives of the Pacific islands alarmed many. The navy ordered a series of court-martials, which led to much public embarrassment and suspicion.

The USS Vincennes, with Lieutenant Charles Wilkes at the helm, plows through ice during the U.S. Exploring Expedition’s survey of the Antarctic shelf in 1840. The expedition served as a pivotal event in the 19th-century maturation of oceanography and science more broadly in the United States. It also epitomizes the imperial role of scientific exploration in the expansionist growth of the nation. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Despite the hostilities and losses of two ships and 28 men, the expedition achieved remarkable results. Logging some 87,000 miles, the fleet surveyed some 280 Pacific islands and created 180 charts, some of which were used well into the 20th century. It greatly extended other Antarctic voyagers’ findings and scientifically proved the continent’s existence. Furthermore, it contributed the first detailed American charts of the Pacific Northwest, which until then was only known through the work of British explorer George Vancouver. Its survey of San Francisco Bay would greatly facilitate the growth of that settlement beginning with the California gold rush in 1849. The appointment of scientists marked the first time in American history that civilian and naval personnel combined resources and skills in a peacetime endeavor. Scientists collected more than 4,000 zoological specimens and identified half that number in new species, as well as 50,000 plants, hundreds of fossils, minerals, and rocks, and more than 5,000 ethnographic artifacts. This massive gathering of exotica would, in 1858, form the founding collection of the National Museum of the United States, eventually known as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. From the U.S. Navy’s point of view, the mission had served as a floating naval academy, for many young officers benefited from the invaluable training and experience. Eight of them became admirals, including Cadwalader Ringgold, who was later chosen to command the 1853–1854 United States North Pacific Exploring Expedition. Finally, the exploits and accomplishments of the Wilkes Expedition further stimulated the national imagination by extending the idea of Manifest Destiny and promoting a sense of American imperial prowess and global reach. Michael Dove See also: Cook, James; Gray, Robert; Manifest Destiny; Vancouver, George; Whaling Industry

Further Reading Joyce, Barry Alan. The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Philbrick, Nathaniel. Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The US Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842. New York: Penguin, 2003. Viola, Herman J., and Carolyn Margolis, eds. Magnificent Voyagers: The US Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985. Wilkes, Charles. Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition: During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Printed by C. Sherman, 1844.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Enslaved American James Riley Encounters an Arab Trader (1815) Between 1785 and 1820, more than 700 Americans were taken hostage and often enslaved by pirates operating out of the North African states of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. The American public was fascinated by these captives’ stories; their tales of desert cities, caravans, and harems bridged the previously popular Puritan captivity narratives and emerging slave narratives. The most influential of all these American Barbary narratives was James Riley’s Loss of the American Brig Commerce. A Connecticut sea captain, Riley ran aground in 1815 and was captured by wandering Arabs. He used his enslavement to call into question the enslavement of Africans and express a common humanity with the desert people he encountered. About the middle of this day two strangers arrived, riding two camels loaded with goods: they came in front of my master’s tent, and having made the camels lie down, they dismounted, and seated themselves on the ground opposite the tent, with their faces turned the other way. There were in this valley six tents, besides that of my masters. All the men had gone out a hunting on their camels, carrying their arms with them; that is to say, seeking for plunder as I concluded. My old and young mistresses went to see the strangers; they had no water to carry, as is customary, but took with them a large skin, with a roll of tent cloth to make them a shelter; the strangers rose as the women drew near, and saluted them by the words “Labez, Labez-Salem; Labez-Alikom;” peace, peace be with you, &c. and the women returned these salutations in similar words. They next ran to our tent, and took a couple of sticks, with the help of which and the skin and tent cloth, they soon made an awning for the strangers. This done, they took the bundles which were on the camels, and placed them in this tent, with the saddles and all the other things the strangers had brought. The two strangers had a couple of skins that contained water, which the women hung up on a frame they carried from our tent. During the whole time the women were thus employed, the strangers remained seated on the ground beside their guns, for they had each a double barrelled musket, and so bright, that they glittered in the sun like silver. The women having finished their attentions, seated themselves near the strangers, and made inquiries, as near as I could comprehend, by saying, “where did you come from? what goods have you got? how long have you been on your journey?” &c. Having satisfied their curiosity on these points, they next came to me, and the old woman (in whom as yet I had not discovered one spark of pity) told me that Sidi Hamet had come with blankets and blue cloth to sell; that he came from the Sultan’s dominions, and

that he could buy me and carry me there, if he chose, where I might find my friends, and kiss my wife and children. Before my master returned I went to the tent of Sidi Hamet, with a wooden bowl, and begged for some water; showing my mouth which was extremely parched and stiff, so much so, that I could with difficulty speak. He looked at me, and asked if I was el Rais (the captain). I nodded assent; he told his brother, who was with him, to give me some water, but this his benevolent brother would not condescend to do; so taking the bowl myself, he poured into it near a quart of clear water, saying, “Sherub Rais”—that is, drink, captain, or chief. I drank about half of it, and after thanking him and imploring the blessing of Heaven upon him for his humanity, I was going to take the rest of it to our tent, where Clark lay stretched out on his back, a perfect wreck of almost naked bones; his belly and back nearly collapsed, and breathing like a person in the last agonies of death: but Sidi Hamet would not permit me to carry the water away, bidding me drink it myself. I pointed out to him my distressed companion; this excited his pity, and he suffered me to give Clark the remainder. The water was perfectly fresh, and revived him exceedingly; it was a cordial to his desponding soul, being the first fresh water either of us had tasted since we left the boat: his eyes that were sunk deep in their sockets, brightened up—“this is good water (said he) and must have come from a better country than this; if we were once there, (added he) and I could get one good drink of such water, I could die with pleasure, but now I cannot live another day.” Our masters soon returned, and began, with others of the tribe, who had received the news of the arrival of strangers, to form circles and chat with them and each other; this continued till night, and I presume there were at least two hundred men present. After dark they began to separate, and by 10 o’clock at night none remained but my old master’s family, and three or four of their relations, at our tent. On this occasion we were turned out into the open air, and were obliged to pass the night without any shelter or covering. It was a long and tedious night; but at the time of milking the camels, our old master coming to us, as if afraid of losing his property by our death, and anxious we should live, dealt out about a pint of milk to each; this milk tasted better than any I had yet drank; it was a sweet and seasonable relief, and saved poor Clark from dissolution. This was the first nourishment of any kind our master had given us in three days, and I concluded from this circumstance that he had hopes of selling us to the strangers. The next morning Sidi Hamet came towards the tent, and beckoned me to come there; he was at a considerable distance, and I made the best of my way to him; here he bade me sit down on the ground. I had by this time learned many words in their language, which is ancient Arabic, and could understand the general current of their conversation, by paying strict attention to it. He now began to question me about my country, and the manner in which I had come here—I made him understand that I was an Englishman, and that my vessel and crew were of the same nation—I found he had heard of that country, and I stated as well as I could the manner of my shipwreck—told him we were reduced to the lowest depth of misery; that I had a wife and five children in my own country, besides Horace, whom I called my eldest son, mingling with my story sighs and tears, and all the signs of affection and despair which these recollections and my present situation naturally called forth. I found him to be a very intelligent and feeling man—for although he knew no language but the Arabic, he comprehended so well what I wished to communicate, that he actually shed tears at the recital of my distresses, notwithstanding that, among the Arabs, weeping is regarded as a womanish weakness. He seemed to be ashamed of his own want of fortitude, and said that men who had beards like him ought not to shed tears; and he retired, wiping his eyes. Finding I had awakened his sympathy, I thought if I could rouse his interest by large offers of money, he might buy me and my companions and carry us up from the desart—so accordingly the first time I saw

him alone, I went to him, and begged him to buy me, and carry me to the Sultan of Morocco or Marocksh, where I could find a friend to redeem me. He said no, but he would carry me to Swearah, describing it a walled town and seaport. I told him I had seen the Sultan, and that he was a friend to my nation. He then asked me many other questions about Mohammed Rassool—I bowed and pointed to the east, then towards heaven, as if I thought he had ascended there: this seemed to please him, and he asked me how much money I would give him to carry me up; upon which I counted over fifty pieces of stones, signifying I would give as many dollars for myself and each of my men. “I will not buy the others,” said he, “but how much more than fifty dollars will you give me for yourself, if I buy you and carry you to your friends?” I told him one hundred dollars. “Have you any money in Swearah,” asked he by signs and words, “or do you mean to make me wait till you get it from your country?” I replied that my friend in Swearah would give him the money so soon as he brought me there. “You are deceiving me,” said he. I made the most solemn protestations of my sincerity:—“I will buy you then,” said he, “but remember, if you deceive me, I will cut your throat,” (making a motion to that effect.) This I assented to, and begged of him to buy my son Horace also, but he would not hear a word about any of my companions, as it would be impossible, he said, to get them up off the desart, which was a great distance. “Say nothing about it to your old master,” signified he to me, “nor to my brother, or any of the others.” He then left me, and I went out to seek for snails to relieve my hunger. I saw Mr. Savage and Hogan, and brought them with Clark near Sidi Hamet’s tent, where we sat down on the ground. He came out to see us, miserable objects as we were, and seemed very much shocked at the sight. I told my companions I had great hopes we should be bought by this man and carried up to the cultivated country—but they expressed great fears that they would be left behind. Sidi Hamet asked me many questions about my men—wished to know if any of them had died, and if they had wives and children. I tried all I could to interest him in their behalf, as well as my own, and mentioned to him my son, whom he had not yet seen. I found my companions had been very much stinted in milk as well as myself, and that they had no water, —they had found a few snails, which kept them alive; but even these now failed. The 24th, we journeyed on towards the N. W. all day—the whole tribe, or nearly so, in company, and the strangers also kept in company with us. When my mistress pitched her tent near night, she made up one for Sidi Hamet also. I begged of him on my knees every time I had an opportunity, for him to buy me and my companions, and on the 25th I had the happiness to see him pay my old master for me: he gave him two blankets or coarse haicks, one blue cotton covering, and a bundle of ostrich feathers, with which the old man seemed much pleased, as he had now three suits of clothing. They were a long time in making the bargain. This day Horace came with his master to fetch something to our tent; at his approach, I went to meet him, and embraced him with tears. Sidi Hamet was then fully convinced that he was my son. I had found a few snails this morning, and divided them between Mr. Savage and Horace before Sidi Hamet, who signified to me in the afternoon that he intended to set out with me in two days for Swearah; that he had tried to buy my son, but could not succeed, for his master would not sell him at any price: then said I “let me stay in his place; I will be a faithful slave to his master as long as I live—carry him up to Swearah; my friend will pay you for him, and send him home to his mother, whom I cannot see unless I bring her son with me.” “You shall have your son, by Allah,” said Sidi Hamet. The whole tribe was gathered in council, and I supposed relative to this business. In the course of the afternoon they debated the matter over, and seemed to turn it every way; —they fought besides three or four battles with fists and scimitars, in their warm and loud discussions in settling individual disputes; but in the evening I was told that Horace was bought, as the tribe in council had forced his master to sell him, though at a great price. I now redoubled my entreaties with my new master to buy Mr. Savage and Clark, telling him that I would give him a large

sum of money if he got us up safe; but he told me he should be obliged to carry us through bands of robbers, who would kill him for our sakes, and that his company was not strong enough to resist them by force of arms—I fell down on my knees, and implored him to buy Mr. Savage and Clark at any rate, thinking if he should buy them, he might be induced to purchase the remaining part of the crew. My mind had been so busily employed in schemes of redemption, as almost to forget my sufferings since Sidi Hamet had bought me. He had given me two or three drinks of water, and had begged milk for me of my former master. On the morning of the 26th, I renewed my entreaties for him to purchase Mr. Savage, Clark, and Hogan—the others I had not seen since the second or third day after we were in the hands of the Arabs. I did not know where they were, and consequently could not designate them to my master Hamet, though I told him all their names. Mr. Savage and Hogan looked much more healthy and likely to live than Clark, and Sidi Hamet insisted that it was impossible that Clark could live more than three days, and that if he bought him, he should lose his money. I told him no, he should not lose his money, for whether he lived or died, I would pay him the same amount. Clark was afflicted with the scalded head, rendered a raw sore in consequence of his sufferings, and his hair which was very long, was, of course, in a very filthy condition; this attracted the attention of Sidi Hamet and his brother, the latter of whom was a very surly and cross-looking fellow. They pushed the hair open with their sticks, and demanded to know what was the occasion of that filthy appearance. Clark assured them, that it was in consequence of his exposure to the sun, and as that was the reason I had assigned for the horrible sores and blisters that covered our scorched bodies and half-roasted flesh: they said, it might possibly be so, but asked why the heads of the rest of us were not in the same state. Source: Riley, James. An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce. New York: T. & W. Mercein, 1817, 99– 107.

Matthew Perry’s Account of His Landing in Japan (1853) Commodore Matthew Perry led the first official American expedition to Japan in 1853. Before that time, Japan had prevented all foreigners from entering the country and had kept itself isolated from world affairs. However, prompted by the promise of a new avenue of trade, the U.S. government compelled the Japanese to open the country to American interests. Following is an excerpt of Perry’s account of landing in Japan at the front of a formidable navy in July 1853. As the atmosphere cleared and the shores were disclosed to view, the steady labors of the Japanese during the night were revealed in the showy effect on the Uraga shore. Ornamental screens of cloth had been so arranged as to give a more distinct prominence as well as the appearance of greater size to the bastions and forts; and two tents had been spread among the trees. The screens were stretched tightly in the usual way upon posts of wood, and each interval between the hosts was thus distinctly marked, and had, in the distance, the appearance of paneling. Upon these seeming panels were emblazoned the imperial arms, alternating with the device of a scarlet flower bearing large heart-shaped leaves. Flags and streamers, upon which were various designs represented in gay colors, hung from the several angles of the screens, while behind them thronged crowds of soldiers, arrayed in a costume which had not been before observed, and which was supposed to belong to high occasions only. The main portion of the dress was a species of frock of a dark color, with short skirts, the waists of which were gathered in with a sash, and which was without sleeves, the arms of the wearers being bare. All on board the ships were alert from the earliest hour, making the necessary preparations. Steam was got up and the anchors were weighed that the ships might be moved to a position where their guns

would command the place of reception. The sailing-vessels, however, because of a calm, were unable to get into position. The officers, seamen, and marines who were to accompany the Commodore were selected, and as large a number of them mustered as could possibly be spared from the whole squadron. All, of course, were eager to bear a part in the ceremonies of the day, but all could not possibly go, as a sufficient number must be left to do ships’ duty. Many of the officers and men were selected by lot, and when the full complement, which amounted to nearly three hundred, was filled up, each one busied himself in getting his person ready for the occasion. The officers, as had been ordered, were in full official dress, while the sailors and marines were in their naval and military uniforms of blue and white. Before eight bells in the morning watch had struck, the Susquehanna and Mississippi moved slowly down the bay. Simultaneously with this movement of our ships, six Japanese boats were observed to sail in the same direction, but more within the land. The government striped flag distinguished two of them, showing the presence on board of some high officials, while the others carried red banners, and were supposed to have on board a retinue or guard of soldiers. On doubling the headland which separated the former anchorage from the bay below, the preparations of the Japanese on the shore came suddenly into view. The land bordering the head of the bay was gay with a long stretch of painted screens of cloth, upon which was emblazoned the arms of the Emperor. Nine tall standards stood in the center of an immense number of banners of divers lively colors, which were arranged on either side, until the whole formed a crescent of variously tinted flags, which fluttered brightly in the rays of the morning sun. From the tall standards were suspended broad pennons of rich scarlet which swept the ground with their flowing length. On the beach in front of this display were ranged regiments of soldiers, who stood in fixed order, evidently arrayed to give an appearance of martial force, that the Americans might be duly impressed with the military power of the Japanese. As the beholder faced the bay, he saw on the left of the village of Gori-Hama a straggling group of peaked roofed houses, built between the beach and the base of the high ground which ran in green acclivities behind, and ascended from height to height to the distant mountains. A luxuriant valley or gorge, walled in with richly wooded hills, opened at the head of the bay, and breaking the uniformity of the curve of the shore gave a beautiful variety to the landscape. On the right some hundred Japanese boats, or more, were arranged in parallel lines along the margin of the shore, with a red flag flying at the stern of each. The whole effect, though not startling, was novel and cheerful, and everything combined to give a pleasing aspect to the picture. The day was bright, with a clear sunlight which seemed to give fresh vitality alike to the verdant hillsides, and the gay banners, and the glittering soldiery. Back from the beach, opposite the center of the curved shore of the bay, the building, just constructed for the reception, rose in three pyramidal-shaped roofs, high above the surrounding houses. It was covered in front by striped cloth, which was extended in screens to either side. It had a new, fresh look, indicative of its recent erection, and with its peaked summits was not unlike, in the distance, a group of very large ricks of grain. Two boats approached as the steamers entered the opening of the bay, and when the anchors were dropped they came alongside the Susquehanna. Kayama Yezaiman, with his two interpreters, came on board, followed immediately by Nagazima Saboroske and an officer in attendance, who had come in the second boat. They were duly received at the gangway and conducted to seats on the quarter-deck. All were dressed in full official costume, somewhat different from their ordinary garments. Their gowns, though of the usual shape, were much more elaborately adorned. The material was of very rich silk brocade of gay colors, turned up with yellow velvet, and the whole dress was highly embroidered with gold lace in various figures, upon which was conspicuously displayed on the back, sleeves, and breast the arms of the wearer.…

A signal was now hoisted from the Susquehanna as a summons for the boats from the other ships, and in the course of half an hour they had all pulled alongside with their various officers, sailors, and marines, detailed for the day’s ceremonies. The launches and cutters numbered no less than fifteen, and presented quite an imposing array; and with all on board them, in proper uniform, a picturesque effect was not wanting. Captain Buchanan, having taken his place in his barge, led the way, flanked on either side by the two Japanese boats containing the governor and vice-governor of Uraga with their respective suites; and these dignitaries acted as masters of ceremony and pointed out the course to the American flotilla. The rest of the ships’ boats followed after in order, with the cutters containing the two bands of the steamers, who enlivened the occasion with their cheerful music. The boats skimmed briskly over the smooth waters; for such was the skill and consequent rapidity of the Japanese scullers that our sturdy oarsmen were put to their mettle to keep up with their guides. When the boats had reached halfway to the shore, the thirteen guns of the Susquehanna began to boom away and re-echo among the hills. This announced the departure of the Commodore, who, stepping into his barge, was rowed off to the land. The guides in the Japanese boats pointed to the landing-place toward the center of the curved shore, where a temporary wharf had been built out from the beach by means of bags of sand and straw. The advance boat soon touched the spot, and Captain Buchanan, who commanded the party, sprang ashore, being the first of the Americans who landed in the Kingdom of Japan. He was immediately followed by Major Zeilin, of the Marines. The rest of the boats now pulled in and disembarked their respective loads. The marines (one hundred) marched up the wharf and formed into line on either side, facing the sea; then came the hundred sailors, who were also ranged in rank and file as they advanced, while the two bands brought up the rear. The whole number of Americans, including sailors, marines, musicians, and officers, amounted to nearly three hundred; no very formidable array, but still quite enough for a peaceful occasion, and composed of very vigorous, able-bodied men, who contrasted strongly with the smaller and more effeminate-looking Japanese. These latter had mustered in great force, the amount of which the Governor of Uraga stated to be five thousand; but seemingly they far outnumbered that. Their line extended around the whole circuit of the beach, from the farther extremity of the village to the abrupt acclivity of the hill which bounded the bay on the northern side; while an immense number of the soldiers thronged in behind and under cover of the cloth screens which stretched along the rear. The loose order of this Japanese army did not betoken any very great degree of discipline. The soldiers were tolerably well armed and equipped. Their uniform was very much like the ordinary Japanese dress. Their arms were swords, spears, and matchlocks. These in front were all infantry, archers, and lancers; but large bodies of cavalry were seen behind somewhat in the distance, as if held in reserve. The horses of these seemed of a fine breed, hardy, of good bottom and brisk in action; and these troopers, with their rich caparisons, presented at least a showy cavalcade. Along the base of the rising ground which ascended behind the village, and entirely in the rear of the soldiers, was a large number of the inhabitants, among whom there was quite an assemblage of women, who gazed with intense curiosity, through the openings in the line of the military, upon the stranger visitors from another hemisphere. On the arrival of the Commodore, his suite of officers formed a double line along the landing-place, and as he passed up between, they fell into order behind him. The procession was then formed and took up its march toward the house of reception, the route to which was pointed out by Kayama Yezaiman and his interpreter, who preceded the party. The marines led the way, and the sailors following, the Commodore was duly escorted up the beach. The United States flag and the broad pennant were borne by two athletic seamen, who had been selected from the crews of the squadron on account of their stalwart proportions. Two boys, dressed for the ceremony, preceded the Commodore, bearing in an envelope of

scarlet cloth the boxes which contained his credentials and the President’s letter. These documents, of folio size, were beautifully written on vellum, and not folded, but bound in blue silk velvet. Each seal, attached by cords of interwoven gold and silk with pendent gold tassels, was encased in a circular box six inches in diameter and three in depth, wrought of pure gold. Each of the documents, together with its seal, was placed in a box of rosewood about a foot long, with lock, hinges, and mountings all of gold. On either side of the Commodore marched a tall, well-formed Negro, who, armed to the teeth, acted as his personal guard. These blacks, selected for the occasion, were two of the best-looking fellows of their color that the squadron could furnish. All this, of course, was but for effect. The procession was obliged to make a somewhat circular movement to reach the entrance of the house of reception. This gave a good opportunity for the display of the escort. The building, which was but a short distance from the landing, was soon reached. In front of the entrance were two small brass cannon which were old and apparently of European manufacture; on either side were grouped a rather straggling company of Japanese guards, whose costume was different from that of the other soldiers. Those on the right were dressed in tunics, gathered in at the waist with broad sashes, and in full trousers of a gray color, the capacious width of which was drawn in at the knees, while their heads were bound with a white cloth in the form of a turban. They were armed with muskets upon which bayonets and flint-locks were observed. The guards on the left were dressed in a rather dingy, brown-colored uniform turned up with yellow, and carried old-fashioned matchlocks. The Commodore having been escorted to the door of the house of reception, entered with his suite. The building showed marks of hasty erection, the timbers and boards of pine wood were numbered, as if they had been fashioned previously and brought to the spot all ready to be put together. The first portion of the structure entered was a kind of tent, principally constructed of painted canvas, upon which in various places the imperial arms were painted. Its area inclosed a space of nearly forty feet square. Beyond this entrance hall was an inner apartment to which a carpeted path led. The floor of the outer room was generally covered with white cloth, but through its center passed a slip of red-colored carpet, which showed the direction to the interior chamber. This latter was entirely carpeted with red cloth, and was the state apartment of the building where the reception was to take place. Its floor was somewhat raised, like a dais, above the general level, and was handsomely adorned for the occasion. Violet-colored hangings of silk and fine cotton, with the imperial coat of arms embroidered in white, hung from the walls which inclosed the inner room, on three sides, while the front was left open to the antechamber or outer room. As the Commodore and his suite ascended to the reception room, the two dignitaries who were seated on the left arose and bowed, and the Commodore and suite were conducted to the armchairs which had been provided for them on the right. The interpreters announced the names and titles of the high Japanese functionaries as Toda-Idzu-no-kami, Toda, Prince of Idzu, and Ido-Owami-no-kami, Ido, Prince of Iwami. They were both men of advanced years, the former apparently about fifty, and the latter some ten or fifteen years older. Prince Toda was the better-looking man of the two, and the intellectual expression of his large forehead and amiable look of his regular features contrasted very favorably with the more wrinkled and contracted and less intelligent face of his associate, the Prince of Iwami. They were both very richly dressed, their garments being of heavy silk brocade interwoven with elaborately wrought figures in gold and silver. From the beginning the two princes had assumed an air of statuesque formality, which they preserved during the whole interview, as they never spoke a word, and rose from their seats only at the entrance and exit of the Commodore, when they made a grave and formal bow. Yezaiman and his interpreters acted as masters of ceremony during the occasion. On entering, they took their positions at the upper end of the room, kneeling down beside a large lacquered box of scarlet color, supported by feet, gilt or brass.

For some time after the Commodore and his suite had taken their seats there was a pause of some minutes, not a word being uttered on either side. Tatznoske, the principal interpreter, was the first to break silence, which he did by asking Mr. Portman, the Dutch interpreter, whether the letters were ready for delivery, and stating that the Prince Toda was prepared to receive them; and that the scarlet box at the upper end of the room was prepared as the receptacle for them. The Commodore upon this being communicated to him, beckoned to the boys who stood in the lower hall to advance, when they immediately obeyed his summons and came forward, bearing the handsome boxes which contained the President’s letter and other documents. The two stalwart Negroes followed immediately in rear of the boys, and marching up to the scarlet receptacle received the boxes from the hands of the bearers, opened them, took out the letters, and, displaying the writing and seals laid them upon the lid of the Japanese box, all in perfect silence. The letter of the President, Millard Fillmore, expressed the friendly feelings of the United States toward Japan and his desire that there should be friendship and trade between the two countries. The documents were laid upon the scarlet box and a formal receipt was given for them. Yezaiman and Tatznoske now bowed, and, rising from their knees drew the fastenings around the scarlet box, and informing the Commodore’s interpreter that there was nothing more to be done, passed out of the apartment, bowing to those on either side as they went. Thc Commodore now rose to take leave, and, as he departed, the two princes, still preserving absolute silence, also arose and stood until the strangers had passed from their presence. The Commodore and his suite were detained a short time at the entrance of the building waiting for their barge, whereupon Yezaiman and his interpreter returned and asked some of the party what they were waiting for; to which they received the reply, “For the Commodore’s boat.” Nothing further was said. The whole interview had not occupied more than from twenty to thirty minutes, and had been conducted with the greatest formality, though with the most perfect courtesy in every respect. The procession re-formed as before, and the Commodore was escorted to his barge, and, embarking, was rowed off toward his ship, followed by the other American and the two Japanese boats which contained the Governor of Uraga and his attendants, the bands meanwhile playing our national airs with great spirit as the boats pulled off to the ships. Source: Eva March Tappan, ed., The World’s Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), Vol. I: China, Japan, and the Islands of the Pacific, pp. 427–437.

Ostend Manifesto (1854) Under the presidency of Franklin Pierce, the United States came into conflict with Spain over the acquisition of Cuba, a territory that was considered vital to U.S. slaveholder interests. American ministers to Spain, the United Kingdom, and France met at a conference in Ostend, Belgium, to discuss Spain’s refusal to sell Cuba to the United States. Their decision, which is outlined in the Ostend Manifesto, published in October 1854, reflected the expansionist mentality of the time. The manifesto advocated the use of force against Spain if it did not cooperate and sell Cuba to the United States. Ultimately, the U.S. government rejected the proposals. The Ostend Manifesto Aix-La-Chapelle: October 18, 1854 SIR:—The undersigned, in compliance with the wish expressed by the President in the several confidential despatches you have addressed to us, respectively, to that effect, have met in conference, first

at Ostend, in Belgium, on the 8th, 10th, and 11th instant, and then at Aix la Chapelle in Prussia, on the days next following, up to the date hereof. There has been a full and unresolved interchange of views and sentiments between us, which we are most happy to inform you has resulted in a cordial coincidence of opinion on the grave and important subjects submitted to our consideration. We have arrived at the conclusion, and are thoroughly convinced, that an immediate and earnest effort ought to be made by the government of the United States to purchase Cuba from Spain at any price for which it can be obtained, not exceeding the sum of.… The proposal should, in our opinion, be made in such a manner as to be presented through the necessary diplomatic forms to the Supreme Constituent Cortes about to assemble. On this momentous question, in which the people both of Spain and the United States are so deeply interested, all our proceedings ought to be open, frank, and public. They should be of such a character as to challenge the approbation of the world. We firmly believe that, in the progress of human events, the time has arrived when the vital interests of Spain are as seriously involved in the sale, as those of the United States in the purchase, of the island and that the transaction will prove equally honorable to both nations. Under these circumstances we cannot anticipate a failure, unless possibly through the malign influence of foreign powers who possess no right whatever to interfere in the matter. We proceed to state some of the reasons which have brought us to this conclusion, and, for the sake of clearness, we shall specify them under two distinct heads: I. The United States ought, if practicable, to purchase Cuba with as little delay as possible. II. The probability is great that the government and Cortes of Spain will prove willing to sell it, because this would essentially promote the highest and best interests of the Spanish people. Then, I. It must be clear to every reflecting mind that, from the peculiarity of its geographical position, and the considerations attendant on it, Cuba is as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present members, and that it belongs naturally to that great family of States of which the Union is the providential nursery. From its locality it commands the mouth of the Mississippi and the immense and annually increasing trade which must seek this avenue to the ocean. On the numerous navigable streams, measuring an aggregate course of some thirty thousand miles, which disembogue themselves through this magnificent river into the Gulf of Mexico, the increase of the population within the last ten years amounts to more than that of the entire Union at the time Louisiana was annexed to it. The natural and main outlet to the products of this entire population, the highway of their direct intercourse with the Atlantic and the Pacific States, can never be secure, but must ever be endangered whilst Cuba is a dependency of a distant power in whose possession it has proved to be a source of constant annoyance and embarrassment to their interests. Indeed, the Union can never enjoy repose, nor possess reliable security, as long as Cuba is not embraced within its boundaries. Its immediate acquisition by our government is of paramount importance, and we cannot doubt but that it is a consummation devoutly wished for by its inhabitants. The intercourse which its proximity to our coasts begets and encourages between them and the citizens of the United States, has, in the progress of time, so united their interests and blended their fortunes that

they now look upon each other as if they were one people and had but one destiny. Considerations exist which render delay in the acquisition of this island exceedingly dangerous to the United States. The system of immigration and labor lately organized within its limits, and the tyranny and oppression which characterize its immediate rulers, threaten an insurrection at every moment which may result in direful consequences to the American people. Cuba has thus become to us an unceasing danger, and a permanent cause of anxiety and alarm. But we need not enlarge on these topics. It can scarcely be apprehended that foreign powers, in violation of international law, would interpose their influence with Spain to prevent our acquisition of the island. Its inhabitants are now suffering under the worst of all possible governments, that of absolute despotism, delegated by a distant power to irresponsible agents, who are changed at short intervals, and who are tempted to improve the brief opportunity thus afforded to accumulate fortunes by the basest means. As long as this system shall endure, humanity may in vain demand the suppression of the African slave trade in the island. This is rendered impossible whilst that infamous traffic remains an irresistible temptation and a source of immense profit to needy and avaricious officials, who, to attain their ends, scruple not to trample the most sacred principles under foot. The Spanish government at home may be well disposed, but experience has proved that it cannot control these remote depositaries of its power. Besides, the commercial nations of the world cannot fail to perceive and appreciate the great advantages which would result to their people from a dissolution of the forced and unnatural connexion between Spain and Cuba, and the annexation of the latter to the United States. The trade of England and France with Cuba would, in that event, assume at once an important and profitable character, and rapidly extend with the increasing population and prosperity of the island. But if the United States and every commercial nation would be benefited by this transfer, the interests of Spain would also be greatly and essentially promoted. She cannot but see what such a sum of money as we are willing to pay for the island would effect in the development of her vast natural resources. Two-thirds of this sum, if employed in the construction of a system of railroads, would ultimately prove a source of greater wealth to the Spanish people than that opened to their vision by Cortez. Their prosperity would date from the ratification of that treaty of cession. France has already constructed continuous lines of railways from Havre, Marseilles, Valenciennes, and Strasbourg, via Paris, to the Spanish frontier, and anxiously awaits the day when Spain shall find herself in a condition to extend these roads through her northern provinces to Madrid, Seville, Cadiz, Malaga, and the frontiers of Portugal. This object once accomplished, Spain would become a centre of attraction for the travelling world, and secure a permanent and profitable market for her various productions. Her fields, under the stimulus given to industry by remunerating prices, would teem with cereal grain, and her vineyards would bring forth a vastly increased quantity of choice wines. Spain would speedily become, what a bountiful Providence intended she should be, one of the first nations of Continental Europe—rich, powerful, and contented. Whilst two-thirds of the price of the island would be ample for the completion of her most important public improvements, she might, with the remaining forty millions, satisfy the demands now pressing so heavily upon her credit, and create a sinking fund which would gradually relieve her from the overwhelming debt now paralyzing her energies.

Such is her present wretched financial condition, that her best bonds are sold upon her own Bourse at about one-third of their par value; whilst another class, on which she pays no interest, have but a nominal value, and are quoted at about one-sixth of the amount for which they were issued. Besides, these latter are held principally by British creditors who may, from day to day, obtain the effective interposition of their own government for the purpose of coercing payment. Intimations to that effect have been already thrown out from high quarters, and unless some new source of revenue shall enable Spain to provide for such exigencies, it is not improbable that they may be realized. Should Spain reject the present golden opportunity for developing her resources, and removing her financial embarrassments, it may never again return. Cuba, in its palmiest days, never yielded her exchequer after deducting the expenses of its government a clear annual income of more than a million and a half of dollars. These expenses have increased to such a degree as to leave a deficit chargeable on the treasury of Spain to the amount of six hundred thousand dollars. In a pecuniary point of view, therefore, the island is an incumbrance, instead of a source of profit, to the mother country. Under no probable circumstances can Cuba ever yield to Spain one per cent. on the large amount which the United States are willing to pay for its acquisition. But Spain is in imminent danger of losing Cuba, without remuneration. Extreme oppression, it is now universally admitted, justifies any people in endeavoring to relieve themselves from the yoke of their oppressors. The sufferings which the corrupt, arbitrary, and unrelenting local administration necessarily entails upon the inhabitants of Cuba, cannot fail to stimulate and keep alive that spirit of resistance and revolution against Spain, which has, of late years, been so often manifested. In this condition of affairs it is vain to expect that the sympathies of the people of the United States will not be warmly enlisted in favor of their oppressed neighbors. We know that the President is justly inflexible in his determination to execute the neutrality laws; but should the Cubans themselves rise in revolt against the oppression which they suffer, no human power could prevent citizens of the United States and liberal minded men of other countries from rushing to their assistance. Besides, the present is an age of adventure, in which restless and daring spirits abound in every portion of the world. It is not improbable, therefore, that Cuba may be wrested from Spain by a successful revolution; and in that event she will lose both the island and the price which we are now willing to pay for it—a price far beyond what was ever paid by one people to another for any province. It may also be remarked that the settlement of this vexed question, by the cession of Cuba to the United States, would forever prevent the dangerous complications between nations to which it may otherwise give birth. It is certain that, should the Cubans themselves organize an insurrection against the Spanish government, and should other independent nations come to the aid of Spain in the contest, no human power could, in our opinion, prevent the people and government of the United States from taking part in such a civil war in support of their neighbors and friends. But if Spain, dead to the voice of her own interest, and actuated by stubborn pride and a false sense of honor, should refuse to sell Cuba to the United States, then the question will arise, What ought to be the course of the American government under such circumstances? Self-preservation is the first law of nature, with States as well as with individuals. All nations have, at different periods, acted upon this maxim. Although it has been made the pretext for committing flagrant injustice, as in the partition of Poland and

other similar cases which history records, yet the principle itself, though often abused, has always been recognized. The United States have never acquired a foot of territory except by fair purchase, or, as in the case of Texas, upon the free and voluntary application of the people of that independent State, who desired to blend their destinies with our own. Even our acquisitions from Mexico are no exception to this rule, because, although we might have claimed them by the right of conquest in a just war, yet we purchased them for what was then considered by both parties a full and ample equivalent. Our past history forbids that we should acquire the island of Cuba without the consent of Spain, unless justified by the great law of self-preservation. We must, in any event, preserve our own conscious rectitude and our own self-respect. Whilst pursuing this course we can afford to disregard the censures of the world, to which we have been so often and so unjustly exposed. After we shall have offered Spain a price for Cuba far beyond its present value, and this shall have been refused, it will then be time to consider the question, does Cuba, in the possession of Spain, seriously endanger our internal peace and the existence of our cherished Union? Should this question be answered in the affirmative, then, by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power, and this upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home. Under such circumstances we ought neither to count the cost nor regard the odds which Spain might enlist against us. We forbear to enter into the question, whether the present condition of the island would justify such a measure? We should, however, be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union. We fear that the course and current of events are rapidly tending towards such a catastrophe. We, however, hope for the best, though we ought certainly to be prepared for the worst. We also forbear to investigate the present condition of the questions at issue between the United States and Spain. A long series of injuries to our people have been committed in Cuba by Spanish officials and are unredressed. But recently a most flagrant outrage on the rights of American citizens and on the flag of the United States was perpetrated in the harbor of Havana under circumstances which, without immediate redress, would have justified a resort to measures of war in vindication of national honor. That outrage is not only unatoned, but the Spanish government has deliberately sanctioned the acts of its subordinates and assumed the responsibility attaching to them. Nothing could more impressively teach us the danger to which those peaceful relations it has ever been the policy of the United States to cherish with foreign nations are constantly exposed than the circumstances of that case. Situated as Spain and the United States are, the latter have forborne to resort to extreme measures. But this course cannot, with due regard to their own dignity as an independent nation, continue; and our recommendations, now submitted, are dictated by the firm belief that the cession of Cuba to the United States, with stipulations as beneficial to Spain as those suggested, is the only effective mode of settling all past differences and of securing the two countries against future collisions.

We have already witnessed the happy results for both countries which followed a similar arrangement in regard to Florida. Yours, very respectfully, JAMES BUCHANAN J. Y. MASON PIERRE SOULÉ Source: The Ostend Manifesto, 1854. New York: A. Lovell, 1892.

Excerpt from William Walker’s The War in Nicaragua (1860) William Walker was the most infamous filibusterer in U.S. and Latin American history, embodying U.S. imperialism and expansionism to Central American and Caribbean nations in the mid-19th century. Beginning in 1853, Walker led four filibustering expeditions into Mexico and Central America, proclaiming himself president of the “Republic of Lower California” and the “Republic of Nicaragua,” the latter after he received a contract from Democratic leader Francisco Castellón to bring 300 “colonists”—or mercenaries—to help defeat the Legitimist Party in the Nicaraguan civil war. The following, originally published in 1860, is Walker’s description of this campaign. THE WAR IN NICARAGUA. THE VESTA AND HER PASSENGERS. ON the 5th of May, 1854, a number of native Nicaraguans who had been exiled by the existing Government of their Republic, landed at Realejo, and thence proceeded to Chinandega with a view of organizing a revolution against the acting authorities of the country. Among them were D. Maximo Jerez, D. Mateo Pineda, and D. Jose Maria Valle, leading citizens of the Occidental Department. They had sailed from Tiger Island on a vessel commanded by an American, Gilbert Morton, and were about fiftyfour in all when they surprised the garrison at Realejo. After the revolutionists reached Chinandega, they were joined by large numbers of the people, and they proceeded with little delay to march towards Leon. On the road thither they met the forces of the Government at several points, each time routing them; and the President, D. Fruto Chamorro, seeing the temper of the people, and unable to resist the revolution about Leon, fled, alone, and without an escort, to Granada. He did not reach the last named city for some days after leaving Leon, having gone astray in the woods and hills about Managua, and his partisans had almost despaired of ever again seeing him, when he rode into the town where his principal adherents resided. After the revolutionists, headed by Jerez, reached Leon, they organized a Provisional Government, naming as Director, D. Francisco Castellon. This gentleman had been a candidate for the office of Director at the preceding election in 1853; and his friends asserted that he had a majority of votes, but that Chamorro had obtained the office by the free use of bribes among the members of the electoral college. Chamorro was installed in the office, and soon found pretexts for banishing Castellon and his chief supporters to Honduras. In that State, General Trinidad Cabanas held executive power; and favored by him, Jerez and his comrades had been able to sail from Tiger Island with the arms and ammunition requisite for their landing at Realejo. While his political enemies were in Honduras, Chamorro had called a constituent Assembly, and the constitution of the country had been thoroughly revised and changed. The constitution of 1838 placed the Chief Executive power in the hands of a Supreme Director, who was elected every two years; the new constitution created the office of President, who was to be chosen every four years. In all respects the

new constitution placed more power in the Government than had been trusted to it by the previous law; hence it was odious to the party styling itself Liberal, and acceptable to those who called themselves the party of order. The new constitution was printed on the 30th of April, 1854; and its partisans say it was also promulgated on that day. The opponents of the new constitution say it never was promulgated. At any rate, the revolution, made professedly against this constitution, was started on the 5th of May, before the new law could have been promulgated in the towns and villages distant from the capital. The Leonese revolutionists styled their Executive Provisional Director, and asserted their resolution to maintain the organic act of 1838. They took the name of Democrats, and wore as their badge a red ribbon on their hats. Chamorro was called by his friends President—they thus declaring their adhesion to the new constitution; and calling themselves Legitimists, they mounted the white ribbon, in opposition to the red of the Democrats. During the month of May the Provisional Government was accepted by all the municipalities of the Occidental Department, and by some of the other towns; and the democratic army, as it was called, marching southward, reached Granada in the early part of June. The delay of the Democrats at Leon and at Managua had given Chamorro time to organize his force, and though his numbers were small, he repulsed Jerez and his followers (for these latter could not be called a force) when they attempted to carry Granada by assault. After the first repulse, Jerez sat down before the town, and affected to lay siege to the place. The rabble at his heels were, however, busier in plundering the shops of the suburbs than in defeating the plans of their enemies. The arrival of some officers and soldiers from Honduras assisted Jerez in his efforts to organize the “democratic army,” and was a proof of the readiness with which Cabanas had recognized the Provisional Government. For some months Jerez remained at Granada, vainly attempting to get possession of the chief square of the city, known as the Plaza. All the towns of the State had in the meanwhile declared for Castellon, and his friends held the lakes as well as the San Juan river, by means of small schooners and bungos. The schooners were under the command of a physician—an American or Englishman who had resided in the United States, and bore the name of Segur, although his real name was Desmond. In the month of January, 1855, Corral succeeded in taking Castillo, as well as the lake schooners, from the Democrats; and soon thereafter Jerez broke up his camp before Granada, and retreated in a rapid and disorderly manner towards Managua and Leon. The flight of the Democrats from Rivas followed almost immediately the retreat from Granada; and in a few weeks the turn of affairs was visible by the adhesion of many persons of property to the Legitimist party. It was well for the Democrats that Chamorro, worn out by long disease and anxious thought, died a short time after they left the Jalteva. He was buried in the parish church, on the main Plaza of Granada, and his death was kept carefully concealed from the enemy. His name was strength to the Legitimists and a terror to their foes; and had he lived, a far more vigorous hand than that of Corral would have driven the flying Democrats back to the square of Leon. After the death of Chamorro, Corral remained in command of the Legitimist army, and the Presidency fell, under the constitution of 1854, to one of the Senators, D. Jose Maria Estrada. In the meantime, causes at work outside of Nicaragua were destined to influence very materially the fate of the Provisional Government. President Carrera, of Guatemala, being friendly to the principles of the party led by his countryman Chamorro, had determined to act against the Government of Cabanas, in Honduras. In view of this fact, Alvarez and the Honduras contingent received orders to return from Nicaragua, and this dampened the spirit of the Democratic leaders. Honduras, threatened by the much greater power of Guatemala on the north, not only had need of all the resources she could control, but she could hardly hope, without foreign assistance, to resist the strength of Carrera and his Indians: Not even

the Nicaraguans themselves could blame Cabanas for the course he took, and the friendship between Castellon and the President of Honduras remained unaffected by the policy the latter was forced to pursue. The alliance between the Governments at Leon and at Comayagua continued, and they seemed to be linked together for a common fate. But closely as the cause of Castellon was bound to that of Cabanas, it was not in Honduras, nor yet in Guatemala, that its destiny was being determined. The very day which witnessed the most signal triumph of the Nicaraguan Democrats was destined to behold the overthrow of the Cabaña administration; and to ascertain the cause of such a strange result we must leave Central America and consider events in California. Source: Walker, William. The War in Nicaragua. New York: S. H. Goetzel & Co., 1860, 13–18.

Glossary

Accommodationist Policies: employed by various Native American leaders, these policies were intended to maintain some tribal cohesion while placating further American demands upon Indians. Algic Language: linguistic classification of languages spoken by Algonquian peoples of North America, which include, in part, Mahican, Massachusett, Mohegan-Pequot, Powhatan, and Unami. Ali‘i: a hereditary Hawaiian chief or noble who governed with a divine power called mana; ruled the Hawaiian islands until 1893 when Queen Lili‘uokalani was overthrown by an Anglo-led coup. Amnesty: a pardon given by a government for previous legal or political offenses, usually in exchange for further cooperation. Anadromous: fish that migrate from the sea into freshwater to spawn; or those that migrate downstream in freshwater to spawn. Anglicization: process of converting to cultural, social, political, and linguistic norms of Britain. Annexation: the forced acquisition of a state’s territory by another state. In 19th-century American history, this process is most closely linked with Texas, California, Oregon, and Hawai‘i. Appropriations Acts: acts passed by a governmental body that allow the Treasury to issue funds for a particular purpose. Archipelago: a collection of islands, also called an island chain. Armistice: a formal agreement of warring parties to stop conflict; while it may not mean the end of war or result in a treaty, it is a more permanent condition than a truce or cease-fire. Autonomous Bands: groups that acted independently. Many Native American peoples were viewed as part of larger tribal structures when they may only have been part of smaller autonomous bands. Auxiliary Scouts: generally young Native American men, hired by the U.S. military to determine appropriate routes, locate game, and protect against other Native groups. Bakufu: literally “an office in a tent” in Japanese, the term originally designated a temporary field office of a general but later came to mean the entire government of the shogun or military commander; also called a shogunate.

Barbary States: largely independent provinces of Ottoman Africa consisting of Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, as well as the independent Sultanate of Morocco. At the end of the 18th century, naval pirates from these countries controlled much of the Mediterranean, capturing merchant ships and ransoming their crews, leading to the Barbary Wars. Bark or Barque: a sailing vessel having three or more masts, square-rigged on all but the aftermost. Baselines: the primary east-west lines upon which a rectangular survey is based and that often divide a survey township between north and south. Baselines are also frequently incorporated into geopolitical boundaries, as in the case of the border between Kansas and Nebraska that runs along the 40th parallel north. Bourbon Reforms: a series of economic and political legislation initiated by the Bourbon monarchy intended to stimulate manufacturing and technology in order to modernize Spain. Brevetted: an addition to a title given to a commissioned officer as a reward for gallantry or meritorious conduct, but without receiving the authority, precedence, or pay of real rank. Brig: while the word originated as a shortened version of brigantine, these sailing vessels had different rigging than their namesake; a two-masted ship with square rigging on both of its masts; popular for its speed and maneuverability. Brigantine: a two-masted vessel with foremast fully square rigged and mainmast rigged with both a fore and aft mainsail (a gaff sail) and a square topsail, and possibly a topgallant sail. Californio: a Spanish-speaking person of Mexican or Spanish descent, living in Alta California, particularly between 1769 and 1848. Calumet: a ceremonial pipe used by many Native American groups to demonstrate a willingness to negotiate war and peace, commerce and trade, as well as social and political decision making. Canonization: formal declaration by the Catholic Church that a deceased person is a saint, upon which declaration the person is beatified as a recognized saint. Carpetbaggers: originally used as a pejorative term to describe a Northerner who moved to the U.S. South after the Civil War (carrying only “carpetbag” luggage) to benefit economically from the political instability; came to refer to any person who moved into a politically unstable area with the intention of seeking private gain. Casta System: a complex social system initiated by the Spanish based on the accepted knowledge that the character and quality of people varied according largely to their birth, color, race, and origin of ethnic types; used to establish political, social, and economic hierarchies and social control. Cession: in contrast with annexation, a land cession transfers land from one political entity to another through treaty and negotiation, without the use of force. Chargé d’affaires: literally “charged with matters,” a counselor or minister who leads a diplomatic mission in the absence of a formal ambassador. City on a Hill: a phrase popularized by Puritan John Winthrop in 1630, one of the earliest articulations of American exceptionalism.

Clothier General: an office in the War Department at the turn of the 19th century, responsible for the procurement and distribution of uniforms. Cohong System: arrangement of limited foreign interaction in China; restricting where, with whom, and for what foreign merchants could trade. Confederation Period: era in American history from 1781 to 1789 that takes its name from the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the new United States, ratified by the Second Continental Congress on March 1, 1781. Constitutional Monarchy: a form of democratic government in which a monarch may hold formal reserve powers but does not set policy or choose political leaders. Consular Outpost: a structure established in a foreign country in which ministers or consuls may represent their country’s interests. Corsair: pirate or privateer. Coup d’état: a sudden and illegal overthrow of a sitting government, usually instigated by a small group within the existing state apparatus, frequently members of the military. Crimean War: conflict between Russia and an alliance of Great Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire between October 1853 and February 1856. Custodial Rights: legal control of a person who is viewed as a child in the eyes of the law. In nineteenthcentury California, Euro-Americans could gain custodial rights over any Native American. Daimyo: a Japanese feudal baron who acted as a military governor. Democratic Party: evolving from the Democratic-Republican Party in 1828, the Democratic Party favored states’ rights and was adamantly pro-expansion. Dialectical: pertaining to linguistic dialects. Dominicans: a Roman Catholic religious order first established in the United States by Edward Fenwick in the early 19th century. Dragoons: light cavalry military unit; denotes either group or individual personnel. Ecclesiastic Authority: power of the Christian Church. Empresario: Spanish for entrepreneur; empresarios were persons granted the right to settle on Mexican land in exchange for recruiting and managing new settlers; system led to an infusion of Anglo-American settlers into northern Mexico and the annexation of Texas by the United States. Encomienda: used by the Spanish crown during their colonization of the Americas, this system ostensibly put Native people under the authority and protection of Spanish settlers; used to forcibly convert Native people and extract labor and tribute. English Legal Doctrine: a framework for law used by the American colonists that relies on precedent (previous rulings) or common law. Common law, as opposed to statutes adopted through legislative process or executive regulations, is developed by judges through previous decisions of the court.

Euro-American: a person or group of persons whose ancestry comes from Western Europe, particularly Great Britain. Extralegal: outside of the province or authority of law. Extraterritoriality or Extraterritorial Rights: being exempted from local law; in the 19th century, a requirement forced on many Asian sovereigns establishing that American citizens accused of a crime in a foreign country would be tried by U.S. authorities, rather than local courts. Federalists: first American political party that existed from the early 1790s to 1816. Federalists called for a strong national government including a national bank, tariffs, and positive relations with Britain as expressed in the Jay Treaty of 1794. Fenian Brotherhood: an Irish republican organization founded in the United States by John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny in 1858, whose members hoped to conquer parts of Canada in order to force Great Britain into granting independence to Ireland. Filibusterers: in the context of American expansion, people who went into foreign lands to try to foment rebellions or uprisings that might lead to U.S. annexation. South and Central American countries, as well as Cuba, were frequent targets of American filibusterers in the 19th century. 42nd Parallel: forms the present northern boundaries of the states of Pennsylvania, Utah, Nevada, and California; was the northern limit of the Spanish Empire as agreed upon in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 and was thus ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the MexicanAmerican War. Franciscans: order of Catholic priests who adhere to the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi; established 21 missions in California between 1769 and 1833 to spread Christianity among Native peoples. Frigate: any warship build for speed and maneuverability. Garrison: refers both to a body of troops stationed in a particular location, and to the military structure at that location, such as a fort. Garroted: a method of execution favored by the Spanish in which an iron collar is used to strangle or break the neck of a condemned person. Gift-Exchange: fundamental to Indian diplomacy, gift-exchange acted as material signs of commitment to agreements made between groups; European success or failure in their attempts to secure trade rights and land frequently depended on their understanding of this process. Girondist: a political faction within the French Legislative Assembly that campaigned for an end to the monarchy but stopped short of the more radical Jacobin calls for complete revolution. As many as 30,000 Girondists were killed in what became known as the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. Haberdasher: a person who sells cloth and small items for clothing such as buttons and zippers. Habitants: settlers of French descent who settled along the eastern coast of North America, farming primarily along the St. Lawrence River in what is now the Canadian province of Quebec.

Haole: derived from the Hawaiian hā‘ole, literally meaning “no breath,” the term generally refers to a non-Hawaiian person of Anglo descent, though before the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778, it was used to refer to any foreigner or foreign species. Heraldic: containing insignias signifying affiliation with a group; a crest or coat of arms. Hessians: German soldiers, frequently from the Hesse region, contracted for military service by the British government; most famously, 30,000 were used against English colonists in the American Revolutionary War. Home Squadron: part of the U.S. Navy organized in 1838; ships were assigned to protect coastal commerce, aid ships in distress, suppress piracy and the slave trade, make coastal surveys, and train ships to relieve others on distant stations. Honolulu Rifles: militia force of predominantly haole or Anglo descendants living in Hawai‘i, formed in Honolulu in 1884. Horticultural Groups: classification of Native peoples who have permanent or semipermanent villages and whose lifeways rely heavily on harvesting foodstuffs. This classification is most commonly associated with peoples of the Middle Missouri such as the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. Howitzer: an artillery piece that could be brought into the field on wheels. It mixed the characteristics of a smaller arm (longer barrel, larger propelling charges, smaller shells, higher velocities, and flatter trajectories) with those of a mortar (meant to fire at even higher angles of ascent and descent). Impressment: forced recruitment generally associated with the British navy immediately following the American Revolution. “Pressing” generally took place at sea where armed gangs would board merchant ships seeking English citizens or even American sailors to kidnap. Indemnity: often used as a synonym for reparations, indemnities are monies paid to compensate for a particular loss. Invasive Species: plants or animals that are not native to a particular bioregion; while many species of plants and animals colonize new habitats, invasive species are generally defined as those bringing negative environmental or ecological change. Ironclad: steam-propelled warship covered with iron and later, steel plates, to protect against explosives. First developed by the French in 1859, ironclads were adopted by the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. Jacobin: political club during the French Revolution that controlled the government from 1793 to July 1794, passing radically egalitarian laws and hunting down political opponents during their so-called Reign of Terror. Kaikoku: the desire to open Japan to foreign trade. After Commodore Matthew Perry’s visit in 1854, the Tokugawa shogunate divided over the stance to take toward the West with some favoring immediate opening of trade (kaikoku) and others advocating joi (“expelling the barbarian”). Labor: a unit of land measurement measuring 177 acres; under the Mexican colonization act, heads of families engaged in farming were to receive a labor of land each while cattle ranchers received a league.

Most of the original Anglo settlers combined the two vocations, thus receiving a league and a labor. Land Title: formal recognition of land ownership; its requirement in the expanding United States in the 19th century led to the creation of the General Land Office; frequently used as a tool to displace Native people already living in a region. Leeward Coast: side of an island where the predominant wind travels from the interior of the island to the sea. This also refers specifically to the southwestern coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu, extending from Kaena Point to Koko Head. Letters of Marque: license authorizing privateers (sailors on privately owned ships employed by a nation in warfare) to attack and capture enemy vessels. Liberalism: a political philosophy based on ideas of liberty and equality; economic aspects include free trade and private property. Māhele: a series of land reforms enacted by King Kamehameha in the late 1840s that allowed residents (including foreigners) the right to purchase Hawaiian land. Intended by Kamehameha to guarantee Native Hawaiians would not lose tenured land, it ultimately proved to be a vehicle for foreigners to obtain private property. Manumission: the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves. Maroon Colonies: communities of fugitive slaves who succeeded in creating self-sustaining groups in remote areas; groups in Florida banded together with remnants of various Southeastern Indian groups to form what became known as Seminoles. Matrilineal: a system in which descent (which can include names, property, titles) is traced through the mother. Meiji Restoration: a series of events that consolidated the political system of Japan under Emperor Meiji in 1868 and brought an end to the Tokugawa shogunate. Spanning from 1868 to 1912, the changes brought about during the Meiji Restoration, including industrialization, were responsible for the emergence of Japan as a modernized nation. Mercantile: an economic system in which a colonial power extracts raw resources from colonies while requiring the colonies to purchase finished products only from its own merchants. Merchant Capitalism: an early phase of development capitalism, merchant capitalism is defined by lack of industrialization and commercial finance. Meridian: (or line of longitude) is the half of an imaginary great circle on the Earth’s surface, terminated by the North Pole and the South Pole, connecting points of equal longitude. The position of a point along the meridian is given by its latitude. Mestizo: originally used in the Spanish empire to describe a person of combined European and Native American descent, the term eventually became central to the formation of a new independent identity in Mexico that was neither Spanish nor indigenous. Minister Plenipotentiary: a diplomatic agent ranking below an ambassador but possessing full power and authority.

Minutemen: members of colonial militia companies who fought against British troops during the American Revolutionary War. Mission: religious outposts created to convert Native people; most famous were the 21 missions established in California by Franciscans between 1769 and 1833. Mnemonic Device: any tool that aids retention of information. Monte: a Spanish card game in which one or more people play against a house or “bank” for money; in the eyes of Victorian-era Anglo-Americans, its play exemplified uncultured behavior. Mosquito Coast: a British protectorate on the Caribbean coasts of what are now Honduras and Nicaragua. Most Favored Nation: a status negotiated through international diplomacy in which a country enjoys the lowest tariffs offered by another country in international trade. Napoleonic Wars: a series of wars spanning from 1803 to 1815 that pitted Great Britain against Napoleon’s France. Through its victory, Great Britain established itself as the foremost world power and Russia began to extend its claim on continental Europe. Naturalized Citizen: a person who becomes a citizen of a country through means other than birth. Neophyte Indians: converted Native population that formed the economic basis of California missions; faced extremely high death rate due to forced labor, foreign diseases, and poor living conditions. Neutral Trade: participating in commerce with multiple parties engaged in war. Neutrality Laws of 1818: an addition to previous acts of 1794 and 1797, which further codified American trade neutrality in the event of two other countries going to war and forbade American privateers or other citizens from waging war against a country with which the United States was at peace. No Quarter: a military term describing total war when no prisoners will be taken. No Transfer Policy: a policy of international diplomacy initiated by Thomas Jefferson that acknowledged Spanish control over Cuba as long as the island was not treated away to another country, such as Britain or France. Like many of his successors, Jefferson believed it was just a matter of time before Cuba would be annexed by the United States. Nomadic: in distinction to horticultural people, nomadic groups have no permanent villages. In the American West, the term was most commonly associated with the equestrian-based groups of the Great Plains. Nullification Movement: a reaction to the highly protective Tariff of 1828, the movement pushed to assert states’ rights to control implementation of federal tariffs; ultimately resulted in South Carolina’s 1832 Ordinance of Nullification bringing about the Nullification Crisis, one of the precursors to the American Civil War. Orders in Council: a series of decrees made by the British government that restricted neutral trading with France, resulting in an English naval blockade of French ports, one of the primary sources of tension between the United Kingdom and United States that led to the War of 1812.

Orient: term used by Europeans and Euro-Americans in the 19th century to describe the continent of Asia. Derives from the Latin word oriens meaning “east,” demonstrating the relational nature of the word. Orthographies: writing systems. Ottoman Empire: reaching its zenith during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman, or Turkish Empire, was one of the most powerful states in the world, controlling much of southeast Europe, western Asia, North Africa, the Caucasus, and the Horn of Africa. It was the center of the interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds. Palisade: a fence or a wall used to create a defensive structure, typically made from tree trunks. Panic of 1819: caused in part by excessive speculation in public lands, it was the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States; provoked popular resentment against banking and business enterprise and sparked popular participation in politics (Jacksonian democracy). Pan-Indian: describes a group or movement that contains Native Americans of multiple tribes or nations. Patent for Monopoly of Trade: by which a government grants exclusive trading rights to an individual or a firm. Paternalistic: a system of administration in which an individual, organization, or state controls the actions of another group, ostensibly for the benefit of the latter; as in a father’s obligation to a child. Patrilineal: a system in which descent (which can include names, property, titles) is traced through the father. Praying Towns: villages established by Puritans between 1646 and 1675 to convert Native people to Christianity, most famous of which was begun in Massachusetts by John Eliot. Presidio: Spanish military fort. Privateer: private citizen or ship authorized to attack foreign vessels in wartime. This system enlarged a navy without the government having to spend Treasury resources. Conflicts between American merchants and French privateers after the French Revolution led to the brief Quasi-War. Proto-language: a hypothetical or reconstructed language from which known languages are believed to have evolved. Quaker: also known as “Friends,” Quakers belonged to a denomination of Protestant Christianity that was active in missionary projects in 18th- and 19th-century America. Despite peaceful intentions, Quakers engaged in many damaging colonizing projects aimed at converting Native Americans. Rancho: large land grants given first by Spanish and then Mexican governments to individuals to encourage settlement. Rangers: companies of light infantry and scouts established during the War of 1812 by act of Congress, modeled after a company of colonial scouts that served during the French and Indian War named Roger’s Rangers. Reciprocal Treaty of 1875: treaty between the United States and the Hawaiian kingdom, which allowed the United States free access to sugar and other products grown on the islands. It also gave the United

States land for a naval base (which became Pearl Harbor) and ultimately led to the creation of Americanowned sugar plantations in Hawai‘i. Red Sticks: an English term for a group of Muscogee Creek people who led a resistance movement against American encroachment in the first decades of the 19th century. Made up primarily of those living in “Upper Towns,” the Red Sticks got their name from the color of their war clubs. Rendezvous: a large festive meeting at which Native American and Euro-American hunters and trappers met with fur-trading companies. One of the largest events was the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous (1825– 1840). Repartimento: a system of forced labor imposed on an indigenous group by Spanish colonizers. Intended to replace the abusive encomienda system, the repartimento generally created the same slavelike labor system in which unpaid or low-paid groups of Indians would work certain numbers of weeks or months per year at Spanish-owned farms, mines, workshops, and public projects. Republicanism: an ideology that rejects inherent political power and stresses individual liberty. American republicanism found its most vocal proponent in Thomas Jefferson who envisioned a republic of independent yeoman farmers. Retrocede: to transfer ownership of land back to a previous owner. Sacristan: an officer charged with overseeing the sacred accoutrements of the church. Safety Valve Theory: belief that acquiring western land would relieve unemployment pressure on the East. Sakoku: began under the shogunate of Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651) and involving a series of edicts written from 1633 to 1639 to control Japanese interactions with foreigners, remaining in effect until 1853. Under the edicts, no foreigner could enter Japan, nor could any Japanese leave the country under penalty of death. Salvage Claims: the right to the cargo and remains of a shipwreck. Scorched Earth Campaign: a military tactic that involves destroying anything in the path of an advancing army that might be useful to an enemy. It can also be a punitive measure. Second Great Awakening: period of popular religious revivals that reached their peak in the 1820s and early 1830s; stressed the right of private judgment in spiritual matters and the importance of industry, sobriety, and self-discipline, thereby promoting the same characteristics that would bring about the concurrent Market Revolution. Shishi: literally “men of high purpose”; groups of Japanese political activists during the late Edo period who promoted the sonno joi ideology. Shogun: literally “military commander” or “general”; though technically appointed by the emperor, these hereditary commanders ruled Japan from 1192 to 1867. Signatory: the signer of a document.

Sloop: a naval vessel defined by use rather than specific number of masts or sail plan; the term generally referred to a warship in the 18th and 19th centuries; short for sloop-of-war. Sonno Joi Ideology: an ideology that focused on revering the emperor and expelling the barbarians as the key to solving Japan’s economic, social, and political problems. Sonoran: from the Mexican state of Sonora that lost more than a quarter of its territory after the MexicanAmerican War. Sounding: finding the depth of a body of water using poles or weighted line. Sovereignty: a legal and political theory designating authority over some polity. The theory is particularly important to Native Americans whose sovereignty often comes in conflict with U.S. state and national laws. Special Envoy: a diplomatic rank of a representative of a government who is sent on a diplomatic mission. Specie: any form of hard currency used in exchange; in coin. Squatters: people occupying land or territory without lawful permission. The United States frequently endorsed squatting as a viable form of land acquisition, particularly vis-à-vis indigenous land claims. Sue for Peace: act by a warring nation to begin a peace process; usually initiated by a losing party to attempt to stave off unconditional surrender. Tejanos: native Mexican settlers in the province of Texas. After the Mexican-American War, many Tejanos were treated poorly by Anglo-Texians who suspected them of aiding Santa Anna and the central Mexican government. Tories: those who remained loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution. Tract Societies: organizations created to publish and disseminate Christian literature. The New England Religious Tract Society (also known as the New England Tract Society) was organized May 23, 1814, and incorporated in June 1816. The name was changed in June 1823 to American Tract Society. In 1825, the Boston-based American Tract Society merged with the New-York Religious Tract Society to form a new organization, which called itself the American Tract Society. Triangular Trade: a pattern of international trade used most often to describe the transatlantic slave trade from the late 16th to early 19th centuries that also included sugar from the Caribbean and manufactured goods from either England or New England. Slaves were brought from West Africa to the Caribbean, which in turn sent sugar to New England, forming two sides of a triangle. The final side was created when finished goods made from the profits of sugar sales were sent back to Africa to be sold or bartered for slaves. Unequal Treaties: the Treaty of Tianjin was one of four treaties signed between the Qing Empire and Western powers. During June 1858, China also signed separate agreements with Great Britain, France, and Russia. Together, the four treaties have been called unequal treaties because the terms called for China to make concessions to the West that included reparations and the ceding of territory. Unilateral: an approach or decision made by one person or party.

Viceroy: an official who administers a district or province in the name of a monarch. During the Spanish Empire in North America, those duties fell to the viceroy of New Spain based in Mexico City. Whigs: a major political party in the United States that originated in opposition to the policies of Andrew Jackson. Active from 1834 to 1854, the party supported industrialized development and a strong central government. Active in both North and South, Whigs generally were not strong supporters of expansion as the issue of slavery in the new territories divided the party. Whitehall: a road lined with government departments and ministries in central London; the word is used as a metonym for all British governmental administration.

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Chronology: 1775–1898

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1785

1786

1787 1790 1790 1791 1794 1795

1796

Daniel Boone leads first party of settlers into Kentucky backcountry and settles Boonesboro. In the Gnadenhütten Massacre, 96 unarmed Delaware Indians are murdered by American militiamen who wrongly claim the Indians assisted British troops. Iroquois cede huge tract of what became the Ohio Country (which they had no control over) to the U.S. government in Treaty of Fort Stanwix. At Treaty of Fort McIntosh, U.S. diplomats inform Huron, Delaware, Ojibwa, and Ottawa tribes that they are at the mercy of U.S. government for their alliance with British during American Revolutionary War. Congress passes Land Ordinance, which establishes pattern for western expansion. Lands west of the Ohio River to be divided into six-mile-square townships with the minimum of 640-acre lots sold for $640. American representatives impose Treaty of Fort Finney on Indians in the Old Northwest, claiming all land in the Ohio Country north of the Ohio River and east of the greater Miami River was open for Euro-American settlement. Congress passes Northwest Ordinance, which details how Northwest Territories will be admitted to the union. Congress passes Trade and Intercourse Acts, making the federal government responsible for all trade or treaties made with Indian groups. Miami Little Turtle and Shawnee Blue Jacket defeat General Josiah Harmar’s troops in first of what became known as the Northwest Indian Wars. Little Turtle and Blue Jacket hand General Arthur St. Clair the worst defeat suffered by the U.S. military up to that time at the Battle of the Wabash. General Anthony Wayne defeats Indians of the Northwest Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, ending armed Indian resistance in the region. Leaders of 12 Indian tribes and American representatives led by General Anthony Wayne sign Treaty of Greenville, ostensibly establishing separate Indian and EuroAmerican lands and ending the so-called Northwest Indian Wars. Treaty of San Lorenzo, or Pinckney’s Treaty, is ratified by U.S. Senate, clarifying border between U.S. and Spanish colonies and granting American docking rights at the port of New Orleans.

1800 1801 1802

1803 1804–1806

1808

1811 1811 1813–1814 1814 1816 1819–1823 1820

1822 1823 1824

1825 1828

1828

Spain cedes control of Louisiana back to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso. 40,000 French troops die in Haiti from yellow fever, allowing successful Haitian slave revolt. Napoleon decides to leave Haiti and sell Louisiana to United States. For the cession of the western half of its territorial claim to the federal government, Georgia receives a payment of $1.25 million and the promise that all American Indian land titles in the state will be extinguished. France sells entire Louisiana Territory to United States for $15 million, doubling the size of the country. Lewis and Clark and Corps of Discovery explore newly purchased Louisiana Territory to lay economic and political claim to region and establish friendly relations with many Indian groups. Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa establish Prophetstown in present-day Indiana as center of pan-Indian alliance against American encroachment. Governor of Indiana William Henry Harrison leads force to destroy Prophetstown while Tecumseh is traveling to the Creeks and Cherokees. Construction of National Road begins in Cumberland, Maryland. Creek Civil War expands to include United States, pitting traditionalist Red Sticks against American forces led by General Andrew Jackson. Battle of Horseshoe Bend ends Creek War and perpetuates image of Andrew Jackson as an Indian fighter. U.S. government establishes system of trading houses in the American West to gain Indian alliances. Stephen Long explores the trans-Missouri West and creates the idea of a “Great American Desert.” Missouri Compromise reached, admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. With the exception of Missouri, slavery will be prohibited on all land north of 36° 30′. William Ashley forms Rocky Mountain Fur Company with which he establishes commercial land route over Rocky Mountains. In Johnson v. M’Intosh, Supreme Court decides that U.S. sovereignty takes precedence in all matters relating to Indian lands. So-called corrupt bargain mars the election of President John Quincy Adams, sowing the seeds of popular discontent that will manifest itself in the election of Andrew Jackson four years later. First Treaty of Prairie du Chien establishes protocol of United States in determining boundaries of Indian territorial claims. Andrew Jackson’s election marks shift in national politics away from the so-called First Party System to the Second Party System, characterized by rapidly rising levels of voter turnout. Gold found in Dahlonega, Georgia, initiating a land rush onto Cherokee land.

1830

Indian Removal Act codifies practice of forcing Native peoples living east of the Mississippi River to move to land west of the Missouri River to make room for Euro-American settlers.

1830

First treaty after passage of Indian Removal Act is signed; Choctaw leaders cajoled into ceding all of their land east of Mississippi River at Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. U.S. Supreme Court establishes Indians as “domestic dependent nations” in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. Tens of thousands of Indians, including 16,000 Cherokees, forced to move west along Trail of Tears, reaching its peak in 1838. Worcester v. Georgia establishes that Indian groups retain sovereignty that makes them exempt from state laws. Black Hawk and other Sauk and Meskwaki Indians are defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe, ending the so-called Black Hawk Wars. Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge, and John Ridge sign Treaty of New Echota, ceding Cherokee land east of the Mississippi River. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding establish Indian missions in Oregon Territory. Second Creek War results in forced relocation of 15,000 Creeks from their homeland to Indian Territory. Many Creek Indians and Seminole Indians, as well as escaped slaves, continue to fight United States in what becomes known as Second Seminole War. Nationwide financial crisis inspires newspaper editor Horace Greeley to exhort people to “Go West.” Nearly 900 Potawatomis forced to move from their homelands in present-day Indiana to Indian Territory in the Potawatomi Trail of Death. Joseph Nicollet and John C. Frémont explore the Upper Mississippi River, gathering information to create Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi. Pre-Emption Act establishes that Euro-Americans who have settled on public lands have the first right to purchase when lands become officially available for sale. John Charles Frémont leads three expeditions into “the West,” becoming one of the leading advocates for western expansion. Samuel Morse successfully sends the first official telegraph message from the capitol to the B&O Railroad depot, consisting of the words: “What hath God wrought.” John O’Sullivan coins the phrase “Manifest Destiny” in editorial in Democratic Review to endorse western expansion. First Mormon settlers reach Deseret along the Great Salt Lake. Gold found at Sutter’s Mill, initiating the largest land migration in U.S. history; by 1855, 300,000 gold seekers had traveled to California from around the world.

1831 1831–1839 1832 1832 1835 1836 1836–1837 1836–1842 1837 1838 1838

1841 1842–1846 1844

1845 1847 1848

1851

First Treaty of Fort Laramie attempts to stem both intertribal conflict and conflict between the tribes and emigrants by establishing territorial boundaries for the Sioux, Arapahos, Assiniboines, Crows, Cheyennes, Mandans, Arikaras, and Gros Ventres.

1853

Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sends expeditions across American West searching for the most “Practicable and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast,” resulting in the 13-volume Pacific Railroad Reports. Kansas-Nebraska Act sets off battles between pro- and antislavery advocates in “Bleeding Kansas.” Gold found near Pike’s Peak, Colorado, enticing tens of thousands to encroach on Native land. Morrill Land Grant Act gives states 30,000 acres of land for each senator or representative on which to establish colleges focused on agriculture and engineering. Homestead Act encourages Western migration by providing settlers (including freed slaves) 160 acres of public land for farming. Dakotas kill approximately 500 settlers in what is now Minnesota in the Great Sioux Uprising. Thirty-eight Indians hanged in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Pacific Railway Act passed, granting contracts for the Central Pacific Railroad of California to build a line east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad Company a line west from the Missouri River. Over 9,000 Navajos (Diné) and additional Mescalero Apaches, many of whom were forced to make a 450-mile “Long Walk” from their reservation in 1863 and 1864 are interred at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers massacre Arapahos and Cheyennes at Sand Creek. Entire command of William J. Fetterman die at the hands of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors at Battle of One Hundred Slain. Three separate agreements between the U.S. government and 5,000 Arapahos, Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches become Treaty of Medicine Lodge. United States purchases the Alaska Territory from the Russian Empire for $7.2 million. Great Sioux Reservation created during second Treaty of Fort Laramie, initiating what has become a nearly 150-year struggle for the Lakotas to reclaim their homeland. Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad meet at Promontory, Utah, marking the completion of the first American transcontinental railroad system. Ferdinand V. Hayden leads exploration of Yellowstone, resulting in the creation of the first national park in the world.

1854 1858 1862

1862 1862

1862

1863–1868

1864 1866 1867 1867 1868

1869 1871

1874–1875 1876

1877 1879 1886 1886 1887

1889 1890 1890 1893 1894 1897 1898

Offensive by U.S. Army against Indians of the southern Plains earns moniker Red River War. Lakotas defeat Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer at Battle of Greasy Grass or Little Bighorn. Nez Perce attempt to flee to Canada to escape forced relocation. Chief Joseph becomes media star of the so-called Nez Perce War. Richard Pratt founds Carlisle Indian School with the stated purpose “to kill the Indian and save the man.” U.S. Supreme Court establishes American plenary power over Native peoples in United States v. Kagama. Chiricuahua Apache Geronimo (Goyahkla) ends his resistance, becoming the last American Indian to formally surrender to United States. General Allotment, or Dawes Act, initiates the transfer of more than 90 million acres of Indian land to private holdings from the time of its passage until its repeal in 1934. A stampede of approximately 10,000 prospective settlers marks the beginning of the Oklahoma Land Rush on lands formerly promised to Indian groups in perpetuity. Oklahoma Territory carved out of Indian Territory by the Organic Act. Massacre at Wounded Knee constitutes last major armed conflict between American Indians and the U.S. Army. 115,00 American homesteaders participate in the Cherokee Strip Land Run. Frederick Jackson Turner publishes “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Klondike gold rush begins, prompting Canadian and American debate over boundaries in the Northwest. Curtis Act dissolves Indian Territory tribal governments, leaving no mechanism for the enforcement of tribal law.

1. The Expanding Nation in the TransAppalachian West, 1785–1835

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW The desire of Americans to migrate west had been evident since the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War. King George III’s decision in the Proclamation of 1763 to limit the expansion of the British colonies to the crest of the Appalachian Mountains infuriated the colonists and thus became one of many factors that eventually led to the outbreak of the American Revolution. After securing their independence and establishing a new country, the citizens of the United States set their sights westward. From their perspective, they had legal claim to those lands due to the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Since the desired land was occupied by numerous Native American groups, questions soon arose as to whether the respective states or the federal government had the authority to negotiate binding treaties with the Indians. Through the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the U.S. Congress established its right to serve that function. Federal authority in matters relating to Native Americans was formally established through the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790. This authority would be tested in two very different regions with remarkably similar results.

WARFARE AND “CIVILIZATION” IN THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY The blueprint for how the United States planned to settle the Northwest Territory was provided in the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 and expanded upon in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The legislation detailed how land would be legally purchased from Native American groups and then sold at a profit to settlers. Provisions were also detailed for how the territories established by settlers could eventually achieve statehood. Through the Northwest Ordinances, settlers were guaranteed their rights as Americans in areas that the United States claimed but did not necessarily control. This situation gave wide latitude to military commanders on the frontiers as they endeavored to assert their version of U.S. policy in the transAppalachian West. In 1790, General Josiah Harmar and the U.S. First Infantry Regiment joined approximately 1,100 militiamen in attempting to clear the Maumee Valley. They were soundly defeated by a force of Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee warriors led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle in what became known as Little Turtle’s War. Blaming the defeat on Harmar’s incompetence, President George Washington ordered Major General Arthur St. Clair to attack Blue Jacket and Little Turtle’s confederation. The two groups fought the Battle of the Wabash on November 4, 1791. After four hours of fighting, the American troops had been decimated. The battle still stands as the worst defeat ever suffered by the U.S. military. In response, Washington ordered Major General Anthony Wayne to build an army powerful enough to subdue the

Natives. Wayne’s 5,000-man Legion of the United States waited until 1794 to once again attack the Maumee Valley. On August 20, 1794, Wayne scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Little Turtle’s War officially came to an end with the signing of the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which saw the Natives cede land in present-day Ohio and Indiana. The remainder of Ohio was ceded to the United States in the 1805 Treaty of Fort Industry. When Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency of the United States in 1801, he articulated a federal Indian policy that was intended both to remove Native peoples from their homelands and to assimilate them into the general U.S. population. Jefferson’s removal policy called for federal agents to negotiate agreements with Native groups to purchase their lands. Jefferson believed that all parties would recognize that negotiation was preferable for all rather than constant warfare. His “civilization” policy promised Native Americans that they would have a place in the United States of America if they abandoned their traditional cultures, embraced Christianity, and adopted an agricultural lifestyle. Over the course of several generations, it was believed, this forced acculturation would lead to complete assimilation. In theory, the removal and civilization policies depended on Native American willingness to give up both their homelands and their cultures voluntarily. Two years into Jefferson’s presidency, the perspective of the federal government changed due to the Louisiana Purchase. Suddenly, the United States owned all American Indian-occupied lands due to an agreement with France. Jefferson subsequently posited that the United States should begin removing Native peoples west of the Mississippi River. The response of Native American groups to the changes in 1803 varied widely. Some rejected the land claims of the United States and forged stronger relationships with Great Britain in order to acquire the arms necessary to militarily resist the Americans. Other groups attempted to find ways to coexist peacefully with the Americans. For some, the “civilization” policy meant yet another means to maintain their identity as a people. Although the French had relinquished all their claims to North America with the Louisiana Purchase, that did not mean that the United States was secure. Spain was still entrenched in Florida, and Great Britain had a powerful economic and military presence in the Northwest Territory. In truth, France’s departure strengthened British influence among many Native groups as they became the only real alternative to the Americans. Access to British weaponry and other material support ensured that the Native groups would continue to be formidable opponents for the United States, whose standing army was relatively weak and depended on support from state militias, many of which were poorly trained and equipped. The United States did make inroads with some Native American leaders. Agents of the United States cultivated relationships with Indians who wished to accommodate the desires of the United States in exchange for peace and a steady supply of trade goods. These accommodationist leaders were useful to the United States, because they could be coerced into signing treaties ceding lands to which they might not even have had a legitimate claim. By providing goods and—by extension—prestige to chiefs whom they favored, the United States also divided Native groups. For example, although Tecumseh is viewed as the greatest Native American leader of his era, he was not followed by all of his fellow Shawnees. Some followed his rival, Black Hoof, who was a dependable ally of the United States. Tecumseh was a respected Shawnee leader who fought alongside Blue Jacket at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he refused to sign the Treaty of Greenville and vowed to continue fighting the advance of the U.S. citizenry. In 1805, Tecumseh’s brother, Lalawethika, had a vision from which he gained religious instructions that enabled him to become a powerful religious leader. He subsequently took the name Tenskwatawa, meaning “Open Door,” and, with his brother, built a pan-Indian militant religious revitalization movement. The religious/military movement attracted

adherents from such varied groups as the Shawnees, Potawatomis, Kickapoos, and Sauks. They lived together in a community named Prophetstown, located in present-day Indiana, which was established by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa in 1808. The town was strategically located close to British outposts, thus providing Tecumseh’s warriors a dependable source of munitions. Tecumseh’s activities did not go unchallenged, as William Henry Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, confronted Tecumseh on several occasions. In 1811 to 1812, Tecumseh visited the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks in search of allies. Upon discovering that Tecumseh was not at Prophetstown, Harrison marched militiamen from Indiana and Kentucky to goad Tenskwatawa into a battle. The forces met at the Battle of Tippecanoe on November 7, 1811. Harrison was able to defeat the Natives and defang the pan-Indian confederacy. When Tecumseh returned, he discovered that most of his warriors were gone. When the War of 1812 erupted, the British asked Tecumseh to recruit Native warriors for the British war effort. Tecumseh and his warriors joined the British in Canada in 1813 in an assault on the Ohio Valley. The campaign went poorly and the British forces were harried by American troops led by William Henry Harrison back to Canada. Tired of continually retreating, Tecumseh and his warriors made their stand at the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh was killed on October 5, 1813. Tecumseh continued to have an influence on the conflict through the Red Stick Creeks. They were the only allies that Tecumseh had gained during his tour of the South between 1811 and 1812. The Red Sticks adopted Tenskwatawa’s religion and erupted in civil war against the planter class of elite Creeks and their American allies. The resulting Creek War of 1813–1814 helped bring Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militia major general, to prominence. His militia and their Cherokee and Creek allies crushed the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, thereby bringing the Creek War to an end. In the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which formally ended the war, Jackson’s views on how to treat the Natives were revealed. He forced the Creeks to cede 22 million acres of land, much of which was occupied by his Creek allies. The Cherokees who fought alongside Jackson were required to give the United States 3 million acres. Jackson subsequently defeated a British force at the Battle of New Orleans, which concluded the War of 1812. The end of the war did not satisfy Jackson, as he illegally invaded Florida in his efforts to prosecute a war with the Seminoles. His actions led to Spain ceding its holdings to the United States. Jackson’s brutal but effective tactics against Native Americans made him a nationally prominent leader. The end of the War of 1812 effectively marked the end of Jefferson’s “civilization” policy. In the eyes of many citizens of the United States, the Indians had been given an opportunity to peacefully acculturate and become Americans. Instead, many had allied themselves with Great Britain and fought against their supposed benefactors. Their actions during the war proved that they could not be trusted to live peacefully among citizens of the United States.

FROM “CIVILIZATION” TO REMOVAL IN THE SOUTH The actions of citizens in Georgia were emblematic of how most Americans embraced President Jefferson’s removal policy at the dawn of the 19th century. At that time, most of present-day Georgia was occupied by the Creeks and the Cherokees. Georgians lusted after the lands inhabited by those groups because they occupied some of the finest agricultural lands known in North America. The soil was particularly suited to growing cotton. Land was obtained from the Creeks through the Georgia Compact of 1802 and individual land sales negotiated by federal agents. Despite federal efforts, Georgia’s citizenry was dissatisfied with the pace of land acquisitions. During the 1820s, Georgia succeeded in acquiring significant tracts of Creek lands by signing treaties with William McIntosh that made him extremely

wealthy at the expense of his fellow Creeks. McIntosh grew so greedy that he even approached Cherokee leader John Ross with a proposal to sell Cherokee lands to Georgia. The Cherokees repudiated McIntosh’s advances and reported his activities to other Creek Indian leaders. Although the Creek Council forbade any other land cessions in 1823, McIntosh and some confederates signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, which ceded all of the remaining Creek land in Georgia, along with most of present-day Alabama. Although all parties involved knew that McIntosh did not have the authority to cede lands, Georgia’s leaders considered the treaty binding. The treaty was so egregious that the U.S. government intervened on behalf of the Creeks. Federal agents negotiated the 1826 Treaty of Washington between the parties that compensated the Creeks for all the lands they ceded in Georgia, but allowed them to retain their lands in Alabama. Southerners, such as Andrew Jackson, resented the federal government negating a “legal” land cession on behalf of the Creeks. The Cherokees, having observed what happened to the Creeks, preemptively made themselves a sovereign nation. They adopted a tribal constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution in 1827. This was the final act in a process that had seen the Cherokees adopt Christianity, become agriculturalists, and live in the same manner as their American neighbors. This was true throughout the South, as the Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws had also acculturated themselves. The elite class of these groups, like their white counterparts, lived on plantations and had slaves. When Georgia violated their sovereignty in 1828, the Cherokees turned to the U.S. Supreme Court to protect their rights. Although they lost the case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia on a technicality, they were successful in the 1831 Worcester v. Georgia case, but the victory proved pyrrhic. Although the Marshall Court had made a landmark decision that supposedly was a victory for all Native groups, Georgia and President Andrew Jackson ignored the decision. Georgia sent surveyors onto Cherokee lands in 1832 and two years later allowed American settlers to seize the real estate that they desired. Believing that life in Oklahoma was preferable to remaining on their homelands, Cherokee leaders Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot illegally traded all Cherokee lands to the federal government in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota. Although the federal government knew that the Cherokee signatories did not have the authority to sell tribal lands, Jackson accepted the document as legal and sent federal troops to enforce its edicts. Most of the Cherokees were forced at the point of a bayonet to move west. Boudinot and both of the Ridges were eventually executed by supporters of Cherokee chief John Ross for their actions. During the presidential campaign of 1828, Indian removal was a major campaign issue. Andrew Jackson was a strong proponent of removal, arguing that the presence of Native Americans within the United States was a threat to national security. He also claimed that Natives were negatively impacting the nation’s economy, as they were not using the land to its fullest potential. This last point was made in relation to the fertile agricultural lands of the South, whose acquisition promised the rise of King Cotton. Upon becoming president, Jackson and his supporters introduced the Indian Removal Act. It was staunchly opposed by northern legislators, who correctly believed that its passage would lead to a massive expansion of slavery in the South. The Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830. The act was written in a manner that required federal authorities to negotiate terms by which Native groups might choose to migrate to lands beyond the Mississippi River. Jackson and his supporters ignored the technicalities and endeavored to remove all Native groups from the East in whatever fashion was required to accomplish the task. The Choctaws were the first of the southern tribes to be moved to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). They opted to move once they were informed by U.S. secretary of war John H. Eaton that a refusal to leave would result in a declaration of war by the United States. In response, Choctaw leaders

accepted the terms of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The Creeks followed after the signing of the 1832 Treaty of Washington, which is also known as the Cusseta Treaty. In 1832, some minor Seminole leaders negotiated away their land in Florida through the Treaty of Payne’s Landing. Although the United States considered the document legally binding, a majority of the Seminoles refused to leave. The Seminoles were instructed to be at Tampa Bay, Florida, by January 1, 1836, or face a war with the United States. Days before the deadline, the Seminoles attacked American forces en route to Fort Brooke and at Fort King. The Second Seminole War would not end until 1842. At that point, the U.S. government opted to negotiate another removal agreement. Removal was not confined to the South, as agents of the United States were also active in the Midwest. One of the more egregious treaties signed during the removal era was negotiated in 1832 between U.S. general Winfield Scott and Keokuk, which resulted in the cession of all lands owned by the Sauks and Meskwakis. Keokuk was not even a chief, but was recognized as one by Scott in order to make the treaty “legal.” The treaty sparked the 1832 Black Hawk War, which lasted from May to August of that year. Following Black Hawk’s defeat, President Jackson had him and his prominent supporters paraded around the United States to demonstrate to all Native peoples that defiance of the United States would only lead to ruin. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, along with the U.S. Army, enabled the United States to rid itself of the Native American groups that resided in the trans-Appalachian West. For those Natives forced west of the Mississippi River, their miseries only continued in the Indian Territory. Much of the land there was poor for agricultural purposes and, more importantly, was already occupied. The Comanches and Osages in particular preyed upon the new arrivals. The violence between all of the respective Native groups was ultimately settled by the dictates of the federal government, which controlled the food that the respective Native groups required to avoid starving to death. This dependency on the federal government would have severe consequences for all of the Native groups into the 20th century.

American System The American System was a political system whose implementation was a key controversy in national politics from the 1820s into the 1840s. Its features included the establishment of tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing, the construction or improvements of the transportation infrastructure required to get goods to market, the establishment of a national bank for the purpose of regulating other financial institutions, and the establishment of land policy in the West. The American System first emerged as a unified response to the necessity of growing industry and manufacturing throughout the United States, a need that had emerged after the conclusion of the War of 1812 when Americans became painfully aware of their economic vulnerability to Great Britain. Over time, the American System came to be tied more to the aspirations of its primary architect, Henry Clay, one of the Whig Party’s leaders, than it did to the needs of the country at large. The American System became the platform for his presidential campaigns of 1824, 1832, and 1844. Henry Clay was born in Virginia in 1777 and educated as a lawyer. In 1797, he moved to Kentucky, where he settled in Lexington. The city was a key cog in the nation’s infrastructure due to its burgeoning hemp industry. Clay and other business and political elites determined that the prosperity of the entire commonwealth depended on their business interests. Thus it was a good use of public funds to construct the roads and improve the waterways that helped Lexington businesses get goods to market. Since Kentucky’s individual counties did not have the financial wherewithal or the technical expertise to

improve their local transportation infrastructure, Clay and his associates utilized the legislature to make that the responsibility of the commonwealth at large. The resulting “Bluegrass System” was embraced by entrepreneurs in Central Kentucky as an expansion of the market revolution to the region. For rural agriculturalists, it was an elaborate way for Lexington’s elites to squander the public’s money. After Clay was elected in 1810 to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Bluegrass System became the model for the American System. The emergence of what became the American System mirrored the development of the Whig Party. The leaders who largely created the Whig Party, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, all came to national prominence during the War of 1812. After the war concluded, the men worked together to address the economic issues that plagued the country. New England, which was Webster’s focus, had seen its manufacturing sector devastated by a combination of Great Britain exporting low-cost goods to the United States and blocking access by American businesses to foreign markets. As a westerner, Clay was particularly concerned about the lack of capital available to build roads to make it possible to get agricultural goods to markets in the eastern portion of the country. Southerners like John C. Calhoun also stood to benefit from economic development for the agricultural sector. As regional differences came to the fore in the 1830s, disagreements among the three men and the parts of the countries they represented made passage of much of the American System difficult. While the North became a manufacturing region, the South embraced agriculture based on slave labor, and the question of which economy would drive western development dominated national politics. Southern Democrats came to distrust any perceived threat to their personal freedoms or states’ rights. Calhoun, representing his constituents, came to see the American System as a consolidation of federal power. The gradual erosion of trust among Clay, Webster, and Calhoun not only impacted the American System, but also led to the dissolution of the Whig Party.

ERIE CANAL Unlike those funded by Henry Clay’s American System, perhaps the most important internal improvement in the first half of the 20th century did not receive money from the federal government but was funded by individual states. Trying to tap into the previously isolated market of the Middle West, New York governor DeWitt Clinton approved funding to create an “artificial river”—a canal—which would run from Lake Erie to the Hudson River. Clinton’s success in making New York “the greatest commercial emporium in the world” spurred relentless competition. In 1816 there were only 100 total miles of canals in the United States. By 1840, there were more than 3,300 miles of canals, and the cost to ship agricultural products from Lake Erie to New York City dropped from $100 per ton to $9. Completed two years ahead of schedule, the Erie Canal recouped its entire construction cost of $10 million in 10 years. It was 363 miles long and 40 miles wide at the top. With elevation changes of 680 feet, it required 83 locks to raise or lower boats. Eighteen aqueducts spanned valleys nearly 100 feet in depth and 1,000 yards long. The canal was seen as a wonder in the 1820s, and many Americans looked on it with nationalistic pride. Proposing more canals be built, the famous statesman John C. Calhoun exclaimed, “Let us … bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals. Let us conquer space.” Americans, it seemed to many, could do anything: make water run uphill, build rivers in the sky, conquer time and space. Unfortunately, pride in the canal system did little to raise the standard of living for the thousands of mostly Irish laborers who actually built it.

Through the 1820s, Clay had been able to fund many internal improvement projects in the United States due to his control of the U.S. House of Representatives. During the presidential campaign of 1824, he helped get John Quincy Adams elected over Andrew Jackson. After Jackson’s ascension to the presidency in 1828, Whigs began the ideological battle with Jackson’s Democratic Party that shaped the future of the American System. Jackson was seen as a man of the people who favored a laissez-faire economic system. Southerners gravitated toward Jackson’s economic ideas, because Southerners believed

free trade with England benefited their cotton economy. Southern voters also believed that the American System’s emphasis on manufacturing discriminated against their economic interests in favor of New England’s. Clay’s economic system was dependent on the use of tariffs to dictate trade policy from a central government. Likewise, his desire for the creation of a central bank was guided by a belief that the nation’s finances needed to be tightly controlled so that an educated business class could determine how best to use the nation’s resources. This particular tenet of the American System reflected an obvious bias on his part, as such control would allow him and his confederates to use the funds however they saw fit. The rivalry between Clay and Jackson gave voters what many saw as a clear choice: Clay’s American System and its centralized government mechanisms versus Jackson’s freedoms for “the common man.” Presidential voters in 1832 chose Jackson over Clay in an election whose central issue was Jackson’s decision not to recharter the Second Bank of the United States. Stymied in his bid to be able to control the government’s finances, Clay turned his attention to land development issues of the West, including improvements to transportation infrastructure. Although Clay was able to get his massive land bill through Congress in 1832, Jackson did not sign the legislation. Clay opted to wait until his adversary left the presidency before trying again to get that bill, which was one of the largest pieces of legislation related to the American System introduced in Congress, passed into law. In 1842 President John Tyler, a Whig, also declined to sign the legislation. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Jackson, Andrew

Further Reading Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Baxter, Maurice G. Henry Clay and the American System. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Howe, Daniel Walter. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Assimilation The United States was born of the Enlightenment, and its idealism informed many aspects of the emerging American nation, nowhere more forcefully than in the Declaration of Independence and its ringing nostrums of “all men created equal.” This enlightened ideal of the equality of humankind had genuine and profound implications for the type of nation—and empire—the United States would become. The nascent American empire, according to its ideals, would be distinct from the British or Spanish or any of the European states in that it would be, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “an empire of liberty.” Few observers thought the emergence of a unique nation in the Western Hemisphere to be accidental. Immigrant and visitor alike proclaimed both the inevitability and the novelty of North American colonial development leading toward independence. The distance from Europe, combined with the practice of self-government, gave rise to a new nation boasting a novel conception of citizenship. In 1776, South Carolinian William Henry Drayton declared: And thus has suddenly arisen in the World a new Empire, stiled, the United States of America. An Empire that as soon as started into Existence, attracts the Attention of the Rest of the Universe; and

bids fair, by the blessing of God, to be the most glorious of any upon Record. (Drayton, 13) That same year, Thomas Paine eloquently elaborated on American uniqueness in Common Sense: “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every Part of Europe” (Paine, 34). Frenchman Hector St. John de Crevecoeur echoed similar sentiments, noting that in the United States “individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world” (De Crevecoeur, letter III). The idea of a nation of equally free citizens would have profound implications for notions of assimilation well into the 20th century. The first generations of the new nation hardly thought about the issues of assimilation as we might today. Rather, they believed that the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” would inexorably mold diverse European immigrants into one people by a process of assimilation and, equally, that others—American Indian and African—likely would not be. The ideals and assumptions of the founding generation excused policymakers from having to reflect on the role of choice and the political process in the formation of citizenship. The assumption that “all men were created equal” in no way altered their belief that “we the people”—that is, the political state—could exclude nonwhites. That all were equally human in no way entailed that all were equally equipped by nature to be citizens of the American state. By excluding African Americans and American Indians, American political leaders and opinion makers left it for later generations to engage with practical questions of assimilation. From Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to Henry James and Mark Twain, most 19th-century Americans celebrated a unique and wonderful ethnic diversity that characterized antebellum America. To the 21st-century sensibility, that same celebratory rhetoric rings decidedly homogenous, racist, exclusive, and pernicious. Indeed, even if largely unacknowledged at the time, “assimilation” included European displacement of Native Americans throughout the Northwest Territories and the Old Southwest as well as amalgamation of African Americans in the South. Never discussed at the time, the single greatest experiment in assimilation to 1835 occurred on the plantations of the American South, where immigrants from a great swath of the African west coast (often via the Caribbean) joined together to recreate themselves as African Americans. Excluding nonwhites, the great discussions of assimilation between 1785 and 1835 concerned what many believed to be the natural and inevitable amalgamation of many European ethnicities and religious affiliations into a single American stock. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated how the United States “transforms the English, the German, the Irish emigrant into an American.… The individuality of the immigrant, almost even his traits of race and religion, fuse down in the democratic alembic like chips of brass thrown into the melting pot” (Emerson, 463). Issues concerning the speed of and methods entailed in “the fusing process” Emerson and others subsumed under the larger questions of nationhood, westward migration, territorial growth, and empire. In the East in the 18th century, assimilation served more as a trope than a reality. As much as the Revolution and Constitution forged a nation, the settlements of the Atlantic Seaboard remained sufficiently spread out so as to enable a high degree of isolation. It seems better to think of Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century more as pluralistic and tolerant than as assimilated or integrated, with even the emerging cities of Philadelphia and New York City featuring separate ethnic neighborhoods. Living in close proximity did not necessarily entail integration. The West and westward migration introduced some novel elements into the mix. Mobility meant many things, including an escape valve, enabling outsiders and outcasts to avoid confrontation or integration by

moving away. Into the 19th century, immigration groups increasingly found opportunity in the transAppalachian West to establish communities where they might enjoy a high degree of autonomy so as to maintain Old World languages and religions and other cultural practices. Germans and Scandinavians bypassed the East to establish large, vibrant communities on the Illinois prairie and in the Michigan and Wisconsin territories at least in part so as to retain ethnic identities. Immigrants in these communities demonstrated how assimilation was neither imposed by the majority nor something that spontaneously happened to new arrivals. Assimilation proved to be a collaborative process, negotiated between and among Americans, old and new. Precisely when an immigrant community joined the mainstream remains an open question. That all European comers could become American became something of a creed in the 19th century, as evidenced at least in part by the failure of the American Party, better known as the Know-Nothings, in the 1850s. As with all creeds, the ideology of assimilation hid within it a multitude of assumptions and prejudices. In the end, measures of assimilation, of Americanness, came to be located less in the rejection of Old World culture than in the wholesale embrace of a novel conception of citizenship. To be an American meant to assent to the idea of a pluralistic nation based on nothing more or less than a set of abstract political ideals. In sum, the story of assimilation in the new nation boasts as many complex chapters as the diverse sections of the United States and experiences of its immigrants. In one sense assimilation, broadly construed, is the universal experience of every American who has had to learn to live in a society where one understands that consensus is negotiated. The great paradox at the heart of assimilation in the first 50 years of the American nation seems evident. Americans celebrated their unity in diversity—e pluribus unum—even as they held certain beliefs about what constitutes an American that today seem exclusive, racist, and un-American. Peter S. Field See also: Anglo-Saxonism

Further Reading De Crevecoeur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. 1782. Drayton, William Henry. A Charge on the Rise of the American Empire. Charleston, 1776. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Galaxy 19, no. 4 (April, 1875). Gordon, Milton. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Philadelphia, 1776.

Bad Axe, Battle of. See Black Hawk Black Hawk (1767–1838) Black Hawk, also known as Makataimeshekiakiak, was born in the Sauk village of Saukenuk in 1767. As a young warrior, he gained renown as an opponent of U.S. expansion into Native lands. He particularly opposed the Treaty of 1804, which ceded all Sauk and Meskwaki lands along a tract located east of the Mississippi River extending from southwestern Wisconsin to portions of Missouri. Black Hawk’s hatred of American encroachment led him to join Tecumseh as an ally of the British during the War of 1812.

Following that conflict, accommodationist Sauk leaders, most notably Keokuk, opted to ally the Sauks to the United States. The United States subsequently recognized Keokuk as the principal chief of the Sauks. In return, Keokuk pledged to keep the Sauks on lands west of the Mississippi River in present-day Iowa. Black Hawk, who refused to recognize Keokuk’s authority and the validity of the Treaty of 1804, continued to reside with his followers in their homeland east of the Mississippi River. By the late 1820s, violence began to emerge between the American settlers and Black Hawk’s followers, and American representatives encouraged Black Hawk’s band to move permanently to Iowa. In 1831, the United States promised to provide Black Hawk’s people the corn required for them to subsist through the winter in exchange for their relocation, but the food never arrived. Black Hawk determined that their agreement had been voided, and in the spring of 1832 he led approximately 1,000 followers across the Mississippi River toward Saukenuk. Although the Natives came with peaceful intentions, their presence led Illinois governor John Reynolds to dispatch the state militia under the excuse that Black Hawk’s actions were an act of war. The so-called Black Hawk War of 1832 began on May 14, 1832, when militia troops fired upon a delegation of Sauks interested in negotiating a truce. The skirmish was followed by the Battle of Stillman’s Run, where 11 militiamen were killed by Black Hawk’s warriors. Black Hawk and his followers had no real desire for war, as they had gone toward Saukenuk with women and children in their midst in the hopes of growing crops. They had not prepared to wage a war. For most of the conflict, the Sauks attempted to retreat while seeking a peaceful resolution to what they viewed as a misunderstanding. Black Hawk and his warriors were forced into a pitched battle against the Illinois forces on August 2 at the Bad Axe River, where more than 300 Sauks, including women and children, were slaughtered. Black Hawk and other Sauk leaders were imprisoned at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. In the surrender agreement, the Sauks were forced to renounce their claims to all lands in eastern Iowa. Black Hawk and his family were subsequently toured around the United States. During his appearances, he pledged his friendship to his conquerors. He was released from prison in 1833. In his later years, Black Hawk dictated his story to Antoine LeClaire, which was subsequently published as Black Hawk: An Autobiography. Black Hawk died on October 3, 1838. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Keokuk; Prairie du Chien, Treaties of; Primary Documents: Black Hawk Remembers Village Life Along the Mississippi (1834)

Further Reading Black Hawk. Black Hawk: An Autobiography. Edited by Donald Jackson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Jung, Patrick J. The Black Hawk War of 1832. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Trask, Kerry A. Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt, 2007.

Black Hoof (d. 1831) Black Hoof, or Catahecassa, was a Shawnee chief who contributed to the new economic and political order of the Northwest after the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. As a politician, Black Hoof led Shawnees at Wapakoneta in an important cultural transition. Black Hoof claimed to have remembered Braddock’s defeat in 1755 and the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, suggesting he was at least middle-aged by the time of the American Revolution. With many fellow Shawnees, he helped defend Shawnee homes from white Kentucky incursions in the 1780s and

against the U.S. invasions under Generals Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne in the early 1790s. After signing the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, he established a town at Wapakoneta on the Auglaize River in western Ohio. Although the majority of Shawnees then lived in Missouri, the Ohio Shawnees lived at Wapakoneta, Lewistown, and Hog Creek reservations. Like some contemporary counterparts, Black Hoof sold land to the United States in return for annual payments and policy control. These treaties included the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1803), Grouseland (1805), and Brownstown (1808). Jeffersonian Indian policy, although fluid, held that Indians could weave themselves into Euro-American society through cultural change. Black Hoof, along with Indian agent John Johnston, supported the agricultural mission of Quaker William Kirk in 1807–1808, whose purpose was to teach Shawnee men to farm rather than hunt. This nominal agreement with the United States pitted him against rising Shawnee militants Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa. These brothers formed a more conservative, anti-American community first in Greenville, Ohio, then Prophetstown, Indiana. Therefore, attempts at peace were undermined on two fronts. First, racial tensions grew between many whites and Indians. Second, ideological differences arose between Shawnees who accommodated and those who resisted American missions. During the War of 1812, Black Hoof suffered anti-Indian violence and threats despite his support of the United States. The War of 1812 effectively removed checks on U.S. expansion; Black Hoof’s bargaining power faded. The Treaty of Fort Meigs (1817) and of St. Mary’s (1818) confined the Shawnees to relatively small reservations. Black Hoof, along with other signers, enhanced his prestige among American agents. U.S. payments provided limited but important supplements for the struggling Shawnee economy. Treaties also maintained a Shawnee land base, albeit small. Even though Euro-Americans saw the Wapakoneta Shawnees as racially inferior and probably a vanishing race, Black Hoof laid the groundwork for their future as Ohioans. Black Hoof, paralleling other Indian chiefs, represented an increasingly centralized tribal nation. As the former village chief of the Mekoče division, he had little coercive authority. Yet as he and U.S. agents constructed his position as “Grand Chief” of the Shawnee Nation, he controlled Shawnee annuities and mediated between the federal government and the Shawnee people. By locating authority in one or a few Indian leaders, U.S. agents meant to ease treaty negotiations and Indian removal. Black Hoof remained against removal to his death in 1831. That year, tired of the cycles of racial violence near the reservation, Wapakoneta Shawnees agreed to remove to Kansas. Cameron Shriver

This portrait of Black Hoof was part of James Hall and Thomas McKenney’s famous History of the Indian Tribes of North America, published in 1839. (Library of Congress)

See also: Assimilation; Civilization Policy; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Ohio Indian Confederation; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskawata; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Calloway, Colin. The Shawnees and the War for America. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Warren, Stephen. The Shawnees and Their Neighbors. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Blue Jacket (ca. 1740–ca. 1810) Blue Jacket was born sometime between 1740 and 1743. He was born Sepettekenathe, meaning “Big Rabbit,” but changed his name to Waweyapiersenwa, or “Whirlpool.” Little is known about his early years, but he became a prominent warrior among the Shawnees. Evidence suggests that he may have been one of the Native leaders at the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774, during Lord Dunmore’s War. When the American Revolution erupted, Blue Jacket traveled to Pittsburgh and negotiated with the colonies to become an ally. Ultimately, Blue Jacket and the Shawnees opted to remain neutral. They abandoned that course following the murder of Cornstalk in 1777 and aligned themselves with Great Britain. Blue Jacket proved valuable to the British after he joined in the campaign against Vincennes in 1778–1779 and the 1780 invasion of Kentucky led by Captain Henry Bird. Once the American Revolution was concluded, what chance there was of peace was destroyed by the United States’ imposition in 1786 of the Treaty of Fort Finney, which claimed all of the land in the Ohio Country that was north of the Ohio River and east of the Greater Miami River for the new country. Later that same year, Colonel Benjamin

Logan led Kentucky militiamen in an invasion of the Ohio Country, where they razed many Native communities, including Blue Jacket’s. Blue Jacket and the Shawnees joined with other groups to fight against the continuing assaults on their people by citizens of the United States. The resulting conflict became known as Little Turtle’s War. In 1790, General Josiah Harmar and his troops invaded the Maumee Valley, where members of the Delawares, Miamis, and Shawnees were living. Those troops were defeated by warriors led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle. Blaming the defeat on Harmar’s incompetence, President George Washington in 1791 ordered Major General Arthur St. Clair to launch an expedition against Blue Jacket and Little Turtle’s forces. On November 4, 1791, at the Battle of the Wabash, Blue Jacket and Little Turtle’s warriors left more than 800 Americans dead or wounded, the worst defeat ever suffered by the U.S. military. It is estimated that the allied Native peoples suffered fewer than 70 casualties. Major General Anthony Wayne and his 5,000-man Legion of the United States launched an expedition during the summer of 1794 to engage Little Turtle and Blue Jacket and avenge the defeats of Harmar and St. Clair. The forces met on August 20 at Fallen Timbers, where the pan-Indian confederacy was soundly defeated. Little Turtle’s War concluded with the signing of the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, when Blue Jacket and other Native leaders ceded substantial amounts of land in present-day Ohio and Indiana to the United States. The United States acquired the rest of Ohio in 1805 through the Treaty of Fort Industry, which Blue Jacket also signed. It is believed that he died sometime between 1808 and 1810. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Greenville, Treaty of; Little Turtle; St. Clair, Arthur

Further Reading Calloway, Colin G. The Shawnees and the War for America. New York: Viking, 2007. Gaff, Alan D. Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Sugden, John. Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Boone, Daniel (1734–1820) Daniel Boone was born November 2, 1734, in Pennsylvania to Sarah and Squire Boone. The Boone family moved to North Carolina in 1750 and settled in the colony’s western frontier. During the early stages of the French and Indian War, Daniel Boone enlisted in the militia and was a part of General Edward Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against Fort Duquesne. While serving in the militia, Boone was told by John Findley about a game-rich area called Kentucky. Boone subsequently returned to North Carolina, where he married his wife, Rebecca, in 1756. Although they soon started a family, Boone was constantly away from home hunting and exploring. On May 1, 1769, Findley and Boone, along with four other hunters, set out together for Kentucky and passed through the Cumberland Gap. Boone explored Kentucky for two years before returning home. He attempted to bring his family and others to settle in Kentucky in 1773 but was forced to turn back after two members of the expedition, including his son, were killed by Indians. In 1775 he returned to Kentucky to establish a settlement for his employer, Richard Henderson, who intended to create a new colony. Toward that end, Boone and his men cut Boone’s Trace or the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and established Fort Boonesborough on the banks of the Kentucky River. Between 1775 and 1778, Boone was involved in many conflicts with Indians living in the region. On February 7, 1778, Boone and approximately 30 men were captured by the Shawnees while trying to

obtain salt. The Shawnee leader, Blackfish, chose to adopt Boone as his son. Boone overheard that Blackfish was going to lead an expedition against Boonesborough, so he escaped and arrived back at the fort just a few days before the attack. Although significantly outnumbered, the fort’s defenders prevailed. Daniel Boone’s final significant battle on the Kentucky frontier took place at Blue Licks on August 19, 1782. A British force and their Shawnee and Wyandot allies ambushed a group of militiamen and routed them. Boone survived, but his son Israel did not. Although Native warriors made sporadic attacks into central Kentucky into the mid-1790s, the frontier had largely moved to the West. Land-hungry businessmen and lawyers began pouring into Kentucky. Although Boone had accumulated approximately 100,000 acres of land that he had personally surveyed, he soon lost it in courtrooms. In 1775, a series of trials began that saw his land titles invalidated due to both his poor skills as a surveyor and technicalities regarding the land titles’ registration. Embittered, he left for Missouri in 1790 where the Spanish provided him with 850 acres of land. He received an additional 8,500 acres when he established a community with 100 families he had enticed to emigrate to Missouri. Boone subsequently lost all that real estate after the Louisiana Purchase because the United States did not recognize his Spanish titles. The U.S. Congress in 1814 decided to award him 850 acres of land for his efforts to open Kentucky and Missouri for settlement, but he was so indebted that he sold the land to pay off his many creditors. He died in Charles County, Missouri, on September 26, 1820. John R. Burch Jr.

Daniel Boone established a route through the Appalachians and helped create Kentucky’s first white settlement. He was the most famous of the first wave of white settlers to colonize the Kentucky back country. (Library of Congress)

Further Reading Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Faragher, John Mack. Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. New York: Henry Holt, 1992.

Morgan, Robert. Boone: A Biography. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007.

Boudinot, Elias (ca. 1802–1839) Elias Boudinot was a Cherokee political leader. Born Galagina, meaning “Buck,” sometime between 1802 and 1804, he was educated by Moravians at their mission school in Georgia from 1811 to 1818. In 1817, he renamed himself Elias Boudinot in honor of the president of the American Bible Society. He then attended the American Board of Commissioners Foreign Mission School in Connecticut until 1822. He converted to Christianity in 1820 and married Harriett Gold, a classmate at the Foreign Mission School, in 1826. The marriage led to the closure of the school, as New Englanders could not accept the interracial marriage that they blamed on the school’s charge that all of its students be viewed as equals. By 1825, Boudinot was once again living among the Cherokees. He became a proponent of the “civilization” effort among his people. Toward that end, he began fundraising in the Northeast on behalf of the Cherokee Council for the purchase of a printing press that utilized the syllabary that had been developed by a Cherokee named Sequoyah. The Cherokee Council in 1827 purchased a printing press and named Boudinot the editor of their biweekly Cherokee Phoenix. Among Boudinot’s collaborators on the Cherokee Phoenix was Samuel A. Worcester, a missionary who became famous as the defendant in the case Worcester v. Georgia. The Cherokee Phoenix was published from 1828 to 1835. In addition to publishing the newspaper, Boudinot also translated several books of the Bible’s New Testament into Cherokee. In the aftermath of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Elias Boudinot came to the conclusion that the only way to retain Cherokee culture and sovereignty was to move away from white settlers and establish a new homeland in the West. Boudinot began advocating for this position in the Cherokee Phoenix, which outraged John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokees, who believed that the official Cherokee newspaper should print only articles articulating the staunch opposition of the Cherokee leadership against removal. Boudinot subsequently resigned as editor in 1832. In December 1835, Boudinot joined the leadership of the Treaty Party, which included his cousin John Ridge and his uncle Major Ridge, in signing the Treaty of New Echota. This treaty ceded the Cherokee homeland in the east for lands in present-day Oklahoma. Although the land cession was a clear violation of Cherokee law, the U.S. government viewed the agreement as binding and forced the Cherokees to migrate to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears. Boudinot and his family migrated west in 1837. He was murdered on September 27, 1830. It is unknown who killed him, but it is widely believed that he died at the hands of John Ross’s supporters as punishment for violating Cherokee law concerning land cessions. John R. Burch Jr.

SEQUOYAH AND THE CHEROKEE SYLLABARY No Native group in the first half of the 19th century fulfilled the requirements of “civilization” more than the Cherokees. In addition to having 33 grist mills, 13 saw mills, 69 blacksmith shops, 2 tan yards, and 2,486 spinning wheels (according to an 1825 census), the Indians established the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper printed in both English and Cherokee. The latter was possible because the son of Virginia trader and a Cherokee mother had, in 1821, hit on the plan for establishing a written version of his native tongue. Using a separate written character for each syllable in the spoken Cherokee language, Sequoyah (also known as George Gist) created an 86-character syllabary that reportedly could be mastered in a week. The written language was endorsed by Cherokee leadership, and it almost immediately came into wide use. According to one contemporary source, “The whole nation became an academy for the study of the system.”

The syllabary exemplified Sequoyah’s larger mission of establishing peaceful relations both among factions of Cherokees and between Cherokees and Euro-Americans. In 1828, he traveled to Washington, D.C., as part of a treaty delegation where he was honored by national officials and had his portrait painted by Charles Bird King. While this treaty was unable to stop the Cherokees’ removal, Sequoyah continued to work to maintain Cherokee identity. In 1839, he signed the Cherokee Union Act, which created a united government in a time of increasing factionalism. Three years later, in ailing health, he continued his mission to unite his people by traveling to Mexico with his son to find a Cherokee band that had previously migrated. Finding them in Matamoros, Mexico, Sequoyah had fulfilled his goal. He died soon after.

See also: Cherokees; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Ridge, John; Ross, John

Further Reading Boudinot, Elias. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot. Edited by Theda Perdue. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Smith, Daniel Blake. An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. New York: Henry Holt, 2011. To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839. Edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Brant, Joseph (1743–1807) Joseph Brant was a prominent Mohawk political leader in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Brant, also known as Thayendanegea, was born in Canajoharie sometime in 1743. From 1761 to 1763, Brant was educated at Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School in Connecticut. Upon his return to Iroquoia, Brant became an interpreter for the British Indian Department. His growing influence resulted in his people recognizing him as a chief and the British making him an officer in the Indian Department. From November 1775 to June 1776, Brant visited London, England, with Sir Guy Johnson, the superintendent of Indian affairs for the Northern Department. The implementation of the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix brought colonists too close to the Mohawk Valley, which enraged Joseph Brant and his people. The outbreak of the American Revolution provided him an opportunity to protect the interests of his people. Working in concert with Sir William Johnson (Sir Guy Johnson’s uncle), the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the Northern Department, Brant persuaded many of the Iroquois and other Native peoples of the Old Northwest to support the British cause. This period was devastating to the Iroquois Confederacy, as many of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras opted to support the colonists in the conflict. Brant organized his Iroquois warriors into a unit known as “Brant’s Volunteers” and led them into various campaigns with British regiments led by Sir Guy Johnson or Walter Butler. During the early years of the war, in addition to supporting British assaults on American installations, Brant led raiding expeditions along the frontier. On November 11, 1778, one of his raids turned disastrous, as his warriors along with Butler’s regiment participated in the Cherry Valley Massacre, where approximately 30 New Yorkers, mostly women and children, were murdered. Although Brant personally tried to protect some of the settlers, his inability to control his followers resulted in a black mark on his military career. The massacre resulted in American retaliation against Iroquoia. In the spring of 1799, American forces attacked the Onondagas, who had chosen neutrality over warfare. The following summer American forces led by Generals James Clinton and John Sullivan razed more than 40 Iroquois communities. The timing of the invasions allowed the troops to destroy all the Iroquois crops, forcing many Iroquois to become refugees at British forts. Brant personally led retaliatory expeditions against not only colonists, but also the Oneidas. Brant’s faith in his British allies proved misplaced during the negotiations of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution, when the British agreed

to peace without addressing the fate of their Native American supporters. Although the British would eventually provide a parcel of land for the Iroquois to reside on, the Iroquois lost most of their traditional homelands.

Joseph Brant was a Mohawk leader who tried to keep American expansion at bay in the late 18th century. Brant’s faith in his British allies proved misplaced, as his Iroquois Confederacy was left out of the peace negotiations following the American Revolution. (Library of Congress)

Since the Mohawks had lost their lands during the American Revolution, Frederick Haldimand, governor of Canada, established a reserve for the Iroquois on the Grand River that was approximately 12 miles wide along the length of the entire river. Brant led a contingent of Cayugas, Delawares, Mohawks, and Onondagas to settle on the land in 1785. From there, Brant encouraged the Native peoples of the Ohio Valley to form a pan-Indian confederacy to oppose the encroachment of U.S. citizens into the region. The confederacy was subsequently formed under the leadership of Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. Brant proved unable to provide Iroquois warriors for the cause, which was ultimately defeated at the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers. Brant purchased an estate on Lake Ontario in 1795, where he died on November 24, 1807. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Blue Jacket; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Iroquois Confederacy; Little Turtle; Ohio Indian Confederation

Further Reading Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Kelsay, Isabel Thompson. Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Shannon, Timothy J. Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier. New York: Viking, 2008.

Calhoun, John Caldwell (1782–1850) John Caldwell Calhoun served the nation in numerous elected and appointed positions, but he never wavered in allegiance to the South and its vested interest in slavery. Although he did not live to witness the Civil War, Calhoun played a key role in promoting the argument for states’ rights that largely led to the conflict. Born in South Carolina, Calhoun was raised on an expansive cotton farm worked by many slaves. As a young man, Calhoun was eager for education, and in 1802 he entered Yale College. After graduation, he met and married Floride Calhoun, the daughter of his cousin and a well-connected socialite. Calhoun was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807. The next year, he was elected to the state legislature. In 1811, Calhoun was elected to the House of Representatives, where he supported the war against Britain. In 1818, President James Monroe appointed Calhoun as secretary of war. When his hope for heading the presidential ticket in 1824 faded, Calhoun accepted John Quincy Adams’s offer to be his vice president. No candidate in the election won an Electoral College majority, and although Andrew Jackson had won a majority of the popular vote, the House selected Adams as president. Many observers, including Calhoun, were upset about the “corrupt bargain” in which they believed Adams named Representative Henry Clay as secretary of state in exchange for Clay’s maneuvering to ensure Adams’s selection. Throughout Adams’s presidency, Calhoun and his boss shared increasingly fewer political views, and their relationship deteriorated. In 1828, Calhoun was once again elected vice president but this time on a Democratic ticket headed by Andrew Jackson. In response to a stiff federal tariff passed under Adams, which stood to hurt the rural South, Calhoun first supported the policy of nullification. The policy dictated that the United States was a compact between the states; therefore, if a state disagreed with a federal policy, it had the right to veto the policy and protect its sovereignty. President Jackson did nothing to repeal the tariff. In fact, Jackson stated that he considered nullification tantamount to treason. A dispute between Calhoun and Jackson involving the dynamics of Jackson’s cabinet and their wives—the “Petticoat Wars”—further caused the two men to sever nearly all interactions. Later in 1831, Calhoun publicly expressed his view of nullification and stated that if the Union did not agree, “it will be impossible to preserve the Union.” South Carolina elected Calhoun to the Senate in 1832, and he became the first vice president to resign the post. He spent most of the rest of his life defending the interests of his native state in the Senate. He opposed President Polk’s war strategy against Mexico, as he foresaw the heightening of the sectional conflict over slavery. When fellow senator Daniel Webster tried to persuade the sickly, aged Calhoun to support the Compromise of 1850, Calhoun refused and delivered an address to be read to the Senate suggesting that the states could “agree to separate and part in peace.” He died later that same month. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: Jackson, Andrew

Further Reading Bartlett, Irving H. John C. Calhoun: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Hatfield, Mark O., with the Senate Historical Office. Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789–1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997, pp. 83–99.

Cass, Lewis (1782–1866)

Born October 9, 1782, at Exeter, New Hampshire, Cass spent a lifetime promoting American expansion. He started his political career in 1806 with his election to the Ohio House of Representatives and served as U.S. marshal for the district of Ohio from 1807 to 1812, governor of the Michigan Territory from 1813 to 1831, secretary of war from 1831 to 1836, ambassador/envoy to France from 1836 to 1842, U.S. senator for Michigan from 1845 to 1848 and 1849 to 1857, and secretary of state from 1857 to 1860. He undertook three attempts to become president of the United States, failing in 1844, 1848, and 1852. He fought in the War of 1812, being captured when General William Hull surrendered Detroit, testified at Hull’s court martial, and participated in the Battle of the Thames (1813). At the conclusion of the war, Cass had risen from the rank of colonel of volunteers to major general in the Ohio militia and by 1813 to brigadier general in the regular army. After resigning from public life in 1860 over the president’s failure to deal forcefully with the secessionist movement, Cass spent his remaining years in Detroit, Michigan, where he died on June 17, 1866. When Cass became the governor of the Michigan Territory in 1813, there were approximately 6,000 Euro-American settlers in the territory. Whereas Cass deemed the use of Indians during war as uncivilized and claimed that the English had done nothing since European discovery to ameliorate Indian conditions, he believed that the United States had undertaken great efforts to civilize and assist Indians in its few years of existence, thereby justifying expansion westward in the name of civilization and freedom. As governor of the Michigan Territory, Cass was also the unofficial superintendent of Indian affairs. While governor he undertook treaties with various Indian nations in Michigan. These treaties opened millions of acres of land for settlement and pushed the frontier ever westward. In addition to the signed treaties, Cass employed surveyors to lay out townships, improved transportation routes, and explored the lakes and rivers to the Mississippi. Cass wrote a number of papers on Indians while governor in support of Indian policies and promoted the notion that Indians were victimizing innocent Americans, thereby justifying all violence directed toward them as necessary and defensive. As the secretary of war for President Andrew Jackson, Cass was responsible for implementing various Indian removal schemes and overseeing treaties throughout the eastern United States, including the Trail of Tears (1831–1838). Prior to becoming the secretary of war, he justified removal to the public. It is largely thanks to his efforts both as governor and secretary of war that removal became a key aspect of 19th-century Indian relations. Simply, Cass was the most influential figure in American Indian policy and its expansion westward. During his tenure as a senator, Cass opposed the resolution of the Oregon Boundary Dispute (1844– 1846). He openly called for American occupation of the Oregon Country up to 54 degrees 40 min. of latitude (“Fifty-Four Forty or fight!” becoming the movement’s rallying cry) and for war with Britain should this occupation be opposed. He was one of 14 senators to vote against the 49th parallel compromise. Karl Hele See also: Civilization Policy; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jackson, Andrew; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; Oregon Treaty; Potawatomis; Schoolcraft, Henry; Trail of Tears

Further Reading Fierst, John. “Rationalizing Removal: Anti-Indianism in Lewis Cass’s North American Review Essays.” Michigan Historical Review 36, no. 2 (2010): 1–35. Prucha, Francis Paul. Lewis Cass and American Indian Policy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967. Schoolcraft, Henry R. Outlines of the Life and Character of Gen. Lewis Cass. Albany: Joel Munsell, Printer, 1848.

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. See Marshall (John) Court Decisions Cherokees At the time of removal from the southern United States in the 1830s, the Cherokee Indians were known as one of the “five civilized tribes” because much of their political, economic, and social systems were recognizable to many Americans. The Cherokees were not always a singularly organized political unit. From European discovery of the New World through the 17th and 18th centuries, the Cherokee Indians gradually, though not linearly, coalesced into a single tribe. When the United States declared its independence in 1776, the Cherokees implemented nationalist structures that both protected their sovereignty as an Indian nation and, at times, raised the ire of the U.S. federal and state governments. When America’s expansionist sentiment looked west during the Jacksonian era, the Cherokees were one of many indigenous tribes caught in the larger removal crisis. Though the vast majority of Cherokees opposed relocating to Indian Territory in the 1830s, the U.S. Congress accepted the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota in 1835 forcing relocation. As a consequence of American expansionist pressure and forced removal, today the Cherokee Nation is fractured into three distinct, federally recognized tribes: the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. According to oral histories, the Cherokees conceptualized their own creation stories as independent of Europeans and Africans. Cherokee stories recalled a time when water completely covered the earth, until a beetle brought mud to the surface, paving the way for large land masses. The first man and woman, Kana’ti and Selu, lived on the land with their son, Wild Boy, who accidentally released wild animals from a cave, condemning all future Cherokee men to hunt for game. Archaeological and early colonial records suggest the Cherokees formed distinct towns in southern Appalachia during the 17th and early 18th centuries, where they relied on corn agriculture and hunted as widely as Alabama and Virginia. Prior to European discovery of the New World, the Cherokees may have numbered as high as 35,000 souls. As with many Native Americans, their population declined after the arrival of Europeans as a consequence of new diseases, advanced weaponry, and profit-oriented slave raiding. By the 1760s, there were fewer than 7,000 Cherokee people concentrated in northern Georgia and the western Carolinas.

“Three American Cherokee Chiefs” depicts the Indians’ trip to London in 1762. Many Native American representatives travelled to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. (Private Collection/Peter Newark American Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library)

Europeans had little direct contact with the Cherokees until the late 1600s. Initially, English settlers sought alliances with the Cherokees for deerskins and war captives to sell as slaves to Southern plantations or the West Indies. The end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris marked a new phase of Cherokee relations with the English. The Proclamation of 1763 attempted to halt colonists from encroaching upon Native land. However, the legal divide stretching along the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains did little to stop white squatters who became some of the most vocal proponents of independence from Great Britain. With the commencement of the Revolutionary War in 1776, a parallel frontier conflict began between the Cherokees and American colonists that ended in a Cherokee defeat in 1777. With Americans securing independence in 1783, the new country claimed dominion over Indian land within the borders of the United States. President George Washington supported a social and economic approach to assure peaceable relations and gradual U.S. land acquisition. The United States managed Indian affairs primarily through a program known as the “civilization plan.” Directed by the federal government, the initiative promoted a reorientation of Native society bequeathing American advancements in exchange for land. From the late 18th century until their forcible relocation, the Cherokees attempted to balance acculturation with American society while securing their political and territorial autonomy. Many Cherokee leaders anticipated the adaptation of American practices and thwarted attempts by white settlers and southern states to take Native land. Gradually, the Cherokees incorporated or adapted several elements of the civilization program into Native society. In 1821, the Cherokee Sequoyah developed a unique syllabary, allowing thousands of Cherokees to read and write in their own language. By 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix first appeared as a weekly newspaper printed in both English and Cherokee. The Cherokees also incorporated African American chattel slavery into their farming and labor practices. In the early 1800s, the Cherokee James Vann was one of the wealthiest slaveholders in the Deep South. Christian missionaries also attempted to convert Cherokee Indians, though they experienced

little success early on. Historians suggest only about 10 percent of the nation adopted Christianity by the 1830s, but missionaries opened schools teaching subjects such as reading, writing, and mathematics. The Cherokees also solidified their commitment to a representative government with the election of delegates to a Cherokee Council and the adoption of a constitution in July 1827. Modeled after the U.S. Constitution, the Cherokee constitution made a clear articulation of the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, taking a firm stand against American encroachment. With much of the nation spanning across northern Georgia, the state threatened to nullify Cherokee claims within its borders. Citing U.S. law that forbade the construction of a state within a state, Georgia demanded that the federal government either abolish Cherokee authority or remove the Indians. When Andrew Jackson won the presidency in 1828, he made Indian removal a defining initiative of his administration. Passed in 1830, the Indian Removal Act gave the federal government the right to treat with all eastern Indians to exchange their homelands for land west of the Mississippi River. In 1835 a minority faction of the Cherokees, led by Major Ridge, signed the Treaty of New Echota, giving up all eastern Cherokee land in exchange for territory in the west. Despite protests by nearly 15,000 Cherokees, the U.S. government commenced relocation. From approximately 1837 to the spring of 1839, more than 10,000 Cherokees made the journey to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. A small number of Cherokees found refuge in the western North Carolina mountains, though they had to accept North Carolinian authority. Abandoned Cherokee land in the east was turned over to state governments and sold off to white speculators and settlers. F. Evan Nooe See also: Boudinot, Elias; Civilization Policy; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jackson, Andrew; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Ridge, John; Ross, John; Trail of Tears; Primary Documents: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831)

Further Reading Boulware, Tyler. Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Region, and Nation among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007.

Chickasaws Known as one of the southeast’s “Five Civilized Tribes,” the Chickasaws established most of their communities in the northern portion of present-day Mississippi, although there is evidence that they also were established in portions of Alabama. Due to their prowess in war and diplomacy, they also claimed territory as far away as Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The Chickasaws first entered the written historical record in 1540 when Hernando de Soto’s Spanish expedition set up camp near Chicaza. Relations between the Spanish and Chickasaws were initially peaceful, but deteriorated to the point that in March 1541 Chickasaw warriors attacked de Soto’s men and dealt them a devastating and demoralizing defeat. The Chickasaws acquired horses from the Spaniards, which they adopted for hunting and warfare. It was their use of equestrian warfare that allowed them to expand their influence into so many present-day states. During the 17th century, the Spanish, French, and British all courted the Chickasaws in hopes of gaining a valuable ally. The Chickasaws ultimately favored Great Britain, which supplied the Chickasaws with guns, horses, and household goods in exchange for furs and Native American slaves who had been

captured from groups such as the Caddos. The French retaliated for their repudiation by encouraging their Choctaw allies to launch raids against the Chickasaws. The Chickasaws remained a staunch British ally until the outbreak of the so-called “Pontiac’s Rebellion,” when Chickasaw warriors opted to join the Ottawas’ movement in 1763. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Chickasaws had once again joined the British cause, as they were determined to stop the growing encroachment by American colonists onto their lands. After the British defeat in the American Revolution, the Chickasaws began repairing relations with the victorious colonists. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, he put into place an Indian policy that promised all Natives a place in the United States if they became “civilized.” This meant that Native peoples had to abandon their traditional cultures, embrace Christianity, and adopt an agricultural lifestyle. Jefferson envisioned that this acculturation would eventually lead to complete assimilation of all Native Americans into Euro-American society. Among the Chickasaws, a significant number of men abandoned hunting and fishing in favor of operating small farms and ranches. Among the elite class, many became plantation owners and used African and African American slaves to work their fields, thereby emulating their counterparts in Euro-American society. Many of the Chickasaw elites that dominated political discourse were actually of Euro-American descent, making it easy for them to thrive in both Chickasaw and EuroAmerican society. Their fathers were frequently Scottish or French traders, but since the Chickasaws were matrilineal, they were viewed as Chickasaws first by their Native kinfolk. Chickasaw relations with the United States were tested by Tecumseh when he toured the southeast in 1811 and 1812 hoping to find allies to join the pan-Indian militant religious revitalization movement he was building. The Chickasaws not only rejected Tecumseh’s offer, but joined Major General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee Militia when they took up arms against Tecumseh’s Red Stick Creek allies during the Creek Wars of 1813 and 1814. Jackson would repay the Chickasaws for their support by calling for their removal to the west upon becoming president of the United States in 1829. Following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 by the U.S. Congress, Chickasaw leaders decided to work with the federal government so that the removal process would benefit all parties. This decision meant that the Chickasaws did not suffer through the political divisions that violently emerged among the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles following their removal west. The Chickasaws and the United States negotiated four separate treaties that spelled out the terms of removal, namely the 1830 Treaty of Franklin, the 1832 Treaty of Pontotoc, the 1834 Articles of Convention and Agreement, and the 1837 Treaty of Doaksville. The final treaty awarded the Chickasaws land in southern Oklahoma that a delegation of Chickasaws had personally inspected prior to signing the treaty to ensure that it would be suitable to serve as the new Chickasaw homeland. Despite the precautions taken by the Chickasaws, their transition was not problem free. First, federal agents and contractors they had hired committed fraud against the Chickasaws. After two investigations ordered by the U.S. Congress, the Chickasaws were awarded a minimal amount of compensation that was far outweighed by their actual losses. Like the Cherokees and Choctaws, the Chickasaws came under attack as they arrived in present-day Oklahoma from the western Native American groups, most notably the Comanches and Osages, who claimed ownership over the lands that the United States was giving away. The sporadic violence lasted until the late 1830s, when the federal government began convening multitribal councils that facilitated the negotiation of treaties between the respective Native American groups that also defined the borders of their homelands. The latter half of the 19th century proved devastating to the Chickasaws. When the U.S. Civil War began in 1860, the Chickasaws opted to join the Confederate States of America. When the war ended, the Chickasaws were subjected to Reconstruction and lost all of their slaves. In 1870, their fortunes appeared

to have changed when a railroad line arrived in their territory, which allowed them to ship their cattle to distant markets. This also meant that land that the United States had considered worthless in the 1830s was suddenly valuable to U.S. citizens; American settlers began arriving in droves in the Oklahoma Territory. Not surprisingly, the Chickasaws were coerced into signing the Akota Agreement in 1897, which exchanged communal ownership of land for allowing individual Chickasaws to own property. In practice, this allowed individual Chickasaws to sell their property to American settlers. The following year, the federal government through the Curtis Act formally disbanded the Chickasaw Nation. All Chickasaws subsequently became U.S. citizens when Oklahoma became a state in 1907. It was not until 1936, with the passage of the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, that the Chickasaws were once again allowed to establish their own sovereign nation. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Horseshoe Bend, Battle of; Pontiac; Tecumseh

Further Reading Ethridge, Robbie. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540– 1715. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Fogelson, Raymond J., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 14, Southeast. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004. Paige, Amanda L., Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. Chickasaw Removal. Norman, OK: Chickasaw Press, 2010.

Civilization Policy Initiated around 1789, the civilization policy was a broad-based attempt by the U.S. government, missionaries, and reformers to encourage Native Americans to adopt American culture, economic practices, and political structures. The process of acculturating Native Americans was a multifaceted endeavor that met varying levels of success and acceptance among Native peoples. With diverse groups of Native Americans across the country, certain aspects of the civilization policy proved more acceptable than others. While many individuals involved with the civilization policy were well intentioned, the United States as a whole consistently utilized the process to acquire Native American land. With the United States looking to expand west shortly after the conclusion of the American Revolution, many questioned the continued existence of the continent’s Native Americans. It was a popular assumption at the time among white Americans that Native peoples were destined for extinction unless they could adapt to and emulate American society. Additionally, as encroaching American settlement pressured Native Americans, the federal government feared that frontier competition for land and resources would ignite costly wars. To maintain peaceable relations and protect Indians, George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, presented a policy to Congress in 1789. They suggested the federal government recognize Indian land claims, take exclusive control of Indian affairs, and block foreign nations such as Great Britain from trading with the Indians. In an attempt to incorporate Native peoples into American society, they also recommended the United States work to “civilize” them to make them what they considered typical American citizens. The policy was further reinforced over the next decade under the administration of Thomas Jefferson. The central assumption of the civilization policy was that Native Americans could and would become indistinguishable from white Americans and completely integrate into U.S. society while simultaneously abandoning assertions of Native nationhood.

Other than the federal government, religious missionaries from such groups as the Quakers, Moravians, and the Episcopal Church made significant efforts among Native peoples to promote the adoption of American society, with a particular emphasis on spreading Christianity. Among the Cherokees, a Moravian mission attempted to convert Native peoples, but when they failed to provide a promised school, the local council asked them to leave. The failure highlighted the inability to unilaterally force the civilization policy on Native Americans. In a more successful attempt, Moravian missionaries established the town of Goshen in the Northwest Territory in 1798 with a congressional land grant. In addition to promoting Christianity among local Delaware Indians, the mission provided instruction in constructing log cabins, fencing fields, and planting crops while discouraging reliance on seasonal hunting. Frequently utilizing government subsidies, religious organizations sponsored schools for Indians. Often run on tribal land, these schools taught children English, writing, and basic mathematics. One Presbyterian and Congregational organization supported 10 schools among the Choctaws with several others across the country. At their largest, individual schools enrolled upwards of 100 Indian children, though typical enrollments were less than 50 students. In some instances, Indian students even attended Princeton and Dartmouth through federal subsidies. Appointed federal Indian agents provided direct federal intervention in promoting the civilization policy among Native Americans. One of the longest tenured and most influential was Benjamin Hawkins, who served as superintendent to the southern Indians from 1796 until his death in 1816. Hawkins worked to encourage centralized political organization among the southern Indians. Traditionally, Native peoples such as the Creeks adhered to local political oversight based upon town authority. At times of war or in dealing with foreign agents, Creek towns came together but primarily retained local autonomy. In implementing an American political structure, Hawkins fostered the creation of the Creek National Council, which was comprised of representatives from each town. The new political body reallocated authority from a local to a national body and provided the United States a single entity to negotiate with instead of numerous towns. While the Creek National Council was successfully able to create a national Creek police force by 1799, not all Creeks recognized the new political structures and openly defied the transition of authority. Hawkins also operated a demonstration plantation among the Creeks. At his home, he provided instruction to the Indians on how to operate a farm, raise livestock, and implement American cultivation techniques such as crop rotation. The demonstration was also part of a broader attempt to encourage an acceptance of private property. While it is dangerous to generalize about all Native groups, individual ownership of land was rare among Indians before the 18th century. While individual families or villages claimed products garnered on a hunting trip or grown on farms, the physical land was held collectively. In encouraging Native Americans to take ownership of specific plots, Indian agents sought to foster conceptions of individual property rights. The U.S. federal government reasoned that if Indians were encouraged to take up agricultural pursuits, they would no longer attempt to hold on to tribal hunting grounds. Needing less land, they would then be more willing to sell tracts to the United States. The federal government could then sell formerly Indian land to Americans pushing west. Despite the intention of the civilization policy, most Native Americans used the efforts to secure their own goals. Typically, land was only reluctantly traded to the federal government in settling debts accumulated at merchant houses or in peace treaties after wars. The Cherokees, for instance, utilized the civilization policy to reinforce Cherokee nationhood. They adopted a constitution, judicial system, and police force in an effort to secure rights to their homeland. With expansion-minded settlers growing increasingly distraught by the federal government’s inability to satisfactorily acquire Native land, many

began supporting the complete relocation of Native peoples west of the Mississippi River. With the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the federal government began forcibly relocating Indians regardless of evidence of cultural reorientation among the Native peoples. F. Evan Nooe See also: Creek Wars; Factory System; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jefferson, Thomas; Knox, Henry; Red Sticks; Washington, George

Further Reading Horsman, Reginald. Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007. Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Clark, George Rogers (1752–1818) George Rogers Clark, soldier, Revolutionary War hero, and eldest brother of William Clark, was born near Charlottesville, Virginia. He was trained as a surveyor. In 1773, he explored down the Ohio River and in 1774 took part in Lord Dunmore’s War. He surveyed for the Ohio Company along the Kentucky River. He was active in opposition to speculators who wished to make Kentucky a proprietary colony. Clark was a commander in the Kentucky militia at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. He made plans for an invasion of the Illinois Country in 1778. By late summer, he and his men had captured Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes. Clark stopped a British counteroffensive that had reached Vincennes and forced the British to surrender. He consolidated his gains during 1779 and 1780 and prevented the enemy from recapturing the Illinois Country, the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville), Pittsburgh, and Fort Cumberland. He later marched to the relief of St. Louis and Cahokia and defeated a combined British and Indian force at Piqua. Even after Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781, the war continued in the west. Clark, now a brigadier general in the Virginia militia, won another encounter with the Shawnees at Chillicothe in November 1782. His military dominance in the Northwest Country was a prime factor in confirming its cession to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783). Following the war, Clark served on the Board of Commissioners to supervise land allotment in the Illinois grant to former soldiers and on a commission concluding a treaty with the Indians. In 1786, during an unsuccessful expedition against the Wabash tribes, he seized goods brought to Vincennes by Spanish traders. This act was utilized by former Continental Army general James Wilkinson to discredit Clark, after which Clark lost the support of Virginia and his loyalty to the new national government was questioned. He was even prevented by George Washington, in 1793, from enlisting in an expedition on behalf of France for the conquest of then Spanish Louisiana. Between 1794 and 1815, Clark lived in Clarksville, on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, where he supervised land apportionment and ran a grist mill. During this time, Clark grew increasingly disillusioned with Virginia and the confederation by what he perceived as their failure to honor financial obligations incurred during his campaigns in the Northwest. After a stroke and the loss of his left leg, he returned to live with his sister at Locust Grove, near Louisville. He died there in 1818. Henry H. Goldman

See also: American Revolution; Northwest Territory; Wilkinson, James

Further Reading Bakeless, John. Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark. New York: Bison Books, 1992. Bodley, Temple. George Rogers Clark: His Life and Public Service. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926. Harrison, Lowell H. George Rogers Clark and the War in the West. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001.

Clay, Henry. See American System Creek Wars As the United States expanded west during the antebellum period, constant pressure on the Creeks of Alabama and Georgia spurred two wars as they attempted to protect their ancestral homeland and resist assimilation into American society. The first Creek War began as a civil war within Creek territory in 1813. Initiated by a faction known as the Red Sticks, it quickly expanded to involve the United States. The war continued until the early summer of 1814, with the United States claiming victory and seizing massive amounts of Creek land. The Second Creek War began in 1836, led by a faction known as the Lower Creeks. They went to war to resist the implementation of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and oppose American squatters invading their lands. Major hostilities concluded in July 1836, but many Creeks joined the efforts of the Seminoles in Florida during the Second Seminole War that continued into 1842. Through the 18th century, the Creeks effectively managed the competing colonial powers that sought to expand in the North American southeast. With American independence and a new constitutional government in 1789, the Creeks found themselves opposing a more determined competitor that looked to expand west and displace Native Americans through relocation or by assimilating them into U.S. society. Through directed efforts collectively known as the civilization policy, federal Indian agents encouraged Native Americans to emulate U.S. culture, agriculture, and socioeconomic practices. The influence of the United States exacerbated preexisting divisions that separated the Creeks into Upper and Lower factions. Prior to the 1813 war, the Lower Creeks were more accepting of acculturating influences, while the Upper Creeks encouraged maintaining traditional culture and discouraged U.S. influence. When the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh visited the Creeks in 1811, his message promoting pan-Indian cooperation and Native revivalism galvanized the divisions already present. A group of Upper Creeks led by Little Warrior later traveled to meet with Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa in the Ohio River Valley. When they returned home in 1812, the party gruesomely murdered an American family along the Duck River. Benjamin Hawkins, the Creek federal Indian agent, demanded immediate justice, and a party of Lower Creeks led by Big Warrior sought out and executed Little Warrior and the others involved. The Creeks soon fell into civil war with those Indians siding with Little Warrior, adopting the name Red Sticks. The Red Sticks targeted Creeks whom they viewed as complicit with the United States and Big Warrior’s followers. They destroyed plantations, slaughtered cattle, and sent an emissary to Pensacola to obtain assistance from the British and Spanish. When Red Sticks attacked Fort Mims in the Tensaw district, they killed more than 250 Americans, Indians, and blacks holed up in the frontier outpost. Killing American citizens prompted an enthusiastic call to arms by the United States, primarily led by Tennessee militia under the command of future president Andrew Jackson.

Illustration from 1858 depicts an officer protecting a woman at Fort Mims during a Red Stick retaliation. This attack on August 30, 1813, left almost 350 wounded or dead and triggered a panic that eventually led to greater U.S. involvement in the Creek War. (Library of Congress)

Leading the way, Jackson struck directly at the center of the Red Sticks’ towns. While he was initially repulsed in a poorly organized campaign in late 1813, by the end of March 1814 the Tennessee militia and their Creek and Cherokee allies defeated the Red Sticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. By the close of the war, the Red Sticks had lost anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 souls. The resulting Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed August 9, 1814, was a conqueror’s treaty. Jackson seized 23 million acres of land, which included territory belonging to U.S.-allied Cherokee and Creek Indians. Jackson justified the harsh terms by claiming other Indians were complicit by not stopping an unprovoked war against the United States. In opposition to defeat and the draconian measures of the settlement, as many as 1,500 Red Sticks fled to Spanish Florida, establishing new towns and joining the Seminoles. The Creeks who remained rebuilt their homes and economy as Americans flooded into the ceded land around them. Andrew Jackson rode his success against the Creeks to obtain command of the army in the south to defend against the British in the parallel War of 1812. His victories at Horseshoe Bend and the Battle of New Orleans set him on a path to the White House, where he vocally supported the relocation of all eastern Native Americans to a federally administered territory west of the Mississippi River. Signed by Jackson on May 28, 1830, the Indian Removal Act authorized the federal government to begin relocating the eastern Native Americans. In 1832, a Creek delegation agreed to cede eastern claims for land in the west. Each Creek family was to sell their land at their own discretion, but American speculators and squatters quickly moved onto Indian land, perpetrating massive fraud. By 1833, an estimated 3,000 illegal intruders occupied Creek land in Alabama. In May 1836, violence escalated between Creeks and encroaching Americans, beginning the Second Creek War. Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered General Thomas S. Jesup to subdue the hostile Creeks and force them to relocate west. Small skirmishes characterized the fighting. Militant Creeks rarely engaged large forces of U.S. regulars or militias and instead opted for vulnerable targets such as frontier homesteads and mail riders. Many American vigilante groups attempted to fight off Indians to seize land claims. While the most intense fighting concluded by July 1836, small outbreaks

continued into early 1837. Late in the war, much of the fighting took place in southern Georgia as many of the hostile Creeks headed south to join with the Florida Indians in the ongoing Second Seminole War. Despite determined efforts by the Creeks to stave off American expansion and protect their ancestral homelands, war invited a stronger response from U.S. states and the federal government. The United States exploited their victories against the Creeks to make massive land grabs, whether premeditated or claimed as the spoils of war. By the late 1830s, the Creeks had lost millions of acres of land in Georgia and Alabama, and around 15,000 moved west to Indian Territory. F. Evan Nooe See also: Civilization Policy; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jackson, Andrew; New Orleans, Battle of; Red Sticks; Seminole War (Second); Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; War of 1812; Primary Documents: Journal of Occurrences of a Party of Emigrating Creek Indians (1837)

Further Reading Ellisor, John T. The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Halbert, Henry S., and Timothy H. Ball. The Creek War of 1813 and 1814. Edited by Frank L. Owsley Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of (1830) The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, signed on September 27, 1830, was the first removal treaty negotiated after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. By the terms of the treaty, the Choctaw Nation signed away all its land holdings east of the Mississippi River for land in Indian Territory. In exchange for their land, the Choctaws received a 20-year annuity of $20,000 as well as other monetary allowances to build schools, churches, and a tribal council house in Indian Territory. The federal government had begun pressuring the Choctaws to relocate in 1820, when General Andrew Jackson was commissioned to meet with three Choctaw district chiefs and other lesser Choctaw officials at Doak’s Stand to discuss removal. All three chiefs opposed removal, but Jackson presented to them a bill, proposed by a Mississippi representative to Congress, that would prevent the Choctaws from using or settling on land west of the Mississippi. Although this sounds contrary to government policy, the federal officials thought that, as long as the Choctaws had free access to their western hunting grounds, they would never cede their Mississippi land. They reasoned that, if the Choctaws believed that the United States already owned the western land, the Natives might be willing to cede part of their eastern land to keep their western hunting grounds. The treaty did not require any Choctaws to leave their homes; those wishing to stay on the ceded land would receive a one-square-mile tract of land, including their improvements. The Choctaws’ new territory had not yet been surveyed when the Treaty of Doak’s Stand was ratified. When the land was surveyed, it was discovered that white settlements already existed on the land. The federal government believed it would be almost impossible to remove the white settlers, so government officials requested that a Choctaw delegation come to Washington in the fall of 1824 to negotiate a new boundary line for the Choctaws’ western land. After the treaty of 1825 was negotiated, the United States expected the Choctaws to leave for their new land in Indian Territory. However, the majority of the Choctaws did not move. Consequently, the

federal government and the state of Mississippi increased pressure on the Choctaws to remove. In 1829, the Mississippi legislature took strong action against the Choctaw people and extended Mississippi state laws over the Natives. In January 1830, the Choctaws became citizens of Mississippi; their tribal government was abolished, and any Native exercising the office of chief or headman became subject to fines and imprisonment. The federal government passed the Indian Removal Act and informed the Choctaw Nation that they would not be protected from hostile Mississippi state laws. After Mississippi extended its laws over the Choctaws, the Natives were constantly harassed by white settlers. To obtain relief, the Choctaw leadership requested a meeting with federal officials at the Dancing Rabbit Creek campgrounds. The negotiations dragged on for about two weeks. When the negotiations began to fail, the government purchased the signatures of the leaders with valuable land grants, lifelong salaries, and other presents. In the end, the government secured the leadership’s cooperation by playing to the Choctaw leadership’s lust for money and power. As soon as the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed, the Choctaw people let it be known that they were outraged by the actions of their chiefs. Different factions elected different chiefs, and anarchy prevailed in the Choctaw Nation. However, little could be done. A few Choctaws left immediately for Indian Territory to claim the best land, but most waited to be moved by the U.S. government in one of three planned moves in 1831, 1832, or 1833. Removal proved to be an extremely difficult experience for the Choctaws. Out of 14,000 tribal members and 512 slaves who left Mississippi during these years, at least 2,500 died during the travel west. More died after reaching Indian Territory due to inadequate food supplies and severe weather. Around 6,000 Choctaws decided to take advantage of Article 14 of the treaty, which provided an opportunity for the Choctaws to remain in Mississippi; any head of household could apply for and receive U.S. citizenship, along with 640 acres of land. These people did not fare well either. The Choctaw agency refused to let most of the Natives register for land allotments, and the paperwork for most of the remaining people who did register was lost. In the end, only 69 heads of household were officially registered. The vast majority of the Choctaws remaining in Mississippi became squatters living in isolated areas on poor farmland. They lost all access to schools and public services and survived as best they could by gathering nuts and wild berries and by growing corn, pumpkins, and potatoes. Some worked for white farmers picking cotton, hoeing the fields, and doing other menial tasks. Many of these people eventually went to Indian Territory during the 1840s. Joyce Ann Kievit See also: Indian Removal Act of 1830; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; Trail of Tears

Further Reading Debo, Angie. The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Kidwell, Clara Sue. Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. McKee, Jesse O., and Jon A. Schlenker. The Choctaws: Cultural Evolution of a Native American Tribe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980.

Delawares. See Ohio Indian Confederation Factory System

The factory system was made up of government-owned and operated trading posts, sometimes called forts, which were intended to regulate and facilitate the fur trade with Native Americans. Operating from 1791 until 1822, the factory system’s primary purpose was to win the loyalty of the Indians to America, rather than to Britain. The factory system was started under George Washington’s presidency as a way of allowing the fledgling American republic to compete with the large, successful British fur trading companies in the lucrative international fur trade. The first factory was established in 1795. Most factories were located in newly opened territories. The fur trade was the largest business in North America and had been highly profitable since the early 1700s. Beaver pelts were in high demand in Europe, where the fur was used to make fashionable hats. Buffalo hides, otter skins, muskrat, and even mink furs were also traded worldwide. The fur trade was heavily dependent upon the Indian tribes, who provided most of the beaver pelts and buffalo hides. By the time of the American Revolution, the British and French had been trading with the Indians for more than 150 years, exchanging blankets, muskets, ammunition, tools, and cooking utensils for furs. Washington thought that independent American fur traders would not be able to compete with established fur companies, such as the British Hudson’s Bay Company, and he recommended that the federal government build and run a series of posts to oversee trade with the Indians. Washington believed that such a system would reduce the influence of the British, who might otherwise create problems for America with the Indians. Additionally, the factories would provide essential goods to the Indians and make them dependent on the U.S. government. Between 1790 and 1799, Congress passed four Trade and Intercourse Acts to regulate trade between American settlers and Indian tribes and to set national policy on expansion. Under the 1791 act, the factory system was established, and in 1806, Congress created the Office of Indian Trade as a subdivision of the War Department to oversee the trading posts. The factories were intended to be self-supporting trading posts, functioning as trading centers where Americans and Indians could meet to exchange goods and services, but they also served as customs houses where the federal government could collect tax revenue. Each factory was managed by a factor. Factors were appointed directly by the president and served as the federal government’s representative at the outpost, performing the duties of a territorial governor as well as overseeing the trading post. Factors also kept the financial records, journals, and other miscellaneous accounts. The factory trade building served as a storefront and warehouse, and sometimes included living space for the factor. Outbuildings provided storage and additional living space for other residents, who would include an Indian agent, whose duties were to ensure that treaties were honored. The agents also issued licenses to private fur traders. A trader without a license could not legally deal directly with Indians and would forfeit his profits if caught. Factories were built near military forts or else were themselves fortified. Garrisons housed soldiers who would defend settlers and friendly Indian tribes who lived in proximity to the factory from hostile tribes or other Americans. Another goal of the factory system was to obtain land from the Indians. Territorial expansion was at the heart of the American political system even from its early days; but after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the pressure for westward expansion was immense. Believing that the Indians’ lifeways were incompatible with American culture, Thomas Jefferson and others expected that Indians would be willing to give up their traditional lifestyles, and their lands, to be assimilated into American culture.

The factory system was expected to facilitate assimilation; and in many ways it functioned like the Spanish mission system, especially in its objective of Americanizing the Indians. Christian missionaries moved to the factories, where they taught Indians agricultural techniques and other skills such as weaving, as well as instructing them in Christianity. Schools were established for the Indian children, where they would be taught arithmetic, reading, and writing, as well as domestic skills. To further encourage the Indians to trade their furs with the Americans instead of the British companies, the factories offered trade goods at just over wholesale prices. Private traders were not prohibited from competing with the factory system but charged more for their goods. In spite of this, private traders were favored trading partners, because they offered the Indians better-quality products than the factories did and sold things that the factories were forbidden to sell, including liquor. The factory system could not compete with private enterprises and was on the verge of failure. In 1816, President Monroe appointed Thomas McKenney, a merchant, to replace John Mason as the superintendent of Indian trade. McKenney worked hard to expand the factory system and was a capable administrator, but his belief in cultural assimilation of the Indians led him to stock the factories with trade goods he thought the Indians should have, instead of what they wanted to buy. But this only drove the factory system to lose more business to the private traders, so in 1818 McKenney urged Congress to ban private fur traders and establish a government monopoly on the fur trade. Private companies were already highly critical of the factory system and against the proposed monopoly. John Jacob Astor of the American Fur Company and the prominent Chouteau family, among others, argued that the government should not be involved in trade and that the factory system should be abolished. Jedidiah Morse, a prominent geographer, was called in as an independent observer to counsel Congress. Morse thought the factories offered little advantage for trade, but he was also critical of private traders. He cited Indians’ lack of confidence in the factory system as a sound reason to discontinue it, especially since it continued to lose money. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri successfully introduced a bill to end the factory system, which was signed by President Monroe on May 6, 1822. The factories were closed and their goods offered at public auction. Karen S. Garvin See also: Assimilation; Astor, John Jacob; Chouteau Family; Hudson’s Bay Company; Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790

Further Reading Dolin, Eric Jay. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York: Norton, 2010. Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the American West, 1800–1860. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. Peake, Ora Brooks. A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1822. Reprint ed. Mansfield Center, CT: Martino, 2006.

Fallen Timbers, Battle of. See Greenville, Treaty of (1795) Fort McIntosh, Treaty of (1785) Signed on January 21, 1785, between the United States and members of the Wyandot (Huron), Delaware, Chippewa (Ojibwa), and Ottawa nations, the Treaty of Fort McIntosh extended the American

government’s control over lands in the Northwest Territory (Ohio Country). Following the conclusion of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix on October 22, 1784, by which the members of the Six Nations ceded lands to the United States, the American government pursued treaties with the remaining Indian nations of the region. Although Native lands were relinquished, the Treaty of Fort McIntosh led to conflict between Indians and American settlers in the Ohio Country. As American squatters infiltrated areas inside the treaty boundary, many Indians resisted the advancement by inciting a series of skirmishes and raids, which came to be known as the Northwest Indian War. As a result, the American government ordered an army under the command of General Arthur St. Clair into the region to reestablish order. St. Clair orchestrated the signing of the Treaty of Fort Harmar on January 9, 1789, yet fighting continued between the Indians and the U.S. government. Terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which ended the American Revolution, excluded the Iroquois and other Indian nations that had allied with the British during the war. To settle with those groups, the American government initiated a series of treaties with the Indian nations of the Ohio Country. The signing of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix on October 22, 1784, provided the United States with claims to the lands of the Six Nations in present-day New York and Pennsylvania. Following the success at Fort Stanwix, the United States sought to draft treaties with the remaining Indian nations to obtain claims to all of the Ohio Country. In December 1784, a group of American diplomats led by George Rogers Clark, Richard Butler, and Arthur Lee gathered members of the Wyandot, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa nations at Fort McIntosh, located at the mouth of the Beaver River. By December 30, 1784, the primary Indian leaders had been assembled, and the opening speech of the treaty council began on January 8, 1785. During the opening speech, the American diplomats reminded the Indians that their former European allies had been defeated during the French and Indian War (France) and the American Revolution (Great Britain). All previous French and British claims to the Ohio Country were relinquished to the United States as a result of the Treaty of Paris (1763 and 1783). In addition, the Americans informed the Indian leaders that, due to their alliance with the British during the American Revolution, they remained at the mercy of the U.S. government. In response, the Native spokesmen defended their claims to the land based on tradition as well as stated their necessity for basic Indian survival. However, the American diplomats refused to acknowledge any of their pleas; instead, they retorted by denouncing Indians’ rights and stating that the lands had been obtained through conquest. The Americans also utilized divisions between Indian groups as an advantage during treaty negotiations, many of which dated back for centuries. Furthermore, leadership within the Indian nations diminished due to differing opinions regarding negotiations with the American government. Many of the Native American elders viewed negotiations as the only viable alternative to American encroachment; younger Indians strove to defend their lands at any cost. Several leaders who supported or signed the treaties returned to their lands only to be shunned by their followers. Within the terms of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, Article 1 required the seizure of three Indian chiefs to serve as hostages until all American prisoners were released. Article 2 forced the Indian nations to acknowledge that they remained under the protection of the American government and could ally with no other sovereign. Article 3 created a boundary line between the United States and the Indian nations. Encompassing a large portion of present-day Ohio, a reservation was established by a boundary line that ran from the mouth of the Cuyahoga River down to the Great Miami River and back north to the shore of Lake Erie. According to Article 4, all lands within the boundary line belonged to the Indians except for areas designated for the erection of trading posts and government posts. Article 5 allowed the Indians to punish any individual who attempted to settle in the reservation established by Article 3. Article 6

authorized the American seizure of all lands east, south, and west of the boundary line that formerly belonged to the Indian nations. The posts of Detroit and Michilimackinac were also ceded as authorized by Articles 7 and 8. Article 9 required any Indian who committed a crime within the boundary to be brought to the nearest post to face trial. In return for signing the treaty, Article 10 provided the Indians with goods that were distributed by the American government. Following the conclusion of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, the American government moved to survey the areas east, south, and west of the boundary line for future settlement. However, many American settlers were unwilling to wait and began squatting on lands inside the boundary. The American government sent an expedition to stop the squatters, yet it had little success. Indian resistance to the squatters erupted into conflict, which came to be known as the Northwest Indian War. In the winter of 1788, the American government sent General Arthur St. Clair to negotiate with the Indian nations in an attempt to obtain parts of the Western Reserve in exchange for lands seized by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the Treaty of Fort McIntosh. Instead, St. Clair drafted the Treaty of Fort Harmar, which was signed on January 9, 1789. Ultimately, the treaty only restated the terms of the previous documents and led to continued conflict between the Indians and settlers. Carl Creason See also: Blue Jacket; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Greenville, Treaty of; Harrison, William Henry; McKenney, Thomas L.; Little Turtle; Neolin; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Fort Stanwix, Treaty of (1784) The 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix was ostensibly a peace agreement between the United States and the Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras, to conclude the fighting between the parties begun during the American Revolution. The treaty, which was signed on October 22, 1784, was the first Indian treaty made by the U.S. government after the American Revolution. It required the Iroquois to recognize the right of the United States to conduct all treaty negotiations with Native peoples, return all of the Americans that the Iroquois had captured during the American Revolution, and cede all lands west of Buffalo Creek in New York to a new western border that was created by U.S. commissioners. The newly defined western border abutted the border established by Great Britain, thereby putting all Iroquois properties within the territorial boundaries claimed by the United States. In return, the Iroquois were given some supplies, which they needed due to the razing of many of their communities during the conflict. The federal government’s commissioners used armed soldiers to intimidate the Iroquois into signing the one-sided treaty. Virtually all of the Iroquois leaders that had allied themselves with the British during the American Revolution repudiated the treaty soon thereafter.

In truth, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix was needed by the U.S. Congress to address conflicts between federal and state authority. Since the United States considered Iroquoia to be conquered territory due to campaigns during the American Revolution against pro-British Iroquois communities led by Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton, the Americans did not believe they needed a formal treaty with the Iroquois that included land cessions. For the United States, the problem with Iroquoia was that it was claimed by two states and the federal government. Massachusetts claimed Iroquoia due to the royal charter that it received from the king in 1630. Massachusetts wanted to sell the land in Iroquoia to land speculators to settle some of its debts. New York also claimed Iroquoia as part of its western territory, which New Yorkers believed extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Like Massachusetts, New York’s state government wanted to sell the land in Iroquoia to land speculators to raise revenue. The U.S. Congress, operating under the Articles of Confederation, had given itself the power, rather than the states, to treat with Native American groups. Congress thus claimed that the states could not seize territory belonging to the Iroquois but that the federal government could. In an effort to purchase much of Iroquoia before Massachusetts or Congress could prevent it, New York’s governor George Clinton held a peace conference in September 1784 with representatives of the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix. The Iroquois opted to rebuff Clinton’s overtures in favor of meeting with federal authorities. When negotiations began between the U.S. commissioners and the Iroquois, New York attempted to sabotage the talks by providing whiskey to the Iroquois chiefs. After the federal officials seized New York’s supply of liquor, New York responded by having local sheriffs arrest all those associated with the seizures for stealing. Federal troops ultimately drove off all of the New Yorkers who were obstructing the treaty conference. The Oneidas also looked to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix as a way to advance their political standing among the Iroquois. As a staunch ally of the colonists during the American Revolution, the Oneidas correctly believed that the other Iroquois would look to them to represent the confederacy’s interests in dealings with both the United States and the respective state governments. During the treaty conference, Oneida leaders adhered closely to the American negotiating position, which infuriated the Iroquois who had fought alongside British forces during the Revolution. Unfortunately for the Oneidas, the Americans made no distinction between Iroquois friend or foe after the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix was signed. Although the Oneidas represented their fellow Iroquois to American officials on many issues, their influence waned along with that of their fellow confederates. Iroquois authority over other Native American groups, especially in the Ohio Country, also declined precipitously following their apparent capitulation at Fort Stanwix. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Iroquois Confederacy

Further Reading Glatthaar, Joseph T., and James Kirby Martin. Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Shannon, Timothy J. Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier. New York: Viking, 2008. Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Fort Wayne, Treaties of (1803, 1809) In June 1803 and September 1809, negotiations between the United States and various Indian nations of the Old Northwest (Ohio Country) occurred at Fort Wayne in the territory of Indiana. Serving as territorial

governor of Indiana and superintendent of Indian affairs in the region, William Henry Harrison authorized both treaties. Members of several Indian nations, particularly the Delawares, Miamis, and Potawatomis, participated in both treaties, and consequently ceded more than three million acres of land in present-day Indiana and Illinois to the United States. As a result of the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809), a militant faction of American Indians developed under the command of Shawnee leader Tecumseh. By the summer of 1810, with supplies and support provided by the British, Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy prepared to move against white settlers entering the region. To defend against the movement, Harrison assembled his own coalition comprised of army regulars and territorial militia to counter Tecumseh. The fighting came to be known as Tecumseh’s War or Tecumseh’s Rebellion, which served as the northwestern theater of the War of 1812. In August 1795, the Treaty of Greenville was negotiated between an alliance of American Indians of the Ohio Country and the United States, thereby ending a decade-long conflict known as the Northwest Indian War. Article 4 of the treaty ceded a tract of land located along the border of present-day Indiana and Illinois to the United States. Known as the Vincennes Tract, the area’s formal boundary became a center for discrepancy between the Indians and white settlers. Following the election of Thomas Jefferson as president, Harrison received added pressure from the government to obtain more land around Vincennes. From 1803 to 1809, the United States negotiated 15 treaties with Indians of the Northwest Territory. One of the initial treaties occurred at Fort Wayne in the territory of Indiana on June 7, 1803. Responsible for all treaties conducted in the Northwest, Harrison gathered chiefs and tribesmen of the Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Kickapoo nations as well as proxy agents of the Weas, Eel River, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias at Fort Wayne. Article 1 of the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1803) accomplished Jefferson’s goal of acquiring more land near Vincennes by defining the boundary as a rectangular tract comprised of 160,000 acres around the Wabash River. Article 2 stated that the United States relinquished all lands adjoining the Vincennes Tract on each side. The United States acquired a salt spring on Saline Creek at the mouth of the Wabash River as a result of Article 3; however, agreements were made to deliver the Indians an annual quantity of salt not to exceed 150 bushels. Article 4 granted the United States rights for the erection of “houses of entertainment” to be used as accommodations for travelers along the road between Vincennes and Kaskaskia and the road between Vincennes and Clarksville. Finally, Article 5 stated that alterations could be made to the boundary line created in Article 1 if the United States determined that citizens had already settled in Indian lands. If lands were taken outside the boundary, the government agreed to cede lands inside the tract at the east or west end to the Indians. Six years later, Harrison again gathered members of the Delawares, Miamis, Potawatomis, and Eel River at Fort Wayne on September 30, 1809. The Shawnees did not participate in the 1809 treaty, and the Kickapoos and Weas engaged in negotiations on December 9, 1809, following the conclusion of the primary treaty. During the six years following the first Treaty of Fort Wayne, a pan-Indian religious movement developed under the leadership of Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet and brother of Tecumseh. Based on spiritual visions that he experienced, Tenskwatawa urged his followers to cleanse themselves of European ways. At Tenskwatawa’s community in Greensville, Ohio, which was later moved to Tippecanoe in the territory of Indiana (Prophetstown) in 1808, the Shawnees and other Indian followers attempted to revert to traditional ways, thereby refusing to obtain or use the white man’s goods. Tensions climaxed between Harrison and Tenskwatawa during the years following the first Treaty of Fort Wayne. Harrison denounced Tenskwatawa as a fraud, and Tenskwatawa encouraged Indians to refuse to partake in treaties with Harrison, even branding those who did as traitors. Knowing the level of antiAmerican activity that occurred around Prophetstown as well as the continued settlement of Americans

north of the Vincennes Tract, Harrison made plans to negotiate a treaty in the summer of 1809. Due to tribal disputes between the Shawnees and Miamis, the Miami leader, Little Turtle, refused to allow the Shawnees to participate in the 1809 negotiations. Little Turtle, who signed the Treaty of Greenville and the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1803), encouraged his people and other Indians to strive for peace and assimilation with the United States. The exclusion of Shawnee leaders, particularly Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, proved beneficial to Harrison, who concluded the signing of the Treaty of Fort Wayne on September 30, 1809. As a result, members of the Delawares, Miamis, and Potawatomis ceded more than three million acres of land in present-day Indiana and Illinois to the United States. In a supplementary treaty on December 9, 1809, the Kickapoos and Weas relinquished their rights to the area as well. In return, the Indians received an increase in annuities ($250–$500 annually) and $5,200 worth of trade goods. The treaty appeared to have been a success for Harrison; however, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh used the event to unite members of various nations into a militant force against the United States. Tecumseh cast the treaty as evidence that Harrison intended to conquer all the Indian lands of the Northwest, despite what the American diplomat claimed. In addition, Tecumseh and his brother denounced the treaty and threatened to kill the chiefs who had signed the document. By the spring and summer of 1810, the Shawnee brothers began to gain the support of regional tribes that had previously refused to join their movement as well as had received supplies from the British; the war was under way. Carl Creason See also: Blue Jacket; Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Harrison, William Henry; McKenney, Thomas L.; Little Turtle; Neolin; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Bird, Harrison. War for the West: 1790–1813. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Keating, Ann Durkin. Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Owens, Robert M. Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Goschochking (Ohio) Massacre of 1782 The Goschochking Massacre of 1782, more commonly known as the Gnadenhütten Massacre, involved the murder of 96 Moravian Delaware Indians on March 8, 1782, at the hands of Colonel David Williamson’s (1752–1814) Washington County, Pennsylvania, militia. Arriving the day before, the members of the militia promised to escort the Christian Indians to Fort Pitt to keep them safe from attacks from proBritish Indians. Believing that the Delawares had been involved in raids against the American frontier, however, they executed every Indian present in Gnadenhütten at that time. The death of the 96 Moravian Indians was the largest single massacre of unarmed Native Americans during the Revolutionary War and helped to open the Ohio Country to further American expansion. The ancestors of the Delaware Indians that were murdered had previously converted to Christianity while in Pennsylvania in the 1740s. Their conversion was the result of the work of a group of mainly German-speaking Christian missionaries called the Moravians, who traced their roots back to the Czech reformer Jan Hus (1369–1415). In the wake of their violent encounter with the Indian-hating “Paxton Boys” in Pennsylvania, the Indians and their children eventually settled in eastern Ohio in the mission towns of Salem, Gnadenhütten, and Schönbrunn, near the larger town of Coshocton. The Moravian Indians found themselves in a dangerous position in the Ohio Country during much of the American Revolution (1775–1783). First, their towns were located in a hotly contested space. American forces were stationed at Fort Pitt, near Pittsburgh to the Indians’ east. To the Delawares’ north and west, the British controlled Detroit and had alliances with numerous tribes throughout the Great Lakes region. Second, the Moravian Indians, drawing from their missionaries’ teachings, were avowed pacifists and allegedly tried to remain neutral in the war. However, the British saw the mission towns as a buffer area between them and the burgeoning young American republic, and the U.S. Continental Army hungered for intelligence on British and British-allied Indian military movements in the region. Lastly, most white settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier had no love for any Indian groups. Several events, largely outside of their control, befell the Christian Indian community at Gnadenhütten between August 1781 and March 1782, when they were murdered. In August 1781, British-allied Wyandot warriors and Indian agent Matthew Eliot forced the Moravian Indians to relocate to Fort Sandusky on the Sandusky River, supposedly to keep them safe from American settlers. Moreover, the British and British-allied Indians accused (and later imprisoned) Moravian missionaries John Heckewelder (1743–1823) and David Zeisberger (1721–1808) in Detroit for providing military intelligence to Americans (the missionaries had in fact been doing so for years). The winter of 1781–1782 was very difficult for the Moravian Delawares to endure. Because they were starving, they asked the Wyandot chief Half-King permission to return to their mission towns to harvest crops that they had planted before being captured. The chief granted their request, and 98 Indians returned home in February. Later that month, some pro-British Indians came racing through the mission towns after pillaging American settlements in western Pennsylvania and warned that some Americans might follow them there. Unfazed by the news, the Moravian Indians went back to harvesting corn. Unfortunately for the Moravian Indians, the warning became true. The Washington County, Pennsylvania, militia led by Colonel David Williamson came to Gnadenhütten with approximately 200 men on March 7, 1782. Even though the militia members originally offered the Moravian Delawares safe passage to American-controlled Fort Pitt, they soon changed their minds. All throughout the village, they saw “white person” wares like tea sets, axes, nice clothes, and other finery that many of the poor

militiamen themselves did not have. So, they suspected the Moravian Indians of being a part of, or at least assisting, the pro-British raiding party. As a result, a majority (the exact number is not known) of militiamen decided to execute the Christian Delawares. Knowing that their fate was sealed, the Moravian Indians cried but also sang hymns and prayed throughout the night. On the next day, the militia separated the men from the women and children. One line went into one house, and the second line went into the other house. All who entered the houses were executed, with some of them dying by the hard swing of a cooper’s mallet. Two children who had been hiding managed to escape. The missionary Heckewelder (who, along with Zeisberger, was still imprisoned in Detroit) eventually used their accounts to write about the massacre. The Gnadenhütten Massacre of 1782 was the most catastrophic single-day known massacre of unarmed Indians during the American Revolution. At the signing of the Treaty of Paris in September 1783, the British officially handed over the Ohio Country to the Americans. In the coming decades, American settlers and the military would eventually defeat the British and anti-American Indians and take hold of the land. Jacob Hicks See also: Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; McKenney, Thomas L.; Northwest Ordinance (1787); Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; St. Clair, Arthur; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Heckewelder, John Gottlieb Ernestus. A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren Among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians from Its Commencement, in the Year 1740, to the Close of the Year 1808, Comprising All the Remarkable Incidents Which Took Place at Their Missionary Stations During That Period, Interspersed with Anecdotes, Historical Facts, Speeches of Indians, and Other Interesting Matter. Philadelphia: M’Carty & Davis, 1820. Sadosky, Leonard. “Rethinking the Gnadenhütten Massacre: The Contest for Power in the Public World of the Revolutionary Pennsylvania Frontier.” In David Curtis Skaggs and Larry L. Nelson, eds. The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001, pp. 187–213.

Greenville, Treaty of (1795) To conclude the Northwest Indian War, leaders of the Ohio Indian Confederacy and representatives of the United States signed the Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795. For a decade (1785–1795), members of the Wyandot (Huron), Miami, Delaware, Chippewa (Ojibwa), Ottawa, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Wea, Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, and Lenape nations united to defend Indian lands north of the Ohio River from American seizure. Following the American Revolution, areas of the Northwest Territory became prime targets for settlement. The United States negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 and the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785 to obtain land in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Several Indian nations vowed to defend their claims from further encroachment, however. Indian resistance to American settlers escalated into an undeclared war, known as the Northwest Indian War, along the frontiers of the Ohio Country. Fighting continued until an American army under the command of General Anthony Wayne defeated the Northwestern Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794. As a result, members of the confederacy were forced to sign the Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795, thereby ceding approximately two-thirds of Ohio and a portion of Indiana to the United States.

During the American Revolution, the British obtained the support of Indian tribes of the Northwest to fight against colonists, particularly those patriots who had settled in the frontier regions west of the Appalachian Mountains. Following the American victory, the newly formed republic sought retribution in the form of land cessions from the nations who had aided the British. During the two years following the Treaty of Paris (1783), the American government obtained several thousands of acres of Native land through the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) and the Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785). Although many Indians had allied with the British, most Natives viewed the American Revolution as merely a segment in an endless war of white encroachment. Many Indians, particularly the younger chiefs and warriors, did not consider themselves defeated by the United States, and following the Treaty of Fort McIntosh, they pledged to prevent any additional cessions to American settlers. With the passage of the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787, the American government abandoned its policy of obtaining Indian lands through coercion and adopted a program to purchase future claims. Nonetheless, as the American government attempted to negotiate peaceful treaties for Indian land in the Northwest, many settlers refused to wait and moved to seize claims in the region. To defend their homes and hunting grounds, the Indian nations united to form a militant confederacy led by Blue Jacket, a Shawnee chief, and Little Turtle, a Miami chief. Warriors of the Northwestern Confederacy began attacking American settlers both north and south of the Ohio River during the late 1780s. Although Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory, negotiated the Treaty of Fort Harmar on January 9, 1789, fighting continued between Indians and white settlers.

Painting depicting the Indian Treaty of Greenville, 1795, in which the Northwestern Confederacy was forced to cede approximately two-thirds of Ohio and some of Indiana to the United States. Principal figures are General Anthony Wayne, Chief Little Turtle, William Henry Harrison, Captain William Wells, and “Tarke the Crane” Wyandotte Chief, Priest and Keeper of the great Calumet, or Pipe of Peace. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)

After persistent requests by settlers for support from the American government, General Josiah Harmar marched an army of regulars and Kentucky militia to attack the Indian villages along the Maumee River in September 1790. Harmar’s attack in mid-October ended in a decisive victory for the Northwestern Confederacy, which only strengthened the confederacy’s commitment to defending the areas north of the Ohio River. Simultaneously, the defeat proved to the American government that a sound military force would be required to convince the Indians to relinquish their land. In the fall of 1791, General Arthur St. Clair received orders to lead a force against the Indians. Like Harmar, St. Clair suffered a significant defeat at the hands of Blue Jacket’s and Little Turtle’s confederacy

in the Battle of the Wabash (St. Clair’s Defeat) on November 4, 1791. Ultimately, the American government obtained victory through the efforts of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who led the Legion of the United States to victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794. The Northwestern Confederacy expected to obtain British support during the battle, but as the Indians retreated to Fort Miami, the British refused to grant them sanctuary. Throughout the Northwest Indian War, Indians received weapons and provisions from the British located in forts along the Canadian border, and many members of the confederacy expected the British to enter into a formal alliance against the United States. The developments of Jay’s Treaty, however, which was signed three months following the American victory at Fallen Timbers, ended all hopes of success for the Northwest Indians. As a result, members of the Northwestern Confederacy traveled to Greenville during the fall and winter of 1794–1795 to request peace. Treaty negotiations began in mid-July, with the formal signing occurring on August 3, 1795. The United States obtained approximately two-thirds of Ohio and a portion of Indiana, due to the establishment of a treaty line that ran from the mouth of the Cuyahoga River to Fort Laurens, then west to Fort Recovery, and finally south to the Ohio River at present-day Carrollton, Kentucky. In return, the Treaty of Greenville established an annuity system that provided yearly payments and supplies to the Indians for their land. Overall, the Treaty of Greenville provided temporary relief for American settlers to infiltrate the Northwest Territory. Order remained for only a short decade, and then the Shawnee leaders Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa organized their own Indian confederacy to counter American conquest. Carl Creason See also: Blue Jacket; Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; McKenney, Thomas L.; Neolin; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Carter, Harvey Lewis. The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Hurt, R. Douglas. The Indian Frontier: 1763–1846. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Sword, Wiley. President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790–1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

Hamilton, Alexander (1757–1804) Alexander Hamilton served as one of George Washington’s closest advisers during the Revolutionary War and Washington’s presidency. As the first secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was responsible for the government’s economic framework and establishing the nation’s credit. Hamilton was a founding member of the Federalist Party in support of a strong central government and capitalistic markets. After years of rivalry with Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Republicans, Hamilton was mortally wounded in a duel against Jefferson’s vice president, Aaron Burr. Hamilton was the illegitimate child of unwed parents in the British West Indies. Family friends helped him emigrate in 1772 to attend school in New York City. He went on to King’s College (now Columbia University). In 1776, he joined the Continental Army in New York as captain of artillery. By 1777, his reputation for bravery reached General Nathaniel Greene, who introduced him to General Washington. Likewise impressed by the young captain, Washington appointed him aide-de-camp later that year. Hamilton left Washington’s staff for a field command in 1781 and led the final American assault at

Yorktown. After the war, he studied law and settled in New York City with his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of one of the state’s most distinguished families; they would have eight children. Hamilton represented New York in the Continental Congress. He also served in the state assembly and as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where he advocated for a strong executive, appointed for life with vast powers. Along with James Madison and John Jay, Hamilton drafted the Federalist Papers to garner support for ratification of the new Constitution. President Washington appointed Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury in 1789 and relied heavily on him to secure the nation’s economic success. Hamilton allowed the federal government to absorb the states’ debts from fighting the Revolutionary War, and he established the credit of the United States abroad, paving the way for investment. Hamilton effectively argued the implied powers of the Constitution to Congress and the president in securing approval for a national bank. When the French Republic turned to America for help in war against Europe, Hamilton advised Washington on a course of strict neutrality. This, along with other forays into foreign affairs, spurred a rivalry with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who disagreed with Hamilton’s policies and sympathized with the French. Soon the differences of opinion between Hamilton and Jefferson gave birth to political parties—Hamilton and Washington’s Federalists, and Jefferson and James Madison’s Republicans. Much to Washington’s dismay, in 1795 Hamilton resigned from the administration and returned to practicing law. When Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in Electoral College votes in the election of 1800, both beating the incumbent Adams, the selection of president went to the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives. Hamilton used his influence to ensure the defeat of Burr, his longtime political and legal rival in New York. After contriving a quarrel with Hamilton, Burr challenged him to a duel in 1804. Hamilton was shot by Burr and died in New York City the next day. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: Jefferson, Thomas

Further Reading Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Hamilton, Alexander. Writings. New York: Library of America, 2002. Rakove, Jack. Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Harmar, Josiah. See Little Turtle Harrison, William Henry (1773–1841) William Henry Harrison was born February 9, 1773, to Benjamin Harrison and Elizabeth Bassett at their plantation on the James River in Virginia. William Henry Harrison followed his father into politics. From 1799 to 1800, he served as the Northwest Territory’s delegate to the U.S. Congress. Harrison was then appointed governor of the Indiana Territory on May 12, 1800. He served in that capacity for four terms. From 1816 to 1819, he represented Ohio in the U.S. Congress. In 1840, he was elected the ninth president of the United States. Harrison’s political career was fueled by his military service. After joining the army in the early 1790s, he was assigned to serve in the Old Northwest Territory. He served as an aide-de camp to General

Anthony Wayne during the 1794 Fallen Timbers Campaign, which raised his profile significantly. He opted to leave the army on June 1, 1798, to focus on his political career. While serving as governor of Indiana, he was named the Indiana Territory’s superintendent of Indian affairs by Thomas Jefferson. In that post, his task was to acquire Native lands for the United States. He was quite effective in that role, but his negotiation of the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne put him in direct conflict with the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. In 1810, Tecumseh left most of his panIndian force under his brother’s control at Prophetstown and went south looking for potential allies among the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks. When Harrison discovered that Tecumseh was absent, he quickly goaded Tenskwatawa into battle. Although the Battle of Tippecanoe (November 7, 1811) was in reality little more than a draw, its legacy had profound consequences for all involved. Tecumseh’s confederacy was greatly diminished after the battle due to the harm to Tenskwatawa’s reputation. He had promised the warriors that the Master of Life had guaranteed them victory and would protect them from American weaponry in the battle, and neither promise was met. Harrison claimed to have defeated Tecumseh, the great Shawnee warrior and chief, at the Battle of Tippecanoe, which was quite a feat since Tecumseh was not even there. Despite that reality, he would use the nickname of “Tippecanoe” in his successful campaign for the presidency decades later. During the War of 1812, Harrison was initially made a brevet major general of the Kentucky militia. On March 2, 1813, he was promoted to major general in the U.S. army. His initial actions against the British in that conflict ended in disaster, but he was able to repair the damage to his military record by capturing Detroit on September 29, 1813. On October 15, Harrison won the Battle of the Thames River, his last conflict in the military. Harrison never really distinguished himself in politics. Much of his political success can be traced to a string of political patrons, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry Clay. Although he eventually rose to the presidency, it was mostly due to having his victory at Tippecanoe burnished over time in the nation’s collective memory. He served as president for approximately a month before dying of pneumonia on April 4, 1841. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Jortner, Adam. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Owens, Robert M. Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Hopewell, Treaty of (1785) The Treaty with the Cherokees, made on November 28, 1785, at Hopewell Plantation in South Carolina, better known as the Treaty of Hopewell (1785), was concluded between the Cherokees and the United States. It reflected a generally accepted pattern of treaty making between the United States and American Indian tribes that was commonly practiced throughout the late 1780s. After the American Revolution, the newly constituted federal government decided to use a peaceful treaty process to order its relations with Native Americans rather than subduing them outright through

conquest. The 13 articles that constitute the treaty were entered into by 4 American commissioners and 37 Cherokee “head-men and warriors” on the banks of the Keowee River on November 28, 1785. Specifically, the Treaty of Hopewell provided for posthostility prisoner exchange, collective placement of the Cherokees under the protection of the United States, determination of boundaries, prohibition of settlement by U.S. citizens on Indian lands, extradition of non-Indian criminals to the United States and their punishment by the United States, prohibition of retaliation by either side, supremacy of the federal government (over the states) to regulate trade with the Cherokees and special regulation of that trade, notice to the United States by the Cherokees of designs against it that they might discover, allowance of an Indian deputy to Congress, and perpetual peace and friendship. In legal theory, the inherent sovereignty of the Cherokees to manage internal relations among themselves was preserved and protected from outside interference—either by the federal government or by the governments of the states wherein they resided. American federal jurisdiction was triggered only when the actions and/or rights of U.S. citizens were implicated and when actions were related to trade. The Hopewell treaty, like all treaties concluded by Congress as that body existed in its unicameral form under the Articles of Confederation prior to adoption of the Constitution, reflected the broad federal policy of separation that was based upon George Washington’s suggestion of 1783: As the Country is large enough to contain us all; and as we are disposed to be kind to them and to partake of their Trade, we will … draw a veil over what is past and establish a boundary line between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People from Hunting or Settling, and within which they shall not come, but for the purposes of Trading, Treating, or other business unexceptionable in its nature. (Washington to Duane, 1783) However, within five years, white settlement had increased dramatically on the lands set aside for the Cherokees in the treaty, despite a proclamation by Congress on September 1, 1788, forbidding such activity and directing those citizens who had settled with their families on Cherokee hunting grounds to depart immediately. By 1790, under the new American constitutional system of government, President Washington was obliged to ask Congress its pleasure regarding the issue: Notwithstanding the [Hopewell] treaty and proclamation upward of 500 families have settled on the Cherokee lands exclusively of those settled between the fork of French Broad and Holstein rivers, mentioned in the said treaty. [Thus] I shall conceive myself bound to exert the powers entrusted to me by the Constitution to carry into faithful execution the treaty of Hopewell, unless it shall be thought proper to attempt to arrange a new boundary with the Cherokees, embracing the settlements, and compensating the Cherokees for the cessions they shall make on the occasion. (Kelly, Treaty of Hopewell) Congress directed the president to renegotiate with the Cherokees, resulting in the July 2, 1791, Treaty of Holston, which reiterated the general terms of the Treaty of Hopewell but reduced the breadth of Indian lands. This was followed by a succession of treaties gradually reducing both Cherokee lands and sovereignty until their final removal from the Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas area to west of the Mississippi River along the Trail of Tears in 1838. Michael J. Kelly See also: Cherokees; Trail of Tears

Further Reading George Washington to James Duane, September 7, 1783. Available at National Archives, Founders Online: http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-11798. Accessed July 22, 2014. Kappler, Charles J., ed. and comp. Indian Treaties, 1778–1883. New York: Interland, 1975. Kelly, Michael J. “The Treaty of Hopewell” (ABC-CLIO History and the Headlines). http://www.historyandtheheadlines.abcclio.com/ContentPages/ContentPage.aspx?entryId=1678719. Accessed July 22, 2014. Wardell, Morris L. A Political History of the Cherokee Nation 1838–1907. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938.

Horseshoe Bend, Battle of (1814) The Battle of Horseshoe Bend was fought on March 27, 1814, at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama. The battle was a significant victory for Major General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia, along with their Cherokee and Creek allies, over the Red Stick Creeks. The defeat was so decisive that the battle effectively ended the Creek War of 1813–1814. Although the Creek War of 1813–1814 became a theater of the War of 1812, it began as a civil war among the Creeks. Afraid that many Creeks were becoming too acculturated, a group known as the Red Sticks—for the color of their war clubs—advocated a return to what they believed to be traditional Creek culture and traditions. Repudiating the wealth accumulated by many Lower Creek leaders, the Red Sticks were made up primarily of residents of Upper Town who supported the preservation of communal land for hunting and cultivation. The conflict expanded beyond a Native American civil war with the attack on Fort Mims on August 30, 1813, which saw the slaughter of men, women, and children. Some historians argue that it was primarily an attack on a group of Lower Creeks who had taken refuge there. Regardless of the intent, 300– 500 whites, slaves, and Creeks were killed. In response, militias were dispatched to the Alabama Territory from Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory. Jackson and his troops first saw action in the conflict on November 3, 1813, when they attacked the town of Tallushatchee. They sacked the town of Talladega on November 9. Jackson’s success continued into the next year, when he won battles at Emuckfaw Creek and Enitachopco Creek. By 1814, Jackson’s militia had been supplemented by the 39th United States Infantry Regiment, Cherokees, and Creeks. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson’s force of approximately 3,000 soldiers and warriors surrounded the Red Sticks’ positions. They then opened fire on the Red Sticks from both the front and the rear. After the initial assault, the infantry regiment made a bayonet attack on the Creek fortifications. It shattered the Red Sticks’ defense, and the battle turned into a massacre. It is estimated that more than 800 Red Sticks were killed in the fighting. In comparison, Jackson suffered fewer than 50 deaths between his soldiers and allied Native warriors. Some Red Sticks and their leaders, most notably William Weatherford, survived the battle and escaped to Florida. Although Weatherford eventually surrendered to Jackson, other Red Sticks continued their fight as Seminoles in the Seminole Wars. The Creek War of 1813–1814 was formally concluded by the Treaty of Fort Jackson. In the treaty, Andrew Jackson endeavored to punish all Creeks for the conflict. They were forced to cede approximately 22 million acres of land, which included the homes of many of Jackson’s Creek allies. The treaty also resulted in Jackson’s Cherokee allies being forced to cede more than three million acres of land to the United States. John R. Burch Jr.

See also: Creek Wars; Jackson, Andrew; Red Sticks; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; War of 1812

Further Reading Braund, Kathryn E. Holland, ed. Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War & the War of 1812. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Heidler, David S., and Jeanne T. Heidler. Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996. Martin, Joel W. Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Indian Removal Act of 1830 The Indian Removal Act of 1830, pushed through Congress and signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, marked a major reversal in U.S. policy toward the sovereignty of Native American tribes. The act was designed to strengthen the federal government’s ability to use treaties as a means of displacing Indians from their tribal lands, which were wanted for settlement and farming by white Americans. The law gave the president power to negotiate treaties with Indian tribes on land east of the Mississippi River. The tribes would give up their land in exchange for land to the west of the Mississippi. Any Indian wishing not to relocate would be forced to become a citizen of that state. Jackson believed the act would benefit the Indians by saving them from attacks by white settlers and allowing them space to govern themselves. At the time, most Americans never thought that the country would stretch beyond the Mississippi. Jackson’s patronizing attitude toward the Indians reflected that of many white Americans, but some protested the act as inhumane and brutal. Many of the southeastern tribes did not agree to move voluntarily, and the U.S. government spent the next 28 years struggling to relocate them. In the early 1800s, land-hungry Americans spread south into what would become Mississippi and Alabama. White settlers wanted the land occupied by Indian tribes in the region and often petitioned the federal government to have them removed. Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe were in favor of giving the tribes land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their current land, but neither pursued the idea. Beginning in 1814, with his defeat of the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, General Andrew Jackson led the way in the Indian removal campaign. Under force, the Creek Indians surrendered more than 20 million acres of their tribal land—in what today are Alabama and Georgia—to the U.S. government. Jackson went on to help negotiate another nine treaties aimed at removing Indians from southern territory over the next 10 years. Recognizing that they could not defeat the American army in battles to retain their tribal lands, many of the largest southeastern Indian tribes adopted a strategy of appeasement. The Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees all agreed to give up much of their land in hopes of keeping at least some. In contrast, the Seminoles in Florida resisted and fought against the United States in an effort to keep their tribal lands. Neither appeasement nor resistance proved effective strategies for the tribes, and the jurisdictional disputes with white Americans continued. In his first State of the Union address in December 1829, newly elected president Jackson stated as one of his priorities to emphasize the sovereignty of states over the sovereignty of Indian nations. He asked, “Whether something can be done, consistently with the rights of the states, to preserve this much-injured race.” He then recommended the removal of Indians living in the East to lands west of the Mississippi. Submitted to Congress in early 1830, the Indian Removal Act stirred four months of fiery debate. The act had strong support in the South, where many states were eager to gain jurisdiction over more land occupied by Indian tribes. The state of Georgia, the largest at the time, had particular interest in the passage of the act, since it was fighting the Cherokee nation in the federal courts over major land disputes.

Opposition to the bill came from a variety of voices, from Christian missionaries living and working on assimilation with the tribes to Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee who spoke on the House floor of his view that Native tribes were a sovereign people. He believed that they had been recognized as such from the founding of the country and the government was bound by treaty to protect them, not pay them to move to unknown lands. In the Senate, Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey spoke of the natural rights of Native Americans—“these early and first lords of the soil.” He raised concerns that under the act, land would not be obtained fairly or for reasonable compensation as the tribes deserved. Also in the Senate, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay opposed the bill, but in the end President Jackson got the power he wanted. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 28 to 19, and the House by a vote of 102 to 97. President Jackson signed the bill into law on June 30, 1830. Later that year the Choctaws became the first tribe to be voluntarily removed in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The Chickasaws also signed a treaty of removal in 1832 and moved west. That same year the Creeks signed a treaty giving much of their Alabama land to white settlers while being allowed to live on the remainder. With no government protection, the Creeks were soon cheated by speculators out of much of their land, and some began to retaliate against white settlers. In 1836 the Jackson administration ordered the tribe’s removal as a military necessity, and within a year most moved west. While a small group of Seminoles were coerced into signing a treaty in 1833, the majority declared the treaty illegitimate and refused to move. The Second Seminole War ensued from 1835 to 1842, after which most of the Indians agreed to move west. The few remaining Seminoles clashed with the United States once again in 1855 until the government agreed to pay them to move in 1858. The Cherokee tribe attempted to battle the federal government in court after a small faction was tricked into signing an illegitimate treaty. After their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, the Cherokees were rounded up by U.S. troops and forcibly marched to Oklahoma along a route that became known as the Trail of Tears—of the nearly 16,000 Cherokees forced to move, between 3,000 and 4,000 died of cold, disease, and exhaustion along the way. By the end of Jackson’s second term, more than 46,000 Native Americans had been moved to land west of the Mississippi, leaving behind 25 million acres of land for white settlers and slaveholders. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Indian Territory; Jackson, Andrew; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Ridge, John; Ross, John; Seminole War (Second); Trail of Tears; Primary Documents: President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress on Indian Removal (1829)

Further Reading Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Watson, Henry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian American. New York: Noonday Press, 1990.

Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 began as a proposal by President George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox to avoid constant warfare with Native American groups by regulating American citizens who were encroaching on Indian territory. They determined that the way to keep peace on the frontier was to first require traders to obtain licenses; if they did not, the traders would be prosecuted. They also called for making it against the law for American citizens to commit crimes against

Native Americans. That too became punishable by the American legal system. More importantly, they proposed making it illegal for citizens or states to privately purchase Indian territory. All private sales were to be deemed illegal unless the transaction had been approved by the federal government. The federal government had been ceded the power to make these changes by the states through the passage of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Congress weakened some of the provisions desired by Washington and Knox. The initial proposal called for a military superintendent to oversee the implementation of the act, but the House of Representatives inserted language that gave that role to a civilian. The Senate removed a provision that would have given the U.S. government the responsibility for distributing trade goods to Native American groups, which the Senate feared impinged on the economic rights of individual settlers and the states. Although Congress passed the act on July 22, 1790, it did so reluctantly. Congress set the law to expire in only two years. The evolution of the United States’ Indian policy began with Article IX of the Articles of Confederation, which gave the federal government the role of negotiating Indian treaties, although a loophole was included by Congress that allowed the states to also negotiate treaties with Native peoples. This inevitably caused problems, as the interests of the respective states did not always coincide with that of the federal government. The Articles of Confederation government attempted to ameliorate that problem by asserting more federal authority with the passage of the Ordinance of 1786. Federal supremacy in Indian affairs was given to Congress by the states on September 17, 1787, with the passage of the U.S. Constitution through the Indian Commerce Clause. Although the states were not supposed to be negotiating treaties after 1787, the practice continued sporadically until 1862. The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 marked a major change in diplomacy between Native Americans and the United States in that it eschewed traditional treaty negotiations in favor of establishing restrictions on the activities of U.S. citizens to prevent the outbreak of warfare on the frontier. This explains Congress’s reticence in allowing the law to stand for more than two years. In many ways, it hearkened back to King George III’s Proclamation of 1763, which was intended to create a buffer at the crest of the Appalachian Mountains between the British colonies and Indian Country. The colonists viewed that as the Crown favoring the interests of Native peoples over theirs by denying them the land on the frontier that they believed belonged to them following the conclusion of the French and Indian War. This was one of the actions by the British government that eventually led to the American Revolution. Some congressmen believed that the 1790 legislation had the potential of repeating the Crown’s 1763 error. Even after the passage of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790, Washington continued campaigning for even stronger legislation. His efforts resulted in the passage of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1793. Subsequent trade and intercourse acts were passed in 1796, 1799, 1802, and 1834. They were eventually incorporated into Title 25, Section 177 of the United States Code. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Proclamation of 1763

Further Reading Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Raymond J. DeMallie, comps. Documents of American Indian Diplomacy: Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775–1979. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Policy in Its Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Jackson, Andrew (1767–1845) Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States and served two terms in office, from 1829 to 1837. A national hero of the War of 1812, during Jackson’s administration he called for abolishing the electoral college, opposed the second national bank, and founded the Democratic Party. He was also a driving force behind Indian removal from the American Southeast in the 1830s. Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, near Waxhaw, South Carolina, to Andrew and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, Scots-Irish immigrants who arrived in America just two years before Jackson’s birth. His father died a month before he was born, and his mother died from cholera in 1781, leaving Jackson an orphan at age 14. The previous year, during the American Revolutionary War, Jackson joined a local militia as a courier at the age of 13. While he was too young to be a soldier, he nevertheless engaged in a number of backcountry skirmishes. After the war, Jackson went to live with his uncles in North Carolina, where he studied law. In 1787, he was admitted to the North Carolina bar and practiced law in Jonesborough, Tennessee, before moving to the Nashville area. There he met Rachel Donelson Robards, the daughter of his landlady, and the two were married in August 1791. Rachel was divorced from her first husband, but when Jackson discovered that it was not official, the couple held a second wedding in January 1794. Accusations of bigamy and adultery would later plague Jackson’s political career. Jackson was well suited to life on the frontier, and his political career in Tennessee soon took off. In 1796, he served as a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention and became Tennessee’s first representative in Congress. In 1797, he was elected as a senator but resigned in less than a year and returned to Tennessee to become a judge on the Tennessee Supreme Court. In 1801, Jackson was appointed commander of the Tennessee militia and in 1802 was made major general. In 1804, he resigned his judgeship to focus on his command. Jackson had a fiery temper and got into several fights, including an 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson, in which Jackson killed his opponent and was injured himself. During the War of 1812, many Indians remained loyal to the Crown. Red Stick Creek Indians, who resisted aggressive American expansion, attacked Fort Mims on August 30, 1813, and killed 400 people. In retaliation, Jackson led an alliance of Tennesseans and Indians to fight the Red Stick Creeks, winning the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814. In May 1814, Jackson was commissioned as a U.S. major general. His task was to prevent the British from invading New Orleans, a strategic port at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Jackson assembled his men and waited for the British to make landfall. On January 8, 1815, the British forces attacked Jackson’s waiting line. The British had more than 2,000 casualties, while Jackson’s casualties numbered less than a hundred. Jackson’s decisive victory at the Battle of New Orleans catapulted him to fame and made him a national hero.

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States and a driving force behind Indian removal from the American Southeast in the 1830s. (Library of Congress)

In December 1817, Jackson was sent to Georgia to lead a campaign in the Seminole War and given orders to end the conflict. The Seminole Indians had been raiding along the border between Spanish Florida and American territory, and Florida was a destination for escaped slaves. Jackson decided the best way to achieve his goal was to conquer Florida. Jackson’s military actions caused an international furor, because the United States and Spain were not at war. His brash behavior earned him many political enemies, and as many admirers. In 1819, Spain ceded the Florida Territory to the United States, and in 1821, Jackson was appointed its governor. From 1814 to 1824, Jackson negotiated nine treaties on behalf of the United States with the Indian tribes living in the southeastern territories. Although Jackson had few credentials for national office, in 1822, the Tennessee legislature nominated him as a presidential candidate. Jackson lost the 1824 election. Despite receiving the most popular votes, he did not obtain a majority, and the election was decided by the House of Representatives. In 1828, Jackson again ran for office. He was elected with 56 percent of the popular vote and 178 electoral votes, but the victory was muted by the death of his wife Rachel in December 1828. Jackson was the first president from west of the Appalachians and the oldest man to take office. The swearing-in ceremony took place on March 4, 1829, and Jackson’s inaugural reception was open to the public. Jackson began his tenure with a vague policy of reform and the desire to solve the so-called Indian problem. In 1830, he signed into law the Indian Removal Act, which gave the president authority to give unsettled western land to the eastern tribes in exchange for their signing over their lands to the federal government.

Some tribes, such as the Choctaws, relocated voluntarily because they believed that the federal government would leave them alone if they were amenable to treaties. The Creeks and Cherokees refused to move. Tensions worsened when gold was found on Cherokee land in 1829. Jackson urged the Indians to accede to the treaty and move before more violence ensued. Jackson was reelected in 1832 for a second term. During his presidency, he opposed the American System, a high tariff to protect American industries, and defused the Nullification Crisis with South Carolina. Jackson also vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States. On January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence made an attempt on Jackson’s life but was quickly subdued. In 1837, Jackson retired to the Hermitage, his plantation just outside of Nashville, where he died on June 8, 1845, at the age of 78. Karen S. Garvin See also: Assimilation; Calhoun, John Caldwell; Creek Wars; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Red Sticks; Ridge, John; Ross, John; Seminole War (Second); Trail of Tears

Further Reading Cole, Donald B. The Presidency of Andrew Jackson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. Satz, Ronald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826) Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), governor of Virginia (1779– 1781), U.S. minister to France (1785–1789), America’s first secretary of state under the Constitution (1790–1793), the second vice president (1797–1801), and the third president of the United States (1801– 1809). Jefferson also helped organize the Democratic-Republican Party, becoming its presidential candidate in 1796, 1800, and 1804. His enduring importance lies not only in his achievements as a statesman, but also in his role as a political philosopher. It was Jefferson who reconciled American expansionism with republican ideology. His concept of an expanding “empire of liberty” challenged the hitherto prevailing association of empire and expansionism with despotic monarchies. Instead, Jefferson maintained that expansion would resolve the regional and local disputes among the union’s diverging parts; it would allow the United States to preserve its agrarian character and prevent the perceived social evils that had befallen European societies. Born on April 13, 1743, in Albemarle County, Virginia, to Peter Jefferson, a planter, surveyor, and member of the General Assembly, and Jane Randolph, daughter of one of Virginia’s most prominent families, Jefferson inherited an estate with roughly 5,000 acres of land and 52 slaves. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1762, was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 1767, and practiced law between 1768 and 1772. In 1769, he was also elected to the House of Burgesses, where he would serve until 1775. In 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton, who brought an additional 11,000 acres of land and 135 slaves into the marriage and with whom he had five daughters and one son (only two daughters, however, survived to adulthood). Jefferson’s 1774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which argued that the British Parliament had no authority over the American colonies and that Americans had the right of self-government, propelled him to continental fame. As a result, he became one of Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress the following year. In 1776, Jefferson was

selected among the delegates to compose a first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which would justify the founding of the United States by presenting a list of grievances endured by the American colonies at the hand of the British king and by pointing to alleged British designs to subdue the colonies into a subordinate status within the British Empire. After the Continental Congress voted for independence, Jefferson returned to Virginia and served in the House of Burgesses from 1776 to 1779. Jefferson spearheaded the Virginia legislature’s abolishment of the practices of entail and of primogeniture (the legal requirement that fathers, upon death, pass their entire estates to their eldest sons or special lines of heirs) to prevent the emergence of an aristocratic class in Virginia. In 1786, the legislature also passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which prohibited state support for religion and disestablished the Church of England in Virginia. As the statute’s author, Jefferson feared that without a “wall of separation” between church and state, a religious majority could use the government to oppress religious minorities. In 1779, Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia, and he was reelected for another one-year term in 1780. After the War of Independence, Jefferson was appointed as a delegate to the Congress of Confederation (1783–1785). In that role, he helped draft legislation that would eventually become the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and would guide future American westward expansion. According to the ordinance, a territory in the Northwest could join the union as an equal member with the original states upon reaching a certain population and having a republican government. The American union would thus not be founded upon an unequal relationship between center and periphery as was the British Empire. From 1785 to 1789, Jefferson served as U.S. minister to France, before becoming Washington’s first secretary of state in 1790. Due to insurmountable political differences with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, he resigned in 1793. Jefferson, along with his lifelong political ally James Madison, organized opposition to the Washington and Adams administrations through the formation of the Democratic-Republican Party. Jefferson became the party’s presidential candidate in the 1796 election, losing to Federalist John Adams and becoming vice president in 1797 instead. When the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts during the Quasi-War with France, which inter alia empowered the president to expel noncitizens considered “dangerous” and sanctioned the punishment of those who criticized the national government, Jefferson, anonymously, authored the socalled Kentucky Resolutions, which the Kentucky legislature adopted in 1798 to protest the federal legislation. Fearing that Federalists were intent on subverting America’s republican order to stay in power, Jefferson argued that states could declare void federal laws they deemed unconstitutional—an argument states’ rights supporters would later use in the Nullification Crisis in 1832–1833.

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, from 1801 to 1809. Jefferson arranged the Louisiana Purchase from France but pursued a harsh policy toward Native Americans, favoring their removal to the West. (BiographicalImages.com)

After Jefferson’s 1801 presidential inauguration, the North African state of Tripoli demanded an annual tribute from the United States in exchange for a promise not to assault American merchantmen in the region. Instead of succumbing to these demands, however, Jefferson deployed the U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean to defend militarily American commercial interests against the piracy of the so-called Barbary States of Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunis. Although this First Barbary War was unsuccessful in ending Mediterranean piracy, it provided the fledging American navy with invaluable combat experience. During his presidency, Jefferson was also forced to address French imperial designs in North America. After Jefferson discovered that Spain had transferred the Louisiana territory to France in 1800, he sent negotiators to France in the hopes of purchasing New Orleans for the United States, as control of the city determined control of the entire Mississippi River, a necessary precondition for further U.S. westward expansion. In a surprising move, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte offered to sell the United States not only New Orleans but the entire Louisiana territory for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase, which effectively doubled the size of the United States and removed a serious foreign threat from North America, is considered Jefferson’s greatest foreign policy achievement. Historians, however, disagree about the Louisiana Purchase being the result of skillful diplomacy or of sheer luck. Napoleon’s decision to sell the territory was probably the result of circumstances beyond Jefferson’s control—such as the failure of the French army to reconquer Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean or the imminent outbreak of war against Great Britain—rather than of Jefferson’s policy initiatives. Jefferson’s third foreign policy challenge involved defending U.S. neutral rights during the Napoleonic Wars. After the Royal Navy gained supremacy over the high seas in 1805 and the French army over the European continent in 1806–1807, each nation tried to keep the United States from trading with

its rival. In reaction to British and French interference with American foreign trade, Congress, at Jefferson’s request, passed the Embargo Act of 1807, prohibiting American exports to force the European belligerents to relinquish their economic blockades. This policy of “peaceable coercion” was unsuccessful, however, as Jefferson had overestimated European nations’ dependency on American commerce. Instead, the embargo caused an economic recession and widespread domestic opposition and unrest. When Jefferson left office in 1809, Congress repealed the Embargo Act and replaced it with the weaker Non-Intercourse Act prohibiting American commerce only with Great Britain and France. The new law was easier to evade, since the government could not control where American vessels would actually go once they had left American ports. Most historians consider Jefferson’s policy toward Great Britain and France a failure, since it did not change British or French policies toward America but eventually led the United States to declare war against Great Britain in 1812. Jefferson was one of the most expansionistic of the so-called Founding Fathers, successfully acquiring Louisiana from France, aspiring to obtain Florida from Spain, and envisioning the incorporation of Canada and Cuba into the American union as well. While Federalists were more cautious about enlarging the union rapidly, since they were concerned the federal government might be too weak to exert authority over an ever-expanding nation, continuous westward expansion across the North American continent (and beyond) aligned with Jefferson’s vision of the United States. Unlike Federalists who wished to transform the fragile union into a powerful centralized nation-state that could compete with European powers as an equal, Jefferson feared European-style state-building efforts, which involved increasing the power of the executive, enlarging state bureaucracies, and creating standing military establishments, ostensibly financed through burdensome taxation and a funded debt. Strong state institutions, he believed, were prone to tyranny and incompatible with republicanism. Instead, the United States should remain a loose union of sovereign states held together by a commitment to shared republican principles and commercial ties. This “empire of liberty,” as he called it, was, in principle, illimitable, as it was based on universal values and not dependent on the coercive power of the modern state: “No constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government,” he told Madison in 1809. To Jefferson, the Federalists’ political program—initiated by Hamilton—undermined the American Revolution’s accomplishments. To transfer wealthy Americans’ loyalty from the states to the union, Hamilton had the federal government assume the states’ Revolutionary War debts and transformed them into a federal debt administered by the newly created Bank of the United States. Hamilton wished to transform the United States from an agriculturally based economy to one that included manufacturing and advocated a strong army and navy. Jefferson, by contrast, believed America’s independent yeomen farmers should form the backbone of the republic. Abundant free land in the west and open markets in Europe—to which Americans could export their agricultural surpluses (and, in return, import necessary manufactured goods)—would ensure that no mass of landless, dependent wage-laborers emerged in America’s eastern cities. According to Jefferson, the United States was exceptional in that it had the unique advantage of being able to expand through space rather than to develop through time and to defy the laws of history. America could thus avoid the fate of European societies, which he believed were characterized by entrenched class structures, tyranny, and frequent warfare. Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” conception was complicated by the institution of slavery and the presence of Native Americans occupying western lands. While Jefferson could not conceive of enslaved Africans or free blacks becoming citizens, he could imagine incorporating Native Americans into (white) American society, if they surrendered their lands and assimilated into Euro-American agriculture, religion, and culture. After the purchase of the Louisiana territory, the federal government still needed to acquire the land from Native Americans before American settlers could take possession of it. Jefferson,

therefore, instructed Indian agents to sell products to Indians on credit, hoping that the accumulation of debts would force them to sell their lands. If Indians resisted American westward expansion, however, the federal government should “pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach,” as Jefferson told Alexander von Humboldt in 1813. Although Indian removal policies are mostly associated with Andrew Jackson, it was Jefferson who first conceived of them. Jefferson’s views on slavery were ambiguous. On the one hand, Jefferson was a slave owner whose presidential election relied on the constitutional stipulation that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for representation purposes, giving the slaveholding South disproportionate political influence in the early republic. He would never free his own slaves and was vehemently opposed to the federal government intervening against the spread of slavery in the Missouri Crisis of 1820. On the other hand, Jefferson believed slavery to be an evil that stained the character of the United States and that posed the greatest threat to the survival of the republic. Since he believed that whites and blacks could not live as equal citizens together peacefully, he held that any steps toward emancipation would have to be accompanied by colonization plans. In his later years, he came to believe that slavery’s distribution throughout the United States could prevent a future “race war,” since enslaved Africans would be scattered across the United States and not be concentrated in a single region. Jasper M. Trautsch See also: American Revolution; Barbary War (First); Corps of Discovery; Hamilton, Alexander; Louisiana Purchase

Further Reading Bernstein, Richard B. Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Cogliano, Francis D. Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Meacham, Jon. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New York: Random House, 2012. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Keokuk (ca. 1783–1848) Keokuk was born in the Sauk village of Saukenuk, in present-day Illinois, sometime between 1783 and 1790. In contrast to the more famous Sauk chief Black Hawk, Keokuk believed creating a geopolitical alliance with the American state offered the most opportunity for his people to withstand Euro-American expansion. Keokuk subsequently became a close ally of the United States, believing that placating American desires for land was the best way for his people to retain their sovereignty. Based on the terms of a treaty signed in 1804, Keokuk ceded Sauk and Fox lands in Illinois and Wisconsin during the mid1820s in exchange for land in present-day Iowa. He pledged to keep his people on lands west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the United States recognizing him as the principal chief of the Sauk and Fox. Keokuk’s actions infuriated Black Hawk, who refused to follow Keokuk’s agreement. Black Hawk led his followers in 1832 from Iowa back to Saukenuk. The presence of Black Hawk’s band in Illinois led to the outbreak of the so-called Black Hawk War in the summer of 1832. The war went disastrously for the Sauks, culminating with the slaughter of more than 300 men, women, and children at the Bad Axe River on

August 2, 1832. In the subsequent peace treaty, the Sauks were forced to cede approximately 6 million acres of land to the United States in eastern Iowa. In reward for their loyalty to the United States, the lands in Iowa belonging to Keokuk and his followers were exempted from the land cession. The treaty also required all of the Sauks and Foxes to recognize Keokuk as their chief. While Keokuk had earned the title of a war chief from the power of his oratory, he did not have the hereditary requirements to become a civil chief, and many viewed Keokuk as a political puppet. This was especially true among the Foxes—or Meskwakis—who had joined the Sauks in the previous century for protection from the French. The Foxes did not recognize Keokuk’s authority over them in any way. Despite his critics among the Sauks and Foxes, Keokuk continued to be a great ally of the United States. He signed treaties in 1836, 1837, and 1842 that ceded a total of 12 million acres of Sauk and Fox lands in Iowa to the United States. In the final treaty, Keokuk agreed to lead the Sauks and Foxes to a reservation in present-day Kansas. Keokuk departed Iowa for Kansas in 1845, where he died in 1848. While historians have generally painted Black Hawk’s fierce resistance to American expansion in a better light than Keokuk’s diplomacy, it was due in large part to the latter’s negotiations that Sauk and Fox descendants were able to secure the small landholdings in Kansas and Iowa that now house the headquarters to two of the three federally recognized Sac (Sauk) and Meskwaki (Fox) tribes. The third and largest, the Sac and Fox Nation, is headquartered in Stroud, Oklahoma. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Black Hawk; Prairie du Chien, Treaties of

Further Reading Black Hawk. Black Hawk: An Autobiography. Edited by Donald Jackson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Colbert, Thomas Burnell. “‘The Hinge on Which All Affairs of the Sauk and Fox Indians Turn’: Keokuk and the United States Government.” In R. David Edmunds, ed. Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, pp. 54–71. Hagan, William T. The Sac and Fox Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980.

King Cotton “King Cotton” was a slogan referring to the political economy of the antebellum Southern states and became the cornerstone of Confederate diplomatic strategy. In the years preceding the Civil War, at least two-thirds of the world’s cotton supply was cultivated by enslaved African Americans working the fields of the United States’ cotton belt—a fact that cheered Southern planters, politicians, and apologists. Slavery threatened the very prosperity it had produced, however, as the political economy of the South collided with that of free labor and domestic industrialization favored by increasing numbers of Northerners. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Confederate strategists hoped to leverage cotton in return for European recognition and assistance. King Cotton combined economic realities with a strident cotton-conscious nationalism. “White gold” was the catalyst of an economic and territorial boom in the South. The profitability of cotton, planters argued, insulated Southern society from domestic and foreign threats because it was so essential to the global economy. Cotton, it was claimed, was the guarantor of Southern security and key to national independence. With the Kansas-Nebraska struggle raging in the background, Senator James H. Hammond’s King Cotton speech of March 1858 championed the South’s claim to economic independence. “Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?” Hammond asked his fellow

senators. If the South withheld cotton, he insisted, “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South; no, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King!” (Jones, 11–12). British dependence on Southern cotton became an article of faith below the Potomac. From the outbreak of the Civil War, the Confederate States’ chief diplomatic objective was to secure recognition of its independence from the European powers, particularly Great Britain. Confederate leaders hoped to appeal to British self-interest by reminding them of their economic dependence on the Southern staple. Jefferson Davis dispatched a three-man commission of William Lowndes Yancey, Pierre Rost, and Ambrose Dudley Mann to London as apostles of King Cotton. In exchange for diplomatic recognition or even intervention, the Confederacy offered an uninterrupted source of raw cotton, free trade with the Confederate States, and the expansion of European power in the Western Hemisphere. Convinced of the infallibility of the power of cotton, Confederate commentators predicted British recognition was inevitable if it were to stave off the collapse of its textile industry and protect its exports from the draconian Morrill Tariff passed by the Union in March 1861. Cotton sustained the British textile industry. By 1860, up to 80 percent of British cotton imports came from the South, and between 4 and 5 million of a population of 21 million owed their livelihood to the cotton mills. Britain looked elsewhere for sources of the raw fiber to free itself from this dependence. Nonetheless, secession’s supporters observed with glee as the British struggled to increase cotton imports from India and remained dependent on Southern crops—dependence it was hoped would offset any lingering antislavery sentiment. Prime Minister Henry Palmerstone succinctly surmised Britain’s dilemma when he observed that “we do not like slavery, but we want cotton” (Jones, 62). To apply pressure to the lever of dependence, Southern planters embargoed cotton exports. While never the official policy of the Confederate government, so powerful was the confidence in King Cotton that it enforced itself. British imports of cotton from the South in 1862 were just 3 percent of the 1860 level. Ironically, the South’s own economic success blocked this avenue to recognition. Southern farmers produced bumper crops in the two seasons preceding the secession winter of 1861, saddling the British textile industry with an enormous surplus. Viewing Britain through the lens of their own single-staple economy, Southerners overlooked the diversity of British economic connections around the globe. Principally, by the outbreak of the Civil War, British reliance on “King Corn” from the Northern states trumped its dependence on Southern cotton. Such assessments were as misjudged as King Cotton diplomacy was mismanaged. The heavy-handed threat of economic extortion by slaveholders alienated the British, especially when delivered by the inexperienced Confederate commissioners who overplayed their hand. Politicians and commentators dismissed Confederate assumptions that they were the economic satellite of the cotton South. Although Confederate commissioners tried to deemphasize the importance of slavery, the majority of the British press considered the peculiar institution the root of America’s troubles and sneered at the Confederacy as “Slaveownia.” In the end, such perceptions fatally weakened Confederate foreign relations. Historians have pointed to this combination of Southern overestimation and misconceptions as undermining the dogma of King Cotton. Southerners certainly misplaced their faith. Nevertheless, King Cotton was an attempt to shape geopolitical and economic realities into both a claim to independence and a strategy of foreign intervention. Ultimately, the Confederacy’s failure to prove its independence decisively on the battlefield, and the actions of thousands of slaves who seized their own freedom in the midst of that battle, were terminal for the Confederacy. The failure of King Cotton, then, served to hasten the demise of the slave system to which the cotton South had been bound for more than half a century. Stephen Tuffnell

See also: Blockade of Confederate Ports; Filibusterers; Missouri Compromise; Ostend Manifesto; Trent Affair; Walker, Robert J.

Further Reading Jones, Howard. Blue & Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. May, Robert, ed. The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995. Owsley, Frank. King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Schoen, Brian. The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Knox, Henry (1750–1806) Henry Knox, American Revolutionary War major general and first U.S. secretary of war, was born on July 25, 1750, in Boston, Massachusetts. As a supporter of American colonial rights, he joined the Continental Army and served under General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. Knox, who had extensive knowledge of military affairs and was an expert in artillery, rose quickly in the military ranks. Knox’s artillery helped George Washington to win key battles in the Revolutionary War. Recognizing his service, President Washington made Knox the first U.S. secretary of war in his cabinet. Knox witnessed the Boston Massacre of 1770 and he joined the Boston Grenadier Corps in 1772. In June 1775 he volunteered to fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill, but his first major contribution to the American Revolutionary cause began in late November 1775 during the siege of Boston. General George Washington’s army urgently needed artillery on the siege lines around Boston, and Knox proposed the idea of transporting cannons captured in forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point in upstate New York to Boston. Washington sent Knox as a commissioned colonel of the Continental Regiment of Artillery to transfer the weapons. Using ox-drawn sleds Knox and his soldiers brought back to Boston more than 60 tons of armaments, including 59 cannons. The 300-mile expedition took him 56 days due to the harsh winter conditions. Knox placed the cannons at Dorchester Heights, recently captured by George Washington as a key position for the control of Boston and its harbor. Facing American bombardment and defeat, the British decided to retreat by sea on March 17, 1776, and American forces entered Boston the following day as winners. After Boston’s capture, Washington continued to use actively Knox’s military expertise. Knox helped Connecticut and Rhode Island to build proper fortifications. Then he joined Washington’s forces in New York, and after the American retreat from the city, Knox organized the Delaware River Christmas crossing of the American troops. Thanks to this operation, Washington defeated the British at the Battle of Trenton in December 1776. After another victory at Princeton, Knox was promoted to brigadier general in January 1777. During the war, Knox also raised support and supplies for the army on behalf of Washington, established an armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, and trained artillerymen. Then he took part in the battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, and his artillery was crucial for the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. For his service, Knox was made major general in 1782. After the American Revolutionary War, Congress elected Knox secretary of war in 1785 and President Washington reappointed him in his first cabinet in 1789. As secretary of war, Knox had to deal with the unrest on the western frontier and relations with the Native American tribes. He became one of the architects of the so-called “civilization policy.” He also oversaw the establishment of a regular U.S.

Navy. After resigning in 1795, Knox retired to his mansion in Thomaston, Maine, where he died unexpectedly in October 1806. Chris Kostov See also: Civilization Policy

Further Reading Lonergan, Thomas J. Henry Knox: George Washington’s Confidant, General of Artillery, and America’s First Secretary of War. Rockland, ME: Picton Press, 2003. Puls, Mark. Henry Knox: Visionary-General of the American Revolution. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Strum, Richard M. Henry Knox: Washington’s Artilleryman. Stockton, NJ: OTTN, 2006.

Little Turtle (ca. 1750–1812) Little Turtle (Miami: Mihšihkinaahkwa) was a Miami chief who helped oversee his community’s political integration with the United States after the American Revolution. He gained a reputation by leading Indian forces to victory over the U.S. Army in 1790 and 1791. Thereafter, he transitioned into civil affairs, including Miami-U.S. diplomacy. Mihšihkinaahkwa’s first major action was in 1780, when Augustin Mottin de La Balme’s French Canadian troops plundered the important Miami cultural and economic town of Kiihkayonki (modern Fort Wayne, Indiana) on their way to capture British Fort Detroit. On November 5, 1780, Mihšihkinaahkwa led a Miami attack that killed La Balme and 30 of his militia. Throughout the following decade, Mihšihkinaahkwa took part in Miami raids on white settlements near the Ohio River. The new United States targeted Kiihkayonki. Secretary of War Henry Knox proposed an expedition “intended to exhibit to the Wabash Indians our power to punish them for their hostile depredations” and “their refusing to treat with the United States” upon invitation. Near Kiihkayonki, Mihšihkinaahkwa forced the army’s retreat, defeating U.S. detachments on October 19 and 21, 1790. Still targeting towns along the upper Maumee, Northwest territorial governor Arthur St. Clair attempted a similar project. Indians under Mihšihkinaahkwa’s leadership attacked the slow-moving army on November 4, 1791, at modern Fort Recovery, Ohio. Quickly routing the militia and flanking the regulars, Mihšihkinaahkwa again had defended the Miami heartland. At some point between 1791 and 1794, Mihšihkinaahkwa’s attitude toward the war changed. General Anthony Wayne began training a third army, and scholars surmise that Little Turtle understood the apparent lost cause of military resistance. Although Mihšihkinaahkwa raided U.S. forts north of the Ohio River and fought against Wayne’s army in 1794, he was not then the Indian confederacy’s primary war chief. The Indians’ defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the subsequent Treaty of Greenville in 1795 heralded a new age of Miami diplomacy in which violence was no longer a viable option.

Little Turtle or Mihšihkinaahkwa was a chief of the Miami tribe during a period of rapid American expansion. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)

Mihšihkinaahkwa led this transition, signing three treaties after Greenville (in 1803, 1805, and 1809) that secured yearly annuities for the Miami Nation in return for ceding much of southern Indiana to the United States. Historians have labeled Indian chiefs such as Little Turtle “accommodationist” or “medal chiefs” because they worked with empires. He continued arguing for Miami territorial and political sovereignty. He also visited the U.S. capital three times (1797–1798, 1801–1802, and 1808–1809), hoping to build relationships between Miami and American leaders. In this era, U.S. officials hoped to transform Indian men from hunters to farmers and Indian women from farmers to homemakers. Mihšihkinaahkwa asked the federal government to work with him; his central success was hiring and keeping his son-in-law and former Miami captive William Wells as the Fort Wayne Indian agent, giving him a voice in the U.S. bureaucracy and securing funds for agricultural tools. Mihšihkinaahkwa remained committed to controlling the internal affairs and cultural change of Miami people. He died in July 1812, suffering from gout. Cameron Shriver See also: Blue Jacket; Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; McKenney, Thomas L.; Neolin; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony; Primary Documents: “The Print of My Ancestor’s Houses”: Little Turtle Balks at Giving Up Land to General Anthony Wayne (1795)

Further Reading Carter, Harvey Lewis. The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Hurt, R. Douglas. The Indian Frontier: 1763–1846. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Sword, Wiley. President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest, 1790–1795. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

Madison, James (1751–1836) Madison played a critical role in many events that led to the birth and expansion of the United States. As a young man, Madison participated in the debates over independence in his home state of Virginia. He helped organize the Constitutional Convention and drafted the Virginia Plan, largely viewed as the starting point for the federal Constitution. Once the Constitution was drafted, Madison worked tirelessly to ensure ratification by the states. Madison went on to serve in Congress, then as secretary of state under President Thomas Jefferson. Finally, he succeeded his friend and mentor as president for two terms. Born to wealthy planters in today’s Orange County, Virginia, Madison studied at Princeton University (then the College of New Jersey). As debate over independence from Britain spread throughout the colonies, Madison became a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776. In 1780, Virginia elected Madison to the Continental Congress. Soft-spoken and small in stature, Madison was the youngest delegate to the Congress. Madison concluded that the federal government as created by the Articles of Confederation was too weak to manage domestic disputes and defend the country against foreign attack. He pushed for a national convention to consider revisions. Central in convening the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison was one of the foremost defenders of a strong national government during its debates. After the Convention, Madison, along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, penned the highly influential Federalist Papers advocating for ratification of the Constitution. Madison was elected to the first House of Representatives in 1789, where he helped introduce the Bill of Rights. During the administration of Federalist president John Adams, Madison and then vice president Thomas Jefferson formalized the opposition Republican coalition. After Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, Madison served as his secretary of state and was instrumental in Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase, which nearly doubled U.S. territory. When Madison succeeded Jefferson as president, the nation was divided between support for Britain (mostly northern states and Federalists) and France (southern and western states and DemocraticRepublicans) as the two countries fought each other. In 1812, Madison appealed to Congress to declared war on Britain to secure maritime independence and assert trade rights. War Hawks in Congress also saw an opportunity to seize Canada, gain Florida from the Spanish, and end western Indian uprisings, blamed on the British for arming the tribes. Madison’s wartime leadership was criticized in the North and the U.S. invasion of Canada failed, but the war cemented national pride and removed the threat of Indian uprisings in the Northwest. During his second term, Madison’s policies reflected the political attention captured by the potential western vote. He supported Henry Clay’s American System, intended to tie the emerging West and established East in one national marketplace. After the presidency, Madison and his wife, Dolley, retired to their Virginia plantation. He denounced the idea of nullification in the 1828 constitutional crisis, and he was a founder of the American Colonization Society for the gradual abolition of slavery and resettlement of blacks in Africa. Madison died at home at the age of 85 after an extended illness. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: American Revolution; American System; Articles of Confederation; Jefferson, Thomas; War Hawks

Further Reading Ellis, Joseph J. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Labunski, Richard. James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Rakove, Jack N. James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic. New York: Longman, 2002.

Marshall (John) Court Decisions (1823, 1831, 1832) The cases Johnson v. M’Intosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia are collectively known as the “Marshall Trilogy.” Through those decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court legally defined the extent to which Native American groups could assert their sovereignty. Johnson v. M’Intosh concerned ownership of two tracts of land in Illinois. The land had originally been purchased from the Piankeshaws in 1775 by British investors. The purchase was technically illegal due to the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade British citizens from owning lands west of the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. The land was never occupied by the investors. After the American Revolution, the United States claimed all the territory that had previously belonged to Great Britain. Years later, William M’Intosh purchased some of the land from the United States for a home. The descendants of some of the British investors went to court to evict M’Intosh from what they claimed to be their land, based on the documentation from 1775. Although none of the parties in the case were Native Americans, Johnson v. M’Intosh was used to limit the sovereignty of Native American groups. The justices on March 10, 1823, determined that Native American groups could not sell their tribal lands without the consent of the United States. Since the United States had never recognized the original land transaction between the British investors and the Piankeshaws, M’Intosh got to stay on his property. For all Native peoples, the decision meant that U.S. sovereignty took precedence in all matters relating to Indian lands. The cases Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia were the culmination of a decadeslong battle with Georgia. Georgia had long coveted the lands within its borders that were owned by the Creeks and the Cherokees, because they were very productive for agricultural purposes. Georgia’s legislature first made its designs evident with the passage of the Georgia Compact of 1802, which called for the removal of both Native groups. At the time, Georgia did not have the ability to force the issue. By the mid-1820s, the national political climate had changed. Many southern legislators in Congress were pursuing legislation to remove Native peoples to the West. The Cherokees responded to Georgia’s land lust and the actions in Congress by issuing a tribal constitution on July 26, 1827, that formally established the Cherokees as a sovereign nation. Through this action, the Cherokees claimed jurisdiction over their borders and forbade the sale of any Cherokee lands. Georgia responded by calling on Congress to enforce the Georgia Compact of 1802. To put further pressure on the Cherokees, Georgia in December 1828 annexed Cherokee territory located in the counties of Carroll, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Hall, and Habersham. The state legislature also asserted that Georgia’s laws extended over Native American-occupied lands. Georgia’s actions were supported by Andrew Jackson, who during his successful presidential campaign in 1828 made Indian removal a major priority. With Georgia’s desires being supported by President Jackson, the Cherokees turned to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Cherokee Nation sued Georgia for trespassing and interfering with the governance of the nation. The Cherokees requested that the Court enforce the terms of treaties made between the United States and the Cherokees that guaranteed the Cherokee Nation the rights to their existing homelands. A majority of the justices agreed with the Cherokees that they were in fact a sovereign nation, as that status had been recognized by the federal government through treaty negotiations. They then defined the limits of that sovereignty by determining that the Cherokees were dependents of the

United States and thus not considered legally a “foreign” country. Since the Cherokees were not considered a foreign country, they did not have standing to bring the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. A technicality the following year allowed the issue of Cherokee sovereignty to once again come before the Supreme Court. In December 1830, Georgia’s legislature had made it illegal for whites to live on Cherokee lands without the express permission of Georgia’s governor. The law was aimed at missionaries that were sympathetic to the Cherokee cause. Georgia officials subsequently arrested a number of missionaries, including Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler. As citizens of the United States, Worcester and Butler did have standing with the Supreme Court and sued Georgia. The decision made by the Supreme Court in Worcester v. Georgia was initially viewed as a major victory for the Cherokees. A majority of the justices found that the Cherokee Nation did have territorial boundaries that were exempt from Georgia’s laws, which made the arrest of the missionaries illegal. The reason that Georgia’s sovereignty did not extend over Cherokee lands was that the U.S. Constitution did not allow states to establish relationships with Native groups. That power was reserved for the federal government. Worcester v. Georgia was legally a landmark victory for all Native peoples, but it also exposed the limits of the Marshall Court’s authority in Jacksonian America. Both Georgia and President Jackson ignored the court’s decision. Georgia officials began surveying Cherokee lands in 1832 and two years later began allowing white settlers to take possession of those lands. By that time, some Cherokees had already begun moving west. Due to the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, President Andrew Jackson sent federal troops to the Cherokee homeland and forced the eviction of most of the Cherokees. The Cherokees were subsequently forced to travel to lands in Oklahoma over the Trail of Tears. John R. Burch, Jr. See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Civilization Policy; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jackson, Andrew; New Echota, Treaty of; Ridge, John; Ross, John; Seminole War (Second); Trail of Tears; Primary Documents: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831)

Further Reading Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Norgren, Jill. The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Robertson, Lindsay G. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

McGillivray, Alexander (ca. 1750–1793) Alexander McGillivray was born sometime in the 1750s to Lachlan McGillivray, a Scottish trader, and Sehoy Marchand, a member of an influential Koasati family of the Creek Indians. Although Alexander was raised among the Koasatis, his father provided him a formal education through schools located in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. His education was cut short by the outbreak of the American Revolution. McGillivray opted to side with Great Britain and was subsequently commissioned a colonel. The British also provided him with trade goods and gifts to influence his fellow Koasatis, and by extension the other members of the Creek Confederacy, to support the English war effort. Although unable to secure a formal alliance between the Creeks and Great Britain, McGillivray was successful in elevating himself in Upper Creek society as he gained renown by organizing, but not participating in,

raids by pro-British Creeks against settlements on the Georgia frontier. The Lower Creek towns, whose warriors fought alongside the colonists during the American Revolution, looked at him with suspicion, believing that McGillivray’s activities were generally not in their best interests. This division among the Creeks resulted in McGillivray having his decisions questioned by other Creek leaders throughout his lifetime. Following the conclusion of the American Revolution, Georgia coerced several Lower Creek leaders to sign a treaty in 1783 that ceded approximately 3 million acres of Creek land to the state. McGillivray believed that the land cession would not satiate the Georgians and they would seek even more land unless the Creeks became a more formidable military force. To bolster the Creek military position, McGillivray turned to Spain. The 1784 Treaty of Pensacola included a promise that Spain would protect Creek property in Florida. It also guaranteed that the British trading company Panton, Leslie, and Company would serve as the primary trading partner for the Creeks. Unbeknownst to most Creeks, McGillivray was made a partner in Panton, Leslie, and Company. In addition to the new business arrangement, Spain also made McGillivray a Spanish commissary, meaning that they supplied him flint, guns, gunpowder, lead balls, and other trade goods to distribute among the Creek Confederacy. This served to empower McGillivray militarily and politically, as those who did not support him did not receive supplies from the Spanish or Panton, Leslie, and Company. In short order, McGillivray reorganized the Creek Confederacy around the Creek National Council, which he controlled. Although McGillivray and the Creek National Council had forbidden any more land cessions, other Creek leaders opted to negotiate with Georgia and signed treaties in 1785 and 1786 that traded land for goods. When settlers began arriving on Creek lands in 1786, they were met by Creek warriors under the command of McGillivray and were repulsed. The demonstrated ability of the Creeks to defend their land lasted until 1787, when Spain suddenly threatened to stop providing the Creeks the war matériel that was required. The Spanish had become concerned that the Creeks were about to draw them into a conflict with the United States that they did not want. Being a pragmatist, McGillivray decided to negotiate a treaty with the United States that would not only protect Creek interests, but also his own. The resulting 1790 Treaty of New York included a promise from the United States to protect Creek lands from further land cessions, as long as the Creeks accepted most of the land cessions made in 1783, 1785, and 1786 as legitimate. McGillivray and the United States ultimately agreed that Georgia would be allowed to keep two-thirds of the land they gained through the three treaties. The United States also legitimized the Creek National Council and McGillivray as the leaders of the Creeks by recognizing the Creek Nation as a sovereign people. The United States rewarded McGillivray for signing the treaty by making him a brigadier general in the U.S. Army. They also gave him the sole right to distribute trade goods from the United States to the Creek Confederacy. For McGillivray, the treaty turned into a disaster. Most of the land that was ceded to Georgia had belonged to the Lower Creeks, and they claimed that he did not represent them. Many Upper Creek leaders, who were McGillivray’s political rivals, joined the Lower Creeks in demanding that McGillivray repudiate the Treaty of New York. McGillivray eventually capitulated. Needing a source of supplies, he once again turned to Spanish Florida. He signed a new treaty of alliance with Spain on July 6, 1792. He died in Pensacola, Florida, on February 17, 1793. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Creek Wars

Further Reading

Cashin, Edward J. Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader: The Shaping of the Southern Colonial Frontier. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Caughey, John Walton. McGillivray of the Creeks. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Fogelson, Raymond J., ed. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 14: Southeast. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004.

McIntosh, William (1778–1825) William McIntosh was born to Captain William McIntosh, a Scottish officer in the British Army, and a Creek woman named Senoya in the Creek town of Coweta in 1778. Raised among the matrilineal Creeks, McIntosh was known among his people as Tustunnuggee Hutke, which translates to “White Warrior.” McIntosh rose to prominence among the Creeks as a war chief. He was also well positioned socially and economically among the United States’ white elites, as he owned several plantations and inns. Importantly, in the United States’ patrilineal society, McIntosh was related through his father to Georgia governor George Troup and to William R. McIntosh, a Georgia legislator. William McIntosh used his connections in both the American and Creek worlds to serve as a political mediator between the two groups, often at the expense of the Creek Confederacy. When the Creek War of 1813–1814 erupted, McIntosh and his Creek followers aligned themselves with General Andrew Jackson to fight the nativist Red Stick Creeks. When the war was over, Jackson made no distinction between Creek factions in the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which forced the Creeks to cede more than 22 million acres of land to the United States. Although Jackson’s actions left the Creeks destitute, McIntosh and his warriors joined Jackson in his 1818 campaign against the Seminoles in Florida. In 1821, McIntosh signed the Treaty of Indian Springs with the state of Georgia, which ceded approximately four million acres of land between the Ocmulgee and Flint Rivers. In appreciation, Georgia officials awarded McIntosh 1,640 acres of land that he used to build an inn. In 1823, McIntosh made overtures to Cherokee chief John Ross encouraging the Cherokees to sell their lands to Georgia. Ross rebuffed McIntosh’s entreaties and notified other Creek leaders of McIntosh’s actions. The Creek National Council responded in July 1823 with a resolution that forbade the negotiation of any more land cessions. The penalty for such an act was death. That same year, George Troup, McIntosh’s cousin, became Georgia’s governor after promising to remove all Native peoples from the state. Troup responded to the Creek National Council’s resolution on land cessions by promising to protect any Creek signatories to treaties. Federal officials, with the support of Georgia’s politicians, negotiated the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs with McIntosh and a handful of minor Creek officials. In that treaty, all Creek lands in Georgia and Alabama were ceded to the United States. On April 29, 1825, Chief Menawa and his warriors executed McIntosh at his home. Although Troup and his supporters were outraged by McIntosh’s death, further bloodshed was avoided between Georgia and the Creek Confederacy due to federal intervention. The resulting 1826 Treaty of Washington provided the Creek National Council with $200,000 for the Creek lands in Georgia and allowed the Creeks to keep their Alabama real estate. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Creek Wars; Indian Territory; Jackson, Andrew; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Red Sticks; Ridge, John; Ross, John; Seminole War (Second); Trail of Tears

Further Reading

Frank, Andrew K. Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Griffith, Benjamin W. McIntosh and Weatherford, Creek Indian Leaders. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988.

McKenney, Thomas L. (1785–1859) Thomas Loraine McKenney was a U.S. government official and the first head of the Office of Indian Affairs. Born in Hopewell, Maryland, McKenney attended Washington College in Chestertown and served briefly in the local militia during the War of 1812. McKenney firmly believed that education was the best way to assimilate Indians into Euro-American culture, and in 1819 he was instrumental in passing the Civilization Fund Act, which provided some funds for educating Native peoples. His first government appointment, made by President James Madison, was as superintendent of Indian trade from 1816 until its abolition in 1822. In this position, McKenney coordinated a network of government-owned trading houses (the Factory System) designed to gain the allegiance of Indian groups living on the American frontier. When Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Office of Indian Affairs in 1824, he appointed McKenney as its head. He was given responsibility for handling correspondence and accounts of agents and superintendents dealing with Indian matters, for administering funds earmarked for Indian education and civilization, and for preparing reports requested by Congress of the Secretary of War. As treaty commissioner, McKinney negotiated several important treaties, such as the Treaty of Prairie du Chien in August 1825, which attempted to settle longstanding territorial disputes between the Sioux, Ioway, Sauk, and other northwestern Indian tribes. While this treaty proved ineffectual, his dealings with southeastern Indians had more immediate impact. With McKenney’s support, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, calling for the removal of Indians residing east of the Mississippi River to a “permanent” Indian territory in the West. McKenney later claimed that his plan for Indian relocation was intended only to benefit Native peoples and that President Andrew Jackson was to blame for the disastrous removal that resulted. Jackson, in fact, had removed McKenney from office shortly after the act became law. McKenney published a number of books between 1827 and 1846. One of McKenney’s most lasting legacies was the information and paintings he compiled with James Hall that became the monumental History of the Indian Tribes of North America, with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs. These three folio volumes contain beautiful color portraits and biographical information on a number of important Indian leaders, as well as depict aspects of Native life in the first half of the 19th century. McKenney’s last decade was financially difficult as he was forced to sign over to creditors the bounty lands he received as a veteran of the War of 1812. He died from typhoid fever in New York City, leaving a mixed legacy. His supporters considered him a sincere advocate of the Indians who did all he could to improve their welfare while his opponents dismissed him as a political opportunist. Martin J. Manning See also: Allotment; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Indian Territory; Jackson, Andrew; Reservation System; Trail of Tears

HISTORY OF INDIAN TRIBES OF NORTH AMERICA Believing, as most Americans did, that Native Americans would soon vanish, Thomas McKenney commissioned Charles Bird King to paint portraits of all the Indian delegates who came to Washington, D.C., so that that some memorial could be preserved “in the archives of the Government whatever of the aboriginal man can be rescued from the destruction of his race.” Between 1822 and 1840, King painted more than 140 portraits to hang in McKenney’s War Department gallery and many smaller portraits that were not intended to be hung. It was McKenney’s decision to print a portfolio of the Indian paintings, along with historical and biographical sketches, that would leave the most lasting impact. Knowing President Jackson would not endorse such a project, McKenney began surreptitiously shipping the originals to Philadelphia to be reproduced by the new process of lithography. McKenney then hired James Hall, a novelist and journal editor, to write the biographies needed for the full three-volume edition of History of Indian Tribes of North America. For $6, customers would receive a hand-colored reproduction of a portrait, or they could purchase the entire catalogue for $120. While the 15-year ordeal of getting the books to print ultimately drove McKenney from the project, the final installment of the first series was printed in 1844. This printing is not only considered one of the finest examples of 19th-century American lithography, it preserved a collection that would otherwise have been lost. In the winter of 1865, workers at the Smithsonian Institution, where King’s original paintings now hung, mistakenly vented a stovepipe into a ventilation shaft. The resulting fire destroyed the building, along with 295 of the original portraits. Only five were saved.

Further Reading Prucha, Francis P. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Viola, Herman J. Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974.

Miami. See Ohio Indian Confederation Morse, Jedidiah (1761–1826) Jedidiah Morse was a geographer and an American Congregational minister. In 1784, he wrote Geography Made Easy, the first geography textbook published in America. Geography Made Easy was issued in 25 editions during his lifetime and established him as the “father of American geography.” In so doing, Morse not only helped establish an academic discipline but was fundamental in creating a national American identity. Morse was born on August 23, 1761, in Woodstock, Connecticut, where he attended the Academy of Woodstock. He matriculated at Yale College, graduating in 1783. Morse was licensed to preach in 1785 and became a pastor of the church in Norwich, Connecticut. In 1789 Morse became a minister in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where he became known as an orthodox Calvinist minister. He was one of the founders of the Andover Theological Seminary. To support himself, Morse ran a school for girls. It was for one of his own classes that Morse originally wrote Geography Made Easy. In 1789, Morse married Elizabeth Ann Breese. The couple had 11 children, one of whom was the painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse. That year, Morse’s second book, American Geography, was published and was so successful that it was also printed in the United Kingdom as well as being translated into German and Dutch. A second revised and enlarged edition was published in 1793 as The American Universal Geography. In later editions of his work, Morse included historical and political information as well as maps. His books include Elements of Geography (1795), The American Gazetteer (1796), A New Gazetteer of the Eastern Continent (1802), and Annals of the American Revolution (1824).

In 1820, Morse was appointed by Secretary of War John Calhoun to visit various Native American tribes to “render a more accurate knowledge of their state.” His Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs (New Haven, 1822) contained both careful observation and racist proclamations of European superiority standard for the time. It was his profession as a geographer that made this trip particularly noteworthy, however. As a mapmaker, Morse had a unique ability to both document and influence the dispossession he witnessed: “The hunting grounds of the Indians on our frontiers are explored in all directions by enterprising white people. Their best lands are selected, settled and at length by treaty purchased.” Morse was involved in a number of heated religious controversies and became embroiled in the promotion of an Illuminati conspiracy theory in 1798–1799. In a series of three lectures, Morse began preaching in support of Proofs of Conspiracy, a book by natural philosopher John Robison. Morse, himself a Federalist, warned that the French Illuminati were influencing the Anti-Federalists and had been responsible for the French Revolution. Morse died on June 9, 1826, and is buried at the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. Karen S. Garvin

Further Reading Brückner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Moss, Richard J. The Life of Jedidiah Morse: A Station of Peculiar Exposure. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Philips, Joseph W. Jedidiah Morse and New England Congregationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

National Debt. See Hamilton, Alexander National Road The National Road, also called the Cumberland Road, was the first federally planned and funded road project in the United States and represented the federal government’s intention of opening the West for expansion. Construction work began on the road in 1811, and by 1834 the road covered a distance of approximately 620 miles and ran from Cumberland, Maryland, in the east to Vandalia, Illinois, at its westernmost point. The National Road ran through six states: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa. Early roads in the United States were frequently former Native American trade routes. These land routes were frequently used by early settlers to link waterways, but river travel often added hundreds of miles to a journey and increased the amount of time before goods reached markets. In 1748, Thomas Cresap and Nemacolin, a Delaware Indian chief, mapped out a path through the Cumberland Narrows mountain pass through the Allegheny Mountains. This route was named the Nemacolin Trail. In 1755, Braddock Road, a military road named for General Edward Braddock of the French and Indian War, was built between Cumberland, Maryland, and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. After the American Revolution, there was a growing demand for an overland route to link the settled East Coast towns and cities and the rural West. A more direct route was desirable, but that meant traveling through mountainous terrain. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson believed that a

trans-Appalachian route was necessary to encourage westward expansion and emigration and to make it easier for western goods to reach markets in the East. A road would also be useful for military purposes. In 1802, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin wrote a letter in which he proposed that a national road be financed through sales taxes. Gallatin’s letter became known as the “Origin of the National Road.” However, it was four years before Congress authorized funding for the highway. President Jefferson approved construction on the road, signing the bill into law on March 29, 1806. First, land needed to be obtained from farmers. The government did not use eminent domain to force property owners to give up land, and there was no payment offered for property, but many people donated land willingly because they wanted the benefits such a road would provide. Cumberland, Maryland, was chosen as the starting point for the National Road because it was already linked to Baltimore by road. The National Road would follow the path of the Nemacolin Trail through the mountains. The Army Corps of Engineers did the surveying for the route, and the actual construction on the road began in 1811. Strict guidelines were issued for the road, including the maximum permissible gradient, the size of the right of way, and the width of the road itself. Tracts of land 66 feet in width were cleared and leveled by hand in preparation for construction. The roadway itself was 20 feet wide.

Illustration from 1905 depicting a “Government Toll-Gate on the Cumberland Road.” The Cumberland, or National Road, was the first federally funded road project in the United States, running from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois. (Interim Archives/Getty Image)

The building specifications called for layers of stone covered with dirt or planking, but by the time that the road was begun, macadam had become available. Made from layers of stone and held together with tar to produce a smooth surface, macadam was highly desirable but expensive and required complex building techniques. In 1830, a section of the road was made using macadam.

Other road surfaces included corduroy and planks. Corduroy roads were bumpy because they used unhewn logs set side by side and nailed in place. Plank roads were smoother, made from eight-foot-wide planks laid atop parallel lines of timbers called sills. The planks were held in place by weight alone. Both types of wooden roads needed frequent replacement due to rotting. To help travelers locate where they were, stone mile markers were placed at five-mile intervals along the south side of the road. In 1835, the stone markers were replaced with cast-iron obelisk markers at one-mile intervals on the north side of the road between Cumberland and Wheeling. Inns and taverns were constructed every 10 miles and soon became the center of small but lively towns. The road was heavily traveled by all manner of traffic, including express stagecoach lines, hauling services, and Conestoga wagons. In 1835, the Pony Express began using the National Road to deliver mail. Numerous bridges were constructed along the road, including S bridges that crossed rivers at an angle. The Wheeling Suspension Bridge opened for traffic in 1849 and remains in use today. By 1818, the road reached a length of 130 miles, running from Cumberland in western Maryland, through part of Pennsylvania, and on to Wheeling, West Virginia, at the Ohio River. Extensions to the road were authorized in 1820 for the second phase of the road, and again in 1825. By 1833, the National Road reached Ohio’s capital, Columbus. During the 1830s, debates about the constitutionality of internal improvements and the role of the federal government in funding the road erupted. As more railroads were built, enthusiasm for road building slowed and the justification for continued funding eroded. By 1838, Congress turned over responsibility for maintenance to the states. To raise money for road repairs, the states built toll houses at intervals of 15 to 20 miles to collect fees from travelers. Toll fares depended on vehicle types, and clergy and funeral processions were exempted from paying tolls. In many areas, the money collected from tolls was not enough to fund road maintenance. The 1840s were the heyday of the National Road. During the 1850s the railway began to encroach upon the road’s popularity, and by the 1860s it nearly destroyed the road’s economy. Stagecoach lines and businesses went bankrupt, and many inns were converted to private residences. The National Road reached its westernmost point at Vandalia, Illinois, in 1852. Arguments over funding and the economic impact of the railway led to federal defunding of the road. In 1879, Congress gave control of the road to individual states, and from want of traffic, the road lapsed into ruin. The introduction of the bicycle in the 1880s and the Model T in 1908 led to an interest in reviving the road. The Rural Road Act of 1916 made federal funds available for rebuilding the road, and in the 1920s the National Road was incorporated into the Federal Highway System as U.S. Route 40. Karen S. Garvin

Further Reading Raitz, Karl. A Guide to the National Road. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Searight, Thomas B. The Old Pike: A History of the National Road, with Incidents, Accidents, and Anecdotes Thereon. Berwyn Heights, MD: Heritage Books, 2009. Sky, Theodore. The National Road and the Difficult Path to Sustainable National Investment. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011.

New Echota, Treaty of (1835)

The Treaty of New Echota was signed between the United States and representatives of the Cherokee nation. Under the treaty’s terms—never accepted by the majority of the Cherokees—the Cherokees ceded their territory in northern Georgia and relocated to the Indian Territory. The Cherokees, who once controlled a large territory of roughly 125,000 square miles across the South, had given up more than 80 percent of their lands by 1829. Most of their remaining land was in northwestern Georgia. Georgia’s government was determined to gain this land but gained little support from the administration of President John Quincy Adams. After Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, Georgia declared the existing federal treaty with the Cherokees nullified and ordered the Cherokee government to dissolve. The chaos of this confrontation was increased when gold was discovered on Cherokee land. Georgia sent surveyors into Cherokee territory and banned the Cherokees from gold mining. The Cherokees, who numbered less than 20,000, feared a flood of white prospectors would leave them outnumbered on their own territory. These fears were fulfilled by the end of 1830, but they were superseded by a new threat. In May 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, giving President Jackson the authority to purchase the lands of Indian nations and relocate them west of the Mississippi River. Cherokee leaders opened negotiations, while also appealing to the Supreme Court to void Georgia’s laws within Cherokee territory. In March 1831, the Court ruled that it had no jurisdiction to hear an appeal by the Cherokees, who it deemed were not truly independent. The following year, Georgia declared Cherokee title extinguished and held a lottery to sell off the Cherokee nation’s land. The Cherokees divided into two factions. The Treaty Party, led by John Ridge, favored relocation. The majority National Party, led by John Ross, rejected the treaty. Their counteroffer of accepting state law if they were allowed to retain their lands was rejected by the U.S. government. In October 1834, the treaty was rejected by the Cherokee General Council. After this setback, the Treaty Party organized its own council. In February 1835, it signed an agreement agreeing to removal for a payment of $3.5 million; John Ross countered with a proposal for $20 million, a sum equal to the entire federal budget. The U.S. government rejected this out of hand. Several of the Treaty Party’s leaders were assassinated in 1835. Georgia kept up pressure as well, even sending its militia across state lines to harass John Ross. Tensions remained high throughout 1835; at the General Council meeting in October, President Jackson’s emissary, John F. Schermerhorn, demanded negotiations at the Cherokee capital of New Echota, but the General Council voted to send a delegation to Washington. Despite this agreement, hundreds of treaty advocates arrived in New Echota for a week of negotiations with Schermerhorn in December 1835. The Treaty of New Echota was signed on December 29. Its terms called for the removal of the Cherokees within two years. In return, the Cherokees were given $5.5 million (roughly equivalent to $120 million in modern dollars), additional funds for all improvements left on Cherokee land, and title to an equal amount of land in Oklahoma, then the Indian Territory. The treaty also included a clause allowing Cherokees to become citizens of Georgia and other southern states on individual grants of 160 acres, although President Jackson removed this provision unilaterally. The treaty’s announcement created an uproar across the Cherokee nation. Not one of the treaty’s signers was an elected official of the Cherokee government. The National Party’s leaders protested, as did the leaders of the General Council, but President Jackson upheld the treaty’s legitimacy. John Ross came to Washington with a petition signed by nearly 13,000 Cherokees, but President Jackson rejected this out of hand. The U.S. Senate also rejected a bill declaring that the Treaty of New Echota was not binding on the Cherokees. On May 18, 1836, the Senate voted 31–15 to ratify the treaty,

just reaching the two-thirds majority requirement. This surprised many observers, since an antiratification senator changed his vote at the last moment. President Jackson declared the treaty ratified on May 23. The Cherokees continued to fight the treaty, and when the two-year deadline arrived, 16,000 Cherokees were still living in their homeland. The U.S. military removed them by force; as many as 4,000 Cherokees died on the march to Oklahoma on what became known as the Trail of Tears. James Erwin See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; Ridge, John; Ross, John

Further Reading Buchanan, John. Jackson’s Way: Andrew Jackson and the People of the Western Waters. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2001. Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Smith, Daniel Blake. An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Northwest Land Ordinance (1785) From the country’s inception, the federal government struggled over how to satisfy settlers’ high demand for land with an orderly transfer from public land to private property. Accordingly, Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785 to establish a systematic way to sell the public domain. That revolutionary ordinance required that land must be surveyed in a rectangular grid pattern before being offered for sale. The implementation of the Land Ordinance of 1785 established land-use practices in much of the transMississippi West, as more than three-fourths of the continental United States was ultimately divided under the system known as the rectangular survey. In 1784, Congress passed a resolution calling for all of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains, north of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River to be divided into 10 separate states. How the land would be divided into salable parcels, however, was not addressed. Thomas Jefferson, then a delegate to Congress from Virginia, had become disenchanted with the metes and bounds system in which land claims followed local markers and natural boundaries. While a relatively fast and straightforward system, it also left many irregular and unsalable parcels of land that, to Jefferson’s scientific and rational worldview, were highly problematic. Jefferson pushed through the Land Ordinance of 1785 as a mechanism to control efficient land dispersal. The rectangular survey process would establish townships of 6 square miles divided into 36 sections of 640 acres each. These sections could then be further subdivided for resale by settlers and land speculators. After they were surveyed, they were offered at auction to the highest bidder with a minimum cost of $1 per acre, with the exception of section 16, which was reserved for schools for their respective townships and land that was to be given to veterans of the Revolutionary War as payment for their service. The system was first implemented on the west side of the Ohio River in the newly formed Northwest Territories in what was called the Seven Ranges. The first north-south line, or meridian, called the Eastern Ohio Meridian (sometimes called Ellicott’s Line after Andrew Ellicott, who had been in charge of surveying), separated the territory from the state of Pennsylvania. The first east-west line (called the Geographer’s Line or Base Line) began where the Pennsylvania boundary touched the north bank of the Ohio River. These two lines met just east of what is now East Liverpool, Ohio, at the point now known as the Point of Beginning (40°38′33″N 80°31′10″W).

Thomas Hutchins, the first geographer of the United States, began surveying the Geographer’s Line on September 30, 1785, but quickly returned to Pittsburgh after he received word of an immanent attack by Miami and Mingo Indians in the region. In August of the following year, he and his men resumed their survey and by September had placed a stone at the end of the Geographer’s Line. (The original survey set stones at one-mile—1.6 km—intervals along the four sides of each township and did not venture to the interior.) Under protection from troops housed at the Fort Steuben, the group completed four ranges and 42 miles of the west side of the fifth range that autumn. Hutchins submitted a plat of the first four ranges to Congress in the spring of 1787. Israel Ludlow completed the seventh range the next year with the southwest corner (39°20′33″N 81°21′52″W) a few miles up the Ohio River from Marietta, Ohio, followed by James Simpson in the sixth range and Absalom Martin in the fifth. The sections of each survey township were numbered according to the plan of the Land Ordinance of 1785. The ranges were numbered starting from Ellicott’s Line working westward. Townships were numbered starting from the southernmost township or partial township in each range, numbering northward toward the Geographer’s Line, a system called the Ohio River Base. Thus, townships next to each other did not have the same number due to the irregularity of the Ohio River’s course, with the townships adjacent to the Geographer’s Line numbered 5, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 in ranges 1 to 7. Recognizing this problem, territories outside of Ohio are numbered from the Base Line. Public sales began in 1787 in New York and were continued in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Steubenville, Ohio. Difficulties with Indians continued in the area until the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, and settlement was slow. Steubenville was founded in 1797, and the land office there opened in 1801. The Steubenville Land Office was responsible for sales in the northern part of the tract, within 48 miles (77 km) of the Geographer’s Line. The Marietta Land Office sold lands in the southern part. While later acts further outlined and specified land dispersal policies, the Land Ordinance of 1785 established the framework for a national land system. David Bernstein See also: Blue Jacket; Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; General Land Office; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; McKenney, Thomas L.; Neolin; Northwest Ordinance; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Johnson, Hildegard Binder. Order upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Rohrbaugh, Malcom. The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Stilgoe, John. Common Landscapes of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.

Northwest Ordinance (1787) The Northwest Ordinance is both the most famous and the most important of the acts passed by the Confederation Congress. Its importance lay in creating a system for the organization of territorial governments and their eventual admission as states, as well as banning slavery northwest of the Ohio River. It also outlined a system of treaty making with Native Americans that was so demonstrably ignored, its language has become symbolic of the failure of U.S. Indian policy. What to do with the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains was a problem that predated the Articles of Confederation. Maryland would not ratify the Articles until states with large western land claims promised to give them to the new federal government. Virginia’s agreement to give up its claims north of the Ohio River in January 1781 induced Maryland to participate in the plan ratified in the Articles. In March 1784, Virginia formally deeded over its claims north of the Ohio River to the Confederation. The same month, a committee made up of Thomas Jefferson, Jeremiah Townley Chase, and David Howell proposed the first Northwest Ordinance stating that for the territories to become states, they would have to have a population at least as large as the smallest of the original 13 states. Its most striking provision was that no slavery would be allowed in the territory after the year 1800. While the bill passed in April by a 10–1 vote, the slavery provision was removed during the debate. A new proposal for creating governments in the western territories was offered in 1786, but did not come up for debate until spring 1787. The new system gave the territorial government a governor who served a three-year term, a secretary serving four years, as well as three judges who served on good behavior. Once a territory reached 5,000 free male inhabitants, a general assembly could be formed. The assembly would be made up of the governor, a legislative council made up of five members with a fiveyear term, and a house of representatives that would have a two-year term. The territory would also be allowed a nonvoting delegate to Congress. Section 14 contained a series of articles that further illuminated the rights of the citizenry, promising freedom of religion and trial protections, and encouraging education. It further outlined that between three and five states could be created out of the region, ultimately resulting in the creation of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This proposal, like its predecessor, did not originally contain a ban on slavery. Article 6 of section 14, which banned slavery, was added only before the final vote when Nathan Dane discovered it had no opposition. William Grayson claimed that the southern states agreed to ban slavery to limit the economic competition between the regions. The ordinance passed July 13, 1787, by an 8–0 vote with Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia all voting in favor. In addition to becoming a model by which other territories would be organized and subsequently admitted to the union, the ordinance is also among the earliest of formal statements of general intent toward American Indian nations. It was composed concurrently with the federal Constitution, which famously mentions American Indians only as economically defined exceptions to the establishment of the new citizenry (“Indians not taxed”) and elsewhere as simply trade concerns. As a result, many scholars of Indian affairs look to the ordinance for its clues about the intentions of Congress toward American Indians. The document, while not a treaty, is consistently utilized as a point of reference, with the “utmost good faith” and “without their consent” clauses suggesting the obligation of the federal government to act as the

trustee of American Indian lands, an obligation that it would later codify and then proceed more or less to ignore. Within the same year, preparations were made to make expedient use of the option reserved in the latter clause, “in just and lawful wars.” The campaign against the tribes of the Northwest Territory began in earnest in 1788 with the assignment of Arthur St. Clair to the region as governor. With respect to American Indian relations, therefore, the ordinance is significant as a template for relations and treaty making as it would be conducted into the 1800s. Indeed, the conflicts in the Northwest would be resolved at the Treaty of Greenville (1795), in which the terms of agreement between apparently equal parties would become increasingly standardized, to more clearly define Indian rights and to negotiate the transfer of very specific tracts of land. Donald E. Heidenreich Jr. See also: Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; McKenney, Thomas L.; Northwest Land Ordinance (1785); Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; St. Clair, Arthur; Wayne, Anthony; Primary Documents: Northwest Ordinance (1787)

Further Reading Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr. “Americans versus Indians: The Northwest Ordinance, Territory Making, and Native Americans.” Indiana Magazine of History 84, no. 1 (March 1998): 90–108. Hurt, R. Douglas. “Historians and the Northwest Ordinance.” The Western Historical Quarterly 20, no. 3 (August 1989): 261–280. Taylor, Robert M., ed. The Northwest Ordinance, 1787: A Bicentennial Handbook. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1987.

Northwest Territory On July 13, 1787, the Congress of the Confederation (successor to the Second Continental Congress and predecessor to the U.S. Congress) created the Northwest Territory, formally known as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. The United States claimed the 260,000-square-mile tract of land north and west of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi, and south of the Great Lakes upon signing the Treaty of Paris of 1783 at the end of the War of American Independence. This land became all or portions of six states: Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Wisconsin (1848), and Minnesota (1858). In the 17th century, the French explored the area, spreading Christianity through missionary work and cultivating trade relations with Algonquian and Siouan Indians. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, France and Britain signed the Treaty of Paris of 1763, giving Britain control of the land. In an attempt to stabilize relations with the diverse groups of Indians in the region, many of whom had fled Iroquois expansion to the east, the British government passed the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which restricted white settlement of its newly acquired land west of the Appalachian Mountains. The proclamation further established the province of Quebec in the northern portion of this land. In 1774, with tensions rising in its North American colonies, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774 in an attempt to appease the French Catholic residents still in the area. The act restored French law for civil suits, allowed the practice of Catholicism, and allowed the Catholic church to impose tithes. It also allowed Catholics to have jobs in the civil service. The tension with 13 of Britain’s North American colonies boiled over into a war for independence in 1775. After an eight-year war, Britain surrendered much of the land it claimed in North America in the Treaty of Paris of 1783: the territory of the colonies declaring independence, as well as the land west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi River. Thomas Jefferson, as a delegate to the Continental

Congress from Virginia, drafted a land ordinance passed in April 1784 that called for the western land north of the Ohio River to “be divided into distinct states.” Virginia had already claimed all of the land and competed with Massachusetts and Connecticut for control of portions of it, but all three states ceded their claims to the federal government between 1784 and 1786. An exception was the Western Reserve, a 5,200-square-mile area that Connecticut had claimed since 1662, and in which it had allowed residents to resettle after the British burned their homes during the war for independence. Connecticut ceded this land in 1800, and it formed the northeastern portion of Ohio when it became a state in 1803. The Land Ordinance of 1785 held that the land should be surveyed and laid out in 36-mile-square townships, with east-west lines every six miles crossed by north-south lines also spaced every six miles. The U.S. government used this grid system throughout much of the western United States. Further, the land was to be sold in 640-acre sections for $1 an acre at auctions held in the East. The proceeds from the sale of section 16 in each township were to be set aside for public education. These conditions benefited large speculators to the detriment of individual settlers. In response, Congress passed the Land Act of 1800, allowing land to be purchased by the half-section, on credit, with as little as $80 down payment, from land offices in settlements located in the territory. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, formally known as “An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio,” established how the United States would regard people in the territory it would add to that of the original 13 colonies. Rather than consider them as colonial subjects, the new country would provide territorial residents the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, trial by jury, representation in a legislature, judicial proceedings, the right to bail, and freedom of religion and from cruel and unusual punishment. There was no self-government, however, until the population reached certain thresholds. Congress would appoint a governor, a secretary, and judges to administer the territory until a portion of it reached a population of 5,000 free adult men. Those men could then elect a territorial legislature. When the population of the territory reached 60,000, representatives from it could be elected “into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever, and shall be at liberty to form a permanent constitution and State government.” Slavery was forbidden in the territory, but slaves of settlers already in the region were not freed, and fugitive slaves were subject to return to their owners. Native Americans in the territory were to be treated with “utmost good faith,” and land was not to be taken from them without their consent. The legacy of the American government’s inability to do so in the region ultimately led Standing Rock Sioux activist Vine Deloria Jr. to write a scathing indictment of American Indian policy using that phrase as its title in the 1970s. As various states were formed from the Northwest Territory, the remaining territory was renamed, creating the Indiana Territory (1800–1816), the Michigan Territory (1805–1837), and the Illinois Territory (1809–1818). The Wisconsin Territory (1836–1848) and the Minnesota Territory (1849–1858) also included land in the future states of North and South Dakota and Iowa. In considering how to add new territory to that of the original 13 colonies, the government of the new United States had to reckon with how to deal with land policy, territorial governments, the expansion of slavery, and treatment of Native Americans. The decisions they made for the Northwest Territory would serve as a model for other territory acquired by the United States in the 19th century. Donald W. Maxwell See also: Black Hawk; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Greenville, Treaty of; Little Turtle; Neolin; Ohio Indian Confederation; Paris, Treaty of (1763); Paris, Treaty of (1783); Pontiac; Quebec Act; St. Clair, Arthur;

Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Primary Documents: “My Husband Was Seized with the Mania”: Harriet L. Noble’s Account of Emigration from New York to Michigan (1824)

Further Reading Buley, R. Carlyle. The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815–1840. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1950. Onuf, Peter S. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Ohio Company Founded in 1786, the Ohio Company, or Ohio Company of Associates (not to be confused with the earlier Ohio Company of Virginia), was a land-speculating company active in the Ohio Country. Its members became the first Euro-Americans to settle in what is today the state of Ohio. Unable to levy taxes under the terms of the Articles of Confederation, Congress had found itself unable to pay pensions to America’s military veterans. In lieu of such payments, 288 former officers of the Continental Army endorsed the Newburgh Petition of 1783 requesting that Congress grant them tracts of land in the Ohio Country, a part of the territory south and west of the Great Lakes that Britain had ceded at the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War. When Congress failed to act on the petition, two of the petitioners—General Benjamin Tupper and General Rufus Putnam—drew up plans to form a joint stock land company based in the same region and advertised in Massachusetts newspapers for others who might be interested in taking part. Both Tupper and Putnam had served as surveyors in the Ohio Country and appreciated the potential economic security that the lands offered. As a result of Tupper and Putnam’s advertisements, 11 men met at the Bunch-of-Grapes Tavern in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1786, and by March 3 had agreed to establish the Ohio Company. The enterprise would raise capital by selling land shares, of which 1,000 would be available; although to discourage overt speculation, no individual would be allowed to purchase more than five shares. Putnam, General Samuel Holden Parsons, and the Reverend Manasseh Cutler were elected directors, and Major Winthrop Sargent was elected secretary. Agents representing blocks of 20 shares were to represent the shareholders at meetings and elect the company’s officers. In addition, the founding members set up a donation system to help potential emigrants unable to purchase shares themselves. Parsons was chosen to approach the Continental Congress about acquiring the necessary land, but when he failed, he was replaced by the Reverend Cutler. The sole nonveteran member of the Ohio Company, Cutler was fortunate enough to befriend financier and secretary of the Board of Treasury William Duer, who was himself interested in land speculation. Through Cutler’s efforts and Duer’s help and influence, a congressional committee approved the Ohio Company’s proposition to acquire 1.5 million acres north of the Ohio River and east of the Virginia Military Reserve on July 14, 1787, for a price of $1 million. The company would pay half the amount at once and the other half when a survey was completed. As it happened, the committee’s approval of the Ohio Company purchase had come only one day after the passage of the final Northwest Ordinance, the third in a series of congressional acts designed to encourage and facilitate the settlement of the newly acquired wilderness. This region, which was officially organized as the Northwest Territory under the terms of the 1787 act, offered the new nation the prospect of orderly expansion while at the same time generating much-needed revenue through the sale of land. In the case of the Ohio Company, a portion of the payment would be covered by military warrants, allowing Congress to retire its obligation to the veterans involved while at the same time collecting

revenue. The company’s investors, on the other hand, would pay less in cash for the land, although it was required that they set aside plots for educational, religious, and governmental use. Under the direction of Putnam, the Ohio Company founded its first settlement—which was also the first in the Northwest Territory—at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers on April 7, 1788. Known at first as Adelphia (“brotherhood”), the community was renamed Marietta shortly afterward in honor of Queen Marie Antoinette of France and in recognition of the support that the American revolutionaries had received from her nation. Arthur St. Clair, who had been president of Congress during that body’s negotiations with the Ohio Company and who had just been named governor of the Northwest Territory, arrived at the settlement in July. With the establishment of Marietta, however, the interests of the two major groups of company investors—those actively engaged in emigration and settlement and those engaged in professional speculation—began to diverge. Although it eventually fell through, a separate 1787 purchase of 5 million acres by Cutler, Sargent, and Duer under the name of the Scioto Company (or Scioto Group) had already aroused the distrust of other members of the Ohio Company. Then, as actual settlement began, the great geographical distance between those relocating in the Ohio Country and those remaining in the Northeast made governance difficult. During the Panic of 1792, both Duer and Ohio Company treasurer Richard Platt went bankrupt owing large sums to the company, which in turn found itself unable to make its second payment to Congress. Attempts to renegotiate the total purchase at a lower price failed, but Congress allowed the company to keep the lands it had already paid for and even granted it more as part of the donation system, with the result that the company ended up with approximately two-thirds of the acres it had hoped to acquire. With surveys completed, land titles assured, and orderly settlement well underway, the Ohio Company lost its reason for being. Agents and stockholders began disposing of the company’s assets and remaining property, and by 1796, it had essentially ceased to exist. Grove Koger See also: Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; McKenney, Thomas L.; Northwest Ordinance (1787); Northwest Territory; St. Clair, Arthur; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Clayton, Andrew R. L. “‘A Quiet Independence’: The Western Vision of the Ohio Company.” Ohio History 90, no. 1 (January 1981): 5–32. Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. May, John. The Western Journals of John May: Ohio Company Agent and Business Adventurer. Cincinnati: Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, 1961. Shannon, T. J. “The Ohio Company and the Meaning of Opportunity in the American West, 1786–1795.” New England Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 1991): 393–413.

Ohio Indian Confederation The Ohio Indian Confederation, a group also referred to as the “Northwestern Confederacy” and “Miami Confederacy” by contemporaries and scholars, consisted of several groups coalescing for common political and military goals in the late 18th century. The most prominent leadership came from Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware towns, but a range of Great Lakes residents attended matters of war and peace. Although they pulled sympathizers from a wide radius, most members lived in modern-day northern

Indiana, northern Ohio, and southern Michigan during this time period. They warred against the United States, including three primary battles from 1790 to 1794. Economically, people of this confederacy relied on women to grow and harvest corn along the rivers and men to hunt. This allowed residents to collect in large towns in the spring and autumn, while traveling to hunting camps in summer and winter. They traded steadily with the British Empire, mainly demanding textiles for skins. Socially, the majority of confederates could easily bridge cultural differences to forge collective action. Many spoke related Algonquian languages: Miami-Illinois (Miami, Wea, Piankeshaw), Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi), Shawnee, or Fox-Sauk-Kickapoo. Politically, villages of the confederates included civil and military chiefs. Thus, when faced with a common threat in the form of U.S. expansion, groups already living near one another formed a military and political confederacy. Indian populations in the period are hard to determine, but Henry Knox estimated the Indian population between the Ohio River and Great Lakes at 20,000 in 1790, which may have been a bit high. Expanding U.S. demographics and land hunger help explain why the United States coveted Indian land in the Northwest. After the Revolutionary War, Americans quickly filled Kentucky; its non-Indian population had jumped to more than 70,000 in 1790. The United States’ 1787 Northwest Ordinance codified a plan for white settlement north of the Ohio River. Individuals purchased wide swaths of Ohio, with some tracts set aside for veterans of the Continental Army. New Euro-American towns included Marietta and Columbia on the river’s northern bank in modern Ohio. Having obtained title to the Northwest from Britain, the United States sought it from Indian residents. Several treaties (1784, Treaty of Fort Stanwix; 1785, Treaty of Fort McIntosh; 1786, Treaty of Fort Finney; 1789, Treaty of Fort Harmar) proposed to transfer dominion from Indian tribes to the United States. However, the decentralized political cultures of the United States and the Indians undermined diplomatic agreement, as both Indians and white settlers continued harassing each other. Treaties were weakened by U.S. representatives’ strong-arm negotiating tactics, their use of liquor during councils, or tribes claiming that signatories were not true representatives. Meanwhile, British agents and merchants, including Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott, who had married Shawnee women, supported British trade with Indians living in territory claimed by the United States. To confirm their territorial claims, the United States targeted a neighborhood of villages clustered around the Maumee and Wabash rivers portage. Indian confederates, led by Miami war chief Little Turtle, collected to defend their towns against Colonel Josiah Harmar’s U.S. army. Harmar marched in with about 1,500 militia and regulars and found the towns deserted. On October 19, an American detachment under Colonel John Hardin pushed northwest, following a trail and believing themselves in hot pursuit of fleeing Indians. Instead, confederates awaited, killing most of the regulars and causing the militia to flee. With most of the army retreating south, the Indians again routed an American detachment at their villages three days later. The next fall, the governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, repeated the attempt. On November 4, 1791, the united Indians again defeated the U.S. army. This time, the Indian forces were larger and the victory more definitive. St. Clair was late in setting off from Cincinnati and slow in coming. When he camped on the upper reaches of the Wabash, Little Turtle led a direct attack, resulting in 913 (of 1,400) casualties. Newspapers decried the defeat, and the Ohio Indian Confederation became a central threat to the fledgling United States. In the summer and autumn of 1792, Indians gathered at the confluence of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers, an area called the Glaize. Observers noted a multitude of tribes: Delawares, Miamis, Shawnees, Potawatomis, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Wyandots, Munsees, Connoys, Nantikokes, Mahicans, Cherokees,

Creeks, Six Nations and Seven Nations Iroquois, Mingoes, Sac and Fox, and Weas. A common enemy, the United States, invited a collective Indian response. Shawnee leaders Red Pole and Blue Jacket argued for continued war, while Iroquois delegates tried to temper this view. When representatives broke in midOctober 1792, they agreed on the Ohio River as the just boundary between white and Indian settlement. This belief rested on treaties; the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix had demarcated this boundary, and Indian representatives discounted subsequent contracts. In 1793, the confederation leaders gathered again, communicating in writing to U.S. commissioners that treaties with single Indian nations were void. Furthermore, they argued that post-Revolutionary treaties had been misunderstood as peace treaties, not land cessions. Finally, Indians asserted their independence from empires. The United States rejected the Ohio River as a firm racial boundary. Therefore, a third U.S. Army marched to the confederate villages in 1794, this time under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. Wayne arrived at the Maumee River with more soldiers than his predecessors. When Indians attacked on August 20, U.S. forces outnumbered Indians. Although the Indians did not suffer devastating casualties, the United States held the field at Fallen Timbers, and the British at nearby Fort Miami refused refuge to retreating Indians. Wyandots, Delawares, Shawnees, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Potawatomis, Miamis, Weas, Piankeshaws, Kaskaskias, and Kickapoos signed the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which ceded most of modern Ohio in return for annual payments to the nations. To counter future confederation and aid land purchase, the United States thereafter attempted to divide Indians into discrete polities. Early in the next century, Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa’s attempt to unite all Indians against the United States echoed the Ohio Indian Confederation’s pan-Indian framework. Cameron Shriver See also: Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Greenville, Treaty of; Harrison, William Henry; McKenney, Thomas; Neolin; Northwest Territories; Ohio Company; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson, eds. The Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, 1754–1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Osceola (ca. 1802–1838) Osceola, also known as Billy Powell and Asi-Yahola, was born sometime between 1802 and 1804 to a trader named William Powell and a mestizo Creek woman. He grew up among the Creeks on the Tallapoosa River until 1814, when his people were forced to flee to Florida following their defeat by General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War of 1813–1814. In Florida, the refugee Creeks became Seminoles. Osceola fought in the First Seminole War, where he became known as a fierce and cunning warrior. By 1832, he had become the Tustannuggee, or war chief, of the Seminoles. Although Osceola was recognized for his military skills, his influence was limited until the Seminole homeland was threatened following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Representatives of

the United States negotiated the 1832 Treaty of Payne’s Landing and the 1833 Treaty of Fort Gibson with Seminole leaders, who traded away their lands in Florida for property in present-day Oklahoma that they would share with the Creeks. Osceola, who vehemently opposed the land cessions, became one of the foremost proponents of remaining in Florida when he murdered Charlie Emathla in November 1835 for signing the treaties of Payne’s Landing and Fort Gibson. A month later, Osceola led Seminole warriors on raids that resulted in the destruction of most of Major Francis Dade’s command as they were marching in central Florida and the death of Wiley Thompson, the United States’ agent to the Seminoles, who had imprisoned Osceola in October 1834. The brazen attacks on Emathla, Thompson, and the troops under Dade’s command marked the outbreak of the Second Seminole War. During the early stages of what was a guerrilla war, Osceola was a prominent battlefield commander. Among his achievements was the defeat of Brigadier General Duncan Clinch’s army on December 31, 1835, at the Battle of the Withlacoochee River. In 1836, he contracted malaria, which limited his ability to lead warriors into battle. Despite his limitations, the U.S. military greatly desired his capture. That was accomplished on October 21, 1837, through a misuse of the white flag of truce. Osceola thought that he was going to be negotiating a cession of hostilities with Brigadier General Joseph Hernandez; but Hernandez, under orders from Major General Thomas Jessup, imprisoned him instead. Osceola was subsequently sent to the prison at Fort Moultrie, in Charleston, South Carolina. He died there on January 30, 1838. His body was buried without his head, as an Army surgeon opted to keep it as a war trophy. John R. Burch Jr.

A Seminole leader born around 1802, Osceola achieved his status not as a hereditary chief but rather through his clearly demonstrated skills during the Second Seminole War (1836–1842). (Library of Congress)

See also: Horseshoe Bend, Battle of; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jackson, Andrew; Red Sticks; Seminole War (First); Seminole War (Second)

Further Reading Belko, W. Stephen. America’s Hundred Years’ War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763–1858. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. Covington, James W. The Seminoles of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842. Rev. ed. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1985. Wright, J. Leitch, Jr. Creeks and Seminoles. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) Thomas Paine was an English American writer of pamphlets and essays in support of the American and French Revolutions. His most influential work, Common Sense, was published during the early stages of the American Revolution and was largely responsible for rallying many colonists behind the idea of independence. Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737. He received only a rudimentary education and drifted through several jobs when young. He married twice, but his first wife died and he separated from his second. In 1772, Paine wrote The Case of the Officer of Excise, his first pamphlet urging higher pay for his current job, and went to London to circulate it. Paine soon lost his job; but while in London, he met Benjamin Franklin, who helped him emigrate to America with letters of introduction. Paine landed in Philadelphia in 1775 and worked as an editor. His views on injustice and the need for political change were still forming while complaints against the British government multiplied. Just five months later, the pivotal events at Lexington and Concord inspired him to write Common Sense, in which he argued that the colonies should not merely revolt against British taxation but demand independence. Paine’s style was straightforward, similar to a sermon for the common man, complete with biblical references. Printed in January 1776, Common Sense initiated public debate about declaring independence —500,000 copies were printed and then passed along and read aloud.

Portrait of Thomas Paine by John Wesley Jarvis, ca. 1807. The author of the extremely popular pamphlet Common Sense helped inspire Americans to seek their independence from Britain. (National Gallery of Art)

Paine volunteered as personal assistant to General Nathaniel Greene in the Continental Army. Rather than fight, Paine wrote to inspire the troops with 16 Crisis essays published between 1776 and 1783. General Washington ordered that Paine’s first Crisis essay be read as encouragement to all of the troops at Valley Forge. Later in the war, while clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly, Paine learned how scarce pay and provisions were hurting the morale of the army. He organized drives in the colonies and France to supply the troops. In 1780, he wrote Public Good in support of a national effort to replace the weak Articles of Confederation with a stronger central government. Paine returned to England in 1787 and became passionately supportive of the French Revolution. In response to a popular attack on the uprising, Paine wrote Rights of Man, in which he not only supported the French but also called for revolt against all monarchies. The British government banned the book and indicted Paine for treason; however, Paine fled to France. He supported the revolution and joined efforts to banish rather than kill Louis XVI. Once they were in power, the radicals threw Paine in jail, where he started The Age of Reason—a controversial challenge to the validity of the Bible and an argument for the separation of religion and government. In 1794, American diplomat James Monroe expedited his release, and Paine later returned to America by invitation of Thomas Jefferson. Paine’s final years were spent in mostly obscure poverty, his contributions to the American Revolution largely forgotten. He died in 1809 in New York and was unceremoniously buried on his farm. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: American Revolution; Articles of Confederation

Further Reading

Langguth, A. J. Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Rakove, Jack. Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Potawatomis The Potawatomis, also known as the Bodewadmik, which translates to “Keepers of the Fire,” are an Algonquian-speaking people who, during the early 17th century, resided along the southeastern portion of Lake Michigan. Due to the outbreak of the Beaver Wars with the Iroquois, many Potawatomis had migrated to present-day Wisconsin by the 1650s. The Potawatomis eventually came to dominate the fur trade in the region and subsequently forged close trading ties with the French. As the animals they hunted came to be depleted locally, the Potawatomis began to expand their territory. By the mid-1700s, Potawatomi bands could be found in the present-day states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Due to the distances between the respective Potawatomi groups, the bands began to operate locally in what they deemed their best interests. For instance, the Potawatomis in the Illinois Territory became trade partners of both Spain and France. Other Potawatomis chose to cast their lot with the British. The resulting factionalism would mark relations between the Potawatomis and first the European powers on the continent and later the United States for centuries. During the French and Indian War, some Potawatomis fought alongside the French while others favored Great Britain. After the British won the war in 1763, the Potawatomis who were allied with the French continued warring with the British by joining the so-called Pontiac’s Rebellion. Following the collapse of Pontiac and Neolin’s pan-Indian movement, all of the Potawatomi communities became British allies. Despite siding with the British during the American Revolution, the Potawatomis were spared the depredations of the war due to their communities being located far from where most of the battles were fought. In 1790, when General Josiah Harmar and the United States First Infantry Regiment invaded the Maumee Valley, Potawatomi warriors joined the Native forces led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle that dealt the Americans a humiliating defeat. The Potawatomi warriors also participated in the Battle of the Wabash, where Major General Arthur St. Clair and his troops suffered the worst defeat ever endured by the U.S. military, also at the hands of Blue Jacket and Little Turtle. President George Washington then turned to General Anthony Wayne to reestablish American military dominance in the Great Lakes Region. On August 20, 1794, Wayne led the first United States Legion against Blue Jacket and Little Turtle in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. After defeating the pan-Indian force, he destroyed the British forts in the area that had been supplying the Native forces with needed arms and supplies. General Wayne then reinforced the dominance of the U.S. military by forcing the Natives of the region to sign the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which forced the Native peoples to cede a substantial amount of land in present-day Ohio and Indiana. Three distinct Potawatomi factions emerged during that period. One group of Potawatomis supported the terms that favored the Americans and quickly signed the document. They then endeavored to become “civilized” according to American standards under the belief that their conversion would allow them to stay in their present homelands and eventually be assimilated into the United States. Another group was generally opposed to the terms of the treaty but signed anyway since the U.S. government promised to provide them annuity payments. The third faction refused to sign the treaty and determined to keep fighting the United States. One of the leaders of this faction was Main Poc, who later became a close ally of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa when they formed their pan-Indian militant religious revitalization

movement. The warriors in this faction also joined Tecumseh in fighting for the British during the War of 1812. Regardless of whether the Potawatomi factions became civilized or continued to oppose American aggression, they all became a problem for the expanding United States. In 1826, the United States decided to build the Michigan Road, which was a federal road designed to connect Logansport, Indiana, to Michigan. Its proposed course went through several Potawatomi communities. Indiana and Michigan were unable to force the respective Potawatomi communities to cede their properties due to previously negotiated treaties. That changed with the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Under the terms of that law, U.S. negotiators invited all of the Potawatomis to convene in Chicago, where they signed the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. The treaty’s terms required the Potawatomis to cede all of the lands they occupied west of Michigan in exchange for a reservation on the Osage River in present-day Kansas. The first group went peaceably and arrived on the reservation in 1837. Since the Potawatomis living on the Yellow River were unwilling to move west, the United States captured their leaders and forced them and their approximately 800 followers to migrate at gunpoint. Their trek became known as the Trail of Death, as more than 100 of them died along the way. Some were settled on the reservation in Kansas, while the others were sent to present-day Oklahoma. Removals of the Potawatomis continued until 1851, when Potawatomis residing in Wisconsin were forced to move to Kansas. That group was struck with a cholera outbreak as they traveled, which resulted in the deaths of a number of people. Despite the efforts of the federal government, some Potawatomi groups managed to avoid the removal process. There are presently more than 10 different autonomous Potawatomi reservations, found in the states of Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Blue Jacket; Greenville, Treaty of; Little Turtle; Neolin; Pontiac; St. Clair, Arthur; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Cleland, Charles E. Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Clifton, James A. The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665–1965. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998. Edmunds, R. David. The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.

Prairie du Chien, Treaties of (1825, 1829, 1830) By the end of the first quarter of the 19th century, tensions were mounting between white settlers and Indians across the Upper Mississippi River drainage, mainly due to an influx of miners and settlers into the area. Meanwhile, intertribal warfare, particularly between the Ojibwas and the Dakotas and the Dakotas and the Sac and Fox, was increasing as the advance of American settlement pushed eastern tribes westward, creating added competition for local resources. That conflict, in turn, interfered with the fur trade. In 1825, in an attempt to calm the tensions and curtail the warfare by defining fixed territories for the highly mobile tribes, American government negotiators forged a treaty with area tribes that was aimed at demarcating their tribal lands and establishing clear boundaries between them. They largely accomplished that during a treaty council held at Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi River in what is now the state of Wisconsin. In reality, however, those negotiations were as much about the tribes asserting

their own territorial claims as they were about the American government protecting its economic interests. Three more treaties followed in close succession, all of them signed at Prairie du Chien and each of them reducing the different groups’ landholdings. The territorial governor of Missouri, William Clark, and the territorial governor of Michigan, Lewis Cass, negotiated that first treaty on behalf of the U.S. government. It was signed on August 19, 1825, by the Ojibwas (also known as the Anishinaabes or Chippewas), the Dakotas (comprised of the four easternmost divisions of the Sioux—specifically, the Mdewakantons, Wahpekutes, Wahpetons, and Sissetons), the Ho Chunks (formerly called the Winnebagos), the Menominees, the Sac and Fox, and the Iowas, as well as by some of the Potawatomi and Ottawa bands. Over the next several months, the treaty commissioners also secured the assent of the more distant Ojibwa bands. The 1825 treaty sought to quell hostilities among these groups by establishing clearly defined boundaries between them and granting each exclusive rights over the lands assigned to them. In what is now the state of Minnesota, for example, it established a line between the Ojibwas to the north and the Dakotas to the south that more or less followed the transition zone between the prairie and the woodlands, a hotly contested and game-rich strip that had long served as a buffer zone between these two peoples. The very southeastern corner of the state was designated Ho Chunk territory. In signing the treaty, these tribes acknowledged the federal government’s power over them and relinquished their ties with all other powers. The establishment of these rigidly defined territorial boundaries facilitated the government’s later negotiations with the tribes for land cessions.

Natives Amencans from many tribes gather at a U.S. military encampment at Prairie du Chien for the presentation of the treaty in September 1825. Designed to quell boundary disputes between tribes, the first treaty of Prairie du Chien established a process for American territorial appropriation. (Library of Congress)

Two more treaties were forged in 1829, one on July 29 with the Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis and the other on August 1 with the Ho Chunks. In signing the first treaty, the Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis relinquished a large swath of Wisconsin and Illinois in exchange for $16,000 in annuities plus 50 barrels of salt annually forever and the services of a blacksmith. That treaty granted them the right to continue to hunt on the ceded lands so long as they remained government property, which would not be for long at all since land-hungry settlers were already waiting in the wings. The Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation also received a reservation in western Illinois. In signing the August 1 treaty, the Ho Chunks ceded potentially fertile farming lands in southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois in exchange for annuities valued at $18,000 plus access to a blacksmith, 3,000 pounds of tobacco, and 50 barrels of salt annually for 30 years.

The fourth treaty signed at Prairie du Chien was between the U.S. government and the Dakota, Sac and Fox, Omaha, Iowa, Otoe, and Missouri Indians. It was signed on July 15, 1830. This time, the signatory tribes were persuaded to cede three tracts of land. The Dakotas and Sac and Fox, who had continued to fight each other, each ceded a 20-mile-wide strip stretching from southeastern Minnesota into northeastern Iowa. This cession was intended to create a buffer zone between them and thereby stem their hostilities. The third, much larger tract included lands in what are now the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri. Most of this land was arable, which made it particularly attractive to white settlers. In exchange for these cessions, each tribe was to receive cash and goods valued at between $500 and $3,000 annually for 10 years plus agricultural implements and the services of a blacksmith. Exactly how much each group received depended on its size and the amount and value of the land ceded. The treaty also provided for the allocation of an additional $3,000 annually for 10 years. This money was earmarked for the Indian children’s education. Later that fall, after further negotiations, the Yankton and Santee Sioux also agreed to abide by the treaty’s provisions. Both of the 1829 treaties and the 1830 treaty also provided for the distribution of gifts to those Indians attending the treaty councils, parcels of land to be given to the “mixed-blood” descendants of white traders and Native women, and the settlement of claims made against the Indians by whites. Some historians argue that the American government never intended for the boundaries established at the 1825 treaty to stand for long. Once boundaries were established, they argue, government agents could negotiate with individual tribes for land cessions that would eventually open up Indian lands to white settlers. Other historians remain unconvinced by this argument and contend that the treaty was held in good faith. Regardless of whether paving the way for future land cession was the government’s real motive, the 1825 treaty did lay the groundwork for that outcome, which was realized all too soon. Within just a few years, the Native land base in the western Great Lakes had been reduced by millions of acres. Debra Buchholtz See also: Black Hawk; Keokuk

Further Reading Calloway, Colin. Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History. New York, Oxford University Press, 2013. Kappler, Charles J. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 1–5. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901–1941. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Red Sticks Recognized by the color of their painted war clubs and ceremonial staffs, the Red Sticks were a traditionalist faction of Creek Indians (Muscogees) that formed in the American southeast during the early 19th century. By early 1812, Indians of the Upper Creek Towns and Lower Creek Towns had divided over decisions of assimilation and land cessions to the United States. Young warriors of the Upper Towns, led by William Weatherford, formed the Red Sticks division of the Creeks to reject American encroachment and promote a return to Native traditions. Opposition to the Red Sticks developed in the Lower Towns, where Creeks led by William McIntosh embraced some Euro-American social and economic practices. Confrontation between the two Creek divisions erupted into the Creek War in 1813. The Red Sticks developed a relationship with the British and Spanish, both of whom provided the faction with weapons during the conflict. Due to alliances formed by American and European involvement in

Creek society, the Creek War coincided with the larger national conflict—the War of 1812. On March 27, 1814, the Red Sticks suffered a critical defeat at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and they were consequently forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson on August 9, 1814. Treaty negotiations, which included both the Red Sticks and the Lower Creeks, granted the United States control of more than 23 million acres of land in present-day Alabama and Georgia. Following the American Revolution, U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins began an effort to Americanize the Indians of the southeast. After purchasing land and slaves, Hawkins worked closely with the Creeks of the Lower Towns in the areas around the Chattahoochee, Ocmulgee, and Flint Rivers (present-day Georgia) to introduce American farming techniques. Due to depleted game herds in the region, many of the Lower Creeks welcomed American farming, which included the domestication of animals. From 1785 to 1812, as American settlers from the Carolinas and Tennessee pushed to settle in the areas around the Lower Towns, Hawkins encouraged the creation of the National Creek Council that negotiated land cessions with the United States. In 1790, 1802, and 1805, the National Council ceded areas of present-day Georgia to the United States, thereby allowing an increase of white settlers into the region. Coinciding with Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s Northwest Indian revival of the early 19th century, Creeks of the Upper Towns located along the Coosa, Alabama, and Tallapoosa Rivers (present-day Alabama) initiated their own movement to return to traditional culture. Referred to as the Red Sticks, Creeks of the Upper Towns denounced the National Council, resented Hawkins and American farming, and sought to prevent any future American seizure of Indian lands. A mixed-blood born to a Creek mother and European father, William Weatherford served as chief of the Upper Towns and leader of the Red Sticks faction. The Red Sticks began exercising their movement against American settlers in the spring of 1812, when a group of warriors attacked and killed two families in southern Tennessee. Again, in the winter of 1813, a party of Red Sticks, who were returning from Detroit, murdered two white families settled along the Ohio River. The result of the two events led to a formal division in the Creek nation. After learning of the attacks, Hawkins demanded that the National Council capture and punish the Red Stick offenders. As a result, a group of warriors from the Lower Towns, led by William McIntosh, were ordered to execute the Red Sticks. Creeks of the Upper Towns believed punishment for the attacks should have been handled in the traditional way, rather than having allowed the National Council to mandate the execution. Following the execution, Red Stick warriors began attacking the homes of members of the National Council and prepared for war against the Lower Towns. American involvement in the Creek War began in the summer of 1813. On their return from Florida with munitions provided by the Spanish, a party of Red Sticks was attacked by a force of Mississippi militia and settlers. Occurring on July 27, 1813, the Battle of Burnt Corn Creek resulted in a Red Stick victory over the American unit. News of the defeat ignited formal American opposition of the Red Sticks as well as government threats directed toward the Spanish for aiding the militant faction. White settlers, determined to protect their claims in the southeast, formed additional militias in Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to confront the Red Sticks. On August 30, 1813, William Weatherford led a party of Red Sticks in an attack against Fort Mims, located approximately 40 miles north of Mobile, Alabama. The Red Sticks enjoyed a decisive victory over the white settlers, in which approximately 300 men, women, children, and slaves were killed or captured. Following the victory at Fort Mims, the Red Sticks orchestrated a number of additional raids against frontier settlements in the southeast.

By January 1814, General Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia had raised a substantial force of white settlers and Indian allies of the Lower Creek Towns and Choctaw and Cherokee nations to begin a campaign against the Red Sticks. In the spring of 1814, Jackson moved his force of 1,000 men toward the Red Stick settlement of Tohopeka, established at a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River. On March 27, 1814, Jackson engaged his army against 800 Red Sticks in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, routing the Indians and killing nearly all the Red Stick warriors. As a result of their defeat, Creek leaders agreed to begin negotiations with Jackson in August 1814. The Treaty of Fort Jackson was signed on August 9, 1814, providing approximately 23 million acres of land in present-day Alabama and Georgia to the United States. Although a majority of Creeks in the Lower Towns supported the American campaign against the Red Sticks, a significant portion of their land was lost as well. Several Red Sticks who avoided the defeat at Horseshoe Bend chose to flee to Florida and join the Seminoles and Spanish. Following the conclusion of the War of 1812, American forces under Jackson began a new campaign in Florida referred to as the First Seminole War. American troops sought to stifle the activity of the Seminoles, many of whom had offered refuge to runaway slaves from the southeast. Carl Creason See also: Creek Wars; Horseshoe Bend, Battle of; Jackson, Andrew; McIntosh, William

Further Reading Griffith, Benjamin W., Jr. McIntosh and Weatherford, Creek Indian Leaders. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988. Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking Press, 2001. Waselkov, Gregory A. A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.

Republicanism. See Jefferson, Thomas Ridge, John (1803–1839) John Ridge was born to Major Ridge, a Cherokee politician, and Susanna Wickett in Oothcaloga, Georgia, sometime in 1803. He was educated first at the Moravian Springplace Mission and later attended the Brainard Mission. In 1818, he began his studies at the American Board of Commissioners Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. While there, he met his future wife, Sarah Bird Northrup. Their interracial marriage in 1824 proved extremely controversial in Cornwall, which resulted in Ridge moving his family back to Georgia. By 1826, Ridge was practicing law and running several businesses, including a plantation. His family’s political ties, combined with his impressive education and growing wealth, allowed him to become an influential Cherokee leader. Ridge distinguished himself as a Cherokee legislator who staunchly opposed the efforts of Georgia, and by extension the federal government, to acquire Cherokee lands. He even supported calls for a penalty of death for any Cherokee that made any land cessions to the United States. An advocate of “civilization” among the Cherokees, Ridge believed in fighting for the Cherokee homeland through the U.S. legal and political system. Even after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Ridge continued to believe that Cherokee rights would be preserved by the federal government because the Cherokees had become civilized. His faith appeared to be rewarded in 1832 when the U.S. Supreme Court provided the Cherokees a landmark victory in the case Worcester v. Georgia.

Like other Cherokee leaders, Ridge believed that Worcester v. Georgia meant that federal removal efforts had been permanently defeated. The legal victory proved useless due to President Andrew Jackson’s refusal to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision. Disillusioned, Ridge subsequently switched from being a staunch opponent of land cessions to a Treaty Party advocate for negotiating a favorable removal treaty with the United States. In December 1835, Ridge’s father and his cousin, Elias Boudinot, joined other members of the Treaty Party in signing the Treaty of New Echota, which ceded the Cherokee homeland in the east for lands in present-day Oklahoma. Ridge was not present at the initial signing of the treaty but added his signature at a later date. Although the land cession was a clear violation of Cherokee law, the U.S. government viewed the agreement as binding and forced the Cherokees to migrate to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears. Ridge led his family to present-day Oklahoma in 1837, where he opened a general store on Honey Creek. Supporters of John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokees, assassinated Ridge on June 22, 1839, for his role in the loss of the Cherokee homeland. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Ross, John

Further Reading Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Smith, Daniel Blake. An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Ross, John (1790–1866) John Ross was born on October 3, 1790, to Daniel Ross and Mollie McDonald. Beginning in 1805, he was educated at a school in Kingston, Tennessee. While there, he developed the merchandising and marketing skills that marked his early professional career. By the 1830s, Ross was one of the wealthiest Cherokee men in Georgia. He owned a large plantation that depended on slave labor to work its more than 200 acres of land. His wealth enabled him to become extremely influential in Cherokee politics. Due to Georgia’s continuing attempts to seize Cherokee lands, the tribe issued a tribal constitution on July 26, 1827, that declared the establishment of a sovereign Cherokee nation. As an independent nation, it claimed sole jurisdiction within its borders. The constitution also forbade the sale of Cherokee lands. Under the new constitution, John Ross became the principal chief of the Cherokees. Ross’s initial efforts were toward preserving the Cherokee homeland. He actively, but unsuccessfully, lobbied in Washington, D.C., against the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Ross and the Cherokees subsequently turned to the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve their interests. In the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the justices determined that the Cherokees did not have standing to bring the case to the Supreme Court. The Cherokees returned to the Supreme Court with Worcester v. Georgia. In that case, the Supreme Court found that the Cherokee Nation had territorial boundaries that were exempt from Georgia’s laws because states had no jurisdiction over the land of Native nations. Only the federal government had the authority to maintain relations with Indian nations. Although Worcester v. Georgia was a significant legal victory for the Cherokee Nation, it proved practically useless. Both Georgia and the federal government ignored the decision. The refusal of President Jackson to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision exacerbated political divisions among the Cherokees. Although Ross and his National Party continued to refuse to consider ceding any Cherokee lands, the Treaty Party, whose leaders included Elias Boudinot, John Ridge, and

Major Ridge, began to advocate for removal to the West. In December 1835, the Treaty Party’s leadership signed the Treaty of New Echota, which traded the Cherokee homeland for land in present-day Oklahoma. Ross traveled to Washington, D.C., and worked for three years to get the treaty declared illegal but was unsuccessful. Upon his return home, Ross worked with General Winfield Scott to begin the removal process. Beginning in 1831, the Cherokees embarked on the Trail of Tears to their new homeland. At least one-fourth of the Cherokees that were forced to migrate died along the way, including John Ross’s wife. Soon after their arrival in Oklahoma, the Ridges and Boudinot died at the hands of Ross’s supporters. Ross was still principal chief when the Civil War erupted. He initially advocated neutrality, but by 1861, he had agreed to ally the Cherokees with the Confederate States of America. Ross quickly realized his mistake when Union forces in 1862 seized control of much of present-day Oklahoma and claimed that the Cherokees had signed the treaty of alliance with the Confederacy under duress. Ross did not live to sign a reunification treaty with the United States. He died on August 1, 1866. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Ridge, John

Further Reading Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking, 2007. Ross, John. The Papers of Chief John Ross. Edited by Gary E. Moulton. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Smith, Daniel Blake. An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

John Ross, Cherokee chief during the removal period of the 1830s. Ross steadfastly refused to move the Cherokees to Oklahoma until 1838, when resistance to American expansion was no longer an option. (Library of Congress)

YAZOO LAND SCANDAL Even before Georgia tried to force the Cherokees off their land in the 1830s, its officials were dubiously claiming territory. In 1795, Georgia governor George Mathews signed an act transferring 35 million acres of land in what would become the states of Alabama and Mississippi to four private companies for $500,000. The lands sold by the Yazoo Act (named for a river that flowed through its western section) and the money its sale generated were then to be distributed among the influential legislators and officials who passed the act. Not only did this act rely on bribery and corruption, but much of the territory the state sold was in fact still claimed by Spain. Apparently more concerned with the states’ power grab than the legitimacy of its claim, the U.S. legislature passed the 1802 Rescinding Act, which transferred the land in question to the federal government. Though the federal government agreed to pay $1.25 million to those who had already invested in the land companies, the speculators deemed this insufficient and brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1814, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Rescinding Act, which had blocked the initial sale, was unconstitutional and ordered $5 million to be distributed among the claimants. The more lasting legacy, however, was in the cession of land to the federal government that the 1802 act initiated. Anger over the loss of land fueled a development of the states’ rights philosophy, which Georgia’s leaders relied on as they pressured the United States to remove Creeks and Cherokees. In many ways, the Trail of Tears was a legacy of the battle over the Yazoo Act.

Seminole War (Second) (1835–1842) The Second Seminole War was fought from 1835 to 1842 between the United States and various groups of Native Americans in Florida collectively known as the Seminoles. With the passage of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the United States sought to relocate eastern Native Americans west of the Mississippi River to a federally administrated Indian Territory. In Florida, many of the Seminoles refused to emigrate and violently opposed removal, employing tactics from traditional battles to guerrilla warfare. The war was further complicated by the presence of a substantial number of free blacks and runaway slaves who took refuge on Indian land in Florida. Though the conflict continued for several years, the U.S. Congress never officially declared war against the Seminoles nor signed a treaty concluding hostilities. After removing the majority of the Seminoles by 1842, the United States unilaterally declared the war over and allowed 100 to 300 Indians to remain in the Florida Everglades. In 1823, the Seminoles were restricted to a four-million-acre tract of land in central Florida after 32 Indian leaders signed the Treaty of Moultrie Creek. Still, many Americans were displeased that Indians remained in Florida. After the passage of the Indian Removal Act, state and federal representatives applied added pressure to force the Seminoles to leave. In 1832, 15 Seminole leaders signed the Treaty of Payne’s Prairie under the expectation that Seminole representatives would travel to Indian Territory and evaluate the possibility of relocating. Once a Seminole contingent arrived there the following year, U.S. Army and federal representatives pressured the Seminoles to sign the Treaty of Fort Gibson, agreeing to give up claims in Florida for land in the west. Later, Indian signatories and some American observers claimed that the Seminoles were either bribed or coerced into signing the treaties of Payne’s Prairie and Fort Gibson. While many Seminole leaders protested the treaties as fraudulent, the U.S. government insisted they prepare to leave Florida.

Seminole warriors attack a blockhouse in December 1835, during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). Though the conflict continued for several years, Congress never officially declared war against the Seminoles nor signed a treaty concluding hostilities. (Library of Congress)

The Seminoles were split over their impending relocation. While some agreed to move, others demanded to keep their Florida land and opted to fight if necessary. The most vocal opponent of removal was Osceola, a Creek Indian who had migrated to Florida after the 1813 Creek War. When the Seminole leader Charley Emathla prepared to head west, Osceola and a small band of supporters murdered him on November 26, 1835. The following month, Osceola and other Seminole warriors organized strategic assaults against vulnerable military targets and American civilians. On December 28, Osceola killed the federal Indian agent Wiley Thompson outside Fort King, near present-day Ocala. On the same day, Seminole warriors ambushed 110 U.S. Army soldiers led by Major Francis L. Dade. The Seminoles achieved a complete victory in the battle, inflicting 100 percent casualties and leaving only one survivor. Afterwards, Seminoles razed Florida farms and plantations, forcing Americans to evacuate to forts and protected towns such as St. Augustine. The Seminole assaults inflamed the passions of American citizens. In Washington, D.C., the federal government ordered the military to defeat the Seminoles and force them to migrate west by appropriating funds to pay for soldiers and supplies. In Southern states such as South Carolina, volunteers overflowed militia quotas. As the war progressed, different military commanders took control of operations in Florida. The commanders ranged from the War of 1812 hero General Winfield Scott, to Florida governor Richard K. Call, to future president Zachary Taylor. The most infamous was Thomas S. Jesup, who captured Osceola under a flag of truce in 1837. Although Osceola died a prisoner of war in South Carolina, Seminole Indians persisted in fighting the United States. Despite initial enthusiasm, technological dominance, and numerical superiority, the United States could not draw the Seminoles into a decisive battle. The United States succeeded in repulsing Indian warriors on the battlefield in every major engagement after the attack on Dade but had difficulty inflicting substantial casualties or capturing Indian warriors. The Florida environment proved exceedingly taxing on the U.S. Army and the volunteers. High levels of rainfall, low-lying wetlands, and excessive heat all hindered U.S. operations. Disease decimated U.S. ranks, particularly during the “sickly season” of the summer months. Measles, dysentery, fever, and typhoid killed far more Americans during the war than the Seminoles. The United States adopted a war of attrition to counter Seminole tactics. By employing guerrilla methods, the Seminoles avoided major confrontations and maintained a permeable front. While U.S.

military commanders attempted to keep the Seminoles restricted to central and southern Florida, Indians continued to make raids as far north as Tallahassee. To counter the guerrilla war, army commanders employed harsh tactics such as destroying Indian villages, crops, and food supplies to force their surrender. While commanding, Zachary Taylor organized Florida into 20-mile squares, constructed roads and bridges, and increased the number of forts in an attempt to provide broader military coverage. The longer the war continued, the more unpopular it became. In many Southern states, Americans criticized the federal government and the U.S. military for their inability to subdue the Indians. From the North, abolitionists such as Joshua Giddings of Ohio lamented that the war was a land grab to expand slavery. As early as 1837, General Jesup questioned the practicality of removing all Seminoles from Florida and suggested establishing a reservation in south Florida. By 1842, the U.S. Congress finally agreed. On August 14, William Jenkins Worth, the last U.S. military commander in the war, declared the conflict over without a formal agreement with the remaining Seminoles. By the end of the war, the U.S. government had spent more than $20 million in fighting the Seminoles. More than 1,500 American regulars and volunteers died during the war, the vast majority due to disease. While some Seminoles managed to hold out, it was at great cost. Through the course of the war, the U.S. government relocated more than 3,800 Seminoles to Indian Territory, and an unknown number perished during the conflict. In 1843, less than 300 Seminoles remained in Florida, restricted to small, isolated villages in and around the Everglades. F. Evan Nooe See also: Adams-Onís Treaty; Creek Wars; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Jackson, Andrew; Osceola; Red Sticks; Trail of Tears

Further Reading Belko, William S. America’s Hundred Years’ War: US Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763–1858. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. Mahon, John K. History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842, Revised Edition. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1985. Sprague, John T. The Origins, Progress and Conclusion of the Florida War. New York: D. Appleton, 1848.

Seminoles. See Seminole War (First); Seminole War (Second) Shawnees. See Ohio Indian Confederation St. Clair, Arthur (1734–1818) Arthur St. Clair was a British, Continental, and U.S. military officer; president of the postindependence Congress; and the first governor of the Northwest Territory. Despite his contributions to the establishment of the early republic, he is now largely a forgotten figure. Arthur St. Clair was born in Scotland. He entered the British Army, which sent him to North America. There he fought with the British in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). As a result of his military triumphs, he was granted thousands of acres of rich agricultural land in southwest Pennsylvania in 1762. After independence, he became president of the newly formed Congress. One of the major projects he sponsored was the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. This legislation resulted in the sale,

political organization, and later incorporation into the United States of land lying west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio River, which was named the Northwest Territory. One key provision of the 1787 ordinance stated that slave owners who inhabited the territories could retain their slaves but no new slaves could be brought into the area. The ordinance cleared the way for white settlers to pour into the region in search of land, despite the fact that Native peoples lived there. Arthur St. Clair became governor-general of the Northwest Territory in 1787. As governor, he supported the continuation of slavery and the settlers’ acquisition of Indian land. St. Clair made no effort to oppose slavery in the territory. The law provided slave owners the right to continue to possess the slaves they already owned, but St. Clair went a step further. In 1790, he wrote to his good friend President Washington to tell him that white settlers were leaving the territory and moving further west because they feared that the 1787 ordinance would threaten their ownership of slaves. St. Clair initially sought to reassure them that this was not the case. Then, in 1791 he publicly stated that those who had owned slaves and lived in the territory before 1787 could return with their slaves. St. Clair also promoted the demands of white settlers to obtain land at the expense of indigenous populations. In response, indigenous peoples of the Northwest Territories, the Six Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations, and the Tuscaroras) and the Wyandots, Delawares, Ottawas, and Chippewas, fought back in an ultimately vain attempt to prevent the loss of their land. Governor St. Clair initiated the Treaty of Fort Harmar in 1789, but many Indian leaders did not participate and continued military resistance. To quell their attacks and ensure the safety of the white settlers, St. Clair led a military force into Indian land in 1791. Led by Miami chief Little Turtle and Shawnee chief Blue Jacket, the Indians soundly defeated St. Clair and killed 600 of his troops, one of the most significant routs by Native Americans in U.S. military history. However, their victory was short lived. In 1794, General Anthony Wayne dealt the indigenous peoples a decisive defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in Maumee, Ohio. Discredited and in debt, Arthur St. Clair returned to Westmoreland County. He died as the result of an accident and was buried in Greensburg in the park that bears his name. Margaret Power See also: Blue Jacket; Fort McIntosh, Treaty of; Fort Stanwix, Treaty of; Fort Wayne, Treaties of; Harrison, William Henry; Little Turtle; McKenney, Thomas L.; Northwest Territory; Ohio Company; Tecumseh; Tenskwatawa; Wayne, Anthony

Further Reading Dowd, Gregory. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Finkelman, Paul. “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity.” Journal of the Early Republic 6, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 343– 370. Smith, William Henry, ed. The Life and Public Services of Arthur St. Clair. New York: Robert Clarke, 1892.

Stokes Commission (1832–1837) The Stokes Commission was a three-man committee appointed by Congress in 1832 that was charged with overseeing the relocation of eastern Indian tribes into Indian Territory in the trans-Mississippi West. The Stokes Commission was created to help pacify the “wild” Indians living on the eastern Plains and prairies in preparation for the emigration of eastern Indians.

The proposed permanent Indian Territory was a large swath of land in the middle of the country, west of the Mississippi River. As American settlers pushed westward, the Indians were seen as an impediment to civilization. The idea of creating a permanent Indian frontier that would contain the tribes, with Indians living west of the Mississippi and whites east of the Mississippi, was expected to offer a permanent solution to the ongoing conflict between American settlers and Indians. Attempts at removing Indians from their native lands began in the early 19th century. As the population of Americans encroached on Indian lands, many Indians began to migrate west of their own accord, but the settlers pressured the government to deal with the “Indian problem.” During the presidency of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), plans for an Indian zone started to take shape. In 1825, a region known as the Indian Country or Indian Territory was specified simply as all lands west of the Mississippi River. This area included land that now comprises the present-day states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and part of Iowa, as well as territory known as the Great American Desert. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) signed the Indian Removal Act into law. Under the terms of the treaties Jackson made with the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—each tribe would cede its lands east of the Mississippi and agree to be relocated to reservations in the Arkansas Territory. While some tribes went willingly, others, such as the Creeks and Seminoles, were forced to migrate. Some members of the civilized tribes were reluctant to leave the East because they feared they would receive a violent welcome from the western tribes. On July 14, 1832, Congress created the Stokes Commission to oversee the creation of Indian Territory and negotiate treaties with the nearly two dozen Plains Indian tribes already living in the area. The commission’s main objectives were to attempt to pacify the western tribes, particularly the Comanches, Kiowas, Osages, and Wichitas; deal with boundary disputes; and prepare the area to receive the relocated eastern tribes. The commission consisted of three members: Montford Stokes (1762–1842) from North Carolina, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (1791–1858) from Connecticut, and John F. Schermerhorn (1786–1851) from New York. Stokes was made the chair of the commission and was ordered by Congress to convene his committee at Fort Gibson, located in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The first task was to negotiate peaceful settlements with the western tribes, which proved to be difficult because of mutual hostility between the tribes and their distrust of the federal agents. The commission had the troops garrisoned at Fort Gibson at its disposal. Stokes wasted no time, and in 1832 he began a series of mounted expeditions to find the nomadic Plains Indian tribes and begin the work of negotiation. The 1832 and 1833 expeditions, which included sightseers, were unsuccessful at finding Indians. In February 1833, the commission settled a boundary dispute between the Creek and Cherokee tribes. Later that year, they began the work of assigning land to tribes that had been relocated or uprooted, including the Quapaws, Senecas, and Shawnees. Stokes proved to be a sympathetic agent for the Indians and was willing to communicate their concerns and problems to the federal government. Stokes was born in Virginia and served in the merchant marine during the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he moved to North Carolina and studied law and spent time as a court clerk before being elected to the Senate. Stokes was serving as the governor of North Carolina and resigned in November 1832 after Jackson appointed him to the Board of Indian Commissioners. Ellsworth, the son of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, graduated from Yale in 1810 and studied law at Litchfield Law School in Connecticut. He was appointed to the Stokes Commission in 1832 and went to Fort Gibson to join the other committee members. Schermerhorn was born in Schenectady, New York, and

spent his early adulthood working as a minister. He was a personal friend of Jackson, who appointed him to the Stokes Commission after Schermerhorn resigned from his church. Although tasked with pacifying Indian tribes, the committee members failed to work together from the beginning. Their hostility toward one another undermined the commission’s authority and increased the distrust the Indians had for the federal agents. In July 1834, the authority of the commission expired, but it managed to get some tribes to agree to a treaty counsel set for the summer of 1835. In spring 1835, the Stokes Commission had its authority renewed and saw some personnel changes. Stokes remained as the leader, but new members Francis Wells Armstrong (ca. 1783–1835) and Matthew Arbuckle (1778–1851) replaced Ellsworth and Schermerhorn. During the summer of 1835, Armstrong died after a bout of cholera and was buried at Fort Coffee, and no replacement was appointed to the commission. The Plains Indians were suspicious of the federal agents and refused to enter Fort Gibson for talks, so Arbuckle and Stokes set out from Fort Gibson, escorted by dragoons, to meet with members of the Comanche, Kiowa, and Wichita tribes. The committee was accompanied by delegates from the Creek, Quapaw, Osage, and Seneca tribes, and later joined by Cherokee delegates. The expedition made camp along Chouteau Creek, naming it Camp Holmes, and built a temporary shelter where they could hold talks. Kiowa representatives had left before the Stokes Commission made camp, but the agents entered into negotiations with the other tribes. On August 24, 1835, the Treaty of Camp Holmes was signed, which was the first peace treaty signed between the U.S. government and Plains Indian tribes. Signatories to the treaty included the Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Comanche, Osage, Quapaw, Seneca, and Wichita tribes. A year and a half later, on May 26, 1837, the Kiowas, Plains Apaches, and Tawakonis signed the treaty at Fort Gibson, intended to secure peace between the tribes. The treaty contained 10 articles and called for the Plains Indians to live peacefully alongside the tribes that were coming into the area, to allow free passage through their settlements and hunting grounds, and to agree not to hinder or harm anyone who visited their settlements. After successfully negotiating the treaty, Stokes was appointed Indian agent for various tribes until his death on November 4, 1842. Karen S. Garvin See also: Great American Desert; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Indian Territory; New Echota, Treaty of; Reservation System; Trail of Tears

Further Reading Bowes, John P. Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Tecumseh (1768–1813) Tecumseh is believed to have been born in 1768 to Puckeshinwa, a Shawnee warrior, and a Creek woman named Methoataske. He was raised alongside his brothers Kumskaukau and Tenskwatawa by his sister, Tecumapease. By the mid-1780s, Tecumseh had become a prominent warrior fighting alongside his brother Cheeseekau, who led the Kispoko Shawnees. Tecumseh became the Kispoko leader following the death of Cheeseekau in 1792. Tecumseh joined Blue Jacket’s confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers

on August 20, 1794, which proved a major defeat to the Native American cause. Unlike many of the defeated Native leaders, Tecumseh refused to become a signatory to the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. In April 1805, Tecumseh’s brother Lalawethika, who renamed himself Tenskwatawa and became known as the Shawnee Prophet, had the first of several visions in which the Master of Life provided him with the religious teachings that he would subsequently use to launch a pan-Indian militant religious revitalization movement. Tecumseh utilized his brother’s religion to unite disparate Native peoples to fight against United States. In 1808, the brothers established Prophetstown near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers in present-day Indiana. Upon arrival in Prophetstown, Tecumseh used his proximity to British officials to forge close ties with them, thus securing a source of supplies and weaponry to fight against American encroachment on Native lands. An intense rivalry soon emerged between Tecumseh and the governor of the Indian Territory, William Henry Harrison, who correctly viewed the Native leader as a formidable military threat. Between 1808 and 1811, Tecumseh was joined at Prophetstown by warriors from groups such as the Kickapoos, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Sauks, and Winnebagos. Between 1811 and 1812, Tecumseh toured the South looking to expand his confederacy. He especially hoped to find allies among the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws. He was rebuffed by all except the Red Stick Creeks, who saw him as a kinsman because of his mother, Methoataske. Upon his return to Prophetstown, he discovered that many of his warriors were gone due to the defeat of Tenskwatawa at the Battle of Tippecanoe on November 7, 1811. When the War of 1812 erupted, Tecumseh became an active British ally. Tecumseh recruited more Native warriors, and in 1813, he joined British forces in Canada on an invasion of Ohio. It ended disastrously. He and the British retreated to Canada, but Tecumseh’s confidence in the British commander, Colonel Henry Proctor, was shattered. Although Proctor promised that they would stop fleeing American forces and make a stand at the Thames River, as desired by Tecumseh and his followers, Proctor did not keep his word. Tecumseh did fight and was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, by troops led by Harrison. Richard Mentor Johnson, who claimed to have killed Tecumseh, used that notoriety to help him secure the vice presidency of the United States in 1837. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Greenville, Treaty of; Harrison, William Henry; Red Sticks; Tenskwatawa

Further Reading Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Edmunds, R. David. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Sugden, John. Tecumseh: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.

Tenskwatawa (1775–1832) Tenskwatawa, also known as “The Shawnee Prophet,” was born Lalawethika in 1775 to Puckeshinwa, a Shawnee warrior, and a Creek woman named Methoataske. He was raised alongside his brothers Kumskaukau and Tecumseh by his sister, Tecumapease. Tecumseh became a renowned hunter and warrior. In contrast, Lalawethika demonstrated few skills that were valued by the Shawnees and eventually became an alcoholic. In April 1805, Lalawethika had the first of several visions in which the Master of Life provided him with the religious teachings that he would subsequently use to launch a pan-Indian revitalization movement. Renaming himself Tenskwatawa, meaning “The Open Door,” he called for an

abandonment of European goods and culture, a return to the traditional lifestyle of their ancestors, a rejection of alcoholic beverages, an end to intertribal conflicts, and the unification of Native peoples to force Europeans off Native American lands. Unlike his spiritual predecessor Neolin, he did make an exception for firearms, which his followers could use for warfare but not hunting. Tecumseh utilized his brother’s militant religion to unite disparate Native peoples to fight against their common enemy, the United States. In 1808, the brothers established Prophetstown near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers in Indiana. Over the following three years, the town grew rapidly, as did its number of warriors. In 1810, Tecumseh left most of his armed force with his brother at Prophetstown and went south looking for potential allies among the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks. Before leaving, he told his brother not to engage the Indiana Territory’s governor William Henry Harrison in battle while he was gone. Harrison soon discovered that Tecumseh had gone south, thus he personally led a military expedition to Prophetstown to goad Tenskwatawa into battle. Unable to control himself, Tenskwatawa informed the warriors at Prophetstown that the Master of Life had guaranteed them victory if they attacked Harrison’s encampment. He also promised them that they would be impervious to American weaponry during the fighting. The warriors attacked on November 7, 1811, and the Battle of Tippecanoe was joined. Harrison emerged victorious, and he subsequently razed Prophetstown. Tenskwatawa’s reputation as a religious leader was greatly diminished. Despite his guarantees, many warriors had been killed or injured, and they had suffered a defeat. Although Prophetstown was rebuilt, many of its former residents opted to return to their home communities. During the War of 1812, Tenskwatawa accompanied Tecumseh to the siege of Fort Meigs in Ohio but did not participate in the fighting. He was also present at the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh was killed, but chose to retreat with the British forces commanded by Colonel Henry Porter instead of fighting alongside his brother and their fellow Shawnees. Following the conclusion of the war, Tenskwatawa settled in Canada. He [??]stayed there until 1825, when he returned to the United States. Soon after arriving, he aided U.S. officials in their efforts to remove the Shawnees to Kansas, where he died in 1832. John R. Burch Jr.

A Shawnee mystic and the brother of Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa was the first of two influential Indians to be called The Prophet, appointing himself prophet in 1805. Laulewasika was his given name, but he adopted the name Elkswatawa, and later Tenskwatawa, “The Prophet.” (Library of Congress)

See also: Harrison, William Henry; Tecumseh

Further Reading Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Jortner, Adam. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Trail of Tears “The Trail Where They Cried” is what the Cherokees called it, but it is more commonly known to nonCherokees as the Trail of Tears. The term refers to the forced removal and relocation of the Cherokee Indians in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory (now in Oklahoma) in 1838 and 1839 by the U.S. government. Of the approximately 15,000 Cherokees forced from their land at gunpoint, approximately 5,000 died from this injustice. The Cherokees lived in northwestern Georgia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee. They were highly adapted to Americans’ way of life, with their own constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution. They also lived in houses, held livestock, farmed, and some even had African American slaves. The Cherokees were one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, along with the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. While the others voluntarily left the Southeast or were removed earlier in the 1830s, the Cherokees were the last to be removed forcibly. As gold discoveries increased whites’ appetite for these western lands, the election of Andrew Jackson as

president (a leading advocate for Indian removal) resulted in this tragic, and almost complete, ethnic cleansing in the southeastern United States. Since Thomas Jefferson’s administration, assimilation had been the preferred policy of the U.S. government toward Indians. Native Americans were to adopt Euro-American ways of life as federal government programs and missionaries worked to “civilize” southeastern U.S. tribes. For those who did not want to adopt white culture, Jefferson suggested removal to new lands west of the Mississippi, which were acquired through the Louisiana Purchase (1804). The War of 1812 increased pressure on those remaining Native Americans in the South, since the U.S. government had signed a number of treaties after the war with northwestern tribes to open their lands to white expansion. Further, as slavery became more entrenched, assimilated Native Americans complicated an increasingly biracial social structure between African Americans and whites. In 1801, Cherokees permitted Moravian missionaries on their land, and these missionaries taught Euro-American ways, including settled agriculture, Christianity, and the English language. Regardless of their assimilation, the state of Georgia viewed Cherokees as savages and wanted their lands. In 1802, the state had given its lands west of the Appalachian Mountains to the federal government, which in return had agreed to remove the Cherokees. Until Andrew Jackson became president in 1829, the federal government had not kept its promise to Georgia. Andrew Jackson, prior to becoming president, had persuaded approximately 6,000 Cherokees to move to the Arkansas Territory in 1817, but most Cherokees remained on their land. Jackson, first elected president in 1828, wanted to remove all Native Americans in the East and South to lands west of the Mississippi River. Georgia governor George Gilmer prioritized the removal of the Cherokees in the 1820s. Ironically, while many in power at the local and state level were plotting their removal, Cherokees were adopting more Euro-American practices. A Cherokee named Sequoyah invented a Cherokee syllabary, and from 1828, the nation published a newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix. Most Cherokees lived in cabins similar to those of their white neighbors, and by the middle of the 1820s, wealthy Cherokees held almost 1,300 African American slaves. In 1827, the Cherokees created a government modeled on the U.S. Constitution and reiterated their sovereignty. The Dahlonega gold rush in the fall of 1828 threatened the Cherokees’ claim. Cherokees referred to the increasing numbers of white miners searching for gold on their land as the “Great Intrusion.” These economic and political calculations culminated in the Georgia legislature passing the Cherokee Removal Bill in 1830, challenging federal law. The Cherokees took the state of Georgia to the Supreme Court. The first case, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), did not solve the dispute because the court ruled it did not have the jurisdiction to hear the case. The court sympathized with the Cherokees and the discrimination they faced, but argued that the Cherokee Nation was not a separate foreign nation in terms of the U.S. Constitution. Rather, it was defined as an “Indian nation” that was within the United States and was dependent upon the United States. This dismissal allowed for another challenge of the Georgia laws. Samuel Worcester and Elizar Bother were missionaries living and working among the Cherokees and advising them legally. After the 1831 dismissal, they saw an opening and allowed themselves to be arrested for violating the new Georgian law prohibiting whites from living with Cherokees. The two were convicted in a Lawrenceville, Georgia, court and sentenced to hard labor. They appealed to the Supreme Court. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the challenge centered around Worcester and his colleague’s arrest for living among the Cherokees. Worcester argued that Georgia did not have authority to pass laws governing the Cherokees. The court agreed and ruled that as a “domestic dependent nation” the Cherokees were not subject to Georgian laws. Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling has become one of the most

important in Native American law. Andrew Jackson, however, chose to ignore the ruling and proceed with his design to remove all Native Americans west of the Mississippi. By 1834, the Cherokees were divided over continued resistance. Chief John Ross and most Cherokees did not want to give up their land, but others, like Major Ridge, felt moving west was their only real option. Without approval from the rest of the tribe, Major Ridge traveled to Washington and negotiated a treaty to sell Cherokee lands for $5 million. When he returned, the Cherokee National Council rejected the treaty. However, the U.S. Congress ratified it (though only by a single vote). The Treaty of New Echota (1835) became the legal basis for removal. To enforce the Treaty of New Echota, the federal government sent approximately 7,000 troops to remove the Cherokees from their land. Another 2,000 state militia troops joined the federal troops and began the Trail of Tears. Soldiers built large holding cells and in May 1838 began to fill them with Cherokees taken at gunpoint from wherever they were, no matter what they were doing at the time. Immediately following the removal of the Cherokees, and even before they were forced on the journey to Oklahoma, local whites looted Cherokee homes and sacred burial grounds, searching for gold and other valuables. By the end of June 1838, more than 8,000 Cherokees had been captured, and only one small group escaped the soldiers’ grasp by hiding deep in the North Carolina mountains. This small band and their descendants became known as the Eastern Band of the Cherokees, and those removed to Oklahoma were the Cherokee Nation. Approximately 1,000 other Cherokees were able to stay in western North Carolina because of William Holland Thomas. Thomas was white, but he had purchased thousands of acres where Cherokees could settle. The North Carolina General Assembly recognized the right of these Cherokees to stay in North Carolina in 1837, and this was an easier decision since the land Thomas had purchased was not wanted by anyone else. An additional 300 Cherokees remained in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; again some were those who had avoided U.S. general Winfield Scott’s army or who were related to or married to whites. Conditions for the forced trek from Georgia to Oklahoma could not have been much worse. Disease broke out in the internment camps, and because so many were dying, Cherokee leaders arranged with General Scott to manage their own removal. Drought had reduced crops and local water sources, and by the time the caravans started, many were low on food and supplies. Diseases plagued the Cherokees on the journey. Cherokees were forced to walk more than 800 miles from their homes to what is now eastern Oklahoma, a journey that took an average of six months. The winter was a particularly harsh one, and Chief John Ross’s wife was one of the many who died on the journey. For those who survived the ordeal, disputes among various groups of Cherokees continued in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). In June 1839, Major Ridge, his son, and Elias Boudinot were assassinated for their betrayal in the Treaty of New Echota. The Cherokee lands in Oklahoma would be reduced in size from the original reserve, as continued migration, greedy whites, and an unjust government pressured the Cherokees. Today, the Trail of Tears is a National Historic Trail running through Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Eric L. Payseur See also: Boudinot, Elias; Cherokees; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Indian Territory; Jackson, Andrew; Marshall (John) Court Decisions; New Echota, Treaty of; Ridge, John; Ross, John; Primary Documents: President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress on Indian Removal (1829)

Further Reading

Perdue, Theda, and Michael Green, ed. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. Penguin Library of American Indian History Series. New York: Viking, 2007. Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Washington, George (1732–1799) George Washington commanded the colonial forces in the Revolutionary War, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and was unanimously elected first president of the United States. Eulogized by a former officer as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” Washington was a seminal figure in the development of American political tradition. Washington was the first child born to a second marriage in rural Virginia in 1732. Little is known about his education, but at 13, he copied 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” which appear to have dictated his behavior all through adulthood. At 15, Washington began surveyor work to earn money for his widowed mother and younger siblings. As his income increased, he began to purchase land—eventually becoming one of the country’s largest landholders. In 1752, his older brother Lawrence died, and Washington inherited their father’s Mount Vernon estate, its acreage, and slaves. In 1753, Washington joined the Virginia militia. His physical feats on the western frontier and in the French and Indian War earned him a reputation for bravery and the rank of colonel. In 1759, he married Martha Custis, a widow with vast wealth and two young children. That same year, he was first elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Washington represented Virginia at the First and Second Continental Congresses, and in the latter he was unanimously elected commander in chief of the colonial forces. By July 1775, he was in the field with his troops near Boston. For the next eight years, he led the army—constantly working to secure provisions, boost morale, prepare the men for battle, tend the sick and wounded, and inspire the colonies. After the British surrendered in 1783, Washington addressed the Continental Congress in Annapolis and retired his commission as commander. He intended to retire to his beloved Mount Vernon estate. In 1787, his friends convinced Washington to lend his prestige to the Constitutional Convention convening in Philadelphia. He reluctantly agreed and was unanimously elected its president. While Washington chose not to enter the debates over ratification, he monitored developments closely. Meanwhile, many Americans leery of a strong central government took comfort in the assumption that Washington would be the first executive under the new Constitution. In 1789, Washington was unanimously elected as president. President Washington set many precedents as he organized the federal government, made appointments, worked with Congress, related to the public, and represented the country to the world. He relied heavily on his department heads to structure the executive functions—by his second term, this group became known as the cabinet. He established the veto in 1792 when he refused to sign a bill passed by Congress. Washington sent representatives to negotiate trade agreements with the British and treaties with the frontier Indian tribes. In 1794 he called up militiamen and led the troops to suppress the antitaxation Whiskey Rebellion. He tried to steer a path of neutrality in foreign affairs as Europe became immersed in war. Washington refused to run for a third term in 1796, and he and Martha returned to Mount Vernon. He died at home after falling ill in December 1799. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: American Revolution; Articles of Confederation; Seven Years’ War

Further Reading Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Flexner, James Thomas. Washington: The Indispensable Man. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1974. Smith, Richard Norton. Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

Wayne, Anthony (1745–1796) Anthony Wayne was born on January 1, 1745, in Waynesborough, Pennsylvania. Although he had no previous military experience, he proved to be an able commander during the American Revolution. Following that conflict, Wayne turned to politics but was not very successful in that field. He returned to military service in 1792, where he built the Legion of the United States into a professional fighting force. Wayne and the legion then set about to regain the United States’ military prestige, which had been squandered by General Josiah Harmar and General Arthur St. Clair in their expeditions against Little Turtle and Blue Jacket in what was then the Old Northwest Territory. In 1776, Wayne joined the Fourth Pennsylvania Regiment as a colonel. After distinguishing himself covering a retreat from Canada in 1777, he was promoted to brigadier general. He earned the nickname “Mad Anthony” for leading a bayonet charge on July 17, 1779, at the Battle of Stony Point in New York. During the war, he proved a daring and capable commander. George Washington, in particular, came to be highly impressed with Wayne’s bravery and tactical brilliance. For his service, Wayne was awarded the brevet rank of major general in 1783. Rather than continuing in the military following the American Revolution, Wayne opted to retire. Events in present-day Indiana ensured that Wayne’s retirement from the army would be brief. In 1790, General Josiah Harmar and the United States First Infantry Regiment, along with approximately 1,100 militiamen, invaded the Maumee Valley. Those troops ultimately suffered a humiliating defeat to warriors led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle. Blaming the defeat on Harmar’s incompetence, President George Washington a year later ordered Major General Arthur St. Clair to launch an expedition against Blue Jacket and Little Turtle’s force of Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee warriors. On November 4, 1791, Blue Jacket and Little Turtle were able to launch a surprise attack on St. Clair in what became known as the Battle of the Wabash. After four hours of conflict, more than 800 Americans were dead or wounded. It is estimated that the allied Native peoples suffered fewer than 70 casualties. It was the worst defeat ever suffered by the U.S. military and prompted Washington to turn to Anthony Wayne to reestablish American control of the frontier. Wayne was named a major general and put in command of the Legion of the United States, which was a new 5,000-man force. He spent two years training his troops in Pennsylvania before taking them into battle. During the summer of 1794, he led his force from Cincinnati, Ohio, to engage Little Turtle and Blue Jacket. The forces met on August 20 at Fallen Timbers, where the pan-Indian confederacy was soundly defeated by Wayne and his legion. Wayne subsequently continued his onslaught against the Natives, including the sacking of Miami Town on September 17. The legion also attacked the Native support network, as they also captured British forts in the area that had been supplying Native warriors in their fight against the United States. Wayne’s reestablishment of the power of the U.S. military in the Old Northwest was confirmed by the Treaty of Greenville, signed in 1795, which forced the defeated Native leaders to cede substantial amounts of land in present-day Ohio and Indiana to the United States. While fortifying the Great Lakes region to ensure the U.S. Army’s dominance, Wayne suddenly died at Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, on December 16, 1796. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Blue Jacket; Greenville, Treaty of; Little Turtle; St. Clair, Arthur; Primary Documents: “The Print of My Ancestor’s Houses”: Little Turtle Balks at Giving Up Land to General Anthony Wayne (1795)

Further Reading Gaff, Alan D. Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Nelson, Paul David. Anthony Wayne: Soldier of the Early Republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Western Reserve. See Northwest Territory Whiskey Rebellion (1794) The Whiskey Rebellion began on July 15, 1794, when John Neville, a federal tax collector, and David Lenox, a U.S. marshal, attempted to collect federal excise taxes on whiskey from farmers in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The next day, Neville’s home was burned down by angry farmers and militiamen. The rebellion against federal taxation quickly spread to the neighboring Pennsylvania counties of Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland, where other tax collectors were accosted while performing their duties. With portions of western Pennsylvania in open revolt and the movement spreading, President George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the Treasury, decided to make an example of the Whiskey rebels and sent approximately 13,000 militiamen under the command of Henry Lee to enforce federal authority on the Pennsylvania frontier. The Whiskey Rebellion had its origins in the years following the conclusion of the French and Indian War. That conflict had left Great Britain severely indebted, so the British began imposing a series of taxes on its North American colonies, beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765. The colonists subsequently began protesting the taxation. The resulting escalating crisis culminated in the American Revolution. The end of the American Revolution saw the creation of the United States of America. This new country assumed the debts from the respective former British colonies and was thus extremely impoverished. Much of the debt was held by bankers and traders who lived in large urban areas along the Atlantic Coast, many of whom eventually became members of the Federalist Party. Upon the passage of the U.S. Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, created an economic plan to stabilize the country’s finances. A key component in his plan was a tax on whiskey that would be used to end the country’s war debt. Whiskey was targeted because the wealthy elites that dominated the Federalist Party did not make their money from corn whiskey. Whiskey production instead occurred in frontier areas where farmers could not easily get their corn to distant markets. For the frontiersmen, it was more profitable to make whiskey from the corn and then sell it to local markets. The tax was enacted in 1791 and was immediately opposed by individuals residing in the vicinity of the Appalachian Mountains, who had few economic or political ties to the federal government. Many of the distillers were war veterans who viewed the new tax as “taxation without representation,” which in their eyes meant their new country’s government was acting as tyrannically toward them as Great Britain had previously.

Farmers in Pennsylvania protest the tax on whiskey by tarring and feathering a tax collector during the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. The revolt tested the principles of representative government and powers of taxation in the new nation. (Library of Congress)

During the fall of 1791, when federal tax collectors arrived in the West to begin collecting the new tax, they were often beaten and occasionally tarred and feathered. The blatant defiance toward tax collectors resulted in federal authorities being unable to hire tax collectors in such locales as Kentucky or North Carolina. Compounding the federal government’s problem collecting taxes was the unwillingness of state officials to prosecute frontiersmen for their actions against tax collectors. Unable to collect taxes from whiskey distillers for several years, President Washington and Secretary Hamilton needed to discover a way to obtain the needed funds for the federal Treasury. Waging a military campaign against frontiersmen throughout the Appalachian region was not a realistic possibility, so they searched for an opportunity to display the federal government’s supremacy in one locale in hopes that federal might would lead others to stop defying the federal government’s mandates. That opportunity emerged with the July 1794 attack on John Neville in Pennsylvania. Washington could not overlook the incident because of its proximity to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the nation’s capital. If he could not maintain federal authority in the home state of the capital, how could he expect to maintain order in other states? On August 7, 1794, President Washington threatened the Pennsylvanians that he was going to mobilize the militia against them if they continued to refuse to pay their taxes. He also dispatched commissioners to western Pennsylvania to find a peaceful solution to the standoff. Washington offered amnesty to the rebels in exchange for oaths pledging subservience to the United States but was rebuffed. On September 25, he dispatched Henry Lee and militiamen from Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to Fort Fayette in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As Lee’s forces marched toward Fort Fayette, they were joined by both Washington and Hamilton in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The presence of federal troops led most of the rebellion’s participants to flee. The militiamen confiscated property owned by the rebels and arrested the handful whom they could locate. Two of the rebellion’s leaders were convicted of treason but were later pardoned by President Washington. Although the resolve of the whiskey rebels proved fleeting, the willingness of the federal government to use overwhelming military force against the rebellious Pennsylvanians echoed throughout the country. It demonstrated that under the new U.S. Constitution, the federal government had real authority and the ability to ensure that its mandates were honored. The actions by Washington’s administration during the Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated to the nation’s populace that they had reason to fear the Federalist view of government, which advocated the primacy of a strong, central government over local rule. The following election cycle resulted in Thomas Jefferson winning the presidency in 1800 and bringing the

Jeffersonian view of government to the fore, which emphasized the power of local authorities over that of the privileged and monied elite class that made up the Federalist Party. With the support of President Jefferson, Congress repealed the tax on whiskey in 1802. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Washington, George

Further Reading Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. New York: Scribner, 2006. Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Worcester v. Georgia. See Marshall (John) Court Decisions

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Northwest Ordinance (1787) Chiefly written by Rufus King and Nathan Dane of Massachusetts and adopted by the Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation on July 13, 1787, the Northwest Ordinance revised an earlier ordinance, written by Thomas Jefferson, that applied to the territories north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. Not only did the Northwest Ordinance provide for the governance of the territories, but it also made a provision for the eventual admission of between three and five states from those territories. Since those states would have the same rights as the original 13, the law assured that the United States would not become a colonial power on the North American continent. A number of provisions within the Northwest Ordinance would later be emulated in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The states eventually carved from the Northwest Ordinance were Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. An Ordinance for the government of the Territory of the United States northwest of the River Ohio. Be it ordained by the United States in Congress assembled, That the said territory, for the purposes of temporary government, be one district, subject, however, to be divided into two districts, as future circumstances may, in the opinion of Congress, make it expedient. Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That the estates, both of resident and nonresident proprietors in the said territory, dying intestate, shall descent to, and be distributed among their children, and the descendants of a deceased child, in equal parts; the descendants of a deceased child or grandchild to take the share of their deceased parent in equal parts among them: And where there shall be no children or descendants, then in equal parts to the next of kin in equal degree; and among collaterals, the children of a deceased brother or sister of the intestate shall have, in equal parts among them, their deceased parents’ share; and there shall in no case be a distinction between kindred of the whole and half blood; saving, in all cases, to the widow of the intestate her third part of the real estate for life, and one third part of the personal estate; and this law relative to descents and dower, shall remain in full force until altered by the

legislature of the district. And until the governor and judges shall adopt laws as hereinafter mentioned, estates in the said territory may be devised or bequeathed by wills in writing, signed and sealed by him or her in whom the estate may be (being of full age), and attested by three witnesses; and real estates may be conveyed by lease and release, or bargain and sale, signed, sealed and delivered by the person being of full age, in whom the estate may be, and attested by two witnesses, provided such wills be duly proved, and such conveyances be acknowledged, or the execution thereof duly proved, and be recorded within one year after proper magistrates, courts, and registers shall be appointed for that purpose; and personal property may be transferred by delivery; saving, however to the French and Canadian inhabitants, and other settlers of the Kaskaskies, St. Vincents and the neighboring villages who have heretofore professed themselves citizens of Virginia, their laws and customs now in force among them, relative to the descent and conveyance, of property. Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That there shall be appointed from time to time by Congress, a governor, whose commission shall continue in force for the term of three years, unless sooner revoked by Congress; he shall reside in the district, and have a freehold estate therein in 1,000 acres of land, while in the exercise of his office. There shall be appointed from time to time by Congress, a secretary, whose commission shall continue in force for four years unless sooner revoked; he shall reside in the district, and have a freehold estate therein in 500 acres of land, while in the exercise of his office. It shall be his duty to keep and preserve the acts and laws passed by the legislature, and the public records of the district, and the proceedings of the governor in his executive department, and transmit authentic copies of such acts and proceedings, every six months, to the Secretary of Congress: There shall also be appointed a court to consist of three judges, any two of whom to form a court, who shall have a common law jurisdiction, and reside in the district, and have each therein a freehold estate in 500 acres of land while in the exercise of their offices; and their commissions shall continue in force during good behavior. The governor and judges, or a majority of them, shall adopt and publish in the district such laws of the original States, criminal and civil, as may be necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the district, and report them to Congress from time to time: which laws shall be in force in the district until the organization of the General Assembly therein, unless disapproved of by Congress; but afterwards the Legislature shall have authority to alter them as they shall think fit. The governor, for the time being, shall be commander in chief of the militia, appoint and commission all officers in the same below the rank of general officers; all general officers shall be appointed and commissioned by Congress. Previous to the organization of the general assembly, the governor shall appoint such magistrates and other civil officers in each county or township, as he shall find necessary for the preservation of the peace and good order in the same: After the general assembly shall be organized, the powers and duties of the magistrates and other civil officers shall be regulated and defined by the said assembly; but all magistrates and other civil officers not herein otherwise directed, shall during the continuance of this temporary government, be appointed by the governor. For the prevention of crimes and injuries, the laws to be adopted or made shall have force in all parts of the district, and for the execution of process, criminal and civil, the governor shall make proper divisions thereof; and he shall proceed from time to time as circumstances may require, to lay out the parts of the district in which the Indian titles shall have been extinguished, into counties and townships, subject, however, to such alterations as may thereafter be made by the legislature. So soon as there shall be five thousand free male inhabitants of full age in the district, upon giving proof thereof to the governor, they shall receive authority, with time and place, to elect a representative

from their counties or townships to represent them in the general assembly: Provided, That, for every five hundred free male inhabitants, there shall be one representative, and so on progressively with the number of free male inhabitants shall the right of representation increase, until the number of representatives shall amount to twenty five; after which, the number and proportion of representatives shall be regulated by the legislature: Provided, That no person be eligible or qualified to act as a representative unless he shall have been a citizen of one of the United States three years, and be a resident in the district, or unless he shall have resided in the district three years; and, in either case, shall likewise hold in his own right, in fee simple, two hundred acres of land within the same; Provided, also, That a freehold in fifty acres of land in the district, having been a citizen of one of the states, and being resident in the district, or the like freehold and two years residence in the district, shall be necessary to qualify a man as an elector of a representative. The representatives thus elected, shall serve for the term of two years; and, in case of the death of a representative, or removal from office, the governor shall issue a writ to the county or township for which he was a member, to elect another in his stead, to serve for the residue of the term. The general assembly or legislature shall consist of the governor, legislative council, and a house of representatives. The Legislative Council shall consist of five members, to continue in office five years, unless sooner removed by Congress; any three of whom to be a quorum: and the members of the Council shall be nominated and appointed in the following manner, to wit: As soon as representatives shall be elected, the Governor shall appoint a time and place for them to meet together; and, when met, they shall nominate ten persons, residents in the district, and each possessed of a freehold in five hundred acres of land, and return their names to Congress; five of whom Congress shall appoint and commission to serve as aforesaid; and, whenever a vacancy shall happen in the council, by death or removal from office, the house of representatives shall nominate two persons, qualified as aforesaid, for each vacancy, and return their names to Congress; one of whom [C]ongress shall appoint and commission for the residue of the term. And every five years, four months at least before the expiration of the time of service of the members of council, the said house shall nominate ten persons, qualified as aforesaid, and return their names to Congress; five of whom Congress shall appoint and commission to serve as members of the council five years, unless sooner removed. And the governor, legislative council, and house of representatives, shall have authority to make laws in all cases, for the good government of the district, not repugnant to the principles and articles in this ordinance established and declared. And all bills, having passed by a majority in the house, and by a majority in the council, shall be referred to the governor for his assent; but no bill, or legislative act whatever, shall be of any force without his assent. The governor shall have power to convene, prorogue, and dissolve the general assembly, when, in his opinion, it shall be expedient. The governor, judges, legislative council, secretary, and such other officers as Congress shall appoint in the district, shall take an oath or affirmation of fidelity and of office; the governor before the president of [C]ongress, and all other officers before the Governor. As soon as a legislature shall be formed in the district, the council and house assembled in one room, shall have authority, by joint ballot, to elect a delegate to Congress, who shall have a seat in Congress, with a right of debating but not voting during this temporary government. And, for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws and constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said territory: to provide also for the establishment of States, and permanent government therein, and for their

admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original States, at as early periods as may be consistent with the general interest: It is hereby ordained and declared by the authority aforesaid, That the following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original States and the people and States in the said territory and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent, to wit: Article 1. No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments, in the said territory. Article 2. The inhabitants of the said territory shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by jury; of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature; and of judicial proceedings according to the course of the common law. All persons shall be bailable, unless for capital offenses, where the proof shall be evident or the presumption great. All fines shall be moderate; and no cruel or unusual punishments shall be inflicted. No man shall be deprived of his liberty or property, but by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land; and, should the public exigencies make it necessary, for the common preservation, to take any person’s property, or to demand his particular services, full compensation shall be made for the same. And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed. Article 3. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them. Article 4. The said territory, and the States which may be formed therein, shall forever remain a part of this Confederacy of the United States of America, subject to the Articles of Confederation, and to such alterations therein as shall be constitutionally made; and to all the acts and ordinances of the United States in Congress assembled, conformable thereto. The inhabitants and settlers in the said territory shall be subject to pay a part of the federal debts contracted or to be contracted, and a proportional part of the expenses of government, to be apportioned on them by Congress according to the same common rule and measure by which apportionments thereof shall be made on the other States; and the taxes for paying their proportion shall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the district or districts, or new States, as in the original States, within the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled. The legislatures of those districts or new States, shall never interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by the United States in Congress assembled, nor with any regulations Congress may find necessary for securing the title in such soil to the bona fide purchasers. No tax shall be imposed on lands the property of the United States; and, in no case, shall nonresident proprietors be taxed higher than residents. The navigable waters leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, and the carrying places between the same, shall be common highways and forever free, as well to the inhabitants of the said territory as to the citizens of the United States, and those of any other States that may be admitted into the confederacy, without any tax, impost, or duty therefor.

Article 5. There shall be formed in the said territory, not less than three nor more than five States; and the boundaries of the States, as soon as Virginia shall alter her act of cession, and consent to the same, shall become fixed and established as follows, to wit: The western State in the said territory, shall be bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio, and Wabash Rivers; a direct line drawn from the Wabash and Post Vincents, due North, to the territorial line between the United States and Canada; and, by the said territorial line, to the Lake of the Woods and Mississippi. The middle State shall be bounded by the said direct line, the Wabash from Post Vincents to the Ohio, by the Ohio, by a direct line, drawn due north from the mouth of the Great Miami, to the said territorial line, and by the said territorial line. The eastern State shall be bounded by the last mentioned direct line, the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the said territorial line: Provided, however, and it is further understood and declared, that the boundaries of these three States shall be subject so far to be altered, that, if Congress shall hereafter find it expedient, they shall have authority to form one or two States in that part of the said territory which lies north of an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan. And, whenever any of the said States shall have sixty thousand free inhabitants therein, such State shall be admitted, by its delegates, into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever, and shall be at liberty to form a permanent constitution and State government: Provided, the constitution and government so to be formed, shall be republican, and in conformity to the principles contained in these articles; and, so far as it can be consistent with the general interest of the confederacy, such admission shall be allowed at an earlier period, and when there may be a less number of free inhabitants in the State than sixty thousand. Article 6. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always, That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid. Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That the resolutions of the 23rd of April, 1784, relative to the subject of this ordinance, be, and the same are hereby repealed and declared null and void. Source: Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M332, roll 9); Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1774– 1789, Record Group 360; National Archives.

“The Print of My Ancestor’s Houses”: Little Turtle Balks at Giving Up Land to General Anthony Wayne (1795) Following the American Revolution, areas of the Northwest Territory became prime targets for settlement. The United States negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 and the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785 to obtain land in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Several Indian nations vowed to defend their claims from further encroachment, however. Indian resistance to American settlers escalated into an undeclared war, known as the Northwest Indian War, along the frontiers of the Ohio Country. Fighting continued until an American army under the command of General Anthony Wayne defeated the Northwestern Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794. As a result, members of the confederacy were forced to sign the Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795, thereby ceding approximately two-thirds of Ohio and a portion of Indiana to the United States.

In Council: Present as before. The Little Turtle, a Miami chief, addressed the General as follows: BROTHER: We have heard and considered what you have said to us. You have shown, and we have seen, your powers to treat with us. I came here for the purpose of hearing you. I suppose it to be your wish that peace should take place, throughout the world. When we hear you say so, we will be prepared to answer you. You have told me that the present treaty should be founded upon that of Muskingum. I beg leave to observe to you, that that treaty was effected altogether by the Six Nations, who seduced some of our young men to attend it, together with a few of the Chippewas, Wyandots, Ottawas, Delawares, and Pattawatamies. I beg leave to tell you, that I am entirely ignorant of what was done at that treaty. I hope those who held it may give you their opinion, whether or not it was agreeable to them.… In Council: Present as before. The Little Turtle, a Miami chief, arose and spoke as follows: General WAYNE: I hope you will pay attention to what I now say to you. I wish to inform you where your younger brothers, the Miamies, live, and, also, the Pattawatamies of St. Joseph’s, together with the Wabash Indians. You have pointed out to us the boundary line between the Indians and the United States, but I now take the liberty to inform you, that that line cuts off from the Indians a large portion of country, which has been enjoyed by my forefathers time immemorial; without molestation or dispute. The print of my ancestors’ houses are every where to be seen in this portion. I was a little astonished at hearing you, and my brothers who are now present, telling each other what business you had transacted together heretofore at Muskingum, concerning this country. It is well known by all my brothers present, that my forefather kindled the first fire at Detroit; from thence, he extended his lines to the head waters of Scioto; from thence, to its mouth; from thence, down the Ohio, to the mouth of the Wabash, and from thence to Chicago, on lake Michigan; at this place I first saw my elder brothers, the Shawanese. I have now informed you of the boundaries of the Miami nation, where the Great Spirit placed my forefather a long time ago, and charged him not to sell or part with his lands, but to preserve them for his posterity. This charge has been handed down to me. I was much surprised to find that my other brothers differed so much from me on this subject: for their conduct would lead one to suppose, that the Great Spirit, and their forefathers, had not given them the same charge that was give to me, but, on the contrary, had directed them to sell their lands to any white man who wore a hat, as soon as he should ask it of them. Now, elder brother, your younger brothers, the Miamies, have pointed out to you their country, and also to our brothers present. When I hear your remarks and proposals on this subject, I will be ready to give you an answer: I came with an expectation of hearing you say good things, but I have not yet heard what I have expected. BROTHERS: (the Indians,) I expected in this council that our minds would have been made up, and that we should speak with one voice; I am sorry to observe that you are rather unsettled and hasty in your conduct.… The General arose, and spoke as follows: BROTHERS, the Ottawas, Chippewas, and Pattawatamies, open your ears, and be attentive: I have heard with very great pleasure, the sentiments delivered by Masass, as the unanimous voice of your three nations. When Mash-i-pi-nash-i-wish, your uncle, came to me last winter, I took him to my bosom, and delivered him the key of all my forts and garrisons; and my heart rejoices when I look around me, and see

so many of your chiefs and warriors assembled here, in consequence of that happy meeting. It will give infinite pleasure to General Washington, the Great Chief of the Fifteen Fires, when I inform him you have thrown the hatchet with so strong an arm, that it has reached the middle, and sunk to the bottom of the great lake, and that it is now so covered with sand, that it can never again be found. The belt which was given to Wassung, many years since, establishing a road between you and the Fifteen Fires, I now return, renewed, and cleared of all the brush and brambles with which time had scattered it. BROTHERS of the three great fires: You say you thought you were the proper owners of the land that was sold to the [F]ifteen Fires, at the treaty of Muskingum; but, you say, also, that you never received any compensation for those lands. [I]t was always the wish and intention of the Fifteen Fires that the true owners of those lands should receive a full compensation for them; if you did not receive a due proportion of the goods, as original proprietors, it was not the fault of the United States; on the contrary, the United States have twice paid for those lands, first, at the treaty of McIntosh, ten years ago, and next, at that of Muskingum, six years since. YOUNGER BROTHERS: Notwithstanding that these lands have been twice paid for, by the Fifteen Fires, at the places I have mentioned, yet, such is the justice and liberality of the United States, that they will now, a third time, make compensation for them. [A large string to the three fires.] BROTHERS, the Miamies: I have paid attention to what the Little Turtle said two days since, concerning the lands which he claims. He said his fathers first kindled the fire at Detroit, and stretched his line from thence, to the head waters of Scioto, thence, down the same, to the Ohio; thence, down that river, to the mouth of the Wabash, and from thence to Chicago, on the southwest end of Lake Michigan, and observed that his forefathers had enjoyed that country undisturbed, from time immemorial. BROTHERS: These boundaries enclose a very large space of country indeed; they embrace, if I mistake not, all the lands on which all the nations now present live, as well as those which have been ceded to the United States. The lands which have been ceded have, within these three days, been acknowledged by the Ottawas, Chippewas, Pattawatamies, Wyandots, Delawares, and Shawanese. The Little Turtle says, the prints of his forefathers’ houses are every where to be seen within these boundaries. Younger brother, it is true, these prints are to be observed; but, at the same time, we discover the marks of French possession throughout this country, which were established long before we were born. These have since been in the occupancy of the British, who must, in their turn, relinquish them to the United States, when they, the French and Indians, will be all as one people. [A white string.] I will point out to you a few places where I discover strong traces of these establishments; and first of all, I find at Detroit a very strong print, where the fire was first kindled by your forefathers; next, at Vincennes, on the Wabash; again at Musquiton, on the same river; a little higher up that stream, they are to be seen at Ouitanon; I discover another strong trace at Chicago, another on the St. Joseph’s of Lake Michigan; I have seen distinctly the prints of a French and a British post a[t] the Miami villages, and of a British post at the foot of the rapids, now in their possession; prints, very conspicuous, are on the great Miami, which were possessed by the French, forty five years ago; and another trace is very distinctly to be seen at Sandusky. I appears to me, that, if the Great Spirit, as you say, charged your forefathers to preserve their lands entire for their posterity, they have paid very little regard to the sacred injunction: for I see they have parted with those lands to your fathers the French, and the English are not, or have been, in possession of them all; therefore, I think the charge urged against the Ottawas, Chippewas, and the other Indians, comes

with a bad grace indeed, from the very people who perhaps set them the example. The English and French both wore hats; and yet your forefathers sold them, at various times, portions of your lands; however, as I have already observed, you shall now receive from the United States further valuable compensations, for the lands you have ceded to them by former treaties. YOUNGER BROTHERS: I will now inform you who it was who gave us these lands, in the first instance; it was your fathers the British, who did not discover that care for your interest which you ought to have experienced. This is the Treaty of Peace, made between the United States of America and Great Britain, twelve years ago, at the end of a long and bloody war, when the French and Americans proved too powerful for the British; on these terms they obtained peace. [Here part of the treaty of 1783 was read.] Here you perceive that all the country, south of the great lakes, has been given up to America; but the United States never intended to take that advantage of you, which the British placed in their hands; they wish you to enjoy your just rights, without interruption, and to promote your happiness. The British stipulated to surrender to us all the posts on their side of the boundary agreed on. I told you some days ago, that treaties should ever be sacredly fulfilled by those who make them; but the British, on their part, did not find it convenient to relinquish those posts as soon as they should have done; however, they now find it so, and a precise period is accordingly fixed for their delivery. I have now in my hand the copy of a treaty, made eight months since, between them and us, of which I will read you a little. [First and second article of Mr. Jay’s treaty, read.] By this solemn agreement, they promise to retire from Michilimackinac, [F]ort St. Clair, Detroit, Niagara, and all other places on this side of the lakes, in ten moons from this period, and leave the same to the full and quiet possession of the United States. BROTHERS: All nations present, now listen to me! Having now explained those matters to you, and informed you of all things I judged necessary for your information, we have nothing to do but to bury the hatchet, and draw a veil over past misfortunes. As you have buried our dead with the concern of brothers, so I now collect the bones of your slain warriors, put them into a deep pit, which I have dug, and cover them carefully over with this large belt, there to remain undisturbed. I also dry the tears from your eyes, and wipe the blood from your bodies, with this soft, white linen: no bloody traces will ever lead to the graves of your departed heroes; with this, I wipe all such entirely away. I deliver it to your uncle the Wyandot, who will send it round amongst you. [A large belt, with a white string attached.] I now take the hatchet out of your heads, and with a strong arm throw it into the centre of the great ocean, where no mortal can ever find it; and I now deliver to you the wide and straight path to the Fifteen Fires, to be used by you and your posterity for ever. So long as you continue to follow this road, so long will you continue to be a happy people; you see it is straight and wide, and they will be blind indeed, who deviate from it. I place it also in your uncle’s hands, that he may preserve it for you. [A large road belt] I will, the day after tomorrow, shew [sic] you the cessions you have made to the United States, and point out to you the lines which may, for the future, divide your lands from theirs; and, as you will have tomorrow to rest, I will order you a double allowance of drink; because we have now buried the hatchet, and performed every necessary ceremony, to render propitious our renovated friendship. Source: U.S. Congress, American State Papers. Indian Affairs, 1789–1815 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), Vol. 1: 567, 570– 571, 576.

“My Husband Was Seized with the Mania”: Harriet L. Noble’s Account of Emigration from New York to Michigan (1824) In 1790, 95 percent of the population lived in the states along the Atlantic Ocean; by 1812, onequarter lived west of the Appalachians. After the American Revolution forced many Indian peoples into land cessation and removal in the Michigan territory and other northwestern areas, low land prices enticed families from overpopulated eastern regions. Harriet Noble and her family took the northernmost of the major migration routes west, crossing upstate New York and Lake Erie to reach Detroit. While her husband faced sickness and other hazards on their isolated farm, Harriet voiced complaints familiar from many women’s narratives of the frontier: the absence of society and social institutions. My husband was seized with the mania, and accordingly made preparation to start in January with his brother. They took the Ohio route, and were nearly a month in getting through; coming by way of Monroe, and thence to Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. Mr. John Allen and Walter Rumsey with his wife and two men had been there some four or five weeks, had built a small house, moved into it the day my husband and his brother arrived, and were just preparing their first meal, which the newcomers had the pleasure of partaking. They spent a few days here, located a farm a little above the town on the river Huron, and returned through Canada. They had been so much pleased with the country, that they immediately commenced preparing to emigrate; and as near as I can recollect, we started about the 20th of September, 1824, for Michigan. We travelled from our house in Geneva to Buffalo in wagons. The roads were bad, and we were obliged to wait in Buffalo four days for a boat, as the steamboat “Michigan” was the only one on the lake. After waiting so long, we found she had put into Erie for repairs, and had no prospect of being able to run again for some time. The next step was to take passage in a schooner, which was considered a terrible undertaking for so dangerous a voyage as it was then thought to be. At length we went on board “The Prudence,” of Cleveland, Capt. Johnson. A more inconvenient little hark could not well be imagined. We were seven days on Lake Erie, and so entirely prostrated with seasickness, as scarcely to be able to attend to the wants of our little ones. I had a little girl of three years, and a babe some months old, and Sister Noble had six children, one an infant. It was a tedious voyage; the lake was very rough most of the time, and I thought if we were only on land again, I should be satisfied, it was a wilderness. I could not then realize what it would be to live without a comfortable house through the winter, but sad experience afterwards taught me a lesson not to be forgotten. We came into the Detroit river; it was beautiful then as now; on the Canada side, in particular, you will scarce perceive any change. As we approached Detroit, the “Cantonment” with the American flag floating on its walls, was decidedly the most interesting of any part of the town; for a city it was certainly the most filthy, irregular place I had ever seen; the streets were filled with Indians and low French, and at that time I could not tell the difference between them. We spent two days in making preparations for going out to Ann Arbor, and during that time I never saw a genteelly-dressed person in the streets. There were carriages; the most wealthy families rode in French carts, sitting on the bottom upon some kind of mat; and the streets were so muddy these were the only vehicles convenient for getting about. I said to myself, “if this be a Western city, give me a home in the woods.” I think it was on the 3d of October we started from Detroit, with a pair of oxen and a wagon, a few articles for cooking, and such necessaries as we could not do without. It was necessary that they should be few as possible, for our families were a full load for this mode of travelling. After travelling all day we found ourselves but ten miles from Detroit (at what is now Dearborn); here we spent the night at a kind of tavern, the only one west of the city. Our lodging was the

floor, and the other entertainment was to match. The next day we set out as early as possible, in hopes to get through the woods before dark, but night found us about half way through, and there remained no other resource but to camp out, and make ourselves contented. The men built a large fire and prepared our supper. My sister and myself could assist but little, so fatigued were we with walking and carrying our infants. There were fifteen in our company. Two gentlemen going to Ypsilanti had travelled with us from Buffalo; the rest were our own families. We were all pretty cheerful, until we began to think of lying down for the night. The men did not seem to dread it, however, and were soon fast asleep, but sleep was not for me in such a wilderness. I could think of nothing but wild beasts, or something as bad; so that I had the pleasure of watching while the others slept. It seemed a long, long night, and never in my life did I feel more grateful for the blessing of returning day. We started again as early as possible, all who could walk moving on a little in advance of the wagon; the small children were the only ones who thought of riding. Every few rods it would take two or three men to pry the wagon out of the mud, while those who walked were obliged to force their way over fallen timber, brush, &c. Thus passed the day; at night we found ourselves on the plains, three miles from Ypsilanti. My feet were so swollen I could walk no further. We got into the wagon and rode as far as Woodruff’s grove, a little below Ypsilanti. There were some four or five families at this place. The next day we left for Ann Arbor. We were delighted with the country before us, it was beautiful in its natural state; and I have sometimes thought that cultivation has marred its loveliness. Where Ypsilanti now stands, there was but one building—an old trading-house on the west side of the river; the situation was fine—there were scattering oaks and no brushwood. Here we met a large number of Indians; and one old squaw followed us some distance with her papoose, determined to swap babies. At last she gave it up, and for one I felt relieved. We passed two log houses between this and Ann Arbor. About the middle of the afternoon, we found ourselves at our journey’s end—but what a prospect? There were some six or seven log huts occupied by as many inmates as could be crowded into them. It was too much to think of asking strangers to give us a place to stay in even for one night under such circumstances. Mr. John Allen himself made us the offer of sharing with him the comfort of a shelter from storm, if not from cold. His house was large for a log one, but quite unfinished; there was a ground floor and a small piece above. When we got our things stored in this place, we found the number sheltered to be twenty-one women and children, and fourteen men. There were but two bedsteads in the house, and those who could not occupy these, slept on feather beds upon the floor. When the children were put in bed you could not set a foot down without stepping on a foot or hand; the consequence was we had music most of the time. We cooked our meals in the open air, there being no fire in the house but a small box-stove. The fall winds were not very favorable to such business; we would frequently find our clothes on fire, but fortunately we did not often get burned. When one meal was over, however, we dreaded preparing the next. We lived in this way until our husbands got a log house raised and the roof on; this took them about six weeks, at the end of which time we went into it, without door, floor, chimney, or anything but logs and roof. There were no means of getting boards for a floor, as everything must be brought from Detroit, and we could not think of drawing lumber over such a road. The only alternative was to split slabs of oak with an axe. My husband was not a mechanic, but he managed to make a floor in this way that kept us from the ground. I was most anxious for a door, as the wolves would come about in the evening, and sometimes stay all night and keep up a serenade that would almost chill the blood in my veins. Of all noises, I think the howling of wolves and the yell of Indians the most fearful; at least it appeared so to me then, when I was not able to close the door against them. I had the greatest terror of Indians; for I had never seen any before I came to Michigan but Oneidas, and they were very different, being partially civilized.

We had our house comfortable as such a rude building could be, by the first of February. It was a mild winter; there was snow enough to cover the ground only four days, a fortunate circumstance for us. We enjoyed uninterrupted health, but in the spring the ague with its accompaniments gave us a call, and by the middle of August there were but four out of fourteen who could call themselves well. We then fancied we were too near the river for health. We sold out and bought again ten miles west of Ann Arbor, a place which suited us better; and just a year from the day we came to Ann Arbor, moved out of it to Dexter. There was one house here, Judge Dexter’s; he was building a sawmill, and had a number of men at work at the time; besides these there was not a white family west of Ann Arbor in Michigan territory. Our log house was just raised, forming only the square log pen. Of course it did not look very inviting, but it was our home, and we must make the best of it. I helped to raise the rafters and put on the roof, but it was the last of November before our roof was completed. We were obliged to wait for the mill to run in order to get boards for making it. The doorway I had no means of closing except by hanging up a blanket, and frequently when I would raise it to step out, there would he two or three of our dusky neighbors peeping in to see what was there. It would always give me such a start, I could not suppress a scream, to which they would reply with “Ugh!” and a hearty laugh. They knew I was afraid, and liked to torment me. Sometimes they would throng the house and stay two or three hours. If I was alone they would help themselves to what they liked. The only way in which I could restrain them at all, was to threaten that I would tell Cass; he was governor of the territory, and they stood in great fear of him. At last we got a door. The next thing wanted was a chimney; winter was close at hand and the stone was not drawn. I said to my husband, “I think I can drive the oxen and draw the stones, while you dig them from the ground and load them.” He thought I could not, but consented to let me try. He loaded them on a kind of sled; I drove to the house, rolled them off, and drove back for another load. I succeeded so well that we got enough in this way to build our chimney. My husband and myself were four days building it. I suppose most of my lady friends would think a woman quite out of “her legitimate sphere” in turning mason, but I was not at all particular what kind of labor I performed, so we were only comfortable and provided with the necessaries of life. Many times I had been obliged to take my children, put on their cloaks, and sit on the south side of the house in the sun to keep them warm; anything was preferable to smoke. When we had a chimney and floor, and a door to close up our little log cabin, I have often thought it the most comfortable little place that could possibly be built in so new a country; and but for the want of provisions of almost every kind, we should have enjoyed it much. The roads had been so bad all the fall that we had waited until this time, and I think it was December when my husband went to Detroit for supplies. Fifteen days were consumed in going and coming. We had been without flour for three weeks or more, and it was hard to manage with young children thus. After being without bread three or four days, my little boy, two years old, looked me in the face and said, “Ma, why don’t you make bread; don’t you like it? I do.” His innocent complaint brought forth the first tears I had shed in Michigan on account of any privations I had to suffer, and they were about the last. I am not of a desponding disposition, nor often low-spirited, and having left New York to make Michigan my home, I had no idea of going back, or being very unhappy. Yet the want of society, of church privileges, and in fact almost every thing that makes life desirable, would often make me sad in spite of all effort to the contrary. I had no ladies’ society for one year after coming to Dexter, except that of sister Noble and a Mrs. Taylor, and was more lonely than either of them, my family being so small. The winter passed rather gloomily, but when spring came, everything looked delightful. We thought our hardships nearly at an end, when early in the summer my husband was taken sick with the ague. He had not been sick at all the first year; of course he must be acclimated. He had never suffered from ague or fever of any kind before, and it was a severe trial for him, with so much to do and no help to be had. He

would break the ague and work for a few days, when it would return. In this way he made his garden, planted his corn, and thought he was quite well. About August he harvested his wheat and cut his hay, but could get no help to draw it, and was again taken with ague. I had it myself, and both my children. Sometimes we would all be ill at a time. Mr. Noble and I had it every other day. He was almost discouraged, and said he should have to sell his cattle or let them starve. I said to him, “to-morrow we shall neither of us have the ague, and I believe I can load and stack the hay, if my strength permits.” As soon as breakfast was over, I prepared to go into the meadow, where I loaded and stacked seven loads that day. The next day my husband had the ague more severely than common, but not so with me; the exercise broke the chills, and I was able to assist him whenever he was well enough, until our hay was all secured. In the fall we had several added to our circle. We were more healthy then, and began to flatter ourselves that we could live very comfortably through the winter of 1826; but we were not destined to enjoy that blessing, for in November my husband had his left hand blown to pieces by the accidental discharge of a gun, which confined him to the house until April. The hay I had stacked during the summer I had to feed out to the cattle with my own hands in the winter, and often cut the wood for three days at a time. The logs which I alone rolled in, would surprise any one who has never been put to the test of necessity, which compels people to do what under other circumstances they would not have thought possible. This third winter in Michigan was decidedly the hardest I had yet encountered. In the spring, Mr. Noble could go out by carrying his hand in a sling. He commenced ploughing to prepare for planting his corn. Being weak from his wound, the ague returned again, but he worked every other day until his corn was planted. He then went to New York, came back in July, and brought a nephew with him, who relieved me from helping him in the work out of doors. Although I was obliged to stack the hay this third fall, I believe it was the last labor of the kind I ever performed. At this time we began to have quite a little society; we were fortunate in having good neighbors, and for some years were almost like one family, our interests being the same, and envy, jealousy, and all bitter feelings unknown among us. We cannot speak so favorably of the present time. When I look back upon my life, and see the ups and downs, the hardships and privations I have been called upon to endure, I feel no wish to be young again. I was in the prime of life when I came to Michigan—only twenty-one, and my husband was thirty-three. Neither of us knew the reality of hardship. Could we have known what it was to be pioneers in a new country, we should never come, but I am satisfied that with all the disadvantages of raising a family in a new country, there is a consolation in knowing that our children are prepared to brave the ills of life, I believe, far better than they would have been had we never left New York. Source: Ellet, Elizabeth F. Pioneer Women of the West (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1852), pp. 388–395.

President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress on Indian Removal (1829) President Andrew Jackson’s message on the removal of southern Indians, part of his first annual message to the U.S. Congress of December 1829, precipitated government removal of Native Americans from their lands in the eastern United States and exiled them to reservations in the West. Despite some public sympathy for the Native Americans, especially the Cherokees in Georgia, Jackson argued that if the Indians remained within existing states, they would constitute a foreign people, contradicting the prohibition of states within other states found in Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution. Congress subsequently adopted the Indian Removal Act of 1830, approving Jackson’s

proposed policy. The Supreme Court decisions in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) proved inadequate to protect Native American interests in the face of state, presidential, and congressional opposition, and they were ultimately forced off their land, culminating in the devastating and dramatic removal of the Cherokees in 1838 on the Trail of Tears. It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. Two important tribes have accepted the provision made for their removal at the last session of Congress, and it is believed that their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages. The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual states, and to the Indians themselves. The pecuniary advantages which it promises to the government are the least of its recommendations. It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the general and state governments on account of the Indians. It will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters. By opening the whole territory between Tennessee on the north and Louisiana on the south to the settlement of the whites, it will incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier and render the adjacent states strong enough to repel future invasions without remote aid. It will relieve the whole state of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those states to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the states; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers; and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community. These consequences, some of them so certain and the rest so probable, make the complete execution of the plan sanctioned by Congress at their last session an object of much solicitude. Toward the aborigines of the country, no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people. I have endeavored to impress upon them my own solemn convictions of the duties and powers of the general government in relation to the state authorities. For the justice of the laws passed by the states within the scope of their reserved powers, they are not responsible to this government. As individuals we may entertain and express our opinions of their acts, but as a government we have as little right to control them as we have to prescribe laws for other nations. With a full understanding of the subject, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw tribes have with great unanimity determined to avail themselves of the liberal offers presented by the act of Congress and have agreed to remove beyond the Mississippi River. Treaties have been made with them, which in due season will be submitted for consideration. In negotiating these treaties, they were made to understand their true condition, and they have preferred maintaining their independence in the Western forests to submitting to the laws of the states in which they now reside. These treaties, being probably the last which will ever be made with them, are characterized by great liberality on the part of the government. They give the Indians a liberal sum in consideration of their removal, and comfortable subsistence on their arrival at their new homes. If it be their real interest to maintain a separate existence, they will there be at liberty to do so without the inconveniences and vexations to which they would unavoidably have been subject in Alabama and Mississippi.

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another. In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes. Nor is there anything in this which, upon a comprehensive view of the general interests of the human race, is to be regretted. Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12 million happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion? The present policy of the government is but a continuation of the same progressive change by a milder process. The tribes which occupied the countries now constituting the Eastern states were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites. The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward, and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West by a fair exchange, and, at the expense of the United States, to send them to a land where their existence may be prolonged and perhaps made perpetual. Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land, our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. Does humanity weep at these painful separations from everything, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and faculties of man in their highest perfection. These remove hundreds and almost thousands of miles at their own expense, purchase the lands they occupy, and support themselves at their new homes from the moment of their arrival. Can it be cruel in this government when, by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontented in his ancient home to purchase his lands, to give him a new and extensive territory, to pay the expense of his removal, and support him a year in his new abode? How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions? If the offers made to the Indians were extended to them, they would be hailed with gratitude and joy. And is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children? Rightly considered, the policy of the general government toward the red man is not only liberal but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the states and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the general government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement. In the consummation of a policy originating at an early period, and steadily pursued by every administration within the present century—so just to the states and so generous to the Indians—the executive feels it has a right to expect the cooperation of Congress and of all good and disinterested men. The states, moreover, have a right to demand it. It was substantially a part of the compact which made them members of our Confederacy. With Georgia there is an express contract; with the new states an

implied one of equal obligation. Why, in authorizing Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, and Alabama to form constitutions and become separate states, did Congress include within their limits extensive tracts of Indian lands, and, in some instances, powerful Indian tribes? Was it not understood by both parties that the power of the states was to be coextensive with their limits, and that, with all convenient dispatch, the general government should extinguish the Indian title and remove every obstruction to the complete jurisdiction of the state governments over the soil? Probably not one of those states would have accepted a separate existence—certainly it would never have been granted by Congress—had it been understood that they were to be confined forever to those small portions of their nominal territory the Indian title to which had at the time been extinguished. It is, therefore, a duty which this government owes to the new states to extinguish as soon as possible the Indian title to all lands which Congress themselves have included within their limits. When this is done, the duties of the general government in relation to the states and the Indians within their limits are at an end. The Indians may leave the state or not, as they choose. The purchase of their lands does not alter in the least their personal relations with the state government. No act of the general government has ever been deemed necessary to give the states jurisdiction over the persons of the Indians. That they possess by virtue of their sovereign power within their own limits in as full a manner before as after the purchase of the Indian lands; nor can this government add to or diminish it. May we not hope, therefore, that all good citizens, and none more zealously than those who think the Indians oppressed by subjection to the laws of the states, will unite in attempting to open the eyes of those children of the forest to their true condition and, by a speedy removal to relieve them from all the evils, real or imaginary, present or prospective, with which they may be supposed to be threatened. Source: U.S. Congress. Senate Journal. 21st Cong., 2nd sess., December 7, 1830.

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) Cherokee Nation v. Georgia was among the most important cases to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in its first half century. Together with Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which involved many of the same issues, Cherokee Nation established the legal underpinnings for the relationship between the government and Indian nations. At issue was the state of Georgia’s attempts to take control of Cherokee land protected by treaties between the federal government and the Cherokees. In a 4 to 2 decision, the Court recognized the Cherokees’ status as a sovereign nation but not a foreign nation, a fine distinction that denied them the right to bring their case before the Court. MR. CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL delivered the opinion of the Court. This bill is brought by the Cherokee Nation, praying an injunction to restrain the State of Georgia from the execution of certain laws of that State which, as is alleged, go directly to annihilate the Cherokees as a political society and to seize, for the use of Georgia, the lands of the Nation which have been assured to them by the United States in solemn treaties repeatedly made and still in force. If Courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined. A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary to their comfortable subsistence. To preserve this remnant, the present application is made.

Before we can look into the merits of the case, a preliminary inquiry presents itself. Has this Court jurisdiction of the cause? The third article of the Constitution describes the extent of the judicial power. The second section closes an enumeration of the cases to which it is extended, with “controversies” “between a State or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens, or subjects.” A subsequent clause of the same section gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in all cases in which a State shall be a party. The party defendant may then unquestionably be sued in this Court. May the plaintiff sue in it? Is the Cherokee Nation a foreign state in the sense in which that term is used in the Constitution? The counsel for the plaintiffs have maintained the affirmative of this proposition with great earnestness and ability. So much of the argument as was intended to prove the character of the Cherokees as a State as a distinct political society, separated from others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself, has, in the opinion of a majority of the judges, been completely successful. They have been uniformly treated as a State from the settlement of our country. The numerous treaties made with them by the United States recognize them as a people capable of maintaining the relations of peace and war, of being responsible in their political character for any violation of their engagements, or for any aggression committed on the citizens of the United States by any individual of their community. Laws have been enacted in the spirit of these treaties. The acts of our Government plainly recognize the Cherokee Nation as a State, and the Courts are bound by those acts. A question of much more difficulty remains. Do the Cherokees constitute a foreign state in the sense of the Constitution? The counsel have shown conclusively that they are not a State of the union, and have insisted that, individually, they are aliens, not owing allegiance to the United States. An aggregate of aliens composing a State must, they say, be a foreign state. Each individual being foreign, the whole must be foreign. This argument is imposing, but we must examine it more closely before we yield to it. The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence. In the general, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other. The term “foreign nation” is, with strict propriety, applicable by either to the other. But the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhere else. The Indian Territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States. In all our maps, geographical treatises, histories, and laws, it is so considered. In all our intercourse with foreign nations, in our commercial regulations, in any attempt at intercourse between Indians and foreign nations, they are considered as within the jurisdictional limits of the United States, subject to many of those restraints which are imposed upon our own citizens. They acknowledge themselves in their treaties to be under the protection of the United States; they admit that the United States shall have the sole and exclusive right of regulating the trade with them and managing all their affairs as they think proper; and the Cherokees, in particular, were allowed by the Treaty of Hopewell, which preceded the Constitution, “to send a deputy of their choice, whenever they think fit, to Congress.” … … They may, more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.… The Court has bestowed its best attention on this question, and, after mature deliberation, the majority is of opinion that an Indian tribe or Nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the Constitution, and cannot maintain an action in the Courts of the United States.…

… But the Court is asked to do more than decide on the title. The bill requires us to control the Legislature of Georgia, and to restrain the exertion of its physical force. The propriety of such an interposition by the Court may be well questioned. It savours too much of the exercise of political power to be within the proper province of the judicial department. But the opinion on the point respecting parties makes it unnecessary to decide this question. If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.… Source: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Peters) 1 (1831).

The Burlend Family Encounters America’s System for Populating the West, Pike Country, Illinois (1831) In the 1830s, preemption law allowed settlers to claim up to 160 acres of land and, if they made improvements to the land, the right to purchase the land before any other claimant for a period of four years. After four years without payment, any person could potentially purchase the land, improved or not. While the government hoped preemption would encourage settlement in the trans-Appalachian West, many squatters, including Rebecca Burlend, exploited the process. In A True Picture of Emigration, Rebecca Burlend described her firsthand experience as a preemptor in Illinois in 1831. After reaping our wheat this season, our neighbour, Mr. Paddock, expressed a wish to sell us the preemption right to his land. Like many persons in Illinois, this individual wanted [lacked] industry, as he rarely worked more than half of his time. He had been more than three years on it, and would consequently lose all right to it in a short time, unless he paid the government demands—one hundred dollars, before the period expired. Notwithstanding his love of ease, he was not without the means to pay for it; but preferred, as he said, a change, and intended to migrate to another unimproved situation, and there spend four years, or perhaps longer, if no one thwarted his interests. As his land was contiguous to ours on one point, we thought it would be a good speculation to purchase it, especially as the price he set upon the improvement was very moderate. He had fourteen or fifteen acres broken up, besides the house, which was a tolerably good one of the kind. He valued his labour at fifty dollars, and offered to receive payment in either cattle or wheat at a fair price. We hesitated a long time before we decided, foreseeing that unless we paid for it at the land office the succeeding spring, we should be liable to lose it. We however finally determined to have it, and as our cattle had again done well, we gave him a good cow, a heifer, and seventy bushels of wheat, which he disposed of at his pleasure. Mr. Paddock, after this, speedily vacated the house, wishing to erect another before the frosts should set in. The only instrument we received as a proof of the bargain, was the pre-emption certificate, which Mr. Paddock had obtained from the recording office, endorsed with his name, ratifying the agreement. This was, however, sufficient testimony. One day shortly after, a Mr. Carr, hearing that Paddock had removed, came to his late possessions and found my husband repairing a fence. He seemed to interest himself very much in the situation and asked several questions respecting the pre-emption right, &c. His questions were evaded as well as civility would allow. They, however, served to premonish [warn] us that Mr. Carr had some sinister plans affecting that property, and we knew that if he took possession of the house, it would be a very troublesome affair. Though these considerations were based only on conjecture, the disreputable character of Mr. Carr, added to his suspicious manner, gave them much of the force of reality. Perplexed with these ideas, we

scarcely knew what course to adopt. At one time we thought it advisable to set fire to the house and burn it down; then again we wished it not to be known that we feared for its safety; besides it would be very useful to keep farming implements in, or it would serve as a piggery or sheep cot if we wanted. We would have gone immediately to the land office and paid for it, if we had possessed sufficient money; we expected, however, our sugar-orchard would make up the deficit the following spring. To quiet our apprehensions in the present instance, our only feasible method appeared to be that we should take possession of the house ourselves. But here was another obstacle: it was impossible that we could leave our present establishment, on account of our cattle and dairy being kept there. We found we should be obliged to divide our family and have one part at Mr. Paddock’s late residence and the other at our own. My husband would have cheerfully gone to the newly purchased situation, had not his presence and services at home among the cattle been indispensable. It evidently therefore became my duty to undertake the unpleasant task of leaving home, to occupy a house which we feared an unprincipled intruder wished to inhabit. I had, however, grown accustomed to hardships even more severe than this. I took with me our two youngest children, something with which to warm our food, and a bed. As the house was only half a mile from our own, I frequently saw the other parts of the family during the day; but the nights seemed dreary and long. For a few days nobody came near us, and I would have gladly hoped our fears were groundless. They eventually proved but too true, as the following account sufficiently manifests: One afternoon, after I had been living in this manner about a week, a person drove a clumsy waggon to the door, containing a little furniture, a woman, and two children. I shut the door, and endeavoured to fasten the latch, there being no lock. But the man, who I afterwards learnt was Mr. Carr, quickly forced it open, and bidding his wife walk in, said to her, “Well, my dear, this is our house; how do you like it?” without seeming to notice me in the least. He then carried in their furniture, and then, for the first time, found leisure to speak to me. He told me they could do without my company pretty well, and wished me to be a good neighbour and go home. There were two rooms; I took my bed and other articles into the other, which was unoccupied, and felt very anxious to see my husband. He came in the evening and saw what had occurred. Mr. Carr held up a paper as a defiance and told him that it was the certificate obtained at the land office, Quincy, as a title to the estate. We were assured he could not have purchased it legally; and we even doubted that he had paid for it at all. When my husband attempted to enter the house, Mr. Carr shut the door, and resisted with all his force; but being inferior in strength, admittance was obtained. On perceiving us engaged in a whispered conversation, he intimated that if we intended to spend the night in his house, he would go and make use of ours, to which we made no reply. The result of our deliberation was that my husband should ride over to Quincy, a distance of 50 miles, take the pre-emption certificate with him, and ascertain whether through perjury he had purchased the land. Shortly after, my husband went home, and on his arrival found Mr. Carr, whom, as I afterwards learnt, he quickly made scamper. Next morning, he called with a quantity of provisions, and took leave of me for his journey, which would take him three days; no one but myself knowing the purport of his leaving home. It was most uncomfortable for me to be thus left with only two little children under the same roof with a family whose sentiments towards me were the most unfriendly imaginable and whose character stood assuredly not very high for probity. In the fullest and worst sense of the word, I was a prisoner, not daring to leave the room, and exposed to the jeers and taunts of a malicious man who left no means untried, short of personal violence, to expel me from the house, telling me my husband had sent me there to get rid of me, with a thousand other fabricated and tantalizing remarks. The third day, which was the Sabbath, having sent for my Bible, I endeavoured to solace myself by perusing its sacred pages. This made him more furious than ever; uttering the most blasphemous

imprecations, he vowed “he would be both rid of me and my cursed religion before long.” About ten in the forenoon, two or three of his friends came to see him, who, finding or knowing how matters stood, assisted him in his attempts to deride me. I really thought I now must surrender, and had it not been for the man’s wife, who checked their scorn, I am apt to think I should have been obliged to withdraw. After dinner, my situation took a favourable turn. By some means or other, many of our neighbours having learnt where I was and on what account, came to the house to see me. For a while my keeper refused admittance to all, till by and by there was quite a crowd at the door. I conversed with some females whom I knew through an aperture in the wall, which served for a window; and as many of them wished to enter, a number of men favourable to our interests told my disappointed persecutor if he did not allow the females to visit me, they would convince him he was no master. Awed by this declaration, he opened the door and the house was immediately filled, Mr. Carr and his party appearing completely nonplused. And, so strangely had matters changed, that religious worship was held in the place that evening, suggested by a few pious friends, who seeing my Bible, had thought it their duty to propose it. This was too much for Mr. Carr; he entirely left the premises during service. Towards nightfall, the arrival of my husband was announced, who was much surprised to find me so well attended. He told Mr. Carr, in the presence of the persons congregated, where he had been and how his perjury was detected. He likewise gave him to understand that he would probably find he had acted imprudently as well as wickedly. But the most agreeable part of the intelligence to me was that there was no necessity for me to remain any longer in the house. I therefore very willingly left it and accompanied my husband to our own habitation, having first thanked my friends for their kind interference and regard. The sum of the particulars is that Mr. Carr had paid for the land, having previously sworn there was no improvement on it, although a pre-emption certificate had been obtained at the recording office, Pittsfield. Of course the purchase was illegal, and Carr liable to a heavy penalty. The following morning, we learnt our firmness had acted powerfully on the mind of our opponent, as his wife called upon us to say that her husband was willing to make a compromise and would either pay us for our claims on the estate or sell his certificate. This proposal required some consideration; we therefore gave her no definite answer, but told her if her husband wished to have an interview with us, notwithstanding his base conduct, we would treat him with civility. In the meantime, we considered it best to sell our pre-emption right, if he would produce the money, as we knew we could not buy his certificate at that time. In a day or two, our opponent waited upon us wishing to have us pacified, as he knew he had acted criminally. We told him we would allow him peaceable possession on the payment of eighty dollars for the improvement, which he agreed to pay, and shortly afterwards the affair was settled, eventually to our advantage, though it cost us some anguish of mind. The peculiarity of the American law respecting the purchase of land, although framed originally with the view of assisting new settlers, is not infrequently a source of strife; at the present time, there are many persons who have cultivated land for numbers of years, without paying anything for it; and there is no means of knowing, except by applying at the land office. Should, however, this counsel escape them, some one would be sure to go and purchase it, or even reap some of the corn when ripe, the original cultivator having no legal power to prevent them. Source: A True Picture of Emigration: Or Fourteen Years in the Interior of North America; Being a Full and Impartial Account of the Various Difficulties and Ultimate Success of an English Family Who Emigrated from Barwick-in-Elmet, near Leeds, in the Year 1831. London: G. Berger, Holywell Street, 1848, 52–55.

Black Hawk Remembers Village Life Along the Mississippi (1834)

Black Hawk, or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, was born at Saukenuk, a Sauk village at the junction of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers. As a young warrior, he gained renown as an opponent of U.S. expansion into Native lands. He particularly opposed the Treaty of 1804, which ceded all Sauk and Meskwaki lands along a tract located east of the Mississippi River, extending from southwestern Wisconsin to portions of Missouri. Following the War of 1812 in which Black Hawk had fought alongside the British, accommodationist leader Keokuk opted to ally the Sauks with the United States. The United States subsequently recognized Keokuk as the principal chief of the Sauks. In return, Keokuk pledged to keep the Sauks on lands west of the Mississippi River in present-day Iowa. Black Hawk, who refused to recognize Keokuk’s authority and the validity of the Treaty of 1804, continued to reside with his followers in their homeland east of the Mississippi River. Encroaching settlers pushed the Sauks into a confrontation with the American government, and Black Hawk’s refusal to abandon his homelands led to the Black Hawk War in 1832. Defeated, Black Hawk and his family were subsequently toured around the United States. During his appearances, he pledged his friendship to his conquerors. He was released from prison in 1833. In his later years. Black Hawk dictated his story to Antoine LeClaire, which was subsequently published as Black Hawk: An Autobiography. The great chief at St. Louis having sent word for us to go down and confirm the treaty of peace, we did not hesitate, but started immediately, that we might smoke the peace pipe with him. On our arrival, we met the great chiefs in council. They explained to us the words of our Great Father at Washington, accusing us of heinous crimes and divers misdemeanors, particularly in not coming down when first invited. We knew very well that our Great Father had deceived us, and thereby forced us to join the British, and could not believe that he had put this speech into the mouths of these chiefs to deliver to us. I was not a civil chief, and consequently made no reply: but our chiefs told the commissioners that “what they had said was a lie!—that our Great Father had sent no such speech, he knowing the situation in which we had been placed had been caused by him!” The white chiefs appeared very angry at this reply and said they “would break off the treaty with us, and go to war, as they would not be insulted.” Our chiefs had no intention of insulting them, and told them so—“that they merely wished to explain to them that they had told a lie, without making them angry; in the same manner that the whites do, when they do not believe what is told them!” The council then proceeded, and the pipe of peace was smoked. Here, for the first time, I touched the goose quill to the treaty—not knowing, however, that, by that act, I consented to give away my village. Had that been explained to me, I should have opposed it and never would have signed their treaty, as my recent conduct will clearly prove. What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of the white people? They might buy our bodies for dissection, and we would touch the goose quill to confirm it, without knowing what we are doing. This was the case with myself and people in touching the goose quill the first time. We can only judge of what is proper and right by our standard of right and wrong, which differs widely from the whites, if I have been correctly informed. The whites may do bad all their lives, and then, if they are sorry for it when about to die, all is well! But with us it is different: we must continue throughout our lives to do what we conceive to be good. If we have corn and meat, and know of a family that have none, we divide with them. If we have more blankets than sufficient, and others have not enough, we must give to them that want. But I will presently explain our customs, and the manner we live. We were friendly treated by the white chiefs, and started back to our village on Rock River. Here we found [t]hat troops had arrived to build a fort at Rock Island. This, in our opinion, was a contradiction to what we had done—“to prepare for war in time of peace.” We did not, however, object to their building the fort on the island, but we were very sorry, as this was the best island on the Mississippi, and had long

been the resort of our young people during the summer. It was our garden (like the white people have near to their big villages), which supplied us with strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds; and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river. In my early life, I spent many happy days on this island. A good spirit had care of it, who lived in a cave in the rocks immediately under the place where the fort now stands, and has often been seen by our people. He was white, with large wings like a swan’s, but ten times larger. We were particular not to make much noise in that part of the island which he inhabited, for fear of disturbing him. But the noise of the fort has since driven him away, and no doubt a bad spirit has taken his place! Our village was situate[d] on the north side of Rock River, at the foot of its rapids, and on the point of land between Rock River and the Mississippi. In its front, a prairie extended to the bank of the Mississippi; and in our rear, a continued bluff, gently ascending from the prairie. On the side of this bluff we had our cornfields, extending about two miles up, running parallel with the Mississippi; where we joined those of the Foxes whose village was on the bank of the Mississippi, opposite the lower end of Rock island, and three miles distant from ours. We have about eight hundred acres in cultivation, including what we had on the islands of Rock river. The land around our village, uncultivated, was covered with bluegrass, which made excellent pasture for our horses. Several fine springs broke out of the bluff, near by, from which we were supplied with good water. The rapids of Rock river furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish, and the land, being good, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squashes. We always had plenty—our children never cried with hunger, nor our people were never in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi, from the Ouisconsin to the Portage des Sioux, near the mouth of the Missouri, being about seven hundred miles in length. At this time we had very little intercourse with the whites, except our traders. Our village was healthy, and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor no hunting grounds better than those we had in possession. If another prophet had come to our village in those days, and told us what has since taken place, none of our people would have believed him! What! to be driven from our village and hunting grounds, and not even permitted to visit the graves of our forefathers, our relations, and friends? This hardship is not known to the whites. With us it is a custom to visit the graves of our friends, and keep them in repair for many years. The mother will go alone to weep over the grave of her child! The brave, with pleasure, visits the grave of his father, after he has been successful in war, and re-paints the post that shows where he lies! There is no place like that where the bones of our forefathers lie, to go to when in grief. Here the Great Spirit will take pity on us! But, how different is our situation now, from what it was in those days! Then we were as happy as the buffalo on the plains—but now, we are as miserable as the hungry, howling wolf in the prairie! But I am digressing from my story. Bitter reflection crowds upon my mind, and must find utterance. Source: Black Hawk. Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak or Black Hawk, Embracing the Tradition of His Nation—Indian Wars in Which He Has Been Engaged—Cause of Joining the British in Their Late War with America, and Its History—Description of the Rock-River Village—Manners and Customs—Encroachments by the Whites, Contrary to Treaty—Removal from His Village in 1831 … Dictated by Himself (Boston: J. B. Patterson, 1834), 68–72.

Journal of Occurrences of a Party of Emigrating Creek Indians (1837) As part of the forced removal of the Creeks, militias were used to gather those who had fled the Creek lands and taken refuge among the Cherokees. In the spring of 1837, Creeks were rounded up as far

away as North Carolina and gathered into holding camps near Gunter’s Landing, Alabama. Directed by Lieutenant Edward Deas, a party of Creeks left Gunter’s Landing in May 1837 and descended the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers to the Arkansas, which they ascended to the Indian Territory. By the time they arrived in the West in June, 80 Creeks had died or escaped. Deas’s journal of occurrences during the trip west “from May 16 to June 5, 1837” is reprinted below. 16th May 1837. Today the Party of Creek Indians; the collection of which for Emigration I have been charged with, was turned over by me to an Agent of the “Alabama Emigrating Company” at a point, four miles South of Gunters Landing N. Alabama. The Party numbers 543 as shown by the muster rolls. After due consideration of all the circumstances, I find that the Route by water to the new Indian country West of this Mississippi River at the present time, is preferable to that by land. I have therefore indicated this mode of transportation for the present party. These Indians are a part of those Creeks, that fled from their own country in Alabama after the treaty with that tribe of 1832; hoping probably by taking refuge among the Cherokees to be placed upon the same footing, with the latter people in reference to the necessity of Emigrating to the West. They have been apprehended at various points in the Cherokee Nation, scattered over an extensive tract of thinly settled or barren country. For this reason and owing to the inaccessible retreats in which they were found by the troops, and the difficulty in procuring subsistence and transportation in such places, and also the necessity of employing agents of intelligence to take charge of the Indians when apprehended, it has required a good deal of experience to prepare the present party for emigration. Nine flat-boats have been purchased by the Contractor to be used until steam conveyance can be procured below the Muscle Shoal Falls, in the Tennessee River. Four of these Flats are of the largest class about 80 feet long, the others 50 & 40 feet in length. This allowance is sufficient to ensure health and comfort to the people. I turned the party over this morning at the encampment of Tennessee volunteers about 4 miles south of Gunter’s Landing, where the Indians have been grounded for the last week. They were moved to the water’s edge by noon, and about sun-set the whole embarked on the Flat-boats & are at this time (10 o’clock PM) progressing slowly by the force of the current. There are but very few cases of sickness at present and the weather is very favorable in this respect. 17th May. The boats continued to float all last-night and until to-day at noon, when they reached Ditto’s Landing 30 miles from point of starting. They were then obliged to stop until 5 PM on account of wind, when they again set out and are still floating (10 o’clock PM). 18th May. About 4 o’clock this morning a heavy wind suddenly arose, by which the boats were compelled to land in the dark and we were so unfortunate as to lose Fifteen of the Indians who took this opportunity of making their escape. Owing to the continuation of the wind the boats could not re-embark until near sun-set, and are still floating (10 o’clock p.m.). 19th May. The Flat-Boats, with the Party on board, continued to float all last night, and today until 3 o’clock P.M, when they were landed on account of wind, a few miles above Decatur; which place is 60 miles from Gunter’s Landing. The Party re-embarked about sun-set, and is still now progressing slowly. (10 o’clock p.m.) 20th May. Early this morning the weather became stormy and the Boats were obliged to land before day light, and in consequence we have lost more of the Indians by desertion. The boats were separated when they were landed, and immediately after some of the smaller ones touched the shore, the people on board of them took advantage of the Darkness, and rain, to make their escape. As soon as the other boats landed, every exertion was made to overtake and bring them back. By offering a reward of one dollar for each that should be returned, I recovered 15. The remainder 56 in

number, could not be overtaken in time, and succeeded in making their escape to the mountains, 5 miles distant. The weather has continued rainy thro’ the day. No progress has been made, but we shall probably start tonight. We are at present at Brown’s Ferry, 12 miles below Decatur. 21st May. About Midnight the boats set-out & came thro’ the Elk River Shoals to Lambs Ferry, 16 miles. We there stopped long enough to procure Pilots & hands to pass the Muscle Shoals, which are some what difficult of navigation. The Boats entered the Rapids at 10 o’clock a.m. and reached the foot of the Shoals at 4 p.m. without any accident. The length of the shoals is 15 miles and at some places the rim is 2 or three miles wide, and is filled with small islands. Many of the passes are very rapid, and experienced Pilots are necessary to carry a Boat thro’ necessity, though in case of accident, then is no other danger than the loads of the boat & cargo. The Party is at present landed on the north bank of the River, about 6 miles above Florence. 22nd May. The Boats started this morning at 4 o’clock, floated 16 miles, and again landed the Party 6 miles below Tuscumbia. An arrangement was made at that place today, for a S-Boat at Waterloo, 30 miles below, at the foot of the Rapid water. Nothing of consequence has occurred, the Indians continue healthy, generally, and apparently well satisfied. No further desertions have taken place. For the last week has been uncommonly cool for this country, at this season. Yesterday and today the weather has been very fine. I should have mentioned on the 20th at Decatur I engaged a Dr. Morrow to accompany the Party at $85 per month, & expenses in place of the physician who started from Gunter’s Landing at which place one could not be hired for less than $5 per day. 23rd May. Early this morning the Party again started, and reached Waterloo at 10 o’clock a.m. The Steam Boat Black Hawk was then got in readiness for the reception of the Indians. One large Keel and two of the large Flats were taken in tow, and at 4 o’clock p.m. the whole Party re-embarked, and we have since come 40 miles & landed for the night, at the foot of an Island in order to prevent desertions, should any of the Indians be so disposed. The Black Hawk is of about the middle size of Steam Boats, & her guards have been covered, and every thing done to accommodate the Indians to the best advantage on board of her. 24th May. The Boats got under way this morning early, and reached Savannah Tenne an hour afterwards. One of the flats was left at that place, as it impeded very much our progress, and was not at all necessary, to the comfort of the people. The other Boats have been rendered as convenient for them as possible by constructing temporary sheds & cooking-hearths, in the Flat Boats, & on the Deck of the Keel. All appear well pleased with the rapid progress we are making, about 8 miles an hour. A child that has been sick for some time back, died today & was buried in the afternoon at a wood landing. Nothing of importance has occurred thro’ the day. 25th May. The boats continued to run thro’ last-night, passed Paducah today at one o’clock, and stopped for the night about sun-set, near the mouth of the Ohio, on the Illinois Shore. Another child died to-day owing probably to the folly of its mother, in putting it in cold water. Since leaving Gunter’s Landing, the weather has been uncommonly cool, for the season. Since yesterday afternoon, there has been an almost constant drizzling rain. Up to the present time the rations have been issued without any failure. I had 17 bushels (all that could be had) of dried Peas issued at Tuscumbia in place of part of the meatration, which is too great for the present inactive situation of the people. 26th May. This morning about day-light the boats started, the weather fine and still cool. In the forenoon we reached New Madrid, where a short stop was made, to procure Corn. Since that time no interruption has occurred, & the boats will continue to run thro’ the night.

27th May. The Boats passed Memphis this morning early, but we have made no stops, as intimation had been given, that some of the Indians wanted to visit the Chickasaw country, & would attempt to leave the party for that purpose. 28th May. The boats continued to run thro’ last night, & reached Montgomery’s Point, this morning about day light. We entered the mouth of White River at 8 o’clock having stopped a short time at the Point, and passed thro’ the cut-off into Arkansas R., about … past nine. We have since come about 50 miles, up the latter stream, and stopped for the night at 8 o’clock p.m. The Arkansas is not a very good stage at present, for small boats, and is on the rise, which will probably continue for some time. The Spring Fresh has just begun. Had we arrived 2 or 3 days sooner we should have been delayed, as small boats are fast on the Bank above, until yesterday. The rise of this river at this season, is said to be owing to the melting of Snows in the Rocky Mountains, and consequently depends upon its time of occurrence, which of course varies with the season. As last winter was a severe one, & the warm weather having set in late this spring, it is reasonable to expect a heavy rise this summer. Nothing of importance has taken place to-day, the weather continues fine tho’ warm. The boats stopped for the night at dark, having come about 50 miles. 29th May. An Indian man & a very old woman both of whom have been sick since starting, died today. As it is necessary at present to stop at night, an account of navigation, and as the people can therefore go on shore to sleep & cook, if they choose, we left the Flat Boat this morning, the steam boat & Keel being sufficient to transport the Party, under such circumstances. The boats got under way early this morning, and stopped at sunset having come about 75 miles. 30th May. The people came on board & the boats started at 6 o’clock a.m. and passed Pine Bluffs in the forenoon. As we shall be able to reach Lt. Rock early to-morrow by running tonight, and the Indians willing to do so, I have consented to its being done. The River has risen so suddenly within the last few days, that the Pilots think there is no longer danger from snags, or other obstructions at night. 31st May. We reached Little Rock this morning at 7 o’clock, stopped there about an hour, and then continued to run until 7 p.m. having come about 50 miles. When the Boats landed a very few of the people went on shore, and as they appeared sincerely desirous of continuing to run thro’ the night, we accordingly started again at 11 p.m. It rained last night but cleared up this morning before reaching Lt. Rock, and the weather is at present fine tho’ warm in the daytime. A female child died this afternoon, but nothing else of importance has occurred thro’ the day. The River is now said to be 12 or 14 feet above low water marks. 1st June 1837. We continued to run thro’ last night, and to-day; the weather very fine tho’ warm. An old woman who has been ill with the consumption more than a year died this afternoon. We are still running (10 o’clock p.m.) and are about 200 miles above Little Rock by water. 2nd June. We continued to travel through last-night & to-day and reached Fort Smith this evening at dark, and are still progressing at the rate of between 3 & 4 miles an hour (10 o’clock P.M). It should have been mentioned that every day a considerable stop has been made in day time, at wood landings, giving the Indians an opportunity of leaving the Boats, and Bathing, and also of taking exercise, the want of which to people of their habits is the greatest objection to transporting them by water. I do not think that the present Party has suffered on this account. 3rd June. We reached Fort Coffee this morning about 2 o’clock, stopped there a half an hour; and then continued to run until 11 a.m. when the boats were obliged to stop 2 or 3 hours to procure wood, which was gathered and cut, by the hands and Indians, who were hired to do so, so little navigation takes place

on this part of the River, that wood landings are very few in number. After laying in a sufficient supply, the Boat again started and will continue to run thro’ the night. We passed the mouth of Canadian River about sun-set and are now between 50–60 miles above Fort Coffee and about 30 from Fort Gibson (10 o’clock p.m.) Another death occurred this morning at Fort Coffee (an infant). For 5 or 6 days after we entered the Arkansas, we traveled at an average of some three or 4 miles per hour, but since then, the current has become so much more rapid, that we have been gradually running slower, and at present the speed of the Boats does not exceed 3 miles. 4th June 1837. We continued to travel through last night, and this forenoon at 7 o’clock passed the mouth of Grand River. The Indians had said to me, that they wished to be landed on the west bank of the Verdigris, near the Creek Agency. When we reached the mouth of Grand River, I sent an Indian Runner to inform the Disburs. Agent of the bank (West), that the Party was in the vicinity, in order that arrangements might be made for its immediate reception, at the point of debarkation. The boats reached the creek Agency at 8 o’clock, and the Indians were immediately mustered, with as much accuracy, as it was possible for the operation to be performed with. The Party was received immediately after it arrived, and the number after deducting desertions and death upon the boats, amounted to Four hundred and sixty three. Fort Gibson Arkansas Territory June 5th 1837. Today the muster roll of the Party of Indians that was yesterday delivered over by me, at the Creek Agency on the Verdigris River certified by the Disbursing Agent, of the Creeks (West.) I have no fault to find with the emigrating Company in regard to the removal of this party. I believe the Indians have received every allowance they were entitled to, and with one trifling exception, were treated in company with the requirements of the letter and spirit of the Emigrating Contract. This exception was the failure to have constructed some necessary fixtures which were essential to cleanliness on the boats and which I was promised should be put up, before starting. Their construction were delayed several days and never were finished as I wished them to be. Had not their necessity been superseded in a few days, by the frequent stopping of the Boats, I should have employed carpenters to make them & have charged the expense to the Contractors. When the miserable and impoverished condition of many of these people, some months previous to starting is considered, and the imperious effects that such circumstances, was calculated to produce upon the health & constitutions of many of them; and when it is also remembered that they were in a party closely confined under guard, for several weeks previous to setting out; and when the unhealthy season of the year is also taken into account; I do not think that the amount of sickness & number of deaths upon the route has been by any means great. The foregoing remarks embrace every occurrence of any importance that has taken place to my knowledge, from the time the party started from Gunter’s Landing, until its arrival and delivery, in the new country next of the Mississippi River. Edw Deas 1st Lt. U.S. Army & Disbursg agent with Creek Emigration Source: Journal of Occurrences of Lt. Edward Deas 1837, National Archives Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, Creek Agency Emigration, Microcopy 234, Roll 238, Document D 97.

2. Into the Plains and Beyond, 1803– 1898

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson approved the purchase of 828,000 square miles of the North American continent from France. For 68 million francs ($15 million) the United States nearly doubled in size, offering Jefferson the opportunity to test his particular form of territorial expansion. His concept of an “empire of liberty” challenged the prevailing association of empire and expansionism with despotic monarchies of Europe. Instead, Jefferson maintained that expansion would resolve the regional and local disputes between the union’s diverging parts; it would allow the United States to preserve its agrarian character and prevent the perceived social evils that had befallen European societies. Despite its comparatively cheap price and the fact that it eliminated a serious foreign rival on the North American continent, the Louisiana Purchase elicited opposition from both the opposing Federalist Party and a minority of Republicans. Many feared that an ever-expanding union might prove ungovernable, particularly as the newly acquired territory was home to hundreds of thousands of Native people. The purchase was also problematic because many believed it would enable the expansion of slavery and upset the sectional balance between the free-labor industrialized North that favored stronger federal control, and the slave-powered agricultural South that backed state’s rights. Much of the debate surrounding the Louisiana Purchase could be reduced to a single question: what role would the federal government play in the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West? The answer to this question would shape America’s future. Even before the transfer had been completed, Jefferson established the precedent of sending large government-backed exploration parties into the region. The president sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead the Corps of Discovery to explore the northern Plains and Pacific Northwest, assert American control over the resources and Native peoples there, and document the area’s economic potential. Closely linked was the hope of finding a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean, which would facilitate more direct trade between the United States and Asia. More immediately, the corps was tasked with mapping the terrain they covered and determining the course of the Missouri River. Expedition members also described in meticulous detail the geographical features, weather patterns, soils, species of flora and fauna, and Native peoples they encountered. This included information about 178 plants and 122 animals previously unknown to science and nearly 50 different Native American groups. Over the next century, dozens more government-funded exploration parties would be at the vanguard of American expansion. Members of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers led most of these explorations. Known as the “Great Reconnaissance,” these journeys not only explored and mapped regions previously unknown to

Euro-Americans but were also a symbol of national unity in a time of increasing sectional tensions. The work of the Corps of Topographical Engineers solidified national boundaries and helped create wagon roads and the transcontinental railroad. The most famous member of the corps was John Charles Frémont. Due in part to his marriage to the daughter of ardent expansionist and Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, Frémont rose to the rank of lieutenant in the corps and led three major mapping expeditions through the American West, earning the nickname “The Great Pathfinder.” The published reports of his expeditions brought the West to the attention of many Americans and guided thousands of overland emigrants to Oregon and California. The most detailed reports about the landscape, people, and natural resources of the West were documented by the topographical engineers in the Pacific Railroad Reports, a monumental publication including descriptions and illustrations of Native Americans, plants, animals, and mineral resources as well as the geographic features. The 13-volume report provided a comprehensive representation of the features of the West. Despite its government attribution, much of the information in the reports came from Native people and fur trappers who had much more intimate knowledge of the landscape than the corps members. Attached to the reports was a culminating map of these surveys. Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s masterpiece, Map of the Territory of the United States from the Pacific Ocean, was the first comprehensive map of the American West based on Euro-American surveys. In addition to the information consolidated from other sources, the map was based on the celestial observations provided by five separate surveying efforts—four of which were east-west routes and the fifth a West Coast northsouth line. The map was created to establish the most “practicable route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean” for a railroad. According to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the decision as which was the most “practicable route” needed to be removed from politics and placed in the hands of scientists. Otherwise, he argued, sectional tensions were sure to escalate into war. The question of slavery in the trans-Mississippi West was first addressed by Congress in the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted two new states to the union, one free and one slave, and split the Louisiana territory at the 36° 30′ parallel with free states north of the line and slaveholding states allowed to be admitted to the south. When the United States claimed new territory not covered by the compromise with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the Mexican-American War (see volume 1, part 2), the question of government control of slavery reemerged. Kentucky senator Henry Clay and Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas attempted to quell the growing furor with the Compromise of 1850, which included the stipulation that the question of slavery in the new states would be decided by popular sovereignty, but it was not enough to stop the growing sectional distrust that would culminate in the Civil War. Once the war began, the railroad route was quickly chosen. The Northern-controlled Congress faced little opposition and in 1862, Congress authorized a bill funding the construction of a transcontinental rail line and offered government incentives to those willing to invest in the project. While the construction of the railroad itself and the “Golden Spike” ceremony at Promontory Point in 1869 was the most dramatic result of the Pacific Railroad Act, its most lasting may be the precedent it set in establishing a system of land grants that transferred hundreds of millions of acres from the federal government to the railroad companies. In addition to all land within 200 feet of the track, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific received 20 alternating sections of land for each mile of track constructed (the nongranted area would remain as public lands to be dispersed by the General Land Office). This system of checkerboard land grants for railroad companies continued throughout the 19th century. Between 1862 and 1872, Congress granted more than 125 million acres of land to railroad companies; by various estimates, railroad grants made up between 7 and 10 percent of all land in the United States.

Despite the vast quantities of land held by the railroad companies, much of the land in the transMississippi West was distributed directly by the federal government. In 1785, the U.S. Congress passed a series of land ordinances that established the system by which land would pass from the public domain to private hands (see volume 2, part 1). This process dictated land-use practices in much of the transMississippi West as more than three-fourths of the continental United States was ultimately divided under the system known as the rectangular survey. The rectangular survey process established townships of six square miles divided into 36 sections of 640 acres each. These sections could then be further subdivided for resale by settlers and land speculators. The subdivision and sale were managed by the General Land Office (GLO). The General Land Office was the gateway to land ownership for millions of Americans and immigrants. It was also the instrument for land speculation, and many corrupt commissioners took advantage of their inside information to identify and purchase the best land before it was made available to the market. As a result many of these commissioners invested in land and accumulated extraordinary wealth from a system designed to aid small farmers. Along with the Pacific Railroad Act and Morrill Land Grant Act (which created the system of “landgrant colleges”), the most significant piece of land legislation administered by the GLO was 1862 Homestead Act. The act granted 160 acres free to anyone, either citizen or noncitizen, who agreed to build a house on the land, live there, and farm it for five years. The law also included a provision that allowed settlers to buy the land outright after they had lived on it for six months at the nominal price of $1.25 an acre. Between 1862 and 1890, approximately two million people settled on nearly 375,000 farms claimed through the Homestead Act. Yet, the ambiguous language of the Homestead Act—the “12-by-14” dwelling requirement did not specify feet or inches, for example—invited rampant fraud. “Dummy” homesteaders, working under the auspices of a speculator, would set up tiny prefabricated shacks to meet the minimum requirement of “improvements.” Cattlemen and lumbermen also used this tactic to acquire tens of thousands of acres. By one historian’s estimate, between 1852 and 1900 half of all homestead claims were fraudulent. Regardless of the maleficence, half a million farms were ultimately created by the Homestead Act, and it was an important aspect of American expansion in the middle of the 19th century. While the federal government was instrumental in settling the Great Plains in the second half of the 19th century, its growth in the region was due in large part to its responsibility of protecting those passing through it at the end of the first. Myths of the treacherous American West and “savage” Indians were strong public perceptions during the 1840s, but the great majority of Indian–white exchanges were positive and peaceful. Many Indians provided advice to emigrants, guided them, and acted as interpreters or packers. Others helped emigrant groups navigate treacherous western waters. Some even operated toll roads and bridges. Much of this Indian–emigrant interaction centered on the exchange and barter of goods, and Indians were shrewd businesspeople and negotiators. As more emigrants were drawn west, however, tensions and violence escalated and the presence of the U.S. Army increased (discussed in this volume). When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the California gold rush the following year led to a massive migration of mostly single men who became known as forty-niners. Approximately 120,000 individuals moved to California during the gold rush years. Ten years later, gold was discovered in the Pike’s Peak area of present-day Colorado. The discovery soon ushered in the largest gold rush in U.S. history and brought an estimated 100,000 prospectors and other fortune seekers to the area. The rush of people trying to find their fortune in the gold strikes, combined with the tens of thousands drawn to Oregon after hearing stories about the rich Willamette Valley, guaranteed more conflicts with Indians in the region. While the immediate response was from the American military, the more damaging legacy of

the federal government came from the policies it enacted to “civilize” Native people (discussed in this volume). It was not only Native people who found themselves in conflict with federal forces. Many came to the West seeking greater personal freedom than they could enjoy in the established East. With the population sparsely settled, the West offered an environment of fewer laws and societal restrictions. Many nontraditional religious groups sought this freedom to worship as they pleased, but no group came in such large numbers as the Mormons. In July 1847, after a grueling overland trek, the first Mormon settlers descended into what would become Salt Lake City, Utah. Thousands more would follow. Despite Mormon hopes of a self-sustained theocracy, by the mid-1850s, the federal government had gradually shrunk the borders of Mormon Deseret into a much smaller “Utah Territory” and appointed a string of territorial governors to replace Mormons’ religious leaders. In 1857, as a result of power struggles between these governors and Brigham Young, the “Utah War” occurred in which federal troops invaded Utah, and Mormon vigilantes murdered a party of overlanders in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Though Mormons craved isolation from a United States that had rejected them, they would always be under the power of the rising American state. Even those who feared unadulterated expansion relied on the power of the federal government to achieve their ends. Commonly referred to as “America’s greatest idea,” National Parks originated amid grave concerns over the nation’s rapid 19th-century westward expansion. Artist George Catlin was among the first to present such a grand idea, though it was naturalist writer John Muir who largely convinced Congress of its value and mobilized popular support to achieve it by the late 1860s. The earliest parks were envisioned as natural museums and monuments to national grandeur rather than as entities intended for the preservation of natural environments. As settlers, speculators, and miners flooded west and wagon roads were followed by the construction of dams and railways, naturalists such as Muir wrote of the threatened beauty and grandeur of wild America. America’s earliest celebrated environmental activist, Muir championed the romantic view of nature. He argued that the identity of the country was rooted in such places; they needed to continue to exist in order for America to keep its soul. The idea that public lands would be protected and administered by the federal government was eventually manifested in the establishment of Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was both America’s and the world’s first genuinely national park. Five more such parks followed over the next 25 years, aided by both firm congressional commitment and the fervent advocacy of groups such as the Sierra Club, founded by Muir in 1884. Not generally told in the story of parks’ creation, however, is the exclusion and dispossession many Indian groups faced as traditional practices of hunting and seasonal burning were now classified as poaching and arson. While the federal government was the most important entity in the settlement of the American West, many Americans believed that their expansion was determined not by political machinations but by an inherent racial superiority of the American branch of the Caucasian race. Once used to defend popular liberties, the myth of Anglo-Saxonism was transformed into a rationale for the domination of peoples throughout the world by the mid-19th century. Anglo-Saxonism proved particularly popular in the United States because it accentuated preexisting Puritan, and then Republican, creeds that the United States was a unique democratic experiment. The success of Puritan settlement, the triumph of the American Revolution, and the sweeping territorial growth of the antebellum decades unfolded logically when refracted through this prism of racial, political, and religious Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. This exceptionalism found its political purchase in the concept of Manifest Destiny. When the United States initiated a war with Mexico in 1846 in hopes of acquiring territory, the country was divided about

both its legitimacy and its ramifications. In order to increase the popularity of the war, the editor of the widely read Democratic Review, John O’Sullivan, wrote an editorial that is frequently cited as the original use of the term. O’Sullivan argued that the United States had a God-given mission to spread across the entire continent as it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (O’Sullivan, 5). Democrats and especially young expansionist-minded members of the party, the so-called Young Americans, soaked up the idea of Manifest Destiny. Since the term was not built on a set of sharply defined ideas, it took many forms. Some Democrats argued that the United States should incorporate all of Mexico, not simply the northern territories won in the war. While some contemporaries argued for all of Mexico, others, including President Polk, argued for all of Oregon. This had served as a campaign issue and was ultimately used by Polk to force Britain to negotiate a boundary settlement. The spirit of Manifest Destiny also influenced filibusters, private armies, to conquer countries in Central America and the Caribbean. While historians have debated how long the ideas inherent in O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny described expansionism, most agree that the narrowly defined term as embraced by the Young Americans was limited to the period from 1845 to 1854. However, the perception that the United States had a providential mission to expand its exceptional institutions and system of government across the continent and the world was not restricted to those nine years. The lasting importance of Manifest Destiny lies in the legacy of American exceptionalism and a sense of superiority over other peoples that continued well into the 20th century and, arguably, to the 21st.

Further Reading O’Sullivan, John. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845): 5–10.

Alaska, Purchase of (1867) On March 30, 1867, the United States purchased the Alaska Territory from the Russian Empire for $7.2 million, a price of two cents per acre. It was referred to at the time as “Seward’s Folly” in the belief that Secretary of State William Henry Seward had made a purchase that would cost the United States more financially than it would gain, although Russian scholars to this day insist that the United States knew about the potential value of gold to be found there. Seward would be vindicated when vast oil reserves and other natural resources, including gold and copper, were indeed discovered. Russian imperial expansion into Alaska dates from August 1728 when Vitus Bering made his way through the strait that today bears his name and made landfall on St. Lawrence Island. Four years later Mikhail Gvozdev would land on Cape Prince of Wales, with Bering making additional landfalls near Kayak Island in June 1741 with his deputy Alexei Chirikov, who himself charted a number of the Aleutian Islands on their return trip. Catherine the Great created the Shelikhov Trading Company, named for Grigory Shelikhov, the merchant to whom Catherine gave a monopoly on the fur trade. He established permanent settlements between 1783 and 1786. In 1799, Czar Paul I commissioned the Russian-American Company, the first Russian joint stock company and the successor to the Shelikhov entity, the influence of which would extend as far south as Fort Ross, California. Together with settlements on Hawai‘i, these actions arguably made the Russian Empire the major Pacific power at the time. The Russian-American Company was never very profitable, however, both because of the great distance between Alaska and Moscow and

because of the competition from the Hudson’s Bay Company beginning in 1839. Fort Ross was abandoned in 1842, and the Russian-American Company retreated to Alaska. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s encroachment on Russian-American Company territory, coupled with the great distance presented the Russian Empire with a military-strategic problem: how to defend Russian territory from possible British seizure. This problem became more acute after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War and the near elimination of its Black Sea fleet, both of which substantially weakened Russia’s position in the world. Russia feared that it could lose the underprotected Alaska Territory in a regional war with the British Empire. Therefore, Czar Alexander II set out to find a profitable way to dispose of the land. He first approached the United States in 1859, but no deal was forthcoming at that time, although the United States itself had been looking toward the region with an interest in the fur trade. The United States was also worried about continued British expansion, not by military means, but by purchasing the Alaska Territory outright from the Russian Empire, should Russia offer to sell to them. Therefore, when Russia approached the United States again through its minister to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl, Secretary of State Seward was interested and negotiations began. William Seward had first served as governor of New York and then as a senator before he unsuccessfully ran for the nomination for president. After Abraham Lincoln secured the nomination, Seward supported him, ultimately becoming his secretary of state in 1861. Seward saw the Alaska Territory as a stepping-stone to Asia, having stated that it was America’s destiny to reach toward the north and across to the opposite shores of the Pacific. Hence, he set out to expand America’s territory as well as its political and economic reach. The treaty of sale was signed on March 30, 1867, with Senate ratification quickly following. The House of Representatives, however, was busy with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and was wary about the value of the purchase. The House was also angry that it had not been consulted in advance. Therefore, the House refused to approve the appropriation promptly, and the money was not released until their bill was passed on July 27, 1868. This had forced the 10-month deadline for payment to be extended. The official transfer ceremony, however, had already taken place on October 18, 1867, in Sitka. The sale of the Alaska Territory realigned the political and military forces in both North America and in the Pacific. No longer was Russia strong enough to maintain an overseas empire, and it began to retreat inside its own borders. No longer would the British be able to maintain any type of supremacy in North America. They were now firmly stopped from expanding any further; moreover, Seward would make an unsuccessful push to purchase British Columbia, which would have linked Alaska to the mainland United States. This purchase also gave the United States an arc at the top of the Pacific Rim through which it could fulfill Seward’s vision, expanding its influence in the Asian military and economic spheres. This purchase gave the United States a decided advantage throughout the 20th century, allowing it to gain supremacy in the Pacific. With Alaska firmly in American hands, President Theodore Roosevelt was able to send the U.S. Navy into the Pacific. The United States was later able to develop military bases in Alaska for the Pacific front of World War II through the construction of the Alaska (ALCAN) Highway; this created a safe land route for the transport of military supplies. Alaska also served a vital role during the Cold War against the Soviet Union through the continued use of air bases throughout the state and listening posts in the Aleutian Islands. Today, Alaska, as the 50th state, continues to serve the United States as a provider of valuable natural resources. Jonathan Z. Ludwig

See also: Baring, Alexander; Russian-American Company

Further Reading Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004. Stahr, Walter. Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Starr, S. Frederick, ed. Russia’s American Colony. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Anglo-Saxonism Anglo-Saxonism was an ideology positing the innate racial superiority of the American branch of the Caucasian race. Anglo-Saxonism was an ideology that argued physical, intellectual, and political superiority was racially determined and divinely sanctioned. It also insisted that “inferior” races were doomed to occupy either a subordinate status or extinction by comparison. Racial Anglo-Saxonism flourished in the mid-19th-century United States when it permeated the discussion of westward expansion, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican War. The myth of Anglo-Saxon racial exceptionalism can be traced as far back as 16th-century England, but its early iterations were more concerned with the unique qualities of Anglo-Saxon institutions and liberties than specific racial characteristics. Once used to defend popular liberties, the myth of AngloSaxon freedom was transformed into a rationale for the domination of peoples throughout the world by the mid-19th century. Anglo-Saxonism proved particularly popular in the United States because it accentuated preexisting Puritan, and then Republican, creeds that the United States was a unique democratic experiment. The success of Puritan settlement, the triumph of the American Revolution, and the sweeping territorial growth of the antebellum decades unfolded logically when refracted through this prism of racial, political, and religious Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. The 1840s were a watershed for the growth of Anglo-Saxonism. Buoyed by the increasing power of Great Britain and the United States, Anglo-Saxonism gained traction on both sides of the Atlantic as commentators viewed the perceived dominance of English language, law, religion, and institutions. The new popularity of Anglo-Saxonism was directly linked to the emerging scientific interest in racial classification, but also drew from strong currents of romantic nationalism interested in cultural and linguistic uniqueness. Anglo-Saxonism’s success was attributable to its malleability. At a time of great economic and political change, with its accompanying insecurities, Anglo-Saxonism denoted racial orthodoxy as well as distinctiveness from African Americans, Indians, Mexicans, and even newly arrived immigrants. Manifest Destiny translated Anglo-Saxonism into a practice of politics in the one-term administrations of John Tyler (1841–1845) and James K. Polk (1845–1849). The term first appeared in 1845 and argued that the U.S. conquest of the North American continent was both divinely ordained and racially predestined. Claims to territory were often couched in racialized terms as the inevitable march of AngloSaxon progress over a dissolute, nonwhite people. Nonwhite people were routinely derided as unfit for self-government and were expected to be replaced by those of purer blood. Such ideas can be found in the rhetorical debate surrounding the annexation of Texas, the Oregon boundary dispute, and the war with Mexico. Hoping to attain racial homogeneity in the United States, the expansionists looked forward to a time when African Americans, Indians, and Mexicans would completely disappear—either “naturally” or by removal—from the continent and Anglo-Americans would take sole possession of it.

Popular notions of Anglo-Saxonism developed at mid-century in the context of slavery and reached the height of their explanatory powers in the late 19th century, the age of color-coded empires. AngloSaxonism underpinned the trend toward Anglo-American reconciliation after the antagonisms kindled by the Civil War. Cross-cultural currents of language and institutions were said to interconnect the transatlantic partners. Race was the key to historical explanation in the minds of Anglo-Saxonism’s exponents, and provided the theory of present-day politics. “We organize by instinct,” wrote the apostle of U.S. empire, Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana. “Under the flag of England our race builds an empire out of the ends of the earth. In America it wove out of segregated settlements that complex and wonderful organization called the American Republic,” Beveridge proclaimed (Kramer, 1332). John Hay, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, portrayed the two nations as “joint ministers in the same sacred mission of freedom and progress” (Ninkovich, 45). Late-19th-century Anglo-Saxonism was often pressed into the service of the United States’ new global self-image as a nation in the vanguard of “civilization.” This was especially the case in explanations of the United States’ imperial surge in 1898. Race patriots interpreted the acquisition of a Pacific Empire as the fulfillment of divine providence and an Anglo-Saxon duty to the world at large to take up the “white man’s burden.” Josiah Strong, founder of the social gospel movement, countenanced that an abandonment of the Philippine archipelago “would be treason to ourselves, to the Anglo-Saxon race, to humanity, and to Western civilization.” Misappropriating aspects of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, racial exceptionalism lent the cloak of “science” to imperial propaganda seeking to explain U.S. success at the turn of the 20th century. “The Anglo-Saxon,” argued Strong, was endowed with “what may be called an instinct or genius for colonizing” (Strong, 202). As historians have argued, the concept of transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism was not invented in the 1890s but it reached a pervasive crescendo in this period. The popularity of Anglo-Saxonism across the 19th century derived from the affinities between its exceptionalist packaging and key features of the United States’ self-image. In the 1840s, it underpinned dynamic waves of settler expansion and military action across the continent, adding a further quarter million square miles to the republic. By 1898, it provided the powerful racial and hereditary ideology that propelled U.S. statesmen into the acquisition of an empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. Although it did not dictate the course of U.S. expansion, it remained a powerful motivating and explanatory force for American foreign policy throughout the 19th century. Stephen Tuffnell See also: Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Strong, Josiah

Further Reading Anderson, Stuart. Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895–1904. London: Associated University Presses, 1981. Healy, David. US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Kramer, Paul. “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910.” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–1353. Ninkovich, Frank. The United States and Imperialism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Strong, Josiah. Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. New York, 1891.

Artists, Western

The Western artists of the 19th century included painters, photographers, sculptors, and later in the century, moving picture artists. Inspired by the vast landscapes and rugged geology of the West and intrigued by the Native peoples they encountered, Western artists created works that celebrated the spirit of adventure and discovery. Their artwork was instrumental in reinforcing the idea of Manifest Destiny. Western artists shaped and helped propagate the mythology of the West as a land of opportunity. This became especially important following the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that resulted in a major recession. Following the widespread unemployment that resulted from the panic, newspaper editor Horace Greeley, a major proponent of westward expansion, exhorted Americans to “go West” as a way to escape their poverty. Tied in with the notion of Manifest Destiny was the safety valve theory, which was considered an effective way to deal with the massive unemployment. The idea was that by making free land available to settlers in the West, the pressure for employment in the East would be reduced and the economy would recover. A series of acts that gave land ownership to settlers was introduced in Congress, beginning with the Homestead Act of 1862 under President Abraham Lincoln. One such painter whose work embraced this homestead spirit and promoted Manifest Destiny was the Prussian-born John Gast. In his painting American Progress, the artist depicts Columbia, the goddess-like personification of America, floating above a landscape in which settlers are heading West in covered wagons and stagecoaches. Gast’s allegorical painting also shows how technology will transform the West by including a steam train and telegraph lines. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson was the largest acquisition of land in American history and doubled the size of the fledgling country. Its western boundary was contested, so Jefferson ordered three expeditions to explore and survey the new territory and map it. These early expeditions included the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804, the Red River Expedition of 1806, and the Pike Expedition of 1806. Westward expeditions continued throughout the early and mid-19th century, and with each new acquisition of land the federal government sponsored expeditions to survey the territories and map out arable lands for future settlement. Nationalistic sentiment made westward expansion seem only natural, while a Protestant revival movement that ran from about 1790 to 1830 gave a religious overtone to expansion. The idea that God was manifest in nature was broadly believed, so one way to see the divine was to experience the frontier.

John Gast’s 1873 painting American Progress depicts an allegorical female figure of America leading settlers, telegraph lines, and railroads into the untamed West. Artists such as Gast helped popularize the notion that Americans had a moral and divine mandate to colonize the lands west of the Mississippi River. (Library of Congress)

PICTURING THE NATION The photographs taken during the great western surveys of the 1860s and 1870s were extremely influential in promoting western expansion. As the United States came out of a divisive Civil War, these photographs allowed the country to focus on the possibilities of a united future rather than a fractured past. William Henry Jackson’s photographs taken during Ferdinand Hayden’s geological survey of the Yellowstone region of the Rocky Mountains exemplified this phenomenon. On this trip, Jackson and seven assistants captured the wonderland of fantastic geysers and waters that, to many Americans, proved the uniqueness of the American landscape. Jackson published his first catalogue of the images in 1871, and the views of Yellowstone are often credited with helping convince Congress to establish the world’s first national park in 1872. The 1873 edition included more than 1,300 images, which was increased to more than 2,000 in the 1875 version. “By no other means,” Jackson accurately claimed, “could the characteristics and wonderful peculiarities of the hitherto almost unknown western half of our continent be brought so vividly to the attention of the world.” Western survey photographs of the 1860s and 1870s found an instant market as people clamored to take part, even from the comfort of their homes, in the exploration of the American West. Distributed in deluxe album sets and official government reports, hung in public places, and reproduced in countless periodicals, the survey photographs brought dramatic scenes of the boundless resources, unending wonders, and limitless possibilities for remaking the American nation.

All of the early expeditions included artists of some sort in addition to surveyors and mapmakers. Most were painters, but some artists added photography to their set of skills. The expeditions took scientists, such as geologists to study the land for minerals and other wealth and anthropologists to study the Native people. The role of the artist was to merge art and science to produce works that were beautiful as well as realistic. Engraver and landscape artist Samuel Seymour was one such expedition artist. He accompanied Stephen Harriman Long on his 1819 steamboat expedition up the Missouri River and the 1820 journey up the Platte, Arkansas, and Canadian Rivers, as well as the Arkansas Territory. In 1823, Seymour again accompanied Long and provided sketches for the official expedition report. Seymour also worked in watercolors and was told to paint any subject that he thought was appropriate, including portraits of Indians and grand landscapes.

Another early Western artist was Titian Ramsay Peale. Peale was a student of natural history and began working as a scientific illustrator while still in his teens. His first trip out West was as the assistant to Thomas Say, the 1819–1820 Long Rocky Mountain Expedition’s zoologist. Peale helped collect natural specimens and made detailed drawings of the plants and animals he encountered, and in later years he became involved in photography. These early explorer-artists merged art and science and focused on a realistic depiction of the flora and fauna they encountered. John James Audubon is probably the best known of these artists. Audubon emigrated to the United States in 1803 at the age of 18 and began to study birds. He was determined to portray them in as realistic a manner as possible, and his work remains popular. Others included Edward Kern and his brother Richard Kern of Philadelphia. As scientists, the brothers had worked at the Smithsonian prior to joining the Frémont expeditions of 1845 and 1848. Edward Kern was the party’s cartographer as well as serving as an artist, and he also collected specimens. The frontier art was driven by authenticity, a theme that was introduced by the artists of the major Western expeditions. All of the surveying missions included artists whose role was to record, as accurately as possible, the landscape, the peoples, and the animals of the West. However, most of the artists made sketches during their journeys and waited until they were back in their studios to complete their paintings. Detractors of Western artists point out that this reduced the realism of the work since artists often worked from a composite of sketches that might not accurately reflect what they encountered. Many of the Western artists were students of the Hudson River school of painting, which was a mid19th-century style of art that owed its artistic heritage to romanticism and naturalism. Originating with Thomas Cole, the Hudson River school style depicted landscapes in a detailed, realistic manner that idealized nature. People were painted in a manner that showed them coexisting peacefully with their wilderness surroundings. Cole began painting in 1825 in the Catskill Mountains of western New York State and worked in the area until his death in 1848. His work had profound influences on other painters, including Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill. Bierstadt would become one of the best-known Western painters, famous for his sweeping landscapes and luminous colors. Hill’s work included paintings of Yosemite Valley. Early Western artists focused on the landscape, since that was the major reason for the land surveys, but George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, and others produced portraits of Indian peoples. Both Catlin and Bodmer, however, focused on traditional Indian lifestyles rather than portraying the Indians in their interactions with Euro-Americans. George Catlin was born in Pennsylvania and became intrigued by Indians after he first saw a group of them in Philadelphia. He was determined to see Indian Country. His first journey westward was on a diplomatic mission with General William Clark in 1830. For eight years he painted portraits of Indians, including members of the Cheyenne, Pawnee, Crow, Mandan, Iowa, and Blackfeet tribes. Returning east, Catlin displayed his art in galleries and delivered public lectures about his life among the Indians, and in 1839, he took his paintings to Europe. Catlin’s portraits were sympathetic to the Indians rather than exploitative, but he was aware that President Jackson’s Indian removal policy and the westward migration fueled by Manifest Destiny were destructive of their indigenous cultures. Catlin dedicated his art to preserving the Indians’ vanishing lifestyle by showing them as they existed before the arrival of Americans and the influence of European culture. Other artists, such as Alfred Jacob Miller and George Caleb Bingham, were more culturally inclusive and showed the interactions between Americans and Indians.

Miller was a European-trained artist who had been hired to accompany nobleman William Drummond Stewart on a Rocky Mountain expedition in 1837. Miller worked with watercolors and oil, and his art was romantic in style, with a soft focus and luminous colors. Unlike other artists, Miller painted images of Indian women and depicted domestic scenes, such as women cooking over a fire or preparing buffalo hides. Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter who specialized in creating majestic landscapes of the West. Trained in Düsseldorf, Bierstadt accompanied a government survey to the Rocky Mountains where he sketched what he saw before returning to his studio to complete his paintings. Bierstadt was a follower of the Hudson River school. He created large panoramic paintings, such as Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, and Last of the Buffalo, which measured nearly 6 by 10 feet in size. The dramatic interplay of light and shadow in his paintings awed his viewers. Bierstadt sold his Lander’s Peak painting for a large profit, but he also had it engraved and sold prints of the painting. Despite the inherent realism in his work, though, Bierstadt took liberties with his field study sketches and sometimes changed details to make a prettier picture and increase the drama. Thomas Moran was another landscape artist who dealt with monumental themes. Moran joined the 1871 Yellowstone survey of Ferdinand V. Hayden. He created pencil sketches and watercolor field studies of the numerous waterfalls, geysers, and other geological formations of the area. Returning to his studio in Philadelphia, Moran created finished watercolors and oil paintings from his notes, sometimes creating large paintings for exhibits, such as his Hot Springs of Gardiner’s River.

Hot Springs of Gardiner’s River, by Thomas Moran, 1875. Moran accompanied both Ferdinand V. Hayden and John Wesley Powell on their famous expeditions through the West. (Niday Picture Library/Alamy)

Also on the survey was photographer William Henry Jackson. A Civil War veteran, Jackson had settled in Omaha in 1867 with his brother Edward and became involved with photography. He documented numerous Indian tribes, including the Winnebagos and Pawnees, and in 1869 was commissioned to photograph scenery along the Union Pacific Railroad to promote tourism and rail travel. Moran’s and Jackson’s work was influential in the formation of the first U.S. national park. Hayden thought that the Yellowstone area, which was already facing development, should be preserved in its pristine condition. He presented Moran’s watercolor paintings and Jackson’s photographs to Congress as proof of the area’s grandeur, and in 1872 Yellowstone National Park was created. In 1873, Moran accompanied John Wesley Powell to the Grand Canyon where he continued to record the vistas.

Moran admitted that he ignored topography in favor of creating an ideal image, in contrast to Bierstadt. Nevertheless, the public was enamored with these artists’ work, and their art became as much a political force as an artistic endeavor. In addition to natural scenes, Moran painted industrial images, such as his Smelting Works at Denver. Photography, on the other hand, offered a gritty realism that could not be denied. While paintings were interpretive, photographs were considered infallible records of the world as it really was. The early photographers, especially on the frontier, had limited access to darkrooms and few opportunities to alter their photographs other than by changing the exposure times. The first generation of Western photographers stunned viewers with their work. Carrying heavy view cameras, plate-glass negatives, and sturdy wooden tripods on their journeys, these photographers produced detailed, sharply focused images of the unbroken wilderness. These photographs showed a West that was a source of terror as well as a land of opportunity, a land that was dominant over man. The second generation of photographers created mass-produced tintypes and stereographs, affordable pictures that became popular and were widely circulated to promote tourism. Advances in technology allowed these photographers to change their lenses and make creative changes to their work, yet photography was still considered an accurate medium. Nevertheless, the artificiality could be manipulated, just as the land could be manipulated. Photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett was one such photographer who used manipulation to his benefit. He used his stereo views and panoramas to show Americans a new kind of landscape: one that had been tamed and was under human control. While the early Western art drove exploration and settlement, the mid-century art softened the frontier into a scenic landscape that invited tourism. At first only the bravest and wealthiest of Americans could afford to head West to see the landscape and peoples for themselves, but after the end of the Civil War both settlement and tourism increased in the West. Tourists traveled for many reasons. Some wished to experience the frontier firsthand, taking in the landscapes and visiting Native peoples, while others wanted to hunt or fish. Cowboy themes were popular Western art subjects. Artists such as Frederick Remington and Charles Marion Russell helped to idealize the cowboy, raising him from a working man into an American mythical figure. Remington was a painter, illustrator, and sculptor who focused on the people of the West rather than on landscapes. His natural depictions of horses at a gallop gave his animals a realistic motion and were widely copied. Throughout American history, the West was a dynamically shifting landscape where people from diverse ethnic backgrounds came together, often with conflicting intentions and desires. Art themes spanned a range of subjects, from sweeping landscapes to intimate portraits. Some Western artists tried to capture the frontier and its peoples before they disappeared, while others promoted the West as a land of opportunity or built the Western cowboy into a mythological hero. Karen S. Garvin See also: Catlin, George; Homestead Act; Manifest Destiny; National Parks; Romantic Thinkers; U.S. Geological Survey

Further Reading Ferber, Linda S. The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision. New York: New York Historical Society, 2009. Goetzmann, William H., and William N. Goetzmann. The West of the Imagination. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Hausdoerffer, John. Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.

Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Hine, Robert V. Edward Kern and American Expansion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Solnit, Rebecca. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Ashley, William Henry (ca. 1778–1838) William Henry Ashley was a successful fur trader, miner, and Western explorer who introduced the rendezvous system to the fur trade. He served in the War of 1812 and later became the first lieutenant governor of Missouri and a representative to Congress. William Henry Ashley was born in Powhatan, Virginia, around 1778. Little is recorded of his early life, but in 1803, Ashley moved to St. Genevieve, Missouri, where he became involved in mining saltpeter, an ingredient used to make gunpowder. Ashley also did surveying work and engaged in land speculation, but the mining alone provided him with a sizable income. Ashley married his first wife, Mary Able, on November 17, 1806. During the War of 1812, he served in the Missouri militia and rose to the rank of brigadier general. Ashley became involved in politics and served as the Missouri lieutenant governor from 1820 until 1824. In 1822, Ashley and his partner Andrew Henry formed the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and ran a newspaper advertisement in a St. Louis newspaper seeking men who were willing to join a beaver trapping expedition up the Missouri River. The ad attracted men such as Jedediah Smith and Jim Bridger, who would later become famous mountain men. Also known as “Ashley’s Hundred,” the mountain men did their own trapping instead of trading with Indians. The first expedition set out on May 8, 1822, and by October it reached the Yellowstone River. The group wintered in the Rocky Mountains and was attacked by Blackfoot Indians. The second expedition set out in the spring of 1823 along the Missouri River and reached Arikara territory near the border of North and South Dakota. On May 30, about 600 Arikara Indians ambushed Ashley’s group and pinned them down in the river. A dozen men were killed and more wounded, but the survivors, including Ashley, escaped and regrouped. To avoid further problems with Indians, Ashley set out to find an overland route through the Rocky Mountains and avoided traveling on the rivers. His mountain route later became the Overland Trail. Ashley’s company differed from other fur trading companies in that he did not build trading posts. Instead, he instructed his men to meet in the summer at a predetermined place and time. This rendezvous system was opened to all traders and changed the way that trapping was done: the “free trapper” replaced the factory system. In 1824, Ashley’s business partner quit the fur trade and in 1826 Ashley, enriched by the fur trade, sold off his shares of the company to devote more time to his political aspirations. On October 17, 1832, Ashley married his second wife, Elizabeth Woodson Moss. Ashley was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served in office from 1831 to 1837. He chose not to seek renomination at the national level and instead made an unsuccessful run for governor of Missouri in 1836. Ashley died of pneumonia on March 26, 1838, near Boonville, Missouri, and is buried on top of an Indian burial mound in Cooper County, Missouri. Karen S. Garvin

See also: Astor, John Jacob; Chouteau Family; Factory System; Hudson’s Bay Company; Mountain Men; Russian-American Company; Smith, Jedediah Strong

Further Reading Clokey, Richard M. William H. Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Dale, Harrison Clifford. The Explorations of William H. Ashley and Jedediah Smith, 1822–1829. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Dolin, Eric Jay. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York: Norton, 2010.

Bent, William (1809–1869) William Bent was a successful trader in the trans-Mississippi West who was part of the first wave of American expansion into the region. He was born in St. Louis on May 23, 1809, to Silas and Martha Bent, a prominent Missouri couple. William married several times and fathered six children, two of whom became famous in their own right, Charles and George. His first marriage to Owl Woman cemented a trading relationship between her father, Cheyenne chief White Thunder, and Bent that benefited both men. William learned the Cheyenne language and gained acceptance by the tribe. As his status grew, he married Owl Woman’s sisters, in keeping with Cheyenne custom. They left him after she died. He later married Adaline Harvey, an educated woman of mixed heritage. William died of pneumonia on May 19, 1869, and was buried at Las Animas, Colorado, near the ranch where he spent the final years of his life. In the 1820s, blending entrepreneurship with an adventurous spirit, William teamed up with brothers Charles, George, and Robert and Ceran St. Vrain and headed west to establish a trading business. They soon built two posts in what is now southeastern Colorado. In 1833, they built Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River. From there, William traded furs, horses, and other goods with the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and other tribes and with travelers on the Santa Fe Trail. After cholera swept through the Cheyenne camps killing a great many people, and faced with falling demand for furs, Bent abandoned what came to be known as Bent’s Old Fort in 1849 and reestablished himself 38 miles downstream. With the fur trade in decline, Bent’s New Fort floundered. When the army built Fort Wise (Fort Lyon) nearby in 1860, Bent leased his fort to the government and turned to other ventures. As the 19th century wore on, tensions mounted between Indians and whites. Differences over how best to interact with the whites and competition over the fur trade also spawned conflict between tribes. Bent used his influence to help broker a truce between the Apaches, Kiowas, and Comanches and the Cheyennes and Arapahos in 1840. Then discovery of gold in the Rockies lured more whites into the area, causing tensions to heighten. In 1854, Bent helped negotiate a treaty with several central Plains groups. Other treaties followed but did little to quell the tensions. William was appointed Indian agent for the Cheyennes and Arapahos in April 1859, a post he held for a year. When conflict erupted between the Indians and whites in 1864, Black Kettle, a Cheyenne leader known for advocating peace, asked Bent to intervene. Bent was in Black Kettle’s village on Sand Creek when Colonel John Chivington’s militia attacked it in November 1864. Bent survived; more than 100 Cheyennes did not. A year later he was appointed to a commission created by the Doolittle Committee to secure peace on the central Plains. While the peace commission managed to forge a new treaty, many tribal members refused to acknowledge it and conflict continued. Debra Buchholtz

See also: Sand Creek Massacre

Further Reading Arnold, Samuel P. “William W. Bent.” In LeRoy R. Hafen, ed. The Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West. Vol. 4. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Bent, George, and Hyde, George E. A Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1880–1860. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

Benton, Thomas Hart (1782–1858) Thomas Hart Benton was one of the great spokesmen for western expansion in the 19th century. Born March 14, 1782, near Hillsboro, North Carolina, Benton later attended Chapel Hill College (later the University of North Carolina) before moving to Tennessee, where the Tennessee Bar at Nashville admitted him as a member in 1806. He won a seat in the state senate, serving from 1809 to 1811. Benton served in the War of 1812 as an aide-de-camp to General Andrew Jackson, colonel of a Tennessee volunteer regiment, and lieutenant colonel of the Thirty-Ninth United States Infantry from 1813 to 1815. After the war, Benton moved west, becoming one of the first senators from the new state of Missouri in 1821. Benton served in the U.S. Senate continuously until March 3, 1851. As a member of the Senate, he championed western expansion. The “Missouri Hawk” established himself as the premier spokesman for western interests in the 1820s, proclaiming that the natural boundaries of the United States rested on the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Benton subscribed to the belief that American liberty was dependent on expansion and supported the posting of military forces throughout the Louisiana Territory from Yellowstone to the falls of the Missouri River. Though relatively new to the Senate, Benton was no timid politician; he denounced the work of John Quincy Adams, who as secretary of state for President James Monroe signed the Convention of 1818 with Great Britain. Benton derided the agreement for yielding American interests in the Oregon Territory. He also criticized the Adams-Onís Treaty (1819) for doing the same in Texas, a theme that returned in the 1830s and 1840s as multiple administrations grappled with the annexation of Texas.

Thomas Hart Benton, one of the most prominent U.S. statesmen of the antebellum period, gained fame as a promoter of westward expansion, and was a leading supporter of his son-in-law, explorer John C. Frémont. (Library of Congress)

Benton publicly decried Anglo-American agreements in the early 1840s for once again conceding too much ground. He called the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 a “bamboozlement” because it ceded 5,000 square miles of Maine to British Canada, and he supported war with Britain to settle claims on the Oregon Territory. Expansion onto the Plains was also one of Benton’s primary concerns. He was the author of the first Homestead Acts, which encouraged settlement by giving land grants to anyone willing to work the soil. Benton’s support of Euro-American settlement on the Plains meant that he was also a staunch advocate of the disenfranchisement and displacement of Native Americans. In 1854 he tricked Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny into endorsing a map of Kansas Territories that incorrectly depicted the area as open for settlement. He also pushed for greater exploration of the West, including support for his son-in-law John C. Frémont, and was a tireless promoter for a transcontinental railroad, particularly one that went through his home state of Missouri. Interestingly, Benton did not support the expansion of slavery in the same way as many advocates of Manifest Destiny. He doubted the efficacy of expanding slavery after war with Mexico. His failure to support the expansion of slavery cost him politically. Despite a career of supporting western expansion, Benton lost his bid for reelection in 1850. Eugene Van Sickle See also: Frémont, John Charles; Manifest Destiny; Missouri Compromise; Transcontinental Railroad; Primary Documents: Senator Thomas Hart Benton on “The Destiny of a Race” (1846)

Further Reading

Arenson, Adam. The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Baigell, Matthew. Thomas Hart Benton. New York: Abrams, 1974. Roosevelt, Theodore. Thomas Hart Benton. New York: Haskell House, 1968. Smith, Elbert B. Magnificent Missourian: Thomas Hart Benton. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1957. Weeks, William Earl. The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754– 1865. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Louisiana Purchase Carson, Kit (1809–1868) Christopher Houston Carson, or “Kit” Carson, was a mountain man as well as a scout, soldier, and Indian agent for the American government in the middle of the 19th century. He was born in Madison County, Kentucky, on Christmas Eve, 1809. When he was a year old, his family moved to rural Missouri, where they settled on land owned by Daniel Boone’s family. Kit left school when he was eight to help on the family farm after his father died in an accident. At the age of 14 he became an apprentice saddlemaker, work that exposed him to trappers, traders, and adventurers. Two years later, he joined a party headed for Santa Fe. There he became a trapper and began to learn the Spanish, Navajo, Apache, and other Native American languages that would serve him so well later in life. He married three times, first to an Arapaho woman with whom he had one or two children, then briefly to a Cheyenne woman, and finally to a woman from Taos Pueblo, with whom had seven children. In the summer of 1842, Carson met explorer John C. Frémont on a Missouri River ferry bound for St. Louis. At the end of the trip, Frémont hired Carson, who was already a seasoned mountain man, to guide him to South Pass in the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming. That expedition triggered a wave of settlers west through the pass on what was to become the Oregon Trail. Frémont led two more expeditions west of the Rockies guided by Kit Carson. It was on the third expedition in 1845, which suddenly detoured to California, that Carson’s career took an unexpected turn. From California, Frémont’s party went to Monterey, Mexico, where they met U.S. commodore Robert Stockton and learned the country was at war with Mexico. Stockton and Frémont joined forces and Kit began his military career at the rank of lieutenant. In that capacity, he continued to serve as a guide and delivered dispatches across great distances and hostile ground. When things were going badly for the Americans during the 1846 Battle of San Pasqual, he slipped through enemy lines and returned with sufficient reinforcements to force the Mexicans to withdraw. After the war, Carson settled near Taos Pueblo with his third wife, Joséfa, and began farming. In 1853 he was appointed federal Indian agent for the area. When the Civil War broke out, he resigned that post and enlisted in the Union Army, where he was given the rank of colonel and command of the First New Mexico Volunteers. The volunteers spent most of their time campaigning against the Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches. In 1863–1864, Carson moved against the Navajos in Canyon de Chelly. In 1864, his troops rounded up 8,000 Natives and marched them more than 300 miles to Fort Sumner. Carson has been blamed for the thousands who died en route or during their long internment at Bosque Redondo. After the Civil War, he became a brigadier general and took command of Fort Garland, Colorado, where he remained until he left the army in 1867. Carson died at Fort Lyon, Colorado, on May 23, 1868. Debra Buchholtz

See also: Boone, Daniel; Bosque Redondo; California Republic; Frémont, John Charles; Long Walk of the Navajo; Mountain Men

Further Reading Dunlay, Thomas W. Kit Carson and the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Quaife, M. M., ed. Kit Carson’s Autobiography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966 (1935). Roberts, David. A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont and the Claiming of the American West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Catlin, George (1796–1872) Born July 26, 1796, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Catlin was one of the most important 19th-century American artists for his depiction of western Indians and landscapes. His work allowed the eastern public to visualize the West, helping to set the stage for eventual expansion into the region. Over the course of his career he visited more than 50 Indian nations. By the time of his death in December 1872, Catlin had worked as an artist, showman, curator, prospector, and author. By his own estimate, he painted or sketched 12,000 images of the American Indians and their country. In addition to these various images, he amassed a vast collection of artifacts and mineral samples, authored several books, and inaugurated the first Wild West Indian shows in Europe. In 1821, Catlin moved to Philadelphia to study art, at which he flourished enough to be elected to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1824 and the National Academy of Fine Art in 1826. In 1828, Catlin married Clara Bartlett Gregory with whom he had four children. After an initial venture west in 1830, Catlin made several trips to paint Plains Indians from 1832 to 1836, and traveled to South America between 1854 and 1860. Catlin’s most famous body of work is the “Indian Gallery,” which contains more than 474 images of Indians and landscapes painted between 1828 and 1838, as well as various artifacts. Catlin toured the Indian Gallery in the United States before taking it to Europe in 1839. He displayed the collection at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly in London where he employed a number of English citizens to perform Indian dances. Wanting to make his Indian Gallery tour appear more authentic, he hired a group of Canadian Ojibwas to perform in the show in 1843, followed by Iowa Indians in 1844. While the appearance of the Ojibwas was fortuitous, it appears that Catlin conspired with P. T. Barnum to bring the Iowas to Europe to perform in his show as authentic-primitive-noble savages, thereby making Catlin’s Indian Gallery one of the first Wild West shows. Industrialist Joseph Harrison acquired the collection after Catlin was forced to sell it in 1852 due to debt. Harrison’s widow donated the collection to the Smithsonian where, a few months before Catlin’s death, Joseph Henry had invited the painter to establish a studio and display some of his work at the burgeoning gallery. While Catlin criticized U.S. Indian policies and decried Euro-American atrocities, some critics argue that Catlin nonetheless aided and abetted the very “march of civilization” he lamented. Catlin’s work helped create the image of a vanishing noble Indian and unspoiled West that became prevalent in 19thcentury society. Catlin also inspired other artists, such as Paul Kane, to document what they saw as a vanishing way of life. Karl Hele See also: Artists, Western; Manifest Destiny

Further Reading Gurney, George, and Therese Thau Heyman, eds. George Catlin and His Indian Gallery. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum; New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Hausdoerffer, John. Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. John, Gareth E. “Benevolent Imperialism: George Catlin and the Practice of Jeffersonian Geography.” Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004): 597–617.

Chouteau Family The Chouteau family was a group of highly successful American fur traders and one of the founding families of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Their commercial activities had a profound effect on the early American economy in the West, and they were instrumental in promoting trade between the Native Americans, the Spanish, the French, and the Americans. The Chouteau family was a large and influential one, and they became important in St. Louis after 1750. They were the first Americans to successfully rival the Canadian fur trappers and were instrumental in raising money to fund western fur trapping expeditions. The most prominent members of the family were René Auguste Chouteau (1749–1829) and Jean Pierre Chouteau (1758–1849). The family’s matriarch, Marie-Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau, known as the “mother of St. Louis,” was born in New Orleans on January 14, 1733, to French and Spanish parents. On September 20, 1748, while still a teenager, Marie-Thérèse wedded René Auguste Chouteau in a marriage arranged by her parents. The next year, on September 7, 1749, she gave birth to her first child, René Auguste. Around 1752, just a few years after the birth of his son, René Auguste senior abandoned his family and went to France, leaving Marie-Thérèse to fend for herself. Marie-Thérèse met Pierre de Laclède Liguest around 1755 and they fell in love. However, the couple was not able to officially marry because under Catholic law Marie-Thérèse was considered to be still married to René Auguste senior. Marie-Thérèse adopted the title of Widow Chouteau because under the law widows had the right to keep their husbands’ property and maintain control over their children. For legal reasons, although MarieThérèse and Laclède had four children together (Jean Pierre, Marie Pelagie, Marie Louise, and Victoire), they were all given the family name of Chouteau instead of Liguest. At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, France ceded part of its North American territory to Great Britain and Spain. One reason was that France had wanted to prevent British traders from the east from trapping for valuable furs in the French colonial lands of New France. Laclède obtained a license from the French territorial government to trade with the Indians on the Mississippi River, in land that was still under French rule. In August 1763, Laclède and his stepson Auguste set out along the Mississippi River, looking for a suitable building site for a trading post. The land close to the river was too marshy, so they selected an area about 20 miles south of the juncture of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. In the spring of 1764 they began clearing the land, and later that year Marie-Thérèse and her children joined Laclède in the new town of St. Louis. Auguste had started as Laclède’s assistant but soon became a business partner. He was joined by his half-brother Pierre Chouteau (1758–1849) and the half-brothers began trading with local Indian tribes, primarily the Osages. The Chouteaus became influential with the Osages because they traded fairly with them, spoke their language, and understood their customs. This insight gave the Chouteaus a business advantage because they knew what the Osages were interested in trading for.

Auguste and Pierre were considered to be experts on tribes west of the Mississippi and the area’s geography. The Chouteaus hosted travelers heading West, including Lewis and Clark. Auguste’s St. Louis mansion, built from money earned in the fur trade, was about 10,000 square feet. The fur trade was a difficult one with a large economic risk. The market for beaver pelts fluctuated according to the dictates of fashion, and frontier hostilities sometimes endangered trappers and investors alike. After Laclède died in 1778, Auguste decided to expand the family’s business interests into agriculture. In 1786, Auguste married Marie-Thérèse Cerré, the daughter of a prominent trading family, and was able to extend his business connections. Auguste became involved in politics and helped mediate resolutions and negotiate treaties. His close connections with the Osages helped defuse a potentially violent situation when, in 1787, the Spanish governor Esteban Miro placed a ban on trade with the Osage tribe. In 1794, Auguste led an Osage delegation to New Orleans to parley with Spanish governor Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet to restore trade relations with the Indians. As part of the agreement, Auguste built Fort Carondelet to protect traders and was given a six-year trade monopoly in the area, after which Spanish traders were allowed into the area. While Auguste remained in St. Louis, Pierre remained active in the fur trade. He joined with another active fur trader, Manuel Lisa, to form the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company. Pierre established a trading post at the western edge of the Osage lands in 1796, which would later become Salina, Oklahoma. The Chouteaus maintained a good relationship with the Spanish government and were able to weather the changing governments. In 1803, after the Louisiana Purchase had been completed, the U.S. government wanted to take control of its new territory. Auguste was appointed an agent for western Indian affairs and held a number of other appointments, including justice of the territorial court and Indian agent. In the early 19th century, economic conditions worsened as the market for beaver pelts declined. To offset his losses, Auguste diversified the family business into real estate and banking, while Pierre remained active in the fur trade. In 1804, Pierre was appointed as the U.S. agent for Indian affairs for the lands west of the Mississippi. He negotiated the 1808 Treaty of Fort Clark, in which the Osages ceded land to the U.S. government in exchange for an annual payment. Pierre was also active in St. Louis politics and became the first chair of the St. Louis Board of Trustees. He retired in 1820, a wealthy man. Auguste died in 1829, survived by his widow and seven children. Pierre remained active in retirement until his death in 1849. Two other influential Chouteaus were Pierre’s son Auguste Pierre Chouteau (1786–1838) and his grandson, Pierre Chouteau junior (1789–1865), known as “Cadet.” Auguste Pierre operated the Grand River trading post for his father and constructed another trading post at the Verdigris River. His business sphere included central and southwestern Oklahoma. In 1847, Cadet and his brother Auguste established Fort Benton on the Upper Missouri River and Cadet introduced steamboats to the area. He ran his own successful trading company until the 1850s before relocating to New York City, where he invested in transportation and mining interests. By mid-century the fur trade had largely disappeared, and while the Chouteaus remained active, their influence faded. Francois Chouteau (1797–1838), Marie-Thérèse’s grandson, was a founder of Kansas City. Karen S. Garvin See also: Ashley, William Henry; Astor, John Jacob; Factory System; Hudson’s Bay Company; Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790; Lisa, Manuel

Further Reading Christian, Shirley. Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Foley, William E., and C. David Rice. The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Hoig, Stan. The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

Clark, William (1770–1838) William Clark was born in Caroline County, Virginia, on August 1, 1770, to slaveholding planters. When he was 15, his family and their slaves moved to the Louisville area of Kentucky, where William made his home until he and a slave named York joined the Corps of Discovery in 1803. After he returned to Kentucky in 1806, William went back to Virginia to court Julia Hancock, whom he married in 1808. The couple had five children. After Julia’s death, William married her cousin, Harriet Kennerly Radford, with whom he had three more children. William Clark died in St. Louis on September 1, 1838, after a brief illness. He was 69. Although lacking a formal education, William Clark kept detailed journals during his exploration of the Northwest and, after Meriwether Lewis’s untimely death, assumed responsibility for editing all the notes and journals from the expedition. These are still an invaluable resource for historians, anthropologists, geographers, and others interested in the history, indigenous peoples, and flora and fauna of the northern Plains and Pacific Northwest. While perhaps best known for his co-leadership with Meriwether Lewis of the Corps of Discovery—also known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition—he played other prominent roles in the nation’s westward expansion. Clark began his professional life by joining the Kentucky militia in 1789 at the age of 19. He transferred to the regular army in 1791, where he first became friends with Meriwether Lewis. After having spent much of his military career fighting Indians, including at the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers, he resigned his commission in 1796 and returned to Kentucky to take care of family business. In 1803, Meriwether Lewis recruited him to share command of the Corps of Discovery, an expedition tasked with exploring what were to become the newly acquired territories of the Louisiana Purchase, establishing trade relations with the Native peoples of the area, and asserting American dominion over both the peoples and the lands. To that end, Clark spent 1803 to 1806 working his way from St. Louis across the Plains to the Pacific and back again. In 1807, President Jefferson appointed Clark brigadier general of the Louisiana militia, which was headquartered in St. Louis. Clark was also rewarded for his role in the Corps of Discovery with land, extra pay, and eventually the governorship of upper Louisiana, at which point he became the ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs. During the War of 1812, Clark led several campaigns north along the Mississippi River and into what is now Wisconsin. Then, when Missouri became a territory in 1813, he became its governor. He held that position until Missouri attained statehood, at which time he ran for election and lost, partly due to his locally unpopular support of the factory system of trade with the Indians. In 1822 he was officially appointed superintendent of Indian affairs, a reflection of the reputation he had built for being fair in his dealings with the Indians. He remained in that position until his death. Debra Buchholtz See also: Corps of Discovery

Further Reading Duncan, Dayton, and Ken Burns. Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Foley, William E. Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Jones, Landon Y. William Clark and the Shaping of the West. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

Compromise of 1850 The Compromise of 1850 was the legislative package largely proposed by Kentucky senator Henry Clay and Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas to resolve the crises created by territorial expansion in the mid1800s. The spoils of American victory in the Mexican-American War became the subject of intense debate in the years following the approval of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the resulting acquisition of the American Southwest. The issue of whether slavery should be allowed in these newly added territories threatened to destroy the fragile peace between slave and free states, which had been tenuously established through the Missouri Compromise three decades earlier. Regional tensions had existed between slave and free states since the inception of the United States but escalated further with California’s application for statehood in 1849. California, which prohibited slavery, created a national crisis with its request to enter the union, because the proposed addition of a free state threatened to tilt the delicate balance of power between slave and free states in the Senate. The situation deteriorated still further when President Zachary Taylor, a Southern slaveholder, defied popular expectations with his support for the admission of California to the union as a free state. Taylor’s belief in popular sovereignty as the most just and desirable solution to the question of the expansion of slavery in the western territories enraged slave owners who had anticipated that his proslavery stance would aid their efforts to open the west to slave-owning settlers. Consequently, a careful and diplomatic response was needed to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of an impassable divide between North and South. Congress turned to John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and its famed “Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay, to establish a solution that would be acceptable to both regions. On January 29, 1850, Clay put forth an eight-part piece of legislation designed to avert the impending crisis. Clay’s proposal was utterly rejected by Calhoun, who charged that the concessions made in favor of slave states were insufficient and, in his view, robbed those states of power in national politics. The Senate debated Clay’s solution to the impending national crisis for seven months before voting down the compromise. Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed a set of alterations to Clay’s original package. With the changes suggested by Douglas, the set of bills was passed through both houses in September 1850. Under the terms of the plan, California would be permitted to join the union as a free state, but the governments of the southwestern territories would be established free of restrictions on slavery. The institution of slavery itself would continue in the nation’s capital, but the slave trade would be outlawed within the borders of Washington, D.C. As a means to further gain support from the South, a stricter fugitive slave law and a prohibition against congressional interference in the interstate slave trade would be put into place and enforced. Additionally, Texas would be forced to renounce its claim to the New Mexico Territory, but in exchange, the federal government would assume its debts. Though the compromise brokered by Clay and Douglas stipulated that the question of slavery in the new states would be decided by popular sovereignty, California’s admission to the union as a free state created outrage in the South. In exchange for its relative loss of power in Congress, and as an assurance that the national government did not seek to dismantle the larger institution of slavery, the South received stricter legislation regarding fugitive slaves. The new Fugitive Slave Law stated that: (1) A slave’s status was not shed on free soil. Slavery was a condition unaffected by geography. (2) Slaves who had already gained free status by escaping to free states were not legally free and could be reclaimed by their owners.

(3) A special court would hear cases of disputed ownership between slaves and slave owners (the system put in place to handle these cases was slanted in favor of slave owners, however, as court officials who ruled in favor of slaveholders received $10, twice the fee that they would earn for ruling in favor of the fugitive slaves). (4) Residents of free states were required to assist in the capture of fugitive slaves, and those found to be aiding runaway slaves could be jailed or heavily fined for their activities. The Compromise of 1850 was widely unpopular in both the North and South. For many Northerners, the Fugitive Slave Law placed federal law in conflict with their consciences. On the other hand, four Southern states were so enraged by the admission of California as a free state that they threatened to secede from the union. The acquisition of Mexican territory following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, created tremendous opportunities for Americans to expand into the West and fulfill the perceived Manifest Destiny of the United States. This expansion, however, brought with it the threat of secession. The controversy over the question of slavery in the new territories inspired a movement that would effectively cause the United States to lose territory through the secession of disgruntled slave states. In a time when the popular concept of liberty was dependent upon the availability of land, the stakes could not have been higher for the dueling advocates of regional interests who championed their respective causes in Congress during the debate over Clay’s compromise. Olivia Stauffer Good See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War

Further Reading Hamilton, Holman. Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and the Compromise of 1850. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford, 2003. Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper Perennial, 2011.

Corps of Discovery (1803–1806) The Corps of Discovery, or what many people know as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was an ambitious undertaking authorized by President Thomas Jefferson, probably with encouragement from his secretary Meriwether Lewis. Although many people believe that the purpose of the expedition was to explore the newly acquired lands of the Louisiana Purchase, the plan was proposed, approved, and set in motion before the treaty with France had been reached. When Jefferson proposed the expedition to Congress and won congressional approval, he did so out of nervousness over British and French economic activities in the area. What he initially had in mind was an expedition to explore the northern Plains and Pacific Northwest, assert American control over the resources and Native peoples of the region, and document its economic potential. Closely linked to this last objective was the hope of finding a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean, which would facilitate more direct trade between the United States and Asia. Congress approved the expedition on February 18, 1803, and funded it with a $2,500 appropriation. Two months later, on April 30, the United States signed a treaty with France finalizing the Louisiana Purchase. That changed the Corps of Discovery’s mission from establishing American dominion over the region before the French or British secured it for themselves, to exploring and asserting sovereignty over what were now suddenly American lands. The newly acquired territory stretched from the Mississippi Delta in the south to north of the present-day Canadian border and from the Mississippi River west to the

Rocky Mountains. It covered roughly 828,000 square miles in all. The Corps of Discovery criss-crossed the northern reaches of that expanse at a total cost of nearly $39,000. A hand-picked group of 33 men, including its now-famous co-leaders, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, comprised the expedition’s permanent members. Twenty-nine of the permanent members spent the winter of 1803–1804 planning and training at Fort Dubois in Illinois Territory. In the spring, they joined the rest of the group at St. Charles, situated just north of St. Louis on the Missouri River above its confluence with the Mississippi. On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery set off up the Missouri River in a 55-foot-long keelboat, propelled by poles, oars, and a sail and loaded with food, supplies, and gifts for the Indians they expected to meet. The expedition returned to St. Louis on September 23, 1806, having lost only one of its members. Two of the party’s original members were dismissed for misconduct en route to Fort Mandan, where the expedition spent the first winter. They were sent back to St. Louis the following spring and replaced by two French Canadian fur traders, Jean Baptiste La Page and Toussant Charbonneau. Joining Charbonneau was his pregnant Shoshone (or maybe Hidatsa) wife, Sacajawea. Together the couple served as interpreters for the expedition. Sacajawea also proved adept at way-finding, which made her an invaluable resource for the team. Her presence also helped convince the tribes the expedition encountered of the Americans’ peaceful intentions. Clark’s slave York also accompanied the expedition for its duration, as did Charbonneau’s and Sacajawea’s newborn son Pomp. Several other men joined it for part of the time. Accompanying Lewis was his dog Seaman. Lewis and Clark departed Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805. From then on, they traveled through uncharted territory. As they did, they mapped it, assigning new names to rivers, mountain peaks, and landscape features that already bore names given to them by the Native peoples of the area. On a good day, the expedition covered only 10 or 12 miles. However, many days were spent not traveling at all but in examining the terrain and its flora and fauna and in visiting the Native peoples they encountered. From Fort Mandan, they worked their way by boat up the Missouri to its origin at the confluence of the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin Rivers near present-day Bozeman, Montana. From there they followed the Jefferson River south into the Rockies, which they traversed overland via the Lehmi, Lost Trail, and Lolo Passes. Following the Clearwater and Snake Rivers they came to the Columbia River, which led them on to the Pacific. On the return trip, Lewis and Clark split up in the Rockies so they could cover more ground. Lewis veered north and Clark stayed to the south, eventually striking the Yellowstone River and following it back to the Missouri, where he reconnected with Lewis. During their more than 8,000mile trek, the explorers had many adventures and encountered plant and animal species never before recorded; what they did not do is find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Today their route is a National Historic Trail under the general oversight of the National Park Service.

The Corps of Discovery was the first scientific expedition ever funded by the U.S. government and it was a massive success. In addition to mapping the terrain they covered and determining the course of the Missouri River, expedition members described in meticulous detail the geographical features, weather patterns, soils, species of flora and fauna, and Native peoples they encountered. This included information about 178 plants and 122 animals previously unknown to science and nearly 50 different Native American groups. Along the way, they pressed and thereby preserved 240 different species of plants and collected hundreds of animal and bird skins and skeletons, all of which they sent back East. They also sent back five live animals, including a black-tailed prairie dog. Lewis, and especially Clark, also recorded useful information about the lifeways of the Native peoples they met, some of whom were gardeners, some of whom were hunters, and some of whom relied on fish for their subsistence. To each of these peoples, Lewis and Clark distributed gifts and presented medals signifying their new relationship with the U.S. government. They also informed them that President Jefferson, whom they described as the “great father” in the East, now owned their lands. Debra Buchholtz See also: Clark, William; Indians of the Middle Missouri River; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Jefferson, Thomas; Louisiana Purchase

Further Reading Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. DeVoto, Bernard. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997 (1953). Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., ed. Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2006. Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army

Although the U.S. Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers existed as a unit for only 50 years, its work was crucial to the westward expansion of the United States. It not only explored and mapped regions previously unknown to Euro-Americans but was also a symbol of national unity in a time of increasing sectional tensions. The work of the Corps of Topographical Engineers resulted in the construction of important coast and harbor improvements, the solidification of national boundaries, and the creation of transcontinental railroad and wagon roads. George Washington, a surveyor and mapmaker himself, recognized the need for technical reconnaissance and maps during the War of Independence. Robert Erskine, a skilled mapmaker and engineer, was appointed the first geographer and surveyor general to the American Army in July 1777. The role of army topographers expanded during the War of 1812 when Congress authorized eight topographical engineers and eight assistants to be attached to the general staff of the army. A Topographical Bureau was established in August 1818, headed by Isaac Roberdeau. As a component of the Engineer Department, the Topographical Bureau also served as a clearinghouse for geographical data and surveying instruments. The bureau was supervised by Roberdeau from 1818 until his death in 1829. His successor was John James Abert, a graduate of West Point and veteran of the War of 1812. In 1838, Abert successfully negotiated the establishment of the Corps of Topographical Engineers as a separate entity from the larger Corps of Engineers and was named its chief. Abert led the Corps of Topographical Engineers until he retired in 1861. Many of the topographical engineers were educated at West Point and studied under Seth Eastman and Richard Somers Smith, who both published manuals on cartography and topography. The curriculum at West Point in the 19th century included instruction on drawing and landscape studies. American painter Robert W. Weir was one of the instructors of drawing. Since photography was an emerging art, mapmaking and scientific illustration in the 1840s and 1850s relied on skillful observation and drawing techniques. The limited size of the corps and the need for additional skilled mapmakers and illustrators often led to including civilian scientists and artists on surveys. French explorer Joseph N. Nicollet was commissioned by the War Department, for example, to lead an expedition to the northern Plains. Nicollet was assisted by topographical engineers John C. Frémont and William H. Emory, who later led their own expeditions. Along with information gathered in Nicollet’s exploration of the Mississippi, this 1838 expedition was the source for data published in Map of the Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi, one of the most significant maps of the 19th century. John C. Frémont was a dominant figure in exploration in the 1840s and the most famous of the topographical engineers. Frémont led three western expeditions between 1842 and 1846, but his career with the army ended when he quarreled with General Stephen Watts Kearny and was dismissed after facing court-martial. Frémont would later lead two private western expeditions, funded by St. Louis business interests, in search of a railroad pass through the Rocky Mountains. Charting waterways was an important mission of the topographical engineers in support of the country’s expansion. The Great Lakes Survey was headed first by Captain William G. Williams. Lieutenant Colonel Kearney took over this project in 1845, overseeing the completion in 1849 of the first comprehensive chart of Lake Erie. Colonel Abert saw the value of the Great Lakes as a northern seaboard, important for transportation and commerce. The surveys of the Great Lakes continued under Captain George G. Meade from 1857 to 1861. Topographical engineers accompanied the military expeditions of the 1840s, when the United States was in close engagement with Mexico. William H. Emory, along with soldier-explorers Lieutenant Abert

(son of John James Abert) and Lieutenant Peck and topographical engineer W. H. Warner, joined the expedition of the “Army of the West” in 1846. Emory also included statistician Norman Bestor and artist John Mix Stanley as part of the expedition that traveled from Missouri to California. Emory would later take on major responsibilities for the United States–Mexico Boundary Survey. In charge of field operations, Emory and his team explored waterways in the region, completing the river survey in 1853. He was subsequently appointed chief astronomer and commissioner for the completion of the boundary survey. The measurements and observations were compiled in an illustrated three-volume report titled The Report of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, which was published between 1857 and 1859. The most detailed reports about the landscape, people, and natural resources of the West were documented by the topographical engineers in the Pacific Railroad Reports, a monumental publication including descriptions and illustrations of Native Americans, plants, animals, and mineral resources as well as the geographic features. The 13-volume report provided a comprehensive representation of the features of the West. Attached to the reports was a culminating map of these surveys. Gouverneur Kemble Warren’s masterpiece, Map of the Territory of the United States from the Pacific Ocean, was the first comprehensive map of the American West based on Euro-American surveys. In addition to the information consolidated from other sources, the map was based on the celestial observations provided by five separate surveying efforts—four of which were east-west routes and the fifth a West Coast northsouth line. The first, most northerly route was led by the newly appointed governor of the Washington Territory, Isaac I. Stevens, and examined a possible line between the 47th and 49th parallels. The second, led by Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith, surveyed the 41st parallel in the vicinity of Salt Lake City. A third route along the old Santa Fe Trail was investigated by Captain J. W. Gunnison (until his death at the hands of a band of Ute Indians), while Captain A. W. Whipple led a fourth route along the 35th parallel. When the Pacific Railroad Surveys were completed in 1855, the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers continued exploring and documenting potential western routes for roads that would make it easier for commercial supplies to move across the country and to move supplies that arrived by sea in California to the interior. In 1857, J. C. Ives set out to explore the Colorado River by steamboat, bringing with him F. W. Eglottstein as topographer and German artist Heinrich Baldwin Mollhausen. When this expedition left the steamboat behind and went overland, they came across the Grand Canyon and were the first to document the huge, colorful, eroded valleys. In 1859, Captain John Macomb led an expedition out of Santa Fe to explore the Colorado River system. Macomb was accompanied by Dr. John Strong Newberry, who prepared a detailed geological report. Captain James Simpson conducted the search for a wagon route across Utah in 1859. After James J. Abert retired in 1861 and many army topographers were drawn into battle during the Civil War, the future dimmed for the status of the corps. Congress abolished the Topographical Bureau and the Corps of Topographical Engineers in an act of March 3, 1864, and the remaining personnel were moved into the larger Corps of Engineers. Rebecca Kohn See also: Frémont, John Charles; Pacific Railroad Act; Pacific Railroad Reports; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading

Goetzmann, William. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. New York: History Book Club, 1993 (1966). Ronda, James P. Beyond Lewis and Clark: The Army Explores the West. Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 2003. Schubert, Frank, ed. The Nation Builders: A Sesquicentennial History of the Corps of Topographical Engineers 1838–1863. Fort Belvoir, VA: GPO, 1988.

Crédit Mobilier Scandal (1872) The Crédit Mobilier scandal involved the Union Pacific Railroad Company, the Crédit Mobilier company, and members of Congress in a scheme to defraud the government for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. While not illegal at the time, the plan allowed railroad managers to skim large amounts of public money from federal grants. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act. Under the terms of the act, the Central Pacific Railroad of California would build a line east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad Company would build a line west from the Missouri River. Each railroad was granted 6,400 acres of land as right-of-way and $48,000 for each mile of completed track. But even with federal grants, the Union Pacific was underfunded. By federal law, it could not raise capital by selling securities for less than their face value, but investors were leery of paying full price until after the railroad was complete. To get around the law, in 1864 Union Pacific executive Thomas Clark Durant purchased the bankrupt Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency and renamed it Crédit Mobilier. The Crédit Mobilier was supposed to be an independent construction company, but in reality it was a wholly owned subsidiary of Union Pacific. Durant used dummy agents to funnel all construction projects through the Crédit Mobilier subsidiary and then hired subcontractors to build the rail line. To ensure as much profit as possible, Crédit Mobilier overestimated its construction prices and built extra miles of railroad. The plan to defraud the government worked through a method of indirect billing: Crédit Mobilier presented its inflated prices to the Union Pacific, but the railroad was able to submit these invoices to Congress, showing an accurate charge for the construction work plus a small surcharge, without arousing any suspicions. Crédit Mobilier made millions of dollars of profit, which it split with the Union Pacific. Crédit Mobilier also used its money to purchase railroad stock at face value and resell it to investors at below market prices. Stockholders included Massachusetts Republican Oakes Ames, an avid railroad supporter and member of the House Pacific Railroad Committee, who had invested in Crédit Mobilier. In 1866, Crédit Mobilier showed returns of more than 90 percent and Ames found himself deluged with requests for stock. During 1867–1868, he sold some of his shares to other congressmen. He kept some shares in his own name, but recorded all of the transactions in a ledger. Rumors of possible bribes began to circulate, but it was not until the summer of 1872 that news of the scandal broke after an unhappy stockholder leaked the story to the New York Sun, which reported that the Crédit Mobilier had made a profit of almost $20 million off taxpayer money. The Democrats tried to use the scandal to undermine Ulysses S. Grant’s bid for reelection. A select committee of representatives headed by Luke Poland of Vermont conducted a public inquiry during January 1873. The committee formally censured Ames and New York Democrat James Brooks, but the other legislators who had been implicated in the scandal were not charged with any crime. Nevertheless, the Crédit Mobilier scandal left the Union Pacific on the verge of bankruptcy and ruined the careers of several members of Congress. Karen S. Garvin

See also: Manifest Destiny; Pacific Railroad Act; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Bain, David Haward. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Penguin, 1999. Brands, H. W. American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900. New York: Anchor Books, 2010. White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Democrats. See Manifest Destiny Deseret. See Mormonism Douglas, Stephen A. (1813–1861) Best known as Abraham Lincoln’s debating opponent in the landmark 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, Stephen A. Douglas dominated Illinois politics for almost 20 years. Douglas sought the Democratic nomination for president three times but in the process he helped to splinter the party and ensure the election to the White House of his Illinois rival, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. Douglas was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives in 1842 and then the U.S. Senate in 1846, where he quickly rose in the party leadership. He championed the passage of the Compromise of 1850 that brought California into the union as a free state but also included a draconian Fugitive Slave Law. This provision became odious in New England because it compelled local authorities to cooperate with and assist slave catchers. Seeking a way to settle the slavery question permanently and to pave the way for a transcontinental railroad, Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 that called for “popular sovereignty,” letting the population of a territory decide whether to be a free or slave state. The seemingly innocuous question of the composition of Kansas’s constitution sparked a political firestorm that would only be extinguished by the torrent of war. Douglas hoped the Kansas-Nebraska Act would energize the Democratic Party in time for the 1854 congressional elections and perhaps provide a springboard for his own presidential ambitions in 1856. Invoking contentious debate, the bill’s key component was the repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise that limited the growth of slavery to below the 36° 30′ line. Elimination of the Missouri Compromise threatened to allow Southerners to import the institution into all U.S. territories. The Democratic Party feuded over the bill as Douglas broke with President James Buchanan in 1857 over the legality of a proslavery Kansas state constitution that was passed with obvious electoral fraud. The debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act accelerated the demise of the Whig Party and the creation of a solidly Democratic South. The lack of electoral challenge left Southern Democrats unwilling to compromise and more strident in their demands. The death of the Whig party also hastened the birth of the Republican Party, bringing together Northern Whigs, Know Nothings, and antislavery Democrats to form a strictly regional party. The Kansas-Nebraska debates killed Stephen Douglas’s presidential chances in 1860, and as the only truly national candidate of the election, perhaps the best chance the South had to avoid the election of Abraham Lincoln and the coming of the Civil War. Douglas defeated Lincoln in the 1858 Illinois

senatorial race, but his victory was pyrrhic as it guaranteed his defeat in the 1860 presidential election. Lincoln forced Douglas to declare that a people could decide to keep slavery out of a territory, and Southern delegates at the 1860 Democratic convention refused to support his candidacy. The party split with Northerners nominating Douglas while Southern Democrats ran Vice President John C. Breckinridge. Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won the election despite only getting 39.8 percent of the popular vote. Douglas died in 1861 of typhoid fever. Stephen McCullough See also: Compromise of 1850; Free-Soil Movement; Manifest Destiny

Further Reading Egerton, Douglas R. Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought On the Civil War. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Johannsen, Robert W. Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Exodusters The Exoduster movement was a mass migration by thousands of African Americans between 1870 and 1880, during which approximately 26,000 former slaves left the South and established communities in Kansas. Putting this migration in biblical terms, many compared their journey to the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, adopting the name “Exoduster.” During Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, federal troops occupied the South to ensure states complied with the new laws. In March 1865, Congress created the Board of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands to assist former slaves in making the transition to freedom. Each family was to be allowed to rent 40 acres of abandoned land, but within a year most of that land was either reclaimed by its owners or else sold for profit by the government. On July 21, 1866, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, which was intended to reduce the price of land so that poor Southerners could afford to buy property. The terms of the act were applicable to freedmen, but the available land was often unfit for farming. Land reform was a failure, and because most freedmen were farmers, they had few other job options. Those with nonagricultural skills also found themselves unable to find employment in the South because racial discrimination was strong and employers gave preferential treatment to whites. Disillusioned, many freedmen ended up working for their former masters, either for small wages or else as sharecroppers. Their socioeconomic situation had not improved and they were often unable to provide for their families. In 1874, a popular movement in Nashville, established a convention that promoted migration to Kansas. The draw of homesteading made Kansas an attractive destination, and the state’s bloody history had shown that its people were willing to fight to keep the state free of proslavery elements. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been an attempt by Congress to equalize the number of free states and slave states and keep political balance in the country. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was passed, it took that decision away from Congress and allowed settlers to decide for themselves, by popular vote, whether they would allow slavery. Kansas was quickly overrun with both pro- and antislavery activists intending to vote on the issue. Emotions ran high on the slavery issue and soon the ideological activists turned to violence. In 1856, a group of 800 proslavery men from Missouri crossed the state line into Lawrence, Kansas, ransacking the

town and killing one man. Antislavery militias fought back. Kansas became a bloody battlefield, earning the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” However, to Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a former escaped slave, Kansas seemed like the Promised Land. Kansas’s antislavery stance made it very attractive and after the Civil War Singleton traveled extensively, promoting Kansas as a colonist’s dream and describing it as a sunny, peaceful place with large tracts of land. In 1874, Singleton and a group of eight men formed the Edgefield Real Estate and Homestead Association to encourage migration, but it was not until 1877 that colonists arrived. The first Singleton Colony, in southeast Kansas, failed because of high land prices. Other colonies, including Dunlap and Nicodemus, were successfully established in central Kansas where land prices were lower due to the 1862 Homestead Act. In April 1877, seven Kansas residents formed the Nicodemus Town Company and began to circulate flyers promoting the town as a colony for African Americans. In June, the company selected a site for the town and filed the necessary paperwork, and by the end of July the first group of 30 settlers took up residence in the new town of Nicodemus. Exodusters were often taken in by land speculators and developers with promises of cheap land, but they had little idea of what lay before them. The arid conditions in Kansas made farming difficult for the settlers, who were used to the more humid South. Many Exodusters left their land because of drought and found work on the railroads or as laborers or domestic servants in local towns. After the federal troops left the South in 1877, violent crimes against African Americans increased and many families began to consider leaving the South. Politics drove migration as well. The 1878 elections in Louisiana were violent: freed slaves, who were most often Republican supporters, were threatened and even murdered by Southern Democrats to prevent them from voting. In the face of this violence, Senator William Windom from Minnesota, introduced a bill in Congress on January 16, 1879, creating a committee charged with investigating the practicality of a partial migration of African Americans from the South. Newspaper reports of Windom’s bill were met with enthusiasm, especially by freedmen who had arrived in New Orleans as political refugees. These refugees had drawn up their own petition to Congress in which they asked for help in leaving Louisiana. In 1879, the political situation continued to deteriorate and prompted a mass migration. Many people described their situation in Biblical terms and compared their journey to the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, so they adopted the name “Exoduster.” Nearly 20,000 African Americans passed through St. Louis during 1879. Alarmed by the migration and the loss of cheap labor, Southerners petitioned the government to intercede. The Senate convened a committee in 1880 to investigate the causes of the mass migration, but it did nothing to stop the flow of people. Exodusters continued to leave the South, crowding along the rivers with all of their possessions and waiting for steamboats to carry them to Kansas. Most Exodusters had little or no money and lacked food, and many fell ill with yellow fever. They were assisted by local communities, including churches and businesses, as well as individual sympathizers, who gave them food and money. Kansas governor John St. John set up the Kansas Freedman’s Relief Association, which received donations from individuals and organizations and established colonies for the newly arrived Exodusters. Most of the communities were in western Kansas and Indian Territory, although some Exodusters opted to settle in Missouri, Nebraska, or Oklahoma. Exodusters established all-black communities in towns such as Boley and Langston, Oklahoma; Dewitty, Nebraska; and Nicodemus, Kansas. They also carved out a space for themselves in existing towns, including Kansas City and Topeka.

By the summer of 1879 the mass migration had slowed to a trickle. Nicodemus was hard hit when the railroad bypassed it, although it remains as the only Exoduster town and is now a National Historic Site. Karen S. Garvin See also: Free-Soil Movement; Homestead Act; Indian Territory; King Cotton; Missouri Compromise

Further Reading Jack, Bryan M. The St. Louis African American Community and the Exodusters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1977. Shortridge, James R. Peopling the Plains: Who Settled Where in Frontier Kansas. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Free-Soil Movement The Free-Soil Movement of the mid-19th century grew out of concern in the Northern states about slavery’s extension into the newly acquired western territories. Free-Soil supporters wanted slavery banned from the western territories. Some supporters were politicians concerned about the growing power of the slaveholding states, within the federal government, while others were settlers in the territories who feared competition from slave owners and their free labor. A third group were abolitionists who opposed slavery anywhere. In 1844, the Liberty Party, a small abolitionist party, effective dashed Henry Clay’s presidential hopes by diverting enough votes from Clay to ensure a victory for James Polk. Liberty supporters were upset with Clay for changing his stance on the annexation of Texas during the campaign. Its success in garnering votes showed that abolitionism could be a powerful political force. In 1846, Pennsylvania representative David Wilmot proposed his famous proviso in Congress, which called for the prohibition of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico. Wilmot feared the expansion of the slave power within the federal government. Wilmot’s idea did not find overwhelming support in Congress. When the two major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, both refused to endorse the proviso, opposition groups saw the need for an alternative. In August 1848, members of the Liberty Party—abolitionist Whigs and discontented New York Democrats known as Barnburners—gathered in Buffalo, New York. Led by Salmon P. Chase and John P. Hale, the coalition became the Free-Soil Party and nominated former president Martin Van Buren for that position, and Charles Francis Adams as vice president. The party adopted a platform opposed to the extension of slavery, in favor of a homestead law, and in support of a tariff for revenue only. The party’s slogan of “free soil, free speech, and free labor and free men” attracted abolitionists as well as laborers who feared unfair competition from slave owners and their free labor. Van Buren received 10 percent of the national vote. More importantly, the party elected two senators and 14 congressmen. After a poorer showing in the 1852 election, with its presidential candidate garnering only 5 percent of the popular vote, the Liberty Party ceased to exist with most members joining the newly formed Republican Party. The Free-Soil Movement gained supporters after the Compromise of 1850 with its stringent fugitive slave provision. The compromise also increased general concerns about the expansion of slavery into the West. By 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and ensuing duel over the possibility of the admission of Kansas as a slave state, turned most of the North toward the Free-Soil Movement. Finally, in 1857 the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, turned many Free-Soil supporters into abolitionists. The final confrontation with slave owners was all but inevitable. In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln

campaigned for president as the Republican nominee as a Free-Soil proponent. Upon Lincoln’s election, South Carolina led the secession from the Union by 11 Southern states. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: Compromise of 1850; Frémont, John Charles

Further Reading Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Frémont, John Charles (1813–1890) Frémont, of relatively modest background and credentials, was a U.S. army officer, explorer, and politician who became an important voice for western expansion. During the 1840s Frémont rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and led three major mapping expeditions through the American West, earning the sobriquet “The Great Pathfinder.” He parlayed this notoriety into a political career as a U.S. senator and the first candidate of the Republican Party for the office of president. Perhaps the most significant factor in Frémont’s eventual rise was his 1841 marriage to Jessie Benton, daughter of Democrat senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Benton was one of the era’s most aggressive promoters of western expansion and a firm believer in the notion of Manifest Destiny. Although Senator Benton was initially displeased with the marriage, in 1842 he used his influence to appoint his son-in-law head of a topographical expedition to survey an existing emigrant route along the Missouri and Platte to South Pass, Wyoming. This would be the first of four western expeditions (the fourth was an abject failure) that Frémont led and which Jessie publicized in romanticized accounts (though much of his success rested upon the Native guides whom he hired, frontiersman Kit Carson, and cartographer Charles Preuss). Nonetheless, Frémont’s surveys succeeded in mapping a complex western geography for a nation that had not yet come to terms with its own internal differences. His published reports of the first two expeditions in particular brought the West to the attention of many Americans and guided thousands of overland emigrants to Oregon and California. He mapped future railroad routes and officially established the existence of the Great Basin.

The explorer and soldier John C. Frémont, known as the Pathfinder of the West, was chosen as the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party in 1856. (Library of Congress)

However, controversy seemed to follow Frémont. His tendency to rush into winter mountain crossings killed at least a dozen of his men on separate occasions. In 1846, Frémont’s Third Expedition—with his permission—massacred several hundred Indians near Deer Creek, California. Less lethal but more publicized was Frémont’s power struggle during the U.S.-Mexican War, in which he refused to cede over his military governorship of California to his superior Stephen Watts Kearney and was court-martialed and convicted of mutiny, though he was later pardoned by President Polk. Though this disgraced Frémont to a degree, he managed to accrue some wealth in California, and by 1856, he ran unsuccessfully against James Buchanan for the U.S. presidency. By this time having combined antislavery with expansionism, Frémont’s campaign slogan was “Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont!” During the Civil War, he served as commander of the Union forces in Missouri, but again ran into conflicts with his superiors when he preemptively emancipated the state’s slaves, and was relieved of his duties by Lincoln in 1862. Frémont eventually settled into his later life in upstate New York. Although he had lost significant wealth in failed railroad ventures, Jessie’s published account of his earlier expeditions gave some limited income to the couple. He died in 1890 in New York City, and Jessie in 1902 in Los Angeles. Paul Nelson See also: Benton, Thomas Hart; California Republic; Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army; Free-Soil Movement; Manifest Destiny; Pacific Railroad Reports

Further Reading Chaffin, Tom. Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.

Denton, Sally. Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped NineteenthCentury America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Roberts, David. A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Frontier The term frontier is used in the social sciences to describe the phenomenon of geographical expansion as settlers move into previously unoccupied territories. The concept, in this use of the word, was articulated and made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner during the last decade of the 19th century. Turner used this framework to explain the unique social, geographic, and economic development of the United States. In his articulation, which would come to be known as the Turner thesis, the frontier is the area just ahead of European holdings where “proper” development has yet to take place. In his explanation of American geographical expansion, the frontier was anything to the west of already established European settlements as Europeans traveled westward from the Atlantic across the American interior. This was a zone of exploration and excitement as settlers conquered previously virgin lands and subjugated them for development by the American people. Turner also claimed that America’s experience with the westwardmoving frontier was responsible for the unique ways in which the psyche of the country was shaped and the fiercely individualistic nature of its people was developed. “[F]rontier individualism,” Turner argued, “from the beginning has promoted democracy.” Turner first articulated his theory in 1893 in a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In this formulation, Euro-American expansion equated with development and progress. “The existence of an area of free land,” Turner wrote, “its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” One of the cornerstones of Turner’s definition of the frontier was the idea that land had to be “improved” in the Western European sense to be part of the American territory. To be considered legitimate holdings, the land had to be incorporated into capitalistic endeavors, that is, it had to be geared toward economic means. Not only was this “improvement” of the land a necessary condition to own property, Europeans also brought with them the institution of land titles, which was used to justify taking lands from people who had no legal deeds to their property. This was a common view of the time, as civilization and economic development were more often than not synonymous with European social structures such as capitalism and Christianity. The Turner thesis would gain extreme popularity as a model for explaining the improvement of previously undeveloped parts of the United States. It would be adopted by geographers and historians of U.S. history as canonical in the explanation of settlement patterns. In subtler forms, this theory continues to be the guiding structure of many interpretations of nation-building including not only the United States but also Brazil, Russia, and Australia. However, Turner has come under scrutiny in recent years on many fronts. Many contemporary critics have argued that Turner’s theory professes, at worst, outright racism and at best ambivalence on racial issues. This critique is based on the language of the Turner thesis that treats all lands that have not yet been settled by Europeans as “free.” The implication is that the multiplicity of peoples who were not of European origin were nonexistent. However, this view of history ignores the centuries of Native American occupation of large tracts of land throughout the country. Not only were the indigenous populations present well before the frontier overtook their lands, but his theory ignores the impact of settlements from those coming east from Asia or north from Mexico, regardless of their ethnicity.

A family in Loup Valley, Nebraska, poses with the covered wagon in which they lived and traveled during their pursuit of a homestead, ca. 1886. The idea of a westward-moving frontier has remained one of the most powerful narratives of American exceptionalism. (National Archives)

Another critique, at a slightly more abstract level, has to do with the history of regions after initial Europeans settlement took place. This review of the implications of the frontier concept states that the Turner thesis ignores the specific regional histories of development, and conversely underdevelopment, which take place after the initial period of settlement. The school of thought that came to be called New Western History aimed at a reexamination and overall revision of the western United States and its postfrontier history. In the traditional narrative, as told by Turner and his students, the story of the West ends in 1890 when the U.S. census put forth the assertion that the frontier had officially been closed based on the claim that European settlement and Native containment had reached acceptable levels. However, scholars in the field of New Western History claim that this is an arbitrary date upon which to end the history of the West in relation to the East. New Western scholars seek to problematize the traditional historical narratives that treat development as a one-way trajectory toward higher forms of social evolution. Instead, historians in this school make a concerted effort to show that the history of the western United States is not an uncontested march toward progress. Other critics have pointed out that the prevalence of the frontier thesis promotes an ideal type of social progress that has led to the need for the United States to constantly find new geographic areas for frontier expansion. The argument is that this view has led to the American expansion of the 20th century. When looked at in this light, the legacy of the frontier ideology is seen as fueling such imperialist endeavors as the Vietnam War and both world wars. Social theorists employing this argument have theorized that the frontier mentality is used not only in the geographical sense of the word but also to justify democratic interventions against totalitarian regimes across the world. While the specifics of Turner’s arguments have come under scrutiny, even its critics point to its unique analytical power to describe historical change. Turner’s frontier thesis, therefore, remains one of the most important models describing how people tell stories about their past. Cory C. Martin See also: Anglo-Saxonism; Artists, Western; Manifest Destiny; Turner, Frederick Jackson

Further Reading Billington, Ray Allen. Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Teacher, Scholar. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. New York: Norton, 1992. Grossman, James, ed. The Frontier in American Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Limerick, Patricia. The Legacy of Conquest. New York: Norton, 1989. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1921.

General Land Office In the decades following the Revolutionary War, the newly created United States of America was faced with many challenges. As a result of the war, the nation started out with a huge debt and a vast amount of unrecorded land in the public domain. Without funds, land distribution was a principal method for the nation to raise revenue, pay Revolutionary War veterans for their service, and convert what was deemed to be “wilderness” to agriculture for economic development. To distribute the land, a recording system was established. With the passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785, these duties were assigned to the Department of the Treasury and the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Its principal architect and administrator, Albert Gallatin, was a resident of western Pennsylvania, which gave him a strong understanding of the land issues on the frontier. As the nation grew, the volume of work associated with public land administration and sales resulted in other Treasury duties being neglected. Under pressure from Gallatin and the threat of another war with England, Congress established the General Land Office (GLO) in 1812. Congress empowered the GLO to survey, manage, and dispose of public lands as well as administer all legislation affecting public lands. When created, the GLO assumed a number of duties originally spread across several governmental departments. Because of Gallatin, the General Land Office was assigned to the Treasury, and it holds the distinction of being the first bureau within a department. The primary functions were to direct the survey and sale of public lands for western expansion. It also assumed the role of administering military bounties and bounty lands from the War Department, and issuing land patents from the secretary of state. Complicating this already complex task were American Indian affairs and existing land claims. Adding to the work burden was the lack of administrative rules and the rapidly expanding frontier. Even with consolidation of land management tasks, it would be many years before the GLO operated effectively. In 1849, the GLO was transferred to the Department of the Interior. The value of the GLO cannot be fully appreciated outside the context of the country’s political system and westward expansion. In addition to the public domain land claimed by independence from Great Britain, the country doubled in land size with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. All this land had to be spatially identified and recorded, and surveyors working for the Treasury could not perform the work quickly enough. In 1861, the nation again faced war but this time it was internal conflict between the Northern and Southern states. Tensions leading to the Civil War included states’ rights versus federal authority and western expansion, particularly whether or not slavery would be permitted in the new territories. When the Southern states seceded, Congress quickly acted and passed the Homestead Act of 1862. The GLO assumed the duties of administering the Homestead Act as well as the Preemption Act. Specifically, the Preemption Act outlined the rules for the disposal of public lands, whereas the Homestead Act encouraged Western migration by providing settlers (including freed slaves) 160 acres of public land for farming. In exchange, homesteaders paid a small filing fee and were required to complete five years of continuous residence before receiving ownership of the land. Homesteaders also had the option of purchasing the land from the government for $1.25 per acre after six months of residency. With

these acts, land became a thriving and high-volume business throughout the 19th century. By 1900, more than 80 million acres of public land had been transferred to private ownership, all administered by the GLO. The General Land Office was the gateway to land ownership for millions of Americans and immigrants. It was also the instrument for land speculation, and many corrupt commissioners took advantage of their inside information to identify and purchase the best land before it was made available to the market. As a result, many of these commissioners invested in land and accumulated extraordinary wealth from a system designed to aid small farmers. It is notable that the legacy of the GLO lasts to this day. The survey method developed as a result of the Land Ordinance of 1785 was applied to all land undeveloped by Euro-Americans. While the methods have changed over time, they helped create the State Plan Coordinate System, which remains substantially unchanged since first used in Ohio, when that land was the United States’ unchartered northwest. Besides dividing land, it also helped map the new territories. One of the early commissioners, Josiah Meigs, required surveyors to also note botanical, zoological, and meteorological detail about the parcels as supplemental guides for buyers and government. (This was technically illegal because the order did not have congressional approval, though Meigs was never investigated.) Surveyors also collected information about mineral deposits, springs, watercourses, and forests that were necessary resources for the development of military and agriculture uses. This additional detail collected by surveyors provides valuable information about our nation’s lands before the changes associated with settlement. Beginning in the early 20th century, the GLO’s primary responsibility shifted to conservation. In 1946, the GLO became the Bureau of Land Management, which it remains. Continuing the responsibility of managing lands in the public domain, the BLM is responsible for the 245 million acres of federally owned lands that compose the National System of Public Lands. It also oversees the 700-million-acre subsurface mineral estate throughout the nation. Housed in Springhill, Virginia, since 1992, the GLO turned 200 years old on April 25, 2012. In addition to its public lands duties, the bureau also stores thousands of historical public records and original tract books. These documents show how the lands of the United States were divided and distributed as the nation expanded westward. Denese M. Neu See also: Homestead Act; Northwest Land Ordinance; Northwest Ordinance

Further Reading Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Gilpin, William (1813–1894) William Gilpin was the first governor of the Colorado Territory and an ardent believer in the idea of Manifest Destiny, tirelessly promoting westward expansion and settlement. He was also an explorer, land speculator, and writer. Gilpin was born in Pennsylvania in 1813 to a rich Quaker family. He was first educated at home by tutors and then spent two years studying in England. Gilpin returned to America and attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1833. Then in 1836, he graduated from West Point Military Academy.

Gilpin received a commission in the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant and served as a recruiting officer in Missouri. He left the army in 1838 and settled in St. Louis, where he practiced law and worked as an independent newspaper editor. He soon moved to Independence, Missouri, and it was there that his contact with settlers began to interest him in the settlement possibilities of the West. In 1843, Gilpin met John C. Frémont and joined his expedition to find a route over the Continental Divide. The expedition passed through the Colorado Territory and pushed on to Oregon, where Gilpin and Frémont parted. Gilpin established himself in the Willamette Valley and helped organize a provisional territorial government. He also had a hand in drafting a petition to Congress for support, which he delivered to Washington himself in 1845. As he traveled back east, Gilpin began to promote the Pacific Northwest as a western settlement and trading center. Gilpin served with distinction as a major in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), after which he moved back to Missouri and resumed his law practice. In 1859, Gilpin turned his hand to writing and authored The Central Gold Region, in which he promoted the expansion of the American West and the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Gilpin was also a futurist. He was enamored with Denver, Colorado, and believed that it would become a major railroad hub, serving as the center of a rail system that would span three continents and connect the world capitals. In 1861, Gilpin was appointed governor of the new Territory of Colorado by President Abraham Lincoln. He arrived in Denver in late May and by July 1861 was requesting the federal government to organize Union forces in the Colorado Territory to prevent possible Confederate attacks. When his request was refused, Gilpin acted alone to create the First Colorado Regiment of Volunteers. To pay for the regiment, he issued illegal negotiable drafts on the federal Treasury. But when the citizens of Colorado found out that the federal government had not authorized the drafts and that it might not make good on them, they called for Gilpin’s removal from office. In April 1862, Lincoln replaced Gilpin with John Evans, thus ending Gilpin’s short-lived governorship. After leaving office, Gilpin became involved with land speculation, which made him wealthy. In 1863 he purchased a portion of territory in the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant and the Luis Maria Baca Grant No. 4, accumulating more than a million acres of land. In 1894, Gilpin was run over by a horse and carriage while out walking and died from his injuries. He is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Jefferson County, Colorado. Karen S. Garvin See also: Frémont, John Charles; Gold Rush, Colorado; Manifest Destiny; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Berwanger, Eugene H. The Rise of the Centennial State: Colorado Territory 1861–76. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Carr, Ralph L. William Gilpin, Pioneer. Pueblo, CO: Rocky Mountain Bank Note Co., 1940. Karnes, Thomas L. William Gilpin, Western Nationalist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.

Gold Rush, California (1848) The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848 created the California gold rush in which tens of thousands of “forty-niners” headed west to seek their fortunes. The California gold rush was the largest mass migration in American history and the best known of the gold rushes, although it was preceded by a gold strike in Georgia in 1829. The California gold rush helped propel California into statehood and opened the way to the Pacific Coast.

James Wilson Marshall (1810–1885) was a carpenter from New Jersey working for John (Johann) Augustus Sutter (1803–1880), an agriculturalist, who owned 50,000 acres of land in California that he had obtained from the Monterey provisional governor. Sutter had plans to build a settlement along the Sacramento River and needed building materials for his project, New Helvetia, so he hired Marshall to build and operate a sawmill in exchange for a portion of the lumber. Marshall began construction on the mill at Coloma, California, in the autumn of 1847. Situated on the American River near its junction with the Sacramento River, the mill used the river to power a waterwheel. On January 24, 1848, Marshall was examining the river channel under the mill when he saw a few flecks of a shiny mineral that he thought might be gold. Marshall tested the mineral and then presented the gold to his employer. Sutter and Marshall tried to keep the discovery secret, and Sutter asked his men to keep quiet for fear that it would disrupt his agricultural plans for New Helvetia. At first the mill employees asked permission to look for gold in their spare time, but they soon abandoned their employment and mined full time. Word about the gold discovery spread slowly at first, but by May it reached San Francisco and by summer the news had spread throughout California. The first forty-niners were local residents and included Americans and Native Americans. These first miners usually worked solo or in small groups, though sometimes entire families prospected side by side. Gold fever gripped the area. Local business and city councils suspended operations because most of their workers had gone searching for gold; even newspapers had to shut down for lack of workers. Because gold was found in the sand of riverbanks, miners were able to do placer mining (panning), which required a minimum investment in equipment. Miners’ tools included a shallow pan, a sluice box, and a few tools such as a shovel and a pick. Additionally, little knowledge or skill was needed to pan for gold, which made gold mining accessible to many people. News of the discovery reached the East Coast in the fall of 1848, but the rumor raised little interest. It was not until President James K. Polk confirmed the gold strike during his State of the Union address in December 1848 by showing off several thousand dollars’ worth of California gold that the real gold rush began. The gold strike came at a propitious time for many people and brought gold seekers from around the globe including Mexico, Australia, South America, China, the Philippines, and Europe. Unemployed veterans of the Mexican War, Irish refugees from the potato famine, and Europeans escaping the revolutions of 1848 all heard the news and headed West. In 1849, large numbers of prospectors began to arrive in California. San Francisco saw its population soar from about 1,000 in 1848 to more than 20,000 in just two years. An estimated 300,000 forty-niners made their way to California within six years.

Gold miners in El Dorado, California, between 1848 and 1853. The California Gold Rush made California the most populous and ethnically diverse area of the West, but it exacerbated problems with Native American groups as industrial mining adversely impacted the environment and drove away game. (Library of Congress)

Trade ships carried news of Gam Saan, the gold mountain, to China, where a poor economy had forced many peasants off their land. By 1850, Chinese miners made up 20 percent of the population around San Francisco. They faced discrimination and violence from other miners as well as the government. In May 1852, California imposed a Foreign Miners Tax of $3 per month, which forced many Chinese miners to change occupations. Prospectors of all sorts faced hardships to reach California. Easterners had the choice of a lengthy sea voyage around the tip of South America and then north to the California coast, or else risk traveling by land cross-country while facing potential Indian attacks and other difficulties, including crossing the formidable Sierra Nevada mountain range. When they first arrived in California, most miners lived in canvas tents and did their own cooking. However, placer mining was time-consuming and exhausting, and left the miners with little time for hunting, fishing, or preparing meals. Mining towns quickly sprang up as merchants and others arrived in the area intent on making their fortunes not from gold, but from the miners. Most forty-niners were men. Although it is impossible to determine how many women participated in the California gold rush, between 1850 and 1860, California’s female population rose from only 3 percent to 19 percent. Many of those women accompanied their husbands and families, although some traveled alone to seek their own fortunes. Some women mined, while others opened hotels, cooked and washed for miners, entertained at saloons and dance halls, and became gold speculators. Prostitution was also common. In 1849, Californians began to push for statehood, and on September 9, 1850, California became the 31st state, entering the union as a free state. The gold rush made California the most populous and ethnically diverse area of the West, but it exacerbated problems with the Indians as industrial mining adversely impacted the environment and drove away game and other wildlife. Surface deposits of gold soon became exhausted. Successful claims were bought out by large commercial mining companies able to afford the industrial equipment needed to do rock crushing and hydraulic mining. By 1864, the California gold rush had more or less ended, but neither Sutter nor Marshall profited from the discovery of gold. New Helvetia was overrun by miners and devastated. Sutter unsuccessfully sought compensation from the federal government and died in 1880, bankrupt.

Marshall fared no better; he was forced off his land, after which he turned to agriculture before going back to mining. Although he received a small pension from the state of California, Marshall died bankrupt in 1885. Karen S. Garvin See also: Gold Rush, Colorado; Gold Rush, Klondike; Mining Camps; Transcontinental Railroad; U.S. Geological Survey; Primary Documents: Journalist Edward Gould Buffum Pans for Gold in California (1848); “This Muddy Place”: Mary Ballou, a Boardinghouse Keeper in the California Gold Rush (1854)

Further Reading Holliday, J. S. The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience. New York: Touchstone, 1981. Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: Norton, 2000. Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Gold Rush, Colorado (1858) In 1858, gold was discovered in the Pike’s Peak area of present-day Colorado, which was then still a part of the western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory. The discovery soon ushered in the largest gold rush in U.S. history and brought an estimated 100,000 prospectors and other fortune seekers to the area, exacerbating tensions with the Native Americans. Within a few years after the 1849 California gold rush, the nation was gripped in a depression. An economic collapse brought about by declining demand for American goods led to the Panic of 1857. Men were hungry for jobs and money, so the discovery of gold created a rush to Colorado. During the 1850s, miners on their way to the California gold fields panned in the streams of the Rocky Mountain river valleys, but the amounts of gold they found had been unimpressive and they did not bother to report their finds. That changed on July 6, 1858, when a party of prospectors led by Georgian William Green Russell found a modest amount of gold dust in Dry Creek, an area southwest of what is now Denver. Russell, an experienced gold miner, had set out for the Ralston Creek area in the Rocky Mountains after hearing rumors of a gold discovery in the eastern parts of the mountains. Word of the prospectors’ discovery soon reached the East Coast. Colorado was a difficult territory to reach, however, both in actuality and in the minds of many Americans. For years Americans had been deluged with images of the “Great American Desert,” a vast expanse of treeless grassland considered fit only for nomadic Native Americans and herds of bison and other animals. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1859, more than 100,000 gold seekers, twice the number of people who had gone to California, flocked to the Front Range at the eastern base of Pike’s Peak. Using the motto “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” these fortune seekers earned the nickname “fifty-niners.” Among the fifty-niners was William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. At first, gold was only found to the north of Pike’s Peak in Cherry Creek, despite an earlier gold find in 1847 on the western side of the mountain. But the initial gold find at Pike’s Peak quickly played out and the region was considered a bust. Easily accessible surface deposits of gold ore were soon depleted. Miners turned to hard rock mining, using industrial techniques such as hydraulic mining, which soon replaced placer mining (panning).

Gold miners at Gregory Gulch near Central City, Colorado, where gold was discovered in 1858. The Colorado Gold Rush brought 100,000 Euro-Americans to what was then Kansas Territory, further deteriorating the geopolitical and environmental stability of Native American groups on the Plains. (Corbis)

Other gold strikes in 1859 included three large discoveries in the areas of modern Gilpin, Clear Creek, and Boulder Counties and continued to draw miners to Colorado. At first miners lived in tent cities, but soon proper towns were built. Mining towns included Aspen, Breckenridge, Central City, Durango, and Leadville. Some of the smaller mining towns became ghost towns once the gold was exhausted, but others thrived. By 1860, for instance, Central City had a population of more than 60,000 people. The small settlement at Denver became a major destination for prospectors, merchants, and settlers, and the boom in population led to the creation of the Colorado Territory in 1861. William Gilpin was appointed as the first governor of the territory and worked tirelessly to promote the region for expansion, even writing a book, The Central Gold Region, in which he saw Denver becoming an important railroad hub. The arrival of thousands of settlers in Colorado severely impacted the Native Americans’ way of life. Trappers and hunters had lived alongside Indian groups for years, but as wildlife was driven away and land was taken that American commissioners had agreed was legally in the control of Crows, Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, tensions increased. Although several tribes used the land for hunting, there was at first no organized resistance to the Anglo settlements. The Treaty of Fort Wise, signed in 1861, offered the Arapahos and Cheyennes reservations to replace the land already taken from them, but it offered no lasting solution because not all tribes were willing to subscribe to the treaty. By the middle of the 1860s, Indian attacks along the trails threatened to isolate Denver and the mining camps, and Governor John Evans supplemented Colorado’s militia with volunteers to deal with hostile tribes. On November 29, 1864, the violence came to a head when 700 of Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers massacred Arapahoes and Cheyennes at the Battle of Sand Creek, about 170 miles southeast of Denver. Gold strikes continued to be found in Colorado. In 1890, gold was discovered at Poverty Gulch in the Pike’s Peak area by Bob Womack, a local part-time prospector and ranch hand. Womack found small amounts of ore but sold his claim. Within a year, other prospectors made the largest discovery of gold in Colorado at Cripple Creek, about 90 miles south of Denver.

In 1891, the Cripple Creek mining district was established and by 1900 there were at least 500 operational mines in the area. One mine alone, the Portland Mine, employed more than 700 miners, and several mines were large enough to make millionaires of their owners. The success of the mines necessitated reliable transportation to get the ore from the gold fields to the industrial areas back East, and railroads were just the ticket. Compared with overland shipping, railroads reduced the time and cost to ship ore to market and facilitated travel and shipment of foodstuffs and tools to the West. The Colorado gold ore was often mixed with other minerals and needed complicated refinement techniques that were hazardous to humans and the environment. At first, a chlorination process was used to refine the gold. Later, cyanide leaching was used, a process in which gold was dissolved in water with sodium or potassium cyanide and allowed to precipitate out. By the 1880s, miners made up nearly 30 percent of Colorado’s working population and labor unions became active in the mines. In 1894, the Western Federation of Miners went on a five-month strike when their work day was increased from 8 to 10 hours with no pay increase. When mine owners hired a private militia to force miners back to work, violence erupted and Governor Davis Hanson Waite had to call in the army to restore peace. The Cripple Creek strike was a victory for the union, but the violence it used created political backlash. Cripple Creek continues to be an active gold mining area. It has produced more than 23 million ounces of gold since its discovery in 1891, almost half of the gold produced in the entire state of Colorado. Karen S. Garvin See also: Gilpin, William; Gold Rush, California; Gold Rush, Klondike; Mining Camps; Red Cloud; Sand Creek Massacre; Transcontinental Railroad; U.S. Geological Survey

Further Reading Dorset, Phyllis Flanders. The New El Dorado: The Story of Colorado’s Gold and Silver Rushes. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2011. Smith, Duane A. San Juan Bonanza: Western Colorado’s Mining Legacy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. West, Elliot. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Gold Rush, Klondike (1897–1899) The Klondike gold rush was triggered in July 1897 by the news that miners carrying bags of gold they discovered near the Klondike River, Yukon, Canada, had reached Seattle and San Francisco by ship. This news initiated a gold frenzy that continued until 1899. About 100,000 gold prospectors set off for the Klondike and 30,000 completed the trip. The discovery of gold and the sudden influx of Americans in Yukon were followed by a U.S.-Canadian boundary dispute due to the increasing importance of the region for both the United States and Canada. The first gold in the area was in fact found a year earlier on August 16, 1896, when American George Washington Carmack and his Indian partners Keish-Skookum Jim Mason and Dawson Tagish Charlie struck gold on Rabbit Creek (later called Bonanza Creek), a tributary of the Klondike River in the northwestern corner of Canada. The news spread quickly among the local miners who had prospected for gold in the area since the 1880s. Within weeks the entire length of Bonanza Creek was divided into claims. These claims quickly spread to Eldorado Creek where an even richer gold vein was found. Because winter paralyzed transportation lines, the news reached the outside world a year later when the

Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported the arrival of 68 miners with more than a ton of gold in July 1897. Within six months of the news 100,000 gold seekers started their trip to the Klondike. The sudden high demand for supplies and proper outfits gave a boost to the economy but most of the fortune seekers were amateurs without any preparation or reliable information about the forthcoming ordeal. A few wealthy prospectors made their way by water but the majority of the gold seekers could only sail as far as the southeast Alaskan ports of Skagway or Dyea. From there, the fortune seekers struggled through the Chilkoot or White Passes. The Chilkoot Pass was the toughest on men because pack animals could not be used easily on the steep slopes leading to the pass. Until tramways were built late in 1897 and early 1898, the stampeders had to carry everything on their backs. The White Pass Trail was the animal killer, as anxious prospectors overloaded and beat their pack animals and forced them over the rocky terrain until they dropped. More than 3,000 animals died on this trail; many of their bones still lie at the bottom of Dead Horse Gulch. Some prospectors tried the all-Canadian routes through the rough terrains of Alberta and British Columbia, which could take up to two years to complete. Even though the Canadian authorities required every gold miner to carry a year’s worth of supplies, roughly one ton per person, many gold seekers gave up and returned home or lost their lives along the trail due to malnutrition, starvation, or the extremely cold temperatures. Only 30,000 people reached their final destination of Dawson City at the mouth of the Klondike River in 1898. To their horror, once there, they realized that all the profitable land had been staked out before their arrival. Only about half actually dared to work in the gold fields, which required extremely hard work, digging more than 10-foot-deep holes in the permafrost. About 4,000 people actually found gold and even fewer of them became rich. Most miners simply spent their gold on alcohol, gambling, or prostitution. The ones that really benefited from the gold rush were the merchants and profiteers who charged outrageous prices for common goods and supplies. Despite the scarcity of found fortunes, the population explosion increased the importance of the region and raised the question about the exact definition of the boundary between Alaska and Canada. Before the Klondike gold rush, the Far North was regarded as frozen wasteland. Only in 1895 had the Canadian authorities created Yukon as a district within the Northwest Territories. Because of the gold rush, Yukon became a completely separate administrative territory in June 1898. While Dawson City barely existed in 1896, by the summer of 1897 it had 5,000 residents; a year later it held 30,000 inhabitants, making it the biggest town north of Seattle and west of Winnipeg. Concerned that the volume of Americans would threaten Canadian sovereignty and allow the United States to define the precise boundary between the countries, police posts were established at the summits of Chilkoot and White Passes to control the border and collect Canadian customs duty for supplies brought by gold prospectors. Canadian authorities also increased the number of North-West Mounted Police officers and sent 200 militiamen, known as the Yukon Field Force, to the fields to increase Canadian military presence in the region. For their part, the U.S. Army sent a small detachment to Circle City, Alaska, to protect American interests. And while the American citizens and entrepreneurs disapproved of the duty-free entry Canadian miners received via the ports of Dyea and Skagway, the Canadian public wanted their government to bar the entry of American miners in Yukon. With their respective citizens calling for action, American and Canadian diplomats began negotiations in September 1898. Though the boundary was not agreed upon until 1903, it was the Klondike gold rush that prompted its establishment, codifying American sovereignty in the region. The discovery of gold in Nome, western Alaska, in the summer of 1899 terminated the Klondike gold rush as most gold seekers rushed to Nome, and by 1901 the population of Dawson City dropped to only 9,000.

Chris Kostov See also: Gold Rush, California; Gold Rush, Colorado

Further Reading Gray, Charlotte. Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike. Berkeley, CA: HarperCollins, 2010. Morrison, William Robert. Showing the Flag: The Mounted Police and Canadian Sovereignty in the North, 1894–1925. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985. Morse, Katherine. The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Great American Desert The Great American Desert was the name given to the geomorphic province that lies roughly between the 100th meridian on the east and the Rocky Mountains on the west. This area, which comprises what is now called the Great Plains, was considered by Americans to be an uninhabitable desert. The Great American Desert was regularly shown on maps from 1820 until 1858 as a real geological feature, and that perception would not change until the mid-19th century. Its boundaries were broadly defined and mutable. As early as 1827, it encompassed the areas of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas, in addition to Indian Territory (those lands set aside for reservations). As more settlers arrived, the Great American Desert shrank, its borders moving westward until it was only the size of Utah and Nevada. The idea of an American desert dates back to Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján, who reported to Philip II in Spain a waterless, desert-like area. His report was echoed by the American explorer Zebulon Pike, who surveyed the area in 1806 and remarked on its lack of trees and vast tracts of bare sand. It was the map and accompanying report from Stephen Long’s 1820 expedition that solidified the idea of a Great American Desert in the mind of the American public. Edwin James, the chronicler of the expedition, wrote that he had “little apprehension of giving too unfavorable account of this portion of the country … which may for ever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, and the jackal.” The area was, of course, the haunt of Native hunters, both nomadic and seminomadic, who either followed the migration of the bison or went on semiannual hunting trips into the heart of the Plains. These included groups such as the Blackfoot, Lakota Sioux, Cheyennes, Crows, Pawnees, and Plains Apaches. During the 1840s and early 1850s, when hundreds of thousands of Euro-Americans traveled over the Plains on their way to the rich agricultural fields of Oregon or the gold mines of California, few had interest in staying: hot, dry winds blew across the open area; sandstorms, dust storms, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and even clouds of locust plagued travelers; while their wagons often got stuck in deep sand. In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed by Congress in the interest of opening up the Plains settlement. Independent farmers could claim up to 160 acres of land by staking an area and living on it for at least five years, or else they could purchase land outright from the government. Many white settlers flocked to the area, followed by newly freed slaves after the end of the Civil War. A new vision of the Plains began to emerge as state chamber of commerce boosters and the railroads did all they could to encourage settlement. Boosters of westward expansion promoted the belief that “rain followed the plough,” meaning that either planting trees or plowing the earth would increase the local rainfall in an area and improve farming. Record levels of rain in the late 1860s turned the short-grass

prairie green, seemingly proving the boosters right. It was only after the unusually wet years ended that the volatile nature of weather on the Plains drove many settlers back East. Karen S. Garvin See also: Exodusters; Homestead Act; Pacific Railroad Act

Further Reading Allen, John, “The Garden-Desert Continuum; Competing Views of the Great Plains in the Nineteenth Century.” Great Plains Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1985): 207–227. Bowden, Martyn J. “The Great American Desert in the American Mind: The Historiography of a Geographical Notion.” In David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden, eds. Geographies of the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hollon, W. Eugene. The Great American Desert Then and Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Homestead Act (1862) Along with the Morrill Land Grant Act and the Pacific Railroad Act, the Homestead Act was part of a set of federal incentives intended to bring Euro-American settlement to the American West. The law established a three-part process for individuals to acquire federal land in the West for occupation and ownership. The Homestead Act opened up to private ownership approximately one-tenth of the land in the United States. For years, Americans had looked west for opportunities for a new life, largely as small farmers. In the early years of the nation, the allocation of unsettled land was often arbitrary with frequent boundary disputes. The Land Ordinance of 1785 standardized a system of federal land surveys that reduced boundary conflicts. At the time, the sale of federal land was seen primarily as a way for the government to raise funds rather than to encourage settlement. Most Americans could not afford to purchase the land or supply the labor necessary to clear it for agricultural use. By 1800, the minimum lot size was reduced and a payment plan was introduced, but prices remained high. That same year, the government introduced graduated prices based on the desirability of the land, which greatly lowered the price on some lots. The government also offered extraordinary bonuses to veterans and individuals interested in settling in the Oregon Territory. These bonuses made homesteading possible for more Americans—but still a very small portion of the population. Around the time of the Mexican-American War, pressure to change homesteading policy gained in popularity. Rising prices for wheat, cotton, and corn enabled larger, wealthier farms—including many Southern plantations—to squeeze out smaller competitors. These small farmers then looked west for a second chance. Most western settlers demand preemption or the right to homestead first and pay later. Eastern factory owners disliked this policy as they feared a drain on their cheap labor pool if workers opted to move west instead. Their fears proved founded as changes in transportation made western farming more viable and unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in America, often looking westward for a new life. Despite all of these pressures to reform homestead laws, action in Congress was stymied as powerful economic forces in the North feared a mass departure of cheap laborers and the Southern states feared the creation of new western states populated by antislavery small farmers. Preemption became the national policy. In 1852, 1854, and 1859 the House of Representatives passed homestead legislation, but each time the Senate defeated it. In 1860, both houses of Congress passed a homestead bill, only to have President Buchanan veto it.

When the Southern states seceded, the slavery issued was removed from the equation and Congress soon passed the Homestead Act. The bill was introduced by Congressman Aldrich and reported from the Committee on Agriculture by Congressman Lovejoy. On February 28, 1862, the House passed the bill by a vote of 107 to 16 with all the affirmative votes but one coming from free states, and all the negative except for five coming from the South. The bill, with a few amendments, passed the Senate on May 6, 1862, by a vote of 33 to 7 with only one negative vote from the free states and one affirmative from the South. Disagreement with the Senate amendments by the House was solved by a conference committee and on May 20, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the act into law. The Homestead Act allowed any U.S. citizen or intended citizen—as long as they had never borne arms against the U.S. government—to file an application claiming 160 acres of surveyed government land. The homesteader then had to live on the land for the next five years and improve it by building a 12by-14 dwelling and growing crops. Once five years passed, the homesteader could submit proof of residency and the required improvements to a local land office and thereby file for the deed of title. All paperwork was then sent to the General Land Office in Washington where the case was examined and valid claims were granted deed of title with only a small registration fee. If the claimant was willing to pay $1.25 per acre, title could also be acquired after a six-month residency and trivial improvements. Furthermore, after the Civil War, Union veterans were allowed to deduct their time served from the required residency period. On January 1, 1863, the first day the Homestead Act became effective, 418 individuals filed claims. Many more pioneers would follow in the years ahead from all walks of life—freed slaves, single women, and newly arrived immigrants. They would face many challenges to growing crops from the frequently harsh physical conditions on the frontier including severe weather, droughts, and insects. The open plains had few trees to be cut down for building and fuel. Limited fuel and water supplies turned many household chores into daily trials. Dry conditions and limited, wild vegetation made raising livestock difficult. Many times these challenges proved too much for homesteaders who did not stay long enough to fulfill their claims. The ambiguous language of the Homestead Act—the “12-by-14” dwelling requirement did not specify feet or inches, for example—invited rampant fraud. “Dummy” homesteaders, working under the auspices of a speculator, would set up tiny prefabricated shacks to meet the minimum requirement of “improvements.” Cattlemen and lumbermen also used this tactic to acquire tens of thousands of acres. By one historian’s estimate, between 1852 and 1900 half of all homestead claims were fraudulent. Regardless of the maleficence, half a million farms were ultimately created by the Homestead Act, and it was an important aspect of American expansion in the middle of the 19th century. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: General Land Office; Morrill Land Grant Act; Northwest Land Ordinance; Pacific Railroad Act; Preemption Act of 1841; Primary Documents: Homestead Act (1862); “We Are Not Entirely Out of Civilization”: A Homesteader Writes Home—Letter from Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and the Wheeler Thomas Family (June 16, 1873)

Further Reading Gates, Paul Wallace. Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–1890. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1954 Lee, Lawrence Bacon. Kansas and the Homestead Act, 1862–1905. New York: Arno Press, 1979. Ottoson, Howard W., ed. Land Use Policy and Problems in the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.

John Sutter’s Mill. See Gold Rush, California Lewis and Clark Expedition. See Corps of Discovery Louisiana Purchase (1803) The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of 828,000 square miles of the North American continent by the United States from France in 1803. The territory of Louisiana encompassed what are today the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska as well as parts of Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana. At the time, the land sale roughly doubled the size of the United States, which paid 68 million francs ($15 million) directly and in debt relief to France for the territory. As Spain disputed the exact boundaries of the area, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned three expeditions to survey the western parts of the territory after the purchase. Among them was the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 between the United States and Spain finally settled the matter, largely in America’s favor. Since the mid-17th century, the notion that France should occupy the area on both sides of the Mississippi River from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies to block further westward expansion of Great Britain’s North American colonies along the Atlantic Seaboard by connecting French possessions in Canada with the Gulf of Mexico had been gaining popularity in France. In 1682, French explorer RenéRobert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, sailed down the Mississippi River from what is today Fort Wayne, Indiana, to the river’s mouth and laid claim to the Louisiana Territory for the French king Louis XIV. At the turn of the 17th century, France began colonizing the river basin. After it had suffered catastrophic defeats in the Seven Years’ War and the French army in Canada had to surrender to the British in 1759, it became clear that France could not successfully defend and hold Louisiana. France therefore ceded the territory to Spain in the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau in exchange for Spain’s promise to enter the war against Great Britain. The agreement, however, was kept secret. So while the 1763 Treaty of Paris officially left the land west of the Mississippi to France, it had already been legally Spanish for a year. Only in 1764 was the Treaty of Fontainebleau made public. French settlers were surprised to learn that they were now living under Spanish rule. When Spain found itself in dire economic and financial circumstances (as a result of the Second Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1796, which had allied Spain to France and required Spain to enter France’s war against Great Britain), Napoleon pressured Spain to return Louisiana, since he intended to resume attempts to build a French empire in North America. This empire was to be based on the lucrative sugar production in Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) with Louisiana providing supplies such as foodstuffs for the island. On October 1, 1800, France and Spain secretly concluded the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, in which Spain returned the Louisiana territory to France. Spain received Tuscany (in modern-day Italy) in return. As this treaty was also kept secret and Spanish authorities at first remained in control of Louisiana, the territorial transfer did not become immediately known to either the inhabitants of Louisiana or the United States.

HAITIAN REVOLUTION The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States for the paltry sum of $15 million. The low cost was due not to Napoleon Bonaparte’s valuation of the territory, however, but rather what was happening on an island nearly 1,500 miles to

the southeast. Saint-Domingue was the jewel of the French overseas empire, producing 50 percent of Europe’s coffee and sugar. In August 1791, a revolt against French masters sent a panic throughout the slaveholding world. By 1792, slave rebels controlled one-third of the island and had the backing of Spanish and British forces. Knowing the 3,500 French soldiers could not contain this combined force, the French Assembly freed the slaves of Saint-Domingue. For a time, the tactic worked. A former slave turned commander named Toussaint L’Ouverture helped expel the Spanish and the British. But when L’Ouverture led an invasion to the nearby island of Santo Domingo to free slaves there, Napoleon no doubt became nervous. This fear was confirmed when a few months later, L’Ouverture issued a constitution that made him governor for life of the autonomous Saint-Domingue. In response, Napoleon sent 20,000 men to regain the island. (Thomas Jefferson, not wanting to inspire his own slaves in the American South, refused to publicly support L’Ouverture. His administration did, however, encourage secret supplies be sent to the rebels for fear of a renewed struggle with the French for supremacy in North America.) Yellow fever and fierce guerrilla tactics decimated French forces, and Napoleon decided to consolidate his empire outside of North America. While it would take another year for Haiti to formally declare its independence, the revolution necessitated the French retreat from the Western Hemisphere and the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803.

Since its founding, the United States had been eager to acquire New Orleans because control of the city determined control of the entire Mississippi River. For western farmers, exporting their goods via the Mississippi was vital, since it was prohibitively expensive and time consuming to transport their products over the Appalachian Mountains. When Spain temporarily closed the port to American goods in 1784 to slow American westward expansion, there was a public outcry and calls for war against Spain. In Pinckney’s Treaty, signed on October 27, 1795, the United States used Spanish fears over an AngloAmerican alliance to convince Spain to guarantee American merchants the right of deposit in New Orleans (the right to use the port for storing goods destined for export and transfer them to oceangoing vessels) and the right to navigate the entire length of the Mississippi. Since Spain was a weak power posing no serious threat to the United States and in no position to repel an American attack, there was no urgency to acquire Louisiana immediately, as more and more Americans began to settle in that area. A transfer of the territory to a powerful country such as France or Great Britain, by contrast, would have halted American expansionism and endangered U.S. security interests. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants,” as Jefferson told America’s minister in France in April 1802. “Spain might have retained it quietly for years. Her pacific dispositions, her feeble state, would induce her to increase our facilities there, so that her possession of the place would be hardly felt by us.” If France took control of the territory, however, it would become America’s natural enemy. “The day that France takes possession of N. Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low water mark.” After Jefferson learned about the transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France in March 1801 (and after it became known that the Spanish intendant had suspended the right to deposit at New Orleans), he sent Robert R. Livingston, a New York Republican and former U.S. secretary of foreign affairs, to Paris to negotiate a possible U.S. purchase of New Orleans. One year later, in 1802, he also sent James Monroe, former U.S. minister to France, to Europe to convince Napoleon to relinquish New Orleans to the United States for a price of up to 50 million francs ($10 million). Before Monroe arrived in Paris, however, the French treasury minister François Barbé-Marbois had already presented Livingston with an offer to sell the entire Louisiana territory for $15 million. Even though the American diplomats were only instructed to purchase New Orleans, they exceeded their instructions and decided to take the offer, believing it to be in America’s best interest and fearing that Napoleon might begin to reconsider his proposition. As a result, the diplomats signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty on April 30, 1803.

Three explanations account for Napoleon’s unexpected offer. First, Napoleon’s imperial aspirations in North America were predicated on France’s ability to crush the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (which had begun in 1791 and had led to the breakdown of French colonial rule by 1799) and to regain control over the island. More than half of the troops sent to the island in 1802, however, died either in battle or from tropical diseases such as yellow fever. Without Haiti’s profitable sugar plantations, Louisiana was of little value to Napoleon. Second, the Peace of Amiens of 1802, which had temporarily ended the war between Great Britain and France waging on since 1793, was about to become a dead letter. As hostilities were about to be resumed, Napoleon needed money to finance another war against Great Britain, and the sale of Louisiana promised a quick and easy supply of money. Third, Jefferson had America’s ministers threaten France with an Anglo-American alliance and a possible Franco-American war, if France failed to sell New Orleans and its adjacent areas to the United States. He also insinuated to Napoleon that even as he wished to avoid war, the American public would likely force him into preemptive action if control over Louisiana passed from Spain to France. As Napoleon’s plan for building a new colonial empire in North America was based on the assumption that the United States would at least temporarily acquiesce in France’s imperial bid and as the impending war with Great Britain would prevent him from sending reinforcements to the New World, Napoleon must have feared that the United States would simply seize New Orleans before he could bring Louisiana under effective French control. As a result, Napoleon chose to sell land that had become useless to him rather than have it taken from him by force.

Despite its comparatively cheap price and the fact that through the acquisition the United States eliminated a serious foreign rival on the North American continent, the Louisiana Purchase elicited opposition from both the opposing Federalist Party and a minority of Republicans. Federalists objected to the acquisition for several reasons. They feared that the Atlantic Seaboard states’ influence would dwindle with the incorporation of future states in the West; that an ever-expanding union might prove ungovernable; that the Louisiana Purchase would enable the expansion of slavery and upset the sectional balance between the North and the South; and that the agreement would tie the United States to Napoleonic France and thus put heavy strains on Anglo-American relations. Several Federalists and a number of conservative Republicans such as John Randolph of Virginia, moreover, questioned the constitutionality of the purchase, since the Constitution did not explicitly grant the president the power to acquire territory for the United States. They were also concerned that the incorporation of French, Spanish, and free black people residing in New Orleans into the union as equal members would undermine the foundation of republicanism in the United States, as they were not used to self-government. Despite some opposition, however, the Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase Treaty with a vote of 24 to 7 on October 20, 1803. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory had many lasting impacts. The admission of states carved out of the Louisiana Territory to the union would lead to fiery debates in Congress; Southern states hoped to extend slavery to the west, while Northern states sought to preserve the delicate sectional balance. The Louisiana Purchase thus significantly contributed to sectional antagonism and eventually to the outbreak of the Civil War. In addition, it answered the question of how land could be acquired by the expanding nation. The Constitution did not explicitly grant the president the power to buy new land for the United States. When Jefferson submitted the Louisiana Purchase Treaty to the Senate for ratification, he set an important precedent for the constitutional interpretation of implied powers, and for the view that the federal government has the authority to acquire new territory for the United States. Finally, it set the stage for many decades of negotiation and conflict between Indians living within the bounds of the Louisiana territory and the U.S. government. Despite various Native groups’ obvious dominance in the territory, peoples such as the Osages, Pawnees, and Lakotas were excluded from the negotiations in 1803. In the years that followed, the rising flood of white settlers would drive many of them off their lands. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Adams-Onís Treaty; Corps of Discovery; Jefferson, Thomas; Paris, Treaty of (1763); Pinckney’s Treaty; San Ildefonso, Treaty of; Seven Years’ War; Primary Documents: Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803)

Further Reading Brecher, Frank W. Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase. Robert Livingston’s Mission to France, 1801–1804. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Kastor, Peter J. The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Kennedy, Roger G. Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny was a slogan attached to motives and rationalization of American expansion in the middle of the 19th century. The phrase refers primarily to the moral justification of expansionists, largely Democrats, in their desire to annex Texas, acquire Oregon, purchase California, and defeat Mexico in the 1840s. When the United States initiated a war with Mexico in hopes of acquiring territory, the country was divided about both its legitimacy and its ramifications. Some Southerners desired the war to bring additional slave territory into the union, but others worried that the inclusion of new territories with “inferior races” would complicate the social hierarchy. Many Northerners viewed the war as an unjustified act of aggression intended to increase the power of Southern slaveholders, while others saw the positive benefits the inclusion of California could have on the trade with Asia. To increase the popularity of the war, the editor of the widely read Democratic Review, John O’Sullivan, wrote an editorial that is frequently cited as the original use of the term. O’Sullivan argued that the United States had a God-given mission to spread across the entire continent as it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (O’Sullivan, 5). Democrats and especially young expansionist-minded members of the party, the so-called Young Americans, soaked up the idea of Manifest Destiny. Until 1854, Manifest Destiny was a rallying cry for expansion into Central America and the Caribbean. Even before its founding, the perception of a divine mission was already apparent in the country. The Puritans had brought with them the hope that the new land would provide them a place where they could exercise their religious views without restrictions. The inherent hope was that the new land would become a shining city, drawing oppressed people from Europe. The Puritans had assumed that they had found a New Canaan in North America and were, like the Israelites, the chosen people of God, who were supposed to forge a new empire. Accordingly, they believed that they fulfilled scripture by uplifting heathen Indians or brushing them aside. The perception of a higher mission only increased with the founding of the United States. Revolutionary rhetoric espoused the ideals of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, which set the United States apart from the monarchical systems of government in Europe. Thus the seemingly contradictory notions of religious mission and enlightenment thought found common cause in the language of expansion. Yet there was no single overriding material motive behind the rhetoric. Some expansionists sought land to secure natural resources such as timber and ore, while others focused on the acreage needed to fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a republic of independent yeomen. Some wanted easier access to trade in Asia, while others hoped to secure geopolitical control in a country divided over slavery. The phrase Manifest Destiny, therefore, was not built on a set of sharply defined ideas and thus took many forms. Some Democrats argued that the United States should incorporate all of Mexico, not simply the northern territories won in the war. While some contemporaries argued for all of Mexico, others, including President Polk, argued for all of Oregon. This had served as a campaign issue and was ultimately used by Polk to force Britain to negotiate a boundary settlement. The spirit of Manifest Destiny also influenced filibusters, private armies, to conquer countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Building on the assumption that Texas was a good example of how to integrate new territory into the union, these filibusterers intended to take over territory and eventually turn that territory into a new state, most often a slave state. Most famous among these filibusterers, who also had ties to the Young Americans, were Narciso López, who tried to take over Cuba and was eventually killed on the island; John A. Quitman, whose expeditions never left the drawing board; and William Walker, whose exploits in Sonora and Nicaragua gained him fame among some and infamy and death among others.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the perception of mission increased once more. The United States, in transitioning to a global and imperial role, looked to the idea of mission as presented by Manifest Destiny for inspiration in the war with Spain in 1898. Other modern presidents have used the terminology of Manifest Destiny as well, but the term best describes the years from 1845 to 1854. Historians have debated how long the ideas inherent in O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny described expansionism. Most agree that the narrowly defined term, as embraced by the Young Americans, was limited to the period from 1845 to 1854. However, the perception that the United States had a providential mission to expand its exceptional institutions and system of government across the continent and the world was not restricted to those nine years. The lasting importance of the idea of Manifest Destiny lies in the legacy of American exceptionalism and a sense of superiority over other peoples that continued well into the 20th century and, arguably, into the 21st. Niels Eichhorn See also: Mexican-American War; Oregon Treaty; Polk, James Knox; Taylor, Zachary; Texas, Annexation of; Texas, Republic of; Primary Documents: John L. O’Sullivan’s Article on America’s “Manifest Destiny” (1845)

Further Reading Hietala, Thomas R. Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. O’Sullivan, John. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845): 5–10. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Mining Camps The discovery of gold in California in 1848 was instrumental in driving westward expansion. Prior to 1848, the California Territory’s American population numbered only about 14,000 and was primarily of Hispanic descent. By 1852, the non-Native population had surged to nearly a quarter of a million. The rapid influx of miners and other fortune seekers contributed to the already uneasy relations with many of the Indian tribes living in those areas. New patterns of American settlement took shape as small communities were built around the mining industry. These settlements tended to cluster together and were often separated by hundreds of miles. This migration pattern followed the discovery of ore, occurring first in California, then throughout the West, in places that included British Columbia, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and the Black Hills of the Dakotas. The gold found at Sutter’s Mill in January 1848 precipitated a rush, despite efforts by discoverer James W. Marshall to keep the gold a secret. By May, the news had reached San Francisco and then spread throughout the California Territory. President James K. Polk confirmed the discovery in December 1848, and by early 1849, the gold rush was on. Tens of thousands of people, nicknamed “forty-niners,” made their way to California to seek their fortunes. Gold fever gripped the country and drew men of every nationality to the ore strikes. These early prospectors often worked solo and arrived equipped with a bare minimum of supplies, which might include a tent, food, a few tools, a gold pan or sluice box, and a mule. Prospectors typically did placer

mining, or panning, in which river dirt was washed in a shallow pan to remove fine sediment and leave the heavier gold in the bottom of the pan. These early miners lived in simple canvas tents and cooked their own food over a campfire. They might eat canned goods, dried biscuits, or bacon or jerky that they had carried with them to camp or purchased from a nearby town. Sometimes they might hunt to supplement their meals, but placer mining was both time-consuming and difficult work, leaving the miners with very little time or energy to hunt, fish, or to prepare meals.

According to miner and author Bret Harte, mining camps were “no more than disorganized raids on nature.” This undated illustration is taken from his book Devil’s Ford. (Corbis)

The living conditions were primitive and miners had to deal with the weather conditions as best they could. The lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in their diets resulted in poor nutrition, leading to scurvy and other diseases. Sanitation and personal hygiene were generally poor, as there were few facilities for bathing or doing laundry, and communicable diseases such as colds and flu were problematic as there were few doctors and medicines available. Miners coped with their difficulties by forming a mining community for support. Many of the miners were single men or had left families behind, although some families did travel together. Games such as cards and dice were popular and required little equipment, and were often accompanied by drinking and gambling, while some men spent their time writing letters to families they had left behind. Mining camps were sometimes just tent cities, but as more miners congregated on a strike, fullfledged mining towns sprang up, sometimes seemingly overnight, thus earning the name “boom town.” These mining towns consisted of hastily constructed wooden buildings and were often poorly made, and the possibility of fire was always a major concern. General stores, boardinghouses, saloons, bowling alleys, brothels, livery stables, and other buildings lined unpaved roads that became muddy when it rained.

Mining towns, especially the new ones, were often disorderly and violent places bordering on lawlessness. Vigilante committees were frequently formed to both enforce law and establish moral codes for the community. Vigilantes might inflict minor punishments on offenders, such as whipping or banishment, but they could also resort to lynching and often became powerful and corrupt. The arrival of large numbers of women tended to have a settling effect on mining camps and towns. California saw its female population increase from 3 percent to 19 percent between 1850 and 1860. Successful mining towns often became full-fledged established towns, and this encouraged an influx of more Americans, including farmers, settlers, and tradesmen. Other mining camps became ghost towns when the ore ran out, as the miners and their followers simply moved on to the next promising ore deposit. Those who could not get rich from mining sought to get rich from the miners, and the prices for even basic supplies soared in the mining towns. A miner might make $6 to $10 dollars a day, but most spent the equivalent of six months’ wages just to travel to the ore strike. Many could not afford to purchase supplies once they arrived and had to take whatever jobs they could find or return home. Surface deposits of ore were easily removed by placer mining and were soon depleted. Claims of successful miners were bought out by large commercial mining companies, who then turned to industrial techniques such as rock crushing and hydraulic mining, expensive equipment that a lone miner could not afford. These industries needed a large labor force, and unsuccessful miners often ended up being paid laborers at one of the conglomerate mines. Hydraulic mining was responsible for large-scale erosion and pollution of the waterways. While the gold and silver rushes were most important in bringing large numbers of settlers into a territory, other metals such as lead, tin, zinc, and copper were also valuable to industry and continued to draw people to the West. Wherever the miners went, though, the Indians lost their traditional hunting grounds. Some Indian tribes, such as the Oglala Sioux, fought fiercely to keep their land, forcing the U.S. Army to establish a series of forts to protect settlers and miners from the Indians. After years of fighting, however, the federal government managed to conclude treaties with the Indians to guarantee the safety of the overland trails that would be necessary for the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The success of the mining industry pushed the growth of the railroad as a quick and reliable method of transporting ore from the field to the rapidly growing industrial areas back East, as well as bringing more settlers to the West. The large population increases due to mining were instrumental in admitting several of the Western territories into the union, including California, Colorado, and Nevada. Karen S. Garvin See also: Black Hills; Gold Rush, California; Gold Rush, Colorado; Gold Rush, Klondike; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: Norton, 2000. Mather, R. E., and F. E. Boswell. Gold Camp Desperadoes: A Study of Violence, Crime, and Punishment on the Mining Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Missouri Compromise (1820)

The Missouri Compromise was a deal cut in Congress to admit two states to the union, one free and one slave, and split the Louisiana territory at the 36° 30′ parallel with free states north of the line and slaveholding states allowed to be admitted to the south. This compromise created a temporary peace between the slave and free states that allowed for popular support for American territorial expansion until the effects of the Mexican War would force another compromise. By 1819, 11 free states and 11 slave states had been admitted to the union. All of the U.S. territory south of the Ohio River had become states while the territories that would become Wisconsin and Michigan were still waiting for statehood. Louisiana became the first state carved out of the Louisiana Territory with its admission as a slave state in 1812. In 1818, Maine was still a district of Massachusetts. The district’s population was more than 290,000, and in 1819 it voted to be admitted as a separate state. On June 19, 1819, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act to create Maine as an independent region and allow its admission to the union as a state. The final legislation admitting Maine was passed on March 3, 1820, and it formally entered the union on March 15. At the same time Missouri made a formal request for admission to the union, claiming a population of more than 60,000. With 15 percent of Missouri’s population being slaves, it was going to create a proslavery constitution. Missouri’s status and location created a problem, however. The Ohio River had been the northern border of the slave territory and the majority of Missouri was north of the Ohio River’s confluence with the Mississippi. This put Missouri in an area many Northern members of Congress saw as free territory. In addition, there were a growing number of Northern congressmen that did not want to see the further expansion of slavery. The two houses of Congress could not initially agree about Missouri’s status. The Senate was willing to admit Missouri as a slave state, but the House passed a bill requiring Missouri to be admitted as a free state. The two houses ultimately agreed to allow Missouri to enter as a slave state. Three days after passing the law to admit Maine, March 6, Congress passed the law that was to put the Missouri Compromise into effect. It allowed the territory of Missouri to form a constitution and state government, and included in section eight a provision that slavery was prohibited in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30′ parallel, except in Missouri. Missouri’s final admission to the union was delayed by over a year by issues arising from its slave state status. The state’s 1820 constitution not only allowed and protected slavery, it allowed for the passage of laws to prevent free African Americans and mulattoes from settling in the state. This was seen by many Northern members of Congress as an infringement of the privileges and immunities protection in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. This led to Congress requiring the Missouri government to promise that those provisions of the state constitution would not be used to prevent individuals from enjoying their privileges as U.S. citizens. After Missouri issued the promise on June 26, 1821, it was finally admitted to the union on August 10, 1821, with a constitution allowing slavery within its borders. The deal was ultimately broken by politics and necessity. The Mexican-American War had added new territory to the United States that was not covered by the Missouri Compromise. The Compromise of 1850 prevented the extension of the slavery boundary into the recently acquired land from Mexico. The territories would create their governments under the new concept of popular sovereignty, where each would choose its status for itself, free or slave. The idea would be extended to all of the territories over the next few years. The last, and unnecessary, nail in the coffin of the Missouri compromise was handed down in 1856 with the Dred Scott decision. In this decision, Chief Justice Taney declared that the portion of the compromise dealing with slavery north of the 36° 30′ parallel was unconstitutional. The court found that

the power to regulate the territories granted to the federal government under the Constitution applied primarily to those areas possessed by the United States based on the 1783 peace treaty with Great Britain. The federal government’s power over acquired territories, such as the Louisiana Purchase, was much more limited as these regions needed to be administered for the common good and to prepare them for statehood, and the court found that Congress had no power over property rights, which included slaves. The Missouri Compromise was a temporary solution to a growing problem, the struggle between slavery’s opponents and defenders, and it made the continued addition of states to the United States possible by defining the limits and possibilities of the expansion of slavery until the Mexican-American War. Donald E. Heidenreich Jr. See also: Compromise of 1850

Further Reading Foley, John. A History of Missouri, Volume 1: 1673 to 1820. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Heider, David, and Heider, Jeanne. Henry Clay: The Essential American. New York: Random House, 2010. Library of Congress. “Primary Documents in American History: http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Missouri.html. Accessed October 14, 2014. March, David. The History of Missouri. Vol. 1. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1967.

Missouri

Compromise.”

Mormonism “Mormons” is the common term referring to members of the Mormon religion and culture, which was founded in 1830 in upstate New York by Joseph Smith and is today formally called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or LDS Church) based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormonism was a quintessentially American religion, which could not have originated and grown against any backdrop other than the optimism of the early American republic, and later the American frontier. It was one of many charismatic, prophecy-based faiths to spring up during the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, in which the entire nation became more evangelically religious than its preceding Revolutionary generation. In some respects, Mormonism was an extension of earlier New England Puritan mindsets from the colonial era: its followers emphasized personal industry and thrift, they lived in tight-knit communities that saw little distinction between civil and religious authority, and they saw their faith in terms of a redemptive return to primitive Christianity that had been corrupted by a wicked world. However, other elements of Mormonism were completely separate from mainstream American Protestant life: doctrines rejected original sin and Hell, hinted that men might become gods in the afterlife, and allowed church elders to marry multiple wives. More broadly, Mormonism’s rejection of the Bible as the sole authority of God and its emphasis on a single prophet leading through direct revelation was unprecedented in American religious history. For these reasons, Mormonism’s relationship to mainstream American Christianity has long been surrounded by controversy, conflict, and sometimes violence. The origins of both the religion and its founding scripture, The Book of Mormon, are equally controversial. Official LDS narrative states that, sometime in the early 1820s, as revivalism was rising in upstate New York, teenager Joseph Smith Jr. became obsessed with finding the “True Church” of Jesus Christ. Upon praying for an answer in the woods, he was visited by God and Jesus, and told that he would found the only true religion on earth. Several years later, after another visit by the “Angel Moroni,” Smith

excavated a bound and inscribed set of “Golden Plates” from nearby Hill Cumorah. With the aid of seer stones and divine inspiration, Smith “translated” the plates into The Book of Mormon. This book was believed by Smith and all devout Mormons to be a scripture even more perfect and uncorrupted than the Christian Bible, although Mormons today view both works as divine. The Book of Mormon’s story, briefly summarized, follows the descendants of Israelites who, around 700 BCE, fled the Babylonian captivity of Israel to settle in the Americas. Shortly after their arrival, half of these refugees were cursed by God for their wickedness with dark skin, to become the ancestors of Native Americans. Through later centuries in the book, light-skinned “Nephites” and dark-skinned “Lamanites” rose, fought, and fell, until they were visited by Jesus Christ, who preached his gospel to them and brought about a 200-year, Pax Romana–style peace. However, by around 300 CE, relations between the two races deteriorated once again, and eventually all Nephites were exterminated, the last of them, Mormon and Moroni, leaving a written record in the Golden Plates to be discovered by Joseph Smith. In 1830, Smith both published The Book of Mormon in English and officially formed the faith he then called “The Church of Christ.”

Joseph Smith reads from the Book of Mormon, the text Smith purportedly translated from metal plates he found in Upstate New York containing pre-Columbian history. Mormons’ view of themselves as the followers of the only true church created conflict in many midwestern towns and pushed them to create the State of Deseret in Utah. (Chris Hellier/Corbis)

Then and now, critics have pointed out problems with these narratives, both in Mormonism’s 19thcentury origins and in their scripture, which was intended by Smith to be read as both scripture and history. Archaeological (and later genetic) evidence has complicated The Book of Mormon’s story of Indians originating as Israelites. More subtly, some scholars have postulated that Smith, coming from a long folk tradition of treasure hunting, divining, and magic translation, actually envisioned and wrote The Book of Mormon first, and only considered building a religion from it much later. Regardless of interpretation, The Book of Mormon’s content was very relevant for the time it was published, and it responded to multiple problems and issues that American and colonial theologians had been wrestling with. It explained the origins of Indians in terms that agreed with biblical literalism and Adamic origins, a conundrum that thinkers going back to Columbus had wrestled with. It gave strength to existing missionary efforts to convert Indians by viewing their redemption as a return to the lost faith of their ancestors. And, perhaps most of all, The Book of Mormon gave a young, confident America a sense of “biblical legitimacy” on a grand, cosmic scale, in the words of Mormon historian Richard Bushman. For this reason, the scripture and religion attracted hundreds, and later thousands of new converts.

However, Mormonism’s sense of separatism and adherents’ exclusionary view of themselves as followers of the only true church brought them into conflict on multiple occasions, and for nearly 20 years, Mormons moved from settlement to settlement in the U.S. Midwest, searching for a home free from outside interference. In 1837, several years after moving church headquarters to Ohio, Smith lost hundreds of followers after encouraging them to invest in failed banknotes. Moving to Missouri shortly thereafter, Mormons found themselves in a state that was already bitterly divided over states’ rights and slavery. Few Mormons owned slaves, and most were from northeastern backgrounds and were wary of slavery. This led to conflict with Missourians who worried that a large Mormon voting bloc could upset any balance that the state had, and not even Smith’s official revelation/announcement that blacks were inferior in the eyes of the church diffused tensions. By 1838, vigilante mob attacks between Mormons and Missourians had led to a state of war, marked most tragically by the murder of 18 Mormons at Haun’s Mill by a Missouri mob. In 1839, most Mormons moved to a new town site chosen by Smith along the banks of the Mississippi River at Nauvoo, Illinois, where they hoped to build a lasting community and stronghold. Here, their numbers swelled to nearly 15,000 and the church made greater gains at becoming a distinctive, autonomous culture. Nauvoo became one of Illinois’s largest cities, a stately temple was constructed, and Smith became both mayor and general of the city. By 1844, he had also stated his intentions to run for the U.S. presidency. But all of this quickly ended. Rumors increased that Mormon men were practicing polygamy, and most disturbingly that Smith had actually ordered other men to give their wives to him for “spiritual sealing” in secret temple ceremonies. In June 1844, The Nauvoo Expositor, published by William Law, a former counselor to Smith, printed its first and only issue, which detailed these accusations of polygamy. Smith retaliated swiftly, instituting martial law in the city and ordering the destruction of the paper’s press and offices. To a state and nation that held freedom of the press and democratic dissent as near-sacrosanct, this action went too far, and Smith was arrested. While awaiting trial in nearby Carthage Jail, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed on June 27, 1844, by an anti-Mormon mob. In the two or three years following the death of Mormonism’s charismatic founder and prophet, the faith was poised on the brink of dissolution, and it might have faded into being just another one of the 19th century’s curious millenarian cults. Mormons fled Nauvoo and their temple was burned by mobs. A schism emerged in which Smith’s widow, mother, and son declared their support for dynastic leadership and disavowed polygamy. This faction of Mormonism remained in the Midwest, calling itself the “Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (today it is called the Community of Christ). However, most Mormons by 1846 opted to follow Brigham Young, a Vermont carpenter who began prophesying that the faithful should flee the secular evils of the United States to a stronghold somewhere in the Far West of North America. In some ways, Young’s westward vision was not new; Smith had considered settling in California or Oregon, and even approached Sam Houston about the possibility of a Mormon-populated “buffer zone” between Texas and Mexico. However, Young’s vision was something different, both in thought and location. Realizing that Mormons would likely run into further conflict if they settled in lush, fertile land such as Oregon or California, Young instead opted for the little-known Great Basin between the Wasatch Mountains and barren Salt Lake. In July 1847, after a grueling overland trek, the first Mormon settlers descended into what would become Salt Lake City, Utah. Thousands more would follow. In their mythical worldview, this State of Deseret, as Mormons called it, was destined to be the stronghold of a Mormon theocracy. They were literal New World Israelites, Young was their Moses, and the Salt Lake Valley was their Promised Land. Quickly, they constructed ordered villages, organized

irrigation systems, and began expanding both north and south from Salt Lake City. Within a decade, Mormon settlements were scattered hundreds of miles in all directions into present-day Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and even California. With this expansion, Mormons hoped to fulfill The Book of Mormon prophecies of converting Indians, to fulfill biblical Isaiahic prophecies about “making the desert bloom,” and perhaps even, most grandiosely, rise up to overpower the corrupt and sinful United States. But for all of this assured destiny, Mormons would always have to live, to some degree, under the power of the rising United States. They arrived at the Great Salt Lake when it was part of Mexico, rationally anticipating annexation by the United States—indeed, several hundred young Mormon men formed a volunteer battalion to fight in the Mexican-American War. Young stressed self-sufficiency and economic isolationism; the church’s existing prohibition of alcohol, tobacco, and coffee had its origins in the fact that these luxuries all had to be imported, and thus tied Mormons to outside trade. But at the same time, the Mormon economy relied heavily on trade with emigrants en route to gold rush California. By the mid-1850s, the federal government had gradually shrunk the borders of Mormon Deseret into a much smaller “Utah Territory” and appointed a string of out-of-touch territorial governors to replace Young’s theocratic power. In 1857, as a result of power struggles between governors and Young, the “Utah War” occurred, in which federal troops invaded Utah and Mormon vigilantes murdered a party of overlanders in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Though Mormons craved isolation from a United States that had rejected them, they would always be under the power of the rising American state. Following the U.S. Civil War, a new, stronger federal government sought to incorporate peripheries of the nation—whether Southern, Hispanic, Indian, or Mormon—into a more modern and integrated political nation. The radical wing of the Republican Party had sworn since before the Civil War to eradicate “the twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy,” and with the South now crushed and railroads connecting East to West as never before, Mormons realized that they were now even more vulnerable. The last vestige of Mormon isolationism in Utah may very well have died with Brigham Young in 1877. The church’s monopoly in dictating settlement and town building gradually weakened. Federal surveyors such as John Wesley Powell traversed the Utah wilderness, mapping and making notes of its resources for outside investment. Most profoundly, with the passage of the 1887 antipolygamy EdmundsTucker Act, the church was officially disincorporated, its ability to fund itself cut off, and federal marshals raided communities throughout Utah, arresting polygamists and breaking up Mormon families. In 1890, realizing that statehood was the key to Mormon autonomy, and that this would never come until polygamy had ended, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a formal manifesto repudiating plural marriage, long one of the church’s most foundational institutions. In 1896, after nearly 50 years of requesting it, Utah finally was granted statehood. Like Indian Oklahoma and Hispanic New Mexico, however, Mormon Utah remained in the eyes of the United States very much an isolated cultural periphery. In some ways, it remains this way to this day. This isolation is even more pronounced in scattered enclaves of fundamentalist Mormons, whose ancestors refused to give up polygamy and who continue the practice despite prohibitions by the law and mainstream Mormonism. Paul Nelson See also: Mountain Meadows Massacre; Smith, Joseph; Young, Brigham

Further Reading Arrington, Leonard. Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830–1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958. Bushman, Richard. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Shipps, Jan. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Stegner, Wallace. The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Morrill Land Grant Act (1862) Signed into law on July 2, 1862, and named after Vermont representative (and later senator) Justin Morrill, the Morrill Land Grant Act was the most important development for postsecondary education in the United States. The act made it possible for new Western states to create “land-grant” colleges focused on agriculture and engineering, and this was the first time the U.S. federal government had offered assistance for higher education. While the focus was on agriculture and mechanic arts, these schools did not exclude classics and general sciences. The land-grant colleges opened the world of higher education to farmers and workers and helped spur continued westward expansion and development. Almost 70 universities received their first start because of this original act, including the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Nebraska, Clemson University, Washington State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cornell University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The “Agriculture and Mechanic Arts” (A&M) focus was attached to the names of many of the original institutions, though except for a few schools like Texas A&M, most have not retained it. Officially entitled “An Act Donating Public Lands to the Several States and Territories Which May Provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts,” the Morrill Act granted 30,000 acres of land for each senator or representative a state had in Congress. In many cases, populous eastern states did not have any available land within their borders, and they used their “scrip” from the federal government to acquire available land in other states that could be sold and used to fund colleges in their own states. The total land allocated by the federal government under the act exceeded 100 million acres. As with Western states’ needs for development, the Morrill Act was equally important for Southern states, as many of these states had been devastated by the Civil War. In 1853, the Illinois state legislature was the first state to advocate that the national government create a system of land-grant institutions focused on agriculture and mechanic arts. Morrill pushed the cause on a national scale in part because of his own experience. One of many sons of a blacksmith, Morrill’s father could not afford higher education for him, forcing him to quit school at 15. Strongly influenced by the ideas of Jonathan Baldwin Turner, Morrill introduced a bill in 1857 to create such a system, but Southern states and some Western representatives opposed it. Though this bill still managed to pass both houses of Congress, it was vetoed by Democratic president James Buchanan. With Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and the succession of the Confederate states from the United States, Morrill again introduced the bill but added military training as an additional focal point for these colleges. This expanded military education outside the few eastern institutions where it was taught and prepared the way for the eventual creation of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) on university campuses. The military training element of the bill was important for President Lincoln since so many West Point graduates had joined the Confederates and were fighting against him and the Union. Without the Southern states’ representatives to oppose it and with a Republican president in favor of it, this transformative piece of legislation was passed. The genius of the legislation was that it revealed a practical vision for how the country could and should develop, and it used effectively one of the few resources the war-stricken United States had: land. Of course, this land had been and continued to be taken from Native Americans. Some states sold their land mostly to help fund existing colleges or create multiple new ones, but for a state to participate, at

least one new college focused on agriculture and mechanic arts had to be created with the monies from the sale of the land. Passage of the Morrill Act was remarkable considering previous opposition to such an educational program. It was also passed during the single bloodiest year of the Civil War. Yet in an economic context, the reasons for its passage are more obvious. At the time of its passage, approximately 90 percent of Americans were engaged in farming, and the previous years had witnessed declining crop production, as farmers had depleted the soil. This fed the demand for new land, but also the scientific drive to study agriculture and improve production as a national concern. Since agriculture was vitally important to the country in economic terms, there were good reasons to focus on the development of new farming techniques and machinery. Prior to the Morrill Act, only the wealthy elite attended colleges and they did so to become ministers, doctors, or lawyers. There was now a critical need for a practical and accessible education to help continue the nation’s development. In many cases, women were able to take advantage of these opportunities, such as the women who graduated from the first class at Iowa State University. A second Morrill Act was passed in 1890 to address the state of education in Southern states and to require these states to admit African Americans or create “separate but equal” colleges and universities specifically for African American students, and in 1894, specific colleges for Native Americans. The land-grant schools were influential in lobbying for another, later, national educational effort in the post– World War II period, the G.I. Bill. Today there are more than 100 land-grant colleges, and virtually all of them maintain the key distinctive feature of extension programs designed to disseminate and apply research knowledge within their local communities. Eric L. Payseur See also: Homestead Act

Further Reading Cross, Coy F. Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant Colleges. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999. Morrill Land Grant Act (1862). http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=33. Accessed October 14, 2014. Williams, Roger L. The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-Grant College Movement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.

Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857) The Mountain Meadows Massacre was a tragedy in which, on September 11, 1857, in southwest Utah, approximately 130 overland migrants were killed by Mormon settlers and Paiute Indians. To this day, it remains controversial. Different historical accounts have viewed it as an Indian attack, a frontier vigilante action, a premeditated and preemptive act of war, or a result of blind religious fanaticism. There were elements of all these phenomena in the events surrounding the massacre. The massacre was by far the most drastic event to stem from a short dispute between Mormon Utah and the United States called “The Utah War,” in which a military expedition under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston marched on Salt Lake City in the summer of 1857 to enforce the installation of a federally appointed territorial governor. The attitudes of both Mormons and Americans during this conflict are essential to understanding how something such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre could have occurred. To the U.S. government and President James Buchanan, Mormon Utah was an antidemocratic theocracy, which ignored federal law by practicing polygamy and disregarded federally appointed governors in favor of their prophet Brigham Young. For a nation debating state versus federal authority on the verge of

the Civil War, Buchanan likely also believed that he could use the invasion of Utah as a demonstration to the Southern states of federal military action. The perspective of 1850s Mormons toward the rest of the United States was more complex. They held bitter memories of nearly two decades of religious persecution in which they had been violently driven from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois before fleeing to Utah in 1847. Upon arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, Young had prophesied that Mormons would be able to stand up to their former persecutors. Coincidentally, word of Johnston’s army first reached Mormons as they were celebrating the 10th anniversary of their arrival in Utah. Indian relations and alliances were also essential to the Mormon view of conflict with the United States. Their scripture, The Book of Mormon, portrayed Indians as a “fallen” people who could be redeemed through both religious conversion and military alliances with Mormons. In power struggles with the United States, Young frequently referred to Indians as the “Battle Axe of the Lord,” and pointed out that he had the political power to unleash hostile tribes upon Americans if he chose to do so. The Fancher party of northwest Arkansas happened to enter this situation as they were making their way to California. Though they were not lacking for money, they found it difficult to buy essential supplies from Mormons, who were preparing for Johnston’s invasion. About 300 miles south of Salt Lake City, the party stopped at a grassy spring called Mountain Meadows, where they planned to feed and water their livestock in preparation for the final, difficult push across the Mojave Desert into California. After this point, the historical record becomes hazier. A war party of Paiutes ambushed the Fanchers, who circled their wagons and easily drove them off. However, children who witnessed this initial attack would later recall seeing white faces along with the Indian attackers. It is likely that Mormons from nearby settlements, including Bishop John D. Lee and militia commander William Dame, encouraged and aided the Paiutes in this attack with the goal of demonstrating their Indian alliance to other American invaders. When it became clear that the Arkansans had a formidable defense, and had also witnessed Mormons fighting alongside the Indians, Mormon leaders may have panicked. Approaching the party under a white flag, Lee warned them that the Paiutes were angry over their defeat, but offered to give the party an armed escort to safety in the nearest Mormon town. On the morning of September 11, the Fancher party voluntarily surrendered their weapons. Men, women, and children formed an orderly line, escorted by an armed Mormon militia. On a prearranged signal, each militiaman turned on the line and fired his gun. Paiutes quickly came in to kill any survivors. Only children under the age of eight were spared and sent to live with adoptive Mormon families. In Salt Lake City, church leaders struggled with the aftermath of the massacre. Although Brigham Young had wanted to demonstrate the power of his Indian alliances to U.S. invaders, he had not expected circumstances to spiral so quickly out of control. As winter settled in, Johnston’s army set up camp outside Salt Lake City with minimal violence. All the men who had been involved in the massacre swore themselves to secrecy, and within a few years, the troops had left Utah to fight in the Civil War. Eventually, responding to further federal inquiries into the massacre, church leaders realized that blame needed to be laid on at least one Mormon. Although he had remained loyal to Young for most of his life, John D. Lee became a scapegoat for the tragedy: he was blamed for inciting Indians against the Fanchers, excommunicated from the church, and lived for years as a fugitive in the southern Utah desert. In 1877, he was finally arrested and executed at Mountain Meadows. He would be the only Mormon ever punished for the tragedy. Through the final decades of the 1800s, official Mormon history and informal folk memory packaged the massacre as an Indian attack prompted by Lee. However, underlying Mormon attitudes still clearly

viewed the Fanchers as somehow having brought their fate upon themselves. They began telling stories of how the Fancher party had insulted Mormon women, brawled with Mormon men, and poisoned Indian water sources before reaching Mountain Meadows. Most significantly, a story emerged of a band of outlaw ruffians that was traveling with the party, who called themselves the “Missouri Wildcats” and bragged of having killed the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith in 1844. While still avoiding direct responsibility, they somehow justified the tragedy by tying its victims to Mormonism’s darkest period. However, subsequent research has shown no contemporary historical accounts of the Fancher party’s misdeeds. The process of understanding Mountain Meadows continues to unfold. In 1950, Mormon historian Juanita Brooks uncovered new evidence showing that nearly every adult Mormon male in southern Utah had taken part in the massacre. More recently, in 2002, Will Bagley argued that the massacre might have been ordered from the highest levels of Mormon leadership. For a religion that has always emphasized divine revelation given to their leaders, the possibility that Brigham Young might have been involved in this tragedy remains the most contentious element of the massacre even today. Paul Nelson See also: Mormonism; Smith, Joseph; Young, Brigham

Further Reading Bagley, Will. Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Brooks, Juanita. John D. Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat. Glendale, CA: Arthur Clark, 1962. Brooks, Juanita. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962 (1950).

Mountain Men Mountain men were fur trappers, explorers, and frontiersmen who were instrumental in exploring and settling the American West. Their exploits made them a potent symbol of the American West and furthered the idea of Manifest Destiny. Most mountain men began their careers as fur trappers and later became explorers and guides to the growing number of migrants heading westward. The West was synonymous with freedom and adventure. Life on the frontier was harsh, but it offered men such as former slave James Beckwourth an opportunity to prosper through hard work and determination.

Mountain men lead a pack mule in the Rocky Mountains. Though overly-romanticized by 20th-century-American popular culture, Euro-American traders and trappers were important intermediaries between Native American groups and the U.S. government. (Christie’s Images/Corbis)

During the 19th century, the fur trade was one of the largest commercial ventures in America. John Jacob Astor, a native of Germany, wanted to establish a western outpost for his Pacific Fur Company. Astor’s intention was to ship valuable furs to Asia and beat British and Canadian rivals. In 1811, Astor sent a boat, the Tonquin, to the Northwest, where its crew built a fortified trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River. Additionally, Astor sent an overland expedition headed by explorer William Price Hunt. This group left Missouri and followed the path described by Lewis and Clark in their journals. Hunt’s group reached Fort Astoria in February 1812 after nearly a year on the trail. Later that year, Robert Stuart, an explorer and one of Astor’s business partners, led a return trip from Astoria to St. Louis. When Stuart decided to travel south to avoid problems with Indians, his group discovered the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains. Although Stuart kept careful notes of the route, the South Pass, which would later become instrumental in westward expansion, was not widely used for at least another decade. The fur trade continued to expand, enticing men willing to leave the comforts of home. Many mountain men began their careers in St. Louis, Missouri, including members of the Chouteau family and its rival, Manuel Lisa. John Colter, a scout for Lewis and Clark, was hired by Lisa to guide his fur traders into the mountains. Colter was the first American to explore the Yellowstone River area. In 1808, Lisa and the Chouteaus formed the Missouri Fur Company. The War of 1812 brought a depression in the fur trade that lasted into the 1820s, when fashion dictates made fur desirable again. In 1822, William Ashley partnered with Andrew Henry to create the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. They advertised in the St. Louis newspapers for men willing to trap for beaver for up to three years at a time. Many responded to the advertisement, and “Ashley’s Hundred” included Jim Bridger, Jim Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Hugh Glass, Jedediah Smith, and William Sublette, among others. In contrast with the image of a lone mountain man tending his traps, the trappers usually traveled in large groups of 40 to 60 men and established a base camp from which small parties of two or three men would set out to find beaver. The possibility of attack by hostile Indians was an ever-present threat, but because trappers learned to speak Indian languages and communicated with sign language, they built a rapport with friendly Indians who then helped mountain men avoid hostile tribes. Beaver pelts were the most sought-after fur because of the thick, lustrous hair, but sea otter, river otter, and muskrat pelts were also prized commodities. Beavers were abundant in the American West and only

absent from the arid areas of the southwest. While some mountain men worked for a company, others were “free trappers” who sold their furs to the highest bidder. Trappers rode long distances to the trading posts to exchange their furs, which could mean a trip of 1,200 miles or more. Ashley realized this was a waste of time, so he devised a rendezvous system. Rather than go to a trading post, his men would meet at a prearranged time and place to drop off furs and pick up supplies. It was advantageous to trappers to stay in the field as much as possible because they could make more money. The rendezvous system expanded into a month-long celebration that attracted trappers and businessmen, women and children, and Indians. The rendezvous was a way for trappers to socialize, play games, and get drunk. As the mountain men sat around the campfire, they spun tall tales that would find their way into the national consciousness. Mountain men took only the bare necessities out into the wilderness. In addition to a riding horse, they would take at least one other horse or mule for carrying furs. Their equipment included animal traps, blankets and spare clothing, rifles and knives, tobacco, cooking utensils, and food, including coffee. They supplemented their diet by hunting game and harvesting fruit and berries. Mountain men typically wore heavy wool hats and coats, buckskin trousers and shirts, and moccasins, supplementing their European style of dress with furs and durable leather to better adapt to the hostile environment of the West. Famous mountain men include Jedediah Strong Smith (1799–1831) and Jim Bridger (1804–1881). Smith was a clean-shaven, devout Christian who survived a grizzly attack and was the first white man to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Bridger signed on with Ashley’s Hundred at age 17. He was the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake, and he discovered Bridger Pass, a route through the Rocky Mountains that shortened the Oregon Trail by 60 miles. After the fur trade peaked in the 1830s, falling prices made trapping less attractive and mountain men turned to exploration or became guides for western settlers. Some turned to their invaluable experience dealing with Indians and helped mediate disputes between Anglos and Indians. The former Indian fighter Kit Carson became an agent for the Ute Indians, and Thomas Fitzpatrick (1795–1854) negotiated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Karen S. Garvin See also: Ashley, William Henry; Astor, John Jacob; Chouteau Family; Factory System; Hudson’s Bay Company; Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790; Lisa, Manuel; Smith, Jedediah Strong

Further Reading DeVoto, Bernard. Across the Wide Missouri. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Hafen, LeRoy R. Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Utley, Robert M. A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

National Parks Commonly referred to as “America’s greatest idea,” national parks originated amid grave concerns over the nation’s rapid 19th-century westward expansion. Artist George Catlin was among the first to present such a grand idea, though it was naturalist writer John Muir who largely convinced Congress of its value and mobilized popular support to achieve it by the late 1860s. The earliest parks were envisioned as natural museums and monuments to national grandeur rather than as entities intended for the preservation

of natural environments. Policy shifts over the next 50 years would reflect changing attitudes toward preservation and the purpose of national parks, as the steady progression of settlers and developers increasingly altered the environment, and the identity, of the United States. Though many other frontier artists became distressed over the devastating impact that expansion continued to have on the wilderness, wildlife, and Indian populations of America’s western region, it was George Catlin who first articulated the great need for the federal government to preserve areas of the nation as “parks.” His early interest in the Native peoples of the West was piqued by the collection of artifacts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the possession of his friend, the naturalist and America’s first museum curator Charles Willson Peale. Catlin’s fascination with America’s Indians was also heavily influenced by the pervasive sense that Indians were members of a “vanishing race” of peoples. In 1830, he accompanied General William Clark on an expedition of diplomacy up the Mississippi River into Indian Territory. For the next six years, Catlin traveled extensively, sketching and painting landscapes, portraits of Indians, and scenes of daily life. His 1832 trip to the Fort Union trading post near the North Dakota–Montana border proved especially enlightening, for his several weeks among 18 different tribes spurred the realization that these Indians and their way of life would be forever changed as the frontier gradually pushed westward. The sense of loss experienced firsthand by Catlin would not be mirrored in the East for some time. The doubling of the nation’s size after the Mexican-American War, thereby opening an enormous territory to settlers, and frenzied migrations such as the California Gold Rush, made some take pause and consider the long-term ramifications of this express growth. In 1864, the Lincoln administration and Congress supported the donation of Yosemite Valley to California for its preservation as a state park. As settlers, speculators, and miners flooded west and wagon roads were followed by the construction of dams and railways, naturalists such as John Muir wrote of the threatened beauty and grandeur of wild America. America’s earliest celebrated environmental activist, Muir championed the romantic view of nature. He argued that the identity of the country was rooted in such places; they needed to continue to exist for America to keep its soul. The idea that public lands would be protected and administered by the federal government was eventually manifested in the establishment of Yellowstone National Park on March 1, 1872. Yellowstone was both America’s and the world’s first genuinely national park. Five more such parks followed over the next 25 years, aided by both firm congressional commitment and the fervent advocacy of groups such as the Sierra Club, founded by Muir in 1884. Not generally told in the story of parks’ creation, however, is the exclusion and dispossession many Indian groups faced as traditional practices of hunting and seasonal burning were now classified as poaching and arson. Despite these conflicts, efforts to establish national parks in the United States received substantially more devotion under President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. Between 1901 and 1909, 5 new parks, 18 monuments, 4 game refuges, 51 bird sanctuaries, and more than 100 million acres of forest came under national protection. The rapid expansion of the preservation movement led to concerns over funding and management. A different vision of land management policy contended that these vast tracts of land should be carefully managed for their resources to the benefit of the nation. Gifford Pinchot, who played a key role in founding the Division of Forestry and upgrading it to bureau status by 1901, advocated for the control of the national parks system by the Forest Service. This approach of utility over aesthetics, many argued, was actually a traditional American position. San Francisco began lobbying in 1882 for the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley located in Yosemite National Park to ensure a fresh water supply for the city. In the aftermath of the great fire and earthquake of 1906, calls for the dam became more urgent until the project was approved. While the dam was built, the project proved to be a seminal event in the history of America’s national parks.

Photograph of the Great Falls at Yellowstone River by William Henry Jackson, taken in 1872. Yellowstone was made the United States’ first national park in 1872. (Library of Congress)

The unprecedented campaign for conservation that resulted in the furor over the dam controversy, led by John Muir and his Sierra Club, signaled a shift in popular opinion on preservation policy. The creation of a central body responsible for the operation and protection of national parks won serious support from Congress, especially once news of Hetch Hetchy Valley and other incursions into these “protected areas” by private development and commercial interests including railways, ranches, sawmills, mines, as well as hotels and shops, became more widely circulated. In 1915, wealthy industrialist Stephen Mather galvanized widespread support for a National Park Service dedicated to the principle of preservation. The bureaucracy would provide consistent leadership and define park standards. When it was finally created on August 25, 1916, by the passage of the Organic Act, the Park Service chose Mather as its director. Under his leadership, the National Park Service developed the standards that remain as its ideals today. Operating under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service was responsible for protecting the 40 national parks and monuments then in existence. It would not be until an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, however, that the National Park Service was tasked with the management of all federal parklands, thus setting the stage for the development of a comprehensive national parks system. Michael Dove See also: Artists, Western; Catlin, George; Manifest Destiny; Northwest Territory; Romantic Thinkers

Further Reading Grusin, Richard. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. 4th ed. New York: Taylor, 2010.

Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Oklahoma Land Run (1889) The Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 opened the Oklahoma district, or so-called Unassigned Lands, to AngloAmerican homesteaders sanctioned by American federal decree. The land run was spurred 10 years earlier when Elias C. Boudinot, a Cherokee railroad attorney, announced in the Chicago Tribune that land located on the eastern margins of Indian Territory was available for settlement. Though the land was originally occupied by Creeks and Seminoles, it was seized after the Civil War by the American federal government. In 1879, three Anglo-American groups tried illegally to enter the territory to claim land and were turned back by U.S. Army guards. Their desire for the land would not go unsatiated for long, however. Ten years later, mounting pressure to colonize this fertile, two-million-acre region finally won the day, and President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed this contested spot of Indian Territory open for settlement. At high noon on April 22, 1889, a pistol shot instigated a stampede of approximately 10,000 prospective settlers in the Oklahoma district. Backed by the Homestead Act of 1862, a homesteader could claim 160 acres of public land for a mere $15 filing fee. Among those ready to stake their claims were railroad workers, soldiers, carpenters, and woodcutters. Federal officials were also numerous, including quite a number of U.S. marshals and their deputies. Because of late-19th-century social restrictions, few African Americans were at the forefront of the rush, yet many still managed to claim land behind the initial throng. As the federal government was worried about the vast number of settlers, military troops were stationed in the area prior to the official “opening time” to detract from anyone attempting to “jump the gun.” However, numerous homesteaders were able to sneak into the Unassigned Lands and stake claims while their comrades waited on the perimeter. In particular, federal officials often took advantage of their power and were some of the most notorious for their illegal land seizure. Those who jumped the gun were dubbed “Sooners,” a moniker eventually ascribed to the entire state. Not surprisingly, hundreds of legal battles arose from the unlawful land grabbing. These contests were debated first at local land offices, and when local law enforcement could no longer assist, the Department of the Interior was called on to intervene. Often, arguments hinged on such technicalities as what determined the “legal time of entry” to claim the land: was it the position of the sun at high noon or Greenwich Mean Time? Although the Land Run was initially created to divvy up individual agricultural allotments, many settlers were also piqued by the communal, political opportunities that could arise from the new formation of town governances. The Seminole Townsite and Improvement Company was the most renowned of several promotional ventures based on accruing political power. Founded by officials of the Santa Fe Railway line, the company surveyed the town sites along the routes of its various stations near the modern-day site of Seminole, even planting men aboard the first trains into the Unassigned Lands so that they would be ready to stake their claims before anyone else. A few of the legal battles ensuing from such practices found their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. One such case in 1892 was Smith v. Townsend. The court found that Alexander Smith, a Santa Fe railway worker from Edmond Station, had acted illegally in making his run from the railroad right-of-way. The court’s ruling eventually resulted in many older settlers, such as the prominent William Couch family, losing their valuable land claims in Oklahoma City and elsewhere. Likewise, there were other groups with similar entrepreneurial aims, culminating in

the selling of conflicting town lots to buyers and producing added confusion in an already frenzied environment. Oklahoma City, Edmond, and Guthrie were all affected by these types of ventures. The Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 led to the formation of the Oklahoma Territory under the Organic Act of 1890 and to the 46th state of the union, Oklahoma, in 1907. Its imperial success also set the stage for further Indian dispossession at the hands of Anglo settlers in Indian Territory, including the Cherokee Outlet in the north, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation in the west, and the Iowa, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi reservations in the east. LuElla D’Amico See also: General Land Office; Homestead Act; Indian Territory

Further Reading Dubois, Muriel, and Sidney Theil. Indians and the Oklahoma Land Rush. Amawalk, NY: Jackdaw, 2002. Gibson, Arrell Morgan. Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. Hoig, Stan. The Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1984.

Oregon Trail Spanning half a continent and stretching more than 2,000 miles, the Oregon Trail was the key northern overland migration route used by Euro-American immigrants through the American West during the mid19th century. As well as serving as a route for westbound transit, the Oregon Trail produced Indian–white interactions that transformed Native American lifeways and helped the United States in its cultural goals of Manifest Destiny, including the subjugation of Native peoples. The trail is marked by myriad cutoffs and shortcuts along its route from Missouri to Oregon. The basic route started in Independence/Kansas City, followed the Santa Fe Trail just south of the Kansas River, then angled to Nebraska along the Little Blue River onto the Platte River. It followed the Platte and North Platte Rivers to South Pass through the Wind River Mountains. The trail then followed the Snake River to the Columbia River before arriving at Oregon City (the trail’s terminus) or taking the Barlow Road to the Willamette Valley. Fur traders, trappers, and missionaries during the 1820s and 1830s were the first to use the trail. Their activities altered the economies, marriage patterns, and other lifeways of many indigenous cultures. More significant, however, was the flood of emigrants during the 1840s and 1850s, whose contact with Native Americans fostered a wide range of Indian–white relations. Myths of the treacherous American West and “savage” Indians plaguing the trail were strong public perceptions during the 1800s. To be sure, some Indian–emigrant violence erupted along the trail, but the great majority of Indian–white exchanges were positive and peaceful, especially during the early years of trail use during the 1840s. Many Indians provided advice to emigrants, guided them, and acted as interpreters or packers. Others helped emigrant groups navigate treacherous western waters. Still others carried mail eastward and cut wood or hay for westbound travelers. Some even operated toll roads and bridges. Much of this Indian–emigrant interaction centered on the exchange and barter of goods, and Indians were shrewd business people and negotiators. Tribes often traded horses, moccasins, robes, lariats, and foods in exchange for trinkets, weapons, ammunition, coffee, sugar, and similar items. The most extensive trading occurred along the more western stretches of the trail between Fort Hall in Idaho and the Oregon country, not on the Great Plains as is the common perception. Both groups viewed each

other as strange curiosities with peaceful interaction, trading, and mutual aid prevailing along the trail early on.

Illustration by William Henry Jackson depicting the first covered wagon caravan on the Oregon Trail led by Smith-JacksonSublette near present-day Lander, Wyoming. The trail transformed Native American lifeways and helped the United States become a conti- nental empire. (Corbis)

DONNER PARTY In 1841, a group of emigrants left the Oregon Trail in Soda Springs, Idaho, and headed southwest to the Humboldt River. From there, they followed its sink to the Carson River and thence to the Walker River. They crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains between the Walker and Stanislaus Rivers and a few weeks later reached San Francisco, becoming the first group of Euro-American settlers to travel what would become the California Trail. Five years later, a party led by George and Jacob Donner decided that rather than taking this established trail to California, they would follow the guidance of Lansford W. Hastings and take the immodestly named Hastings Cutoff. This decision would cost them 18 days and most of their supplies before they reached Salt Lake City. Now pressed for time and exhausted physically and mentally, the fractured group decided to try to make it through the Sierra Nevada Mountains before the first winter storm hit. They did not make it, getting stranded in the mountains on October 19. By the middle of December, it was clear the group would not make it through the winter, and the 15 strongest survivors decided to go for help. Ultimately only seven of the Forlorn Hope, as the 15 were called, survived the 32-day ordeal, in part by resorting to cannibalism. On January 10, 1847, the seven stumbled into an Indian camp. A little over a month later, the first of several rescue groups reached the rest of the snowbound travelers at the original camp. They fared little better, however, also resorting to eating those who died. Of the 89 who began the journey, only 45 survived.

U.S. interests in Oregon originally consisted of fur traders, most of them employed by the American Fur Company. The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition had established some claim to the land, but few Americans actually lived in Oregon. The idea of emigration to Oregon began to spread in 1829, when Hall Jackson Kelley organized the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of Oregon Territory. The first permanent U.S. inhabitants came to Oregon for religious, not financial reasons. After a small group of Native Americans from the region visited St. Louis, Methodist missionaries set off in 1834 to spread Christianity. Jason Lee and his nephew Daniel established a mission at Salem in the Willamette Valley. Another missionary, Samuel Parker, arrived too late to join the Lee party. He returned to New York, where he rounded up support for another group to travel to Oregon the following year. In 1836, Marcus Whitman and his wife, and Henry Harmon and Eliza Hart Spalding took the first wagons

from the east into Oregon. Narcissa Whitman and Spalding were the first white women to move to the Oregon Territory. Stories about the rich Willamette Valley and the land available spread among Americans, thanks to people like Kelley. Many people dispossessed by the Panic of 1837 saw Oregon as a place for a new beginning. They began to form groups that could travel with greater safety and could pool resources for difficult times. Caravans of wagons with livestock crossed the plains on their way to Oregon. Information about the best route to follow spread, creating the Oregon Trail. Fur trappers and traders had conducted the preliminary survey work. The trail began in Independence, Missouri. Wagons could travel some 1,200 miles northwest along the Platte and North Platte rivers, until they reached Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a post established by the American Fur Company. There, travelers could rest, repair equipment, and buy supplies for the next leg of the trip. The immigrants continued northwest and crossed the Continental Divide at South Pass. They continued west until Fort Hall. Another leg remained, along with a crossing of the Snake River. Immigrants who wanted to settle in the Willamette Valley finished with a boat journey down the Columbia River. Antebellum-era migration quickened along the trail, producing less-than-friendly confrontations and eventual military conquest of Western tribes. Natives recognized quickly the threats that overlanders posed. Emigrant livestock overgrazed the region, emigrants depleted timber resources, and they also overhunted and drove away buffalo and other game. Waters became contaminated, and epidemic diseases spread. By traveling along major rivers, emigrants monopolized important resource areas as well. Increasing numbers of Americans traveled the Oregon Trail each year. In 1843, the Great Migration took place, with nearly 900 settlers making the trip. Two years later, the total was around 2,500 people. In 1847, 4,000 Americans crossed the Continental Divide to Oregon. For most, Native Americans provided guides, food, and assistance. In return, the settlers often spread diseases such as smallpox and depleted wildlife. These conditions made the West a contested region between Indians and Euro-American immigrants. Native peoples responded by demanding compensation or tribute for lost resources, sometimes at the suggestion of government agents. During the 1850s, Manifest Destiny gave rise to a sense of entitlement and racial superiority and a predisposition toward suspicion and fear that was generated by guidebooks and newspapers, as emigrants became increasingly belligerent toward Native Americans. Some refused to pay compensation and at times violent confrontations erupted. The area of greatest conflict, however, was not the Great Plains region, but westward beyond South Pass where 90 percent of clashes on the trail occurred. One of the biggest problems was the shooting of cattle by Great Basin tribes, who hoped emigrants would leave the wounded animals for the taking. The result of increased tensions between tribes and emigrants along the trail eventually led to a greater U.S. government presence in the American West. Peace commissions and treaty negotiations to open the American West and to ensure safe passage for overlanders increased. The Oregon Trail became a major pathway for the U.S. government’s colonization of the region. In 1854, along the trail near Fort Laramie, an incident involving a passing wagon train precipitated what became known as the Grattan Fight, in which an Army officer and his troops were killed. This event altered Lakota–federal government relations from one of peaceful interactions to an inflammatory conflict between the United States and the Plains Indians that would not be resolved until the end of the 1870s. After the transcontinental railroad’s completion in 1869, the trail ceased to be used for long-distance travel. Tim Watts and S. Matthew DeSpain See also: Buffalo Cultures; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Manifest Destiny

Further Reading Faragher, John Mack. Women and Men on the Overland Trail. Rev. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Hunsaker, Joyce B. Seeing the Elephant: The Many Voices of the Oregon Trail. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003. Unruh, John D. The Plains Across: The Overland Immigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

O’Sullivan, John L. See Manifest Destiny Pacific Railroad Act (1862) The Pacific Railroad Act authorized the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroad companies to build a transcontinental rail line and offered government incentives to those willing to invest in the project. The legislation provided government bonds to help pay for construction as well as grants of federal land for the railway and a national telegraph line. While a second railroad act would be needed in 1864 to ensure adequate funding, the project was finally completed on May 10, 1869, when workers joined the two lines with a ceremonial “Golden Spike” at Promontory, Utah. The transcontinental railroad was a technological feat that linked the nation as never before. Travel time across the continent was reduced from several months to one week, and the railroad allowed for the economical movement of goods and people on an unprecedented scale. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on July 1, 1862, the act authorized extensive land grants in the western United States to the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad (later the Southern Pacific Railroad) companies to construct a continuous transcontinental railroad between the eastern side of the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the navigable waters of the Sacramento River in Sacramento, California. In addition, Congress loaned the railroads $16,000 to $48,000 per mile depending on the nature of the terrain and steepness of the grade through which the railroad would travel. These loans were in the form of 30-year government bonds that would provide the capital raised to the railroad companies upon completion of sections of the railroads in exchange for a lien on that section. While the construction of the railroad itself was the most dramatic result of the Pacific Railroad Act, its most lasting may be the precedent it set in establishing a system of land grants that transferred hundreds of millions of acres from the federal government to the railroad companies. In addition to all land within 200 feet of the track, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific received 20 alternating sections of land for each mile of track constructed (the nongranted area would remain as public lands to be dispersed by the General Land Office). This system of checkerboard land grants for railroad companies continued throughout the 19th century. Between 1862 and 1872, Congress granted more than 125 million acres of land to railroad companies (by various estimates, railroad grants made up between 7 and 10 percent of all land in the United States). In theory, the railroads would quickly sell the land to individual homesteaders, raising capital while facilitating development. While railroad grants did promote rapid settlement in some areas, in others the grants actually delayed migration of Anglo-American farmers. Congress had not realized how slowly some companies would be to select their routes and survey the land. While they decided, all lands along potential routes were closed. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, for example, 20 percent of potential homestead land in Kansas was closed. The lands that were open through the Homestead Act would be far away from any potential railroad, forcing potential settlers to purchase the land that was available from the railroad companies at much greater cost.

David Bernstein See also: Pacific Railroad Reports; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Bain, David Howard. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking, 1999. White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: Norton, 2011.

Pacific Railroad Reports (1853–1855) The Pacific Railroad Surveys were a series of explorations of the American West initiated to explore possible routes for a transcontinental railroad across North America. The expeditions included surveyors, scientists, and artists and resulted in an immense body of data regarding at least 400,000 square miles of the American West. In addition to the topography of possible routes, these surveys also gathered information on the geology, zoology, botany, and paleontology of the region, as well as provided ethnographic descriptions of the Native peoples encountered during the surveys. This information, along with many illustrations of landscapes, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, as well as many maps, were published by the U.S. War Department from 1855 to 1860 in a 13-volume set called the Pacific Railroad Reports. To accomplish the work of the Pacific Railroad Surveys, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis created a unit within the army named the Office of Pacific Railroad Explorations and Surveys. Headed by experienced topographic engineer William H. Emory, the office oversaw six field parties that mapped sections of the Southwest from the summer of 1853 to August 1855. Tensions between the states about where the potential rail line would be located, and suspicions that Jefferson Davis would favor a southern route, resulted in extensive resources being granted to the investigation of the northernmost route. While Congress and the railroad industry lobbyists thought of the surveys as a process for selecting one route, the topographical engineers saw the expeditions as an opportunity to fulfill the type of directive that Jefferson had given Lewis and Clark for a descriptive analysis of the West. The introduction of the reports stated that the expeditions would “observe and note all the objects and phenomena which have an immediate or remote bearing upon the railway, or which might seem to develop the resources, peculiarities, and climate of the country; to determine geographical positions, obtain the topography, observe the meteorology, including the data for barometric profiles.” The northernmost survey was led by Isaac Ingalls Stevens on a route between the 47th and 49th parallels from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Puget Sound in the Washington Territory. Stevens’s expedition worked in two parties. Stevens led his section from the upper Midwest and sent Captain George B. McClellan to Oregon via ship to work eastward. Accompanying the Stevens party was artist John Mix Stanley. A preliminary report of three volumes was compiled by Captain Humphreys and Lieutenant Gouverneur Kemble Warren and was published in 1855, even though all the survey parties had not turned in their information. Humphreys and Warren did not support Stevens’s northern route and focused their evaluation on the remaining three alternatives. A central route from St. Louis had been the long-held desire of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, fatherin-law of explorer John C. Frémont. Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith and Captain John W. Gunnison led a party over a central route along the 28th parallel by way of the headwaters of the Arkansas to the Great Salt Lake. This survey was cut short when the exploring party was attacked by a party of Ute Indians and several members were killed. Humphreys and Warren also disagreed with the concept of a central route, considering it impractical. The railroad lobby and business interests in St. Louis were so keen to see a central route selected, however, that the decommissioned Frémont was hired by these private interests to continue exploration of possible passages through the Rocky Mountains. The 35th parallel survey from Fort Smith to California via Albuquerque was commanded by Lieutenant Amiel W. Whipple. Whipple’s company included Lieutenant J. C. Ives and German artist

Heinrich Baldwin Mollhausen. Mollhausen was the official artist and naturalist for this survey party and contributed a large number of illustrations included in the final reports. The Whipple party benefited from hiring French Canadian scout Antoine Leroux, who had served as a scout on the Bartlett Boundary Survey in 1852. The southernmost route along the 32nd parallel was surveyed in two expeditions, one under Lieutenant John Pope and the other under Lieutenant John G. Parke. This expedition was also conducted in two parts, with Parke departing San Diego in January 1854 heading east and Pope departing from the Rio Grande in February 1854. Other parties under Parke, and Lieutenants Henry L. Abbot and Robert S. Williamson, explored the mountains of Oregon and California for potential railroad passes. The maps, illustrations, descriptions, and data about the landscape, plants, animals, and peoples of the West were collected into a 13-volume work, officially titled Reports of Exploration and Surveys to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economic Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. A map compiled by Warren showed the result of the surveys. Incorporating the existing body of knowledge illustrated in the maps of earlier explorers and combining it with the material gathered by the Pacific Railroad Surveys, Kemble’s comprehensive map showed military establishments, routes, and dates of expeditions. Secretary of War Davis declared the 32nd parallel to be the optimal choice for a transcontinental railroad. However, partisan discontent in Congress and the amount of data in the reports that illustrated the benefits to the different routes resulted in a stalemate. A transcontinental rail line would not be realized until after the Civil War. Rebecca Kohn See also: Pacific Railroad Act; Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army

Further Reading Goetzmann, William. Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. New York: History Book Club, 1993 (1966). Ronda, James P. Beyond Lewis and Clark: The Army Explores the West. Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 2003. Schubert, Frank, ed. The Nation Builders: A Sesquicentennial History of the Corps of Topographical Engineers 1838–1863. Fort Belvoir, VA: GPO, 1988. United States War Department. Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Made under the direction of the Secretary of War, in 1853–1854. House of Representatives Exec. Doc. No. 91, 33d Congress, 2d Session. Washington, DC: Nicholson, 1856.

Polk, James Knox (1795–1849) During his single term, President James Polk increased the size of the United States more than any executive since Thomas Jefferson. Born to frontier farmers in North Carolina, Polk attended the University of North Carolina and studied law under a Tennessee congressman and friend of President Andrew Jackson. In 1823, he won his first political election to the Tennessee state legislature. Two years later, he was elected to Jackson’s old seat representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served as Speaker of the House during the last two years of Jackson’s presidency and the first two of Van Buren’s. Chosen by Jackson as the best candidate to unite the Democratic Party, Polk campaigned for president with appeals to popular, expansionist views. His campaign slogans included “Reannexation for Texas and Oregon!” and “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” which referenced the northern

border of the Oregon Territory as jointly occupied with Britain since 1818. In 1844, Polk narrowly defeated Whig nominee Henry Clay to become the only Speaker of the House ever elected president. Polk’s presidency largely focused on foreign affairs as he attempted to expand the country west toward the Pacific Ocean. Polk opened negotiations with Britain regarding the Oregon Territory. At first, Polk echoed the call of his campaign supporters for U.S. rights to the entire territory, but when Britain balked, he compromised. The new border was set at the 49th parallel with the United States in control of the Columbia River and land rights all the way to the Pacific Coast. Just before Polk’s inauguration in March 1845, Congress passed a joint resolution to annex Texas even though Mexico threatened war. President Polk supported the reannexation of Texas. Furthermore, he offered to purchase the territories of New Mexico and California from Mexico. When Mexico refused, Polk concluded that military force would be necessary to take the territories. He had already prepared a message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Mexico when shots were fired over the disputed Texas-Mexico border. As U.S. forces defeated the Mexican army and occupied Mexico City in 1847, expansionist fever grew rampant at home among Democrats, some of whom pressured Polk to annex all of Mexico. Meanwhile, many Whigs sharply criticized the president for initiating war with Mexico. They dreaded the acquisition of new southwestern territories and the potential spread of slavery therein. In the end, Polk submitted a treaty, which the Senate approved, for the purchase of California and New Mexico and settlement of the Texas border at the Rio Grande River. The size of the United States increased by one-fourth with the vote.

James Knox Polk, 11th president of the United States, oversaw the dramatic territorial growth of the United States in the 1840s. His campaign slogans of “Reannexation for Texas and Oregon” and “54–40 or Fight” captured the expansionist sentiments of the Democratic party. (Library of Congress)

During the war with Mexico, Polk became concerned that Britain might take the opportunity to stake additional territorial claims in Central America. When New Granada initiated talks for a commercial

treaty, Polk secured the right of way across the Isthmus of Panama, the later location of the Panama Canal. He also, unsuccessfully, opened negotiations with Spain in hopes of purchasing Cuba. Polk chose not to run for reelection in 1848. He was disappointed by the defeat of his party’s candidate to Whig Zachary Taylor, for he viewed the loss as a public vote of disapproval with his administration. In his final State of Union address, he attempted to remind the nation of his accomplishments: “The Mississippi, so lately the frontier of our country, is now only its center.” In the same speech, Polk spoke of the quantities of gold discovered in the new California Territory and thereby helped trigger the massive gold rush of the following year. In 1849, Polk and his wife returned to Tennessee. Three months later, he contracted cholera and died shortly thereafter. Kathleen Gronnerud See also: Mexican-American War; Oregon Treaty; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Seguín, Juan; Texas, Republic of; Texas, Annexation of; Primary Documents: President James K. Polk’s Speech Reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine (1845)

Further Reading Borneman, Walter A. Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America. New York: Random House, 2008. Merry, Robert W. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Seigenthaler, John. James K. Polk. New York: Times Books, 2003.

Powell, John Wesley (1834–1902) John Wesley Powell was a U.S. Army officer, scientist, explorer, and bureaucrat. While best known for leading the first two successful expeditions down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, he was also visionary in explaining how desert lands in the American West should be used and regulated. On the broadest scale, he was a model and forerunner for later Progressive-era conservation measures that aimed to use educated, federal bureaucracies to protect natural resources from the more predatory elements of free market capitalism. Powell was born in New York to a traveling Methodist preacher, and through his childhood moved throughout the Great Lakes region. He began exploring rivers as a young man, and even rowed the majority of the Mississippi from Minnesota to New Orleans. During the Civil War, he distinguished himself, losing his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh and moving from the rank of private to colonel (although he referred to himself as “the Major” for most of his life). Following the war, Powell began teaching as a geology professor in Illinois and led his students on a series of summer trips through the Rocky Mountains. It was during these expeditions that Powell began considering the possibility of a river survey down the Green and Colorado Rivers through desert canyons in what was the most unmapped region of the United States. In May 1869, the Powell party began its journey in Green River, Wyoming. Though intended to be a structured geological survey, most of the expedition was a desperate struggle for survival. Over the course of four months, one boat was destroyed, numerous scientific instruments broke, food supplies molded or ran out, crew members nearly drowned, and Powell nearly fell to his death while rock climbing. Most tragically, only days before exiting the canyon in August, three members of the expedition opted to hike away from the river and were likely killed by Indians. Despite the tragedy and desperation

of this expedition, Powell was able to use his success to secure funding from the Smithsonian Institution for a second, more organized survey of the Colorado and its surrounding tributaries, which lasted through 1871–1872. By the mid-1870s, Powell was perhaps the nation’s foremost expert on what he called “The Arid Lands.” He published a sensational and extremely popular account of his river adventures, which is still in print today. Just as important was his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, which he submitted to Congress in 1879. In this conservation manifesto, Powell argued that the 1862 Homestead Act, which granted 160-acre parcels of land to settlers, was unsuitable for regions with less than 20 inches of rainfall annually. Powell also suggested the government restrain its grants only to those lands easily irrigated. Unfortunately, Congress ignored this report. Had Powell’s advice been heeded, later drought tragedies such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s might have been less severe. Powell eventually directed the U.S. Geological Survey, branched his interests into anthropology and ethnology, and continued to promote stories of his river expeditions. He died in 1902 in Maine. Paul Nelson See also: U.S. Geological Survey

Further Reading Powell, John Wesley. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (originally published 1895, numerous reprints available). Powell, John Wesley. Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah. Boston: Harvard Common Press, 1983 (1879). Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the American West. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. Worster, Donald. A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Preemption Act of 1841 The Preemption Act of 1841, was a federal act designed to give legal preemption rights to squatters who “improved” up to 160 acres of federally owned land. Signed into law by President John Tyler, the Preemption Act codified a series of temporary measures that had retroactively pardoned squatters. Legally, preemption means “prior right of purchase” or “purchase before the sale.” A squatter, who filed a preemption right, had to prove no other person had made a similar claim and also pledge to “improve” the land by fencing it, living on it, and making it productive. It proved to be a boon to land speculators and settlers and a disaster for indigenous Americans. The passage of the Preemption Act marked a shift from the largely unsuccessful land auction system that the federal government had established with the Land Ordinance of 1785. This system failed in two key areas: it failed to force settlers to purchase the lands that the federal government wished to sell, and it failed to entice settlers to pay up front for their lands. In its failure, the land auction system promoted illegal squatting and thus resulted in the new system of preemption. American settlers, rather than the government, often chose the lands they desired. In the early United States, new land became part of the public domain and thus alienable through the process of treaty-making and land cession between the U.S. Congress and indigenous nations. Indigenous communities generally desired to hold onto the most desirable lands: areas with water, fertile soils, and abundant resources. Only as they experienced pressure, did Native Americans relinquish less desirable lands through treaty and cession, lands that the government attempted to sell to provide much-needed revenue. Since the best

lands were not always the lands put up for auction, settlers often chose to try to get these lands by illegally squatting. Even when it could entice settlers to purchase the lands it legitimately had the right to sell, the government had trouble getting settlers to pay. The early ordinance required large purchases of land (640acre plots), which discouraged small landholders and favored speculators. Seeking to make manifest the belief in the individually owned farm and desiring to sell directly to settlers, Congress passed laws regularly that lowered the minimum acreage of salable land, lowered the minimum price at which the land could be auctioned, and extended payment relief. In spite of these measures, settlers continued to squat. At the same time, squatters pressured Congress for a general preemption act that would allow them to get the title to the lands they had chosen and occupied without any up-front payment. In 1830, Congress acquiesced and issued a general pardon to squatters, allowing them to purchase the land on which they were settled (not exceeding 160 acres) for $1.25 per acre. Settlers continued to exert their on-the-ground authority by forming “claims clubs,” which offered protection to squatters worried about losing their land once it went up for auction. Clubs frequently used threats of physical violence against other bidders to ensure members kept their land. Finally, in 1841, after a decade of temporary pardon measures, Congress issued its general preemption law allowing settlers to claim up to 160 acres of land and, if they made improvements to the land, the right to purchase the land before any other claimant for a period of four years. After four years without payment, any person could potentially purchase the land, improved or not. The Preemption Act of 1841 then allowed settlers to develop a market for preemption claims, which in effect made them into speculators. In A True Picture of Emigration, Rebecca Burlend described her firsthand experience as a preemptor in Illinois in 1831. She and her husband first purchased land from a man, Mr. Oakes, who claimed preemption rights and had already begun cultivating the plot. They paid $60 for his rights and also had to pay $100 for actual ownership of the land. Early waves of preemptors would often sell their rights and improved land to latecomers despite not having actual ownership of the land. Having settled on their new farm, the Burlends quickly began speculating on the surrounding land. Their neighbor sold them his preemption rights for $50, but a claim jumper, Mr. Carr, invaded their new plot. Carr perjured himself at the land office, claiming the land was uninhabited. The Burlends then offered to sell their claim to Carr for $80, netting a $30 profit. Many so-called settlers doubled as speculators. The Preemption Act’s theoretical aim was to promote the productive use of American land, but in practice smallholders and big investors alike gamed the system. After 1841, “claims clubs” remained strong, though their purpose morphed. Settlers now used these clubs to sell claimed land to newcomers though no actual improvement had been made on the land. Clubs continued to employ intimidation but now they hoped to prevent newcomers from making preemption claims of their own. In some cases, businesses employed preemption to seize large tracts of land for the harvesting of timber or other natural resources. The company’s employees would all make simple 160-acre preemption claims, pay for the land, and then sell the land to the company en masse. Without any restrictions on an individual’s ability to sell preemption rights, the Preemption Act was regularly abused to allow for both speculation and acquisition of large parcels of government land. While the Preemption Act of 1841 promoted the land market and fueled the economy of the early republic, in legitimating squatters’ sense of right to enter territories they did not own and take up residence, it undermined indigenous sovereignty and wreaked catastrophic damage on Native peoples. Moreover, as the direct precursor to the much more well-known Homestead Act of 1862, the Preemption Act reveals that common American settlers formulated the culture that justified land-taking, and that the

government learned from their actions to create legal structures that would enable them to do the work of conquest. Taylor Spence and Zachary Quaratella See also: General Land Office; Homestead Act; Northwest Ordinance

Further Reading Burlend, Rebecca, and Edward Burlend. A True Picture of Emigration (1848). Edited by Milo Milton Quaife. New York: Citadel Press, 1968. Dick, Everett. The Lure of the Land: A Social History of the Public Lands from the Articles of Confederation to the New Deal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Robbins, Roy M. Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain 1776–1936. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942.

Rectangular Survey. See General Land Office Romantic Thinkers The cultural tradition of European romanticism, that flourished during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, had reached the shores of the United States when the young nation had no clear aesthetic sensibility or patronage in visual art or letters, and had yet to cultivate a public intelligentsia besides the traditional sermonizers of rigid Calvinist deism. By mid-century, this artistic, literary, and intellectual movement had a major influence on American cultural developments. However, as romanticism looped through the consciousness of an American cultural elite, it created a specifically American space of transformation that played into the broader historical drama of national territorial expansion westward from the Eastern Seaboard. Two strains of romanticism developed—“light” and “dark”—each promising a different kind of aesthetic experience and transcendental insight through experiencing or contemplating American wilderness. The most prominent thinkers and writers were Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803– 1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Herman Melville (1819– 1891), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), and Walt Whitman (1819–1892). The leading visual artists such as Thomas Cole (1801–1848), Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), and Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) belonged to the renowned Hudson River school of landscape painters. Defining and explaining European romanticism has become an academic cottage industry that has produced many different interpretations. It should be sufficient to say that romanticists reacted sharply to certain conditions of modernity against which they promoted a particular kind of aesthetic intelligence. Within such a frame of mind, pattern and consistency spoil originality and idiosyncrasy; society and urbanity undermine individuality and solitude; objectivity and reason obscure feeling and intuition; civilization and authority deaden wilderness and wildness. No wonder the art of romanticism displayed intense emotion through vivid atmospheres, melodramatic narratives, and heroic and sometimes melancholy characters. Wild spaces, medieval landscapes, and “primitive” peoples, all common leitmotifs of romantic visual art and letters, were ennobled because they were seen as pure, beautiful, authentic, and sublime. Individual immersion in wilderness could ignite the deepest feelings and produce the most extraordinary ideas, both assumed to be unmediated and therefore unconventional. American romantics, known also as transcendentalists, developed an aesthetic intelligence that processed wild nature as both sacred and profane, though not necessarily fundamental to the romantic rapture. What was gained from individuals’ quest for transcendental insight depended on whether they

were light or dark romantics. To begin with, both strains developed out of a reaction to the commercialism, industrialism, and scientism beginning to reshape American culture and society. New stories and ideas about the nation and its people were necessary to fill the moral and spiritual void that opened up between past traditions and present conditions, although, naturally, ideological elements from the past were assimilated into this cultural awakening. Most important here, however, is that light and dark romantic thinkers assumed in one way or another that the American wilderness offered the opportunity for the transformation of the individual ego—the primary purpose of the quest—and of the nation. Ultimately these stories could be used to characterize and justify American expansionism, while simultaneously framing an ethos for American modernity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leader of the Transcendentalism movement, was one of the foremost American writers and thinkers of the 19th century. Along with other Romantic figures, Emerson articulated anxieties over the growing industrialization of the country. (Library of Congress)

Ralph Waldo Emerson was responsible more than anyone else for refashioning European romanticism into the American movement known as transcendentalism. Nature (1836), arguably his most philosophically important and influential work of literature, was not only required reading for the educated elite attending university in New England, at the time the cultural core of the United States, but also reflected the country’s values, ideals, and beliefs. For Emerson, but not for all American romantics, individual immersion in wild spaces, though not necessary, provided an opportunity for reuniting mind, matter, and God. Experiencing the holistic truth of a living and moral universe could only happen in the American wilderness; only here, in a natural landscape made directly from the creator’s hands, and not in the landscape of Europe with its palimpsest of cultural artifice, could paradise be regained. For transcendentalists, optimism and promise must imbue and distinguish the art of America and lead the nation (and the world) toward moral and social perfection. Such unity and progress rested on personal virtues like self-reliance, independence, and spirituality.

Some romanticists such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman did not accept Emerson’s universal optimism, preferring instead the aesthetic delight of immediate contact with the natural world that could potentially reveal the natural kinship of all beings. Yet, Thoreau sets the cardinal direction for the fulfillment of the transcendental ego, and by cultural association the expansionism of Euro-America: “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.” The work of Albert Bierstadt and other painters of the American West reinforced this ideal geography. While light romantics ordained wild nature as sacred, dark romantics associated it with insanity, death, and the hellhole—all pleasurable, at least when experienced from a distance—through the medium of art. The movement’s antecedents were European Gothicism and late 18th-century American Gothic influenced by Puritan settlers’ negative attitude toward uncultivated and unredeemed landscapes and “soulscapes.” This attitude was reinforced by their precarious existence in a “New World” they thought was steeped in the blackness of original sin. Rather than questing for “new light and power” as Emerson proposed, the dark romantic hero attempted to transcend mainly into the frightful and terrifying posthumous consciousness. These artists repudiated the conventional transcendentalist union of aesthetics and morality, claiming that it obstructed the free enterprise of the imagination, a freedom that lures the most dedicated and sensitive into a labyrinth where the mind can lose all bearings, creating not a world of dreams but rather of nightmares in which the terrible, unfamiliar, and perverse recombine in an infinity of grotesqueries. Nature then was understood as an insecure space with the potential of causing psychological disintegration. The dark romantic perspective, however, was also detached from geographical experience and used wild nature as more or less a provocative trope. Nevertheless, it contained a space of transformation that eventually spread into American mythology by way of an educated elite caught in a 19th-century wave of nationalism. These artists exaggerated the difficulty of the nation’s expansion westward by creating an extraordinary and exclusive adversary—a dismal, desolate, hostile nature—conquered by exceptional characters—the American saint, pioneer, and cowboy. Dark romantics were not seeking redemption after destruction, a common theme in much of American storytelling, but the wilderness they imagined set the stage for Manifest Destiny with its mix of nationalism and universalism. Ken Whalen See also: Artists, Western; Manifest Destiny; National Parks

Further Reading Bowden, Martin J. “The Invention of American Tradition.” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 1 (1992): 3–26. McGreevy, Patrick. Imagining Niagara. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967. Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture, American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Seward, William H. See Alaska, Purchase of Smith, Joseph (1805–1844) Joseph Smith was a religious leader and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as Mormons. This uniquely American religion and its followers were important forces

in the expansion of non-Native society both in the trans-Mississippi West and the Great Basin. Born December 23, 1805, to Joseph and Lucy Mack, Smith spent his early childhood at his birthplace in Sharon, Vermont. By the time he was 12 years of age, his family had relocated to New York State. His religious education was inconsistent, yet the culture of religious revival influenced his fundamental beliefs. Smith was inundated with many different competing religions and opted instead to study the Bible to ascertain the true voice of God. In 1820, Smith had a deeply religious experience while praying in the woods near his home. This epiphany convinced Smith of the place religious entities had in everyday life. In 1823 this belief manifested itself when Smith claimed to have been visited by the angel Moroni, who gave him metal plates that contained pre-Columbian history. In 1829, eight men testified that they had seen the angel give the plates to Smith, and the following year Smith published what he claimed was a translation of the plates as The Book of Mormon. This text became the cornerstone of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. The year following the publication of The Book of Mormon, Smith and his congregation moved westward to Ohio and Missouri. Mormons were persecuted in society and therefore expanded their church frequently through relocation. In the 1830s, Smith managed a network of missionaries while publishing and building his church. Smith published his visions and other religious writings, which served to firmly establish his values. Smith was a remarkable speaker and to many, he seemed to embody the sublime power of the ancient prophets he emulated. At the time of his death, there were approximately 25,000 Latter-day Saints. Smith expanded to Illinois in the early 1840s where he augmented his spiritual leadership by participating in local politics in Nauvoo, Illinois. His announcement as a candidate for president in 1844 and the secret induction of plural marriage both in practice and doctrine alienated many followers, however, as antiMormonism grew as quickly as did the religion. In 1844, Smith ordered the destruction of a printing press that was utilized to publish critiques of Mormonism. Smith was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois. Joseph Smith was murdered on June 27, 1844, during a riot at the jail in which he remained in custody. Upon Smith’s death, Brigham Young became leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and eventually led his followers to their Zion near the Great Salt Lake. Jennifer Daley See also: Mormonism; Mountain Meadows Massacre; Young, Brigham

Further Reading Brodie, Fawn M. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. New York: Vintage, 1995. Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Smith, Joseph. The Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City, UT: G. Q. Cannon, 1871.

Telegraph The telegraph was independently invented by several people, including, among others, Englishman Francis Ronalds (1816), Russian baron Pavel Livovitch Schilling von Canstatt (1832), and American David Alter (1836). Alter invented a working telegraph in 1836, a full year before Samuel F. Morse, but it was Morse who received a patent in 1837 for creating the first commercially viable telegraph system. Early forms of the telegraph had been proposed since the mid-18th century and included both electrochemical and electrostatic telegraph systems. But it was not until the development of a practical

and reliable source of electricity in the form of a voltaic pile, or battery, that experiments with telegraphy really became feasible. Morse had been interested in electricity since his student days at Yale College. In 1832, during a return voyage from Europe, Morse struck up a conversation with fellow ship passenger Dr. Charles T. Jackson about electromagnetism experiments. Morse wrote down his ideas for an electromagnetic recording telegraph device and developed a system for sending messages. When he returned home, Morse constructed a working model of an electromechanical telegraph in 1835. The sending mechanism was an automatic system that consisted of two metal plates, one long and one short, and a moving pointer that would be manipulated by the operator to send a pulse of electricity. The receiver had an electromagnet with a stylus that would punch a moving paper tape to create a series of codes that could be read by a trained operator. In the spring of 1836, Morse showed his device to Leonard D. Gale, a professor of chemistry at the University of the City of New York. Gale was instrumental in helping Morse overcome the problem of a weakening signal over long distances by using a relay system that had been developed by electrical pioneer Joseph Henry. Gale became a part owner of the telegraph rights, and in the fall of 1837, Alfred Vail was taken in as a partner and technician. Work to refine the telegraph continued, but meanwhile, Morse learned that Jackson was claiming credit for the invention. In September 1837, Morse filed a caveat for a patent on “The American Recording Electro-Mechanical Telegraph,” but it would not be until 1840 that he received a patent on his telegraph. In February 1838, Morse gave a public demonstration of his telegraph system to members of Congress and President Martin Van Buren. Morse applied to the government for money to extend his system. In December 1842, Congress appropriated funds for a feasibility test and then approved $10,000 for the construction of a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of about 40 miles. Morse’s initial idea was to place the telegraph wires in an underground pipe. He hired construction engineer Ezra Cornell to do the work. However, defective insulation on the wire and a looming project deadline forced Morse to use an overhead wiring system.

OVERLAND MAIL Before telegraphs made it possible for people living in the population centers along the East Coast to communicate virtually instantaneously with people in the West, messages had to be delivered by hand. By an act of Congress in 1857, this semiweekly service would be subsidized for $600,000 annually and was to take a maximum of 25 days. The first contract was awarded to the Overland Mail Company, which established two starting points at St. Louis and Memphis. The lines would converge at Fort Smith, Arkansas, from where the mail would then travel a circuitous route through El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona, before moving on to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Concord coaches carried as many as nine people along with the mail on the 2,800-mile trip. An ardent supporter of government-aided transportation improvements, Senator William Gwin of California persuaded the Russell, Majors and Waddell Company to provide a more direct route on horseback. Though unsure of the economic feasibility, the company agreed in part because Gwin agreed to seek reimbursement for the experiment. Public announcements advertised that the Pony Express would deliver letters from Missouri to California in 10 days, half the time of the Overland Mail Route. On April 3, 1860, the service was inaugurated. While the winter trips between San Francisco and St. Joseph would take up to 18 days, most trips only went between Fort Kearny, Nebraska, to Fort Churchill, Nevada, the unfinished portion of the transcontinental telegraph. It was ultimately that telegraph that put an end to the service in 1861.

Samuel F. Morse’s telegraph indicator. The telegraph transformed communication in the middle of the 19th century, allowing for almost immediate correspondence across the country’s domain. (Duncan Walker/iStockPhoto.com)

On May 1, 1844, a telegraph signal was sent from Annapolis Junction, Maryland, to the Capitol Building in Washington to announce the nomination of presidential candidate Henry Clay. On May 24, 1844, Morse successfully sent the first official telegraph message from the Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol to the B&O Railroad depot in Baltimore. It consisted of four words: “What hath God wrought.” Morse hired Amos Kendall in 1845 to handle his business interests. The four partners formed the Magnetic Telegraph Company, which completed a telegraph line between Washington and New York in 1846. Morse licensed his technology to other companies, but competing systems were also in use and multiple lawsuits were filed. By 1851, more than 50 telegraph companies existed. The Western Union Telegraph Company was created in 1856 by merging several smaller companies and would grow to dominate the telegraph market. On October 24, 1861, it completed the first transcontinental telegraph line. The task was monumental and required thousands of telegraph poles and miles of wire. During construction, Sioux cut some of the telegraph wires and used them to make jewelry. The telegraph had profound effects on the nation’s railroads, commerce, and finance. The telegraph made use of the railroad’s right-of-way and was at first seen as a nuisance, but during the 1850s it became valuable in helping stationmasters coordinate train schedules and reducing the number of accidents. The telegraph was of vital importance during the Civil War because it allowed President Abraham Lincoln to communicate directly with his generals in the field. The White House did not have a telegraph office, so Lincoln spent many hours at the War Department while messages were sent and received. To facilitate communicating with the army, more than 15,000 miles of telegraph wires were strung for the explicit use of the military. Mobile telegraph wagons were set up at camp. The telegraphers used Morse code, but because it was so well known the messages sent were liable to be intercepted by Confederate forces. Systems of secret codes, or ciphers, were developed to prevent telegraph messages from falling in the wrong hands, and that included journalists. In 1857, a committee had suggested adding telegraph wires to a new House chamber for the use of the press. But during the Civil War, the government censored the telegraph news, prompting official complaints. In December 1861, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on government censorship. Commerce, especially the meatpacking industry and companies dealing in perishable products, could track and control their shipments more efficiently to reduce spoilage. But it was the financial market that

saw the greatest impact from the telegraph as centralized prices replaced the hundreds of existing stock exchanges and helped make New York the financial capital of the United States. In 1858, the first transatlantic cable was laid, allowing for rapid international communications and further bolstering trade. The telegraph offered employment to many women as well as men. Men were assigned the strenuous and sometimes dangerous duties of delivering telegrams, while women remained in the telegraph office and handled the sending and receiving of telegraph messages. In some remote areas, telegraph offices were little more than a corner in a private home, which allowed women to work at home. Business and industry profited by the telegraph, but as prices to send a telegram dropped, it was increasing affordable to the average person. The cost to send a telegram was $1.55 in 1850, but by 1890 dropped to only 40 cents. Telegraph communications continued to be used throughout the 20th century, and a telegraph office remained in the Capitol Building until 2007. Karen S. Garvin See also: Manifest Destiny; Morse, Jedidiah; Pacific Railroad Act; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Hochfelder, David. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. New York: Walker, 2007. Wheeler, Tom. Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

Transcontinental Railroad On May 10, 1869, hundreds of people gathered to watch the Union Pacific Railroad and the Central Pacific Railroad join the tracks at Promontory Point, Utah, to create the first transcontinental railroad. The United States was now connected from coast to coast by rail. This six-year-long project was one of the most important events in the development of the United States and one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the 19th century. Yet the building of the transcontinental railroad would not have happened without massive U.S. government support and the hard labor of Chinese Americans, Irish Americans, and African Americans. While the railroad exemplified a rapidly industrializing United States, it also destroyed the lives of many Native Americans living along its path and took many lives of those who laid it down. The railroad helped destroy the buffalo on which Native Americans on the Plains survived, while it allowed longhorn cattle to spread throughout the West. Though there was a steep price for its completion, the transcontinental railroad truly revolutionized American life in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States. As early as 1830, railroad entrepreneurs dreamed of linking the United States from coast to coast. The most famous of these early champions was Asa Whitney. In the 1840s and 1850s, Whitney tried to get Congress to support a self-financed scheme to build a transcontinental railroad, but the differences between Northern and Southern congressmen and the debate over the Compromise of 1850 were too toxic an environment for Whitney’s railroad. However, Whitney’s promotion of the idea of a transcontinental railroad popularized the project and inspired more business-minded persons to take up the cause.

In 1862, Congress chartered the Central Pacific Railroad to build east from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific Railroad to build west from Omaha, Nebraska. Here, workers join the tracks at Promontory Point in Utah, in 1869, creating the first transconti- nental railroad. (National Archives)

One of those was Theodore Judah. In 1860, he identified a possible path through the rugged Sierra Nevada Mountains in California and started to look for investors to lay tracks through Donner Pass. Sacramento businessman Collis Huntington joined Judah and together with Mark Hopkins, James Bailey, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford they formed the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Huntington was interested because even if the railroad itself was not built, the roads built to bring workers and supplies would be important routes in their own right. He was responsible for bringing in Stanford, Crocker, and Hopkins. Huntington became the vice president of the Central Pacific and the main buyer and lobbyist for the company in Washington, D.C. It would be Leland Stanford, however, who would become the most well known of the six. Stanford was appointed president of the Central Pacific Railroad by the nominating committee he had chosen earlier. He became governor of California and he used his power to support the railroad and used company resources to build large homes and to create Leland Stanford Junior University, better known today as simply Stanford University. During the 1850s, Congress funded five surveying teams to search for overland passages on which to build a railroad to the Pacific. In June 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act authorizing construction of a railroad to span the continent from the developing Midwest to California, using a route across northern states. The transcontinental railroad was to start on the shores of the Missouri River at Omaha, Nebraska, and run to Sacramento, California. The authorizing bill required that the railroads be built by private organizations but financed by government subsidies at $16,000 per mile on flat land and $48,000 per mile in the mountains. The subsidies offered by the federal government were not gifts, however, but long-term loans in the form of 30-year bonds. Congress chartered the Union Pacific Railroad to build the segment from Omaha to central Utah and the Central Pacific Railroad to build the segment from central Utah to Sacramento. The Union Pacific Railroad was formally incorporated in early 1863, with Thomas Durant as its president. The Civil War delayed construction while Durant sought to resolve problems regarding labor and financing. After the war ended, Irish immigrants performed most of the backbreaking and poorly paid

labor to lay the track. To help finance the construction of the railroad and maximize his profits, Durant formed a construction company, Crédit Mobilier of America, with himself as president. The Union Pacific issued stocks, received funds from Congress, borrowed money for railroad projects, and contracted with construction companies to build the railroad, while Crédit Mobilier, which received most of the construction contracts, built the railroad. Because of the war and the complications noted above, only 15 miles of track had been laid by the end of 1865. Union general Grenville Dodge, who became famous for rapidly rebuilding Union railroads after Confederate raids during the war, became chief engineer for the Union Pacific in May 1866, with the result that construction speeded up significantly. Construction crews performed extraordinary tasks through hot summers and cold winters to get as far as possible before meeting the other railroad. The further the railroad went, the more subsidies and land grants it obtained from the federal government. The Union Pacific built 1,090 miles of track, which cost the federal government $74 million in subsidies and 38,000 square miles in land grants. Trade, industry, and western migration were all significantly bolstered by the transcontinental railroad, and it substantially contributed to the development of the prairie states and the West. In 1872, the Crédit Mobilier scandal erupted when certain illegal business practices of Crédit Mobilier were exposed. The company was accused of inflating its construction costs (more than double, by some estimates) and bribing congressmen with stock and other benefits. Representative Oakes Ames, a congressman who was a large shareholder and a board member of Crédit Mobilier, had given other congressmen shares of stock at grossly undervalued prices in return for favors. Although no legal charges resulted from the investigation, the reputations of both Durant and Ames were tarnished, as were the reputations of several congressmen. The Central Pacific was not without its own maleficence. The Central Pacific began laying track eastward from Sacramento, California in 1863. It spent $200,000 on bribes to politicians. In return, the railroad got 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds. Building the railroad cost $36 million, but Central Pacific paid $79 million to the construction company, which it owned. This overpayment generated additional, unearned profits for the company’s owners. Despite these huge profits for the company’s owners, it was the hard work of Chinese and Irish laborers that actually built the railroad. Building railroads was hard work and it was difficult to keep workers for long. At the beginning of 1865, the Central Pacific needed 4,000 men but it struggled to keep 800 employed. Most of these workers were Irish immigrants until some Irish workers demanded higher wages. Management decided to try Chinese workers—against whom they were even more prejudiced than against the Irish—to replace them. Sensing they would lose their jobs, the Irish dropped their demand for higher wages. Central Pacific management observed that using the Chinese as a threat to compete against the Irish would ensure their existing workers were more reliable and loyal. They started by hiring 50 Chinese to see how they would work. These 50 impressed the foremen so much that they hired more Chinese for more difficult jobs. A couple thousand Chinese worked for the Central Pacific at the end of 1865, and within three years, they became the vast majority of the company’s workers. The Chinese were paid much less than the Irish workers, regardless of job positions. They received eight dollars less per month initially, then five dollars less per month than the Irish, but the Chinese had to pay for their food and their accommodations from this salary, while the Irish did not have to pay for their accommodation. In June 1867, Chinese workers had enough of the horrible and dangerous conditions, and they went on strike. They wanted the length of the workday reduced to only 10 hours per day, instead of from dawn to dusk. They also wanted $40 per month instead of the $35 the company paid. The Central Pacific

management refused to give in to any of these demands, and instead, they cut off supplies to the Chinese workers. After a week without much food, most men decided to return to work and paid a fine for their disobedience. For the Central Pacific, trying to get through the Sierra Nevada Mountains was a tremendous engineering challenge. In 1866, a new chemical compound would help break through the solid mountain rock. Nitroglycerin cut through and cleared the rock much better than black powder explosives. However, it was extremely dangerous to handle. Two accidental explosions of the compound led to a ban against its importation. However, the Central Pacific found a chemist who could mix nitroglycerin on the spot, thus eliminating some of the danger. Soon, progress on the railroad increased. There were many advantages to the continued use of nitroglycerin over black powder, and the distance through the rock now covered by the crews increased between 54 percent and 75 percent, depending on the difficulty of the rock being blasted. Yet, an unknown number of Chinese workers continued to die from the blasting work, and once Central Pacific had cleared the major hurdle of the Summit Tunnel, they decided to end the use of the dangerous substance. In 1869, as both competing railroad companies were racing to outdo each other, it was clear they would not agree on a place to meet and join their lines. To pressure them into a compromise, the government withheld money until they agreed on the meeting point in Utah. Finally, on May 10, 1869, the Union Pacific met the Central Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, where Durant struck the “Golden Spike” to link the tracks in a ceremony that was publicized around the world. By 1870, people and goods could travel from New York to San Francisco completely by rail. The railroad continued and expanded the population growth of the United States, as the West and all other areas of the United States grew in population. In the 20 years from 1860 to 1880, the Dakota Territory (North and South Dakota), Nebraska, Kansas, and Minnesota grew in total population from 300,000 to more than two million. The first transcontinental railroad spurred three more transcontinental railroads in the years between 1869 and 1890. To go from coast to coast prior to the railroad would have taken as long as 26 days to sail to and cut through Panama, but after the transcontinental railroad, it took only one week. Equally important, the railroad supported and enhanced the continued industrial development of the United States, as products and rare materials were shipped back and forth across the country. By 1880, the western railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean was carrying $50 million of freight each year. Native Americans on the Plains lost more land and were confined to reservations, and their lifestyle was permanently altered because of the demise of the buffalo. There were just 1,000 buffalo left from the millions that used to roam the Plains. From the time of the completion of the transcontinental railroad to 1920, the U.S. rail network had expanded to more than 250,000 miles, and this total was more than the total miles for railroads of all other nations in the world. Eric L. Payseur See also: Pacific Railroad Act; Pacific Railroad Reports

Further Reading Bain, David Haward. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Penguin, 1999. Kraus, George. High Road to Promontory: Building the Central Pacific Across the High Sierra. Palo Alto, CA: American West, 1969. White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Turner, Frederick Jackson (1861–1932) For much of the 20th century, the writings of historian Frederick Jackson Turner defined the process of American expansion. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was used by historians and producers of popular culture alike to explain the process of settling the North American continent. While many of the specifics of his thesis have been disputed or greatly complicated by scholars, Turner’s depiction of a steadily moving westward frontier still dominates popular narratives of 19th-century American expansion. Born in Portage, Wisconsin, Turner earned his 1891 doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Turner wrote Rise of the New West, 1819– 1829, became president of the American Historical Association, and published numerous essays. His 1932 volume The Significance of Sections in American History won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” brought him national attention. In Turner’s view, American democracy had begun in American rather than German forests. American history, he maintained, was to a great extent the history of the conquest of the West. The availability of free land had drawn settlers farther and farther westward, and as each successive wave of immigrants struggled with the “primitive conditions” of the frontier, they were transformed by the experience. While Turner first delivered his now-famous thesis at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association on July 12, 1893, it received widespread attention with its 1894 publication. “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (Turner, 60). Seizing upon this end of the American “frontier” and the various crises, policymakers, military advisers, missionaries, and businessmen believed the nation needed to pursue new Caribbean and Pacific “frontiers.” These groups utilized Turner’s essay to justify America’s imperial surge in the 1890s and early 1900s. Turner believed that the frontier had shaped the American character; from it stemmed Americans’ toughness, resourcefulness, and individualism, as well as American democracy. He also believed that the frontier had served as a kind of safety valve for Americans, allowing mobility and the promise of new opportunities: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” (Turner, 31). Yet as of 1893, Turner observed, citing a recent bulletin from the superintendent of the census, the western frontier was officially gone. He worried about what the future held in store for Americans without a western frontier, but he hoped that because of their frontier heritage, Americans would avoid many of the social ills that beset Europeans. Turner remained at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he became a professor at Harvard. From 1909 to 1910, he served as president of the American Historical Association, and from 1910 to 1915, he was on the board of the American Historical Review. Upon his retirement from Harvard in 1924, he worked as a research associate at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. Here, he devoted himself to an analysis of such problems as the depletion of natural resources, population explosions, and the prospect of another world war more terrible than the last. Turner died on March 14, 1932 at the age of 71, before such a war occurred. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: American Century/American Exceptionalism; Anglo-Saxonism; Frontier; Manifest Destiny

Further Reading

Grossman, James R., Richard White, and Patricia Nelson Limerick. The Frontier in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Turner, Frederick Jackson. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

U.S. Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS) was established by an act of Congress on March 3, 1879. A bureau within the U.S. Department of the Interior, the USGS was intended to scientifically study the natural resources of the United States. The USGS and its surveys and reports were instrumental in locating mineral and agricultural resources and giving settlers and miners the information they needed, as well as fulfilling nationalistic impulses of expansion. Geological surveys had been done in the United States since the early 1800s to map arable land. As settlers began to move west, more surveys were undertaken, broadening in scope to include geological and mineralogical surveys. By 1839, the federal government expressed interest in having a geologist classify public lands prior to Congress offering the lands for sale, and the discovery of gold further increased the need for geological surveys. From 1860 to 1879, four federal expeditions were conducted, referred to as the “Great Surveys” of the West, which led to the formation of the USGS. The first of these was the two-year Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel led by Clarence King, the appointed U.S. geologist. Accompanying King was a small group of scientists, a photographer, and camp aides, whose mission was to map a 15,000-square-mile area, collect specimens, and set up barometrical stations. The second survey, the United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Western Territories, was led by Ferdinand V. Hayden, who had been a physician in the Union Army during the Civil War. He spent 12 years surveying the West, including the Nebraska Territory. Hayden surveyed the Yellowstone region in 1871, accompanied by a group of about 50 men, including artist Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson. Hayden’s geological report to Congress helped created Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the nation’s first. John Wesley Powell, a professor of geology, led a privately funded expedition down the Colorado River in the summer of 1869. He received money from Congress in 1870 to launch a second expedition (the third of the Great Surveys), the Geographical and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West. In addition to mapping the area, Powell’s expedition encountered Native peoples and archaeological sites and produced reports on languages as well as on geology and geography. The fourth Great Survey was the Wheeler Survey led by George Montague Wheeler, who was funded by Congress in 1872 to map the lands west of the 100th meridian. This survey lasted until 1879 and included multiple expeditions, leading to the production of more than 70 maps and 25 publications. The expedition sent more than 40,000 specimens to the Smithsonian Institution. By 1879 economic reasons made Congress question the viability of continuing to support four separate surveys. Although the King expedition had completed its work, the other three expeditions were still in the field. A committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences recommended the establishment of an independent agency within the Interior Department to study lands within the public domain. In March 1879, the United States Geological Survey was established by an amendment to a sundry civil expenses bill, and under the new agency, the remaining three surveys would be ended.

Clarence King, leader of the Fortieth Parallel expedition, became the first director of the USGS. He took office on May 24, 1879, and served until 1881. King’s first objective was to organize the USGS, which had been tasked with classifying public lands and examining the resources of the nation. At the time, the federal government still had the title to most of the land west of the Mississippi River, and King focused the work of the USGS on surveying those regions.

William Henry Jackson’s famous photograph, “Pack Train of the U.S. Geological Survey.” It depicts the travels of one of the surveying teams along the Yellowstone River in 1871, prior to the establishment of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) as an official government agency in 1879. (National Archives)

King’s emphasis in those first years of the USGS was on finding mineral wealth, as the massive industrialization of the nation required raw materials, especially iron and precious metals. However, the USGS also did general geological work, as well as some paleontology and topographic mapping. Mining studies included surveys of ore-rich areas in Colorado and Nevada, including the Leadville, Comstock, and Eureka mining districts. Other tasks included collecting mineral statistics in both western and eastern regions. On the administrative side, King gave the USGS a mission, helped to define the qualifications for applicants to the USGS, and established salaries. In March 1881, King resigned and named John Wesley Powell as his successor. In 1882, Powell was authorized by Congress to continue working on a geologic map of the entire country, which then expanded the survey to include the eastern states. Topographic mapping became an important part of the USGS’s work during the first few years that it was under Powell’s direction, and the agency’s funding continued to grow. In the mid-1880s, following years of drought in the Midwest and Great Plains, Congress authorized the USGS to conduct a survey for the purpose of selecting sites for reservoirs and determining the viability of irrigation. Topographic mapping for catchment basins began in 1888. Despite the fact that this Irrigation Survey was discontinued in 1890, the agency began to come under scrutiny as some argued it had strayed from its original mission; many of its critics were from the mining industry who feared the agency’s emphasis on agricultural needs had taken precedence. Powell served as director until June 30, 1894, and was succeeded by Charles D. Walcott, a capable administrator who worked to expand the USGS’s mission. Under his direction, the agency would conduct geological research in addition to surveys. Under Walcott’s guidance the USGS began to search for gold

deposits, primarily in the West but also in Alaska. The agency also looked for sources of iron and copper, and in 1894, it began to study the country’s water supply. During this time, the USGS became increasingly involved in other aspects of geologic work. Studies in paleontology and stratigraphy, glacial geology, and petrography occupied the geologic branch, as well as the study of underground water and water utilization. Surveys of public land expanded to include forest reserves. At the end of the 19th century, the USGS expanded its scope beyond the nation’s boundaries. Geologists went to Nicaragua in 1897 to offer advice on the proposed canal, and in 1898 they went to Cuba and the Philippines to study mineral resources. Karen S. Garvin See also: Artists, Western; Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army; National Parks

Further Reading Manning, Thomas G. Government in Science: The US Geological Survey, 1867–1894. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967. Moore, James Gregory. King of the 40th Parallel: Discovery in the American West. Stanford, CA: Stanford General Books, 2006. Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the West. New York: Penguin, 1992. Worster, Donald. A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Utah Expedition (Utah War) (1857–1858) Rooted in decades of mistrust and miscommunication between Mormons and the U.S. government, the Utah Expedition, also known as the Utah War, was the largest American military operation undertaken between the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, and lasted from 1857 to 1858. Historians have generally classified it as an expansionist maneuver designed to place the future of the American West solidly in the hands of the federal government, rather than a Mormon leadership of which the American public and government were greatly suspicious. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known commonly as the Mormons or Saints, migrated westward from Nauvoo, Illinois, following the 1844 assassination of their leader, Joseph Smith, at the hands of an angry mob. Finally settling in the area surrounding the Great Salt Lake in 1847, the population of Utah had expanded to 75,000 within 10 years. Because many Mormons had emigrated to the Utah Territory following conversion in the United Kingdom, rumors of Britain’s intention to infiltrate the Saints to erode Americans’ control over the North American West abounded. At the same time, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was at its height of influence in American culture. The successful migration of thousands of Americans to the Oregon Territory, the victory of the United States in the Mexican-American War, and the consequent land acquisition attained through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ushered in a prevailing expansionist mood among Americans. Throughout this period of rapid growth, American society developed a decisively anti-Mormon sentiment, as it was believed that Utah’s Mormon leadership posed a threat to American expansion. The group’s theocratic tendencies and the widely held perception that Mormonism, rather than naturalized American citizenship, was the prerequisite to the rights of suffrage and office holding in the Utah Territory, led many Americans to fear that the Saints were creating their own nation within American borders, which would potentially inhibit the successful attainment of Manifest Destiny. Culturally, Mormons were distrusted and unpopular with the American public because of the practice of plural marriage (polygamy) and charges of ruthless lawlessness. In 1856, the Republican Party’s

platform called for the end of both slavery and polygamy, which were called the “twin relics of barbarism.” By the time James Buchanan took office in 1857, the tide of public opinion had solidified against the Mormons and their leaders. Though the Mormons sought statehood for their adopted home by proposing the establishment of the State of Deseret, they were seen as a threat to the continued expansion to the Pacific coast. Americans generally desired to stunt the growth of the perceived Mormon nation within its borders. Mormons controlled a large area, roughly one-eleventh the size of the United States in the 1850s and five times larger than either New York or Pennsylvania, that was of key strategic importance in America’s efforts to expand westward, and fears that the Saints would interfere with communication and transportation through the region lent popular support to the war. The Utah Expedition was initiated by President James Buchanan ostensibly as a means to exercise his right to replace territorial officials, namely Governor Brigham Young, in the face of popular opposition. The war was a clash between Young and Buchanan over influence and control in the Utah Territory. Young had been named governor of the territory during the Fillmore administration on the advice of the influential Mormon apologist and advocate Thomas L. Kane. When Buchanan sought to replace Young with Alfred Cumming, an appointee of his own choosing, an army of 2,500 American soldiers was deployed to oversee the transfer of power in July 1857. Young responded with the institution of martial law and a guerrilla warfare campaign led by the Utah Territorial Militia. This retaliation was seen as a confirmation of Buchanan’s claims of open rebellion in Utah by many of the Saints’ opponents. In practical terms, the Utah Expedition also necessitated further developments in transportation and communication, which served the cause of westward expansion for future settlement. Communication delays in excess of four months, during the war, illustrated the need for more efficient methods of transferring communication across the continent. Additionally, road improvements through Colorado and Utah were also implemented as a consequence of the war, to shorten travel times in the region. The events and motivations that led to the Utah Expedition had a far deeper root, centered around the fears of a suspicious America that Mormons were a threat to the achievement of Manifest Destiny. The American public feared that its vision for the American West would be replaced by a Mormon West that was popularly seen as wholly incompatible with the American concept of Manifest Destiny. The U.S. government wanted to establish a decisively American presence in the Utah Territory, complete with a territorial leadership that upheld American law and expansionist ideals. The war was not a simple conflict designed to reestablish the federal government’s authority to appoint and remove territorial officials at will, but rather it was an expansionist action designed to advance the ideals of Manifest Destiny and American progress, which were so prevalent during the 19th century. On a larger scale, the Utah Expedition demonstrates the American desire to physically occupy the North American continent from coast to coast and extend its reach of influence over the western lands obtained through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Olivia Stauffer Good See also: Manifest Destiny; Mormonism

Further Reading Grow, Matthew J. “The Suffering Saints: Thomas L. Kane, Democratic Reform, and the Mormon Question in Antebellum America.” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 4 (2009): 681–710. MacKinnon, William P. “Epilogue to the Utah War: Impact and Legacy.” Journal of Mormon History 29, no. 2 (2003): 186–248. Poll, Richard D., and William P. MacKinnon. “Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered.” Journal of Mormon History 20, no. 2 (1994): 16–44.

Wagon Train. See Oregon Trail Young, Brigham (1801–1877) Brigham Young was a foundational figure in the early years of the Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon Church. In addition to being the second president of the Mormon Church following the death of its founder, Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844), Young was also responsible for establishing Salt Lake City and became the first governor of the Utah Territory. Young is seen as a controversial figure, however, due to his polygamous lifestyle, his alleged role in hiding Mormon involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, and his support and legalization of slavery in the Utah Territory. Young was born in 1801 in Whitingham, Vermont, a small town in the southern part of the state. In his formative years, the Young family moved to several different locations, primarily in New York. By his early thirties, Young had converted to Mormonism and immediately following his baptism, he became an elder in the church. The next move for Young was to Kirtland, Ohio, where many of the prominent members of the Mormon Church resided. However, the situation in Kirtland would prove to be disastrous for the Mormons following a series of ruinous financial practices. To evade legal prosecution, debt collectors, and disgruntled townspeople, Young relocated to various locations in the American Midwest. In 1844, Joseph Smith Jr. was killed by an anti-Mormon mob while being incarcerated in an Illinois prison. Following the founder of Mormonism’s death, Young succeeded him. In 1846, Smith uprooted most of the early Mormon community and began the long journey west toward the Great Salt Lake Basin in present-day Utah. Young and the Mormon pioneers settled in a vast territory that was to be named Deseret, a reference to the honeybee in The Book of Mormon. In 1850, Congress passed legislation recognizing Deseret, now to be known as Utah, as a territory. President Millard Fillmore (1800–1874) appointed Young the territory’s inaugural governor. This appointment would shortly be rescinded with the election of a new president. In 1857, the recently elected president James Buchanan (1791–1868) ordered an army of 2,500 soldiers to approach the Utah Territory with the intention of removing Young as governor. The Utah Expedition ended with minimal casualties in 1858. However, the Mormons were required to recognize Alfred Cumming as the new governor replacing Young. In addition to the threat posed by the federal government, Young was also confronted with a band of travelers from Arkansas and Missouri who arrived at Cedar City, a town in the Utah Territory. The travelers were reportedly intolerant, hostile, and offensive toward their Mormon hosts. The Native population of the area was also incensed with the travelers for poisoning their water supply. In 1857, a Mormon-Native alliance massacred more than 100 men and women from this band of travelers. Just before his execution in 1877, John D. Lee, the Mormon leader involved in the massacre, accused Young of concealing Mormon involvement. The veracity of this claim continues to be debated in scholarly circles. In the last few years of his life, Young suffered from a host of physical ailments coupled with the intense agony brought about by the death of several of his children. Young’s physical condition worsened until he finally succumbed to his various illnesses in 1877 at the age of 76. The legacy of Brigham Young is difficult to judge from a modern perspective. Young’s role in valiantly leading Mormon pioneers across a large and inhospitable frontier is clouded by his 55 polygamous marriages, his prejudiced racial teachings and policies, and his alleged role in one of the darkest chapters of Mormon history. John Cappucci

See also: Mormonism; Mountain Meadows Massacre; Smith, Joseph; Utah Expedition (Utah War)

Further Reading Arrington, Leonard J. Brigham Young: American Moses. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Bringhurst, Newell G. Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier. Edited by Oscar Handlin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986. Hirshson, Stanley P. The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Louisiana Purchase Treaty (1803) On April 30, 1803, representatives from the French and U.S. governments drafted this treaty, formally transferring ownership of the vast Louisiana Territory, encompassing large portions of the South and Midwest, from France to America for roughly $15 million. Orchestrated by President Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase sparked heated debate in the U.S. Congress, which questioned Jefferson’s constitutional authority to make such a dramatic acquisition of territory. Nevertheless, the Senate approved the treaty on October 20 by a vote of 24 to 7, and the United States formally took possession of the region on December 20. Treaty between the United States of America and the French Republic The President of the United States of America and the First Consul of the French Republic in the name of the French People desiring to remove all Source of misunderstanding relative to objects of discussion mentioned in the second and fifth articles of the Convention of the 8th Vendémiaire on 9/30 September 1800 relative to the rights claimed by the United States in virtue of the Treaty concluded at Madrid the 27 of October 1795, between His Catholic Majesty & the Said United States, & willing to Strengthen the union and friendship which at the time of the Said Convention was happily reestablished between the two nations have respectively named their Plenipotentiaries to wit The President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate of the Said States; Robert R. Livingston Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States and James Monroe Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy extraordinary of the Said States near the Government of the French Republic; And the First Consul in the name of the French people, Citizen Francis Barbé Marbois Minister of the public treasury who after having respectively exchanged their full powers have agreed to the following Articles. ARTICLE I Whereas by the ARTICLE the third of the Treaty concluded at St Ildefonso the 9th Vendémiaire on 1st October 1800 between the First Consul of the French Republic and his Catholic Majesty it was agreed as follows. “His Catholic Majesty promises and engages on his part to cede to the French Republic six months after the full and entire execution of the conditions and Stipulations herein relative to his Royal Highness the Duke of Parma, the Colony or Province of Louisiana with the Same extent that it now has in the hand of Spain, & that it had when France possessed it; and Such as it Should be after the Treaties subsequently entered into between Spain and other States.” And whereas in pursuance of the Treaty and particularly of the third article the French Republic has an incontestible title to the domain and to the possession of the said Territory—The First Consul of the

French Republic desiring to give to the United States a strong proof of his friendship doth hereby cede to the United States in the name of the French Republic for ever and in full Sovereignty the said territory with all its rights and appurtenances as fully and in the Same manner as they have been acquired by the French Republic in virtue of the above mentioned Treaty concluded with his Catholic Majesty. ARTICLE II In the cession made by the preceeding article are included the adjacent Islands belonging to Louisiana all public lots and Squares, vacant lands and all public buildings, fortifications, barracks and other edifices which are not private property.—The Archives, papers & documents relative to the domain and Sovereignty of Louisiana and its dependances will be left in the possession of the Commissaries of the United States, and copies will be afterwards given in due form to the Magistrates and Municipal officers of such of the said papers and documents as may be necessary to them. ARTICLE III The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible according to the principles of the federal Constitution to the enjoyment of all these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States, and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property and the Religion which they profess. ARTICLE IV There Shall be Sent by the Government of France a Commissary to Louisiana to the end that he do every act necessary as well to receive from the Officers of his Catholic Majesty the Said country and its dependances in the name of the French Republic if it has not been already done as to transmit it in the name of the French Republic to the Commissary or agent of the United States. ARTICLE V Immediately after the ratification of the present Treaty by the President of the United States and in case that of the first Consul’s shall have been previously obtained, the commissary of the French Republic shall remit all military posts of New Orleans and other parts of the ceded territory to the Commissary or Commissaries named by the President to take possession—the troops whether of France or Spain who may be there shall cease to occupy any military post from the time of taking possession and shall be embarked as soon as possible in the course of three months after the ratification of this treaty. ARTICLE VI The United States promise to execute Such treaties and articles as may have been agreed between Spain and the tribes and nations of Indians until by mutual consent of the United States and the said tribes or nations other Suitable articles Shall have been agreed upon. ARTICLE VII As it is reciprocally advantageous to the commerce of France and the United States to encourage the communication of both nations for a limited time in the country ceded by the present treaty until general arrangements relative to commerce of both nations may be agreed on; it has been agreed between the contracting parties that the French Ships coming directly from France or any of her colonies loaded only with the produce and manufactures of France or her Said Colonies; and the Ships of Spain coming directly from Spain or any of her colonies loaded only with the produce or manufactures of Spain or her Colonies

shall be admitted during the Space of twelve years in the Port of New-Orleans and in all other legal ports-of-entry within the ceded territory in the Same manner as the Ships of the United States coming directly from France or Spain or any of their Colonies without being Subject to any other or greater duty on merchandize or other or greater tonnage than that paid by the citizens of the United States. During that Space of time above mentioned no other nation Shall have a right to the Same privileges in the Ports of the ceded territory—the twelve years Shall commence three months after the exchange of ratifications if it Shall take place in France or three months after it Shall have been notified at Paris to the French Government if it Shall take place in the United States; It is however well understood that the object of the above article is to favour the manufactures, Commerce, freight and navigation of France and of Spain So far as relates to the importations that the French and Spanish Shall make into the Said Ports of the United States without in any Sort affecting the regulations that the United States may make concerning the exportation of the produce and merchandize of the United States, or any right they may have to make Such regulations. ARTICLE VIII In future and for ever after the expiration of the twelve years, the Ships of France shall be treated upon the footing of the most favoured nations in the ports above mentioned. ARTICLE IX The particular Convention Signed this day by the respective Ministers, having for its object to provide for the payment of debts due to the Citizens of the United States by the French Republic prior to the 30th Sept. 1800 (8th Vendémiaire an 9) is approved and to have its execution in the Same manner as if it had been inserted in this present treaty, and it Shall be ratified in the same form and in the Same time So that the one Shall not be ratified distinct from the other. Another particular Convention Signed at the Same date as the present treaty relative to a definitive rule between the contracting parties is in the like manner approved and will be ratified in the Same form, and in the Same time and jointly. ARTICLE X The present treaty Shall be ratified in good and due form and the ratifications Shall be exchanged in the Space of Six months after the date of the Signature by the Ministers Plenipotentiary or Sooner if possible. In faith whereof the respective Plenipotentiaries have Signed these articles in the French and English languages; declaring nevertheless that the present Treaty was originally agreed to in the French language; and have thereunto affixed their Seals. Done at Paris the tenth day of Floreal in the eleventh year of the French Republic; and the 30th of April 1803. Robt R Livingston [seal] Jas. Monroe [seal] Barbé Marbois [seal] Source: Louisiana Purchase Treaty, April 30, 1803; General Records of the U.S. Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.

John L. O’Sullivan’s Article on America’s “Manifest Destiny” (1845)

In July 1845, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review published the following article by journalist John L. O’Sullivan. In writing about the outbreak of the Mexican-American War the previous May, O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” to symbolize Americans’ drive to expand across the continent. Five months later, O’Sullivan used the term again in an article he published in the New York Morning News, which seized the imagination of the American public and established the phrase as emblematic of 19th-century expansionism. ANNEXATION It is time now for opposition to the Annexation of Texas to cease, all further agitation of the waters of bitterness and strife, at lease in connexion with this question,—even though it may perhaps be required of us as a necessary condition of the freedom of our institutions, that we must live on for ever in a state of unpausing struggle and excitement upon some subject of party division or other. But, in regard to Texas, enough has now been given to Party. It is time for the common duty of Patriotism to the Country to succeed;—or if this claim will not be recognized, it is at least time for common sense to acquiesce with decent grace in the inevitable and the irrevocable. Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; and made the requisite changes in her already republican form of constitution to adopt it to its future federal relations. Her star and her stripe may already be said to have taken their place in the glorious blazon of our common nationality; and the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. She is no longer to us a mere geographical space—a certain combination of coast, plain, mountain, valley, forest and stream. She is no longer to us a mere country on the map. She comes within the dear and sacred designation of Our Country; no longer a “pays” country she is a part of “la patrie” our country and that which is at once a sentiment and a virtue, Patriotism, already begins to thrill for her too within the national heart. It is time then that all should cease to treat her as alien, and even adverse—cease to denounce and villify all and everything connected with her accession—cease to thwart and oppose the remaining steps for its consummation; or where such efforts are felt to be unavailing, at least to embitter the hour of reception by all the most ungracious frowns of aversion and words of unwelcome. There has been enough of all this. It has had its fitting day during the period when, in common with every other possible question of practical policy that can arise, it unfortunately became one of the leading topics of party division, of presidential electioneering. But that period has passed, and with it let its prejudices and its passions, it[s] discords and its denunciations, pass away too. The next session of Congress will see the representatives of the new young State in their places in both our halls of national legislation, side by side with those of the old Thirteen. Let their reception into “the family” be frank, kindly, and cheerful, as befits such an occasion, as comports not less with our own self-respect than patriotic duty towards them. Ill betide those foul birds that delight to defile their own nest, and disgust the ear with perpetual discord of ill-omened croak. Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfilment of our manifest de[s]tiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. This we have seen done by England, our old rival and enemy; and by France, strangely coupled with her against us, under the

influence of the Anglicism strongly tinging the policy of her present prime minister, Guizot. The zealous activity with which this effort to defeat us was pushed by the representatives of those governments, together with the character of intrigue accompanying it, fully constituted that case of foreign interference, which Mr. Clay himself declared should, and would unite us all in maintaining the common cause of our country against the foreigner and the foe. We are only astonished that this effect has not been more fully and strongly produced, and that the burst of indignation against this unauthorized, insolent and hostile interference against us, has not been more general even among the party before opposed to Annexation, and has not rallied the national spirit and national pride unanimously upon that policy. We are very sure that if Mr. Clay himself were now to add another letter to his former Texas correspondence, he would express this sentiment, and carry out the idea already strongly stated in one of them, in a manner which would tax all the powers of blushing belonging to some of his party adherents. It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous—of military conquest under forms of peace and law—of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded, and has been before so amply refuted in these pages, as well as in a thousand other modes, that we shall not again dwell upon it. The independence of Texas was complete and absolute. It was an independence, not only in fact but of right. No obligation of duty towards Mexico tended in the least degree to restrain our right to effect the desired recovery of the fair province once our own—whatever motives of policy might have prompted a more deferential consideration of her feelings and her pride, as involved in the question. If Texas became peopled with an American population, it was by no contrivance of our government, but on the express invitation of that of Mexico herself; accompanied with such guaranties of State independence, and the maintenance of a federal system analogous to our own, as constituted a compact fully justifying the strongest measures of redress on the part of those afterwards deceived in this guaranty, and sought to be enslaved under the yoke imposed by its violation. She was released, rightfully and absolutely released, from all Mexican allegiance, or duty of cohesion to the Mexican political body, by the acts and fault of Mexico herself, and Mexico alone. There never was a clearer case. It was not revolution; it was resistance to revolution; and resistance under such circumstances as left independence the necessary resulting state, caused by the abandonment of those with whom her former federal association had existed. What then can be more preposterous than all this clamor by Mexico and the Mexican interest, against Annexation, as a violation of any rights of hers, any duties of ours? We would not be understood as approving in all its features the expediency or propriety of the mode in which the measure, rightful and wise as it is in itself, has been carried into effect. Its history has been a sad tissue of diplomatic blundering. How much better it might have been managed—how much more smoothly, satisfactorily and successfully! Instead of our present relations with Mexico—instead of the serious risks which have been run, and those plausibilities of opprobrium which we have had to combat, not without great difficulty, nor with entire success—instead of the difficulties which now throng the path to a satisfactory settlement of all our unsettled questions with Mexico—Texas might, by a more judicious and conciliatory diplomacy, have been as securely in the Union as she is now—her boundaries defined— California probably ours—and Mexico and ourselves united by closer ties than ever; of mutual friendship, and mutual support in resistance to the intrusion of European interference in the affairs of the American republics. All this might have been, we little doubt, already secured, had counsels less violent, less rude, less one-sided, less eager in precipitation from motives widely foreign to the national question, presided over the earlier stages of its history. We cannot too deeply regret the mismanagement which has disfigured the history of this question; and especially the neglect of the means which would have been so

easy, of satisfying even the unreasonable pretensions and the excited pride and passion of Mexico. The singular result has been produced, that while our neighbor has, in truth, no real right to blame or complain —when all the wrong is on her side, and there has been on ours a degree of delay and forbearance, in deference to her pretensions, which is to be paralleled by few precedents in the history of other nations— we have yet laid ourselves open to a great deal of denunciation hard to repel, and impossible to silence; and all history will carry it down as a certain fact, that Mexico would have declared war against us, and would have waged it seriously, if she had not been prevented by that very weakness which should have constituted her best defence. We plead guilty to a degree of sensitive annoyance—for the sake of the honor of our country, and its estimation in the public opinion of the world—which does not find even in satisfied conscience full consolation for the very necessity of seeking consolation there. And it is for this state of things that we hold responsible that gratuitous mismanagement—wholly apart from the main substantial rights and merits of the question, to which alone it is to be ascribed; and which had its origin in its earlier stages, before the accession of Mr. Calhoun to the department of State. Nor is there any just foundation for the charge that Annexation is a great pro-slavery measure— calculated to increase and perpetuate that institution. Slavery had nothing to do with it. Opinions were and are greatly divided, both at the North and South, as to the influence to be exerted by it on Slavery and the Slave States. That it will tend to facilitate and hasten the disappearance of Slavery from all the northern tier of the present Slave States, cannot surely admit of serious question. The greater value in Texas of the slave labor now employed in those States, must soon produce the effect of draining off that labor southwardly, by the same unvarying law that bids water descend the slope that invites it. Every new Slave State in Texas will make at least one Free State from among those in which that institution now exists—to say nothing of those portions of Texas on which slavery cannot spring and grow—to say nothing of the far more rapid growth of new States in the free West and Northwest, as these fine regions are overspread by the emigration fast flowing over them from Europe, as well as from the Northern and Eastern States of the Union as it exists. On the other hand, it is undeniably much gained for the cause of the eventual voluntary abolition of slavery, that it should have been thus drained off towards the only outlet which appeared to furnish much probability of the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders. The SpanishIndian-American populations of Mexico, Central America and South America, afford the only receptacle capable of absorbing that race whenever we shall be prepared to slough it off—to emancipate it from slavery, and (simultaneously necessary) to remove it from the midst of our own. Themselves already of mixed and confused blood, and free from the “prejudices” which among us so insuperably forbid the social amalgamation which can alone elevate the Negro race out of a virtually servile degradation even though legally free, the regions occupied by those populations must strongly attract the black race in that direction; and as soon as the destined hour of emancipation shall arrive, will relieve the question of one of its worst difficulties, if not absolutely the greatest. No—Mr. Clay was right when he declared that Annexation was a question with which slavery had nothing to do. The country which was the subject of Annexation in this case, from its geographical position and relations, happens to be—or rather the portion of it now actually settled, happens to be—a slave country. But a similar process might have taken place in proximity to a different section of our Union; and indeed there is a great deal of Annexation yet to take place, within the life of the present generation, along the whole line of our northern border. Texas has been absorbed into the Union in the inevitable fulfilment of the general law which is rolling our population westward; the connexion of which with that ratio of growth in population which is destined within a hundred years to swell our numbers to the enormous population of two hundred and fifty millions (if nor more), is too evident to leave us in

doubt of the manifest design of Providence in regard to the occupation of this continent. It was disintegrated from Mexico in the natural course of events, by a process perfectly legitimate on its own part, blameless on ours; and in which all the censures due to wrong, perfidy and folly, rest on Mexico alone. And possessed as it was by a population which was in truth but a colonial detachment from our own, and which was still bound by myriad ties of the very heartstrings to its old relations, domestic and political, their incorporation into the Union was not only inevitable, but the most natural, right and proper thing in the world—and it is only astonishing that there should be any among ourselves to say it nay. In respect to the institution of slavery itself, we have not designed, in what has been said above, to express any judgment of its merits or demerits, pro for or con against. National in its character and aims, this Review abstains from the discussion of a topic pregnant with embarrassment and danger—intricate and double-sided—exciting and embittering—and necessarily excluded from a work circulating equally in the South as in the North. It is unquestionably one of the most difficult of the various social problems which at the present day so deeply agitate the thoughts of the civilized world. Is the negro race, or is it not, of equal attributes and capacities with our own? Can they, on a large scale, coexist side by side in the [s]ame country on a footing of civil and social equality with the white race? In a free competition of labor with the latter, will they or will they not be ground down to a degradation and misery worse than slavery? When we view the condition of the operative masses of the population in England and other European countries, and feel all the difficulties of the greater problem, of the distribution of the fruits of production between capital, skill and labor, can our confidence be undoubting that in the present condition of society, the conferring of sudden freedom upon our negro race would be a boon to be grateful for? Is it certain that competitive wages are very much better, for a race so situated, than guarantied support and protection? Until a still deeper problem shall have been solved than that of slavery, the slavery of an inferior to a superior race—a relation reciprocal in certain important duties and obligations—is it certain that the cause of true wisdom and philanthropy is not rather, for the present, to aim to meliorate that institution as it exists, to guard against its abuses, to mitigate its evils, to modify it when it may contravene sacred principles and rights of humanity, by prohibiting the separation of families, excessive severities, subjection to the licentiousness of mastership, &c.? Great as may be its present evils, is it certain that we would not plunge the unhappy Helot race which has been entailed upon us, into still greater ones, by surrendering their fate into the rash hands of those fanatic zealots of a single idea, who claim to be their special friends and champions? Many of the most ardent social reformers of the present day are looking towards the idea of Associated Industry as containing the germ of such a regeneration of society as will relieve its masses from the hideous weight of evil which now depresses and degrades them to a condition which these reformers often describe as no improvement upon any form of legal slavery—is it certain, then, that the institution in question—as a mode of society, as a relation between the two races, and between capital and labor,—does not contain some dim undeveloped germ of that very principle of reform thus aimed at, out of which proceeds some compensation at least for its other evils, making it the duty of true reform to cultivate and develope the good, and remove the evils? To all these, and the similar questions which spring out of any intelligent reflection on the subject, we attempt no answer. Strong as are our sympathies in behalf of liberty, universal liberty, in all applications of the principle not forbidden by great and manifest evils, we confess ourselves not prepared with any satisfactory solution to the great problem of which these questions present various aspects. Far from us to say that either of the antagonist fanaticisms to be found on either side of the Potomac is right. Profoundly embarrassed amidst the conflicting elements entering into the question, much and anxious reflection upon it brings us as yet to no other conclusion than to the duty of a liberal tolerance of the honest differences of both sides; together with the certainty that whatever good is to be done in the case is to be done only by

the adoption of very different modes of action, prompted by a very different spirit, from those which have thus far, among us, characterized the labors of most of those who claim the peculiar title of “friends of the slave” and “champions of the rights of man.” With no friendship for slavery, though unprepared to excommunicate to eternal damnation, with bell, book, and candle, those who are, we see nothing in the bearing of the Annexation of Texas on that institution to awaken a doubt of the wisdom of that measure, or a compunction for the humble part contributed by us towards its consummation. California will, probably, next fall away from the loose adhesion which, in such a country as Mexico, holds a remote province in a slight equivocal kind of dependence on the metropolis. Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country. The impotence of the one and the distance of the other, must make the relation one of virtual independence; unless, by stunting the province of all natural growth, and forbidding that immigration which can alone develope its capabilities and fulfil the purposes of its creation, tyranny may retain a military dominion which is no government in the legitimate sense of the term. In the case of California this is now impossible. The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of AngloSaxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses. A population will soon be in actual occupation of California, over which it will be idle for Mexico to dream of dominion. They will necessarily become independent. All this without agency of our government, without responsibility of our people—in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous working of principles, and the adaptation of the tendencies and wants of the human race to the elemental circumstances in the midst of which they find themselves placed. And they will have a right to independence—to self-government—to the possession of the homes conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings and sacrifices—a better and a truer right than the artificial title of sovereignty in Mexico a thousand miles distant, inheriting from Spain a title good only against those who have none better. Their right to independence will be the natural right of self-government belonging to any community strong enough to maintain it—distinct in position, origin and character, and free from any mutual obligations of membership of a common political body, binding it to others by the duty of loyalty and compact of public faith. This will be their title to independence; and by this title, there can be no doubt that the population now fast streaming down upon California will both assert and maintain that independence. Whether they will then attach themselves to our Union or not, is not to be predicted with any certainty. Unless the projected rail-road across the continent to the Pacific be carried into effect, perhaps they may not; though even in that case, the day is not distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and Pacific would again flow together into one, as soon as their inland border should approach each other. But that great work, colossal as appears the plan on its first suggestion, cannot remain long unbuilt. Its necessity for this very purpose of binding and holding together in its iron clasp our fast settling Pacific region with that of the Mississippi valley—the natural facility of the route—the ease with which any amount of labor for the construction can be drawn in from the overcrowded populations of Europe, to be paid in the lands made valuable by the progress of the work itself—and its immense utility to the commerce of the world with the whole eastern coast of Asia, alone almost sufficient for the support of such a road—these considerations give assurance that the day cannot be distant which shall witness the conveyance of the representatives from Oregon and California to Washington within less time than a few years ago was devoted to a similar journey by those from Ohio; while the magnetic telegraph will enable the editors of the “San Francisco Union,” the “Astoria Evening Post,” or the “Nootka Morning News” to set up in type the first half of the President’s Inaugural, before the echoes of the latter half shall have died away beneath the lofty porch of the Capitol, as spoken from his lips.

Away, then, with all idle French talk of balances of power on the American Continent. There is no growth in Spanish America! Whatever progress of population there may be in the British Canadas, is only for their own early severance of their present colonial relation to the little island three thousand miles across the Atlantic; soon to be followed by Annexation, and destined to swell the still accumulating momentum of our progress. And whatsoever may hold the balance, though they should cast into the opposite scale all the bayonets and cannon, not only of France and England, but of Europe entire, how would it kick the beam against the simple solid weight of the two hundred and fifty or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1845? Source: “The Great Nation of Futurity,” The United States Democratic Review, Volume 6, Issue 23, pp. 426–430.

President James K. Polk’s Speech Reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine (1845) On December 2, 1845, in his first annual message to the U.S. Congress, President James K. Polk espoused this statement illustrating his support for the Monroe Doctrine, particularly in regard to U.S. claims on disputed territory in the Pacific Northwest, which Great Britain also claimed. Polk’s firm attitude toward the U.S. acquisition of this territory (part of present-day Oregon and Washington) brought the United States and Britain to the brink of war but ultimately secured the region for America. It is submitted to the wisdom of Congress to determine whether, at their present session, and until after the expiration of the year’s notice, any other measures may be adopted consistently with the convention of 1827 for the security of our rights and the government and protection of our citizens in Oregon. That it will ultimately be wise and proper to make liberal grants of land to the patriotic pioneers, who amidst privations and dangers lead the way through savage tribes inhabiting the vast wilderness intervening between our frontier settlements and Oregon, and who cultivate and are ever ready to defend the soil, I am fully satisfied. To doubt whether they will obtain such grants as soon as the convention between the United States and Great Britain shall have ceased to exist would be to doubt the justice of Congress; but, pending the year’s notice, it is worthy of consideration whether a stipulation to this effect may be made consistently with the spirit of that convention. The recommendations which I have made as to the best manner of securing our rights in Oregon are submitted to Congress with great deference. Should they, in their wisdom, devise any other mode better calculated to accomplish the same object, it shall meet with my hearty concurrence. At the end of the year’s notice, should Congress think it proper to make provision for giving that notice, we shall have reached a period when the national rights in Oregon must either be abandoned or firmly maintained. That they cannot be abandoned without a sacrifice of both national honor and interest is too clear to admit of doubt. Oregon is a part of the North American continent, to which, it is confidently affirmed, the title of the United States is the best now in existence. For the grounds on which that title rests, I refer you to the correspondence of the late and present secretary of state with the British plenipotentiary during the negotiation. The British proposition of compromise, which would make the Columbia the line south of 49 degrees, with a trifling addition of detached territory to the United States north of that river, and would leave on the British side two-thirds of the whole Oregon territory, including the free navigation of the Columbia and all the valuable harbors on the Pacific, can never for a moment be entertained by the United States without an abandonment of their just and clear territorial rights, their own self-respect, and the

national honor. For the information of Congress, I communicate herewith the correspondence which took place between the two governments during the late negotiation. The rapid extension of our settlements over our territories heretofore unoccupied, the addition of new states to our confederacy, the expansion of free principles, and our rising greatness as a nation are attracting the attention of the powers of Europe, and lately the doctrine has been broached in some of them of a “balance of power” on this continent to check our advancement. The United States, sincerely desirous of preserving relations of good understanding with all nations, cannot in silence permit any European interference on the North American continent, and should any such interference be attempted will be ready to resist it at any and all hazards. It is well known to the American people and to all nations that this government has never interfered with the relations subsisting between other governments. We have never made ourselves parties to their wars or their alliances; we have not sought their territories by conquest; we have not mingled with parties in their domestic struggles; and believing our own form of government to be the best, we have never attempted to propagate it by intrigues, by diplomacy, or by force. We may claim on this continent a like exemption from European interference. The nations of America are equally sovereign and independent with those of Europe. They possess the same rights, independent of all foreign interposition, to make war, to conclude peace, and to regulate their internal affairs. The people of the United States cannot, therefore, view with indifference attempts of European powers to interfere with the independent action of the nations on this continent. The American system of government is entirely different from that of Europe. Jealousy among the different sovereigns of Europe, lest any one of them might become too powerful for the rest, has caused them anxiously to desire the establishment of what they term the “balance of power.” It cannot be permitted to have any application on the North American continent, and especially to the United States. We must ever maintain the principle that the people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny. Should any portion of them, constituting an independent state, propose to unite themselves with our confederacy, this will be a question for them and us to determine without any foreign interposition. We can never consent that European powers shall interfere to prevent such a union because it might disturb the “balance of power” which they may desire to maintain upon this continent. Near a quarter of a century ago the principle was distinctly announced to the world, in the annual message of one of my predecessors, that: “The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” This principle will apply with greatly increased force should any European power attempt to establish any new colony in North America. In the existing circumstances of the world the present is deemed a proper occasion to reiterate and reaffirm the principle avowed by Mr. Monroe and to state my cordial concurrence in its wisdom and sound policy. The reassertion of this principle, especially in reference to North America, is at this day but the promulgation of a policy which no European power should cherish the disposition to resist. Existing rights of every European nation should be respected, but it is due alike to our safety and our interests that the efficient protection of our laws should be extended over our whole territorial limits, and that it should be distinctly announced to the world as our settled policy that no future European colony or dominion shall with our consent be planted or established on any part of the North American continent. Source: A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789–1897, vol. 4, James D. Richardson, ed., 1920, pp. 385– 416.

Senator Thomas Hart Benton on “The Destiny of a Race” (1846) Thomas Hart Benton was one of the great spokesmen for western expansion in the 19th century. Benton subscribed to the belief that American liberty was dependent on expansion and supported the posting of military forces throughout the Louisiana Territory from Yellowstone to the falls of the Missouri River. He was the author of the first Homestead Acts, which encouraged settlement by giving land grants to anyone willing to work the soil, and was a staunch advocate of the disenfranchisement and displacement of Native Americans. In fact, Benton believed strongly in Anglo-Saxonism, an ideology that argued physical, intellectual, and political superiority was racially determined and divinely sanctioned. It also insisted that “inferior” races were doomed to occupy either a subordinate status or extinction by comparison. Racial Anglo-Saxonism flourished in the mid-19th-century United States when it permeated the discussion of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Thomas Hart Benton, The Destiny of the Race Since the dispersion of man upon earth, I know of no human event, past or present, which promises a greater, a more beneficent change upon earth than the arrival of the van of the Caucasian race (the CelticAnglo-Saxon division) upon the border of the sea which washes the shore of eastern Asia. The Mongolian, or Yellow race, is there, four hundred million in number, spreading almost to Europe; a race once the foremost of the human family in the arts of civilization, but torpid and stationary for thousands of years. It is a race far above the Ethiopian, or Black—above the Malay, or Brown (if we must admit five races)—and above the American Indian, or Red; it is a race far above all these, but still, far below the White; and, like all the rest, must receive an impression from the superior race whenever they come in contact. It would seem that the White race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth! for it is the only race that has obeyed it—the only one that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a New World, to subdue and replenish. Starting from western Asia, taking Europe for their field, and the Sun for their guide, and leaving the Mongolians behind, they arrived, after many ages, on the shores of the Atlantic, which they lit up with the lights of science and religion, and adorned with the useful and the elegant arts. Three and a half centuries ago, this race, in obedience to the great command, arrived in the New World, and found new lands to subdue and replenish. For a long time, it was confined to the border of the new field (I now mean the Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division) and even fourscore years ago the philosophic Burke was considered a rash man because he said the English colonists would top the Alleghenies, and descend into the valley of the Mississippi, and occupy without parchment if the Crown refused to make grants of land. What was considered a rash declaration eighty years ago, is old history, in our young country, at this day. Thirty years ago I said the same thing of the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia: it was ridiculed then: it is becoming history today. The venerable Mr. Macon has often told me that he remembered a line low down in North Carolina, fixed by a royal governor as a boundary between the whites and the Indians: where is the boundary now? The van of the Caucasian race now top the Rocky Mountains, and spread down to the shores of the Pacific. In a few years a great population will grow up there, luminous with the accumulated lights of European and American civilization. Their presence in such a position cannot be without its influence upon eastern Asia. The sun of civilization must shine across the sea: socially and commercially, the van of the Caucasians, and the rear of the Mongolians, must intermix. They must talk together, and trade together and marry together. Commerce is a great civilizer—social intercourse as great —and marriage greater. The White and Yellow races can marry together, as well as eat and trade together. Moral and intellectual superiority will do the rest: the White race will take the ascendant, elevating what

is susceptible of improvement—wearing out what is not. The Red race has disappeared from the Atlantic coast: the tribes that resisted civilization, met extinction. This is a cause of lamentation with many. For my part, I cannot murmur at what seems to be the effect of divine law. I cannot repine that this Capitol has replaced the wigwam—this Christian people, replaced the savages—white matrons, the red squaws—and that such men as Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, have taken the place of Powhattan, Opechonecanough, and other red men, howsoever respectable they may have been as savages. Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites, and civilization, always the preference of the Whites, has been pressed as an object, while extinction has followed as a consequence of its resistance. The Black and the Red races have often felt their ameliorating influence. The Yellow race, next to themselves in the scale of mental and moral excellence, and in the beauty of form, once their superiors in the useful and elegant arts, and in learning, and still respectable though stationary; this race cannot fail to receive a new impulse from the approach of the Whites, improved so much since so many ages ago they left the western borders of Asia. The apparition of the van of the Caucasian race, rising upon them in the east after having left them on the west, and after having completed the circumnavigation of the globe, must wake up and reanimate the torpid body of the old Asia. Our position and policy will commend us to their hospitable reception: political considerations will aid the action of social and commercial influences. Pressed upon by the great Powers of Europe—the same that press upon us—they must in our approach see the advent of friends, not of foes—of benefactors, not of invaders. The moral and intellectual superiority of the White race will do the rest: and thus the youngest people, and the newest land, will become the reviver and the regenerator of the oldest. Source: The Congressional Globe, Appendix. 28 May 1846. 29th Cong. 1st sess. 867–879.

Journalist Edward Gould Buffum Pans for Gold in California (1848) Edward Gould Buffum, (1820–1867) a journalist by profession, went to California during the Mexican War as a soldier in a New York regiment in 1846. There, Buffum and his regiment helped wrest California from Mexico. After his discharge from the army, Buffum remained to pan gold in the area around John Sutter’s sawmills where it had just been discovered. Buffum recorded his experiences in a book, Six Months in the Gold Mines, from which this excerpt comes. Next morning early, in better spirits than we had enjoyed for a week previously, we started for Yuba River. About a mile from the camping-place we struck into the mountains, the same range at whose base we had been before travelling, and which are a portion of the Sierra Nevada. The hills here were steep and rugged, but covered with a magnificent growth of oak and red-wood. As we reached the summit of a lofty hill, the Yuba River broke upon our view, winding like a silver thread beneath us, its banks dotted with white tents, and fringed with trees and shrubbery. We had at last reached the “mines,” although a very different portion of them than that for which we started. We turned out our tired horses, and immediately set forth on an exploring expedition. As my clothing was all dirty and wet, I concluded to indulge in the luxury of a new shirt, and going down to the river found a shrewd Yankee in a tent surrounded by a party of naked Indians, and exposing for sale jerked beef at a dollar a pound, flour at a dollar and a half do., and for a coarse striped shirt which I picked up with the intention of purchasing, he coolly asked me the moderate price of sixteen dollars! I looked at my dirty shirt, then at the clean new one I held in my hand, and finally at my little gold bag, not yet replenished by digging, and concluded to postpone my purchase until I had struck my pick and

crowbar into the bowels of the earth, and extracted therefrom at least a sufficiency to purchase a shirt. The diggings on Yuba River had at that time been discovered only about three months, and were confined entirely to the “bars,” as they are called, extending nearly a mile each way from where the road strikes the river, on both its banks. The principal diggings were then called the “upper” and the “lower diggings,” each about half a mile above and below the road. We started for the upper diggings to “see the elephant,” and winding through the hills, for it was impossible to travel all the way on the river’s bank, struck the principal bar then wrought on the river. This has since been called Foster’s Bar, after an American who was then keeping a store there, and who had a claim on a large portion of the bar. Upon reaching the bar, a curious scene presented itself. About one hundred men, in miner’s costume, were at work, performing the various portions of the labour necessary in digging the earth and working a rocking machine. The apparatus then used upon the Yuba River, and which has always been the favourite assistant of the golddigger, was the common rocker or cradle, constructed in the simplest manner. It consists of nothing more than a wooden box or hollowed log, two sides and one end of which are closed, while the other end is left open. At the end which is closed and called the “mouth” of the machine, a sieve, usually made of a plate of sheet iron, or a piece of raw hide, perforated with holes about half an inch in diameter, is rested upon the sides. A number of “bars” or “rifflers,” which are little pieces of board from one to two inches in height, are nailed to the bottom, and extend laterally across it. Of these, there are three or four in the machine, and one at the “tail,” as it is called, i. e. the end where the dirt is washed out. This, with a pair of rockers like those of a child’s cradle, and a handle to rock it with, complete the description of the machine, which being placed with the rockers upon two logs, and the “mouth” elevated at a slight angle above the tail, is ready for operation. Modified and improved as this may be, and as in fact it already has been, so long as manual labour is employed for washing gold, the “cradle” is the best agent to use for that purpose. The manner of procuring and washing the golden earth was this. The loose stones and surface earth being removed from any portion of the bar, a hole from four to six feet square was opened, and the dirt extracted there from was thrown upon a raw hide placed at the side of the machine. One man shovelled the dirt into the sieve, another dipped up water and threw it on, and a third rocked the “cradle.” The earth, thrown upon the sieve, is washed through with the water, while the stones and gravel are retained and thrown off. The continued motion of the machine, and the constant stream of water pouring through it, washes the earth over the various bars or rifflers to the “tail,” where it runs out, while the gold, being of greater specific gravity, sinks to the bottom, and is prevented from escaping by the rifflers. When a certain amount of earth has been thus washed (usually about sixty pans full are called “a washing”), the gold, mixed with a heavy black sand, which is always found mingled with gold in California, is taken out and washed in a tin pan, until nearly all the sand is washed away. It is then put into a cup or pan, and when the day’s labour is over is dried before the fire, and the sand remaining carefully blown out. This is a simple explanation of the process of gold-washing in the placers of California. At present, however, instead of dipping and pouring on water by hand, it is usually led on by a hose or forced by a pump, thereby giving a better and more constant stream, and saving the labour of one man. The excavation is continued until the solid rock is struck, or the water rushing in renders it impossible to obtain any more earth, when a new place is opened. We found the gold on the Yuba in exceedingly fine particles, and it has always been considered of a very superior quality. We inquired of the washers as to their success, and they, seeing we were “green horns,” and thinking we might possibly interfere with them, gave us either evasive answers, or in some cases told us direct lies. We understood from them that they were making about twenty dollars per day, while I afterwards learned, from the most positive testimony of two men who were at work there at the time, that one hundred dollars a man was not below the average estimate of a day’s labour.

On this visit to Foster’s Bar I made my first essay [attempt] in gold-digging. I scraped up with my hand my tin cup full of earth, and washed it in the river. How eagerly I strained my eyes as the earth was washing out, and the bottom of the cup was coming in view! and how delighted, when, on reaching the bottom, I discerned about twenty little golden particles sparkling in the sun’s rays, and worth probably about fifty cents. I wrapped them carefully in a piece of paper, and preserved them for a long time,—but, like much more gold in larger quantities, which it has since been my lot to possess, it has escaped my grasp, and where it now is Heaven only knows. The labour on Yuba River appeared very severe, the excavations being sometimes made to a depth of twelve feet before the soil containing the gold, which was a gravelly clay, was reached. We had not brought our tools with us, intending, if our expedition in the mountains had succeeded, that one of our party should return for our remaining stock of provisions and tools. We had no facilities for constructing a machine, and no money to buy one (two hundred dollars being the price for which a mere hollowed pine log was offered us), and besides, all the bars upon which men were then engaged in labour were “claimed,” a claim at that time being considered good when the claimant had cleared off the top soil from any portion of the bar. We returned to our camp, and talked over our prospects, in a quandary what to do. Little did we then dream that, in less than six months, the Yuba River, then only explored some three miles above where we were, would be successfully wrought for forty miles above us, and that thousands would find their fortunes upon it. We concluded to return to the Embarcadero, and take a new start. Accordingly, next morning we packed up and set off, leaving at work upon the river about two hundred men. Having retraced our steps, we arrived at Sutter’s Fort in safety on the evening of November 30th, just in time to find the member of our party whom we had left behind, packing all our remaining provisions and tools into a cart, ready to start for the “dry diggings” on the following morning. The history of John A. Sutter, and his remarkable settlement on the banks of the Sacramento, has been one of interest since California first began to attract attention. Captain Sutter is by birth a Swiss, and was formerly an officer in the French army. He emigrated to the United States, became a naturalized citizen, and resided in Missouri several years. In the year 1839 he emigrated to the then wilderness of California, where he obtained a large grant of land, to the extent of about eleven leagues, bordering on the Sacramento River, and made a settlement directly in the heart of an Indian country, among tribes of hostile savages. For a long time he suffered continual attacks and depredations from the Indians, but finally succeeded, by kind treatment and good offices, in reducing them to subjection, and persuading them to come into his settlement, which he called New Helvetia. With their labour he built a large fort of adobes or sunburnt bricks, brought a party of his Indians under military discipline, and established a regular garrison. His wheat-fields were very extensive, and his cattle soon numbered five thousand, the whole labour being performed by Indians. These he paid with a species of money made of tin, which was stamped with dots, indicating the number of days’ labour for which each one was given; and they were returned to him in exchange for cotton cloth, at a dollar a yard, and trinkets and sweetmeats at corresponding prices. The discovery of the gold mines of California has, however, added more to Sutter’s fame than did his bold settlement in the wilderness. This has introduced him to the world almost as a man of gold, and connected his name for ever with the most prized metal upon earth. He is quite “a gentleman of the old school,” his manners being very cordial and prepossessing. Sutter’s Fort is a large parallelogram, of adobe walls, five hundred feet long by one hundred and fifty broad. Port-holes are bored through the walls, and at its corners are bastions, on which cannon are mounted. But when I arrived there its hostile appearance was entirely forgotten in the busy scenes of trade which it exhibited. The interior of the fort, which had been used by Sutter for granaries and storehouses,

was rented to merchants, the whole at the annual sum of sixty thousand dollars, and was converted into stores, where every description of goods was to be purchased at gold-mine prices. Flour was selling at $60 per barrel, pork at $150 per barrel, sugar at 25 cents per pound, and clothing at the most enormous and unreasonable rates. The principal trading establishment at this time was that of Samuel Brannan Co. Mr. Brannan informed me, that since the discovery of the mines, over seventy-five thousand dollars in gold dust had been received by them. Sutter’s Fort is in latitude 35 33′ 45″ N., and longitude 121 40′ 05″ W. With all our worldly gear packed in an ox-wagon, we left Sutter’s Fort on the morning of the 1st of December, and travelling about seven miles on the road, encamped in a beautiful grove of evergreen oak, to give the cattle an opportunity to lay in a sufficient supply of grass and acorns, preparatory to a long march. As we were to remain here during the day, we improved the opportunity by taking our dirty clothing, of which by that time we had accumulated a considerable quantity, down to the banks of the American Fork, distant about one mile from camp, for the purpose of washing. While we were employed in this laborious but useful occupation, Higgins called my attention to the salmon which were working up the river over a little rapid opposite us. Some sport suggested itself; and more anxious for this than labour, we dropped our half-washed shirts, and started back to camp for our rifles, which we soon procured, and brought down to the river. In making their way over the bar, the backs of the salmon were exposed some two inches above water; and the instant one appeared, a well-directed rifle-ball perforated his spine. The result was, that before dark Higgins and myself carried into camp thirty-five splendid salmon, procured by this novel mode of sport. We luxuriated on them, and gave what we could not eat for supper and breakfast to some lazy Indians, who had been employed the whole day in spearing some half dozen each. There is every probability that the salmon fishery will yet prove a highly lucrative business in California. Next morning we packed up and made a fresh start. That night we encamped at the “Green Springs,” about twenty-five miles distant from Sutter’s Fort. These springs are directly upon the road, and bubble up from a muddy black loam, while around them is the greenest verdure,—the surrounding plain being dotted with beautiful groves and magnificent flowers. Their waters are delicious. As the ox-team was a slow traveller, and quarters were to be looked for in our new winter home, on the next morning Higgins and myself were appointed a deputation to mount two horses we had brought with us and proceed post-haste to the “dry diggings.” We started at 10 A. M., and travelled through some beautiful valleys and over lofty hills. As we reached the summit of a high ridge, we paused by common consent to gaze upon the landscape and breathe the delicious air. The broad and fertile valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin lay stretched at our feet like a highly coloured map. The noble rivers which lend their names to these rich valleys were plainly visible, winding like silver threads through dark lines of timber fringing their banks; now plunging amid dense forests, and now coming in view sparkling and bright as the riches they contain; the intermediate plains, here parched and browned with the sun’s fierce rays; there brilliant with all the hues of the rainbow, and dotted with the autumnal flowers and open groves of evergreen oak. Herds of elk, black-tailed deer, and antelope browsed near the mountain sides, on the summit of which the eagle builds his eyry. The surrounding atmosphere, fragrant with delightful odours, was so pure and transparent as to render objects visible at a great distance, and so elastic and bracing as to create a perceptible effect on our feelings. Far in the distance the massive peak of Shaste [Shasta] reared its snow-capped head, from amid a dense forest, fourteen thousand feet into the sky. We arrived at what was then called Weaver’s Creek, about dusk. About a dozen log houses, rudely thrown together and plastered with mud, constituted the little town which was to be our winter home, and where we were to be initiated into the mysteries, pleasures, and sufferings of a gold-digger’s life. A pretty little

stream, coursing through lofty oak and pine-covered hills, and on whose left bank the settlement had been made, was the river that had borne down the riches which we hoped to appropriate to our private uses. It was a beautiful afternoon when we reached it. The sun was just declining, and, resting upon the crest of the distant Sierra Nevada, seemed to cover it with a golden snow. The miners were returning to their log huts with their implements of labour slung over their shoulders, and their tin pans containing the precious metal in their hands. We learned that the “dry diggings” for which we had started, were three miles further into the mountains, that there was a great scarcity of water, and that but very little could be accomplished before the commencement of the rainy reason. Finding some old friends here, who generously offered us a “chance” upon the mud floor of their log cabin, we remained with them for the night, and stretching our blankets upon the floor and lighting our pipes, were soon engaged in an interesting conversation on the all-absorbing topic. Next morning our party arrived with the team, and from the representations of our friends, we concluded to remain at Weaver’s Creek, and pitched our tent on the banks of the stream. Our teamster’s bill was something of an item to men who were not as yet accustomed to “gold-mine prices.” We paid three hundred dollars for the transportation, about fifty miles, of three barrels of flour, one of pork, and about two hundred pounds of small stores, being at the rate of thirty dollars per cwt. This was the regular price charged by teamsters at that time, and of course there was no alternative but to pay, which we did, although it exhausted the last dollar belonging to our party. But there, before us, on the banks of that pretty stream and in the neighbouring gorges, lay the treasures that were to replenish our pockets, and the sigh for its departure was changed by this thought into a hope that our fondest wishes might be realized in our new and exciting occupation. Source: Buffum, Edward Gould. Six Months in the Gold Mines (Philadelphia, Lea and Blanchard, 1850), 49–58.

“This Muddy Place”: Mary Ballou, a Boardinghouse Keeper in the California Gold Rush (1854) While some “forty-niners” did profit from their efforts panning for gold during the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, many of the fortunes made were by those who provided goods and services to the miners. Mary Ballou and her husband ran a boardinghouse in the gold mining town of Negro Bar, California. Ballou’s letter to her son, written in 1852, evoked the rough housing, violence, and high prices (from which the Ballous profited) in California during the gold rush. She also described the limited number of women among the flood of male miners, and how important they were to each other for companionship and consolation. California Negrobar October 30 1852 My Dear Selden we are about as usual in health. well I suppose you would like to know what I am doing in this gold region. well I will try to tell you what my work is here in this muddy Place. All the kitchen that I have is four posts stuck down into the ground and covered over the top with factory cloth no floor but the ground. this is a Boarding House kitchen. there is a floor in the dining room and my sleeping room coverd with nothing but cloth. we are at work in a Boarding House. Oct 27 this morning I awoke and it rained in torrents. well I got up and I thought of my House. I went and looket into my kitchen, the mud and water was over my Shoes I could not go into the kitchen to do any work to day but kept perfectly dry in the Dining so I got along verry well. your Father put on his Boots

and done the work in the kitchen. I felt badly to think that I was de[s]tined to be in such a place. I wept for a while and then I commenced singing and made up a song as I went along. my song was this: to California I did come and thought I under the bed I shall have to run to shelter me from the piercing storm. now I will try to tell you what my work is in this Boarding House. well somtimes I am washing and Ironing somtimes I am making mince pie and Apple pie and squash pies. Somtimes frying mince turnovers and Donuts. I make Buiscuit and now and then Indian jonny cake and then again I am making minute puding filled with rasons and Indian Bake pudings and then again a nice Plum Puding and then again I am Stuffing a Ham of pork that cost forty cents a pound. Somtimes I am making gruel for the sick now and then cooking oisters sometimes making coffee for the French people strong enough for any man to walk on that has Faith as Peter had. three times a day I set my Table which is about thirty feet in length and do all the little fixings about it such as filling pepper boxes and vinegar cruits and mustard pots and Butter cups. somtimes I am feeding my chickens and then again I am scareing the Hogs out of my kitchen and Driving the mules out of my Dining room. you can see by the descrption of that I have given you of my kitchen that anything can walk into the kitchen that choeses to walk in and there being no door to shut from the kitchen into the Dining room you see that anything can walk into the kitchen and then from kitchen into the Dining room so you see the Hogs and mules can walk in any time day or night if they choose to do so. somtimes I am up all times a night scaring the Hogs and mules out of the House. last night there a large rat came down pounce down onto our bed in the night. sometimes I take my fan and try to fan myself but I work so hard that my Arms pain me so severely that I kneed some one to fan me so I do not find much comfort anywhere. I made a Bluberry puding to day for Dinner. Somtimes I am making soups and cramberry tarts and Baking chicken that cost four Dollars a head and cooking Eggs at three Dollars a Dozen. Somtimes boiling cabbage and Turnips and frying fritters and Broiling stake and cooking codfish and potatoes. I often cook nice Salmon trout that weigh from ten to twenty pound apiece. somtimes I am taking care of Babies and nursing at the rate of Fifty Dollars a week but I would not advise any Lady to come out here and suffer the toil and fatigue that I have suffered for the sake of a little gold neither do I advise any one to come. Clarks Simmon wife says if she was safe in the States she would not care if she had not one cent. She came in here last night and said, “Oh dear I am so homesick that I must die,” and then again my other associate came in with tears in her eyes and said that she had cried all day. she said if she had as good a home as I had got she would not stay twenty five minutes in California. I told her that she could not pick up her duds in that time. she said she would not stop for duds nor anything else but my own heart was two sad to cheer them much. now I will tell you a little more about my cooking. somtimes I am cooking rabbits and Birds that are called quails here and I cook squrrels. occasionly I run in and have a chat with Jane and Mrs Durphy and I often have a hearty cry. no one but my maker knows my feelings. and then I run into my little cellar which is about four feet square as I have no other place to run that is cool. October 21 well I have been to church to hear a methodist sermon. his Text was let us lay aside every weight and the sin that doth so easely beset us. I was the only Lady that was present and about forty gentleman. So you see that I go to church when I can. November 2 well it has been Lexion day here to day. I have heard of strugling and tite pulling but never saw such a day as I have witnessed to day the Ballot Box was so near to me that I could hear every word that was spoken. the wind Blows verry hard here to day. I have three lights Burning and the wind blows so hard that it almost puts my lights out while I am trying to write. if you could but step in and see the inconvience that I have for writing you would not wonder that I cannot write any better you would wonder that I could write at all. notwithstanding all the dificuty in writing I improve every leishure moment. it is is quite cool here my fingers are so cold that I can hardly hold my pen. well it is ten o clock

at night while I am writing. the people have been Declareing the votes. I hear them say Hura for the Whigs and sing whigs songs. now I hear them say that Morman Island has gone whig and now another time a cheering. now I hear them say Beals Bar has gone whig now another time cheering. well it is getting late and I must retire soon there is so much noise I do not expect to sleep much to night. there has been a little fighting here to day and one chalenge given but the chalenge given but the chalenge was not accepted they got together and setted their trouble. I will tell tell you a little of my bad feelings, on the 9 of September there was a little fight took place in the store. I saw them strike each other through the window in the store. one went and got a pistol and started towards the other man. I never go into the store but your mothers tender heart could not stand that so I ran into the store and Beged and plead with him not to kill him for eight or ten minutes not to take his Life for the sake of his wife and three little children to spare his life and then I ran through the Dining room into my sleeping room and Buried my Face in my bed so as not to hear the sound of the pistol and wept Biterly. Oh I thought if I had wings how quick I would fly to the States. that night at the supper table he told the Boarders if it had not been for what that Lady said to him Scheles would have been a dead man. after he got his pashion over he said that he was glad that he did not kill him so you see that your mother has saved one Human beings Life, you see that I am trying to relieve all the suffering and trying to do all the good that I can. there I hear the Hogs in my kichen turning the Pots and kettles upside down so I must drop my pen and run and drive them out. so you this is the way that I have to write—jump up every five minutes for somthing and then again I washed out about a Dollars worth of gold dust the fourth of July in the cradle so you see that I am doing a little mining in this gold region but I think it harder to rock the cradle to wash out gold than it is to rock the cradle for the Babies in the States. October 11 I washed in the forenoon and made a Democrat Flag in the afternoon sewed twenty yards of splendid worsted fringe around it and I made whig Flag. they are both swinging acrost the road but the Whig Flag is the richest. I had twelve Dollars for making them so you see that I am making Flags with all rest of the various kinds of work that I am doing and then again I am scouring candle sticks and washing the floor and making soft soap. the People tell me that it is the first Soft Soap they knew made in California. Somtimes I am making mattresses and sheets. I have no windows in my room. all the light that I have shines through canvas that covers the House and my eyes are so dim that I can hardly see to make a mark so I think you will excuse me for not writing any better. I have three Lights burning now but I am so tired and Blind that I can scearcely see and here I am among the French and Duch and Scoth and Jews and Italions and Sweeds and Chineese and Indians and all manner of tongus and nations but I am treated with due respect by them all. on the night of Election the second day of November was Burnt down and some lives lost. Adams express office was Broken open by a band of robbers a large quantity of money was taken. they took one man out of bed with his wife took him into the office and Bound him laid him on the floor and told him to give them the key to the safe or they would kill him. one of the robbers staid in the room his wife his face was muffled and Pistols by his side and told her that if she made any noise for so long a time he would kill her. only immagine what her feelings must be. I lived close by the office. I went in to see her the next morning she told me that she nearly lost her sences she was so frigtned. I immagine you will say what a long yarn this is from California. if you can read it at all I must close soon for I am so tired and almost sick. Oh my Dear Selden I am so Home sick I will say to you once more to see that Augustus has every thing that he kneeds to make him comfortable and by all means have him Dressed warm this cold winter. I worry a great deal about my Dear children. it seems as though my heart would break when I realise how far I am from my Dear Loved ones this from your affectionate mother

Mary B Ballou Source: Ballou, Mary B. “I Hear the Hogs in My Kitchen”: A Woman’s View of the Gold Rush. Edited by Archibald Hanna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 42–46.

Homestead Act (1862) Along with the Morrill Land Grant Act and the Pacific Railroad Act, the Homestead Act was part of a set of federal incentives intended to bring Euro-American settlement to the American West. The law established a three-part process for individuals to acquire federal land in the West for occupation and ownership. The Homestead Act opened up to private ownership approximately one-tenth of the land in the United States. CHAP. LXXV.—An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and. sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres. SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the person applying for the benefit of this act shall, upon application to the register of the land office in which he or she is about to make such entry, make affidavit before the said register or receiver that he or she is the head of a family, or is twenty-one years or more of age, or shall have performed service in the army or navy of the United States, and that he has never borne arms against the Government of the United States or given aid and comfort to its enemies, and that such application is made for his or her exclusive use and benefit, and that said entry is made for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation, and not either directly or indirectly for the use or benefit of any other person or persons whomsoever; and upon filing the said affidavit with the register or receiver, and on payment of ten dollars, he or she shall thereupon be permitted to enter the quantity of land specified: Provided, however, That no certificate shall be given or patent issued therefor until the expiration of five years from the date of such entry; and if, at the expiration of such time, or at any time within two years thereafter, the person making such entry; or, if he be dead, his widow; or in case of her death, his heirs or devisee; or in case of a widow making such entry, her heirs or devisee, in case of her death; shall prove by two credible witnesses that he, she, or they have resided upon or cultivated the same for the term of five years immediately succeeding the time of filing the affidavit aforesaid, and shall make affidavit that no part of said land has been alienated, and that he has borne [t]rue allegiance to the Government of the United States; then, in such case, he, she, or they, if at that time a citizen of the United States, shall be entitled to a patent, as in other cases provided for by law: And provided, further, That in case of the death

of both father and mother, leaving an Infant child, or children, under twenty-one years of age, the right and fee shall ensure to the benefit of said infant child or children; and the executor, administrator, or guardian may, at any time within two years after the death of the surviving parent, and in accordance with the laws of the State in which such children for the time being have their domicil, sell said land for the benefit of said infants, but for no other purpose; and the purchaser shall acquire the absolute title by the purchase, and be en-titled to a patent from the United States, on payment of the office fees and sum of money herein specified. SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the register of the land office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of, his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded. SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That no lands acquired under the provisions of this act shall in any event become liable to the satisfaction of any debt or debts contracted prior to the issuing of the patent therefor. SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That if, at any time after the filing of the affidavit, as required in the second section of this act, and before the expiration of the five years aforesaid, it shall be proven, after due notice to the settler, to the satisfaction of the register of the land office, that the person having filed such affidavit shall have actually changed his or her residence, or abandoned the said land for more than six months at any time, then and in that event the land so entered shall revert to the government. SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That no individual shall be permitted to acquire title to more than one quarter section under the provisions of this act; and that the Commissioner of the General Land Office is hereby required to prepare and issue such rules and regulations, consistent with this act, as shall be necessary and proper to carry its provisions into effect; and that the registers and receivers of the several land offices shall be entitled to receive the same compensation for any lands entered under the provisions of this act that they are now entitled to receive when the same quantity of land is entered with money, one half to be paid by the person making the application at the time of so doing, and the other half on the issue of the certificate by the person to whom it may be issued; but this shall not be construed to enlarge the maximum of compensation now prescribed by law for any register or receiver: Provided, That nothing contained in this act shall be so construed as to impair or interfere in any manner whatever with existing preemption rights: And provided, further, That all persons who may have filed their applications for a preemption right prior to the passage of this act, shall be entitled to all privileges of this act: Provided, further, That no person who has served, or may hereafter serve, for a period of not less than fourteen days in the army or navy of the United States, either regular or volunteer, under the laws thereof, during the existence of an actual war, domestic or foreign, shall be deprived of the benefits of this act on account of not having attained the age of twenty-one years. SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the fifth section of the act en-titled “An act in addition to an act more effectually to provide for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and for other purposes,” approved the third of March, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, shall extend to all oaths, affirmations, and affidavits, required or authorized by this act. SEC. 8. And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be construed as to prevent any person who has availed him or herself of the benefits of the first section of this act, from paying the minimum price, or

the price to which the same may have graduated, for the quantity of land so entered at any time before the expiration of the five years, and obtaining a patent therefor from the government, as in other cases provided by law, on making proof of settlement and cultivation as provided by existing laws granting preemption rights. APPROVED, May 20, 1862. Source: Act of May 20, 1862 (Homestead Act), Public Law 37–64, 05/20/1862; Record Group 11; General Records of the United States Government; National Archives.

“We Are Not Entirely Out of Civilization”: A Homesteader Writes Home— Letter from Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and the Wheeler Thomas Family (June 16, 1873) Making houses out of sod bricks, homesteaders in the trans-Missouri west faced innumerable hardships. Mattie Oblinger and her husband’s experiences in Kansas were like those of many who made homes on the vast, treeless plains and faced a series of hardships on the land in the 1870s: blizzards, droughts, and grasshoppers, as well as low crop prices. Mattie died in childbirth at the age of 36. Fillmore County Neb June 16th 1873 Dear Brother & Sister & all of Uncle Wheelers Thinking you would like to hear from us and hear how we are prospering I thought I must write you a letter and to fulfill the promise I made when I last saw you The reason I have not written sooner I have not had the time I have wrote a letter almost every sunday to send home and that has occupied most all my leisure time Sunday is rather a poor day for us to get a chance to write too for we have went to Church and sunday school every sunday I have been here two sundays we went about 9 miles the rest of ther time we went to Giles the next preaching will be at Giles which is in two weeks The man that preaches is quite old and is a baptist minister but when he preaches he makes no distinction in denominations We have a good sunday school in progress now I suppose there must be about fifty enrolled We have not the means yet to carry on sunday school yet as they do in older settlments but we have our bibles and hymn books and we all gather together and read a lesson and then ask questions and sing and offer prayers and I think we do about as much good as any sunday school I know it is not quite so interesting as if we had money to buy papers and books I think we have Just as enterpriseing people here as any where There was methodist preaching yesterday about four miles from here Mr Elliotts and us had intended to go but it threatened rain and it was so late when our sunday school and society meeting was out that we did not go I think there will be a methodist preaching place established in the neighborhood before long as there was a methodist preacher around a few days ago hunting up the scattered members in the country He said the conference had sent him here so you see we are not entirely out of civilizatian I know if you was here you would not think so I have just as good neighbors as I ever had any where and they are very sociable I was never in a neighborhood where all was as near on equality as they are here Those that have been here have a little the most they all have cows and that is quite a help here I get milk & butter from Mrs Furgison who lives 1/4 of a mile from us get the milk for nothing and pay twelve cents a pound for butter she makes good butter Most all of the

people here live in Sod houses and dug outs I like the sod house the best they are the most convenient I expect you think we live miserable because we are in a sod house but I tell you in solid earnest I never enjoyed my self better but George I expect you are ready to say It is because it is somthing new No this not the case it is because we are … on our own and the thoughts of moveing next spring does not bother me and every lick we strike is for our selves and not half for some one else I tell you this is quite a consolation to us who have been renters so long there are no renters here every one is on his own and doing the best he can and not much a head yet for about all that are here was renters and it took about all they had to get here Some come here and put up temporary frame houses thought they could not live in a sod house This fall they are going to build sod houses so they can live live [sic] comfortable this winter a temporary frame house here is a poor thing a house that is not plastered the wind and dust goes right through and they are very cold A sod house can be built so they are real nice and comfortable build nice walls and then plaster and lay a floor above and below and then they are nice Uriah is going to build one after that style this fall The one we are in at present is 14 by 16 and a dirt floor Uriah intends takeing it for a stable this winter I will be a nice comfortable stable A little ways from the door is a small pond that has watter the year round we use out of it for all purposes but drinking and cooking We have the drinking water cary about 1/4 of a mile and the best of water We have two neighbors only 1/4 of a mile from us I must stop and get supper Supper is over and dishes washed I wish I had a cow or two to milk I would feel quite proud then think will get one after harvest Uriah is going up near Crete to harvest The wheat and Oats looks well here but there is not so much sown as in older settlements each man calculates to do his own harvesting in this neighborhood this year there is several men going from this settlement in to older ones to get harvesting Mrs Elliot and I are talking of staying together while our men go harvesting Almost every man here does his own work yet for they are not able to hire I think it will be quite different in a few years Uriah has 23 acres of sod corn planted it looks real well I tell you it is encourageing to have out a lot of corn and all your own We have a nice lot of Squashes and Cucumbers & Mellons & Beans comeing on There was a striped bug worked some on our squashes but did not bother our other vines We have our Potatoes and cabbage up at Giles as they do not so well on sod I set a hundred & thirty cabbages last week they are every one growing We have the nicest patch of early rose potatoes in the neighborhood will not be long until we will have new potatoes We have fared pretty well in the potato line as Uriah bought ten bushel when I come to Crete he bought for seed and to use we will have plenty until new potatoes come If nothing happens we will have a nice lot this fall I have nice Tomatoes plants comeing on I want to set more Tomatoes and Cabbage this week I get Garden vegetables in Giles garden I could not make garden here as we had no sod subdued and I have such good neighbors they said they would divide their garden vegetables I planted a lot of beet seed in Mrs Alkires garden they look real nice Uriah is breaking sod to day he will soon have 40 acres turned over then it will be ready to go into right next Spring It looks like it was fun to turn the sod over here there are no roots or stpumps to be jerkinking the plows out It has been very warm for a few days and it makes old buck pant considerable he is almost fat enough for beef old bright is not so fat so he gets along the best. We have had an immense lot of rain here this season but I guess this has been the general complaint every where I think we had the hardest storm saturday night or evening that has been since I come the wind blew very hard I do not know how long it lasted for I went to sleep and the wind was blowing yet We can not notice the wind so much in a sod house as in a frame Giles a Doc came home with us yesterday I heard them & Uriah laughing about going out to see if the fences was blown down I looks very strange to me to see Crops growing here and no fence around them They have a herd law here and the stock a man has for use about home he must Lariett them out his other cattle he puts them in herds in the

neighbor hood gets them herded for 25 cts per month The prarie looks beautiful now as the grass is so nice and green and the most pretty flowers I can not tell how many different kinds I have noticed I have seen three Antelopes one Jack Rabbit and one swift and lots of prarie squirrels I thought when I left the timber I would not see any more birds but there are lots of them here some that are entirely different to any I ever saw in Ind There is more Rattle snakes here than there are garter snakes in Ind Uriah has killed two on our place there are not so plent right in our neighborhood as they are three miles east of here near a prarie dog town some men over there have killed as high 18 & 20 John how is this for high hardly any one gets bit with them they are mostly black rattle snakes Sam has sold out to Mr Mc Clanin. McClain he had not improved as much as the law requested he should and he was afraid some one would jump his claim and then he would be out he sold very cheap only got fifty dollars I ask him if he was going back with out secureing a peice of land he said no Ill bet I dont go back home with out owning some of this nice prarie he said he was bound to have land here He is going to buy RR land and then he will not have to stay by it I think he will go to Ind this fall I have not heard him say for certain This is a lonely place for a single man for there are not many young ladies here for them to go with but there are lots comeing on a little too young for Doc Uriah Cook started for Minnesota last monday he bought eighty acres one mile east of us paid one hundred & twenty five dollars he has a very pretty 80 He set no time to come back Geo do you and Grizzie of comeing west yet if you do I wish you would come here I am quite sure you would like the country for it is as pretty and good as it can be of course it has some draw backs as all other places do Ella is fat and hearty she said I should tell you to come over and bring Earny she often speaks of him I got her a little kitten last evening she is trying to comb it We are all well hope this will find you all well and Aunt Eliza getting better I washed to day Now Geo I send this in your name but I want you to besure and give it Uncle Wheels too as postage is scarce I thoughgt this would do all I want you all to besure and write soon We send our love and best wishes from U W O & M V Oblinger Direct to Sutton Clay County Neb Excuse letter paper Source: Uriah W. Oblinger Collection, Nebraska Historical Society, from Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters, American Memory, Library of Congress; Nebraska State Historical Society, Digital ID, nbhips1109. Used by permission of the Nebraska State Historical Society.

3. Controlling the Indians, 1835–1903

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW HORSE, GUN, AND DISEASE When American settlers began pushing onto the Great Plains in the middle of the 19th century, they encountered a world that was already in flux. The newcomers did not encounter a static landscape but one that had been changing for generations. Before the introduction of the horse by the Spanish in the late 17th century, most Native populations in the region were sedentary peoples who lived in earth lodges and cultivated extensive acreages of crops. However, once the Apaches acquired horses following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and the animals spread throughout the West by trading and raiding, many peoples altered their lifeways to take advantage of the resources now available to them. While horticulturalists like Mandans, Arikaras, Hidatsas, and Omahas continued to raise crops along the Missouri River, others like the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Kiowas, and Blackfeet transformed into mobile communities, following the rich bison herds. Horses not only changed the locations of groups, but the cultures themselves as warfare became increasingly common. Young men now sought visions that would allow them to outdo one another in battle, for example, collecting horses that would bring prestige and wealth. As warfare escalated, it also became more deadly. While Spanish horses spread across the Plains from the vast Southwestern trading center known as Comancheria (see volume 1, part 2), British guns filtered in from the northeast through seminomadic peoples such as the Pawnees. By the end of the 18th century, the horse and gun network covered the entire western half of the continent. Crow and Cheyenne people could trade horses they obtained from the Shoshones for guns at a Mandan village through Pawnee middlemen. The Shoshones, in turn, traded with the Flatheads and Blackfeet, who traded with Pacific Coast groups such as the Chinooks who themselves dealt with Europeans along the coast. The expansion of these trading networks only increased the violence as the need for guns and horses increased. The Great Plains became a battleground as warriors raided for horses and fought for honor, and tribes clashed over hunting grounds and resources. As older residents repositioned themselves, groups pressured from American expansion to the east were drawn to the rich resources and opportunities available in the West, none more so than the Sioux. The western tribes of the Sioux—Oglalas, Hunkpapas, Brulés, Minneconjous, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Sihaspas—began to push the Iowas, Sauks, Meskwakis, Otoes, and other prairie peoples to the south and west. By the turn of the 19th century, the newcomers had taken control of the northern Plains. By the middle of the century, the Lakotas’ alliance with the Cheyennes and Arapahos made their expansion the primary concern for many Indian groups throughout the Great Plains. Horses and guns became key to countering the growing Western Sioux.

While the horse and gun drastically altered its geopolitics, diseases brought even more devastating changes to the Plains. European pathogens such as smallpox and measles, to which Native Americans lacked acquired immunity, inevitably followed the same routes into Indian country as guns, horses, and trade goods, spawning what historians refer to as “virgin soil epidemics.” These epidemics wreaked havoc on Native peoples well before Americans began settling west of the Mississippi, with some estimates of as high as 90 percent of the total population dying from European diseases. Combined with the expanding Sioux, these epidemics made life precarious for many Indian groups even before American settlers transformed their lifeways. The Lakotas suffered less from smallpox and other European diseases than did the other Native peoples, however, for two reasons. First, they were mobile, living and traveling in small, flexible groups. At the slightest hint of disease, they simply dispersed, which interrupted person-to-person transmission. Those living in agricultural villages along the Missouri did not have such an option. The Mandans, for example, numbered as many as 15,000 when the French first met them in 1738 but after the smallpox epidemic of 1837, only 138 remained. Second, many Lakotas were inoculated against smallpox whereas those further north and west were not vaccinated due to inadequate vaccine supplies. As a result, the population of the already numerous, powerful, and widely feared Lakotas continued to increase rapidly while other groups lost as much as half of their populations—or even more—to disease. In 1833, half of the nearly 20,000 Pawnees were killed by smallpox. Between 1837 and 1849, half the Arikaras and Assiniboines, and two-thirds of the Blackfeet were killed by disease. The Crows lost one-third of their people. Even before the American military conquest of the region, the horse, gun, and disease had drastically altered life for Native peoples. For all these changes, however, none left a deeper legacy than the conquest of the Indians by the American government. Within the span of 40 years, Native peoples living on the Plains were stripped of their land, confined to reservations, and forced to rely on government handouts and the assistance of Indian agents. This conquest involved both the military defeat of the western tribes and the destruction of their way of life.

MILITARY CONQUEST Of the 250,000 emigrants who crossed the Plains between 1840 and 1860, only 362 died in recorded conflicts with Indians. Yet the U.S. government was determined to protect its citizens and in 1851 called together the largest meeting ever held with most of the Indians from the northern and central Plains with the hope of restricting tribes to designated areas. In so doing, it hoped to reduce intertribal conflict and create a safe avenue for Americans to cross the Plains. For their part, Indian leaders who participated in the Treaty of Fort Laramie were trying to gain American protection while at the same time securing their land claims against other Native groups. The Americans’ role as peacekeeper was put to the test three years later when a Minneconjou Lakota named High Forehead killed a cow that had wandered off from a Mormon wagon train. Lieutenant John Grattan then led 29 soldiers and two howitzers into the Brulé camp where High Forehead was staying and ordered the Indian arrested. When the Indians refused, Grattan opened fire. In the ensuing fight, the Lakotas killed Grattan and all of his men. When General William Harney retaliated by destroying the village of Ash Hallow the following year, it set the stage for more than 20 years of open warfare between the Western Sioux and the U.S. Army, culminating in two of the most famous, and infamous, episodes in the history of Native and Euro-American relations on the Plains.

In the summer of 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led an expedition into the Lakotas’ sacred Black Hills, triggering a gold rush. The next fall, government negotiators were unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade the Lakotas to relinquish their legitimate claim to the hills. Under the pretext of curtailing the mounting violence and securing the region for white settlement, the commissioner of Indian affairs issued an ultimatum to those living in the unceded territory west of the Great Sioux Reservation that ordered them to return to the reservations by January 31 or be deemed hostile. When they didn’t comply, the commissioner turned the matter over to the army. Custer, accompanied by Crow and Arikara scouts, led his Seventh Cavalry to the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory where they were summarily defeated by the Lakotas and Cheyennes waiting for them. The death of Custer, a dashing Civil War hero, and its timing during the American centennial made “Custer’s Last Stand” a rallying cry for further American subjugation of the Indians. That desire would come to fruition 16 years later at Wounded Knee. Alarmed at the growth of a millennial movement called the Ghost Dance on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations of the Lakotas, the army sent 3,000 troops to arrest the person who they believed was instigating the agitation, a Hunkpapa chief named Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull and nine of his followers were killed as the army tried to arrest him, Minneconjou chief Big Foot led his band away from the increasingly tenuous situation. The Seventh Cavalry, who had been defeated so badly 16 years earlier, caught up with the group and demanded that they disarm. When a gun accidentally went off, the army saw an opportunity to exact revenge. In the ensuing fight, the soldiers unleashed a murderous volley at pointblank range while the artillery opened fire on tipis and Indians, killing and wounding men, women, and children indiscriminately. In all, nearly 300 Indians were either killed at Wounded Knee or died of wounds or exposure later. It was not only the Lakotas who suffered so callously at the hands of the U.S. army. The Diné (Navajos) faced their own harrowing ordeal at Bosque Redondo. In 1858, after a series of skirmishes between the Diné and American settlers, the U.S. government signed the Bonneville Treaty, in which the government promised to protect the Diné from outsiders in exchange for a cession of prime grazing lands. When the United States failed to live up to its promises, Diné leaders Barboncito and Manuelito led a raid that destroyed the American fort in the region. In response, General James H. Carleton arrived the next year and began making plans to remove the Diné from their homelands. Carleton’s plan called for first relocating the Diné, along with the Mescalero Apaches, to a reservation at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner. After a “scorched earth campaign” led by Kit Carson left the Diné starving, they had little choice but to comply. The first bedraggled group of 1,500 Diné arrived at Fort Sumner in February 1864 followed by a second group of 2,500 in March. A census taken a year later documented that more than 9,000 survived what the Diné referred to as the “Long Walk,” while nearly 400 perished along the way. Unfortunately, life was no better at Bosque Redondo as poor government planning and insufficient funding created a virtual concentration camp. In the end, thousands of Navajos died of starvation, mistreatment, disease, and outright violence. Those who survived lived isolated from their homeland and deprived of their liberties. For the Navajos, the Long Walk and their five-year internment at Bosque Redondo became the most significant event in their history. The same year the first Diné were being marched at gunpoint to Bosque Redondo, Black Kettle, a Northern Cheyenne chief known for his desire to keep peace with Americans, brought his band to Sand Creek, Colorado. Fearing violence from settlers, he had been promised protection by the commander of nearby Fort Lyon. When the Third Colorado Volunteers under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington arrived at the camp, Black Kettle raised American and white flags to demonstrate their peaceful intentions. Ignoring the Indians’ signals, Chivington ordered his men to attack. In the

disorganized melee that followed, soldiers killed 270 helpless Cheyennes, often murdering fleeing women and children and mutilating Native American bodies. When the regimen returned to Denver, the volunteers displayed scalps and severed genitalia as trophies of the slaughter. Tragically, the greatest legacy of Colonel Chivington’s unjustified attack may be the congressional investigation launched into his behavior and the new Indian policy it helped initiate.

“KILLING THE INDIAN, SAVING THE MAN” As military and newspaper accounts spread concerning the nature of the attack and the horrific mutilation of the bodies that followed, several governmental agencies launched investigations into the incident. Building on these investigations, Congress established a Peace Commission in 1867 to assess the role of government officials in the ongoing “Indian Wars.” The official report of the commission, dated January 7, 1868, described detailed histories of the causes of the conflicts including numerous social and legal injustices to Indians, repeated violations of numerous treaties, acts of corruption by many of the local agents, and the culpability of Congress in failing to fulfill certain legal obligations. Rather than further violent conquest, therefore, the commission endorsed “the hitherto untried policy in connection with Indians, of endeavoring to conquer by kindness.” The first step in this policy was to concentrate Indians onto reservations where they could live under the watchful eye of moral caretakers. The first manifestations of the policy can be seen in the treaties of Medicine Lodge in 1867 and Fort Laramie in 1868. Both of these treaties attempted to concentrate tribes onto large reservations where they would be inundated with Euro-American culture through elementary education for children, education in agricultural techniques taught by resident farmers, and guaranteed annuities to replace subsistence practices. While many of the annuities were never provided to Native peoples, the land cessions required by them were enforced, setting the stage for the Lakotas’ legal challenge to the validity of the 1868 agreement, a challenge that remains ongoing to this day. One of the largest administrative changes brought about by the peace policy was the creation of a board to oversee the notoriously corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs. President Ulysses S. Grant created the Board of Indian Commissioners, made up of largely Protestant men who were tasked with “civilizing” Indian people. The extensive official participation by Christian churches in the administration of Indian policy was not a new innovation, but under Grant’s program more financial support was given directly by the government to programs for educating Native Americans and converting them to Christianity. The Society of Friends, for example, were given funds to run 10 agencies, overseeing nearly 20,000 Indians in eastern Kansas, while Baptists were given charge of 41,000 Cherokee, Creek, Paiute, and other Utah Indians. Religious principles were not the only elements of the peace policy. Along with the more humanitarian motives, the policy required the strict enforcement of reservation boundaries. Indians who refused to move to reservations to receive these reforms were either driven there by force or killed. Many reformers advocated limiting army involvement sharply, because of its punitive role and the demoralizing effect of enlisted soldiers on Native Americans. However, the peace policy was not intended to stop military control over Native Americans who left their reservations. While the army was barred from the reservations for several years, once it became clear that many Indians still attempted to leave the reservations to hunt or visit kin, troops were admitted again. While many reformers were devoted to improving the condition of Native peoples, their strategies were confounded by their belief that nothing in Native American life and traditions was worth saving, or indeed, merited any respect. This sentiment was perhaps best seen in the creation of off-reservation

boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. These schools removed Indian children from their homes, families, and surroundings in order to educate them in the ways, thinking, values, and practices of Euro-Americans. For most children, boarding schools were a bewildering and often painful experience where they were stripped of their previous names and identities and punished for speaking their Native tongues. In Carlisle founder Richard H. Pratt’s words, the goal of these boarding schools was “to kill the Indian and save the man.” Reformers such as Pratt were part of a larger movement deemed “Friends of the Indian.” In 1886, a conference in Lake Mohonk, New York, was held, bringing together the Boston Indian Committee, the Indian Rights Association, and the Lake Mohonk Friends of the Indian to help further the goals of the peace policy. Like most humanitarians of the time, these reformers believed that Indians could only be saved if their collective identities were destroyed. The biggest hindrance to such an end, it was believed, was the communal ownership of land. Together with Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, the Friends established the framework for the 1887 General Allotment Act that called for the breakup of all tribally owned land. Between its passage in 1887 and repeal in 1934, the Dawes Act transferred 86 million acres of land out of Indian hands. The act called for allotting each Indian family 160 acres of land for farming, plus an additional 320 acres of land for grazing. The Indian family was given four years to select the land that they wanted and if it took longer than this period of time, the land was selected for them. After selection, the land was held in trust for a period of 25 years, after which it was given to the Indian family and citizenship was granted to them. While some of the act’s failure can be attributed to fraud, its legacy lasts mostly in the fulfillment of its intentions. Allotment weakened the sense of community that Indian tribes had felt on reservations and destroyed aspects of Native cultures, leaving many Indians as impoverished colonial subjects in America’s transcontinental empire.

Allotment Allotment was a policy of land distribution that was part of a program of forced assimilation of American Indians by the U.S. government. By the last quarter of the 19th century, so-called “Friends of the Indian” and other liberal thinkers were blaming the reservation system for Indians’ lack of progress toward civilization. Foremost among them was anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who had conducted extensive research among the Omahas. She believed that tribalism rooted in communal land use was impeding the Omahas’ assimilation into mainstream society. Fletcher traveled to Washington in 1882 to urge Congress to allot each Omaha adult 80 acres of tax-exempt land and thereby encourage them to become selfsufficient farmers. Congress liked the idea and applied it to most reservations with passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887, or what is often called the Dawes Severalty Act after its sponsor, Senator Henry Dawes. Under the Dawes Act, household heads received 160 acres of land, single adults and orphans 80 acres, and children 40 acres. These lands were held in trust for them by the federal government for 25 years, during which time they were exempt from taxation and could not be sold or otherwise transferred. Reservation lands remaining after allotment were sold to non-Indians, with the proceeds earmarked for tribal benefit. Proponents of the plan argued that non-Indians who settled on and farmed the surplus lands would be role models for their Indian neighbors. With allotment, Congress hoped to speed the Indians’ assimilation into American society by turning them into landholding farmers and undermining their tribal identities and traditional lifeways. Congress also sought to open Indian lands to white settlement and reduce reservation administrative costs.

Congress amended and supplemented the Dawes Act several times. In 1889, it brought most of the tribes initially excluded from allotment under the act. Two years later it amended the act to clarify inheritance, provide for prorated allotments on reservations with limited acreage, and double allotment sizes in those areas without arable land to allow for livestock raising. By then, white settlers flooding into Oklahoma Territory were clamoring for more land and statehood. The Dawes Act, which had excluded the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma (Cherokees, Choctaws, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Creeks), addressed neither of those demands. In 1893, Congress passed legislation authorizing the Dawes Commission to persuade the Five Civilized Tribes to accept allotment and relinquish their surplus lands. That objective was realized with the Curtis Act of 1898, which provided for allotment of the Oklahoma tribes, dissolved their tribal governments, brought them under state and federal law, opened more land to white settlement, and paved the way for statehood. The Kiowas challenged their allotment in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock and lost. Congress continued to seek new ways to reduce the burden of administering Indian affairs. It passed the Burke Act in 1906, which enabled the secretary of the Interior Department to issue allottees deemed “competent,” or capable of managing their own affairs, full title (i.e., a patent in fee simple) to their lands. Once that happened, the lands lost their trust status, became taxable, and could be leased, sold, or bequeathed. Issuance of these “forced fee patents” caused millions of acres of Indian land to be lost through tax forfeiture because some landowners didn’t realize their land was taxable and others simply could not pay the taxes. Allottees whose lands came out of trust automatically became U.S. citizens. Those deemed incompetent were denied citizenship and often found their lands leased on their behalf but not necessarily with their consent or for a fair price.

An allotment official and his interpreter grant U.S. citizenship to Oglala Sioux chief American Horse in 1907. Between 1887 and 1934, the allotment policy was responsible for transferring over 90 million acres of land out of Indian control. (Library of Congress)

The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) ended allotment, indefinitely extended the trust period for those allotments that remained, and empowered tribes to acquire additional lands to place in trust. This helped protect and even expand the tribal land base but did not address the growing problem of fractionated heirship. Under the Dawes Act, if an allottee died intestate (i.e., without a will), any heirs inherited the land jointly in undivided shares. Such lands could not be split among the heirs nor could the shares be transferred or consolidated. Moreover, all shareholders had to consent to any action involving

the allotment. As successive generations died and left their shares to their own heirs, the undivided shares got smaller and smaller and before long the land was virtually useless. An example provided in the 1987 Hodel v. Irving Supreme Court case illustrates the magnitude of the problem. At that time, 439 people held undivided shares in a single 40-acre parcel that was valued at $8,000 and generated an annual income of $1,080. A third of the shareholders got less than five cents a year from the proceeds and none got more than a dollar, yet it cost the government an estimated $17,560 to administer. Congress tried to resolve the fractionated heirship problem with the Indian Land Consolidation Act of 1983, which enabled tribal governments to consolidate tribal lands. The act mandated that all shares of less than 2 percent or that earned less than $100 a year be automatically transferred to the tribe when the shareholder died and without compensation to the heirs. This provision faced a court challenge on the grounds that it constituted a taking of lands without just compensation. The Supreme Court agreed. In Hodel v. Irving, it ruled that individuals have a right to convey their property to their heirs. Congress then amended the act to give tribes more leeway and heirs more rights, but even that proved inadequate. In 2004, Congress passed the American Indian Probate Reform Act, which did little to improve the situation. When Congress passed the Dawes Act in 1887 the tribes had about 138 million acres of land. In 1934, when it ended allotment with passage of the IRA, only 48 million acres remained in Indian hands, which constitutes a loss of about 90 million acres. Some of that was lost through the sale of surplus lands to nonIndians, some was sold by the allottees themselves (often for less than market value), some was seized for back taxes, and about 41 million acres were allotted. By the time allotment ended, 90,000 or so Indians were landless. Debra Buchholtz See also: Assimilation; Dawes Severalty Act; Peace Policy; Reservation System

Further Reading Carlson, Leonard A. Indians, Bureaucrats, and the Land: The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Debo, Angie. And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984 (1940). Otis, D. S. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973 (1934). Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975.

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was America’s first foreign missionary society. Established in 1810 by New England Congregationalists inspired by the Second Great Awakening, the ABCFM’s main objective to spread Christianity worldwide attracted missionaries from other denominations including Presbyterianism and Dutch Reformed. Following the first mission to India in 1812 were those to Hawai‘i, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Overseas missions also proved to be a significant vehicle for the extension of American culture abroad. Though the ABCFM continued to establish missions outside of North America, its immediate focus for evangelizing campaigns shifted in the 1820s to the American Indians, including the Plains people of the Great Basin. Jeremiah Evarts, a member of the board’s executive between 1812 and 1831, led the ABCFM’s efforts to place missionaries among American Indian tribes. Initially concentrating on the Southeast region, the ABCFM eventually operated missions in other territories, including Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Evarts became a chief opponent of the federal government’s Indian Removal

Act of 1830, which forced tribes to choose between adopting a “civilized” behavior and settling on smaller plots as farmers or being relocated to federal lands west of the Mississippi River. Relocation was voluntary in name only, however, and intense pressure was placed on tribes to accept removal. The ABCFM supported a policy of integration through conversion and education. Its resistance to the act suffered tremendously when Georgia passed a law that essentially barred ABCFM missionaries from operating in Indian Territory, followed by Evarts’s death from tuberculosis in 1831. Realizing that pressure for further continental expansion of the United States was all but certain, the ABCFM looked to missionize among Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River. A widely publicized visit to St. Louis in 1831 by four Flathead Indians seeking instruction about Christianity got the attention of the ABCFM and other mission organizations, encouraging them to establish missions in the Oregon Territory. Reverend Samuel Parker believed that missionary activity among the tribes was a means of both Christianizing and civilizing the Indians in preparation for the future arrival of settlers. In 1833 Parker petitioned the ABCFM to send him to Oregon as a missionary. While fundraising in New York in 1834, Parker attracted the attention of Dr. Marcus Whitman, who was eventually appointed as an assistant missionary to Parker on an exploratory mission among the Nez Perce. Convinced of the viability of such a mission, the ABCFM authorized their establishment in the Oregon Territory. In 1836, the ABCFM sent Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Henry and Eliza Spalding, and William Gray to establish missions in the areas reconnoitered by Whitman and Parker. The first Oregon station for the ABCFM was built by the Whitmans at Waiilatpu on the Walla Walla River in Cayuse territory; the Spaldings established a mission near Lapwai Creek in present-day Idaho among the Nez Perce nation. Both the Whitmans and the Spaldings encountered early success in attracting members and instructing them in agricultural methods and cloth-making. The ABCFM’s most effective missionary was Henry Spalding, who drew large numbers of Nez Perce to camp meetings to hear his sermons and receive medical care. Spalding requested reinforcements be sent to establish mission stations from Puget Sound to the Snake River Country. He asked for farmers, mechanics, schoolteachers, physicians, and ministers, as well as their spouses and children. Already supporting 360 missionaries at stations scattered around the world while suffering the effects of a major economic depression, the ABCFM declined. It did, however, send additional missionaries. The ABCFM was not the only missionary group operating in the American West. Methodists were the first missionaries to enter Oregon in 1834. Jason Lee’s mission at French Prairie on the Willamette River competed directly with the ABCFM missionaries for converts. Matters intensified by 1840 when Catholic missionaries arrived in Oregon, receiving support from British Hudson’s Bay Company posts in the region. The separate groups often disparaged one another openly among the Indians. The representatives of the ABCFM were themselves divided, for several ministers including William H. Gray and Asa Bowen Smith did not believe that Indians could become true Christians. Quarrelling among the missionaries in terms of message and strategy increasingly concerned the board. In 1842, high maintenance costs, a poor record of missionary achievement, and constant complaints concerning missionaries’ behavior led the ABCFM to recall several of its people from Oregon and close the missions at Waiilatpu and Lapwai. Whitman hurriedly returned east and convinced the ABCFM to reconsider its decision. After 1843, the chief role of the missions lay in the provision of food, medicine, and other relief to the growing numbers of white settlers moving along the Oregon Trail. The overriding effect of the ABCFM missions, therefore, was in drawing the attention of settlers to the Oregon Territory, which had the largely unintended result of further distancing the missionaries and their religious teachings from the Indians.

As this activity increased, the Cayuse and surrounding tribes became agitated, especially after 1846 when the Whitman mission devoted its energies exclusively to supporting white emigrants. Exacerbating the rising tensions between Indians and whites in the region was the spread of disease. The summer of 1847 was particularly devastating as a measles epidemic at Waiilatpu killed dozens of natives while few whites died. Tensions culminated that November when a band of Cayuse attacked the mission at Waiilatpu, killing the Whitmans and 12 other whites and taking nearly 50 captive. The “Whitman Massacre,” as it became known, dealt a heavy blow to the ABCFM’s missionary program in the American West. Ineffective in its mission to convert large numbers of the western tribes to Christianity, the ABCFM was more successful in lending support to the nearly 300,000 white settlers who had moved west by 1860. This enormous wave of emigration to the West led to the increased disruption of tribal life and the eventual displacement of resident tribes, while it facilitated the United States’ acquisition of Oregon and westward expansion. Michael Dove See also: Assimilation; Civilization Policy; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Missions; Nez Perce; Spalding, Henry and Eliza Hart; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Andrew, John A., III. From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Phillips, Clifton Jackson. Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Shenk, Wilbert R., ed. North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004.

Arapahos. See Great Peace of 1840 Big Foot (ca. 1825–1890) Big Foot, a Minneconjou (Sioux) diplomat and leader, was known to his own people as Spotted Elk (Sitanka). Born in the mid-1820s, he became leader of the Minneconjous around 1877 when his father, Lone Horn, died. Spotted Elk, already near death from pneumonia, was killed by soldiers on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in present-day South Dakota. Spotted Elk allied himself with his cousin Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in the 1870s but was not at the Little Bighorn. When the government forced the Lakotas to relinquish the Black Hills and their nomadic way of life, Spotted Elk resisted assimilation yet cautioned his people not to provoke whites. The government assigned the Minneconjous to the Cheyenne River Agency, where Spotted Elk took up farming. Believing the only way forward was to accept the best of what the whites had to offer, he joined a delegation to Washington, D.C. to try to secure a school for his people. Despite such overtures, he urged his people to maintain their language and as many of their traditional ways as possible. Conditions on the Lakota reservations deteriorated in the 1880s. The government continued to take Lakota lands to give to white settlers, unscrupulous agents diverted food and money intended for the Lakotas, and settlers and prospectors streamed into the area. In 1890 a heat wave and drought struck. The crop failures coincided with government ration cuts and left the Lakotas on the brink of starvation. Many sought relief in a new religion sweeping the West. The Ghost Dance religion promised that the ancestors,

bison, and old ways of life would return and the whites would disappear, a message many settlers found disturbing. The Minneconjous embraced the new religion, but it appears that Spotted Elk soon distanced himself from it.

Big Foot became chief of one of the Lakota Sioux tribes after the death of his father, Long Horn. Big Foot, also known as Si Tanka and Spotted Elk, was killed by American soldiers in the Wounded Knee Massacre, while attempting to lead his followers to safety. (National Archives)

On December 15, Sitting Bull was killed in a botched attempt to arrest him and stop the Ghost Dance among the Hunkpapa Lakotas. A few days later, amidst a flurry of inaccurate rumors about Minneconjou militancy and involvement in the Ghost Dance, Colonel Edwin Sumner detained Spotted Elk and his followers at the agency. Sensing danger, they slipped away on December 23 and headed south to seek refuge with Red Cloud at Pine Ridge. By then, refugees from Sitting Bull’s camp had joined them, probably swelling their ranks to well over 300. On December 28, the Seventh Cavalry under Major Samuel Whitside intercepted and redirected them to Wounded Knee Creek. Later that night Colonel James Forsyth arrived and took command. The next morning the soldiers disarmed them. When a gun went off unexpectedly, the soldiers opened fire on the now defenseless Lakotas. Among the weapons used were four Hotchkiss guns. Spotted Elk was among the first killed. Official records list 160 Lakotas dead, but the total count probably exceeds 200. Debra Buchholtz See also: Black Hills; Buffalo Cultures; Sitting Bull; Wounded Knee Massacre

Further Reading Hyde, George. A Sioux Chronicle. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956.

Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak. The Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892–1893, Part 2. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Black Hills The area known as the Black Hills is a heavily wooded mountain range that covers about 5,000 square miles in the semiarid southwest corner of South Dakota. Its highest point is Harney Peak at 7,244 feet. Home to Mount Rushmore, it is a popular outdoor recreation and tourism destination. A variety of federal and state agencies, corporations, and private individuals now own or control most of the Black Hills. Despite that, the Sioux claim the range, or Pahá Sapa in Lakota, as their own. They base that claim on the terms agreed in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Pahá Sapa constitutes the center of the Sioux universe and is one of their most sacred places. Because of its tremendous spiritual power, it is where many young Sioux have chosen to undertake their lifechanging vision quests. The Sioux have also long appreciated Pahá Sapa as a place rich in resources, although the resources they value have never been the gold and other minerals coveted by white prospectors and miners. Sitting Bull once describe the area as his people’s “food pack,” a description that accurately reflects the game and wild plant foods they always found in abundance there. The Cheyenne Indians also hold the Black Hills sacred. It was nearby at Bear Butte that Maiyun (the Great Spirit) gave Sweet Medicine the four sacred arrows that signify Cheyenne collective identity and existence. To this day the Cheyennes visit Bear Butte to pray, fast, and perform sacred rituals, as do the Sioux. Under the provisions of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the Black Hills—situated within the borders of the Great Sioux Reservation—belonged to the Sioux. A few years after the treaty was signed rumors of gold began to circulate. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills in 1874. Its stated purpose was: (1) to locate a spot to build a fort, (2) to find a route through the hills, and (3) to collect scientific data. What it did do—and many people suspect this was its true objective—was confirm the presence of gold in the hills. The discovery triggered a rush of prospectors into the region. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the army did little to keep the whites out, and clashes between the Sioux and the intruders increased. Acting under the pretext of trying to maintain peace, a commission headed by Senator William B. Allison visited the Great Sioux Reservation in the fall of 1875 to negotiate the purchase of the Black Hills. The Sioux refused to sell. Six weeks later, the commissioner of Indian affairs issued an ultimatum to those Sioux and Cheyennes still living by the hunt off-reservation in the unceded territory, as they were entitled to do under the provisions of the treaty. It warned them to return to the reservation by the end of January or be treated as hostile. The wanderers did not comply, setting in motion the chain of events that led to Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn in late June 1876. Some reservation Sioux had participated in the Little Bighorn fight, or what they remember as the Greasy Grass Battle, but most had not. Despite that, all were punished. On August 15, 1876, Congress passed an Indian appropriations bill that made the continued receipt of goods and services owed the Sioux under the terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty contingent upon their relinquishing the Black Hills, abandoning the unceded territory, and accepting a diminished reservation. A commission headed by former commissioner of Indian affairs George W. Manypenny met with Sioux leaders at locations across the Great Sioux Reservation in September and October to secure their consent to the new terms. Only about a tenth of the adult males agreed to “touch the pen” and most of those did so under duress. This fell

far short of the three-quarters stipulated by the Fort Laramie Treaty. Despite that, Congress confirmed the agreement on February 28, 1877, and the Sioux lost the Black Hills. Despite ratification of the so-called Sioux Agreement, the Sioux still claimed the Black Hills as their own. When Congress passed legislation in 1920 that enabled them to press their claim through the U.S. Court of Claims, they did so. In that first case, they argued that the Black Hills were taken from them without their consent or just compensation. The Court of Claims dismissed the case in 1942 on the grounds that the 1920 legislation did not grant them jurisdiction over matters pertaining to compensation. When Congress established the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 to deal specifically with tribal land claims against the federal government, the Sioux resubmitted their Black Hills claim. The Claims Commission eventually ruled that the Sioux were entitled to just compensation for the Black Hills and sent the claim back to the Court of Claims. The Court of Claims calculated that the Sioux were entitled to $17.5 million in compensation but not to any interest. The Sioux appealed and, after much political wrangling, Congress ordered the Court of Claims to reconsider the matter of interest. In 1979, the court ruled that the Sioux are entitled to an annual rate of 5 percent interest on the agreed compensation starting in 1877, the year the Black Hills were taken. The Supreme Court also considered the case. On June 30, 1980, it handed down its opinion in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, where it agreed that, because the Black Hills were taken without the required consent of three-quarters of the adult males, the Sioux deserved interest on the $17.5 million award. Thus, after many decades of political jockeying and legal and legislative action and inaction, the Sioux were finally awarded $106 million for the Black Hills. They refused to take the money. Instead, they demanded the return of Pahá Sapa, which they still hold sacred and which was originally taken from them without their consent. As of this writing, they are still rejecting the monetary settlement and campaigning for the return of their sacred Pahá Sapa. Debra Buchholtz See also: Big Foot; Buffalo Cultures; Custer, George Armstrong; De Smet, Pierre-Jean; Fort Laramie Treaties; Grattan, John L.; Great Peace of 1840; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle; Sitting Bull; Wounded Knee Massacre

Further Reading Deloria, Vine, Jr. “Reflections on the Black Hills Claim.” Wicazo Sa Review 4, no. 1 (1988): 33–38. Lazarus, Edward. Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation Versus the United States, 1775 to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Viking Books, 2010.

Bosque Redondo (1863–1868) Bosque Redondo was an internment camp at Fort Sumner that held more than 9,000 Navajos (Diné) and 400 Mescalero Apaches between 1863 and 1868. It was at the end of what is known as the Long Walk in which thousands of Indians were forced to walk at gunpoint more than 450 miles from their reservation in what is now Arizona to the fort in eastern New Mexico. For many, the forced march and their internment at Bosque Redondo has become the most significant event in their history. Overall, 53 different groups made the Long Walk between the summer of 1864 and the winter of 1866 over several different trails. The first group to arrive at Bosque Redondo was 425 Mescalero Apaches in the summer of 1863. In September that same year, the first group of Navajos arrived and were

immediately put to work building their future homes, constructing Fort Sumner, and enlarging the irrigation ditches started by the Mescaleros. They expanded the mother ditch, which grew to 6 miles long and 12 feet wide. Next they dug more than 15 miles of lateral lines, which would carry the water to the 3,000 acres of corn, beans, squash, and wheat the Navajos needed to survive their first year of internment. The military planned to feed the Navajos and Mescaleros government rations until Bosque Redondo became self-sufficient. Eventually the cost of feeding the Navajos at Bosque Redondo reached over $1 million a year. But government funding remained inadequate, so the Navajos remained undersupplied and malnourished during their entire period of incarceration at Bosque Redondo. The first year at Bosque Redondo was grim, as the poor planning of the U.S. military reduced the Navajos to a near starvation diet. Many died due to the unhealthy diet, hard work, and exposure to the elements. Others died simply because they were not used to eating “white man’s food” and did not know how to prepare it. But despite the horrible living conditions, the Navajos worked hard and by early summer 1864, it looked as if the Navajos would be able to stave off the worst of the famine. Misfortune struck in the form of a plague of cutworms, however, which destroyed the corn crop. A late storm destroyed the wheat.

Resettled Navajos use adobe bricks to construct living quarters (for Union soldiers) while under armed guard in the remote Bosque Redondo region, New Mexico. The so-called Long Walk to the internment camp is remembered as one of the most violent events in Diné history. (Time Life Pictures/National Archives/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

The army had picked the 40-square-mile area on the east bank of the Pecos River because they believed it held several advantages. It was close to water, wood for fires, open land, and it was located far from other settlements, lessening the chance of Navajo depredations. The isolation would also allow General James Henry Carleton to concentrate on his plan to civilize the Navajos far from their homeland and the temptation to return. The location, however, ultimately proved detrimental as its isolation made it hard to get supplies by wagon from Fort Union in a timely manner. And although the camp was close to the Pecos River, the water turned out to be highly alkaline and often undrinkable. This also made it unsuitable for irrigation purposes. As living conditions deteriorated, the tensions that existed between the Navajos and the Mescaleros grew worse. The Mescaleros decided to take matters into their own hands and began leaving Bosque Redondo in April 1864. By November 1865 the final 335 Mescalero escaped and returned to their traditional homeland in the Sacramento Mountains.

The situation of the Navajos did not improve with the departure of the Mescaleros, however, as crop failures continued in 1865 and a statewide drought made it difficult for the army to procure rations for the hungry Navajos. Carleton instituted food rationing but by 1866 all three essentials for life at Bosque Redondo were depleted; water, wood, and grass. Even the army had to admit that the internment camp was a failure. As the cost of keeping the Navajos at Bosque Redondo increased, the critics of Carleton’s plan increased as well. In the spring of 1867, the Navajos had to be forced at bayonet point to work on the irrigation ditches and prepare the fields for planting. After three years of failure the Navajos were convinced that another year of farming was useless. By now Bosque Redondo resembled a concentration camp as the Navajos were reduced to near starvation and were dying in large numbers from dysentery, tuberculosis, cholera, and socially transmitted diseases. Finally, Congress in 1868 stepped in to attempt to “fix” the Indian problem. It sent General William Tecumseh Sherman to Fort Sumner and Bosque Redondo to investigate and report his findings to Congress. Within days of his arrival he received permission to treat with the Navajos and send them back home. On June 1, 1868, Sherman signed a treaty with Navajo headmen permitting the Navajos to leave Bosque Redondo and return to their homeland. On June 15, 1868, more than 7,000 Navajos started the long walk back. Walking from 10 to 12 miles a day, they arrived back home on July 20, 1868. In the end, hundreds of Navajos died of starvation, mistreatment, disease, and gunshot wounds, many guilty of committing no crime. Those who survived lived isolated from their homeland and deprived of their liberties. For the Navajos, the Long Walk and their internment at Bosque Redondo became the most significant event in their history. The collective trauma of the Long Walk and captivity at Bosque Redondo are critical to the Navajos’ sense of identity as a people. John T. “Jack” Becker See also: Long Walk of the Navajos; Peace Policy; Reservation System; Sherman, William Tecumseh

Further Reading Bailey, Lynn R. Bosque Redondo: The Navajo Internment at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, 1863–1868. Tucson: Westernlore Press, 1998. Roessel, Robert A., Jr. “Navajo History, 1850–1923.” In Alfonso Ortiz, ed. Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 10: Southwest. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1983, pp. 506–523. Thompson, Gerald. The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment 1863–1868. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976.

Buffalo Cultures When Europeans first encountered them, the Plains Indians had no horses or guns. Some lived in permanent villages and tended gardens along major watercourses while others roamed on foot in search of plant foods and game animals, including the American bison. Because certain technologies and practices were better suited to a horticultural or a foraging subsistence pattern in the Plains environment than others, how a group got its food strongly influenced its material culture; its social, political, and economic organization; and its belief system. Consequently, the horticultural village groups had broadly similar cultures and the nomadic foraging groups had broadly similar cultures. This has led some scholars to use the term “Buffalo Culture” to describe the characteristic cultural pattern of the Plains hunters, particularly as it took shape after they acquired horses. Among the groups under this heading are the Lakotas, Cheyennes, Crows, Arapahos, Kiowas, Blackfeet, Gros Ventres, and Assiniboines. Yet despite

their overt similarities, significant cultural differences existed between these groups and each retained its own cultural distinctiveness. This observation has led other scholars to reject the “Buffalo Culture” label as an overgeneralization that masks as much as it reveals. Although scholars may not agree on whether it is best to emphasize the commonalities or the particularities of Plains Indian culture, one thing they do agree on is that the Indians’ growing dependence on the bison ultimately proved to be their Achilles’ heel. Prior to white settlement, the introduction of guns and horses, the fur trade, and other anthropogenic (or human-caused) disruptions, bison flourished in North America. The earliest European visitors reported seeing them in great abundance from the fringes of the boreal forest north of the present-day U.S.-Canadian border south into what is now Mexico and from coast to coast. Recent estimates put the number on the Plains alone at around 30 million when Europeans arrived. There were two subspecies of bison—or what are more commonly, yet inaccurately, called buffalo—in North America at that time, the Plains bison (Bison bison bison) and the larger woods bison (Bison bison athabascae). Bison are massive ungulates that graze on grasses and sedges. Bulls can easily top 2,000 pounds and cows can weigh as much as 1,200 pounds. In the warmer months the bison moved across the Plains in vast herds. When the weather turned cold, the animals scattered to forage in sheltered areas. The size, behavior, and seasonal movements of the bison influenced the technologies and practices the Plains Indians used to hunt them.

Indians Hunting the Bison, by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, ca. 1832–1834. (Library of Congress)

Although horses existed in North America long ago, they had been extinct for at least 10,000 years when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 1500s. Some of the Spanish horses eventually fell into Indian hands and from these first animals developed the herds of Indian ponies found across the Plains in the 19th century. The Plains Indians first acquired horses in the 18th century from Native peoples to their south and west. Shortly thereafter they began to acquire guns directly or indirectly from French and British traders to their north and east. Until then, they had hunted bison and other game animals on foot using spears and bows and arrows. Groups of pedestrian hunters and their families often cooperated to drive herd animals such as antelope and bison into box canyons and other catchment areas where, once impounded, they could easily be killed. With bison, they sometimes resorted to “buffalo jumps” in which they drove the animals over cliffs, at the bottom of which they killed and butchered those injured in the fall. So long as the Indians relied on techniques such as these, there was little risk of them overhunting a particular species or territory. That began to change when they obtained guns and horses and got drawn

more deeply into the fur trade, which enabled and even encouraged them to exchange furs, hides, and meat for goods to satisfy their newly acquired wants and needs. Before they obtained horses, the Plains hunting groups lived in small, conical tipis covered with skins and used dogs to pull racklike travois that carried their possessions, both of which were well suited to a nomadic way of life. Although their societies tended to be relatively egalitarian, a gender division of labor existed in which women collected vegetable foods and assumed responsibility for child care and a range of domestic tasks while men hunted and engaged in warfare and raids to protect their families, secure their hunting grounds, and avenge wrongs committed against them by other groups. In the summer, when game and plant foods were plentiful, tribal members gathered in large groups to socialize, conduct rituals, and undertake communal buffalo hunts. In the winter, like the bison themselves, they dispersed in small bands to seek shelter in canyons and along wooded rivers and streams. Once mounted, the Plains hunters devoted more and more of their subsistence efforts to the bison hunt. Bison soon gained added importance in their lives both materially and spiritually. Bison meat, either fresh or dried and pounded with berries and fat into pemmican, became more important in Indian diets and more material goods were created out of buffalo: the heart sack and stomach were used as cooking vessels; hides became clothes, footwear, bedding, and tipi covers while rawhide became shields, carrying containers, saddles, rope, drums, bull boats, and other household and ritual items. From bison hair Plains Indians made ropes, ornaments, and headdresses; they used the hair to pad their saddles, insulate their moccasins, and stuff dolls and balls. Out of the hooves they made glue and crafted rattles and out of the horns they fashioned rattles, cups, spoons, and containers to carry powder and fire embers. From the sinew they got bowstrings, thread, and bindings and from the tail they made whips and fly swatters. They even used the bones, from which they fashioned arrow points, war clubs, awls, scrapers, knives, and other tools. With the aid of guns and horses, they were able to accumulate a surplus of bison hides, which they exchanged for kettles, more guns and ammunition, cloth, food items, alcohol, and other European goods. Just as importantly, the bison became the center of many peoples’ spiritual life. The bison featured prominently in their myths and rituals, and even name choices reflect its overriding importance in their lives.

BARBED WIRE Despite all the pressures the railroad and Euro-American hunters put on the buffalo, it was the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains that guaranteed the end of the great bison herds. Buffalo could survive on the open range favored by cattle ranchers. Once the agricultural frontier reached the range, however, the fencing required to keep cows from destroying crops made it impossible for the buffalo herds to migrate to new feeding grounds. This settlement was only possible because of the invention of barbed wire. While the 1862 Homestead Act made agricultural land on the plains available to settlers, the cost to fence it was as much as for fertile land elsewhere. In 1873, Joseph Glidden, a farmer from Illinois, applied for a patent for a wire that had spurs on it, which were held in place by two wires twisted around them. For $60,000, Glidden sold the patent to Washburn and Moen Manufacturing Company who quickly bought up any similar patents. The company produced 2.84 million pounds of the new fencing in 1876. By 1880, that number reached 80 million. Barbed wire revolutionized land values and opened the Great Plains for agricultural settlement. Without barbed wire, homesteaders would have been unable to protect their farms from grazing herds and agriculture ventures would have stagnated. But at least some of the great buffalo herds might have continued to survive along with the cattle of the open range.

Just as scholars disagree over whether the similarities between the Plains hunting groups outweigh the many differences among them in analytical importance, so too do they disagree over whether the changes set in motion by the introduction of the horse are best viewed as an elaboration of previous cultural

patterns or something altogether new. What they do agree on is that the arrival of the horse set in motion similar cultural changes across the nomadic hunting groups. With horses, for example, they no longer had to stalk bison on foot or drive them into impounds or over cliffs, although some hunters still did so from time to time. Mounted on horses they could chase their quarry, which enhanced their chances of making a kill. Horses also enabled them to roam further faster in search of bison and other game and fur-bearing animals and to transport larger volumes of meat and hides greater distances, all of which served their fur trade ambitions. Although the Plains Indians were more mobile after they acquired horses, they still congregated in the summer months and scattered in smaller groupings in the winter months. Communal hunts continued to be organized by the tribal elders and were policed by what the Lakotas called akicita. Drawn from a particular warrior society, the akicita were men tasked with preventing overzealous hunters from acting alone and scattering the herd during the communal hunting period. Hunters who failed to adhere to the rules that governed the hunts faced harsh punishment from the akicita, which could include having their horses confiscated or killed and their lodges destroyed. The material culture, social organization, and cultural practices of the Plains Indians also changed in response to the more mobile life made possible by horses. Many groups adopted bigger tipis, the poles of which they used for the larger travois their horses rather than dogs now dragged as they moved from place to place. On the travois they loaded furs, meat, personal possessions, and household goods as well as individuals too old, too young, or too sick to travel by other means. The men replaced their long bows with shorter ones better suited for use on horseback. Instead of clay pots, they now used more durable rawhide bags and envelope-like parfleches to store and carry food and other items and metal pots to cook with. In some cases, their political and social organization also changed to accommodate the enhanced status of men made possible by the accumulation of horses and war honors, their increased mobility, and the added emphasis on warfare. In many groups, the status of women relative to men declined as did the relative value attached to their subsistence contributions. Changes also occurred in their worldviews and ritual lives and for many of the same reasons. Horses provided young men with new ways to enhance their status by proving themselves as successful hunters and warriors. Since the ability to give goods away increased a man’s status, surplus horses became a particularly valuable asset among the Plains Indians. Horses may have made the Indians’ lives easier in some ways but they also changed them by facilitating their increased involvement in the fur trade, put added pressure on the bison herds, led to heightened competition over prime hunting grounds, and ultimately increased intertribal conflict. These intertwined circumstances led, in turn, to an elaboration of the warrior tradition as skilled warriors were needed to defend their people against raids and to secure their hunting grounds. And for tribes like the Lakotas, which had their own imperialist ambitions, the horse provided a means to do so faster and more effectively. Whereas the Plains Indians had once killed bison only to meet their subsistence needs, by the beginning of the 19th century they were hunting for the fur trade and by the 1840s they were probably killing more bison for their hides than for meat to eat. White settlers moving west also hunted bison and disrupted the herds’ seasonal movements, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 divided the bison into southern and northern herds. The impact this had on the bison was compounded by a series of droughts that hampered their ability to successfully reproduce and, hence, their population recovery. By the middle years of the century, developments in the East had created an increased demand for bison hides for industrial use, which prompted more white hide hunters to head west. By then, Indian agents, army generals, and government officials, who recognized the Indians’ dependence on the bison as a vulnerability, were actively encouraging sport and hide hunting as an expedient way to finish the job of bringing the Plains Indians under government control and thereby securing the region for white settlement.

Between 1872 and 1874, hide hunters killed an estimated 7.5 million bison. They shipped the hides to the East by train but usually left the carcasses in place to rot. By the mid-1870s, the southern herd was gone and within a few years the northern herd was also gone, leaving the Plains hunters who had depended so heavily on them destitute and demoralized. By the 1880s, the Plains tribes could no longer rely on the bison for their subsistence and had relinquished their traditional lifeways. Confined to reservations, they now relied on the meager rations distributed by the U.S. government as part of the treaty agreements and whatever livestock and crops they managed to raise on the typically marginal lands reserved for them. Debra Buchholtz See also: Comancheria; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Transcontinental Railroad

Further Reading Hämäläinen, Pekka. “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures.” Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003). Holder, Preston. The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development among North American Indians, Landmark Edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. Lowie, Robert. Indians of the Plains. Preface by Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Buffalo Soldiers The Buffalo Soldiers were African American soldiers in a segregated, permanent regiment created in 1866 in the American army. They consisted of two infantry units, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth, as well as the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry divisions. They had a reputation for having high morale, a low desertion rate (4 percent compared to 25 percent in white regiments), and for being valuable soldiers. They served as an inspiration to black communities all over the United States. These segregated regiments were responsible for exploring much of the western United States and were heavily involved in the Indian Wars between 1869 and 1890. Between 1870 and 1890 14 black soldiers assigned to these units were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The etymology of the name “Buffalo Soldiers” has been debated. Some sources contend that Native Americans gave black soldiers the sobriquet because their dark curly hair resembled a buffalo’s coat. Other sources claim that the name came from a specific incident in which Private John Randall of the Tenth Cavalry division managed to hold off 70 Cheyenne warriors using only his pistol. Regardless of its origins, the name Buffalo Soldier has become an honored name among many U.S. Army units. While the Buffalo Soldiers gave hope to black people in the United States, they were not exempt from racism within the army. They were given uniforms that did not protect against extreme weather, leaky shelters, and subpar nutrition. They were not always recognized for their achievements and sometimes were not given the compensation they were promised. Black soldiers were also rarely promoted. There was only one black officer, Charles Young, who was responsible for teaching at the Wilberforce University in Ohio. Most egregiously, the army frequently would not seek justice for violence against Buffalo Soldiers by others in the army. When two soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth regiment were lynched, the men responsible were acquitted. Although the Buffalo Soldiers found their roots in the Civil War, African Americans were not originally welcomed into the army. President Lincoln feared that an integrated army would force some border states to the Confederacy, as well as demoralize the white troops. Lack of volunteers for the Union forced Lincoln’s hand, and in September 1862 he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves and allowing African Americans to join the army. The first regiment to be used in the federal service was

the Kansas Colored Volunteer Regiment on January 13, 1863, after which black regiments became known as the United States Colored Troops. There were many people who believed that black soldiers were inferior to white soldiers, regardless of their accomplishments. Some white officers would rather resign than be transferred to command a black regiment. When the bill to create permanent sections for black soldiers was drafted, it originally included two artillery units; these were cut due to the notion that black soldiers were not smart enough for these specialized responsibilities. Jessica Lynn O’Neill See also: Red River War

Further Reading Carlson, Paul H. The Buffalo Soldier Tragedy of 1877. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Foner, Jack D. Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective. New York: Praeger, 1974. Leckie, William H., and Shirley A. Leckie. The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West, Revised Edition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.

Bureau of Indian Affairs America’s first agency dedicated to Indian management and oversight was launched as part of the War Department in March 1824 and called the Office of Indian Affairs. Its name was soon changed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and in 1849 it was absorbed by the U.S. Department of the Interior where it remains today. The BIA was tasked with overseeing treaty-making and trading between the United States and Native groups. Previously, these tasks fell largely on the superintendent of trade, Thomas L. McKenney (1816–1822), who became the first head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1824–1830). American jurisdiction stemmed from the Second Continental Congress, which initiated national Indian policy in 1775. Commissioners such as Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry were tasked with maintaining Indian neutrality during the Revolution, a job they met with mixed success. Following the war, Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution described Congress’s powers over Indian affairs in the following way: “To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” In 1789, as questions of land tenure became more prominent, Congress placed Indian relations within the new War Department: a sensible choice in the eyes of leaders focused on securing new territory. Maintenance and expansion of the fur trade still remained a core task of the War Department, and in 1806 the post of superintendent of Indian trade was created. After the factory system ended in 1822, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (1817–1825) established a superintendency of Indian affairs, a position subsumed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824, at which point programs intended to help “civilize” Indian peoples by promoting literacy, farming, and vocational assistance were implemented. As pressures mounted to acquire Indian land, President James Monroe made a summation of the mood of the nation toward Native Americans during an 1825 message to Congress: “The removal of the tribes from the territory which they now inhabit … would not only shield them from impending ruin, but promote their welfare and happiness” (Monroe, 111). Monroe’s sentiment was shared by numerous leaders of his era and shaped the identity of Indian relations for years. Natives were perceived as both undermining progress and requiring assistance as the world changed around them.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, marking a major shift in U.S. policy toward Native sovereignty. The act was designed to strengthen the federal government’s ability to use treaties as a means of displacing Indians from their tribal lands, which were wanted for settlement and farming by white Americans. The law gave the president power to negotiate treaties with Indian tribes on land east of the Mississippi River. The tribes would give up their land in exchange for land to the west of the Mississippi. Any Indian wishing not to relocate would be forced to become a citizen of that state. In 1832, the Bureau of Indian Affairs received statutory authority to carry out the federal government’s treaty relations with tribes. Armed with enforcement legislation, the agency managed Indian affairs for the state, a herculean task including removal planning and reservation management. Pressure from squatters on land awarded in previous years to autonomous tribal nations and the constant threat of military force made the job of the BIA even more difficult. While initially voluntary, removal of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes in the American Southeast reached tragic proportions as the BIA followed Jackson’s plan of removal. The U.S. Army oversaw the march known as the Trail of Tears that forced Indians to walk at bayonet point from their homes in present-day Georgia and Alabama to what became the state of Oklahoma. Between 1831 and 1839 about 46,000 Indian people were relocated across the Mississippi River. The Choctaws lost one-fourth of their people before arriving in Oklahoma, while the Creeks lost 3,500 of the 15,000 who began the journey. The Seminoles, the Chickasaws, and the Cherokees were also forced to vacate. The actions of the BIA, as legal authority of the removals, caused festering resentment among tribal leaders for generations and extended to various parts of the growing nation. The Sac (Sauk) and Fox (Meskwaki) tribes of Illinois and Wisconsin suffered heavily from removal policies as well. The migration was so destructive that entire families within tribes vanished or broke away. Some nations with long-held hostilities were placed near each other, creating further discomfort. Demands on the BIA increased in the aftermath of the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo forced Mexico to cede land encompassing modern-day California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and Indians living in those regions now came under BIA supervision. Since so many issues in the West centered on the control of land, the BIA was transferred to the newly created U.S. Department of the Interior (responsible for the management and conservation of most federal land and natural resources) in 1849. After the switch, the bureau was called variously the Indian office, the Indian bureau, the Indian department, and the Indian service. In 1868, approximately 250,000 American Indians all across the nation were officially under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Unfortunately, the agency had become a dumping ground for the party faithful and “a morass of corruption and inefficiency,” according to historian Robert Utley (Utley, 123). Disgusted, reformers and policymakers called for a change that they believed would result in positive accomplishments, such as civilizing American Indians through education, Christianity, and teaching methods of self-support. The first issue, however, was reforming the Indian Bureau. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant named Ely S. Parker as commissioner and ordered him to create an oversight organization for the bureau. Parker, a Seneca and the first Native American commissioner, helped create the Board of Indian Commissioners: an oversight group composed of white philanthropists that served as a civilian watchdog agency over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from 1869 to 1933. While the BIA now had a group to potentially limit fraud, its mission was failing. By the 1870s, many reformers and policymakers argued that the policy of removing Indians from contact with Euro-American society had failed. These reservations had neither encouraged the gradual assimilation of Indians, nor

reduced violence. Further, demand for land, stimulated by the Homestead Act and Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, put new pressures on Indian leaders to relinquish reservation land that had been promised to them in perpetuity. Settlers saw Indian reservations as obstacles to expansion and believed that the Indians who inhabited them were not using the land to its fullest potential. This notion resulted in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 (or General Allotment Act), which gave the president of the United States the right to divide Indian reservations into individual allotments. BIA officials hoped destroying communally controlled tribal lands would require Indians to assimilate into mainstream American society as private landowners. Lands were to be held in trust for a period of 25 years, after which Indian families would take ownership of parcels and citizenship was granted. Although members of the Indian Administration claimed that Indians on reservations supported the Dawes Severalty Act and that allotment attempts had worked prior to 1887, in reality, this was far from the truth; most Indians opposed the act and it is easy to understand why. Through allotment and the sale of land after it went out of trust, the Indian population lost approximately 86 million acres of land between 1887 and 1934. Allotment weakened the sense of community that Indian tribes had felt on reservations, it attempted to destroy Indian culture, and it left Indians as impoverished subjects of America’s transcontinental empire. As American speculators and settlers took advantage of stipulations in the law to gain access to the best lands, the BIA was unable or unwilling to stop the theft. If an Indian was deemed “competent and capable” under the Burke Act (often called the forced Fee Patenting Act), he could sell his allotted land sooner than the required 25 years. Because individuals deemed “capable” tended to be mixed-blood Indians with strong European ancestry, BIA officials were viewed as manipulators and opportunistic mouthpieces for a distrusted government. There were plenty of reasons for Indians to be distrustful. For example, the Dawes Act also authorized the secretary of the Interior Department to sell timber from allotted land and increased existing powers authorizing the government to lease land for the supposed “benefit” of the allottees. Income from such activities was deposited in a Bureau of Indian Affairs account, called Individual Indian Monies (IIM), to be paid to allottees only if the bureau deemed them “worthy.” A scandal subsequently ensued in Oklahoma when full-blooded members of the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma Territory died of starvation despite the fact that they had IIM accounts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The BIA had been diverting their income to pay for construction of schools and churches. In 1996, the fraud and incompetence of those years was partially rectified by the filing of a classaction lawsuit alleging that the BIA had not fulfilled its obligation of properly managing lands held in a trust for the benefit of Native Americans. The plaintiffs of Elouise Pepion Cobell, et al. v. Gale A. Norton, Secretary of the Interior, et al., claimed that neither the sale of millions of acres of land nor profits from any possible sales, based on the provisions of the General Allotment Act of 1887, could be accounted for. After dozens of rulings and appeals that lasted a decade, the federal government, under the Barack Obama administration, agreed to a settlement in Cobell v. Salazar (2009). In December 2009, the Department of the Interior awarded $1.4 billion to the plaintiffs for the claims dealing with account mismanagement, which will benefit well over 100,000 class members. Additionally, a $2 billion Trust Land Consolidation Fund was established to properly fulfill the mandates of the General Allotment Act; up to 5 percent of the interest on the fund will be transferred into the Indian Education Scholarship Fund to be distributed to help Native Americans with access to higher education. Jake Sudderth

See also: Allotment; Civilization Policy; Dawes Severalty Act; McKenney, Thomas L.; Peace Policy; Reservation System

Further Reading Fixico, Donald L. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Landmarks of the American Mosaic Series. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2012. Hoffman, Tom, and Gwen-Torges Hoffman. “Bureau of Indian Affairs.” In George T. Kurian, ed. A Historical Guide to the U.S. Government. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Monroe, James. January 27, 1825, Message to Congress, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume 2. In Steven Mintz, ed. Native American Voices: A History and Anthology. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1995, pp. 111–112. Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Carlisle Indian School Richard H. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. It was the first off-reservation school for Native Americans and served as a model for 26 other boarding schools that opened by the early 1900s. The goal of Carlisle was to remove Indian children from their homes, families, and surroundings to educate them in the ways, thinking, values, and practices of EuroAmericans. In Pratt’s own words, the goal of these boarding schools was “to kill the Indian and save the man.” Whereas Pratt had once militarily confronted Native Americans who opposed U.S. rule on the battlefield, he now attempted to subdue them through the lessons the Euro-American teachers taught them in the classroom. Much of U.S. society still considered Indians savages, but reformers such as Pratt believed that through education, discipline, and the adoption of so-called white ways, they could be civilized. Children from a number of different tribes attended the school. Both the children and their parents saw the schools as the only available avenue to an education. For many children the school was a bewildering and often painful experience. Shortly after the children arrived the teachers cut their hair, forced them to wear white clothes, spoke to them in English (which many did not understand), and forbade them to speak their own languages. The teachers taught them proper etiquette, such as which eating utensils to use and when, and how to behave in polite society.

Omaha boys in cadet uniforms at the U.S. government-administered Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, ca. 1880. The Carlisle school was the nation’s first off-reservation boarding school, where students were required to abandon their native clothing and hairstyles to assimilate into white culture. (National Archives)

Clear lines of authority were enforced, as were rigid ideas about behavior. The children marched military-style in lines to and from the classrooms. White ideas about gender permeated school policies. Indian girls were forced to wear Victorian-style dresses, while boys’ clothing most closely resembled military uniforms. The school assigned them new, non-Indian names. If the children resisted, the teachers punished them, physically and emotionally. The typical day at Carlisle was divided into two parts. In the morning the children attended classes where they were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. The afternoon lessons focused on skills such as sewing and laundry work for the girls and trades such as carpentry and wagon making for the boys. The school encouraged the children to adopt Christian religious beliefs and attend church on Sunday. The school also developed the “Outing System,” which sent children to work and live in the homes of nearby farmers, businessmen, or craftsmen. Supporters of the program claimed that it taught the children practical skills that they could later use to earn a living and, at the same time, provided them with a modest income. At any rate, it definitely supplied vulnerable workers at little cost to people in the area who needed their labor. It is not known if the children were subjected to sexual abuse, although some reported physical abuse. One other goal of the Carlisle educational program was to break down the children’s sense of belonging to a collective organization, their tribe. Instead, they were to identify primarily as individuals. The sense of themselves as individuals and the push to produce adults who had skills that were needed, but for which they could only hope to receive low wages, also served the needs of the economic system at the time. The school published two newspapers, Red Man and Indian Helper. The masthead of the Indian Helper noted that Indian boys printed the weekly newspaper, but a white man edited it. The publications served to publicize the image of the school that the white administration and teachers favored. For that reason, the school sent the newspapers to members of Congress, philanthropists, newspapers, and military outposts. The school depended on these organizations and individuals for approval and funding. Zitkala-Ša was a Sioux Indian from South Dakota who taught at the Carlisle Indian School from 1897 to 1899. After she left the school she published an article in the Atlantic Monthly that was highly critical of the educational practices and attitudes that defined the school. She rejected the idea that Indians were savages, praised the comfort and decency of Indian dress, and sharply criticized the school’s practice of cutting Indian hair by pointing out that Indians viewed short hair as a sign of mourning. The school retaliated through its mouthpiece, the Red Man. It claimed that she had learned everything she knew in white-run schools and that she was the only educated Indian who made such “morbid claims.” In the late 1800s, boys in the school sought and received permission to form a football team. The team went on to win major, and for some whites, surprising victories in the early 1900s against football powerhouses such as Cornell, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton. Jim Thorpe was the team’s star player. He obtained national recognition and awards for his prowess on the field. In the 1912 Olympics he won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon. By 1918, when the school shut its doors, roughly 12,000 Indian children had attended classes there. In 2000, Indians of diverse tribes worked with inhabitants of Cumberland County, where Carlisle is located, and held a Pow Wow on Memorial Day to commemorate what Indian children had experienced and suffered at the school. Today the U.S. Army War College operates out of what was once the school.

Margaret Power See also: Assimilation

Further Reading Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Enoch, Jessica. “Resisting the Script of Indian Education: Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School.” College English 65, no. 2 (2002).

Cherokee Outlet and Cherokee Strip The Cherokee Outlet was an eight-million-acre parcel of land in the northern Oklahoma Territory that was given to the Cherokees by the U.S. government. The Outlet provided the Cherokees a safe passage to reach hunting grounds on the southern Great Plains from their reservation in Indian Territory. The Cherokee Strip was a narrow band of territory at the northern border of the Outlet that was the result of a survey dispute. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, the United States embarked on a policy of Indian removal. Plans for creating an Indian zone had begun during the presidency of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) and were continued under Thomas Jefferson’s (1743–1826) administration. Proponents of an Indian Country or Indian Territory believed that it would solve problems between white settlers and Indians. In the first three decades of the 19th century, the federal government used both persuasion and coercion to displace tens of thousands of Indians from their ancestral homelands in the south, northeast, and northwest so that Euro-Americans could settle the land. One such Indian tribe was the Cherokees, the largest tribe in the American south with an estimated 10,000 members living throughout the southeastern United States, primarily in and around Georgia. In 1802, Georgia ceded its remaining land in the Old Southwest to the federal government, which in turn promised to eliminate all Indian titles within Georgia. Many Indians had little desire to live surrounded by whites, and so by 1810 some 6,000 Cherokees voluntarily migrated west and took up residence in the Arkansas Territory. These became known as the Western or Old Settler Cherokees. After President Thomas Jefferson signed the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, acquiring 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River, the demand to relocate Indians intensified. During the 1820s, Georgia continued to pressure the federal government for action, and on May 6, 1828, the Western Cherokees signed a treaty with the United States that gave the Cherokees a permanent home and outlet in the West. Under Article 2 of the treaty, the boundaries of the land set aside for the Cherokees, known as the Cherokee Outlet, was stipulated in detail. The Cherokees also received $50,000 and an annuity of $2,000 per year for three years, which was meant to defray their expense of moving, plus some additional money toward costs incurred in rounding up their livestock. The federal government retained a strip of land two miles wide and six miles long for the use of the military stationed at Fort Gibson. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Treaty into law, and he told the Eastern Cherokees, who had remained in Georgia, that they had no constitutional means to resist being relocated. The Eastern Cherokees signed the Treaty of New Echota on December 29, 1835, with the United States, agreeing to cede all the lands they owned east of the Mississippi River to the United States for $5 million.

The Cherokee Outlet was part of the land the United States received from France under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase. The Cherokee Outlet was located in northeastern Oklahoma Territory and southwestern Kansas, and measured 58 miles north to south and 226 miles east to west, bordered on the east by the 96th meridian and on the west by the 100th meridian. The federal government told the Cherokees to vacate Georgia within two years of signing the Treaty of New Echota. During 1838–1839, the tribe, numbering nearly 10,000, emigrated to their new reservation. The forced migration was fraught with hardship and became known as the Trail of Tears. Once the Eastern Cherokees arrived in Indian Territory, they joined with the Western Cherokees and the two tribes merged under the 1839 Act of Union. In 1837, Congress authorized Reverend Isaac McCoy to survey the boundaries of Cherokee land. Some Cherokee land fell into the Kansas Territory, and after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed on May 30, 1854, the Cherokees approached the federal government about the survey and asked that the southern boundary line be adjusted. The outbreak of the Civil War delayed the correction, but after the war the Cherokees ceded the land to the United States. The disputed area measured 2.46 miles north to south and was 50 miles wider than the Outlet. It was named the Cherokee Strip. In 1866, the Cherokees granted permission for friendly tribes to be settled on the Cherokee Outlet, including the Nez Perce, Osage, and Pawnee tribes, in exchange for payment ranging from about 50 to 70 cents per acre. The Outlet also provided a safe route for transporting large herds of cattle, and on March 7, 1893, the Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association was formed for the purpose of leasing land from the Cherokees for grazing cattle. In the 1880s, land speculators called “Boomers” began to settle on Indian Territory in hopes of forcing the government to open the area to white settlement. Federal agents began negotiations with the Cherokees, offering them $1.25 per acre, but cattlemen made a counteroffer of $3.00 per acre. The government closed the area to the cattlemen and renegotiated with the Cherokees, offering them $1.40 per acre. On December 19, 1891, the Cherokees accepted the offer and sold six million acres to the federal government. Between 1889 and 1895, a series of land runs opened the remaining land not assigned to particular tribes to American homesteaders. The largest of these was the Cherokee Strip Land Run, which took place on September 16, 1893. An estimated 115,000 settlers participated in the race to claim 160-acre parcels of land. Homesteaders raced to a portion of land, physically staked a claim, and then reported to a claim office to pay the filing fee. They were required to remain on the land for at least six months and make improvements before receiving a deed. In May 1890, the Organic Act eliminated remaining tribal land and merged unassigned land to create the Oklahoma Territory. In 1907, the remaining Indian Territory land was joined with the Oklahoma Territory to become the state of Oklahoma, and Indian Territory, including the Cherokee Outlet and Cherokee Strip, ceased to exist. Karen S. Garvin See also: Allotment; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Dawes Severalty Act; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Indian Territory; Jackson, Andrew; New Echota, Treaty of; Reservation System; Trail of Tears

Further Reading Newsom, D. Earl. The Cherokee Strip: Its History and Grand Opening. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press, 1992. Price, Jay M. Cherokee Strip Land Rush. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2006. Savage, William W., Jr. The Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association: Federal Regulation and the Cattleman’s Last Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Chief Joseph (1840–1904) Chief Joseph (Hinmatóowyalaht it or Young Joseph) was a leader of the Wallowa band of Nez Perce who lived in present-day northeast Oregon. In 1877, he was an important figure in what became known as the Nez Perce War. Chief Joseph’s leadership and rhetoric made him famous throughout the United States. Joseph was born in 1840, shortly before the arrival of American settlers. His father, Tuekakas (often called Old Joseph), was a respected leader and buffalo hunter. He had been one of the first Christian converts but after a 1863 treaty forced the Wallowas off their land, Old Joseph renounced his church membership and tried to segregate his group from settlers. The Wallowas had maintained an uncomfortable neutrality while Americans fought wars with several neighboring groups but the situation deteriorated as settlers began moving onto Nez Perce land; after gold was discovered there in 1860, nearly 20,000 settlers flooded in. Young Joseph emerged as a leader of the traditionalist faction after a faction of Christian converts signed treaties ceding his band’s lands. The diplomatic crisis became war when General Oliver Otis Howard demanded that all Nez Perce relocate to a reservation in May 1877. Chief Joseph decided to flee and led nearly 400 of his band, 1,500 cattle, and 3,000 horses into Crow country. If they could not get support from their Indian allies in Montana, the Wallowas decided, they would continue to Canada. Chief Joseph was secondary to Nez Perce war chiefs during the flight, but U.S. officials who didn’t understand Nez Perce society believed him to be the mastermind of the war. He was acclaimed as the “Red Napoleon” in the American press. American military leaders encouraged this interpretation, pointing to Joseph’s supposed military genius to explain their mediocre performance. When Colonel Nelson Miles finally trapped and besieged the Nez Perce in Montana, he addressed his surrender demand to Joseph, surprising the Nez Perce. Regardless of their feelings, they had little choice; they were pinned down under artillery bombardment. Joseph formally surrendered to Miles on October 5, 1877, at the Bear Paw battlefield. After the war, in which about 180 Americans and 150 to 200 Nez Perce died, Joseph’s band was moved five times from Washington to Oklahoma, a journey that took six months. Joseph worked relentlessly to end their exile. His continued fame gained him audience with several presidents, but he was never allowed to return to his homeland in the Wallowa Valley. He died in 1904 on the Colville Reservation of eastern Washington, where his band was settled in 1885. He remained highly esteemed after his death, although modern histories have raised questions about the authenticity of his surrender speech and noted that he was not a war chief during the Nez Perce War. James Erwin See also: Nez Perce; Reservation System; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Nerburn, Kent. Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold Story of an American Tragedy. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. West, Elliot. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford, 2011.

Cochise (1805–1874)

Cochise was a Chiricahua Apache chief famous for resisting the encroachment of both the Mexicans and Americans into Apache territory. Initially friendly toward Americans, Cochise would later make war on them after being falsely accused of kidnapping a rancher’s son and having his family taken hostage by American soldiers. Cochise was born in 1805 in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona, then a part of the Mexican region of Sonora. He received a traditional Apache upbringing and received training as a warrior. Cochise proved to be brave and confident and won the approval of his elders. After the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821), the presidio system came to an end, and on October 16, 1831, war resumed between the Mexicans and Apaches when Mexico stopped providing the Apaches with food. As a warrior, Cochise participated in raids on the Mexican haciendas, which were now prime targets. The Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua sued for peace with the Apaches, but when this approach failed they resorted to posting bounties for scalps, which only exacerbated the hostilities. In 1832, Cochise fought in the Gila River battle against Mexican forces. In 1837, a trader named John Johnson lured a group of Apaches into his camp by pretending to have goods to trade. When they arrived, Johnson and his men fired on them and 20 Apaches were killed. Known as the Johnson Affair, this event soured American-Apache relations and led to revenge wars in which Cochise participated. Cochise married Dos-teh-seh, a Mimbreno Apache, and in 1842 his son Taza was born. In 1855 he became the war leader of the entire Chiricahua band. Cochise attempted to make peace with the Americans, but after a group of 30 Chiricahuas were slaughtered at the Fronteras Presidio in 1858, he and his warriors attacked the fort. In 1861, Lieutenant George Bascom left Fort Buchanan with 54 men to find a rancher’s son by the name of Felix War who was believed to be kidnapped. Assuming it was Cochise’s band, Bascom sent James Wallace to invite the Apaches to the army’s camp for a talk.

Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise is famous for resisting the encroachment of both the Mexicans and Americans into Apache territory. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Cochise and five family members, including his wife, arrived around dinner time. After questioning Cochise, Bascom refused to believe the Chiricahuas were not responsible for the kidnapping. When Bascom took Cochise and his family prisoners, Cochise pulled his knife and slit the tent open. He escaped from the camp and was shot in the leg, leaving his family as hostages. The Bascom Affair, known to Apaches as the Cut the Tent Affair, led to bitter warfare. Cochise tried in vain to get his family back. He finally gave up and took hostages, whom he tortured and killed. This only enraged Bascom, who called for reinforcements. The Apaches continued raiding settlements but were slowly driven up into the Dragoon Mountains, where Cochise managed to evade capture. Finally, in 1872, General Oliver O. Howard and Tom Jeffords worked with Cochise to establish a peace treaty. Cochise moved his people onto the Chiricahua Reservation, where he died in 1874 of natural causes. Cochise was buried in the mountains in an unmarked grave. Karen S. Garvin See also: Geronimo; Peace Policy; Presidios; Reservation System; Vanishing Indian

Further Reading Roberts, David. Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Schwarz, Melissa. Cochise: Apache Chief. New York: Chelsea House, 1992. Sweeney, Edwin R. Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Watt, Robert, and Adam Hook. Apache Tactics 1830–86. Botley, UK: Osprey, 2012.

Crazy Horse (1840–1877)

Crazy Horse was a war leader of the Oglala Lakotas (Sioux). A ferocious warrior, Crazy Horse is perhaps most famous for leading a war party to victory against General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876. Crazy Horse was born sometime around 1840. His parents were from two different Lakota tribes and his father was a medicine man. Crazy Horse led his first war party before he turned 20, building his reputation as a warrior and becoming famous among the Lakotas. Crazy Horse fought in the Battle of Platte Bridge in July 1865 along with Red Cloud, another Oglala Lakota. He also fought in the Fetterman Massacre (Battle of the Hundred in the Hand) on December 21, 1866, in which 80 soldiers were ambushed and slaughtered. On August 2, 1867, he was involved with the Wagon Box Fight, an attack on a wood-cutting crew near Fort Phil Kearney. In 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie established the Great Sioux Reservation in the Black Hills. But Crazy Horse, leery of encroaching miners and settlers who threatened to violate the treaty terms, attacked a mineral surveying party in 1873 that was under the leadership of General George Armstrong Custer. According to the treaty terms, by the end of January 1876, all Sioux were to be moved to a reservation. But Crazy Horse led an Indian resistance movement that included Oglalas and Cheyennes. On June 17, 1876, in the Battle of the Rosebud, Crazy Horse rebuffed General George Crook’s efforts to advance toward Sitting Bull’s camp. Later that month, on June 25, Custer was sent to locate the camps of those Indians involved in the battle. Underestimating the number of warriors in the encampment, Custer prepared for battle, divided his men into three units, and ordered them to attack immediately. Little is known about the actual battle except that Crazy Horse played a prominent role in the fighting. The Battle of Little Bighorn, which was an overwhelming defeat for the American Seventh Cavalry, was the largest battle in the Great Sioux War of 1876. In September 1876, Crazy Horse fought in the Battle of Slim Buttes, followed by the Battle of Wolf Mountain in January 1877. But the constant warfare, combined with a harsh winter and lack of food, weakened the Indians. Rather than risk his people, Crazy Horse turned himself in to the federal government authorities at Red Cloud Agency near Fort Robinson, Nebraska. For several months after his surrender, Crazy Horse continued to live at his village among growing tensions between him and the other Lakota chiefs. Translation difficulties led General George Crook to think that Crazy Horse was going to kill him, and he issued arrest orders for the chief, who fled to the Spotted Tail Agency. Crazy Horse returned to Fort Robinson under army escort, but was taken into custody and placed in the post’s guardhouse. When he tried to escape he was stabbed with a bayonet, apparently by the guard, and was taken to the surgeon. He died that evening. The exact circumstances of Crazy Horse’s death are unclear, and he is buried in an unmarked grave. Karen S. Garvin See also: Black Hills; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Custer, George Armstrong; Fort Laramie Treaties; Great Sioux Uprising or Minnesota Uprising; Indian Territory; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Red Cloud

Further Reading Bray, Kinglsey M. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2006. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Henry Holt, 1970. Marshall, Joseph. The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History. New York: Viking, 2004. Powers, Thomas. The Killing of Crazy Horse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Crow Dog (ca. 1832–1912) Crow Dog, or Kangi Sunká, was a Brulé Lakota (Sioux). He was born in the early 1830s in present-day Montana and died in 1912 on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Well respected by his people, he was captain of the tribal police force when he first gained notoriety by killing his cousin, Brulé chief Spotted Tail. Today Crow Dog is remembered not so much for murdering Spotted Tail as for his role in the landmark Supreme Court case Ex Parte Crow Dog, which had lasting consequences for tribal sovereignty. Crow Dog and Spotted Tail were longtime adversaries. Crow Dog was a staunch defender of traditional ways while Spotted Tail exhibited a more conciliatory posture toward Euro-American settlers and a general willingness to accept the assimilative changes they demanded. These tensions, which frequently pitted the men against each other, were exacerbated by personal animosities and a sometimes hostile rivalry over power and influence in tribal politics. On August 5, 1881, Crow Dog shot and killed Spotted Tail at the Rosebud Agency on the Great Sioux Reservation. In accordance with tradition, the matter was resolved to the Brulés’ satisfaction by the Crow Dog family paying restitution to the Spotted Tail family, possibly $600, eight horses, and a blanket. Despite that, the acting agent for the Rosebud Agency had Crow Dog arrested, imprisoned, and tried for murder in a Dakota territorial court. It was the first time an Indian was tried in a U.S. court for killing another Indian. Despite Crow Dog’s claim of selfdefense, the white court convicted him of murder under the General Crimes Act and sentenced him to death by hanging. Crow Dog’s execution date was set for January 14, 1884, but was delayed when his attorney appealed the verdict. Crow Dog awaited the outcome of the appeal in jail. In appealing the verdict, Crow Dog’s attorney questioned the territorial court’s jurisdiction in the matter. The U.S. Supreme Court heard Ex Parte Crow Dog in November 1883. In a unanimous decision handed down on December 17, 1883, it overturned Crow Dog’s conviction, arguing that under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the territorial court had no jurisdiction in Indian-on-Indian crimes committed on the reservation without specific authorization from Congress. That meant that, since Crow Dog and Spotted Tail were both Lakotas and the crime had occurred on the reservation, any punishment was to be meted out by Lakotas, in which case justice had already been served. To underscore the inherent sovereignty tribes possessed, the justices also cited the 1832 Supreme Court case Worcester v. Georgia, which guaranteed tribes federal protection against infringements upon their sovereignty. Congress found the decision and its implications for federal jurisdiction on tribal lands unsettling. Consequently, in 1885 it passed the Major Crimes Act, which placed seven major crimes (including murder) committed on reservations under federal jurisdiction, even if they were Indian-on-Indian crimes. It proved to be the first of several legislative acts aimed at limiting tribal sovereignty. Debra Buchholtz See also: Assimilation; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Marshall (John) Court Decisions

Further Reading Harring, Sidney L. Crow Dog’s Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hyde, George E. Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961.

Custer, George Armstrong (1839–1876)

George Armstrong Custer was born to Emmanuel and Maria Custer in New Rumley, Ohio. His early education was completed at the Stebbins Academy in Monroe, Michigan, and Hopedale, Ohio’s McNeely Normal School. In June 1857, he enrolled in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Although he graduated last in his class in 1861, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Second U.S. Cavalry. At the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, 1861, Custer distinguished himself as a cavalry officer and came to the attention of Major General George B. McClellan, commander of the Union Army, and General Alfred Pleasanton, commander of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac. After serving as staff officer for McClellan, Custer was promoted to brigadier general and became the commanding officer of the Second Brigade of the Third Cavalry Division. Already famous as the youngest general in the Union Army, Custer further burnished his reputation nationally at the Battle of Gettysburg where he defeated an attack by General J. E. B. Stuart’s cavalry. By the end of the Civil War, Custer had achieved the rank of major general and was widely considered one of the United States’ finest cavalrymen. Despite his achievements during the conflict, he was demoted to captain during the military’s reorganization following the Civil War. In 1866, Custer was given command of the newly formed Seventh Cavalry as a lieutenant colonel. Custer’s career in the West began with General Winfield Hancock’s campaign against the Cheyennes, where Custer performed so poorly that he was court-martialed and found guilty of misconduct. General Philip Sheridan intervened on Custer’s behalf to curb his punishment. Custer rebuilt his reputation at the Battle of the Washita, where on November 27, 1868, he and his troops massacred many women and children living in Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village.

George Armstrong Custer, one of the youngest generals in the Civil War, went on to an infamous career as an Indian fighter during the Sioux Wars. He and his 7th Cavalry were defeated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. (National Archives)

In 1874, Custer and the Seventh Cavalry surveyed the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota, where miners accompanying the expedition found gold. The discovery sparked a gold rush that subsequently led

to the outbreak of the Great Sioux War of 1876. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, which was fought on June 25 and 26, 1876, proved to be the turning point of the war. After discovering a large Sioux and Cheyenne village at the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana, Custer divided the Seventh Cavalry into three separate battalions and attacked. Native warriors under the command of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse subsequently delivered one of the most decisive defeats ever suffered by the U.S. military. The Seventh Cavalry lost more than 40 percent of its troops, including the entire brigade that was directly under Custer’s command. Custer’s death on June 25 and the embarrassing defeat prompted the U.S. military to provide substantial numbers of soldiers to the effort to defeat the Native peoples of the West. The Natives were unable to withstand the onslaught. The Seventh Cavalry also gained vengeance for the humiliating defeat suffered by Custer through its participation in such sordid military actions as the pursuit of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce and the massacre at Wounded Knee. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Black Hills; Crazy Horse; Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle; Nez Perce; Sitting Bull; Wounded Knee Massacre

Further Reading Fox, Richard Allan. Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Lehman, Tim. Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Michno, Gregory F. Lakota Noon: The Indian Narrative of Custer’s Defeat. Missoula, MT: Mountain Press, 1997.

Dawes Severalty Act (1887) The Dawes Severalty Act, also known as the General Allotment Act or simply the Dawes Act, was approved by the U.S. Congress on February 8, 1887. Sponsored by Senator Henry Dawes from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Dawes Severalty Act gave the president of the United States the right to divide Indian reservations into individual allotments in the hopes of destroying communally controlled tribal lands and assimilating Indians into mainstream American society as private landowners. The act also allowed the federal government to purchase former reservation lands that had not been allotted to an individual Indian. This caused a land boom, particularly in the Oklahoma Territory in 1889, increasing the size of America’s transcontinental empire and allowing westward expansion to continue across the continent of North America. Allotment came to an end with the passing of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934; but not before various Indian groups lost nearly two-thirds of their lands to white Americans and many were relegated to smaller allotments than their ancestors had possessed. By the completion of the American Civil War in 1865, many reformers and policymakers argued that the policy of removing Indians from contact with Euro-American society had failed. These reservations had neither encouraged the gradual assimilation of Indians, nor reduced violence. Further, demand for land, stimulated by the Homestead Act and Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, put new pressures on Indian leaders to relinquish reservation land that had been promised to them in perpetuity. Settlers saw Indian reservations as obstacles to expansion and believed that the Indians who inhabited them were not using the land to its fullest potential. Therefore, in 1871, another Indian Appropriations Act was passed by Congress, reinforcing the legal definition of Indians as “wards” of the federal government and dissolving

the status of Indian tribes as independent nations, thus granting the federal government ownership over Indian lands. Beginning in the 1860s, New England lawmakers began to dissolve the few remaining Indian tribes in the area, granting them individual allotments and making them citizens of the United States. Massachusetts Senator Dawes was at the forefront of the movement, chairing the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. In 1886, he organized a conference in Lake Mohonk, New York, that brought together the Boston Indian Committee, the Indian Rights Association, and the Lake Mohonk Friends of the Indian. This conference produced the framework for what would become the General Allotment Act of 1887, which bears Dawes’s name. Dawes concurred with the majority of the leading humanitarians of the period, who believed that they knew what was best for Indians; that private landownership would destroy the past Indian way of life and would finally allow them to become civilized. Therefore, although Dawes knew that the act was a violation of several treaties, he still encouraged Congress to pass the act that would allot each Indian family 160 acres of land for farming, plus an additional 320 acres of land for grazing. The land was held in trust for a period of 25 years and at the completion of the 25-year period, the land was given to the Indian family and citizenship was granted to them. The Indian family was given four years to select the land that they wanted and if it took longer than this period of time, the land was selected for them. In an attempt to satisfy the American public, who believed that the Indians were not using their reservation lands to their fullest potential, the federal government took the remaining land and sold it to American speculators and settlers. The money that was made from the sale of Indian lands was used to purchase farming equipment for the Indian population in the area, in an attempt to facilitate a faster assimilation to what was perceived to be the acceptable American way of life. Because of previous treaties, the act did not apply to the Five Civilized Tribes or to the Senecas in New York State. Although members of the Indian Administration claimed that Indians on reservations supported the Dawes Severalty Act and that allotment attempts had worked prior to 1887, in reality, this was far from the truth; most Indians opposed the act and it is easy to understand why. Through allotment and the sale of land after it went out of trust, the Indian population lost approximately 86 million acres of land between 1887 and 1934. Allotment weakened the sense of community that Indian tribes had felt on reservations, it attempted to destroy Indian culture, and it left Indians as impoverished colonial subjects in America’s transcontinental empire. In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act slowed the process of allotment. It also called for the federal government to return two million acres of land to Indian tribes, and it allowed for the creation of selfgovernments on Indian reserves. Unfortunately for the Indian population that had been adversely affected by the Dawes Severalty Act, between 1887 and 1934, the United States had completed its transcontinental empire and American settlers already had occupied the best available land in the American West. Gregg French See also: Allotment; Assimilation; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Homestead Act; Indian Territory; Oklahoma Land Run; Pacific Railroad Act; Reservation System; Primary Documents: Dawes Severalty Act

Further Reading Deloria, Vine, Jr. “American Indians in Historical Perspective.” In John R. Wunder, ed. Native Americans and the Law: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on American Indian Rights, Freedoms, and Sovereignty. New York and London: Garland, 1996, pp. 123–135. Otis, D. S. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Rusco, Elmer R. A Fateful Time: The Background and Legislative History of the Indian Reorganization Act. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2000.

Shattuck, Petra T., and Jill Norgren. Partial Justice: Federal Indian Law in a Liberal Constitutional System. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

De Smet, Pierre-Jean (1801–1873) Pierre-Jean De Smet was a Jesuit missionary among the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River. Born on January 30, 1801, in Belgium, De Smet arrived in the United States in 1821 to attend the Jesuit training school at White Marsh, Maryland. Ordained in 1827, he continued his association with the Catholic Church at St. Louis College following his missions. De Smet became a trusted mediator between Indian tribes and the federal government in the latter’s attempts to secure lands for the country’s westward expansion. For more than three decades, De Smet traveled extensively throughout the Pacific Northwest to Christianize Indians through settled missions. He also made numerous journeys back East and to Europe to collect funds and recruit priests and assistants to staff the Rocky Mountain missions. De Smet was the first to missionize among the Potawatomis when in 1838 he established a mission near present-day Council Bluffs, Iowa. The following year he helped negotiate a peace between the Potawatomis and the Yankton Sioux. In response to requests from the Flathead Indians for a mission, De Smet journeyed along the Oregon Trail to Montana in 1840–1841 and built St. Mary’s Mission. He sought provisions from the Hudson’s Bay Company posts at Fort Colvile and Fort Vancouver, where he was well received by both Indians and Catholic Canadian trappers and servants. At Fort Vancouver, De Smet spent time with the only other Catholic missionaries in the region, Fathers F. N. Blanchet and Modeste Demers. There he learned of a successful evangelical teaching tool, the Catholic Ladder, which he modified in 1843 as the Indian Symbolic Catechism, the first ladder to become widely distributed across North America. Upon returning from a European fundraising mission, he established a central Jesuit administration headquarters on the Willamette River and St. Ignatius’s Mission in Montana. In 1845–1846, he traveled thousands of miles to Fort Edmonton to locate the powerful Blackfeet. He hoped to negotiate a peace on behalf of the Flathead Indians and other tribes that had been the target of Blackfoot aggression near St. Mary’s Mission. Stepping down as superior of the Rocky Mountain missions and returning to St. Louis in 1846, De Smet was called upon in 1851 to attend the Great Council where he played a vital role in brokering the Treaty of Fort Laramie. As an army chaplain attached to General William S. Harney, he proved instrumental in keeping both sides at peace during a conference at Fort Vancouver in 1858. His efforts to secure peace and diplomacy between Indian and white worlds continued when in 1868 he visited with Sioux chief Sitting Bull to facilitate the second Treaty of Fort Laramie. De Smet died on May 23, 1873, in St. Louis. Revered among Indians of the Plains and Pacific Northwest, and respected by officials in the East and overseas, De Smet proved to be an effective consultant, mediator and spiritual adviser through tumultuous decades of American westward expansion and Indian societal transformation. Michael Dove See also: Assimilation; Fort Laramie Treaties; Indians of the Pacific Northwest; Missions; Potawatomis

Further Reading De Smet, Pierre-Jean. New Indian Sketches. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1985. De Smet, Pierre-Jean. Oregon Missions and Travels over the Rocky Mountains in 1845–46. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1978. Killoren, John J. “Come, Blackrobe”: De Smet and the Indian Tragedy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

Dodge, Henry (1782–1867) Henry Dodge was a noted frontiersman, U.S. army officer, and politician. Though he was born in Vincennes, Indiana, he grew up on the Missouri frontier. There he worked a multitude of occupations, spending time learning the trades of lead mining, salt production, and whiskey distillation. Dodge’s political career threatened to be short lived when he joined Aaron Burr’s conspiracy to capture land in the Southwest in 1804, for which he was indicted for treason against the United States. The government soon dropped the charges, however, and Dodge was allowed to return to Missouri to pursue his political and military aspirations. In 1806, he became district sheriff of Missouri, succeeding his father, Israel Dodge. When the Missouri Territory was organized in 1812, Dodge was appointed its marshal. During the War of 1812, Dodge was appointed captain of the mounted rifle company. His most notable achievement came after an American Indian raid on Boone’s Lick settlement, where he saved approximately 150 Miami Indians from massacre. After the war, Dodge continued to be active in both military and political matters, acting as a delegate to the Missouri Constitutional Convention. The lure of the booming lead industry tempted Dodge to move to Michigan Territory in 1814 where he found success mining iron ore. Dodge, of course, was not alone in his quest to find fortune, and tensions between Native American populations and Anglo-American settlers soon grew. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson appointed Dodge a colonel over Michigan militia troops in an effort to secure the region from what they viewed as unwarranted Indian attacks. On July 21, 1832, Dodge fought Sauk chief Black Hawk to a draw at Wisconsin Heights and a month later defeated the chief in the two-day Battle of Bad Axe. Jackson rewarded Dodge by appointing him commander of the First Regiment of the United States Dragoons, a mounted frontier unit, in 1833. For the next two years, Dodge’s dragoons took command of the Western territories, attempting to displaying the power of the American military in an effort to overawe Native American tribes. Dodge retired from the military in 1836, and he served as governor of the Wisconsin Territory twice, from 1836 to 1841 and again from 1845 to 1848. The Wisconsin Territory at this time included what are now the states of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. In the time between his two tenures as governor, Dodge was appointed a territorial delegate to Congress. Upon Wisconsin being recognized as a state in the union in 1848, he was elected as one of its first two senators, staying in the role for two terms until 1857. Though courted for the 1844 Democratic presidential nomination, Dodge declined, averring his support of Martin Van Buren instead. He died in Burlington, Iowa, in 1867, 10 years after completing his last term as senator. LuElla D’Amico See also: Black Hawk; Keokuk; Prairie du Chien, Treaties of

Further Reading Clark, James L. Henry Dodge, Frontiersman: First Governor of Wisconsin Territory. Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1857. Meudt, Edna. Promised Land: The Life and Times of Henry Dodge, First Territorial Governor of Wisconsin. Fennimore, WI: Westburg Associates, 1977. Pelzer, Louis. Henry Dodge. Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1911.

Dog Soldiers In the first half of the 19th century, the Cheyenne Indians had two main political institutions. The most important was the Council of Forty-Four, which was the decision-making body responsible for maintaining peace. It was composed of four chiefs drawn from each of the 10 bands plus four principal chiefs drawn from among their predecessors. Also of great importance were the military societies. They conducted raids and defended the village. When called upon by the Council of Forty-Four to do so, they also policed the communal bison hunts, enforced Cheyenne law, and maintained order within the tribe. The Cheyennes had six military societies, of which the Dog Soldiers was the most prominent. This was due to its large membership and reputation for daring, valor, and courage in battle. Although only a few remain today, military societies were once widespread among the Plains Indians, with most tribes having several. Military societies are a type of voluntary association or what anthropologists call a sodality. The distinguishing characteristic of sodalities is that their membership is determined by criteria other than kinship. In tribes that have unilineal descent systems and clans as the Cheyennes did, sodalities play an important role by cross-cutting kin groups and thereby uniting nonrelatives in a common purpose. In doing so, they undermine the natural but potentially devastating tendency for competition and rifts to develop between different kin groups. That was initially the case with the Cheyenne military societies: each drew its membership from across the Cheyenne kin groups and bands. Because sodalities are formed on the basis of common interests or purpose, most are gender specific. Consequently, Cheyenne military societies were for men only. Each military society was supernaturally sanctioned and had its own founding myths and traditions. With membership in a particular military society came special rights and duties, behavioral expectations, songs and rituals, and characteristic ways of dressing, bodily adornment, and ritual paraphernalia, many of which derived from those founding myths. Great camaraderie existed among military society members as did pride in and loyalty to the society itself. This was particularly well developed among the Dog Soldiers, who often camped together. Despite the high standards of behavior expected of military society members and the responsibilities heaped upon them, individual members sometimes overstepped the line, as Dog Soldiers leader Porcupine Bear did in 1837. The pivotal incident occurred while Porcupine Bear was shuttling between different Cheyenne and Arapaho camps trying to enlist warriors in a retaliatory attack on the Kiowas. After a drinking session in one of those camps, he became embroiled in a fight between two Cheyennes during which he killed one of them. This was the most serious offence a Cheyenne could commit not only because of the social upheaval it might cause but also because it soiled the sacred arrows with flecks of blood and thus undermined their powers until the arrow renewal ceremony could be performed. Under Cheyenne law, the punishment for killing another Cheyenne was banishment. Consequently, the Council of Forty-Four expelled Porcupine Bear from the tribe and forbade the Dog Soldiers, which Porcupine Bear had disgraced with his actions, from carrying through with their planned attack on the Kiowas. Although they had long exhibited a tendency to camp together, the Dog Soldiers were a fully integrated part of Cheyenne culture until 1837, when most of the Dog Soldiers followed Porcupine Bear into exile. Disregarding the decision of the Council of Forty-Four, the Dog Soldiers went ahead and attacked the Kiowas, counting the first coup, which carried great honor among the Cheyennes. But because they were in exile and had defied the Council of Forty-Four, their feat was not recognized by the rest of the tribe. From then on, the Dog Soldiers and their families camped with Porcupine Bear, effectively transforming

what had once been a military society into a band. In time, others joined them, thus eroding the Cheyenne band structure and undermining the council’s authority. A cholera epidemic in 1849 wiped out two of the original Cheyenne bands and prompted a third, the Flexed Legs or Masikotas, to relinquish their separate identity and join the Dog Soldiers. Some scholars argue that the transformation of the Dog Soldiers from a military society into a band was the impetus for the breakdown then underway in the Cheyenne matrilineal/matrilocal system in which a man moved to his wife’s camp upon marriage. That may have been a factor but other forces were also at work. The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty recognized what was by then a de facto reality, and that is that the Cheyennes had separated into northern and southern divisions. Shortly thereafter, the Cheyennes stepped up their resistance to American encroachment into their homelands. The Dog Soldiers became increasingly militant and played a leading role in that struggle, often allied with like-minded Lakotas, with whom they began to intermarry. Before long, the Dog Soldiers had carved out a territory for themselves in the area where present-day Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado meet. As their position toward the whites hardened, the Dog Soldiers increasingly opposed or openly defied decisions taken by the Southern Cheyenne leadership. As a result, the rift between the Dog Soldiers and the rest of the tribe widened, and the Dog Soldiers spent more and more time living apart, in effect becoming a third division. The Dog Soldiers played a major role in the Plains Indian Wars. Not only did they refuse to sign the 1861 Fort Wise treaty or be bound by its terms, but throughout the 1860s they relentlessly attacked the railroads and white settlements as well as travelers, farmers, and traders. When the U.S. Army responded with force, as it was inevitable it would, it was often other Cheyenne bands that suffered the consequences. From the spring of 1867 onward, the Dog Soldiers regularly clashed with the soldiers. Then in July 1869, the Fifth Cavalry led by General Eugene A. Carr and accompanied by Pawnee scouts killed most of the Dog Soldiers in a battle at Summit Springs, thus bringing Southern Cheyenne resistance to an end. Debra Buchholtz See also: Buffalo Cultures; Great Peace of 1840; Lakotas or Western Sioux

Further Reading Afton, Jean, David Fridtjof Halaas, and Andrew E. Masich, with Richard N. Ellis. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997. Berthrong, Donald J. The Southern Cheyennes. 4th ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Grinnell, George B. The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Lifeways. 2 vols. Bison Books Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972 (1928). Moore, John H. “Cheyenne Political History, 1820–1894.” Ethnohistory 21, no. 4 (1974): 329–359.

Fletcher, Alice C. (1838–1923) Alice Cunningham Fletcher was an ethnologist who spent time living among the Omaha, Nez Perce, and Sioux Indian tribes to study their culture and musical traditions. She was instrumental in promoting the allotment system and believed Indians should be assimilated into American culture for their own benefit. The allotment system ultimately transferred millions of acres out of Indian hands and was a key factor in the expansion of federal landholdings in the last decades of the 19th century. Fletcher was born on March 15, 1838, in Havana, Cuba. Her father died when she was about a year and a half old and the family moved to New York City, where Fletcher attended the Brooklyn Female

Academy. After graduating she taught school, and during the 1870s she became actively involved in suffragette and feminist groups in the city. Fletcher was interested in anthropology and began giving lectures to supplement her income. Frederick Ward Putnam, the director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, heard about Fletcher’s interests and invited her to study with him at the institute. Fletcher was an apt pupil and developed a careful approach to research. On September 16, 1881, Fletcher, who did not speak any Indian languages, left Omaha City accompanied by an interpreter, Susette La Flesche, and Susette’s husband, the journalist Thomas Henry Tibbles. They traveled to the Dakota Territory, where Fletcher lived among Sioux women for six months to study and record their way of life. Fletcher also became involved with the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

A pioneer anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist, Alice Cunningham Fletcher spent her life studying Native American culture, particularly among the Omaha. Like many “Friends of the Indian” she believed Native people should be assimilated into American culture, and promoted the allotment policy. (Cirker, Hayward and Blanche Cirker, eds. Dictionary of American Portraits, 1967)

In 1882, Fletcher was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to survey the Indian tribes and make recommendations about their suitability for allotment, a process in which communal tribal lands would be broken up into individual plots. Proponents of allotment believed it would prevent the federal government from taking more Indian land; instead, the allotment system allowed for the sale of “surplus” land and actually reduced the amount of land owned by Indians. Although Fletcher respected the Indians’ way of life, she believed Indians were nearing extinction and thought collective landholding by the Indian tribes prevented them from using it to their best economic interests. Fletcher helped write and promote the Dawes Act of 1887, which was signed into law on February 8, 1887. Congress appointed Fletcher to supervise the allotment process for the Omaha, Nez Perce, and Winnebago tribes.

Fletcher wrote several books about Indian life, sometimes collaborating with her adopted son, Francis La Flesche, including The Omaha Tribe, which is still considered to be a definitive work. Fletcher was especially interested in Indian music and published several books on the topic. She also kept a journal during her 1881 fieldwork, in which she recorded her thoughts on the subject of “the Indian Question” as well as her attempts to develop a methodology for her anthropological work. Fletcher’s professional dedication earned her many distinctions. In 1896, she became the first woman to serve as a scientific section head for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1905, she was elected first woman president of the American Folklore Society. In 1891, Harvard awarded Fletcher the Mary Copley Thaw Fellowship, which provided funding that allowed her to continue her work until her death on April 6, 1923. Despite her involvement with the flawed allotment system, Fletcher is best remembered for her scientific contributions to Native American ethnology. Karen S. Garvin See also: Allotment; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Carlisle Indian School; Chief Joseph; Dawes Severalty Act; Nez Perce; Vanishing Indian

Further Reading Fletcher, Alice C. Life among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Gay, E. Jane. With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889–92. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Tonkovich, Nicole. The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

Fort Laramie Treaties (1851, 1868) Fort Laramie was strategically positioned at the confluence of the Laramie and North Platte Rivers in what is now eastern Wyoming. Robert Campbell and William Sublette established it in 1834 as a fur trading post. In 1849 they sold it to the U.S. government for use as a military fort. Because of its prime location, Fort Laramie has featured prominently in discussions of the Plains Indian Wars period. Two important treaties were signed there, one in 1851 and the other in 1868. As Euro-American settlement expanded in the east, it pushed Native peoples westward. This created territorial conflicts between different Native peoples, a situation exacerbated by the fur trade, which turned animal furs into marketable commodities and increased competition over hunting grounds. Discovery of gold in California in 1849 worsened the situation by luring emigrants west through Indian country. As they trekked across the Plains, they used resources Native peoples relied on and disrupted the game. In 1851, in an attempt to stem both intertribal conflict and conflict between the tribes and emigrants, government agents assembled the Sioux, Arapahos, Assiniboines, Crows, Cheyennes, Mandans, Arikaras, and Gros Ventres at Fort Laramie to negotiate a treaty. The government’s objective was to define territorial boundaries between the tribes, ensure safe passage for the settlers, and start the Indians down the “road to civilization” by undermining their nomadic and seminomadic land use patterns. In signing the treaty, Indian leaders were frequently trying to gain American protection while at the same time securing their land claims against other Native groups. In return, they gave the government permission to build roads to facilitate the movement of settlers and soldiers across the Plains. Indian leaders also relinquished land in exchange for annuities worth $50,000 annually for 50 years. The promised annuities included livestock, farm implements, food, and clothing. Before ratifying the

treaty, however, the Senate slashed the annuity period from 50 to 10 years (but allowed for a five-year extension). That change required consent from the tribes, which federal agents had only limited success in obtaining. As a result, the president of the United States never proclaimed the treaty. Despite that, the land cessions went ahead, the new tribal boundaries were fixed, and the Indian Bureau distributed annuities for 15 years. Meanwhile, intertribal conflict and conflict between the Indians and emigrants and the Indians and the army increased in frequency and intensity. The end of the Civil War unleashed a new flow of emigrants west across the Plains, only this time, many stayed on the land they had previously only passed through. All across the Plains conflict erupted between the Indians and whites. A sizable proportion of the emigrants veered off the Oregon Trail onto the Bozeman Trail, which took them through the Powder River country into Montana. The Oglala leader Red Cloud and his Sioux followers and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies relentlessly targeted the Bozeman Trail in what is known as Red Cloud’s War (1866–1868). In the summer of 1867, Congress authorized a Peace Commission to negotiate a new treaty with the Plains tribes in an attempt to bring peace to the Powder River country and push the Indians still further down the road to civilization. The next spring, government agents assembled the Sioux, Crows, Northern Cheyennes, and Northern Arapahos at Fort Laramie and persuaded most of them to sign the new treaty. Followers of traditionalists such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse refused to sign the treaty, never acknowledged its legitimacy, and stubbornly continued their nomadic way of life. Red Cloud refused to sign the treaty so long as the Bozeman Trail was in use and the army posts that protected it—Forts Reno and Phil Kearney in Wyoming and F. C. Smith in Montana—remained active. Since a new extension of the Union Pacific Railroad had more or less rendered the Bozeman Trail obsolete, the government agreed. Over the summer, it closed down the trail, withdrew the troops, and demolished the forts. In November, after first taking time out to hunt buffalo, Red Cloud and his followers signed the treaty and ceased their attacks on travelers. In signing the 1868 treaty, the tribes agreed to more land cessions in exchange for annuities and accepted new tribal boundaries. In return, the government promised them protection against depredations by non-Indians. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty also created the Great Sioux Reservation west of the Missouri River in Dakota Territory and granted the Sioux permission to hunt in the unceded territory west of the reservation boundary. Finally, in signing the treaty, the Sioux agreed to settle at agencies on the reservation and live their lives on terms dictated by the federal government. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty brought Red Cloud’s War to an end but there were those traditionalists led by men such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse who continued to resist white incursions into their homelands. In 1874, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led a massive expedition across the Great Sioux Reservation and into the Black Hills contrary to assurances contained in the 1868 treaty. Its confirmation of gold in the area triggered a new gold rush, which the government made little effort to stop. The next fall, another commission was dispatched to the Sioux, this time to negotiate purchase of the Black Hills. When the Sioux refused to sell, the commissioner of Indian affairs ordered the Indians roaming in the unceded territory to return to the reservation. When they did not comply, military action was launched against them that culminated in the late June battle on the Little Bighorn, where Custer and every member of his immediate command were killed. Two months later, Congress passed a punitive appropriations bill that made the goods and services promised the Sioux in the 1868 treaty contingent upon their abandoning the unceded territory and giving up more land, including the Black Hills. Only about 10 percent of the adult males agreed to the cession. Despite the agreement’s falling well short of the required number of signatures, Congress ratified the Sioux Agreement and took the Black Hills. That laid the groundwork for legal and legislative wrangling over the Black Hills that continues to this day. Debra Buchholtz

See also: Black Hills; Buffalo Cultures; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Red Cloud; Treaty System; Primary Documents: Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868)

Further Reading DeMallie, Raymond J. “Touching the Pen: Plains Indian Treaty Councils in Ethnohistorical Perspective.” In Frederick C. Luebke, ed. Ethnicity on the Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980, pp. 38–53. Oman, Kerry R. “The Beginning of the End: The Indian Peace Commission of 1867–1868.” Great Plains Quarterly 22 (2002): 35–51. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Geronimo (1820s–1909) Born Goyahkla or “one who yawns,” Geronimo was a leader of the southernmost band of Chiricuahua Apaches, the Nde’indai. He was the last American Indian to formally surrender to the United States and became a symbol of 19th-century Indian resistance to Euro-American expansion. Born near the headwaters of the Gila River, his early life was defined by continuous violence between his people and the Mexicans and Anglos who were fighting for geopolitical control of what became the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora and the American state of Arizona. In 1858, Mexican soldiers attacked an Apache village near the town of Janos, killing Geronimo’s mother, wife, and children. This trauma sent him on a warpath against Mexicans and Americans alike, becoming one of the most feared and revered Indians in both Mexico and the United States. His fame grew to epic proportions after he was arrested in 1877 with 110 of his band and taken to a reservation in San Carlos, New Mexico. The reservation did not contain him long, however, and between 1877 and his final surrender in 1886, he continued to elude containment. This was highlighted by a period between May 1885 and September 1886 when the United States employed 42 companies of cavalry (Mexico added 4,000 men) to capture Geronimo and his 50 men at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. “Geronimo Captured—Apache War Ended!” read the newspaper headlines, and thus began his odyssey as a prisoner of war that would take him from prison camp at one end of the United States to the other, all the while emerging as a celebrity of international acclaim. His autographs, handicrafts, photographs, and portraits fetched a high price, and his appearances at national expositions and county fairs were all the rage. Geronimo’s simultaneous status as an American cultural icon and iconoclast reflects the uncertainties and contradictions that seem to haunt the collective consciousness of settler societies. His loyalty to and defense of his people are beatified in film. Places, streets, and schools bear his name, as does the World War II parachutist’s yell that intimates courage; even Daffy Duck, a most endearing American cartoon character, screams “Geronimoooo!” when he leaps into empty space. The most ironic of contradictions surrounding Geronimo may be that at the time of his death from pneumonia in 1909 at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, he was on the federal payroll as an army scout. Ken Whalen See also: Manifest Destiny; Mexican-American War; Peace Policy; Reservation System

Further Reading Geronimo, as told to S. M. Barrett. Geronimo: His Own Story: The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Shorto, Russell. Geronimo and the Struggle for Apache Freedom. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1989.

Utley, Robert M. Geronimo. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Ghost Dance. See Wounded Knee Massacre Grattan, John L. (1830–1854) John Lawrence Grattan was born in Vermont in 1830. He attended West Point from July 1848 until July 1853, when he graduated in the bottom third of his class. His first and only commission, delayed by his lackluster performance as a cadet, was as brevet second lieutenant attached to G Company of the Sixth Infantry. His only posting was frontier duty at Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory, where he reported more than six weeks late on November 16, 1853. Once at Fort Laramie, Grattan distinguished himself as an arrogant braggart who had little respect for the Indians and their fighting abilities. It proved his downfall. Lakota warriors killed him on August 19, 1854, at the age of 24. He is buried at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Settlers heading west on the Oregon Trail in the summer of 1854 were plagued by Indian raids. On one occasion, a party gave chase but turned back after coming to suspect the warriors were leading them into an ambush. Grattan scorned them for breaking off their pursuit. By August, thousands of Brulés and Oglalas were camped near Fort Laramie awaiting an annuity distribution. When a Minneconjou Lakota named High Forehead killed a cow and feasted on it with his hungry Brulé hosts, the Mormon from whose wagon train it had wandered complained to the post commander, Lieutenant John Fleming. Fleming sent for Conquering Bear, the Brulé leader. Conquering Bear offered restitution but the Mormon rejected it and demanded a $25 cash payment. The matter remained unresolved. Grattan sided with the Mormon and pressured Fleming to arrest High Forehead. Conquering Bear, who lacked authority over his guest, could not hand him over but offered instead to show the soldiers his lodge. The next afternoon, after persuading the reluctant Fleming to proceed with the arrest, Grattan entered the Brulé camp with 29 soldiers and two howitzers and ordered High Forehead to surrender. When High Forehead refused, Grattan tried negotiating with Conquering Bear. Conquering Bear was willing to talk but asked that a friendly trader replace the post interpreter, who was drunk and offensive. By the time the trader arrived, Grattan had directed the artillery at the village, which had attracted hundreds of warriors, including many Oglalas. Grattan was preparing to leave the camp when one of his men, unnerved by the warriors, opened fire and hit one. The warriors responded in force. The soldiers manning the artillery and Grattan were killed first, followed by the rest of the detachment. Only three Lakotas died, one of them Conquering Bear, who was wounded and died several days later. The Lakotas looted the trading posts, then left the area. Just over a year later, the army exacted its revenge when troops led by General William S. Harvey attacked and destroyed two Brulé villages on Blue Water Creek in present-day Nebraska. The Grattan Massacre, as it was called, triggered the First Sioux War and inaugurated a conflict between the Lakotas and the army that lasted until Wounded Knee in 1890. Debra Buchholtz See also: Black Hills; Lakotas or Western Sioux

Further Reading

Beck, Paul N. The First Sioux War: The Grattan Fight and Blue Water Creek, 1854–1856. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Utley, Robert M. Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

Great Peace of 1840 The Great Peace of 1840 was a peace agreement concluded between the Arapaho, Plains Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa Indian tribes. The agreement came about after the 1838 Battle of Wolf Creek, the largest intertribal conflict to be fought on the southern Great Plains, when tribes that had previously fought one another decided they must cooperate to ensure their survival against encroaching American settlers. The southern Plains were home to nomadic and seminomadic Indian tribes. Each tribe had its own distinct civilization, but the warrior culture was an important part of the Plains Indians’ lives. The Spanish brought horses and guns with them when they arrived in the New World in the 16th century. For the Plains tribes, horses changed the way they hunted and allowed them to travel faster and farther and follow the great bison herds they depended on for food. In many groups, a warrior measured his wealth according to the number of horses he owned. Fighting between Plains Indian tribes was a way of life long before American settlers arrived in the Great Plains, but incursions of whites and others into Indian lands intensified old grievances and introduced new ones, upsetting the precarious balance of power between tribes. Some Indians now also had access to guns, which they used to gain superiority over other tribes. The Indian tribes continued to fight one another, but they increasingly also fought the Spanish, French, and Americans. The tribes of the southern plains included the Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Wichitas, Caddos, and Plains Apaches, among others. The Cheyennes were thought to have relocated to the plains from Minnesota during the 17th or 18th century while the Comanches were relative newcomers to the Southwest, having moved from the central Great Plains to the New Mexico region in the early 18th century. As the Comanches expanded their trading network in the 18th century, the Spanish colonial government traded with them and presented them with gifts to maintain a friendly relationship. Officials in Mexico City welcomed the Comanches as powerful allies against the warlike Apaches. However, when Mexico won its independence from Spain during the Mexican War of Independence (1810–1821), it was a weak, underpopulated state, badly in need of revenue. Mexico could not afford to continue paying the Comanches the tribute they were accustomed to receiving and so stopped giving out gifts. As the friendship began to deteriorate, the Comanches also found themselves facing the powerful Osage tribe, as well as the newly arrived eastern Indians forced to migrate west by federal treaties, and white settlers, who also brought diseases that the Indians had no immunity to, such as smallpox and measles. The Comanches approached Mexico for help in ridding their territory of invaders, but while Mexico wished to continue good relationships with the Comanches it offered them no assistance. The Comanches already sold horses and mules to American settlers, but to supplement their income they began to raid Mexican ranches. During the 1820s and 1830s, Mexico was beset by so many Indians raids, from both Comanche and Apache Indians, that the Mexican government offered rewards for Indian scalps. Meanwhile, the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes began trading with whites coming into the region, particularly William Wells Bent (1809–1869), who operated a trading outpost on the Arkansas River known as Bent’s Fort. Bent was born in St. Louis, Missouri. In partnership with three of his brothers, Charles, Robert, and George, as well as Ceran St. Vrain, Bent traveled west to trap furs and trade with

Indians. The partners traveled through southern Colorado and built two forts to protect their trade business. In 1833, Bent and his brother Charles built Bent’s Fort, an adobe fur trading post, on a portion of the Santa Fe Trail. It was the first major permanent American settlement on the Santa Fe Trail. Bent’s Fort provided food and other supplies for travelers and the U.S. Army, and traded goods such as beads, guns, and blankets with the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in exchange for buffalo hides. The fort also provided a safe haven for traders, including permanent and temporary lodging, and Indians often camped outside the fort’s walls. In 1835, Bent became a member of the Cheyenne tribe when he married Owl Woman, the daughter of White Thunder, a respected Cheyenne leader and medicine man. Bent traded with several tribes at his trading post and often found that he needed to intervene to keep rival tribes from fighting when they came to trade. Bent worked to negotiate peace between the tribes, tried to dissuade them from raiding the settlers and traders in the area, and was modestly successful, although the peace remained insecure. On the morning of June 23, 1838, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors attacked the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas at Wolf Creek in northwestern Oklahoma, where they had camped to forage and hunt. The attack was meant to avenge Cheyenne warriors killed in an 1836 raid by the Kiowas. By mid-afternoon the fighting ceased, but the Indians recognized that they needed to make peace rather than continue fighting among themselves. At the behest of Bent, the Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa tribes met with their enemies the Cheyennes and Arapahos at Bent’s Fort in the summer of 1840. The five tribes, with the assistance of Bent, spent several weeks negotiating terms of a peace agreement that would last through the end of the 19th century. Karen S. Garvin See also: Bent, William; Comancheria; Indian Removal Act of 1830; Indian Territory; Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Delay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War. Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

Great Sioux Uprising or Minnesota Uprising (1862) The Sioux are comprised of seven tribes. The easternmost four are the Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Wahpeton, and Sisseton Sioux, which are known collectively as the Dakotas or Santees. They lived in what is now southern Minnesota. On August 17, 1862, frustrated and angry Dakotas rose up and killed between 400 and 600 white settlers and soldiers in a relatively brief wave of violence that swept the length of the Minnesota River valley and north into the Minnesota heartland. An undetermined number of Dakotas also died in that violence. Historians call this the Great Sioux (or Dakota) Uprising or the U.S.Dakota War but the press of the day labeled it the Minnesota Massacre, a reflection of contemporary social attitudes toward Indians by settlers across the Plains. The origins of the conflict are multiple and complicated. From the beginning of the 19th century, successive treaties forged between the U.S. government and the Dakotas had whittled away at the Dakota homeland, undermining the Dakotas’ traditional ways of life and political structures. As these previously

self-sufficient peoples became government dependents, intra- and intergroup tensions escalated. In the summer of 1851, 7,000 Dakotas were forced onto two small reservations along the Minnesota River south of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The lands they had relinquished in exchange for the reservations, government protection, various services, and the annual distribution of food, agricultural implements, and other supplies (what are called annuities) were quickly occupied by white settlers, some of whom encroached on the Dakotas’ remaining lands. Over the next few years, resentment grew among the traditional Dakotas over fraud and irregularities in the distribution of their annuities and the preferential treatment received by more acculturated tribal members. Resentment and frustration turned to anger, which boiled over into violence in the late summer of 1862 as the Dakotas faced starvation. They were already destitute, and a delay in the distribution of their annuities combined with crop failures, poor hunting, and traders who refused to extend them credit for food and other essentials made the situation untenable. An indication of the traders’ coldhearted stance can be seen in a statement attributed to Andrew Myrick, a local trader who is alleged to have said “if the Indians are hungry, let them eat grass.” Violence erupted on August 17 when four Dakota hunters killed five white settlers in Meeker County. That night some of the Dakotas convened a war council and decided to launch a full-scale attack in an attempt to drive white settlers out of what they still considered to be Dakota country. On August 18, a Mdewakanton leader named Little Crow led an assault on the Lower Sioux Agency. At least two dozen soldiers of the Minnesota militia were killed along with agency personnel and several settlers. Among them was the trader Myrick. According to one widely circulated version of the story, his body was found with grass stuffed in its mouth. From there the violence quickly spread to New Ulm and beyond, then back again, with the warring Dakotas killing or capturing hundreds of settlers. It was not until August 26 that forces led by Colonel Henry Sibly began to turn the tide of violence, and by mid-September Sibly’s troops had gained the upper hand. Of the nearly 7,000 Dakotas assigned to the two reservations, it is believed that less than 1,000 actually took part in the violence. As a general rule, the more acculturated Sissetons and Wahpetons from the upper agency and most of the “mixed bloods” opposed it. The war ended on September 26 when the Dakota Peace Party, a faction from the upper reservation, released nearly 300 captives they had obtained from the warring faction and surrendered.

Execution of the 38 Sioux Indians at Mankato Minnesota, December 25, 1862. An estimated 4,000 people watched what remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. (Library of Congress)

By late September it was over and around 1,800 Dakota and “mixed-blood” men, women, and children had surrendered to the army. Roughly 1,600 of them spent the winter of 1862–1863 interred in a

camp on Pike Island near Fort Snelling at St. Paul awaiting forced relocation to distant reservations. Meanwhile, between the end of September and late November, a rapidly convened military commission tried another 393 Dakota and “mixed-blood” men for their role in the uprising. It found 303 of them guilty of murdering or raping settlers and sentenced them to death, often on the basis of little or no credible evidence. In a politically unpopular but what he felt necessary move, President Lincoln commuted the death sentences of all but 39 of those men. One of those was reprieved just before the execution due to a lack of evidence against him. As an estimated 4,000 people watched, the remaining 38 men were hanged in Mankato on December 26, 1862, in what remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. The doomed Dakotas mounted the scaffold singing their death songs and continued singing until the very end. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that at least two of them were hanged by mistake. In the spring of 1866, President Andrew Johnson ordered the release of most of those spared but some spent the rest of their lives in prison. Even before the violence ended, white settlers were demanding that the Dakotas be expelled from the state. Congress agreed with that sentiment and on February 16, 1863, passed an act that authorized the president to remove the Sioux from Minnesota. However, by then most of the Dakotas who had not surrendered or been captured had fled to Canada or Dakota Territory, including Little Crow and his followers. Consequently, the law only affected those Dakotas already interred on Pike Island, who were mainly women, children, and very old men. The internees were removed to reservations in South Dakota. The men who had been spared execution but were still held at Mankato were transferred to Camp McClellan in Iowa. Debra Buchholtz See also: Reservation System; Primary Documents: “A Sioux Story of the War”: Jerome Big Eagle Describes the Great Sioux Uprising (1862)

Further Reading Anderson, Gary Clayton. Little Crow, Spokesman for the Sioux. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986. Anderson, Gary Clayton, and Alan R. Woolworth. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988. Carley, Kenneth. The Sioux Uprising of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1976.

Indians of the Eastern Plains Prior to the continent-wide upheaval set in motion by the westward expansion of the United States, the eastern Plains were home to the Caddoan-speaking Pawnees and several Siouan-speaking tribes. When French and Spanish fur traders first encountered them in the late 17th or early 18th century, the Pawnees were living part of the year in earth lodge villages along the Platte, Loup, and Republican Rivers in what is now the state of Nebraska, as they had been for some time. They grew corn, squash, and other crops for food, which they supplemented with meat obtained on long hunting trips away from their villages. “Pawnee” is a name outsiders applied to four politically autonomous but allied groups. Those groups, however, self-identified as the Skiris, Chawis, Kitkahahkis, and Pitahawiratas. The Skiris traditionally hunted north of the Platte while the other three groups, sometimes referred to in the aggregate as the South Band Pawnees, hunted south of the river. The Skiris and the South Band Pawnees spoke mutually intelligible but different dialects of Pawnee. Even after circumstances forced them to interact with the

U.S. government as a single tribe in the 19th century, each group continued to maintain its distinct cultural identity.

Pawnee lodges at Loup, Nebraska, ca. 1873. The Pawnees are made up of four different bands: the Chaui (Grand), Pitahuarat (Tappage), and Kitkehahki (Republican) make up the three South Bands while and the Skiri, or Skidi (Loup), make up the fourth. (National Archives)

To the north of the Pawnees were the Omahas and Poncas and to the south were the Kansas (or Kaws), Qawpaws, and Osages, a cluster of culturally similar peoples who spoke closely related languages of the Dhegiha branch of the Siouan family. The Dhegiha speakers trace their origins back to a common ancestral group in the Ohio River valley. Sometime around 1500 they moved up the Mississippi River valley, splitting off into distinct groups as they went. The Kansas headed up the Missouri River, where the French encountered them in the late 17th century. The Osages moved west along the Osage River, the Quapaws stayed further south on the Arkansas River, and the Omahas-Poncas worked their way north into the southwestern corner of what is now the state of Minnesota, joining up for a time with the Iowas. Eventually the Yankton Sioux forced the Omahas-Poncas back south. It was on that return migration—probably around 1735—that the Omahas and Poncas permanently separated in what is now northern Nebraska. The Poncas settled along the Niobrara River and the Omahas continued eastward to the Bow Creek area, where they made their home. Like the Pawnees, the Dhegiha groups lived part of the year in earth lodge villages, where they grew corn and other crops, unless enemy raids prevented them from doing so. They also hunted for subsistence and trade and gathered wild plant foods. By the early 18th century, they were deeply involved in the fur trade and increasingly reliant on guns, metal pots and axes, and other European goods, for which they exchanged furs, horses, and, at least in the case of the Kansas, slaves. Many of those slaves were captured Pawnees. Although they conducted most of their trade with the French, the Dhegiha groups also traded with the Spanish and British and, eventually, the Americans. Despite speaking related languages and sharing a common history and ultimately a common fate, they sometimes fought one another. More often, however, they fought the Pawnees, Padoucas (Plains Apaches), and Lakota Sioux. Much of that warfare stemmed from competition over hunting grounds and access to trade goods. The Poncas and Omahas, in particular, took steps to prevent guns and other European goods from moving up the Missouri to the Lakotas and other enemy groups. In 1806, Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike became the first American to visit the eastern Plains in an official capacity. His mission was to create a more conducive trading environment by brokering peace

between the Pawnees, Kansas, and Osages and by asserting American authority over them. Over the next dozen years, the United States forged friendship treaties with all four Pawnee groups and most of the other peoples in the region. A treaty signed in 1825 established American jurisdiction over the Pawnees and regulated trade with them. Similar treaties were signed with the Omahas, Poncas, and Kansas that year. From then on, Pawnee, Omaha, Ponca, and Kansa contact with American officials and settlers steadily increased as did the challenges the newcomers posed to their lives and livelihoods, either directly or indirectly as a by-product of the nation’s westward expansion. As settlers headed west across the Plains, they depleted the game and other resources upon which the Pawnees and their neighbors relied for survival and introduced diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and measles. Because the Indians had never acquired immunity to European diseases, the consequences were devastating for them. Meanwhile, as American settlement spread into new areas in the East, the government removed the Native peoples living in those places west of the Mississippi. Once there, they relied on the same resources as the longtime residents. As those resources were stretched thinner and thinner, intertribal conflict and Indian-white conflict increased. Although each group has its own unique story, the Pawnees’ experience is fairly typical. In 1833, in an attempt to halt the escalating conflict by clearly demarcating tribal boundaries, government negotiators persuaded the Pawnees to relinquish their lands south of the Platte in exchange for a few years of annuity distributions, services, and government protection. In signing the treaty, the Pawnees agreed to give up most of their weapons and settle down on the reservation. By then they had been weakened by population loss from disease. These factors rendered them vulnerable to attack, particularly from the Lakota groups who were expanding into their homelands from the north. In the decades that followed, Lakota warriors and their Cheyenne allies killed many Pawnees. In 1846, in an attempt to escape the attacks, the Pawnees abandoned their Loup River villages and moved further up the Platte. The Lakotas continued to attack them. Meanwhile, the government opened Nebraska Territory to white settlers, who pressed for the Pawnees’ removal to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Instead, government agents negotiated the 1857 Table Creek Treaty, which created a smaller reservation for them on the Loup River. Once settled on their new reservation, the Pawnee women resumed growing their traditional crops, the men continued to hunt and raid for horses, and everyone ignored government attempts to hasten their acculturation. In 1869, under President Grant’s peace policy, administrative responsibility for the Pawnees and other Nebraska reservations was assigned to the Society of Friends (or Quakers), whose assimilation strategy focused on undermining tribalism by allotting communally held lands to individual Pawnees, teaching them to farm those lands, and providing their children with a practical education rooted in Christian values. The ongoing Lakota raids undermined the Quakers’ efforts. Finally, the Pawnees joined the Americans in fighting their mutual enemies. From 1864 to 1877, Pawnee warriors enlisted in the U.S. Army as scouts on campaigns against the Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. That afforded young men a chance to prove themselves as warriors and seek revenge but it did not stop the attacks on their villages. After the Homestead Act was passed and the Union Pacific Railroad was completed in the early 1870s, settlers swarmed into Nebraska, gobbling up all available land and stripping it of its resources. Then, in 1873, a combined force of Oglala and Brulé Lakotas attacked the Pawnees, killing more than 100 people. Such developments made many Pawnees receptive to the idea of relocating to Indian Territory. In 1875, the Pawnees moved to a reservation on Black Bear Creek near present-day Pawnee, Oklahoma. The Pawnees fared little better in Oklahoma, at least initially. Only a third of their new lands were arable, and their efforts to grow crops were thwarted by drought, insects, and hailstorms. And, while much of the remaining land was good for grazing livestock, their cattle soon died from disease. Hunting

was also poor and the annuity payments inadequate to buy enough food to stave off hunger. Large numbers of the Pawnees contracted malaria, tuberculosis, or pneumonia and many died. Despite all that, allotment proceeded. In 1893, the last Pawnees received their allotments, the surplus lands were opened to settlers, and the Pawnees became U.S. citizens and subject to territorial law. In 1906, the Curtis Act ended their tribal government and it wasn’t until 1938 that they were able to organize a new constitutional tribal government under the Indian Reorganization Act. The experiences of the Omahas, Poncas, and Kansas ran broadly parallel to those of the Pawnees. After the earliest friendship treaties, agreements forged with the U.S. government steadily nibbled away at their land base until they were struggling to survive on much smaller reservations in Indian Territory. Once there, they found it difficult to raise enough food to meet their needs, succumbed in great numbers to malaria and other diseases, and were under tremendous pressure to give up their traditional ways of life and assimilate into mainstream society. And, as happened to the Pawnees, their new lands were allotted to individuals in congressionally mandated parcel sizes with the surplus opened to white settlers, and their traditional forms of governance were suppressed. Debra Buchholtz See also: Buffalo Cultures; Pawnee Scouts

Further Reading Fletcher, Alice C., and Francis La Flesche. The Omaha Tribe. 2 vols. 2nd rev. ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 (1911). Hyde, George E. The Pawnee Indians. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1988 (1951). Miner, Craig H., and William E. Unrau. The End of Indian Kansas: A Study in Cultural Revolution, 1854–1871. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1977. Wishart, David. An Unspeakable Sadness: Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Indians of the Great Basin The Great Basin is a geological formation encompassing lands from modern-day southern Oregon to the border between California and Mexico and from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevadas in California to the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. Almost the entire state of Nevada is contained within the boundaries formed by major mountain ranges. The “basin” description actually belies one important geologic aspect in that it is mostly a high plains desert plateau where elevations average around 5,000 feet above sea level. Unlike the Great Plains with its huge herds of bison and antelope, the Great Basin was home to smaller animals that lived together in smaller groups. Deer, antelope, and mountain goats all made the Basin home but in fewer numbers and over wider territory dictated by the availability of water and grazing. Consequently, when people arrived, these same conditions drove them into much the same life patterns. People first arrived in the general area around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago and adapted to its conditions. Living in the basin required mobility, flexibility, and the ability to seize short-lived opportunity. Population density in some places of the Great Basin was only one person for every 40 square miles, and large groups of people seldom congregated for more than a few days. Basin tribes did not build permanent houses. Small bands on hunting and gathering rounds used temporary windbreaks of brush and cattail, while winter houses, constructed of branches and bark slabs, were solid enough to make it to the next spring.

For those same reasons, social organization rarely involved more than 30 or 40 people, usually related by blood or marriage. Such groups were usually under the leadership of an older man (though sometimes a woman) who had little more than advisory power. Membership in such groups was dependent on resources, and individuals and families frequently moved in and out of various groups. By the time the first European explorers arrived, three very large related groups of indigenous peoples resided within the Great Basin. The Shoshones, the Paiutes, and the Utes were the largest, but alongside them were three smaller tribal complexes known as the Washoes, the Kawaiisus, and the Bannocks. The Shoshones lived mainly in the eastern and northeastern quadrants while the Utes called the southeast and southern portions home. The Paiute people lived along the western edges of the Great Basin, although there were some “southern” Paiute people that lived in the southern portion as well. The smaller tribes lived mainly in the California portions of the area. The first American to successfully cross the Great Basin was Jedediah Smith in 1827. His reports, along with those of others who had skirted the region, established the “Great American Desert” in many published accounts used by early travelers and traders. The terrain, the weather, and the condition of the indigenous people all helped in making the push onward to the Pacific Coast an easy decision. Beginning in the 1840s, however, Euro-Americans began to settle in the region, led by the arrival of the Mormon pilgrims escaping persecution in the east. Anchoring themselves and their settlements to the sides of the Wasatch Mountains as a base, the Mormon farmers, merchants, and families soon started to change the land. Despite its antipathy to the religion, the United States soon used the settlements as the basis for new official “territories”—Oregon in 1848, Deseret in 1849, which in 1850 was changed to Utah. For the Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute people, these changes brought culture destruction on an everincreasing scale. People had for centuries depended on life-giving cycles of nature in different places at different times. Incursions and disruptions, no matter how small, were large enough to upset these sustaining patterns. The serious cultural disruptions, particularly of the smaller bands and tribes of people, started much later than that experienced by the peoples of the Great Plains. By the 1840s, the Plains Indian peoples were cemented into the minds of most nonindigenous people as “the” American Indians. American literature in the early 19th century fostered a belief that American Indians were disappearing. Artists and explorers from around the world ventured out to the Plains to capture in words and art the vanishing civilizations. Artists such as the European Karl Bodmer and the American George Catlin romantically, if not mostly accurately, portrayed the magnificence of the Plains warriors in all their finery, with their dances, horses, hunts, and houses. With few exceptions, most notably the Shoshone people, Great Basin cultures not based on the romanticized buffalo culture of the Plains never drew the attention of such adventurers. Unforgiving climate, barren-looking ground, at least to non-Indian eyes, and the lack of a romantic “noble savage” image did not draw much attention. Eventually, American settlers did find ways and means to live in many places throughout the region. Diverted streams and rivers watered livestock, pastures, and fields. Dams held seasonal flow for later use. Conflicts arose as small groups of indigenous peoples met newly arrived settlers, but never were there the big battles between the two cultures that there were on the Great Plains. Instead, cultural destruction happened through murder, disease, loss of traditional living areas, and environmental destruction. From these peoples, many of whom were held in contempt by outsiders because of what was considered extreme poverty and lack of culture, came art that was functional, religion that was transforming, and mobility that anchored. Baskets, woven with intricate designs from vegetation, were so finely made they could hold water. Of all the emotive topics in American history with its indigenous

peoples perhaps none is more evocative than the Ghost Dance. Paiute prophets Wodziwob, first in 1869, and later Wovoka, in 1889, introduced the beliefs and celebration in dance ceremony to return the old ways and lifestyles. The comparatively late arrival of American settlers into the region allowed the indigenous people to maintain their beliefs and traditions much longer than did those on the Plains or the Pacific Coast. When their traditional living areas were taken, the destruction of their fragile cultures was hastened. Rodney G. Thomas

Further Reading D’Azevedo, Warren L., ed. Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 11: Great Basin. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1986. Pritzker, Barry M. A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000.

Indians of the Great Plains. See Buffalo Cultures; Lakotas or Western Sioux Indian Territory During the 17th and 18th centuries, the term Indian Territory was used by Euro-Americans to describe lands in which aboriginal title was recognized. As Americans gained what they viewed as legal control of much of North America, the term came to mean lands set aside by the federal government for Indian habitation. The term was used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to describe much of the transMississippi West, but by the end of the 19th century, it denoted a small portion of the southern Plains that had become the home of thousands of Indians removed from their ancestral homeland. In 1907, the Oklahoma Enabling Act created the state of Oklahoma by combining Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory, thus ending the existence of a formally recognized Indian Territory. By the end of the American Revolution, most Anglo settlers saw Indians as hindering civilization. Plans for an Indian zone were initiated during the presidency of John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) and continued under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). In 1802, the state of Georgia ceded its remaining land in the Old Southwest to the federal government, which in turn promised to eliminate all Indian titles within Georgia. On April 30, 1803, Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase Treaty with France, procuring the 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million. The boundaries of the new acquisition were not established until the United States signed the Adams-Onís Treaty (Transcontinental Treaty) with Spain in February 1819, which gave Florida to the United States. The Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Florida doubled the size of the United States. Indian removal policies had been in place since the beginning of the century, and Indian migration was both voluntary and forced. One group of Cherokees moved west in 1810, and in 1817 a larger group crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas Territory. In 1816, the Osages and Cherokees ceded land to the federal government in what is present-day Arkansas. The land sale was “Lovely’s Purchase,” named for Major William Lewis Lovely, assistant agent to the Cherokee Indians who negotiated the land purchase from the Osages. Lovely bought the land in an attempt to create a buffer zone between the Cherokee and Osage tribes. Initially, white settlers were confined to the land east of the Mississippi, but by the 1820s they had crossed the river. Indians also had little wish to live surrounded by whites, and as increasing numbers of

settlers encroached on their lands, they became divided on to how best to deal with the growing American population. Some believed that moving west to avoid confrontations with white settlers was their best option, and so they appeased the federal government by agreeing to cede land. In 1824, Cantonment Gibson was established in Indian Territory as a temporary garrison for troops whose duties included keeping peace between Americans and Indians. In 1832, the outpost was given the name Fort Gibson and it became a permanent feature of the area. The fort would be the location for numerous talks between federal Indian agents and tribes. A year later, in 1825, Indian country or Indian Territory was described as all land west of the Mississippi River, which included land that now comprises the present-day states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and part of Iowa, as well as territory known as the Great American Desert. The number of white settlers continued to increase. Cotton production increased and drove up the price of land, prompting settlers to push the government to rid the area of Indians. The Cherokees resisted attempts to be relocated and declared themselves to be an independent sovereign nation. However, the tribe was split on whether to remain in their ancestral homeland or move west. Renowned Indian fighter President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) was the first westerner to be elected president. He began his presidency in 1829 with a desire to solve the Indian problem and created a systematic approach for removing the Indians from their lands. Jackson pushed Congress to adopt the Indian Removal Act, which he signed into law on May 28, 1830. The Indian Removal Act gave the president authority to give unsettled land west of the 95th meridian to the eastern tribes in exchange for their exiting land in the eastern United States. Under the terms of treaties Jackson made with the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—each tribe would cede its lands east of the Mississippi River and agree to be relocated to reservations in the Arkansas Territory.

MANYPENNY’S MAP Between 1825 and 1854, most of the trans-Missouri West was, by law, unavailable to Euro-American settlers. By 1853, pressure was mounting to allow Euro-American settlers into what was then still Indian Territory. The following year, Missouri senator and ardent expansionist Thomas Hart Benton prepared a map of Indian Country marking its exterior boundaries. Benton then sent the map to George Manypenny, the commissioner of Indian affairs, with the request that his office mark all of the cessions made by Indian groups since the removal process began; land that was set aside for the exclusive use of groups who had traded their land east of the Mississippi River for this land west of the Missouri River. Benton then made a new version of the map with the added caption, “Official Map of the Indian Reservations in Nebraska Territory, drawn by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at the request of Col. Benton, and published to show the public lands subject to settlement.” Aided by Wyandot Indian Abelard Guthrie and Lucien Eastin, editor of two local newspapers, Benton printed and distributed hundreds of copies of his new map. As Benton knew well, all of the trans-Missouri West remained closed to Euro-American settlement, including those lands ceded to the United States. Yet with his manipulated map, which seemed to have the endorsement of the commissioner of Indian affairs, Benton gave speeches claiming that “astonishing … new intelligence” indicated that the “whole country from the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, with the exceptions of a few Indian reservations, is now open to settlement.” Despite Manypenny’s protestations and declarations that the map should be withdrawn from circulation, the map opened the floodgates to Euro-American squatters and within a year, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed.

Some tribes, such as the Choctaws, were willing to relocate because they believed that the federal government would keep its word and leave them alone if they agreed to the treaty terms. Other tribes, including the Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles, were forced to migrate. Members of the civilized tribes were often reluctant to leave the East because they feared they would receive a violent welcome from the western tribes.

Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, land known as Indian Territory or Indian country was set aside strictly for Indians. Indian Territory was bounded by the Red River in northern Texas to the lower Missouri River in Nebraska. Throughout the 1830s the United States government removed Indians from their land through a series of treaties that promised the Indians land in the West. The discovery of gold on Cherokee lands in 1829 created a gold rush and more pressure to remove Indians to the west. The Choctaw tribe was the first to be forcibly removed from its land under the Indian Removal Act. The Choctaws had signed the Treaty of Doak’s Stand in 1820, which ceded nearly 13 million acres of land east of the Mississippi for cotton plantations. However, most Choctaws did not vacate their land until forced to do so by the Indian Removal Act. During the winter of 1831–1832, the first group of nearly 6,000 Choctaws migrated to Indian Territory, followed a year later by another 5,000. From about the 1830s to the 1860s, the United States embarked on a mission of westward expansion, driven by the ideology of Manifest Destiny. After obtaining the Oregon territory from Britain, the United States fought Mexico for California and Texas. The federal government concluded numerous treaties with Indian tribes to acquire more land and moved the tribes into Indian Territory. The nearly two dozen Plains Indians tribes who already lived in the region that encompassed Indian Territory were not favorably inclined to accept more tribes into the area, and they resented the newcomers. The immigrants often arrived with few possessions and soon found they had to defend themselves against the hostile Plains Indian tribes. To deal with the problems created by forced relocation, Congress created the Stokes Commission in July 1832 under the leadership of Montford Stokes (1762–1842). The three-member committee was charged with the task of overseeing the pacification of the Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita tribes. It also had the duty of negotiating treaties, resolving boundary disputes, and preparing the area to receive relocated eastern tribes. The committee operated from Fort Gibson and had the difficult task of overcoming the mutual hostility of western tribes and their mistrust of the federal government, but within five years the Stokes Commission managed to persuade most of the larger western tribes to sign the 1837 Treaty of Camp Holmes, the first peace treaty signed between the United States and Plains Indians tribes. The Treaty of New Echota was signed in 1835 between the state of Georgia and a Cherokee minority group. The Cherokees gave up all land east of the Mississippi in exchange for land in northeast Oklahoma. Several thousand Cherokee migrated but more remained behind to fight legal battles with the federal government. In 1838, 7,000 army troops under the command of General Winfield Scott seized 18,000 Cherokees and confined them to a concentration camp, where many died from disease or malnutrition. During the fall and winter of 1838–1839 the Cherokees made a 1,000-mile forced march that became known as the Trail of Tears. An estimated quarter of the Cherokees died on the journey west. Because many tribes were forcibly relocated to Indian Territory, this sometimes resulted in violence. The Seminole Indians, originally part of the Creek tribe, fought three wars from 1817 to 1858. Although the Seminoles remained unconquered, they gave in to pressure and the first group of migrants arrived in Indian Territory in 1836. The Fox and Sauk tribes of Illinois waged a short war before ceding their land, but in 1832 chief Black Hawk led a group of followers back to Illinois. The Americans panicked and, ignoring Black Hawk’s flag of truce, fired upon the Indians, who then took up arms. The Indians fled to Wisconsin but were routed by the militia at the Massacre of Bad Axe River. About 30 tribes from all over the continent were relocated to Indian Territory. From the northeast were the Delawares, Senecas, Ottawas, Illinois, Potawatomis, Shawnees, Foxes, Sauks, and Kickapoos. From the southeast were the Caddos, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. From

the west were the Modoc, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Kiowa, Apache, Comanche, Wichitas, and Kansas tribes. In 1834, Indian Territory was further defined as the Indian country that was west of the Mississippi River but not within Missouri or Louisiana, nor any territory, including the Arkansas Territory. Indians were to be relocated west of all white settlements, and whites were to be excluded from Indian Territory. All trade between Americans and Indian tribes was regulated by the federal government. The territory was divided into northern and southern regions, with Missouri taking jurisdiction over the northern area and the Arkansas Territory taking jurisdiction over the southern area. Relocated Indian tribes were assigned to one of the two regions and by the 1840s the region was thinly populated. However, Indian Territory was not an official designation and the region had no formal government. The land grabs continued, as settlers soon realized that the land was fertile and encroached on the territory. In 1854, the Kansas and Nebraska Act took the northern part of Indian Territory and organized it into territories. In 1861, Kansas achieved statehood, followed by Nebraska in 1867. After the Civil War, the Indians living in those areas moved south to present-day Oklahoma. Indian Territory continued to shrink. In 1889, a federal law established jurisdiction in the area and specified explicit boundaries for Indian Territory. The area was now enclosed by Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and the New Mexico Territory. In May 1890, the Oklahoma Territory was created from Indian Territory land by the Organic Act, and a governor was appointed for the territory. Indian Territory was reduced to just the eastern portion of Oklahoma. After 1870, federal Indian policy focused on breaking up reservations. The Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, was passed by Congress on February 8, 1887. Under the act, the president was authorized to dissolve reservations and give each member of a tribe a small parcel of land. Proponents of the allotment system included ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who helped write the Dawes Act. The belief was that by allowing Indians to independently own land rather than continue to hold it as communal tribal land, they would become better assimilated into American culture. One side effect of the allotment system was that it produced “surplus” land that was then available for sale by the federal government. The 1898 Curtis Act, an amendment to the Dawes Act, called for the abolishment of tribal governments on March 6, 1906. The Five Civilized Tribes and others had opposed all efforts at statehood for Indian Territory, but with this deadline approaching they reconsidered. In 1905, the Sequoyah Convention was convened to draft a constitution for a proposed state that would be created from Indian Territory, but Congress refused to consider the bill. Instead, on November 16, 1907, Indian Territory and the Oklahoma Territory were joined to become the state of Oklahoma, and Indian Territory ceased to exist as a separate entity. The term Indian Territory is still sometimes used to refer to the Oklahoma region. Karen S. Garvin See also: Dawes Severalty Act; Fletcher, Alice C.; Jackson, Andrew; Indian Removal Act of 1830; New Echota, Treaty of; Reservation System; Stokes Commission; Trail of Tears

Further Reading Berthrong, Donald J. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal: Reservation and Agency Life in the Indian Territory, 1875–1907. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Bowes, John P. Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Smith, Daniel Blake. An American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Jackson, Helen Hunt (1830–1885) Helen Hunt Jackson was born Helen Maria Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, on October 13, 1830. Jackson supported self-determination for Native Americans in an era when the U.S. government was increasingly exerting control over inhabitants of the West and well-intentioned reformers felt that the assimilation of Natives into Euro-American culture was advisable. An orphan in her teens, she lost her own two children in their youth and was widowed when her first husband, Major Edward Bissell Hunt, was killed during the Civil War. Inspired by her childhood friend, the poet Emily Dickinson, Jackson turned to writing as therapy—and a source of income in the 1870s and 1880s. She published volumes of poetry, travel accounts, short stories, and children’s stories, concentrating on material that appealed to women readers, with her writing appearing in such publications as Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, and Scribner’s Monthly. She often traveled in the western United States and met her second husband, William Sharpless Jackson, while in Colorado recovering from illness. They married in 1875 and resided in Colorado Springs. Jackson frequently returned East for meetings with publishers. It was during a trip to Boston in 1879 that she met a group of Ponca and Omaha Indians who were there to air their grievances against the U.S. government for having usurped tribal lands. Inspired, Jackson sent letters to the editors of the New York Tribune and New York Independent newspapers and later wrote several books to draw attention to the plight of Native Americans. Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor was a scathing history of the treatment Native Americans received at the hands of the U.S. government. She sent copies to lawmakers and clergy after its publication in 1881. Jackson successfully nominated herself to be appointed special commissioner to the Mission Indians of southern California by the secretary of the interior. In 1883 she published, with the conservationist Abbot Kinney, the government-commissioned Report on the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians. Her muckraking exposés were frequently cited by organizations petitioning for reform. Disappointed with the lack of attention her exposés received, Jackson wrote the novel Ramona: A Story (1884), with which she hoped she could do “for the Indian, a thousandth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro” (Jackson, 258). Upon the publication of Ramona, Jackson reportedly said, “I have sugared my pill, and it remains to be seen if it will go down” (Jackson, 341). Down Ramona went, but not in the way that Jackson had hoped. Readers of the book seemed to miss that the book was intended to draw attention to the plight of Native Americans, and instead saw it as a romance about southern California. The novel fueled tourist interest in sites named in it and was adapted into films and plays. Jackson also wrote about Mormons in Utah and Chinese immigrants in California. She died of cancer at age 54, in 1885, a year after the publication of Ramona. Donald W. Maxwell See also: Dawes Severalty Act; Indians of California; Primary Documents: Excerpt from Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881)

Further Reading Jackson, Helen Hunt. The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885. Edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Mathes,Valerie Sherer. Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. Senier, Siobhan. Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Lakotas or Western Sioux The Lakotas are part of a long-standing alliance of culturally similar peoples known collectively as the Sioux. The Sioux recognize three internal divisions based on geographical location, cultural features originating in different subsistence practices, and relatively minor linguistic differences. They are the Dakotas, the Nakotas, and the Lakotas, labels derived from the different dialects of the Siouan language spoken by the groups within each division. The Dakotas, or Santee Sioux, are the easternmost division. During the heyday of the fur trade, they resided on the prairies of southern Minnesota and eastern South Dakota, where many remain today. Four groups comprise the Dakotas: the Mdewakantons, Wahpetons, Wahpakutes, and Sissetons. West of the Dakotas were and still are the Nakotas, or Yankton Sioux, which includes the Yanktons and Yanktonais. The Lakotas, or Teton Sioux, were at the vanguard of the generally westward spread of the Sioux. The Lakotas are further subdivided into seven politically autonomous bands with distinct tribal identities. They are the Brulés (Burnt Thighs), Oglalas, Sans Arcs (No Bows), Hunkpapas, Minneconjous, Blackfoot (often referred to by their Lakota name, Sihaspas, to distinguish them from the Blackfeet, an unrelated group), and Two Kettles. Although they have always acknowledged an affinity and maintained friendly relations, the different Lakota bands only rarely cooperated in joint undertakings. Together the Dakotas, Yanktons-Yanktonais, and Lakotas make up the Oceti Sakwin, or Seven Council Fires, their name for the related peoples others call the Sioux. Today, they have reservations in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Nebraska in the United States and reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada. In addition to living on reservations and reserves, contemporary Lakotas, Dakotas, and Yanktons-Yanktonais make their homes in rural and urban areas throughout the United States and Canada. When Europeans first encountered them, the Sioux possessed neither horses nor guns and were living in the lake country west of the Great Lakes. European contact created continent-wide upheaval as displaced Native peoples were pushed westward by Euro-American settlement and drawn into the expanding fur trade, often simultaneously. By the middle of the 18th century, the then better-armed Ojibwas had pushed the Sioux out onto the prairies beyond the Mississippi with the Lakotas leading the way. Continually pushed from behind by their enemies and lured forward by the enticing new economic opportunities presented by the fur trade, the Lakotas migrated south and west after the bison herds. Soon they began to acquire horses through trade with and raids on Native peoples further south and west and guns directly or indirectly from white traders. By the mid-18th century, the Lakotas were well supplied with both horses and guns and were on their way not only to developing the mounted buffalo-hunting culture pattern with which they are so strongly associated in the popular imagination, but also to controlling trade across much of the central and northern Plains. For many years, they hunted bison in the summer, hunted and trapped for the fur trade in the winter, and attended trade fairs in the spring. Slowly, however, they began to concentrate more and more of their productive energies on the bison hunt. By the early 19th century, most intertribal warfare was undertaken to acquire horses or control access to choice hunting grounds, both of which were not just matters of subsistence but essential to a group’s political and economic well-being. Throughout this period, the Lakotas fought other tribes but remained on relatively good terms with Americans, who supplied them with guns, ammunition, and material goods but were not yet perceived as economic competitors or a threat to the Lakota way of life. They even allied with the army when it served their political and economic interests, as it did in 1823 when as many as 1,500 Lakotas joined a force led by Colonel Henry Leavenworth in a punitive expedition against their fur trade rivals, the Arikaras. Until the middle years of the 19th century, when they at last butted up against the Americans’ territorial aspirations, Lakota expansion in the central and northern Plains was shaped by

the migrations of the bison herds on the one hand, and their efforts to control access to the fur trade on the other. Tribes such as the Arikaras and Crows were well positioned to control and profit from the flow of goods on the Plains by serving as middlemen in the fur trade and, for a time, they were strong enough to defend that role. But as the increasingly powerful Lakotas expanded across the central and northern Plains, they strategically disrupted trade among their rivals and between their rivals and the whites. They did so by driving them out of the prime hunting grounds, by blocking their access to the fur traders and middlemen, and by directly attacking the Crows, Arikaras, and other intermediaries. The spread of disease worked to the Lakotas’ advantage by weakening rival tribes and especially those serving as middlemen. European diseases such as smallpox and measles, to which Native Americans lacked acquired immunity, inevitably followed the same routes into Indian country as guns, horses, and trade goods and spawned what historians refer to as “virgin soil epidemics.” The Crows and the sedentary Arikaras and other village-dwelling groups along the Missouri River were hit particularly hard. The Lakotas suffered less from smallpox and other European diseases than did the village Indians and many other groups. This was for two reasons. First, they were mobile, living and traveling in small, flexible groups. At the slightest hint of disease, they simply dispersed, which interrupted person-to-person transmission. Second, many Lakotas were inoculated against smallpox whereas individuals further north and west were not vaccinated due to inadequate vaccine supplies. As a result, the population of the already numerous, powerful, and widely feared Lakotas continued to increase rapidly while other groups lost as much as half of their populations—or even more—to disease. This discrepancy further enhanced the power of the Lakotas.

Four Lakota women standing, three holding infants in cradleboards, and a Lakota man on horseback, in front of a tipi, probably on or near the Pine Ridge Reservation, ca. 1891. The Lakota were the most powerful group on the central and northern Plains in the 19th century. (Library of Congress)

But just as the Lakotas were solidifying their control over a vast territory stretching from the Minnesota River to the mountains of Montana and all the way south into what is now Kansas, increasing numbers of Euro-American settlers appeared on the scene, disrupting the balance of power in the region, killing or driving off the game, and causing intertribal warfare to increase as resources grew scarcer. In

an attempt to curtail the warfare and render the Central Plains safe for white travelers, the U.S. government forged a treaty with the Plains tribes at Fort Laramie in 1851. Most of the 10,000 or so Indians who attended the treaty council were Lakotas or their close Cheyenne and Arapaho allies. That treaty, which the Senate never ratified, did little to restore peace but it did establish the Lakotas and the Americans as the forces to be reckoned with. Within a few years, the Lakotas were rallying against American incursions into their homelands and the concomitant threat posed to their subsistence base and other economic and political interests. The intermittent warfare that followed between these two expanding powers—the Americans and the Lakotas—lasted nearly three decades. The first major clash between the Americans and the Lakotas occurred when a Minneconjou man killed a cow from a Mormon wagon train halted near Fort Laramie in 1854. The official response to the incident was clumsily handled and resulted in the so-called Grattan Massacre, in which 30 soldiers were killed. A year later, the army retaliated by attacking a Brulé camp, killing 86 people, and taking 70 women and children prisoner. Hostilities escalated after the Bozeman Trail to the gold fields of Montana opened in 1864, slashing through prime hunting grounds and enraging the Lakotas and their allies. To protect travelers on the trail, the army established three posts along it: Forts Reno and Phil Kearny in Wyoming Territory and Fort F. C. Smith in Montana Territory. The Oglala leader Red Cloud spearheaded a sustained assault aimed at shutting down the trail and stopping the movement of settlers through Lakota territory. In an effort to end the conflict, a so-called Peace Commission invited the northern Plains tribes to Fort Laramie in 1868 to forge a new treaty. That treaty redefined the boundaries between groups and established the Great Sioux Reservation in what is now South Dakota. Many Lakotas signed it and moved onto reservations but Red Cloud refused to do so until the Bozeman Trail and its forts were closed. The government agreed. Once they were closed, Red Cloud laid down his weapons and signed the treaty. He never again fought the United States but many other Lakotas continued to resist American expansion and the destruction of more traditional lifeways. Following such notable leaders as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, some Lakotas continued to strike at white settlements, travelers, and military posts. In the summer of 1874, a military expedition into the Lakotas’ sacred Black Hills confirmed the presence of gold there, triggering a gold rush across the Great Sioux Reservation. Ignoring the promises made in the 1868 treaty, the army did little to try to stop the trespassers. Instead, in the fall of 1875 the government dispatched commissioners to persuade the Lakotas to relinquish the Black Hills. The Lakotas refused. Frustrated by their refusal and by the continued raids, the commissioner of Indian affairs ordered all off-reservation Indians to return to the reservation. When they failed to comply, he turned the matter over to the army for enforcement. This set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass, in which Lakotas and their Cheyenne allies defeated Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Despite their victory at the Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass, the Lakotas’ wandering days—and much of the traditional life it represented—were over. Within a year, most had returned to the reservation. After the battle, Sitting Bull and his followers fled north into Canada. They returned south and surrendered in 1881, bringing this chapter of Lakota history to a close. However, the drama was not over. Soon after the Little Bighorn debacle, government representatives visited the Lakotas to force them to relinquish the Black Hills. Few Lakotas signed the agreement presented but the Senate ratified it anyway, and the United States took the Black Hills without payment. Over the next few years, the Great Sioux Reservation was greatly diminished. In 1887, Congress passed the General (Dawes) Allotment Act, which authorized the allotment of lands to individual tribal members and the land left over to be opened to outsiders. Two years later, Congress passed the Sioux Bill, which carved five smaller reservations out of the Great Sioux Reservation, authorized the allotment of each, and opened the remaining lands—about nine million acres

or roughly half the original reservation—to white homesteaders and entrepreneurs. Those five reservations are Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge, Rosebud (Upper Brulé), and Lower Brulé. At the end of the 1880s, frustration over the loss of their lands and the destitution of reservation life drove many Lakotas to the Ghost Dance, a new religious movement that promised the return of the ancestors, bison, and old way of life. That quest ended in tragedy at Wounded Knee in 1890. Over the next few decades the Lakota land base continued to shrink as allottees sold their lands or lost them to tax forfeiture. The Lakotas lost the Black Hills in 1876 but the struggle for their return continues. Congress passed legislation in 1920 that created a mechanism through which the Lakotas could press their claim for the Black Hills and they immediately did so. But the wheels of justice moved slowly. After decades of legal wrangling, court decisions, and appeals, the courts finally awarded the Lakotas $106 million for the Black Hills. They refused to accept the payment, demanding instead that the hills be returned to them. The issue has yet to be resolved. Debra Buchholtz See also: Big Foot; Black Hills; Buffalo Cultures; Great Peace of 1840; Great Sioux Uprising or Minnesota Uprising; Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle; Sitting Bull; Wounded Knee Massacre

Further Reading Ortiz, Roxanne, ed. The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America—an Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle for Sovereignty. Berkeley, CA: Moon Books, 1977. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Penguin, 2011. Walker, James R. Lakota Society. Edited by Raymond J. DeMallie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle (1876) On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry, accompanied by Crow and Arikara scouts, attacked a Lakota and Cheyenne village on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. The size of the village—around 8,000 people, including 1,500–1,800 men of fighting age—was both unexpected and unprecedented. At the first sign of attack, warriors from the village rallied to defend their families and homes. By late afternoon, Custer and everyone under his immediate command lay dead on the bluffs above the river. Through the night and for most of the next day, warriors kept the rest of the soldiers pinned down on a hilltop four miles away. They finally abandoned their siege when they detected more soldiers approaching from the north and the village decamped southward. In all, 263 soldiers and attached personnel died in the battle, 210 of them under Custer’s immediate command. Another 60 sustained wounds but more than 400 lived. No one knows how many Lakotas and Cheyennes died but estimates range from 30 to 300. Non-Indians call this the Battle of the Little Bighorn and popular culture celebrates it as Custer’s Last Stand, but the Lakotas and Cheyennes remember it as the Greasy Grass Battle, after their name for the river. Today, the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, a National Park Service site that encompasses much of the battlefield, memorializes the diverse peoples who participated in the battle. This is the iconic battle of the Indian Wars period, partly because it resulted in the death of Custer, a dashing Civil War hero and darling of the Eastern press, partly because of the mystery that shrouds it, and partly because the breaking news shattered the climax of the nation’s Centennial Celebration. Despite the Indians’ stunning victory, many analysts depict the battle as a “last stand” for their way of life as well as

for Custer and his men. While the battle had disastrous consequences for the Lakotas and Cheyennes, their way of life had been under pressure and changing for some time. Even so, it did not end that day. The army hunted down the wanderers and returned them to the reservations, where they had to adopt new ways of making a living, but the Cheyennes and Lakotas nonetheless endured and retained their cultural distinctiveness.

Depiction of the Battle of Little Bighorn, June 25–26, 1876, by the Lakota Sioux ledger artist Amos Bad Heart Buffalo, ca. 1900. (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

After the Civil War, the United States resumed its westward expansion. Prospectors and farmers traipsed across the Plains in search of their fortunes or a better life. As they did, they trespassed and sometimes settled on Native American homelands and disrupted the bison and other game, threats some Indians countered with force. To contain the situation, open new lands for white settlement, and gain access to gold and other minerals, government negotiators forged a series of treaties with the Plains groups. In most, tribal members agreed to lay down their arms and relinquish their claims to large tracts of land in exchange for reservations, goods, services, and protection from white depredations. Both sides violated the treaties. Some Lakotas and Cheyennes rejected reservation life altogether and continued to wander in search of the bison and other game upon which they had long depended. This brought them into conflict with white settlers, prospectors, and soldiers. In the summer of 1874, Custer led an expedition into the Lakotas’ sacred Black Hills. It found gold, which triggered a gold rush. The next fall, government negotiators tried to persuade the Lakotas to relinquish their legitimate claim to the hills. They refused. Shortly thereafter, under the pretext of curtailing the mounting violence and securing the region for white settlement, the commissioner of Indian affairs issued an ultimatum to those Indians wandering in the unceded territory west of the Great Sioux Reservation, as they were entitled to do under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The ultimatum ordered them to return to the reservations by January 31 or be deemed hostile. When they didn’t comply, the commissioner turned the matter over to the army. The plan the army devised involved three columns, which were to converge on the Powder River country of eastern Montana, where the wanderers were known to have wintered. They were the Montana Column (Colonel John Gibbon commanding), the Wyoming Column (General George Crook commanding), and the Dakota Column (General Alfred Terry commanding), which included Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. As the senior officer, Terry had overall command of what came to be known as the Sioux or Centennial Campaign. Unbeknownst to the others, the

Wyoming Column retreated after clashing with Lakota and Cheyenne warriors in the Rosebud valley on June 17. The Dakota and Montana columns rendezvoused on the Yellowstone River in early June. There, based on the available intelligence, Terry surmised that they would find their quarry in the Little Bighorn valley. He ordered Custer and the Seventh Cavalry to approach from the east but not to attack before June 26, which would give the rest time to get into position to block the Indians’ escape northward. The Seventh Cavalry arrived at the divide above the Little Bighorn valley late on June 24. Scouts spotted a small party of Indians early on the 25th. Fearing they had been detected and the Indians would scatter, Custer split his command into four detachments and attacked. A great deal is known about the actions of three of those detachments because they had many survivors. What happened to Custer’s command, however, remains a matter of reasoned conjecture and spirited debate. Afterwards, the army fielded a force against the wanderers of a size unprecedented in the post–Civil War era. Within a year, most of them reported to the reservations but some Lakotas followed Sitting Bull to Canada, where they remained until July 1881, when they finally surrendered. The army also seized the guns and horses of the reservation Indians, some of whom had been visiting relatives in the village at the time of the battle. That fall government negotiators arrived to force the Lakotas into relinquishing the Black Hills as punishment for the Little Bighorn debacle. Debra Buchholtz See also: Crazy Horse; Custer, George Armstrong

Further Reading Buchholtz, Debra. The Battle of the Greasy Grass/Little Bighorn: Custer’s Last Stand in Memory, History, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2012. Dippie, Brian W. Custer’s Last Stand: The Anatomy of an American Myth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Donovan, James. A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—The Last Great Battle of the West. New York: Little, Brown, 2008. Philbrick, Nathaniel. The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. London: Vintage Books, 2010. Viola, Herman J. It Is a Good Day to Die: Indian Eyewitnesses Tell the Story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock was a U.S. Supreme Court case brought by a Kiowa chief against the U.S. government. It was an unsuccessful attempt to challenge the allotment policy set out in the Dawes Act and subsequent acts and agreements pertaining specifically to tribes living in the Oklahoma Territory. In handing down its decision, the Supreme Court ruled against the Kiowas and gave Congress the go-ahead to abrogate—or ignore—treaties signed with tribes. In doing so, it undermined the integrity of the treaty system, weakened tribal sovereignty and land rights, and hastened the disenfranchisement of Native Americans. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock originated in a set of agreements the Jerome Commission made with the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches in October 1892. Established by the president in 1889, the commission was tasked with achieving in Oklahoma Territory what the 1887 Dawes Act was doing elsewhere: get tribes to accept allotment and open the land deemed “surplus” to homesteaders. At the time of the agreement, the Kiowas, Apaches, and Comanches shared a reservation set aside for them by the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek. Some provisions of that treaty remained in effect for several more

years, a detail the tribes tried to use to delay the negotiations that proved ineffectual. Eventually, the Jerome Commission claimed to have obtained the consent of more than three-fourths of the adult males, the minimum set by the treaty for land cessions. Tribal leaders disagreed. They claimed that the commission had misrepresented the agreement and that many of those who signed it did so under duress. They also presented credible evidence that non-Indians had also signed the agreement and showed that the commission had underestimated the number of eligible signers. As a result, the number of legitimate signatories fell short of the three-fourths benchmark. Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones, and other high-level officials found their argument persuasive and urged Congress not to ratify the agreement as presented. Congress ignored their intervention and ratified the agreement in 1900. Kiowa chief Lone Wolf then filed suit in federal court seeking an injunction to halt allotment under the Jerome Agreement. He argued that because the agreement lacked the necessary signatures, it breached the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek. The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which weighed whether Congress had the power to ignore the three-fourths agreement clause or was limited by the language of the treaty. In 1903, the Court handed down its unanimous, landmark decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. It ruled against the Kiowas and concluded that, since Congress had always exercised plenary —or absolute—power over tribes, it could act as it deemed fit, even if its actions contravened treaties. The justices noted that Congress acted in good faith and reasoned that since the Jerome Agreement merely converted land into money, it did not actually deprive the tribes of property. The Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock decision struck a blow to tribal sovereignty and speeded up allotment by eliminating the need to get consent before selling tribal lands. An early application of the Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock decision came in 1904 in the context of a 1901 agreement signed by the Rosebud Sioux regarding the sale of their unallotted lands. The Rosebud Sioux had agreed to sell 4,000 acres for an asking price of $2.50 an acre. Senator Orville Platt objected and proposed that the 1901 agreement be amended to remove the asking price and ensure a quick sale for whatever price the land would fetch. Congress enacted the amendment in the 1904 Rosebud Act over objections from the tribe. Shortly thereafter, language in the Crow Agreement that specified an asking price was replaced without the Crow Tribe’s consent by language from the Rosebud Act. Similar measures were passed in rapid succession for other tribes. In the fall of 1905, the Uintah, Crow, Flathead, and Wind River reservations were opened to non-Indian settlement, following the pattern set in the Rosebud Act and made possible by the Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock decision. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock was also used to justify making expenditures using Indian monies without tribal consent, as in the case of large irrigation projects on the Wind River, Yakima, and other reservations. As seen here, Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock paved the way for the abrogation of treaties throughout the 20th century. After the Lone Wolf decision, tribal consent no longer posed a barrier to allotment and the pace accelerated. In 1977, the Supreme Court revisited the issue in Rosebud Sioux Tribe v. Kneip, Governor of South Dakota, where it used Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock to reaffirm Congress’s plenary power to abrogate treaties in allotting, then reducing, and, finally, breaking up the Great Sioux Reservation into six separate reservations. Applying the same logic as in the earlier case, it reasoned that since Congress had acted in good faith and the change resulted in no loss of monetary value, further consent was unnecessary. In 1980, the Supreme Court considered the Sioux claim for interest on the principal sum they were awarded for the 1877 taking of the Black Hills in breach of the three-fourths consent clause of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. In reaching its decision, the Court drew on the parallels between Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock and United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians. In 1903, it had ruled that since Congress acted in good faith, had plenary power, and merely changed the Indians’ investment from land to money, the

Indians had lost no property and had no recourse to a legal remedy. In 1980, however, it ruled that the 1877 act authorizing the taking of the Black Hills did not change the Indians’ investment from one form to another but constituted a taking of the land, consequently the Indians were owed just compensation and interest on it from the time of the taking. The Supreme Court has continued to uphold Congress’s power to unilaterally abrogate treaties as established in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. But in recent decades it has stressed that treaties are contracts and warned Congress to exercise caution in abrogating them. Debra Buchholtz See also: Marshall (John) Court Decisions

Further Reading Clark, Blue. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pommersheim, Frank. Broken Landscape: Indians, Indian Tribes, and the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Long Walk of the Navajos (1863–1864) As white settlers and prospectors pushed west in the 19th century, they encroached on Native American homelands and exploited the scarce resources upon which those peoples depended. In the American Southwest they encountered peoples who, once the targets of Mexican slave raiders, were suspicious of outsiders. When the United States gained control of the region at the end of the war with Mexico in 1848, it exerted its authority over the Native peoples living there. Like many other groups, the Diné of the Colorado Plateau—better known to outsiders and in the historical record as the Navajos—resisted both white incursions and American authority, sometimes with force. That eventually led to the army rounding up between 8,000 and 9,000 Diné women, children, and men and forcing them to walk more than 300 miles—and in some cases as many as 450 miles—to Fort Sumner. Those who survived the journey spent the next four years interred under deplorable conditions at Bosque Redondo, a 40-mile-square reservation of desolate wasteland on the Pecos River in New Mexico. In 1868, the Diné were allowed to return home but by then well over 2,000 had perished, either on what they remember as the Long Walk or from starvation, exposure, and disease at Bosque Redondo. When the United States first took political control of the region after the Mexican-American War, the Diné did not welcome the newcomers. Their pragmatic leaders nonetheless tried to negotiate a peaceful way forward. Any success from those negotiations was usually short-lived as both sides soon breached the agreements. The situation deteriorated in August 1849, when U.S. soldiers under Colonel John Washington opened fire on a group of Diné with whom they had been negotiating after a dispute arose over a horse. Narbona, the leader of the group, died in the gunfire. The next year, the army began building forts in the area, ostensibly to protect the Diné. The Diné objected. Agents of the federal government and Diné leaders continued to sign agreements but they failed to secure lasting peace, in part because the Diné signatories lacked authority to act on behalf of their people and in part because the government failed to keep its promises. Finally, in 1858, the Diné and the U.S. government signed the Bonneville Treaty, in which the government promised to protect the Diné from outsiders in exchange for a cession of prime grazing lands. Once again, however, the promised protection was not forthcoming, this time because of settlers clamoring for land and rumors that prospectors had discovered gold and silver in the area. The Diné raids

increased. Then, in the spring of 1860, Diné leaders Barboncito and Manuelito led a raid that all but destroyed Fort Defiance. Another treaty was signed in February 1861 but a few months later, Diné warriors killed 30 Indians attached to the army. General James H. Carleton arrived the next year and began making plans to remove the Diné from their homelands. Carleton’s plan called for first relocating the Diné, along with the Mescalero Apaches, to a reservation at Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner. There, he argued, they could learn to farm and be subjected to the “civilizing influences” of Christian missionaries and an American-style education before being relocated elsewhere. Carleton told the Diné leaders that they must move to Fort Sumner and gave them until July 20, 1863, to get ready. On July 1, he sent troops commanded by Colonel Kit Carson into Canyon de Chelly, where many of the Diné had sought refuge. When the Diné refused to relocate, Carleton ordered “total war” against them, his assumption being that once their homes, animals, crops, and food supplies were destroyed, starvation would force them to capitulate. In late summer, Kit Carson’s troops started rounding them up using the “scorched earth” tactics Carleton advocated and whatever force they deemed necessary. The first bedraggled group of 1,500 Diné arrived at Fort Sumner in February 1864, followed by a second group of 2,500 in March. A census taken a year later recorded more than 9,000 Diné at the fort. Another 300 or so had died en route. Carleton grossly underestimated the number of Diné to be resettled at Bosque Redondo, and the stockpiled supplies fell far short of what was needed to sustain them. Moreover, the reservation itself proved woefully inadequate. The internees rapidly depleted the sparse tree cover for cooking and heating fuel, the Pecos River water was brackish, the parched soils were unsuited to farming, and any shelter was inadequate. Under such conditions, disease took hold. The Mescalero Apaches who had been interned with the Diné soon escaped, leaving the Diné alone at Bosque Redondo. A few Diné also managed to sneak away. Armyworms destroyed any crops the Diné coaxed to grow and, within a couple of years, they gave up trying to farm altogether. With no work or other means of subsistence, they languished on the reservation and relied on the meager government rations for survival. The already high and steadily mounting costs of maintaining the Diné at Bosque Redondo raised serious concerns in Congress, and the little progress made in their “civilization” made it hard for Carleton and other supporters of the plan to justify those costs. Moreover, regional politicians and members of the general public had grave concerns over the inhumane conditions under which the Diné were being held. The problem was finally resolved with the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo between the United States and the Diné. General William T. Sherman, the chief government negotiator, initially proposed relocating them to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma or to Kansas, but Barboncito, speaking on behalf of the Diné, successfully pressed for a return to their Four Corners homeland. The ratified treaty recognized the Diné’s sovereignty and granted them permission to return home. It also promised education for their children and to provide the supplies they would need to resume farming. In exchange for their freedom and these concessions, the Diné accepted a roughly 3.5-million-acre reservation. It was a mere fraction of their original homeland and inadequate to fully meet their needs. Debra Buchholtz See also: Bosque Redondo; Peace Policy; Reservation System; Sherman, William Tecumseh

Further Reading Broderick, Johnson, ed. Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period. Tsaile, AZ: Diné College Press, 1973. Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Thompson, Gerald. The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976. Tohe, Laura. “Hwéeldi Bééhániih: Remembering the Long Walk.” Wicazo Sa Review 22, no. 1 (2007): 77–82.

Manuelito (ca. 1818–1894) Manuelito (a Spanish name given him by Mexicans) is noted for his resistance to Mexican and American invasions of Navajoland, or Dinétah. During his lifetime, Hastiin Ch’iil Hajiin (his Native name) was committed to Navajo sovereignty and strove to maintain possession of Navajo lands. Manuelito was born into the Bit’ahni Clan (Folded Arms People) near Bear Ears, Utah, around 1818. Following the teachings of the ancestors, Manuelito trained as a medicine man who followed hózhó, the path of harmony and balance to old age, the path that Navajos had been following for many generations. Manuelito’s marriage to the daughter of the headman Narbona provided him with the wise leader’s insight. In later years, Manuelito also found his wife Juanita to be a valuable companion. Beginning in the late 1500s, Spaniards and then Mexicans came into the Southwest seeking their fortunes and establishing colonies. Navajos experienced cultural changes that made them herders and warriors. With the horse, Navajos ably impeded the foreigners’ advances. Manuelito witnessed the shifting relationships of peace and conflict between Navajos and Mexicans. In the 1830s, Mexicans rode into Navajoland determined to break Navajo resistance and to capture women and children for the slave trade. Slavery had been known in the Southwest, but the slave trade intensified with Euro-American invasions. Slave raiders targeted Navajo women and children. In fact, raiding for Navajo slaves reached a peak during the 1830s. In a battle at Copper Pass in 1835 in the Chuska Mountains, warriors led by Narbona and Manuelito successfully defeated the Mexicans. At that time, Manuelito was a young man. By the time the United States claimed the Southwest in 1846, Manuelito was a respected war chief, and the cycle of peace and conflict among Navajos, other tribal peoples, and the U.S. immigrants began anew. In 1851, the establishment of Fort Defiance in Navajoland preceded a war that would end in the Navajos’ defeat. The conflict began over the pasturelands that lay outside the newly established fort. In 1858, General William Brooks asserted control of the pastures for U.S. Army use. In defiance, Manuelito continued to pasture his livestock on the disputed lands, whereupon Brooks ordered the livestock slaughtered. Soon afterward, a Navajo killed Brooks’s black slave, and Brooks demanded that the Navajos produce the murderer for American justice. Eventually, Navajos produced a body, most likely that of a Mexican captive. Enraged at what he considered Navajo arrogance, Brooks called for a war. In 1860 Manuelito and 1,000 warriors struck at Fort Defiance several times but were unable to take the fort.

Manuelito (Hastiin Ch’iil Hajiin) was one of the most accomplished Navajo war leaders and was recognized as head chief of the Navajo from 1870 to 1884. (Library of Congress)

The American Civil War turned the U.S. Army’s attention away from Navajoland, and Fort Defiance was abandoned. After the war, Euro-American settlement again threatened the Navajos. Manuelito led the resistance and urged his people to have courage. Finding Navajos to be obstacles to white expansion, General James H. Carleton ordered their removal to a reservation near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where the Navajos would learn the arts of civilization. General Carleton enlisted Indian fighter Kit Carson for the campaign against the Diné. Carson and his men literally scorched Navajoland. They destroyed cornfields, peach trees, hogans, and livestock. By 1863 destitute Navajos began surrendering to the Americans. As prisoners, they endured a 300-mile journey to the internment camp. Some Navajo leaders went with their people, encouraging them to keep heart. Navajo bodies littered the trail. The old and sick were abandoned if they held up the march. Pregnant women were shot and killed if they could not keep up. Many drowned when they tried to cross the Rio Grande. At the prison, the Navajos barely survived. Manuelito, however, vowed to remain free. The U.S. Army, fearing that he served as inspiration to others who eluded their enemy, wished to either capture or kill him. In 1865, Navajo leaders, including Herrera, met Manuelito and gave him the army’s message to surrender. Manuelito refused, declaring that “his mother and his God lived in the West and he would not leave them.” Finally, in 1866, wounded and ill, Manuelito surrendered and was interned at the Bosque Rodondo prison. After four years, General Carleton reluctantly admitted that his plan was not working. There was talk of returning the Navajos to their former homes. On June 1, 1868, Manuelito and other leaders signed a treaty so that they could return to Dinétah. The treaty stipulated a peaceful relationship between Navajos and the United States, defined a boundary for a reservation, and required education for Navajo children.

Seventeen days later, more than 8,000 Navajos began the journey home. About 3,000 Navajos had died during the war. Upon return to Dinétah, Manuelito remained an influential leader who articulated his concerns for the return of his people’s land. He was appointed head of the first Navajo police who would keep order on the reservation. In 1874, he traveled with his wife and other Navajo leaders to Washington, D.C., to meet President Ulysses S. Grant. In 1894, Manuelito died from disease and alcoholism. His widow, Juanita, and his daughters carried on his messages about the importance of land for the coming generations. Jennifer Nez Denetdale See also: Bosque Redondo; Carson, Kit; Long Walk of the Navajos; Peace Policy; Reservation System

Further Reading Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Roessel, Ruth. Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press, 1973. Sundberg, Lawrence D. Dinétah: An Early History of the Navajo People. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 1995.

Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty (1867) President Andrew Johnson sent the members of the U.S. Peace Commission, which included Major General Alfred Terry, Major General Christopher Augur, General William S. Harney, Samuel Tappan, Senator John B. Henderson, Nathaniel G. Taylor, and John B. Sanborn, to Medicine Lodge Creek in southern Kansas to negotiate a peace agreement with the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches. The treaty council, which took place October 12–29, 1867, was attended by approximately 5,000 members of the respective Native groups, with some of the primary negotiators being Buffalo Chief, Bull Bear, Little Raven, Little Robe, Satanta, Satank, and Toneanko. It resulted in a treaty containing three separate agreements: one with the Comanches and Kiowas; the second with the Comanches, Kiowas, and Plains Apaches; and the third with the Arapahos and Comanches. The overtures for peace from the United States were due to its self-interests. The southern Plains had been aflame since the Sand Creek Massacre in November 1864, with Native American warriors launching attacks in areas such as Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. Representatives of the United States negotiated the Treaty of the Little Arkansas in 1865 but that did little to stem the violence. By 1867, it was imperative that the United States make a binding peace agreement with the tribes of the southern Plains because of the construction in the region of both the Union Pacific Railroad and the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The underlying assumption by the United States throughout the negotiations was that all American Indians were doomed to extinction unless they relocated to reservations and became “civilized,” meaning that they gave up their traditions and cultures. They were expected to become farmers and were required to send their children to schools. To facilitate the process, the Peace Commission promised in the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty to provide to the residents of each reservation annuity payments for 30 years, an Indian agent, food, clothing, a school, a sawmill, a physician, a blacksmith, and a farmer. The United States also promised to keep settlers off the reservations. To ensure that the federal government would hold up its part of the bargain, language was included in the treaty that the secretary of the interior would spend $25,000 a year on the needs of the Native peoples. It was further stipulated that the U.S. Congress could not reduce that amount. Of course, the U.S. Congress did not honor that part of the agreement. Although the Peace Commission expected the Native peoples of the southern Plains to give up

their culture, they did make one significant concession. They gave permission for the Native hunters to continue hunting buffalo south of the Arkansas River as long as there were sufficient herds. In exchange, the respective Native groups had to cede all of the territories they claimed, which totaled approximately 90 million acres, and move onto reservations in present-day Oklahoma. They had to live in peace with the United States and all of its citizens, including settlers and railroad workers. The Native bands were also required to surrender some of their warriors, whom the United States termed “bad men.” Although most of the Native Americans present signed the treaty, there were some Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche warriors who refused to sign and continued to war with the U.S. military until the mid-1870s. The U.S. Congress did not ratify the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty until July 1868. Unfortunately, that was after Congress had passed the federal budget, so no money was available to meet the treaty obligations, such as the promised annuities. To complicate matters, the reservations were not ready for the influx of new residents, many of whom were starving. In March 1871, the treaty system came to an end in the Indian appropriations bill when Congress determined it would no longer negotiate with Indian tribes or nations. John R. Burch Jr. See also: Buffalo Cultures; Peace Policy; Reservation System; Sherman, William Tecumseh; Treaty System; Vanishing Indian

Further Reading Calloway, Colin G. Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Clark, Blue. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Jones, Douglas C. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge: The Story of the Great Council as Told by Eyewitnesses. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966.

Métis Métis are people of combined North American Indian and European descent. Disparagingly labeled “halfbreeds,” the general term métis comes from the French word for “people of mixed blood.” Though families and communities of dual Indian-white ancestry are identifiable in the eastern region by the early 17th century, the first distinguishably Métis communities developed in Great Lakes, Northwest, and Plains regions in what is now the United States and Canada. These groups were descendants of French, English, and Scottish men, who came to these areas as fur traders, and Cree and Anishinaabe women. They gradually formed distinct communities based on common language, religion, and customs and began to identify themselves as an ethnic group that incorporated aspects of both European and indigenous cultures. The Métis were integral to the North American fur trade, which formed the basis for the subsequent expansion of the United States to the north and west, for they served as trappers, guides, and intermediaries between Indian and European worlds. The Métis were the first non-Indians to populate most of the fur-bearing lands of North America. Those of French descent, often referred to as “coureurs de bois” and “voyageurs,” were Catholic and tended to pursue a nomadic living based on hunting and the fur trade, whereas those of English descent were Protestant and tended toward a sedentary existence centered on agriculture. By the time of the Seven Years’ War, informal biracial settlements had been established at the present sites of Detroit,

Michilimackinac, Chicago, Peoria, Milwaukee, and Green Bay. The Métis also formed the majority of the fur traders operating along the Allegheny, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers, eventually settling in what are now Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. The conquest of New France by Britain served to heighten Métis identity, especially in the Great Lakes and along western trading routes. The fur trade out of Montreal, operated by Highland Scots of the North West Company, relegated Francophones to the lower ranks. Métis populations became further affected by imperial designs as the next century developed. Under Jay’s Treaty in 1794, which set the United States–Canada boundary around the Great Lakes, communities became split and further displaced as settlers flooded in and territorial governments took hold. Many Métis communities in the lower Great Lakes moved northwest to Minnesota and the Red River drainage system in North Dakota and Rupert’s Land, a vast region controlled by the British Hudson’s Bay Company. The Red River region featured a particularly well-established Métis population that would influence both American and Canadian strategies for territorial expansion. By the early part of the 19th century, the Métis had assumed vital roles as buffalo hunters and provisioners to American fur companies and the North West Company, which had extended its trading routes to the Pacific and the Northwest. A series of bloody confrontations between the company and its Métis employees, and the colonists of the Hudson’s Bay Company–supported Selkirk settlement resulted in the merger of the two companies in 1821. Until the 1860s, Métis living along the Red River conducted annual buffalo hunts in Wisconsin, western Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Montana, North Dakota, and northern Minnesota. The rapid growth of the Métis and their temporary migration patterns alarmed many, who began to disparage them based on racial interpretations of the period. Scientific and popular Anglo-American imperialist writers including Henry Schoolcraft and James Fenimore Cooper challenged the authenticity of whiteness among the Métis and believed the French practice of interbreeding with Indians was evidence of their degeneracy. Though Schoolcraft promoted intermixing as an effective method of civilizing and assimilating nonwhite peoples, he disapproved of the French Métis example of living with the mother’s tribe rather than becoming part of the father’s white society. The Métis continued to experience racially motivated attacks and harassment physically, in print, and through government policy. The Métis shared in the Indian experience of becoming increasingly constricted in terms of land use and mobility as pressure from the east for development and settlement intensified following the Civil War. When Canada entered Confederation in 1867, it sought to protect territory in the west from possible American expansion. The boundary between the two countries, set at the 49th parallel, already divided the historic homeland of the Métis. When the Hudson’s Bay Company transferred the vast region of Rupert’s Land to Canada in 1870 and government surveyors began mapping the Red River without regard to local residents, Louis Riel, a Métis, emerged to organize a resistance movement. Although his provisional government negotiated a significant allocation of land for the Métis, within a few years settlers, troops, new laws, and amendments to the original agreement served to dispossess the Métis of their land, forcing thousands to migrate further west or south into American territory. By 1879, the American military became increasingly concerned about the Métis. Riel, living in exile with the Milk River Métis in Montana, attempted to organize a confederacy of northern Plains Indians and Métis. When this failed, he petitioned the Indian commissioner for the establishment of a homeland in Montana. Though it initially won support, it was rejected due to pressure from cattle, land, and mining interests and prevailing beliefs regarding quality of American citizenship. Riel returned to Canada in 1885 to lead a resistance of Métis communities in Saskatchewan. The North-West Rebellion was swiftly put down by the Canadian government and Riel was executed. Large numbers of Métis promptly fled the region to join communities in North Dakota and Montana. The U.S. military asked the State Department

for permission to deport the so-called “refugees” to Canada. The deportation, which included American citizens, occurred 10 years later. The formation of Métis identity in the United States and Canada followed different paths. As American expansion moved west, the government’s discouragement of biracial identities through its treaty provisions resulted in the fragmentation of the Métis. Though Métis communities in the United States learned to adapt and survive without the fur trade and the buffalo, they were considered Indian and continued to be the target of racial stereotyping and government assimilation policies into the 20th century. Michael Dove See also: Buffalo Cultures; Hudson’s Bay Company; Mestizos; Northwest Territory; Schoolcraft, Henry

Further Reading Brown, Jennifer, and Theresa Schenk. “Métis, Mestizo, and Mixed Blood.” In Philip Deloria and Neal Salisbury, eds. A Companion to American Indian History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 321–338. Ens, Gerhard. Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the Red River Métis in the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Foster, Martha Harroun. We Know Who We Are: Métis Identity in a Montana Community. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S. H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Minnesota Uprising. See Great Sioux Uprising or Minnesota Uprising (1862) Nez Perce The name “Nez Perce” is an exonym given by French Canadian fur trappers that means “pierced nose.” Prior to European expansion into the Americas, these people regarded themselves only as Nimi’ipuu or Nee-Mee-Poo (The People) and Iceyeeye Niim Mama’yac (Children of the Coyote). According to oral history, along what is today the Clearwater River in Idaho, there once lived a great monster with an insatiable appetite. It devoured all the animals in the valley. This disturbed Coyote, so he made a knife out of flint, dove down the monster’s throat, and proceeded to carve its body into pieces, which he then scattered across the Great Plains and into the adjoining Rocky Mountains. These pieces became various Indian nations. When Coyote saw that the splendid valley was left uninhabited, he squeezed the heart of the beast and the falling drops of blood formed people of eminent character—the Nez Perce. Others say their ancestors migrated down the west coast of North America and were the first people to settle the Columbia River Plateau in the Pacific Northwest 7,000–12,000 years ago. Either way, the Nez Perce established small fishing villages along the Snake River and its tributaries. With the addition of the horse, they extended their reach from the Northwest Pacific Coast to the Great Plains. The Nez Perce acquired their first horses in the first quarter of the 18th century by trading with the Shoshones to the south. This shifted their subsistence needs toward the Plains and the bison, though they continued to incorporate fish into their lifeways. By 1800, they were the largest nation on the Columbia River Plateau with 6,000 citizens and a homeland of 17 million acres. As the 19th century progressed, significant numbers of non-Indian miners, farmers, and ranchers advanced on the region, and the Nez Perce were forced to the extremes of capitulating to American expansion or resisting. In 1855, bands of Nez Perce reluctantly agreed to the terms of the Treaty of Wallowa that reduced their land holdings to 7.5 million acres but allowed them to stay in their beloved valley of the same name. As settlers steadily increased, the Nez Perce were again urged to treat away their lands but this time the stipulations included removal from the Wallowa Valley. Some bands signed, some did not; this effectively split the nation. Nontreaty Indians remained in the valley, attempting to follow their traditional way of life while resisting intrusions by newcomers. The others relocated to Fort Lapwai, one of three present-day reservations most significant to the history of the Nez Perce. In the summer of 1877, the nontreaty Indians, made up of a few bands including those of Im-mut-tu-ya-lat-lat or Chief Joseph, had finally decided to leave the open lands to take up residence on the new Lapwai reservation. But before yielding, several young warriors went on a rampage of revenge targeting settlers who had earlier mistreated them. The killings set off a shockwave of fear through settler towns. The U.S. Army, assisted by town militias—and Indian scouts and warriors from tribes such as the Sioux and Cheyennes who often skirmished with the Nez Perce for control of hunting grounds on the Plains—set out to either capture or destroy remaining holdouts.

Uncertain of their fate, approximately 800 Nez Perce, 200 of whom were warriors, took matters into their own hands and abandoned the valley to seek refuge in Canada where Oglala leader Sitting Bull and his people were biding time. Traveling 1,400 miles over exceptionally rugged terrain and staving off or escaping repeated attacks, the Nez Perce led American forces on a four-month-long pursuit. The chase became a “real time” media spectacle, though much of it was based on rumor. Regardless, it fostered sympathy for their plight. Americans could perhaps see themselves in the Nez Perce’s epic journey, and in their courage and resilience. Just 40 miles from the border they succumbed to a large military force under Colonel Nelson A. Miles, though about 200 Nez Perce escaped into Canada. When the “Nez Perce War” ended in 1877, the era of Reconstruction that transformed society in the southern United States after the Civil War (1861–1865) had also come to a close. However, in subduing the last large nation of American Indians, the U.S. government could now embark on a wider reconstruction effort that would extend from east to west. The intention was to incorporate new territories into the country through federally funded large-scale projects such as the building of irrigation and transportation systems, and the creation of national forests, parks, and land-grant universities. Essential to this process was the need to make American Indians citizens of the United States as former African slaves had become after the Civil War. To do so, Indian ways of life and landscapes were romanticized at the same time they were being destroyed, epitomized by the glorification of the Nez Perce’s final bid for freedom. The trend helped to assimilate the West and its Indian nations into the nationalistic idea and supplemented the ideal of American exceptionalism. The Nez Perce, who had aided and comforted the Corps of Discovery in the Rocky Mountains about 70 years earlier, had become a trope for territorial integration through transformation. In a twist of irony, Chief Joseph became the epic hero of that war and, as such, a positive symbol of Western reconstruction. During the latter part of the 19th century, his words of surrender, or at least those attributed to him, were as well known as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Ken Whalen See also: Assimilation; Chief Joseph; Corps of Discovery

Further Reading Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. New York: Mariner Books, 1997. The Nez Perce (Nee-Me-Poo) National Historic Trail. 2012. Orofino, ID: The United States Department of Agriculture—Forest Service. http://www.fs.usda.gov/npnht/. Accessed October 15, 2014. West, Elliott. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

One Hundred Slain, Battle of (1866) The Battle of the One Hundred Slain—also known as the Fetterman fight or massacre—took place near Fort Kearny in what is now north-central Wyoming on December 21, 1866. It was a battle between U.S. soldiers defending the Bozeman Trail and a large, unusually well-organized force of Lakota (Western Sioux), Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors resisting what they perceived as incursions into their homelands. Captain William J. Fetterman and his entire command—80 men in all—died in the battle along with an estimated 13 or 14 warriors. Although Red Cloud did not fight that day, this was a key battle in the prolonged conflict that bears his name, Red Cloud’s War. Until the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, it stood as the frontier army’s greatest defeat at the hands of the Indians. In early summer 1866, troops commanded by Colonel Henry B. Carrington established three forts along the Bozeman Trail to protect settlers headed for the Montana gold fields from Indian attack. They were Forts Reno and Kearny in Wyoming and F. C. Smith in Montana. Stationed at Fort Kearny, Carrington’s headquarters, were around 400 soldiers and a large number of civilians. Several women and children were among them, including Carrington’s wife, Margaret. From the outset, warriors harassed the post, and especially its civilian woodcutters. Almost immediately, Carrington requested more troops, weapons and ammunition, and horses, none of which were forthcoming. In its first six months in operation, warriors killed nearly 70 soldiers and civilians from the fort. In November, a cavalry detachment arrived to bolster the fort’s military complement. Among the cavalrymen was Captain Fetterman, a man later depicted by Carrington as a glory-seeking Civil War veteran who lacked Indian fighting experience and was contemptuous of his commander’s leadership. Shortly after the cavalry arrived, Carrington received orders to take the offensive against the Indians. His first chance came on December 6, when woodcutters working four miles from the post came under attack. Accompanied by Fetterman, he went to their aid. Two soldiers were killed and four wounded when warriors lured them into a trap. Despite their losses, the soldiers fended off the raiders. The Indians attacked another woodcutting detail on December 19 but were repelled. On December 21, the warriors again attacked the woodcutters, only this time Crazy Horse and a few others lay in wait to decoy the soldiers into an ambush. When Carrington got word of the attack, he organized a relief party. He initially assigned command to another officer but, upon his request, reassigned it to Fetterman. As Carrington watched, Fetterman and his 49-man detachment left the post on foot heading away from the woodcutters toward Lodge Trail Ridge. A bit later, Lieutenant George W. Grummond followed with 27 mounted cavalrymen, increasing Fetterman’s detachment to 80 men. When word came back that the Indians had broken off their attack, Carrington did not recall Fetterman. Only later when he heard heavy gunfire in the distance did he dispatch reinforcements on foot. They moved cautiously up the ridge. Peering over the top, they saw an overwhelming mass of warriors in the valley below. When the warriors dispersed, they descended into the valley to find the stripped and mutilated bodies of their comrades. They located most of the infantry, including Fetterman, huddled together among some large rocks and most of the cavalry a mile further on. Nearly all of the soldiers died from arrow,

spear, knife, or club wounds; only six sustained gunshot wounds. According to Native testimony, it took the warriors about 20 minutes to eliminate the infantry and another 20 to deal with the cavalry. It is impossible to ascertain what Fetterman was thinking or what happened after he left the fort. However, it is evident that, rather than relieve the woodcutters, he crossed the ridge. Maybe he was chasing decoys, as Native eyewitnesses claim, or perhaps he was circling around behind the woodcutters or trying to intercept retreating warriors. Whatever his reasoning, two things are clear: first, that the warriors attacked his command from both sides a half mile after it crested the ridge, and second, that the cavalry was far in advance of the infantry by then. His superiors initially held Carrington responsible for what happened and relieved him of command, but an official report eventually exonerated him. By then, however, the press and the general public were disinclined to accept his innocence. At first, Carrington cited a lack of military personnel and equipment in his own defense. Such claims posed political problems for his superiors, who were embroiled in a post–Civil War struggle over resources and jurisdiction, and they suppressed them. Lacking the political standing to criticize Generals Grant and Sherman, Carrington shifted the blame to Fetterman, who he claimed disobeyed orders. From then on, Carrington insisted that he had ordered Fetterman to relieve the woodcutters and not to cross the ridge under any circumstances. Carrington’s orders to Fetterman remain a point of controversy. That no one heard Carrington issue those orders and that he actually watched Fetterman head toward the ridge without redirecting him suggests to some that Carrington approved of Fetterman’s actions. Carrington did give similar orders to Grummond before he departed, but whether Grummond conveyed them to Fetterman remains unknown. Other officers have also been criticized. Some people think Grummond carelessly allowed his cavalry to be lured ahead of the infantry by decoys. They argue that had the infantry and cavalry stuck together, they might have succeeded in warding off the warriors. Captain Tenodor Ten Eyck, who led the reinforcements, has also been accused of being slow and overly cautious in his approach and of cowardice and drunkenness. Carrington spent the rest of his life trying to restore his reputation. Eventually his wife, Margaret, told his side of the story in Ab-sa-ra-ka, Home of the Crows, which derives from the journals she kept while at Fort Kearny. Debra Buchholtz See also: Lakotas or Western Sioux; Red Cloud

Further Reading Brown, Dee. The Fetterman Massacre. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962. Calitri, Shannon Smith. “‘Give Me Eighty Men’: Shattering the Myth of the Fetterman Massacre.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 54, no. 3 (2004): 44–59. Carrington, Margaret I. Ab-sa-ra-ka, Home of the Crows: Being the Experience of an Officer’s Wife on the Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 (1868).

Pahá Sapa. See Black Hills Pawnee Scouts (1864–1876)

The years following the Civil War saw an increase in violence across the American West as the U.S. Army sought control over the Plains Indians’ movements. With the Army Act in 1866, Congress authorized the enlistment of up to 1,000 Indian scouts to provide much-needed assistance in the conquest of the American West. American officials also believed that the exposure to military life might instill EuroAmerican values of discipline and obedience in American Indian scouts and have a “civilizing effect” upon them. Although Indian scouts were envisioned only to provide reconnaissance for the regulars, army-Indian cooperation often resembled more the alliances of near-equal partners than the limited role envisioned by the authors of the Army Act. The employment of the Pawnee scouts not only provides an example of how the U.S. Army exploited intertribal conflicts, but also how the Pawnees themselves utilized military service to defend their homelands. The first enlistment of Pawnee scouts dates back to 1857 when five Pawnees were recruited during the Cheyenne campaign and took part in the battle at South Fork at the Salomon River. However, it was from 1864 through 1877 during the height of warfare on the central and northern Plains that the Pawnee scouts established their fame. The scouts became renowned for their service and loyalty as they participated in the Powder River Campaign (1865); guarded the Union Pacific Railway (1867–1868); joined in the Republican River Expedition and the Battle of Summit Springs (1869); undertook freelance scouting operations (1870–1874); and were part of General Greenville Dodge’s punitive Powder River Campaign against the Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos.

Four members of the Pawnees Scouts in 1869. While brothers Frank and Luther North are often credited with organizing the group that became famous for fighting Indians hostile to the Union Pacific Railroad, the Pawnees had their own reasons for sending war parties against the Lakota and Cheyenne. (Library of Congress)

In the first half of the 19th century, the Pawnees lived in four bands; the Chauis (Grands), Kitkehahkis (Republicans), and Pitahauerats (Tappages) formed what was known as the South Bands while the Skidis maintained their own political alliances. A semisedentary people, the Pawnees lived in earth lodges along

the Republican, Platte, and Loup Rivers in what is today Nebraska and Kansas. During the summer and fall, the Pawnees hunted buffalo on the Plains to the west, which frequently put them in conflict with the Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos who also hunted the diminishing herds. By 1850, several epidemics and continual intertribal warfare with surrounding tribes greatly decreased the Pawnee population. Outnumbered and hoping to rekindle a tenuous alliance with the United States, the Pawnees signed a treaty with the United States in 1859 that granted them a small reservation on the Loup River in exchange for protection from the heavy raids of the Lakotas and their allies. In 1864, the U.S. Army asked the Pawnees to assist in their own battles with the Lakotas, which the Pawnees readily accepted. The campaigning of the first enlisted Pawnee battalion was unspectacular, but it drew attention to the leadership qualities of Lieutenant Frank North (1840–1885) and his brother Frank (1846–1935). Frank would command all subsequent campaigns of the Pawnee scouts and their history became closely associated with the North brothers. The Norths grew up in Columbus, Nebraska, a frontier settlement adjacent to the Pawnee reservation, where their family had relocated in the 1850s. The acquaintance with the Pawnees began in 1859 when Frank worked as a clerk and translator at the newly established agency at the Loup River in Nebraska. Subsequently, Frank turned into a trusted friend and adviser of the Pawnees. The fact that he never married into the tribe might have also given him the status of an unbiased outsider whose advice would be heard when good judgment was needed. In his capacity as an officer of the scouts, he served as mediator between the Pawnees and the U.S. Army, ensuring the continuous flow of arms, ammunition, horses, and pay to the Pawnee people who in return accepted him as, if not a leader, at least a voice of authority. The Pawnee scouts provided invaluable service to the U.S. Army. They regularly fought alongside their white comrades, serving well beyond their assigned roles as trackers and scouts. The effectiveness of the Pawnee scouts can be attributed to a great extent to the military qualities of the scouts whose tactics, style, and conduct of warfare remained distinctly Pawnee although they were officially enlisted in U.S. uniform. Throughout their service the Pawnee people (who call themselves Chahiksichahiks—men of men) adhered to their traditional mode of warfare: they continued to cut horses and count coup on their enemies; they frequently changed names in recognition of brave deeds and celebrated their exploits with victory dances; and they continued to carry their medicine on the warpath and prepared for battle with their own customs. Pawnees, for example, observed intertribal boundaries when they enlisted. Each company or platoon was composed of members of one of the four bands and their own elected officers. From a Pawnee perspective, siding with the U.S. Army reinforced traditional Pawnee warrior culture and helped ensure cultural survival. Serving as scouts, or “wolves” for the U.S. Army allowed Pawnees to uphold the cultural traditions of their ancestors, as only the fulfillment of prescribed warrior accomplishments could earn men a place in their tribal societies. In that sense, the Pawnees apparently used service in the U.S. Army to continue their martial customs and traditions. Although the Pawnee scouts proved their worth by helping the U.S. military defeat Lakota and Cheyenne resistance to American expansion, they hastened their own removal from their homeland. In 1876, amidst their loyal service to the U.S. Army, the Pawnees were pressured to sign away their last tracts of land and were resettled in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), where their descendants live today. The special relationship between the Pawnee nation and the U.S. military, however, has continued to the present day. Under the American flag, Pawnees have served during World War I and World War II, in Korea and Vietnam, and in current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Matthias Voigt See also: Buffalo Cultures; Great Peace of 1840; Indians of the Eastern Plains; Lakotas or Western Sioux

Further Reading Bruce, Robert. The Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts, Narratives and Reminiscences of Military Service on the Old Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1932. Dunlay, Thomas W. Wolves for the Blue Soldiers, Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–90. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Van de Logt, Mark. War Party in Blue, Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.

Peace Policy The “peace policy” of the United States toward Native Americans in the late 19th century was the name reformers attached to a series of federal statutes and changes in administrative structures that were aimed at assimilating Native Americans into Euro-American culture. The peace policy is generally associated with President Ulysses S. Grant, who served between 1869 and 1877, but many of its principles date at least to the Civil War. By the middle of the 1850s, it was clear that previous attempts to solve “the Indian Problem” by moving Native groups onto the Great Plains was no longer a feasible option. According to most policymakers, there were only two remaining possibilities: assimilation or extermination. Thus the goal was to turn Indian peoples into “white” Americans. The name “peace policy” was, therefore, less an accurate reflection of the culturally violent policy it proposed than an indication of just how genocidal was the alternative. The first manifestations of the policy can be seen in the treaties of Medicine Lodge Creek in 1867 and Fort Laramie in 1868. Both of these treaties attempted to concentrate tribes onto large reservations where they would be inundated with Euro-American culture. Through elementary education, the application of new agricultural techniques, and guaranteed annuities, Indians would give up subsistence practices and become indistinguishable from the surrounding settlers. The stated principles of the policy were articulated at a Peace Commission in 1869, formed in response to the growing violence between American soldiers and Indians living on the Great Plains (particularly Colonel John M. Chivington’s unjustified attack on Cheyennes and Arapahos by troops at Sand Creek, Colorado, on November 29, 1864). According to the commission, the violence could only be quelled by using “the hitherto untried policy in connection with Indians, of endeavoring to conquer by kindness.” A major reason for advocating change in the administration of Native American policy was that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had been created in 1834 and had remained under army control until its transfer to the Department of the Interior in 1849, had a reputation for corruption. There were many opportunities for graft in the procurement of goods by the federal government and in the provision of access to natural resources located on reservations to business interests. Low salaries and poor living conditions for employees of the bureau often led them to misuse their positions. President Grant took a number of steps regarding Native American policy soon after becoming president. One was his appointment of Ely S. Parker, his former aide-de-camp, as commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker, a Seneca Indian, undertook some useful initiatives, but he was driven from his post by accusations of profiteering. Grant soon dismissed all the “Indian agents,” who supervised reservations, replacing them with army officers or persons recommended by various Christian denominations on the basis of work already done among respective tribes. This extensive official participation by Christian churches in the administration of Indian policy was the most distinguishing feature of the peace policy. This was not entirely an innovation as the federal

government had been consistently supportive of missionary efforts. Under Grant’s leadership, however, more financial support was given to programs for educating Native Americans and converting them to Christianity. The Society of Friends, for example, was given funds to run 10 agencies overseeing nearly 20,000 Indians in eastern Kansas, while Baptists were given charge of 41,000 Cherokee, Creek, Paiute, and other Utah Indians.

ELY S. PARKER (1828–1895) President Grant’s “peace policy” has been viewed by many historians as forced assimilation by well-intentioned white, Protestant missionaries. Yet, one of its primary administrators was a Seneca Indian. Ely Samuel Parker was born in 1828 and given the name Ha-sa-no-an-da, or Leading Name, at Indians Falls near Pembroke, New York. In 1850, Parker became chief of the Senecas and was renamed Do-ne-ho-gawa (Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois). In that role, he fought to preserve the lands of New York’s Senecas and was involved in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Fellows v. Blacksmith (1857). In his first annual report as commissioner of Indian affairs, Parker exhorted Congress to fulfill its treaty obligations to Indians. It was this history of Indian advocacy that Parker brought to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to oversee the implementation of the peace policy and root out plaguing corruption. Parker initiated many reforms including the creation of an oversight committee that became known as the Board of Indian Commissioners. Parker also argued that the boundaries of Indian territories must be clearly defined with a clear “plan of territorial government for the Indians … [that] should remain on the books as the permanent and settled policy of the government.” Parker also pushed for compensatory legislation to provide food and supplies for Native communities whose lands had been unfairly usurped. Parker was ultimately forced out of office, but not before he created bureaucratic tools he believed would help Indians maintain some self-governance. Ironically, it was ultimately this very bureaucratic structure that Parker helped create that was used to govern every aspect of Indians’ lives in an effort to speed along assimilation.

The involvements of the churches and their accomplishments were decidedly mixed. Some churches went beyond providing agents and tried to supervise their agents and other reservation staff members, but quite a number of them believed that recommending agents was enough. Many agents, moreover, despite their good intentions, did not prove to be competent administrators, and others were all too tempted by the opportunities for graft that the system still provided. Protestant-Catholic tensions also militated against effective administration of some reservations and the general implementation of the peace policy. By 1882, appointments of agents on the basis of religious affiliations had ended. Religious principles were not the only elements of the peace policy. Along with the more humanitarian motives, the policy required the strict enforcement of reservation boundaries. Indians who refused to move to reservations to receive these reforms were either driven there by force or killed. Many reformers advocated limiting army involvement sharply, because of its punitive role and the demoralizing effect of enlisted soldiers on Native Americans. However, the peace policy was not intended to stop military control over Native Americans who left their reservations. While the army was barred from the reservations for several years, once it became clear that many Indians still attempted to leave the reservation to hunt or visit kin, troops were admitted again. As devoted as reformers were to improving the living conditions of Native Americans and to preventing their extermination, they often impeded their own efforts by their belief that nothing in Native American life and traditions was worth saving, or indeed, merited any respect. This stance toward Indians has been compared usefully with attitudes toward immigrants to the United States at the same period. Reformers insisted that Native Americans move quickly from a communal culture to the individualism extolled in the 19th century. After President Grant left office, official church participation in tribal activities greatly decreased. However, many of the tenets of assimilation were implemented in more drastic form in the Dawes

Severalty Act of 1887 that removed land from tribal control, causing even more loss of land for Natives. Benjamin R. Beede See also: Bureau of Indian Affairs; Fort Laramie Treaties; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Reservation System; Sand Creek Massacre

Further Reading Armstrong, William H. Warrior in Two Camps: Ely S. Parker, Union General and Seneca Chief. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1978. Keller, Robert H., Jr. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869–82. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.

Red Cloud (1822–1909) Red Cloud was a warrior and a prominent chief of the Oglala Lakotas (Sioux) from 1868 until his death in 1909. Known for his leadership and diplomacy skills, he negotiated with the U.S. government’s Indian agents on behalf of his people. Red Cloud was born near the Platte River in Nebraska. His father died when he was three and he was raised by his maternal uncle, Old Chief Smoke. In his mid-teens Red Cloud participated in raids against neighboring Pawnee, Ute, and Crow tribes and gained a reputation for being courageous. As more miners and settlers made their way into Lakota territory, the army constructed forts to protect them along what is today the Bozeman Trail. In 1864, Red Cloud took part in the Grattan Massacre, the opening battle of the First Sioux War, and a year later, in July 1865, he was involved in the attack at Platte Bridge. Red Cloud knew that the Eastern Lakotas had already lost their lands to white settlers, so in 1866 he launched a series of successful attacks against the U.S. Army that became known as Red Cloud’s War or the Powder River War. One of the battles was the Fetterman Massacre (also called the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand) on December 21, 1866. A group of 81 men under the leadership of Captain William J. Fetterman were slaughtered by a combined force of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians. With the U.S. Army unable to protect the Bozeman Trail, the federal government decided to invite Red Cloud, along with 125 other chiefs, to discuss terms. These negotiations led to the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie on April 29, 1868, which established the Great Sioux Reservation in the Black Hills. After successful peace negotiations, Red Cloud served as a diplomat for the Oglala Lakotas. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1870, along with other Indian leaders, to meet with President Ulysses S. Grant and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ely S. Parker, touring the capital and negotiating to keep the Sioux lands on the Platte River and not the Missouri. In 1875, Red Cloud would again meet with Grant, this time to discuss Sioux hunting rights along the Platte River. An 1874 mining expedition led by General George A. Custer found gold in the Black Hills, and soon miners were encroaching on Sioux land. The U.S. Army was ordered to protect miners even though it was they who were in violation of the treaty. Although Red Cloud tried to maintain a peaceful approach with the whites, other Indian leaders fought to keep their territory. Red Cloud did not take part in the ensuing 1876–1877 Lakota War, in which George Armstrong Custer and his men were defeated. During the 1880s, Red Cloud helped his people adjust to reservation life and worked with the Indian agents to make sure that food and supplies, as stipulated in the treaty, were distributed properly. Red

Cloud died in 1909 at the age of 87 on Pine Ridge Reservation. Karen S. Garvin See also: Black Hills; Bureau of Indian Affairs; Crazy Horse; Dawes Severalty Act; Fort Laramie Treaties; Grattan, John L.; Great Sioux Uprising or Minnesota Uprising; Indian Territory; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Reservation System; Primary Documents: Red Cloud’s Speech at Cooper Union, New York (1870)

Further Reading Allen, Charles Wesley, Red Cloud, San Deon, and R. Eli Paul. Autobiography of Red Cloud: War Leader of the Oglalas. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1997. Larson, Robert W. Red Cloud: Warrior-Statesman of the Lakota Sioux. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Olson, James C. Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

Red River War (1874) The Red River War, officially known as the Indian Campaign of 1874, was a major offensive by the U.S. Army against the Indians of the southern Plains near the headwaters of the Red River in the Texas Panhandle. A departure from previous attempts to subdue the Indians, this military operation involved a force of 3,000 soldiers and scouts with the objective of permanently removing the Indians from the region and forcing them onto reservations, thereby opening the lands to American settlement. Though none of the nations inhabiting the southern Plains were native to the region, the Kiowas, Comanches, Southern Cheyennes, and Southern Arapahos had moved there by the 1840s. They formed an alliance to counter encroachment by Mexicans and Texas settlers while being sustained by the enormous buffalo herds and a trade in horses, guns, furs, and manufactured goods. Government plans to extend the reservation system and establish military posts in the region were interrupted by the Civil War. Indian nations intensified their raids on the unprotected frontier, prompting settlers to plead with Congress to take action. Congress’s response, creating an Indian Peace Commission, reflected the nation’s warweariness and heavy debt. A treaty signed at Medicine Lodge Creek in October 1867 promised Indians rifles, ammunition, seeds, instruction in farming, schools, and doctors in return for their commitment to live on a reservation in western Oklahoma and not to interfere with the construction of roads, railways, and forts. It proved ineffective due to inadequate food and supplies and Texas opposition to the hunting rights granted to Indians in the state-owned Panhandle. Most Indians returned to the Plains within a year. A series of developments precipitated the war. High demand for buffalo hides by eastern tanners generated an influx to northern Kansas of hide hunters, who between 1872 and 1874 killed an estimated five and a half million buffalo. As buffalo dwindled, hunters turned south of the Arkansas River, thereby breaking the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty. In one season, the southern Kansas herds on which the Cheyennes and Arapahos subsisted were nearly wiped out. In the spring of 1874, hunters moved en masse into the Panhandle, followed by merchants and tradesmen. The army, led by General Philip Sheridan, proved ineffective at patrolling the Kansas–Indian Territory boundary, thus fueling Indian attacks and a call to war by Isatai of the Kwahada band of the Comanches. On June 27, 1874, a force of 200 led by Isatai and Chief Quanah attacked the Adobe Walls trading post, resulting in three defenders dead and several Indian casualties. While merchants left for Dodge City, many hunters returned that fall, thereby escalating hostilities.

During the summer, General Sheridan and General William Sherman were entrusted with enforcing a new Indian policy. It called for the protection of “innocent” and “friendly” Indians at their reservations and the pursuit and destruction of “hostile” Indians without regard for reservation or departmental boundaries. They designed an offensive strategy of encirclement, which called for five military columns from Missouri and Texas to converge on the area of the Texas Panhandle, specifically focusing on the upper tributaries of the Red River where they believed the main Indian force to be located. Though the resulting war encompassed as many as 20 clashes and minor skirmishes over its 10-month period, its outcome is generally regarded to have been determined by seven significant battles. On August 30, 1874, Colonel Nelson Miles attacked about 500 Southern Cheyennes on the Red River. The First Battle of Palo Duro Canyon saw one soldier and one scout wounded and 25 Indians killed. Out of supplies, Miles sent Captain Wyllys Lyman and 36 wagons for relief. Kiowa and Comanche warriors, led by several chiefs including Lone Wolf, launched a sustained attack on the supply train between September 9 and 12. This second major clash, known as the Battle of Lyman’s Wagon Train, was followed by a militarily insignificant yet morale-boosting engagement referred to as the Battle of Buffalo Wallow. On September 12, four soldiers and two scouts riding with dispatches from Colonel Miles were surrounded by a force of 125 warriors fresh from their attack on Lyman’s wagon train. Five of the six survived despite being greatly outnumbered. Widely reported as a heroic engagement, the incident became a source of confidence and inspiration for the army and its campaign. Also on September 12 was Major William Price’s battle at Sweetwater Creek against a large number of Kiowas and Comanches under the leadership of Lone Wolf. The turning point in the war came on September 28 at the Second Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. A force under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie surprise attacked and destroyed the winter stores and more than 1,400 horses of several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the canyon along the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. Many Indians returned to reservations following these devastating losses. The final two main battles of the war occurred within days of each other later that fall. On November 6, Lieutenant Henry Farnsworth and his scouting expedition were engaged by Grey Beard’s Cheyenne warriors on Round Timber Creek. Driven off, the same force of warriors was routed two days later by Lieutenant Frank Baldwin at the Battle of McClellan Creek. The army followed these victories with winter attacks aimed at destroying villages, crops, and food stores. The campaign officially ended in June 1875 when Chief Quanah surrendered with his band of Comanches at Fort Sill. The most influential chiefs were imprisoned at Fort Marion, Florida, until 1878, when they either returned to reservations in Oklahoma or attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established by Lieutenant Richard Pratt who oversaw the prisoners to Florida. Despite there being very few casualties on either side, the war had a momentous impact on the United States. Within a few years of the forced removal of these nations from the southern Plains, American farmers and ranchers quickly entered the territory, followed by the construction of wagon roads and railroads, further enabling settlement and the country’s westward expansion. Michael Dove See also: Buffalo Cultures; Carlisle Indian School; Indian Territory; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Reservation System; Santa Fe Trail

Further Reading Cruse, J. Brett. Battles of the Red River War: Archaeological Perspectives on the Indian Campaign of 1874. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Haley, James L. The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1976. Leckie, William H. The Military Conquest of the Southern Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

Marshall, J. T. The Miles Expedition of 1874–1875: An Eyewitness Account of the Red River War. Edited by Lonnie J. White. Austin, TX: Encino Press, 1971.

Reservation System Indian reservations are lands the U.S. government has “reserved” or set aside for the permanent and exclusive use of particular Native American groups. Although the reservation system predates American nationhood, the federal government created most of the 314 reservations currently in existence during the 19th century. It did so by forging treaties with the tribes or through federal legislation and executive orders. New reservations are still being created under special circumstances, but since 1919 that has required an act of Congress. The largest reservation is the 16-million-acre Navajo Reservation in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Others are much smaller, with many encompassing less than 1,000 acres of land. About half of the reservations in California are called rancherias and in New Mexico most are called pueblos. In addition to these federal reservations, there are a dozen state reservations, most of which were created during the colonial period and nearly all of which are in the Northeast. Initially, the purpose of reservations was to keep Indians and non-Indians apart, but in the 19th century they came to be seen as a way to control Native peoples, consolidate the tribes, and open new lands for white settlement. Because treaties are customarily entered into by sovereign nations, modern federal reservations enjoy a degree of sovereignty not shared by other political units in the country. As a result, they are largely exempt from state regulation and taxation. That means that the reservation governing body can regulate business, hunting and fishing, and the exploitation of minerals and other natural resources within the reservation borders. It can also deal with Indian-on-Indian crimes committed on the reservation and, if it chooses, open casinos with minimal state interference. Reservations nonetheless participate in federal programs and fall under federal jurisdiction. Because state reservations were created through different mechanisms, they are subject to state law and do not have the same degree of sovereignty as federal reservations. When the reservations were first established, the federal government held their lands in trust for the tribes assigned to them. Since 1849, when Congress moved the Office of Indian Affairs from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, the secretary of the interior has acted as trustee. Much has changed since then but the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an agency within the Department of the Interior, still oversees the reservations. Most reservations now operate under a federally approved constitution and all have their own political structures. Nearly all of the reservations are governed by an elected tribal council and have their own justice system that includes tribal laws, courts, and police. Some even levy their own taxes. The Indian Health Service provides health care and the Bureau of Indian Education oversees schools on the reservations.

Bird’s-eye view of a large Lakota camp of tipis, horses, and wagons on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1891. Initially begun as a way to keep Native- and non-Native American people apart, by the 1870s reservations became the primary means of controlling Indian populations and opening new land for white settlement. (Library of Congress)

According to the U.S. Census, only about 34 percent of Native Americans live on reservations. Not all federally recognized tribes have a reservation and a few tribes have more than one, as in the case of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Some tribes have reservations situated on their traditional homelands while others were relocated to new areas. A few tribes share a reservation. In some cases those sharing are former allies and in other cases they are former adversaries. The federal government currently holds about 55 million acres of land in trust for Indian tribes, groups, and individuals. Not all of that land is reservation land nor is all reservation land held in trust. On a few reservations, nearly all of the land is owned by the tribe and is held in trust by the federal government. On most reservations, however, the land was allotted to individual tribal members under the 1887 General Allotment Act. Most of the allottees eventually acquired the title to their lands in fee patent. A few continued to farm or ranch their lands, some leased or sold them to outsiders, and many lost them through tax forfeiture. In recent decades, some tribes have expanded their reservations by buying land and having it placed in trust. Because of all this, many modern reservations are characterized by a “checkerboard” pattern of lands held by the tribe, by individual tribal members, and by outsiders. Despite the high levels of poverty found on many reservations and regardless of whether they live on or off the reservation, many Native Americans closely identify with their reservation. Such individuals tend to view their reservation as their homeland and a reservoir of tradition. This has sometimes worried politicians and lawmakers. In the late 19th century, for example, many believed that the reservations were impeding the Indians’ assimilation into mainstream society. The 1887 General Allotment (or Dawes) Act was the first major assault on the reservation system. It aimed to erode tribal sovereignty and undermine tribal identity by replacing tribal landownership with individual landownership. In that the Dawes Act and related legislation resulted in the transfer of about 52 million acres of Indian land into non-Indian hands between 1887 and 1921, it largely succeeded in achieving that objective. After World War I, Congress adopted a new approach to the management of Indian affairs, one that actively supported the reservations and promoted a greater degree of self-determination. It was at this time that many tribes adopted a constitutional form of government. Congress reversed course again after World War II and initiated measures to terminate federal responsibility for the reservations, which it once more saw as

barriers to the complete assimilation of Native Americans. By the early 1960s Congress had terminated several tribes and their reservations, including the Menominees and Klamaths. The consequences were disastrous as communities that were once economically stable became destitute almost overnight. By the early 1970s the trend had again reversed and federal Indian policy was promoting Indian selfdetermination. During this period, tribes like the Menominees and Klamaths succeeded in getting their termination rescinded and trust status restored. That trend continued into the 1990s, when funding cuts and legal decisions once again challenged tribal sovereignty and the prosperity of the reservations. Debra Buchholtz See also: Peace Policy

Further Reading Deloria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Tennert, Robert A., Jr. Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846–1851. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975. Treuer, David. Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life. New York: Grove Press, 2013.

Sand Creek Massacre (1864) On November 29, 1864, the Third Colorado Volunteers under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington attacked an unsuspecting band of Cheyennes and a smaller band of Arapahos at Sand Creek, Colorado. This unprovoked assault has become a symbol of the violence perpetrated by the federal government on Native peoples due to American expansion in the second half of the 19th century. Despite little conflict between whites and Native Americans in the new Colorado Territory, many settlers professed fearing Indians, and some civilian and military leaders tried to turn this fear to their political advantage. Both Chivington, the army commander in Colorado, and Colorado territorial governor John Evans had lost prestige after their unsuccessful campaign for Colorado statehood in 1864. In his dual role as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs, Evans showed a remarkable reluctance to negotiate with Native Americans, strongly suggesting that he did not want an end to the fighting. Evans insisted that Native Americans must make peace only through the military authorities. Chivington also seems to have hoped that lashing out against Native Americans, whether hostile or not, would prove popular with the whites in Colorado and would thereby enlarge his political base in the territory. Despite skepticism in Washington about Evans’s claims that a general war with Plains Indians was coming, Evans was permitted to raise a third Colorado regiment of 90-day volunteers. Recruiting was not altogether successful until Chivington imposed martial law and forced more enlistments. Once the regiment had been formed, many of its members were eager to attack Native Americans, and they pressed to be led into combat.

DOOLITTLE REPORT In 1869, under public scrutiny to provide more humane treatment for Native Americans (and to lower administrative costs), President Ulysses S. Grant established his so-called “peace policy.” This decision can be traced to the early morning hours

of November 29, 1864, when the Third Regiment of Colorado Volunteers, led by the reckless Colonel John M. Chivington, massacred a friendly band of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians along the banks of Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. As military and newspaper accounts spread concerning the nature of the attack and the horrific mutilation of the bodies that followed, several governmental agencies launched investigations into the incident. One such investigation, created by Congress in March 1865, called for a special joint committee, headed by Senator James R. Doolittle, to inquire into the condition of the Indian tribes and the actions of the civil and military authorities of the United States. The “Doolittle Report,” as it came to be called, took nearly two years to complete and contained a mass of documents more than 500 pages in length. Among its findings, the committee described in detail the deterioration of the Indians’ condition and the causes of Indian hostility, which they believed could largely be traced to the “aggressions of lawless white men.” The report also condemned the actions of Chivington at Sand Creek and called for the creation of five boards of inspection of Indian affairs that could annually visit the Indian tribes within their districts in an effort to better comprehend their conditions and avoid future military conflicts.

Meanwhile, Black Kettle, a Northern Cheyenne chief known for his desire to keep peace with the whites, brought his band to Sand Creek with the approval of the commanding officer of nearby Fort Lyon, Major Edward J. Wynkoop. Major Scott Anthony, Wynkoop’s successor at Fort Lyon, agreed that the Cheyennes could remain at Sand Creek, but he mistrusted them, refraining from an attack on them simply because he lacked enough troops. The situation changed when Chivington’s command of about 700 cavalrymen from the First and Third Colorado Cavalry Regiments arrived. Although Chivington’s attack was carefully planned, the assault became a disorganized melee in which individual soldiers fought largely on their own, often murdering fleeing women and children and mutilating Native American bodies. Chivington claimed that his men had killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, but the Indian dead really amounted to about 200 women and children. When the regiment returned to Denver, the volunteers displayed scalps and severed genitalia as trophies of the slaughter. In response, Cheyenne warriors twice sacked Julesburg, Colorado, and engaged in more attacks on the Great Plains. Congress and the army responded quickly to the massacre. Over the next few months, three official inquiries would lay blame squarely on the Colorado troops and their commander. Chivington was disgraced, and he quickly resigned from the army. Evans was soon forced to resign from his post as governor. Limited reparations were made through the Treaty of Little Arkansas in late 1865. Benjamin R. Beede See also: Dog Soldiers; Peace Policy

Further Reading Hoig, Stan. The Sand Creek Massacre. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. Kelman, Ari. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Svaldi, David. Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Examination: A Case Study in Indian-White Relations. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989.

Schoolcraft, Henry (1793–1864) Henry Schoolcraft became famous for his detailed accounts of American Indian ethnography and for his exploration of the Mississippi River. During his lifetime he was a noted author, explorer, mineralogist, glassmaker, and Indian agent, and was recognized as one of the earliest anthropologists studying American Indians in the United States. Schoolcraft was born March 28, 1793, in a small town near Albany, New York. At the age of 20, Schoolcraft became the manager of the Vermont Glass Factory in

Salisbury, Vermont. After the business failed in 1817, Schoolcraft traveled west to examine mining operations in Missouri that led to his publication of A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri in 1819. Schoolcraft was offered the position of mineralogist for the 1820 Cass Expedition by then secretary of war John Calhoun. The Cass Expedition was undertaken to survey both the American Indian people as well as the geography of the Old Northwest. After his return from the west with the Cass Expedition, Schoolcraft served as territorial representative for Michigan and later served as the U.S. Indian agent for the northern tribes of the Great Lakes region based out of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. While working as an Indian agent for the Ojibwa tribes of northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Schoolcraft married Jane Johnston, the daughter of Scots-Irish fur trader John Johnston and Ojibwa mother Ozhaguscodaywayquay. The Schoolcrafts had four children though only two survived to adulthood. Schoolcraft collected and edited a series of Ojibwa stories that became Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe Lodge Stories. In 1832, Schoolcraft, along with Native guides, traveled up the Mississippi River and identified Lake Itasca as the true source of the Mississippi River. He published his Narrative of an Expedition Through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake in 1834 about his experience of exploring the source of the Mississippi River. Upon his return, Schoolcraft became the state of Michigan superintendent of Indian affairs. In 1836, Schoolcraft negotiated a treaty with the Ojibwas still living in Michigan that removed the remaining Ojibwas from the state of Michigan. After Schoolcraft’s service as superintendent he moved with his family to New York City in 1841 where he began to publish his journals and other studies of American Indian culture. While on tour in Europe Schoolcraft learned of his wife’s death in 1842. Schoolcraft remarried in 1847 to Mary E. Howard and was appointed by Congress to serve as a special agent of the Office of Indian Affairs. Schoolcraft was tasked with conducting a census of all American Indian tribes as well as collecting and preserving American Indian heritage. Schoolcraft was plagued with bad health in his later years. This included a stroke that produced paralysis that continued to erode his already fragile health. Schoolcraft’s illness forced him to be confined to bed during the last years of his life. He died December 10, 1864, in Washington, D.C. Jacob C. Jurss See also: Algonquians; Cass, Lewis; Northwest Territory

Further Reading Bremer, Richard G. Indian Agent and Wilderness Scholar: The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. Mount Pleasant: Central Michigan University, 1987. Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe Lodge Stories: Life on the Lake Superior Frontier. Edited by Philip P. Mason. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997.

Sherman, William Tecumseh (1820–1891) William Tecumseh Sherman is best known for his service in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was a brilliant strategist and one of the first modern generals. After the war, Sherman was instrumental in protecting the westward expansion of the railroads and helping to enforce the so-called “peace policy” that restricted Indians to reservations. One of 11 children, Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on February 8, 1820, to Charles R. Sherman and Mary Hoyt. Sherman’s father died on June 24, 1829, leaving the family in dire financial

straits, and he went to live with Thomas Ewing, a U.S. senator and family friend. In the spring of 1836, Sherman received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After graduating in 1840 he entered the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant. By 1846 Sherman was a first lieutenant in the Third U.S. Artillery, stationed at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. He was assigned recruitment duty in New York City and later, during the Mexican-American War, he was sent to California where he performed administrative tasks. Perhaps dismayed by his lack of active service, Sherman resigned from the army in 1853 and spent several years trying his hand at mostly unsuccessful business ventures. In 1859 he became the first superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, which later became Louisiana State University. While sympathetic to the South’s support of slavery, Sherman opposed succession. He was living in Missouri working as president of the St. Louis Railroad when the Civil War began. After volunteering for service, in 1861 Sherman received a commission as a colonel in the Thirteenth U.S. Infantry regiment.

Major General William Tecumseh Sherman brought Reconstruction to the American West in the form of the “Peace Policy,” which restricted Indians to reservations in the hopes of assimilating them into Euro-American culture. (National Archives)

Sherman fought at the First Battle of Bull Run, Shiloh, and Vicksburg before being named commander of the Army of Tennessee. During Sherman’s march on Georgia, his army covered 450 miles in 50 days and left a 60-mile-wide trail of destruction in its wake. In June 1865, Sherman received an appointment as commander to the Military Division of the Mississippi, later named the Military Division of the Missouri. Sherman’s command included land west of the Mississippi and extending to the Rocky Mountains. His duties included protecting railroad workers from hostile Indians, and he established military outposts that furthered the encroachment of the federal government on Indian lands.

Appalled by the 1866 “Fetterman Massacre” in which 80 cavalry were killed by Sioux, Sherman thought the army should be ruthless in its treatment of Indians. A proponent of the Indian reservation system, Sherman helped negotiate the Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty of 1867 and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. In 1869, Sherman became the general commander of the U.S. Army and began a series of attacks on the Plains Indians with the goal of eliminating Indian resistance to the expanding United States. His campaigns affected the Kiowas, Comanches, Lakotas, and Cheyennes, who were all forced onto reservations by the late 1870s. Relinquishing his command in November 1883, Sherman retired on February 8, 1884. He was a widely requested speaker and turned down a presidential nomination in 1884. Sherman spent the remainder of his years in New York City and died on February 14, 1891. Karen S. Garvin See also: Fort Laramie Treaties; Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty; Peace Policy; Reservation System

Further Reading Athearn, Robert G. William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West. With a foreword by William M. Ferraro and J. Thomas Murphy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Fellman, Michael. Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman. New York: Random House, 1995. Marszalek, John F. Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Sitting Bull (1831–1890) It is believed that Tatanka Yotanka was born in 1831 to Sitting Bull and Her-Holy-Door. When Tatanka Yotanka turned 14 and became a warrior, his father bequeathed him the name Sitting Bull and renamed himself Jumping Bull. His battlefield prowess led him to be named a Hunkpapa war chief during the late 1850s. Unlike most warriors, he also became a Lakota religious leader, which made him extremely influential not only among the Sioux, but also with other Plains peoples. Following the Minnesota Sioux Uprising of 1862, U.S. forces in 1863 decided to punish all of the Sioux for actions that most of them did not participate in. This forced Sitting Bull to fight the U.S. military for the first time. Over the next six years, Sitting Bull constantly warred against the U.S. Army. Those years saw a divide among the Sioux as some, like Sitting Bull, advocated fighting the United States while other Sioux leaders wanted to cease hostilities. In 1868, the Great Sioux Reservation was created by the U.S. government for those Sioux desiring to live in peace. Sitting Bull emerged as one of the primary leaders of the militant faction of the Lakota Sioux. By the 1870s, Sitting Bull and his followers were targeting workers and soldiers involved in the construction of railroads through Sioux territory. In 1874, George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry surveyed the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota, where miners accompanying the expedition found gold. The resulting gold rush led to the outbreak of the Great Sioux War of 1876. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25 and 26, 1876, proved to be the turning point of the war. Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under the command of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse delivered a decisive defeat to the Seventh Cavalry, killing more than 40 percent of its troops including the entire brigade directly under Custer’s command. The U.S. Army responded to the defeat by providing massive reinforcements to the military units fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne. In 1877, Sitting Bull retreated to Canada to escape the U.S. forces, but had trouble finding enough food to feed his followers. He surrendered to U.S. authorities at Fort Buford in present-day Montana on July 20, 1881.

Sitting Bull and his followers were initially sent to the Standing Rock Reservation, but fears that he might lead another rebellion led the United States to send him and his followers south to Fort Randall. It was not until May 1883 that Sitting Bull was allowed to settle permanently at the Standing Rock Reservation, after which he became part of “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West and Rough Riders Show where he participated in recreations of “Custer’s Last Stand” at the Battle of Little Bighorn. In 1890, the Ghost Dance spread to the Standing Rock Reservation. Reservation officials worried that Sitting Bull’s standing as a holy man among the Lakotas would lead him to join the movement, so they opted to arrest him. During the arrest attempt on December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was killed after suffering a gunshot to his head. John R. Burch Jr.

Hunkpapa war chief and Lakota religious leader Sitting Bull. Before being killed in 1890, Sitting Bull participated in recreations of his famous defeat of the 7th Cavalry at Greasy Grass in “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West and Rough Riders Show. (Library of Congress)

See also: Custer, George Armstrong; Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle; Wounded Knee Massacre

Further Reading Lehman, Tim. Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer, and the Destinies of Nations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Manzione, Joseph. “I Am Looking to the North for My Life”: Sitting Bull, 1876–1881. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990. Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield: Sitting Bull and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

Treaty System

The semisovereign status federally recognized tribes now enjoy and which many non-Indians find so perplexing originated in the treaty system. The treaty system predates the United States’ existence as an independent nation. It was a mechanism initially developed to formalize relations between the indigenous peoples of North America and the Europeans who appeared in their homelands. From their earliest incursions in the New World, the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch entered into informal and formal agreements—or treaties—with the Native peoples they encountered. Those early contacts with the Europeans, combined with their own traditional norms of social interaction, helped shape Native American expectations and practices when they later interacted and negotiated with the U.S. government. The treaty system had its heyday in the middle years of the 19th century, but it originated in British imperial policies and practices, which were then reshaped and formalized in interactions between Native peoples and the fledgling American government during the colonial era and early republic. It encompassed not just the formal written and ratified contract-like agreements one normally thinks of as treaties but also more informal verbal agreements that each side remembered and recorded in its own way. Many Native groups conveyed the content of such agreements from person to person and generation to generation through their oral histories. Others noted them in more formal ways. The Iroquois, for example, recorded their earliest treaties in designs woven into their beaded wampum belts. For their part, the whites with whom Native peoples parleyed reported the proceedings in letters and journal entries. By the end of the 18th century, the rituals and protocols that came to characterize treaty making and the treaty system in the United States were firmly in place and the power to make treaties was invested in the federal government. However, in addition to those federal treaties, some tribal groups entered into treaties with states, other tribes, and even with the Confederate states during the American Civil War. By definition, treaties are binding agreements made between authorized representatives of sovereign nations and ratified by their respective governments. In the modern sense of the term, treaties are contractual arrangements between sovereign states, but during the 18th century the term “treaty” was used more loosely to include other kinds of negotiated agreements. The U.S. Constitution, which was written in 1787 and fully ratified in 1789, assigns the power to ratify—or formally approve—treaties to the Senate and the power to proclaim—or sign and formally announce—them to the president. The only role the House of Representatives has in the process is to appropriate the funds necessary to cover any costs incurred by the provisions of a treaty. In the case of treaties with Native American groups, such appropriations covered the annuities (cash payments), food, goods, livestock, and services usually promised to the Indians in exchange for land cessions. Only after the president proclaimed a treaty did it become binding, and then it was placed in the Ratified Indian Treaties file maintained by the Department of State. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution declares treaties “the supreme law of the land.” However, those forged between the federal government and Native American groups are somewhat anomalous, in part because the U.S. government claims a fiduciary duty toward (or trusteeship over) the tribes and in part because Congress exercises plenary (or absolute) powers over them. In handing down its landmark decision in the 1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock case, the Supreme Court acknowledged that Congress has always exercised plenary power over the tribes and agreed that it could, acting in good faith, abrogate— or break—treaties when it deemed it necessary and appropriate to do so. This ruling not only constituted a departure from the normal assumption that treaties are binding agreements, it also undermined tribal sovereignty by upholding the authority of the United States over the tribes. Treaties the United States entered into with Native American groups addressed a range of issues, including peace and friendship, alliance formation, commerce, territorial boundaries and rights of access, and exchanges of land for money, goods, and services. These treaties were also frequently broken by parties from both sides.

The earliest treaty sessions between the United States and Native American groups followed the British model, which combined British and Native customs and expectations regarding how such meetings should proceed. Soon, however, treaty councils between federal negotiators, often called commissioners, and Native peoples developed their own routines and traditions, which varied in detail from tribe to tribe. Often, their success relied as much on white missionaries, traders, and trappers as intermediaries and translators as on the diplomatic finesse of the official negotiators. Generally speaking, treaty councils were characterized by open but long and often rambling discussions in which individuals on each side voiced their concerns and demands. They also frequently included eloquent expressions of grievances by Native American participants, paternalistic exhortations in which government spokespersons urged the Native peoples to take up farming and embrace “civilization,” and declarations of friendship and forgiveness of past wrongdoings. They almost always ended in an exchange of gifts. Before long, however, the gift exchanges evolved into a pattern of unilateral gift-giving in which government representatives distributed food, metal knives and pots, mirrors, and other trinkets to the assembled Indians, anticipation of which enticed many who might have otherwise stayed away to attend the treaty councils. Few of the earliest treaties were written down. Of the many forged between Native groups and the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War period (1775–1783), the only one recorded was the Treaty of Fort Pitt signed with the Lenapes (Delawares) on September 17, 1778. Thereafter written treaties were the norm and most of the testimony at the treaty councils was painstakingly recorded. The U.S. State Department has 375 treaties with Native American groups on file. The first seven of those are between tribal groups and the British. The earliest federally recognized treaty is the Great Treaty of 1722 signed in Albany, New York. It was between the Iroquois Confederacy (comprised of the Senecas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Mohawks, and Oneidas) and Mohicans (or Moneghans) on the one side and the British colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia on the other. Somewhere in the vicinity of 47 to 87 treaties between tribes and the United States were never ratified by the Senate or proclaimed by the president and, consequently, never attained official status. This created confusion and further complicated relations between the tribes and the federal government. Sometimes, as in the case of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, the provisions of those treaties were nonetheless fulfilled, at least in part. Congress officially ended treaty making with Native American tribes with a rider attached to the Indian Appropriations Act of March 3, 1871, which barred their recognition as sovereign nations. Most historians attribute this action to the House of Representatives’ mounting frustration over having to appropriate money to satisfy treaties ratified by the Senate without having had any say in their provisions. Although treaty making with the tribes ended in 1871, Congress and the courts still recognize those treaties duly ratified. From 1871 onward, the types of formal agreements between the United States and Indian tribes previously sealed in treaties were achieved through less formal agreements, executive orders, and acts of Congress. And from then on, court decisions, including those by the Supreme Court, played an increasingly important role in Indian affairs. Treaties served a variety of functions. Sometimes they constituted a declaration of friendship and secured the regulation of “trade and intercourse” in federal hands, as was the case with the 1825 treaties with the Crow and Cheyenne tribes. Other treaties defined boundaries between opposing tribes, as happened in the unratified Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, or redefined existing boundaries, as in the case of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Such provisions helped federal authorities control the movements of Native peoples. Many treaties offered annuities, food, goods, livestock, and services in exchange for land cessions, as the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 did. Still others forced tribal peoples to relinquish their ancestral homelands and relocate elsewhere, sometimes to reservations already occupied by other groups.

This happened to the Cayuse and Walla Wallas, who in signing treaties in 1855 agreed to move to the Umatilla Reservation in Oregon, where they still live today. Many treaties accomplished several objectives at once. Treaties forged with the Nez Perce illustrate how the federal government used the treaty system to reduce the tribal land base and open new lands to white settlers. They also demonstrate how, at times, government negotiators relied on cooperative or “friendly” tribal members to seal the deal and ignored the wishes of those who opposed it. When Lewis and Clark passed through their territory in 1805, the Nez Perce claimed about 17 million acres around the Snake, Salmon, and Clear Water Rivers in what are now the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The creation of Oregon Territory in 1848 drew an influx of settlers into the region, most of whom traversed Nez Perce lands. In 1855, the territorial governor met with the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakima, and Cayuse and Palouse tribes in an attempt to quell the mounting tensions. After tense negotiations, the Nez Perce agreed to cede all but about seven million acres of their territory but retained the right to hunt and fish on the ceded lands. The Senate eventually ratified the treaty and the president proclaimed it in 1858. Soon thereafter, gold was discovered in Nez Perce country, which triggered an invasion of prospectors and settlers. Rather than stop them from trespassing on Nez Perce lands, the federal officials convened another treaty council to persuade the tribe to cede more land. Nez Perce living on the lands in question vehemently opposed the agreement and walked out of the proceedings. Those already living within the proposed new reservation boundaries remained and signed the treaty, relinquishing about 90 percent of their remaining lands, which left them with a reservation of only about 750,000 acres. In that the commissioners had refused to negotiate with individual bands and insisted on forging the treaty with the entire tribe, this treaty was fairly typical of the treaty-making process. Due to unsuccessful attempts by the Senate to amend the treaty, it wasn’t ratified until 1867. By then, whites had further encroached on Nez Perce lands. Nez Perce leaders traveled to Washington the next year, where they negotiated a new treaty, which provided extra lands for allotment and better protected their resources. This was the last treaty entered into between the United States and an Indian tribe. Treaties were breached more easily than they were made. Indian violations most often entailed attacks on white persons or property. Non-Indian violations included trespass, as seen in the Nez Perce case; failure to adequately compensate the tribes for lands taken; taking lands without the required consent of tribal members; and unfulfilled treaty promises. Such breaches gave rise to a variety of grievances—or claims—against the U.S. government. The creation of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 finally provided the tribes a legal mechanism for pursuing those claims in court, as long, laborious, and often unsatisfying as that process proved to be. Two important by-products of the treaty system were the creation of reservations and federal recognition. Most of the reservations that exist today were created by treaties. The term “reservation” originally referred to lands reserved by a treaty for a tribe’s exclusive use as opposed to lands that were ceded and opened to non-Indians. Over the years, those reserved lands might have been allotted, otherwise reduced, or even added to but they nonetheless constitute the foundation of today’s reservations. Tribes with reservations are federally recognized, a status needed to receive benefits and take part in most programs earmarked for Native Americans. Some tribes without reservations are also federally recognized. Special mechanisms now exist whereby unrecognized tribal bodies can become recognized, but most attained their federal recognition by entering into treaties or other formal agreements with the U.S. government prior to 1900. Debra Buchholtz

See also: Individual treaties

Further Reading Calloway, Colin G. Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kappler, Charles J. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol. 1–5. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901–1941. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Two Moons. See Little Bighorn, Battle of, or Greasy Grass Battle Vanishing Indian The Vanishing Indian is a culturally constructed image that was long used to characterize and ultimately subjugate Native Americans, particularly those residing within the borders of what is now the continental United States. It originated in the early 19th century in a pernicious assumption that Indians were rapidly disappearing. Closely linked to it was another cultural construct, the Noble Savage, which portrayed Indians as living in harmony with nature in a pristine state of innocence. Those who viewed Indians in this way believed that they could only exist in natural freedom and once drawn into the orbit of civilization would simply wither away. At first it was thought this would happen through their physical extinction, then by their isolation on remote reservations, and more recently through their assimilation into mainstream society. Such imagery usurped the Indian future by refusing to acknowledge it as a possibility, which had profound consequences for Native peoples and their cultures. But they did—and do—have a future. Native Americans may have had their populations decimated, their lands taken, and their cultures undermined and forcibly changed, but they never vanished nor did most of their cultures. Today, their populations are growing, their sense of tribal and pan-tribal identity is strengthening, their cultures are thriving, and they participate fully in American life. However, insofar as some people still view them as relics of the past, the Vanishing Indian continues to haunt them. From the early 19th century until well into the 20th, the Vanishing Indian was the linchpin of a discourse of Native American disappearance. It constituted not only a myth but also a metaphor, both of which originated in mainstream American society and served its interests by legitimating and furthering its domination over Native peoples. As a myth, or sacred narrative believed to be true, the Vanishing Indian underpinned the nation’s putative Manifest Destiny to span the continent by construing its original inhabitants as a temporary—or “vanishing”—impediment to westward expansion and, therefore, ultimately inconsequential. As a metaphor, Vanishing Indian imagery implied that Native people were unprepared for, or even fundamentally unsuited to, “civilized” life and thus needed help and protection from well-meaning whites and especially the government. This argument was used to justify paternalistic federal policies designed to ensure Indians’ subordination to mainstream society, yet offered a ready explanation when such policies backfired and left Indians landless and destitute. Popular culture played a key role in creating, then keeping alive, the Vanishing Indian stereotype. Perhaps the most poignant example of this was John Gast’s 1872 painting America’s Progress. In it, the goddess-like America drifts westward over the continent with farmers, factories, the railroad, telegraph lines, and other accoutrements of civilization trailing after her. As the rising sun enlightens the East, the wild animals and Indians flee her progress into the West, where civilization has yet to cast its rays. The Vanishing Indian also featured in such blockbuster exhibitions as the 1893 Columbian World Exposition in

Chicago, where living exhibits offered the American public one last chance to see “real Indians.” By the time the Panama-Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco in 1915, the Vanishing Indian’s fate apparently had been realized. Awaiting visitors in the Entrance Hall was The End of the Trail, James Earl Fraser’s sculpture of a doomed but once-proud Plains warrior slumped on his played-out pony. Meanwhile, in the Court of Honor, visitors encountered the cause of the Indian’s plight in Solon Hamilton Borglum’s The American Pioneer. In this sculpture, a pioneer sits tall and proud in the saddle with the tools of civilization’s conquest of the wilderness in hand, a rifle and axe. Similarly, museums across the country confirmed Indians’ vanishing fate by displaying items of Native material cultures with other “long-gone” specimens, such as dinosaur bones and other extinct fauna. Books and photographs also employed the Vanishing Indian theme. Edward S. Curtis, for example, richly illustrated his 29-volume The North American Indian (1907–1930) with melancholy photographs of the “vanishing race.” One of his best known shots—that of a Navajo family riding away from the camera down into a canyon—was in fact titled “Vanishing Race—Navaho.” During the same period, businessman Rodman Wannamaker sponsored three expeditions to the western tribes to document their fading lifeways and celebrate their assimilation. One of them culminated in a gathering of tribal leaders, including a number who had fought Custer at the Little Bighorn. Joseph K. Dixon was there and later described it in The Vanishing Race: The Last Great Indian Council (1913), which he illustrated with his own photographs. Anthropologists also chased the Vanishing Indian. Franz Boas led his students in the charge to salvage Native American cultures before they disappeared forever, as he was certain they soon would. The Boasians believed that Indian cultures were dying out as much through cultural change, which they interpreted as cultural destruction rather than an ongoing and inevitable process, as through population loss. Social theorists also had a hand in constructing the Vanishing Indian. In the early 18th century, Samuel Morton maintained that the Indians would vanish because they were biologically unsuited to civilized life. A few decades later, social evolutionist Lewis Henry Morgan predicted that they would dramatically alter their lifeways as they progressed from savagery through a state of barbarism to civilization, as he believed they must do if they were to survive at all. But their plunging populations led many people to doubt that they would survive. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Vanishing Indian trope had been reworked to depict cultures as vanishing, rather than Indian people. Under this revised formulation, Indians were merely assimilating, which most non-Indians assumed was good. Many also believed that, if Indians did survive, their cultural demise was inevitable in the face of a superior culture and government policies aimed at speeding their assimilation into the American mainstream. Lurking behind this modernized version of the Vanishing Indian was the belief that Native American cultures, unlike American culture, cannot change without losing their authenticity and becoming something else altogether. Debra Buchholtz

Further Reading Curtis, Edward S. The Vanishing Race: Selections from Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian. New York: Taplinger, 1977. Dippie, Brian W. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy, new ed. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991. Dixon, Joseph K. The Vanishing Race: The Last Great Indian Council and the Indians’ Story of the Custer Fight. New York: Doubleday, 1913. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagery and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Virgin Soil Epidemics

Virgin soil epidemics were one of the most important factors in the precipitous decline of indigenous populations following colonial contact. Due to a number of demographic and genetic factors, Native populations of the Americas did not have any prior contact with certain diseases originally derived from Eurasia and Africa. When these diseases traveled across the ocean during the Columbian Exchange, New World populations were exposed to new pathogens to which they had not acquired immunities, leaving them relatively defenseless against such virulent diseases as smallpox, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, and yellow fever. Native populations without immunity were also susceptible to other lethal bacteria and viruses. The precise number of deaths caused by these epidemics is impossible to fully ascertain, as the question largely depends on the highly debatable issue of how many indigenous peoples there were in North and South America before colonial contact. Prominent American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber first posited in 1939 that no more than 8.4 million people inhabited the Western Hemisphere, with less than a million in North America alone. He came up with this number largely by counting the number of people mentioned in colonial accounts. This figure was substantially revised in the middle of the 20th century by groups using statistical models. Demographers from the University of California–Berkeley, for example, posited a hemispheric population of up to 100 million, 12.5 million of whom were in North America, according to their models. In 1983, ethnohistorian Henry Dobyns postulated an entire hemispheric population of 112 million, including a North American figure of as many as 18.5 million. While most scholars now accept a precontact population of between 3 and 8 million people in North America, the debate will never be conclusively settled. Regardless, by 1900, the combined indigenous population of the United States, Canada, and Greenland reached a nadir of no more than 375,000, thereby suggesting a decline since 1492 at least in the range of 90–95 percent. Despite the severity of such epidemics, the claim that indigenous populations died simply because they had no immunity whatsoever cannot be taken literally. Rather, it should more correctly be understood to mean that the prior lack of exposure resulted in a deficient immunity compared to that of the incoming Europeans and Africans. It is also important to recognize that the pre-Columbian Americas were not disease-free paradises, as many pathogens were apparent before contact. Focusing on the sheer numbers also underestimates the larger cultural and sociopolitical effects of losing such large numbers of a given population. Particularly in contexts where epidemics followed in quick succession, fertility rates often plummeted due to the demoralizing loss of spouses and loved ones. Moreover, the loss of elders, a demographic category particularly susceptible to illness, also meant the demise of repositories of corporate memory, cultural identities, and group knowledge, which had been accumulated for generations. Further, the changes in demographics altered relations between groups. For example, on the Great Plains, the sedentary horticulturists of the upper Missouri River whose tightly knit villages made them more susceptible to contagious epidemics lost their economic and military superiority to the more mobile Lakotas at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet, there is no single explanation of the massive demographic hemorrhage of the New World. A wide range of social factors intersected with disease to precipitate depopulation, including displacement, warfare, slavery, economic dislocation, soil depletion, malnutrition, and disparities in and lack of access to health care. In order to discern the complex causal dynamics of depopulation, as well as to acknowledge the wide-ranging variability of indigenous experiences and outcomes, more nuanced examinations with greater consideration of local and regional specificities are required. Nevertheless, the deficient capacities of Native American peoples for quickly acquiring immunities to lethal epidemics played a significant role in the demographic catastrophe of the Americas. David Bernstein

Further Reading Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dobyns, Henry F. Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Jones, David S. “Virgin Soils Revisited.” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–742. Ramenofsky, Ann F. Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1987. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.

Wounded Knee Massacre (1890) Wounded Knee constituted the last major armed conflict between American Indians and the U.S. Army at the end of the 19th century. By the third quarter of the 19th century, most Lakotas found themselves confined to reservations where they were subject to a massive campaign to assimilate into white society. Churches preached Christian values and sought to eradicate Native beliefs; boarding schools taught children to reject their own culture; and allotment tried to turn nomads into farmers. Supported by the presence of nearby troops, agents, missionaries, and teachers attempted to destroy Lakota lifeways. In this dire situation, many Lakotas found solace in the Ghost Dance. Begun by a Paiute by the name of Wovoka, the Ghost Dance preached the return of the old ways and asked for the reappearance of the buffalo. It was the popularity of the Ghost Dance that gave American officials a rationale to send troops to the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in 1890, initiating what has been become one of the most infamous examples of the American government’s violence toward Native peoples. With the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn fresh in their minds, white settlers who noticed the growing popularity of the Ghost Dance grew alarmed. A government agent called in troops to impose order and to suppress the ceremony on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations. By November 1890, 3,000 troops had arrived, adding to the existing fear and tension. On December 15, 1890, Lieutenant Henry Bull Head and 43 other Indian policemen arrived at Hunkpapa chief Sitting Bull’s cabin on Standing Rock to arrest the suspected leader of what they viewed as an agitation. After an ensuing skirmish, Sitting Bull and seven of his followers lay dead, as did six tribal policemen; two more policemen succumbed to their wounds shortly thereafter. As the news of the death spread, it created fear and resistance among the Ghost Dancers. Many of Sitting Bull’s followers attempted to find safety under Minneconjou chief Big Foot. Fearing reprisals from American forces, Big Foot put his people and the new additions on the road to Pine Ridge where he hoped to find safety. On December 28, Major Whitside and some troops of the Seventh Cavalry intercepted Big Foot’s band at Porcupine Butte, less than 30 miles from Pine Ridge Agency. The Indians offered no resistance and so the decision was made to disarm them the following day. The band was escorted to Wounded Knee Creek, five miles west of the butte, where camp was made. During the night, Whitside’s commander, Colonel Forsyth, arrived with additional troops of the Seventh, a company of scouts, and artillery, and assumed command. At that point the U.S. troops numbered 470 men backed up by four Hotchkiss cannons. Big Foot’s band consisted of an estimated 120 men and 230 women and children. The next morning, on December 29, 1890, Forsyth ordered the Indian males and older youth into a close-packed semicircle around Big Foot’s tent to turn over their guns. In a clear show of force, Forsyth deployed the troops in commanding positions around the camp with the four artillery pieces overlooking the tipi village and ordered the band disarmed. Given the overwhelming presence of the U.S. troops and

the questionable circumstances surrounding Sitting Bull’s death, the Indians were reluctant to give up their arms. At one point, as a cavalryman tried to take a rifle from a deaf warrior, a shot rang out and a firefight began. In the ensuing fight, the soldiers unleashed a murderous volley at point-blank range while the artillery opened fire on tipis and Indians, killing and wounding men, women, and children indiscriminately. The Lakotas fled in all directions; some sought shelter in a nearby ravine (which soon became the target of the Hotchkiss guns); others fled across the Plains where they were chased down and killed, some up to three miles from the scene of the carnage.

Big Foot’s camp three weeks after the Wounded Knee Massacre. More than 300 Native Americans being transported to the Pine Ridge Reservation were killed by the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, marking the end of armed Native resistance to white expansion into the Plains in the 19th century. (Library of Congress)

On New Year’s Day of 1891, following a heavy blizzard, a burial detail interred the remains of 146 Indians (84 men and boys, 44 women, and 18 children) in a large mass grave. Fifty-one wounded survivors (of whom at least 7 died later) were brought to the hospital at Pine Ridge. The exact death toll at Wounded Knee remains unknown. All in all nearly 300 Indians were either killed or died of wounds or exposure later. White casualties in the fight included 25 killed and 39 wounded (6 of whom would later die). In the collective memory of the Lakota people, Wounded Knee lives on as a day of infamy and historical trauma. In 1903, a monument was erected by surviving relatives atop a hill that reads in part, “Many women and children who knew no wrong died here.” For their part, the U.S. Army maintained that Wounded Knee was a tragic, yet authentic battle that resulted from misunderstanding on both sides. Forsyth, initially suspended and court-martialed, was found innocent. In a possible attempt to justify the events, the army awarded 20 Medals of Honor, the highest number of medals granted in a single engagement. While repeated attempts to rescind the medals have failed, in 1990, 100 years after the incident, the 101st Congress passed a resolution to apologize to the Lakota people and expressed support for a suitable and appropriate memorial. Due to differing opinions about the memorial itself, it has not yet been erected. Since 1986, the Lakotas have commemorated Chief Big Foot’s band and their flight from Standing Rock to Wounded Knee with a 191-mile Memorial Ride through the badlands. Matthias Voigt

See also: Big Foot; Lakotas or Western Sioux; Primary Documents: Wounded Knee Massacre: Testimony of the Sioux (1890)

Further Reading Coleman, William S. E. Voices of Wounded Knee. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and US Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Utley, Robert. The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Yakima War (1855) The mid-1800s were a turbulent time in the Pacific Northwest. The Oregon and Washington Territories’ Native population had been ravaged by disease, resulting in the Whitman Massacre, and news from Indians around the Northwest was keeping racial tensions high. In 1854–1855, the new territorial governor, Isaac I. Stevens, was on a mission to acquire Native Americans’ land in the Pacific Northwest for a proposed transcontinental railroad route from the Mississippi River to Puget Sound. To do so, he needed to secure peace in the region and to open the land to Euro-American immigration. After negotiating several treaties around Puget Sound, Stevens intended to do the same with the Plateau Indians, and then cross over the Rocky Mountains to deal with the Flatheads and the Blackfeet. For the council with the Plateau Indians at Walla Walla, Stevens enlisted the assistance of Oregon Indian agent Joel Palmer. Upon hearing of these plans, Kamiakin, the headman of the Yakamas (formerly Yakimas), called for a meeting of chiefs from several tribes and nations in the region on the Grand Ronde River during the summer of 1854 to discuss the rumors. After meeting for five days, all the men of authority among the Plateau Indians agreed to band together against Stevens and refuse to give up their people’s lands. Some powerful men, mainly Spokan Garry (Spokane tribe) and a lawyer of the Nez Perce, however, advised the chiefs to listen to what the immigrants had to say before entering into an avoidable and costly war. When the Walla Walla council finally met in the summer of 1855, the solidarity that had been agreed upon at Grand Ronde quickly broke down, and the chiefs found themselves scrambling to retain any of their people’s land at all. In the end, the Yakamas received a relatively small reservation in the Yakima Valley, a loss of nearly 30,000 square miles. This was a devastating loss to the Yakamas and, along with the increased traffic from the Puget Sound settlements to the gold mines in northeastern Washington, Kamiakin’s warriors were furious. In September 1855, A. J. Bolon, subagent to the Yakamas, was murdered, sparking open hostilities. Bolon was assumed to have known that some white travelers were killed by Qual-chin, son of Chief Owhi, who was Kamiakin’s half-brother, so Qual-chin ambushed Bolon to keep the authorities from punishing him for the murders. Meanwhile, Governor Stevens was meeting with Native peoples in the Rocky Mountains; acting governor C. H. Mason called on troops from Fort Vancouver and Fort Steilacoom to protect EuroAmerican immigrants traveling through the area and to escort Governor Stevens on his return to Washington Territory. This duty fell upon Major General Rains, the commander of Fort Vancouver, who ordered Brevet-Major Granville O. Haller from The Dalles, Oregon, and Lieutenant W. A. Slaughter from Fort Steilacoom to join forces. En route, Haller, with nearly 100 men and a howitzer, encountered approximately 1,500 well-armed Indians at Toppenish Creek on October 6, 1855. The Indians attacked and surrounded the soldiers.

Fighting continued for three days, as the soldiers were forced to bury all their extra supplies, including the howitzer, and make a fighting retreat to The Dalles. Along the way, Haller met with a group of 45 artillerymen under Lieutenant Day on the Klickitat River. There they built a blockhouse and defended themselves. At the same time, Lieutenant Slaughter had tried to cross the Cascade Mountains through Naches Pass with 50 men, but on the eastern side, he encountered so many hostile Indians that he returned to the west side of the mountains. General Mason then sent Lieutenant Phil Sheridan from Fort Vancouver, along with two companies of volunteers and regulars from The Dalles, plus two government ships from Puget Sound. Governor Curry of Oregon Territory sent four more companies of volunteers against the hostile Indians. Major General Rains, with two companies of Washington volunteers and all the available regulars, combined with four companies of Oregon volunteers under Colonel J. W. Nesmith in the Yakama country on November 7. On the next day, they engaged Natives near the Yakima River. The soldiers pursued the Indians upstream along the river, but the Indians escaped by climbing the cliffs out of the canyon. Initially, the Yakima War lasted only a few months, July to November 1855, but, having escaped the pursuing soldiers for the time, the Indians resumed their hostilities against the intruders. By July 1858, war had erupted again, this time with the help of the Palouse, Spokane, and Coeur d’Alene Indians. This war lasted until September 1858, when the Indians were defeated and many of their leaders were hanged. After this, most Plateau Indians resigned themselves to their reservations. Peace was shattered again in another conflict in 1877, when Chief Joseph fled federal troops until his defeat in western Montana. Daniel R. Gibbs See also: Chief Joseph; Nez Perce; Reservation System; Whitman, Marcus and Narcissa Prentiss

Further Reading Josephy, Alvin M. The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Miller, Christopher. Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Chief Arapooish’s Speech on Crow Country from Washington Irving’s The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1830s) Some time before the 18th century, the Crow Indians separated from the Hidatsas and moved into Big Horn and upper Yellowstone country in present-day Montana. According to oral tradition, when First Worker created the world, he gave the Crows the best land and told them they must have strong hearts to keep their enemies out of their country. The following speech by Crow chief Arapooish, or Rotten Belly, recorded in the early 1830s by a U.S. Army captain, indicates why the Crows felt so strongly about their country and why it was so coveted by their neighbors. 22. The Crow country—A Crow paradise—Habits of the Crows—Anecdotes of Rose, the renegade white man—His fights with the Blackfeet—His elevation—His death—Arapooish, the Crow chief—His eagle—Adventure of Robert Campbell—Honor among Crows

BEFORE WE ACCOMPANY Captain Bonneville into the Crow country, we will impart a few facts about this wild region, and the wild people who inhabit it. We are not aware of the precise boundaries, if there are any, of the country claimed by the Crows; it appears to extend from the Black Hills to the Rocky Mountains, including a part of their lofty ranges, and embracing many of the plains and valleys watered by the Wind River, the Yellowstone, the Powder River, the Little Missouri, and the Nebraska. The country varies in soil and climate; there are vast plains of sand and clay, studded with large red sand-hills; other parts are mountainous and picturesque; it possesses warm springs, and coal mines, and abounds with game. But let us give the account of the country as rendered by Arapooish, a Crow chief, to Mr. Robert Campbell, of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. “The Crow country,” said he, “is a good country. The Great Spirit has put it exactly in the right place; while you are in it you fare well; whenever you go out of it, whichever way you travel, you fare worse. “If you go to the south, you have to wander over great barren plains; the water is warm and bad, and you meet the fever and ague. “To the north it is cold; the winters are long and bitter, with no grass; you cannot keep horses there, but must travel with dogs. What is a country without horses? “On the Columbia they are poor and dirty, paddle about in canoes, and eat fish. Their teeth are worn out; they are always taking fish-bones out of their mouths. Fish is poor food. “To the east, they dwell in villages; they live well; but they drink the muddy water of the Missouri— that is bad. A Crow’s dog would not drink such water. “About the forks of the Missouri is a fine country; good water; good grass; plenty of buffalo. In summer, it is almost as good as the Crow country; but in winter it is cold; the grass is gone; and there is no salt weed for the horses. “The Crow country is exactly in the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates and good things for every season. When the summer heats scorch the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains, where the air is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snow-banks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer, and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and mountain sheep. “In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down into the plains and hunt the buffalo, or trap beaver on the streams. And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves, and cottonwood bark for your horses: or you may winter in the Wind River valley, where there is salt weed in abundance. “The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country.” Such is the eulogium on his country by Arapooish. We have had repeated occasions to speak of the restless and predatory habits of the Crows. They can muster fifteen hundred fighting men, but their incessant wars with the Blackfeet, and their vagabond, predatory habits, are gradually wearing them out. In a recent work, we related the circumstance of a white man named Rose, an outlaw, and a designing vagabond, who acted as guide and interpreter to Mr. Hunt and his party, on their journey across the mountains to Astoria, who came near betraying them into the hands of the Crows, and who remained among the tribe, marrying one of their women, and adopting their congenial habits. A few anecdotes of the subsequent fortunes of that renegade may not be uninteresting, especially as they are connected with the fortunes of the tribe.

Rose was powerful in frame and fearless in spirit; and soon by his daring deeds took his rank among the first braves of the tribe. He aspired to command, and knew it was only to be attained by desperate exploits. He distinguished himself in repeated actions with Blackfeet. On one occasion, a band of those savages had fortified themselves within a breastwork, and could not be harmed. Rose proposed to storm the work. “Who will take the lead?” was the demand. “I!” cried he; and putting himself at their head, rushed forward. The first Blackfoot that opposed him he shot down with his rifle, and, snatching up the war-club of his victim, killed four others within the fort. The victory was complete, and Rose returned to the Crow village covered with glory, and bearing five Blackfoot scalps, to be erected as a trophy before his lodge. From this time, he was known among the Crows by the name of Che-ku-kaats, or “the man who killed five.” He became chief of the village, or rather band, and for a time was the popular idol. His popularity soon awakened envy among the native braves; he was a stranger, an intruder, a white man. A party seceded from his command. Feuds and civil wars succeeded that lasted for two or three years, until Rose, having contrived to set his adopted brethren by the ears, left them, and went down the Missouri in 1823. Here he fell in with one of the earliest trapping expeditions sent by General Ashley across the mountains. It was conducted by Smith, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette. Rose enlisted with them as guide and interpreter. When he got them among the Crows, he was exceedingly generous with their goods; making presents to the braves of his adopted tribe, as became a high-minded chief. This, doubtless, helped to revive his popularity. In that expedition, Smith and Fitzpatrick were robbed of their horses in Green River valley; the place where the robbery took place still bears the name of Horse Creek. We are not informed whether the horses were stolen through the instigation and management of Rose; it is not improbable, for such was the perfidy he had intended to practice on a former occasion toward Mr. Hunt and his party. The last anecdote we have of Rose is from an Indian trader. When General Atkinson made his military expedition up the Missouri, in 1825, to protect the fur trade, he held a conference with the Crow nation, at which Rose figured as Indian dignitary and Crow interpreter. The military were stationed at some little distance from the scene of the “big talk”; while the general and the chiefs were smoking pipes and making speeches, the officers, supposing all was friendly, left the troops, and drew near the scene of ceremonial. Some of the more knowing Crows, perceiving this, stole quietly to the camp, and, unobserved, contrived to stop the touch-holes of the field-pieces with dirt. Shortly after, a misunderstanding occurred in the conference: some of the Indians, knowing the cannon to be useless, became insolent. A tumult arose. In the confusion, Colonel O’Fallan snapped a pistol in the face of a brave, and knocked him down with the butt end. The Crows were all in a fury. A chance-medley fight was on the point of taking place, when Rose, his natural sympathies as a white man suddenly recurring, broke the stock of his fusee over the head of a Crow warrior, and laid so vigorously about him with the barrel, that he soon put the whole throng to flight. Luckily, as no lives had been lost, this sturdy rib roasting calmed the fury of the Crows, and the tumult ended without serious consequences. What was the ultimate fate of this vagabond hero is not distinctly known. Some report him to have fallen a victim to disease, brought on by his licentious life; others assert that he was murdered in a feud among the Crows. After all, his residence among these savages, and the influence he acquired over them, had, for a time, some beneficial effects. He is said, not merely to have rendered them more formidable to the Blackfeet, but to have opened their eyes to the policy of cultivating the friendship of the white men. After Rose’s death, his policy continued to be cultivated, with indifferent success, by Arapooish, the chief already mentioned, who had been his great friend, and whose character he had contributed to develope. This sagacious chief endeavored, on every occasion, to restrain the predatory propensities of his tribe when directed against the white men. “If we keep friends with them,” said he, “we have nothing

to fear from the Blackfeet, and can rule the mountains.” Arapooish pretended to be a great “medicine man”, a character among the Indians which is a compound of priest, doctor, prophet, and conjurer. He carried about with him a tame eagle, as his “medicine” or familiar. With the white men, he acknowledged that this was all charlatanism, but said it was necessary, to give him weight and influence among his people. Mr. Robert Campbell, from whom we have most of these facts, in the course of one of his trapping expeditions, was quartered in the village of Arapooish, and a guest in the lodge of the chieftain. He had collected a large quantity of furs, and, fearful of being plundered, deposited but a part in the lodge of the chief; the rest he buried in a cache. One night, Arapooish came into the lodge with a cloudy brow, and seated himself for a time without saying a word. At length, turning to Campbell, “You have more furs with you,” said he, “than you have brought into my lodge?” “I have,” replied Campbell. “Where are they?” Campbell knew the uselessness of any prevarication with an Indian; and the importance of complete frankness. He described the exact place where he had concealed his peltries. “‘Tis well,” replied Arapooish; “you speak straight. It is just as you say. But your cache has been robbed. Go and see how many skins have been taken from it.” Campbell examined the cache, and estimated his loss to be about one hundred and fifty beaver skins. Arapooish now summoned a meeting of the village. He bitterly reproached his people for robbing a stranger who had confided to their honor; and commanded that whoever had taken the skins, should bring them back: declaring that, as Campbell was his guest and inmate of his lodge, he would not eat nor drink until every skin was restored to him. The meeting broke up, and every one dispersed. Arapooish now charged Campbell to give neither reward nor thanks to any one who should bring in the beaver skins, but to keep count as they were delivered. In a little while, the skins began to make their appearance, a few at a time; they were laid down in the lodge, and those who brought them departed without saying a word. The day passed away. Arapooish sat in one corner of his lodge, wrapped up in his robe, scarcely moving a muscle of his countenance. When night arrived, he demanded if all the skins had been brought in. Above a hundred had been given up, and Campbell expressed himself contented. Not so the Crow chieftain. He fasted all that night, nor tasted a drop of water. In the morning, some more skins were brought in, and continued to come, one and two at a time, throughout the day, until but a few were wanting to make the number complete. Campbell was now anxious to put an end to this fasting of the old chief, and again declared that he was perfectly satisfied. Arapooish demanded what number of skins were yet wanting. On being told, he whispered to some of his people, who disappeared. After a time the number were brought in, though it was evident they were not any of the skins that had been stolen, but others gleaned in the village. “Is all right now?” demanded Arapooish. “All is right,” replied Campbell. “Good! Now bring me meat and drink!” When they were alone together, Arapooish had a conversation with his guest. “When you come another time among the Crows,” said he, “don’t hide your goods: trust to them and they will not wrong you. Put your goods in the lodge of a chief, and they are sacred; hide them in a cache, and any one who finds will steal them. My people have now given up your goods for my sake; but there are some foolish young men in the village, who may be disposed to be troublesome. Don’t linger, therefore, but pack your horses and be off.”

Campbell took his advice, and made his way safely out of the Crow country. He has ever since maintained that the Crows are not so black as they are painted. “Trust to their honor,” says he, “and you are safe: trust to their honesty, and they will steal the hair off your head.” Having given these few preliminary particulars, we will resume the course of our narrative. Source: Washington Irving, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., G. P. Putnam and Son, 1868, p. 165.

“A Sioux Story of the War”: Jerome Big Eagle Describes the Great Sioux Uprising (1862) In 1894, a newspaper reporter interviewed Jerome Big Eagle about his recollections of the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862 when the Santee Sioux rose up in revolt against white settlers in Minnesota. In that year, corrupt and indifferent government officials produced suffering and anger in the Mdewakanton, Wahpeton, Wahpekute, and Sisseton villages after failing to honor earlier agreements made to the Sioux. The Santees rose up in what many have historicized as a classic racial conflict that ultimately resulted in the hanging of 38 Santee Sioux, the largest mass execution in American history. Though the so-called Dakota War left a bitter legacy of interracial conflict in Minnesota, it also shattered bonds of kinship within Santee society that had evolved over generations. The recollections of Mdewakanton chief Jerome Big Eagle recalled the frustrations that produced the war and some of the disagreements between various Sioux factions. CHIEF BIG EAGLE’S STORY OF THE SIOUX OUTBREAK OF 1862. The stories of the great Sioux war in Minnesota in 1862 never grow old. They are always new to many and never dull to anybody. Although thirty-two years, nearly a third of a century, have passed since that eventful episode, yet to many it seems but a few months since barbarism rode rampant over a great part of the state, and civilization, gashed and bleeding, was prone on the prairies, with none to bind up the wounds. All over the state are survivors of that terrible contest who remember its incidents and relate them as if the crack of the rifle and the din of the war-whoop yet rang in their ears. The story is always of interest to them. There are two sides to this as to every other story. The version of the white people ought to be well enough known. But the Indian side, strangely enough, has not been recorded. The soldiers of the Union read no stories of the great Rebellion with more interest than the narratives of the ex-Confederates, and we never got the full and true story of the war until they began to write. So we can never fully understand the Sioux war of 1862 until the Indians tell their story. In June, 1894, Mr. Robert I. Holcombe of St. Paul (who had become familiar with the history of Gen. Sibley’s campaigns against the Sioux in 1862 and 1863, from having been employed several months in examining and classifying the letters and papers of Gen. Sibl[e]y for the Minnesota Historical society), made a trip to Flandrau, S. D., to get from Mrs. Huggan and others the Indians’ side of the story of the great outbreak of 1862. He there met Big Eagle, a chief, who had taken part with Little Crow in the battles, but had not been engaged in the massacre of whites. His narrative was taken down from his own lips, through Mrs. Huggan, Rev. Mr. Eastman and other competent interpreters. (This story was first published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 1, 1894.) Perhaps the most notable survivor of the old Sioux hostiles is Mr. Jerome Big Eagle, now residing near Granite Falls, in this state. His true Christian name, however, is Elijah. His Indian name is “Wamdetonka,” which literally means Great War Eagle, but he was commonly called Big Eagle. The Sioux for the common bald eagle is “hu-ya” and “wamde” means war eagle, “tonka” meaning great or big. He was a sub-chief, and may be termed one of the Sioux generals, since he had a band or division of his own. A representative of the Pioneer Press, who for some time has been engaged in the work referred to, recently interviewed Mr. Big Eagle at Flandrau, S. D., where he was temporarily on a visit, upon the subject of the war of 1862. He cannot speak English, and Rev. John Eastman of Flandrau, an educated and

intelligent gentleman, and Mrs. Nancy Huggan, a sketch of whose adventurous life appears in this volume, kindly acted as interpreters during the “talk,” which lasted several hours. Mr. Big Eagle was first informed that his statements were wanted solely in order that a correct knowledge of the military movements of the Indians during the war might be learned. It was suggested to him that no harm therefrom could come to him or any of his people; that neither the war banner nor the “bloody shirt” waved any longer in Minnesota; that it was well known that he was a prominent character in the war, but that he was now and had been for many years a quiet, industrious Christian citizen, respected by all who knew him, and he was assured that he would be correctly reported. He readily consented to tell his story, and gave full permission to use his name. Other Indians interviewed on the same subject gave certain information, but requested that their names be not printed. Big Eagle’s story is here given substantially as related to the reporter by the two intelligent interpreters, or at least as it was understood. The old man was very frank and unreserved. He did not seem to wish to avoid or evade an answer to a single question. He is of more than ordinary intelligence, and spoke candidly, deliberately and impassively, and with the air and manner of one striving to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” He proved a mine of information, and his story contains many items of history never before published. (The portraits of Big Eagle, Bed Legs and Blue Earth, shown on page 381, are from photographs taken in 1858, when on their way to Washington, and which are now in the possession of the Historical society.) “I was born in the Indian village of my father near Mendota, in 1827, and am now sixty-seven years old. My father was Grey Iron, a sub-chief of the Midawa-xanton Sioux. When he died I succeeded him as chief of the band and adopted the name of his father, Wambde-tonka, which, as is commonly called, means the Big Eagle. When I was a young man I often went with war parties against the Chippewas and other enemies of my nation, and the six feathers shown in the head-dress of my picture in the Historical society at St. Paul stand for six Chippewa scalps that I took when on the warpath. By the terms of the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851, the Sioux sold all of their lands in Minnesota, except a strip ten miles wide on each side of the Minnesota river from near Fort Kidgely to the Big Stone lake. The Medawakantons and Wacoutas had their reservation up to the Yellow Medicine. In 1858 the ten miles of this strip belonging to the Medawakanton and Wacouta bands, and lying north of the river were sold, mainly through the influence of Little Crow. That year, with some other chiefs, I went to Washington on business connected with the treaty. The selling of that strip north, of the Minnesota caused great dissatisfaction among the Sioux, and Little Crow was always blamed for the part he took in the sale. It caused us all to move to the south side of the river, where there was but very little game, and many of our people, under the treaty, were induced to give up the old life and go to work like white men, which was very distasteful to many. “Of the causes that led to the outbreak of August, 1862, much has been said. Of course it was wrong, as we all know now, but there were not many Christians among the Indians then, and they did not understand things as they should. There was great dissatisfaction among the Indians over many things the whites did. The whites ‘would not let them go to war against their enemies.’ This was right, but the Indians did not then know it. Then the whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men go to farming, work hard and do as they did and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway. It seemed too sudden to make such a change. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians. The Indians wanted to live as they did before the treaty of Traverse des Sioux go where they pleased and when they pleased; hunt game wherever they could find it, sell their furs to the traders and live as they could.

“Then the Indians did not think the traders had done right. The Indians bought goods of them on credit, and when the government payments came the traders were on hand with their books, which showed that the Indians owed so much and so much, and as the Indians kept no books they could not deny their accounts, but had to pay them, and sometimes the traders got all their money. I do not say that the traders always cheated and lied about these accounts. I know many of them were honest men and kind and accommodating, but since I have been a citizen I know that many white men, when they go to pay their accounts, often think them too large and refuse to pay them, and they go to law about them and there is much bad feeling. The Indians could not go to law, but there was always trouble over their credits. Under the treaty of Traverse des Sioux the Indians had to pay a very large sum of money to the traders for old debts, some of which ran back fifteen years, and many of those who had got the goods were dead and others were not present, and the traders’ books had to be received as to the amounts, and the money was taken from the tribe to pay them. Of course the traders often were of great service to the Indians in letting them have goods on credit, but the Indians seemed to think the traders ought not to be too hard on them about the payments, but do as the Indians did among one another, and put off the payment until they were better able to make it. “Then many of the white men often abused the Indians and treated them unkindly. Perhaps they had excuse, but the Indians did not think so. Many of the whites always seemed to say by their manner when they saw an Indian, ‘I am much better than you’ and the Indians did not like this. There was excuse for this, but the Dakotas did not believe there were better men in the world than they. Then some of the white men abused the Indian women in a certain way and disgraced them, and surely there was no excuse for that. “All these things made many Indians dislike the whites. Then a little while before the outbreak there was trouble among the Indians themselves. Some of the Indians took a sensible course and began to live like white men. The government built them houses, furnished them tools, seed, etc., and taught them to farm. At the two agencies, Yellow Medicine and Redwood, there were several hundred acres of land in cultivation that summer. Others staid in their tepees. There was a white man’s party and an Indian party. We had politics among us and there was much feeling. A new chief speaker for the tribe was to be elected. There were three candidates Little Crow, myself and Wa-sui-hi-ya-ye-dan (‘Traveling Hail’). After an exciting contest Traveling Hail was elected. Little Crow felt sore over his defeat. Many of our tribe believed him responsible for the sale of the north ten-mile strip, and I think this was why he was defeated. I did not care much about it. Many whites think that Little Crow was the principal chief of the Dakotas at this time, but he was not. Wabasha was the principal chief, and he was of the white man’s party; so was I; so was old Shakopee, whose band was very large. Many think if old Shakopee had lived there would have been no war, for he was for the white men and had great influence. But he died that summer, and was succeeded by his son, whose real name was Ea-to-ka (‘Another Language’), but when he became chief he took his father’s name, and was afterwards called ‘Little Shakopee,’ or ‘Little Six,’ for in the Sioux language ‘Shakopee’ means six. This Shakopee was against the white men. He took part in the outbreak, murdering women and children, but I never saw him in a battle, and he was caught in Manitoba and hanged in 1864. My brother, Medicine Bottle, was hanged with him. “As the summer advanced, there was great trouble among the Sioux troubles among themselves, troubles with the whites, and one thing and another. The war with the South was going on then, and a great many men had left the state and gone down there to fight. A few weeks before the outbreak the president called for many more men, and a great many of the white men of Minnesota and some half-breeds enlisted and went to Fort Snelling to be sent South. We understood that the South was getting the best of the fight, and it was said that the North would be whipped. The year before the new president had turned out Maj.

Brown and Maj. Cullen, the Indian agents, and put in their places Maj. Galbraith and Mr. Clark Thompson, and they had turned out the men under them and put in others of their own party. There were a great many changes. An Indian named Shonka-sha (‘White Dog’); who had been hired to teach the Indians to farm, was removed and another Indian named Ta-opi (‘The Wounded Man’), a son of old Betsy, of St. Paul, put in his place. Nearly all of the men who were turned out were dissatisfied, and the most of the Indians did not like the new men. At last Maj. Gralbraith went to work about the agencies and recruited a company of soldiers to go South. His men were nearly all half-breeds. This was the company called the Eenville Bangers, for they were mostly from Renville county. The Indians now thought the whites must be pretty hard up for men to fight the South, or they would not come so far out on the frontier and take halfbreeds or anything to help them. “It began to be whispered about that now would be a good time to go to war with the whites and get back the lands. It was believed that the men who had enlisted last had all left the state, and that before help could be sent the Indians could clean out the country, and that the Winnebagoes, and even the Chippewas, would assist the Sioux. It was also thought that a war with the whites would cause the Sioux to forget the troubles among themselves and enable many of them to pay off some old scores. Though I took part in the war, I was against it. I knew there was no good cause for it, and I had been to Washington and knew the power of the whites and that they would finally conquer us. We might succeed for a time, but we would be overpowered and defeated at last. I said all this and many more things to my people, but many of my own bands were against me, and some of the other chiefs put words in their mouths to say to me. When the outbreak came Little Crow told some of my band that if I refused to lead them to shoot me as a traitor who would not stand up for his nation, and then select another leader in my place. “But after the first talk of war the counsels of the peace Indians prevailed, and many of us thought the danger had all blown over. The time of the government payment was near at hand, and this may have had something to do with it. There was another thing that helped to stop the war talk. The crops that had been put in by the ‘farmer’ Indians were looking well, and there seemed to be a good prospect for a plentiful supply of provisions for them the coming winter without having to depend on the game of the country or without going far out to the west on the plains for buffalo. It seemed as if the white men’s way was certainly the best. Many of the Indians had been short of provisions that summer and had exhausted their credits and were in bad condition. ‘Now,’ said the farmer Indians, ‘if you had worked last season you would not be starving now and begging for food.’ The ‘farmers’ were favored by the government in every way. They had houses built for them, some of them even had brick houses, and they were not allowed to suffer. The other Indians did not like this. They were envious of them and jealous, and disliked them because they had gone back on the customs of the tribe and because they were favored. They called them ‘farmers,’ as if it was disgraceful to be a farmer. They called them ‘cut-hairs,’ because they had given up the Indian fashion of wearing the hair, and ‘breeches men,’ because they wore pantaloons, and ‘Dutchmen,’ because so many of the settlers on the north side of the river and elsewhere in the country were Germans. I have heard that there was a secret organization of the Indians called the ‘Soldiers’ Lodge,’ whose object was to declare war against the whites, but I knew nothing of it. “At last the time for the payment came and the Indians came in to the agencies to get their money. But the paymaster did not come, and week after week went by and still he did not come. The payment was to be in gold. Somebody told the Indians that the payment would never be made. The government was in a great war, and gold was scarce, and paper money had taken its place, and it was said the gold could not be had to pay us. Then the trouble began again and the war talk started up. Many of the Indians who had gathered about the agencies were out of provisions and were easily made angry. Still, most of us thought the trouble would pass, and we said nothing about it. I thought there might be trouble, but I had no idea

there would be such a war. Little Crow and other chiefs did not think so. But it seems some of the tribe were getting ready for it. “You know how the war started by the killing of some white people near Acton, in Meeker county. I will tell you how this was done, as it was told me by all of the four young men who did the killing. These young fellows all belonged to Shakopee’s band. Their names were Sungigidan (‘Brown Wing’), Ka-omde-i-ye-ye-dan (‘Breaking Up’), Nagi-wi-cak-te (‘Killing Ghost’), and Pa-zo-i-yo-pa (‘Runs against Something when Crawling’) I do not think their names have ever before been printed. One of them is yet living. They told me they did not go out to kill white people. They said they went over into the Big Woods to hunt; that on Sunday, Aug. 17, they came to a settler’s fence, and here they found a hen’s nest with some eggs in it. One of them took the eggs, when another said: ‘Don’t take them, for they belong to a white man and we may get into trouble.’ The other was angry, for he was very hungry and wanted to eat the eggs, and he dashed them to the ground and replied : ‘You are a coward. You are afraid of the white man. You are afraid to take even an egg from him, though you are half-starved. Yes, you are a coward, and I will tell everybody so.’ The other replied: ‘I am not a coward. I am not afraid of the white man, and to show you that I am not I will go to the house and shoot him. Are you brave enough to go with me?’ The one [who] had called him a coward said: ‘Yes, I will go with you, and we will see who is the braver of us two.’ Their two companions then said: ‘We will go with you, and we will be brave, too.’ They all went to the house of the white man (Mr. Robinson Jones), but he got alarmed and went to another house (that of his son-in-law, Howard Baker), where were some other white men and women. The four Indians followed them and killed three men and two women (Jones, Baker, a Mr. Webster, Mrs. Jones and a girl of fourteen). Then they hitched up a team belonging to another settler and drove to Shakopee’s camp six miles above Redwood agency, which they reached late that night and told what they had done, as I have related. “The tale told by the young men created the greatest excitement. Everybody was waked up and heard it. Shakopee took the young men to Little Crow’s house (two miles above the agency), and he sat up in bed and listened to their story. He said war [w]as now declared. Blood had been shed, the payment would be stopped, and the whites would take a dreadful vengeance because women had been killed. Wabasha, Wacouta, myself and others still talked for peace, but nobody would listen to us, and soon the cry was ‘Kill the whites and kill all these cut-hairs who will not join us.’ A council was held and war was declared. Parties formed and dashed away in the darkness to kill settlers. The women began to run bullets and the men to clean their guns. Little Crow gave orders to attack the agency early next morning and to kill all the traders. When the Indians first came to him for counsel and advice he said to them, tauntingly: ‘Why do you come to me for advice? Go to the man you elected speaker (Traveling Hail) and let him tell you what to do’; but he soon came around all right and somehow took the lead in everything, though he was not head chief, as I have said. “At this time my village was up on Crow creek, near Little Crow’s. I did not have a very large band not more than thirty or forty fighting men. Most of them were not for the war at first, but nearly all got into it at last. A great many members of the other bands were like my men; they took no part in the first movements, but afterward did. The next morning, when the force started down to attack the agency, I went along. I did not lead my band, and I took no part in the killing. I went to save the lives of two particular friends if I could. I think others went for the same reason, for nearly every Indian had a friend that he did not want killed; of course he did not care about anybody’s else friend. The killing was nearly all done when I got there. Little Crow was on the ground directing operations. The day before, he had attended church there and listened closely to the sermon and had shaken hands with everybody. So many Indians have lied about their saving the lives of white people that I dislike to speak of what I did. But I did save

the life of George H. Spencer at the time of the massacre. I know that his friend, Chaska, has always had the credit of that, but Spencer would have been a dead man in spite of Chaska if it had not been for me. I asked Spencer about this once, but he said he was wounded at the time and so excited that he could not remember what I did. Once after that I kept a half-breed family from being murdered; these are all the people whose lives I claim to have saved. I was never present when the white people were willfully murdered. I saw all the dead bodies at the agency. Mr. Andrew Myrick, a trader, with an Indian wife, had refused some hungry Indians credit a short time before when they asked him for some provisions. He said to them : ‘Go and eat grass.’ Now he was lying on the ground dead, with his mouth stuffed full of grass, and the Indians were saying tauntingly: ‘Myrick is eating grass himself.’ “When I returned to my village that day I found that many of my band had changed their minds about the war, and wanted to go into it. All the other villages were the same way. I was still of the belief that it was not best, but I thought I must go with my band and my nation, and I said to my men that I would lead them into the war, and we would all act like brave Dakotas and do the best we could. All my men were with me; none had gone off on raids, but we did not have guns for all at first. “That afternoon word came to my village that soldiers were coming to the agency from Fort Snelling. (These were Capt. Marsh and his men.) At once I mounted the best horse I had, and, with some of my men, rode as fast as I could to meet them at the ferry. But when I got there the fight was over, and I well remember that a cloud of powder smoke was rising slowly from the low, wet ground where the firing had been. I heard a few scattering shots down the river, where the Indians were still pursuing the soldiers, but I took no part. I crossed the river and saw the bodies of the soldiers that had been killed. I think Mr. Quinn, the interpreter, was shot several times after he had been killed. The Indians told me that the most of them who fired on Capt. Marsh and his men were on the same side of the river; that only a few shots came from the opposite or south side. They said that White Dog did not tell Mr. Quinn to come over, but told him to go back. Of course I do not know what the truth is about this. White Dog was the Indian head farmer who had been replaced by Taopi and who was hanged at Mankato. “I was not in the first fight at New Ulin nor the first attack on Fort Kidgely. Here let me say that the Indian names of these and other places in Minnesota are different from the English names. St. Paul is the ‘White Rock;’ Minneapolis is ‘the Place Where the Water Falls;’ New Ulm is ‘the Place Where There Is a Cottonwood Grove on the River;’ Fort Ridgely was ‘the Soldiers’ House;’ Birch Coulie was called ‘Birch Creek,’ etc. I was in the second fight at New Ulm and in the second attack on Fort Ridgely. At New Ulm I had but a few of my band with me. We lost none of them. We had but few, if any, of the Indians killed; at least I did not hear of but a few. A half-breed named George Le Blanc, who was with us, was killed. There was no one in chief command of the Indians at New Ulm. A few sub-chiefs, like myself, and the head soldiers led them, and the leaders agreed among themselves what was to be done. I do not think there was a chief present at the first fight. I think that attack was made by marauding Indians from several bands, every man for himself, but when we heard they were fighting we went down to help them. I think it probable that the first attack on Fort Kidgely was made in the same way; at any rate, I do not remember that there was a chief there. “The second fight at Fort Ridgely was made a grand affair. Little Crow was with us. Mr. Good Thunder, now at Birch Coulie agency, was with us. He counted the Indians as they filed past him on the march to the attack, and reported that there were 800 of us. He acted very bravely in the fight, and distinguished himself by running close up to the fort and bringing away a horse. He is now married to the former widow of White Dog, and both he and his wife are good Christian citizens. We went down determined to take the fort, for we knew it was of the greatest importance to us to have it. If we could take

it we would soon have the whole Minnesota valley. But we failed, and of course it was best that we did fail. “Though Little Crow was present, he did not take a very active part in the fight. As I remember, the chief leaders in the fight were ‘The Thief,’ who was the head soldier of Mankato’s band, and Mankato (‘Blue Earth’) himself. This Mankato was not the old chief for whom the town was named, but a subchief, the son of old Good Road. He was a very brave man and a good leader. He was killed at the battle of Wood lake by a cannon ball. We went down to the attack on both sides of the river. I went down on the south side with my men, and we crossed the river in front of the fort and went up through the timber and fought on that side next the river. The fight commenced about noon on Friday after the outbreak. We had a few Sissetons and Wakpatons with us, and some Winnebagoes, under the ‘Little Priest,’ were in this fight and at New Ulm. I saw them myself. But for the cannon I think we would have taken the fort. The soldiers fought us so bravely we thought there were more of them than there were. The cannons disturbed us greatly, but did not hurt many. We did not have many Indians killed. I think the whites put the number too large, and I think they overestimated the number killed in every battle. We seldom carried off our dead. We usually buried them in a secluded place on the battle-field when we could; we always tried to carry away the wounded. When we retreated from Ridgely I recrossed the river opposite the fort and went up on the south side. All our army but the scouts fell back up the river to our villages near Kedwood agency, and then on up to the Yellow Medicine and the mouth of the Chippewa. “Our scouts brought word that our old friend Wapetonhonska (‘The Long Trader’), as we called Gen. Sibley, was coming up against us, and in a few days we learned that he had come to Fort Ridgely with a large number of soldiers. Little Crow, with a strong party, went over into the Big Woods, towards Forest City and Hutchinson. After he had gone, I and the other sub-chiefs concluded to go down and attack New Ulm again and take the town and cross the river to the east, or in the rear of Fort Ridgely, where Sibley was, and then our movements were to be governed by circumstances. We had left our village near the Kedwood in some haste and alarm, expecting to be followed after the defeat at Ridgely, and had not taken all our property away. So we took many of our women with us to gather up the property and some other things, and we brought along some wagons to haul them off. “We came down the main road on the south side of the river, and were several hundred strong. We left our camps in the morning and got to our old villages in the afternoon. When the men in advance reached Little Crow’s village which was on the high bluff on the south side of the Minnesota, below the mouth of the Redwood they looked to the north across the valley, and up on the high bluff on the north side, and out on the prairie some miles away, they saw a column of mounted men and some wagons coming out of the Beaver creek timber on the prairie and going eastward. We also saw signs in Little Crow’s village that white men had been there only a few hours before, and judging from the trail they had made when they left, these were the men we now saw to the northward. There was, of course, a little excitement, and the column halted. Four or five of our best scouts were sent across the valley to follow the movements of the soldiers, creeping across the prairie like so many ants. It was near sundown, and we knew they would soon go into camp, and we thought the camping ground would be somewhere on the Birch Coulie, where there was wood and water. The women went to work to load the wagons. The scouts followed the soldiers carefully, and a little after sundown returned with the information that they had gone into camp near the head of Birch Coulie. At this time we did not know there were two companies there. We thought the company of mounted men (Capt. Anderson’s) was all, and that there were not more than seventy-five men. “It was concluded to surround the camp that night and attack it at daylight. We felt sure we could capture it, and that 200 men would be enough for the undertaking. So about that number was selected.

There were four bands my own, Husha-sha’s (‘Ked Legs’), Gray Bird’s and Mankato’s. I had about thirty men. Nearly all the Indians had double-barreled shotguns, and we loaded them with buckshot and large bullets called ‘traders’ balls.’ After dark we started, crossed the river and valley, went up the bluffs and on the prairie, and soon we saw the white tents and the wagons of the camp. We had no di[ffi]culty in surrounding the camp. The pickets were only a little way from it. I led [m]y men up from the west through the grass and took up a position 200 yards from the camp, behind a small knoll or elevation. Bed Legs took his men into the coulie east of the camp. Mankato (‘Blue Earth’) had some of his men in the coulie and some on the prairie. Gray Bird and his men were mostly on the prairie. “Just at dawn the fight began. It continued all day and the following night until late the next morning. Both sides fought well. Owing to the white men’s way of fighting they lost many men. Owing to the Indians’ way of fighting they lost but few. The white men stood up and exposed themselves at first, but at last they learned to keep quiet. The Indians always took care of themselves. We had an easy time of it. We could crawl through the grass and into the coulie and get water when we wanted it, and after a few hours our women crossed the river and came up near the bluff and cooked for us, and we could go back and eat and then return to the fight. We did not lose many men. Indeed, I only saw two dead Indians, and I never heard that any more were killed. The two I saw were in the coulie and belonged to Bed Legs’ band. One was a Wakpaton named Ho-ton-na (‘Animal’s Voice’) and the other was a Sisseton. Their bodies were taken down the coulie and buried during the fight. I did not see a man killed on the prairie. We had several men wounded, but none very badly. I did not see the incident which is related of an Indian, a brother of Little Crow, who, it is said, rode up on a white horse near the camp with a white flag and held a parley and had his horse killed as he rode away. That must have happened while I was absent from the field eating my dinner. Little Crow had no brother there. The White Spider was not there. I think Little Crow’s brothers were with him in the Big Woods at this time. The only Indian horse I saw killed that I remember was a bay. Buffalo Ghost succeeded in capturing a horse from the camp. Late in the day some of the men who had been left in the villages came over on their horses to see what the trouble was that the camp had not been taken, and they rode about the prairie for a time, but 1 don’t think many of them got into the fight. I do not remember that we got many r[e]-enforcements that day. If we got any, they must have come up the coulie and I did not see them. Perhaps some horsemen came up on the east side of the coulie, but I knew nothing about it. I am sure no re-enforcements came to me. I did not need any. Our circle about the camp was rather small and we could only use a certain number of men. “About the middle of the afternoon our men became much dissatisfied at the slowness of the fight, and the stubbornness of the whites, and the word was passed around the lines to get ready to charge the camp. The brave Mankato wanted to charge after the first hour. There were some half-breeds with the whites who could speak Sioux well, and they heard us arranging to Assault them. Jack Frazer told me afterward that he heard us talking about it very plainly. Alex Faribault was there and heard the talk and called out to us: ‘You do very wrong to fire on us. We did not come out to fight; we only came out to bury the bodies of the white people you killed.’ I have heard that Faribault, Frazer and another half-breed dug a rifle pit for themselves with bayonets, and that Faribault worked so hard with his bayonet in digging that he wore the flesh from the inside of his hand. One half-breed named Louis Bourier attempted to desert to us, but as he was running towards us some of our men shot and killed him. We could have taken the camp, I think. During the fight the whites had thrown up breastworks, but they were not very high and we could easily have jumped over them. We did not know that Maj. Joe Brown was there; if we had, I think some of our men would have charged anyhow, for they wanted him out of the way. Some years ago I saw Capt. Grant in St. Paul and he told me he was in command of the camp at Birch Coulie.

“Just as we were about to charge word came that a large number of mounted soldiers were coming up from the east toward Fort Ridgely. This stopped the charge and created some excitement. Mankato at once took some men from the coulie and went out to meet them. He told me he did not take more than fifty, but he scattered them out and they all yelled and made such a noise that the whites must have thought there were a great many more, and they stopped on the prairie and began fighting. They had a cannon and used it, but it did no harm. If the Indians had any men killed in the fight I never heard of it. Mankato flourished his men around so, and all the Indians in the coulie kept up a noise, and at last the whites began to fall back, and they retreated about two miles and began to dig breastworks. Mankato followed them and left about thirty men to watch them, and returned to the fight at the coulie with the rest. The Indians were laughing when they came back at the way they had deceived the white men, and we were all glad that the whites had not pushed forward and driven us away. If any more Indians went against this force than the fifty or possibly seventy-five that I have told you of I never heard of it. I was not with them and cannot say positively, but I do not think there were. I went out to near the fortified camp during the night, and there was no large force of Indians over there, and I know there were not more than thirty of our men watching the camp. When the men of this force began to fall back, the whites in the camp hallooed and made a great commotion, as if they were begging them to return and relieve them, and seemed much distressed that they did not. “The next morning Gen. Sibley came with a very large force and drove us away from the field. We took our time about getting away. Some of our men said they remained till Sibley got up and that they fired at some of his men as they were shaking hands with some of the men of the camp. Those of us who were on the prairie went back to the westward and on down the valley. Those in the coulie went down back southward to where their horses were, and then mounted and rode westward across the prairie about a mile south of the battle-field. There was no pursuit. The whites fired their cannons at us as we were leaving the field, but they might as well have beaten a big drum for all the harm they did. They only made a noise. We went back across the river to our camps in the old villages, and then on up the river to the Yellow Medicine and the mouth of the Chippewa, where Little Crow joined us. “For some time after the fight at Birch Coulie the greater part of the Indians remained in the camps about the Yellow Medicine and the mouth of the Chippewa. At last the word came that Sibley with his army was again on the move against us. Our scouts were very active and vigilant, and we heard from him nearly every hour. He had left a letter for Little Crow in a split stick on the battle-field of Birch Coulie, and some of our men found it and brought it in, and correspondence had been going on between us ever since. Tom Robinson and Joe Campbell, half-breed prisoners, wrote the letters for Little Crow. It seems that some letters were written to Gen. Sibley by the half-breeds which Little Crow never saw. I and others understood from the half-breeds that Gen. Sibley would treat with all of us who had only been soldiers and would surrender as prisoners of war, and that only those who had murdered people in cold blood, the settlers and others, would be punished in any way. There was great dissatisfaction among us at our condition. Many wanted to surrender; others left us for the West. But Sibley came on and on, and at last came the battle of Wood lake. “When we learned that Sibley had gone into camp at the Wood lake, a council of the sub-chiefs and others was held and it was determined to give him a battle near there. I think the lake now called Battle lake was the old-time Wood lake. As I understand it, there once were some cotton woods about it, and the Indians called it M’da-chan’ Wood lake. The larger lake, two miles west, now called Wood lake, was always known to me by the Indian name of ‘Hinta hauk-pay-an wo-ju,’ meaning literally, ‘the Planting Place of the Man who ties his Moccasins with Basswood Bark.’ We soon learned that Sibley had thrown up breastworks and it was not deemed safe to attack him at the lake. We concluded that the fight should be

about a mile or more to the northwest of the lake, on the road along which the troops would march. This was the road leading to the upper country, and of course Sibley would travel it. At the point determined on we planned to hide a large number of men on the side of the road. Near the lake, in a ravine formed by the outlet, we were to place another strong body. Behind a hill to the west were to be some more men. We thought that when Sibley marched out along the road tind [sic] when the head of his column had reached the farther end of the line of our first division, our men would open fire. The men in the ravine would then be in the rear of the whites and would begin firing on that end of the column. The men from behind the hill would rush out and attack the flank, and then we had horsemen far out on the right and left who would come up. We expected to throw the whole white force into confusion by the sudden and unexpected attack and defeat them before they could rally. “I think this was a good plan of battle. Our concealed men would not have been discovered. The grass was tall and the place by the road and the ravine were good hiding places. We had learned that Sibley was not particular about sending out scouts and examining the country before he passed it. He had a number of mounted men, but they always rode together, at the head of the column, when on a [m]arch, and did not examine the ground at the sides of the road. The night he lay at Wood lake, his pickets were only a short distance from camp less than half a mile. When we were putting our men into position that night we often saw them plainly. I worked hard that night fixing the men. Little Crow was on the field, too. Mankato was there. Indeed, all our fighting chiefs were present and all our best fighting Indians. We felt that this would be the deciding fight of the war. The whites were unconscious. We could hear them laughing and singing. When all our preparations were made, Little Crow and I and some other chiefs went to the mound or hill to the west so as to watch the fight better when it should commence. There were numbers of other Indians there. “The morning came and an accident spoiled all our plans. For some reason Sibley did not move early as we expected he would. Our men were lying hidden waiting patiently. Some were very near the camp lines in the ravine, but the whites did not see a man of all our men. I do not think they would have discovered our ambuscade. It seemed a considerable time after sun-up when some four or five wagons with a number of soldiers started out from the camp in the direction of the old Yellow Medicine agency. We learned afterwards that they were going without orders to dig potatoes over at the agency, five miles away. They came on over the prairie, right where part of our line was. Some of the wagons were not in the road, and if they had kept straight on would have driven right over our men as they lay in the grass. At last they came so close that our men had to rise up and fire. This brought on the fight, of course, but not according to the way we had planned it. Little Crow saw it and felt very badly. “Of course you know how the battle was fought. The Indians that were in the fight did well, but hundreds of our men did not get into it and did not fire a shot. They were out too far. The men in the ravine and the line connecting them with those on the road did the most of the fighting. Those of us on the hill did our best, but we were soon driven off. Mankato was killed here, and we lost a very good and brave war chief. He was killed by a cannon ball that was so nearly spent that he was not afraid of it, and it struck him in the back, as he lay on the ground, and killed him. The whites drove our men out of the ravine by a charge and that ended the battle. We retreated in some disorder, though the whites did not offer to pursue us. We crossed a wide prairie, but their horsemen did not follow us. We lost fourteen or fifteen men killed and quite a number wounded. Some of the wounded died afterwards, but I do not know how many. We carried off no dead bodies, but took away all our wounded. The whites scalped all our dead men so I have heard. “Soon after the battle I, with many others who had taken part in the war, surrendered to Gen. Sibley. Kobinson and the other half-breeds assured us that if we would do this we would only be held as

prisoners of war a short time, but as soon as I surrendered I was thrown into prison. Afterward I was tried and served three years in the prison at Davenport and the penitentiary at Eock Island for taking part in the war. On my trial a great number of the white prisoners, women and others, were called up, but not one of them could testify that I had murdered any one or had done anything to deserve death, or else 1 would have been hanged. If I had known that I would be sent to the penitentiary I would not have surrendered, but when I had been in the penitentiary three years and they were about to turn me out, I told them they might keep me another year if they wished, and I meant what I said. I did not like the way 1 had been treated. I surrendered in good faith, knowing that many of the whites were acquainted with me and that I had not been a murderer, or present when a murder had been committed, and if I had killed or wounded a man it had been in fair open fight. But all feeling on my part about this has long since passed away. For years I have been a Christian and I hope to die one. My white neighbors and friends know my character as a citizen and a man. I am at peace with every one, whites and Indians. I am getting to be an old man, but I am still able to work. I am poor, but I manage to get along. This is my second wife, and this little girl is our adopted daughter. I will come and see you when I come to St. Paul. Good-bye.” Source: Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society (1894) 382–400.

Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) Signed in Wyoming Territory on November 6, 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty was perhaps the most significant treaty between the United States and the Sioux. The two sides failed to maintain the terms of the treaty, however, resulting in the outbreak of the Sioux War just eight years later. ARTICLES OF A TREATY MADE AND CONCLUDED BY AND BETWEEN Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, General William S. Harney, General Alfred H. Terry, General O. O. Augur, J. B. Henderson, Nathaniel G. Taylor, John G. Sanborn, and Samuel F. Tappan, duly appointed commissioners on the part of the United States, and the different bands of the Sioux Nation of Indians, by their chiefs and headmen, whose names are hereto subscribed, they being duly authorized to act in the premises. ARTICLE I From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall for ever cease. The government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it. The Indians desire peace, and they now pledge their honor to maintain it. If bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States, shall commit any wrong upon the person or property of the Indians, the United States will, upon proof made to the agent, and forwarded to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at Washington city, proceed at once to cause the offender to be arrested and punished according to the laws of the United States, and also reimburse the injured person for the loss sustained. If bad men among the Indians shall commit a wrong or depredation upon the person or property of [any] one, white, black, or Indian, subject to the authority of the United States, and at peace therewith, the Indians herein named solemnly agree that they will, upon proof made to their agent, and notice by him, deliver up the wrongdoer to the United States, to be tried and punished according to its laws, and, in case they willfully refuse so to do, the person injured shall be reimbursed for his loss from the annuities, or other moneys due or to become due to them under this or other treaties made with the United States; and the President, on advising with the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, shall prescribe such rules and regulations for ascertaining damages under the provisions of this article as in his judgment may be proper,

but no one sustaining loss while violating the provisions of this treaty, or the laws of the United States, shall be reimbursed therefor. ARTICLE II The United States agrees that the following district of country, to wit, viz: commencing on the east bank of the Missouri river where the 46th parallel of north latitude crosses the same, thence along low-water mark down said east bank to a point opposite where the northern line of the State of Nebraska strikes the river, thence west across said river, and along the northern line of Nebraska to the 104th degree of longitude west from Greenwich, thence north on said meridian to a point where the 46th parallel of north latitude intercepts the same, thence due east along said parallel to the place of beginning; and in addition thereto, all existing reservations of the east back of said river, shall be and the same is, set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named, and for such other friendly tribes or individual Indians as from time to time they may be willing, with the consent of the United States, to admit amongst them; and the United States now solemnly agrees that no persons, except those herein designated and authorized so to do, and except such officers, agents, and employees of the government as may be authorized to enter upon Indian reservations in discharge of duties enjoined by law, shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory described in this article, or in such territory as may be added to this reservation for the use of said Indians, and henceforth they will and do hereby relinquish all claims or right in and to any portion of the United States or Territories, except such as is embraced within the limits aforesaid, and except as hereinafter provided. ARTICLE III If it should appear from actual survey or other satisfactory examination of said tract of land that it contains less than 160 acres of tillable land for each person who, at the time, may be authorized to reside on it under the provisions of this treaty, and a very considerable number of such persons shall be disposed to commence cultivating the soil as farmers, the United States agrees to set apart, for the use of said Indians, as herein provided, such additional quantity of arable land, adjoining to said reservation, or as near to the same as it can be obtained, as may be required to provide the necessary amount. ARTICLE IV The United States agrees, at its own proper expense, to construct, at some place on the Missouri river, near the centre of said reservation where timber and water may be convenient, the following buildings, to wit, a warehouse, a store-room for the use of the agent in storing goods belonging to the Indians, to cost not less than $2,500; an agency building, for the residence of the agent, to cost not exceeding $3,000; a residence for the physician, to cost not more than $3,000; and five other buildings, for a carpenter, farmer, blacksmith, miller, and engineer—each to cost not exceeding $2,000; also, a school-house, or mission building, so soon as a sufficient number of children can be induced by the agent to attend school, which shall not cost exceeding $5,000. The United States agrees further to cause to be erected on said reservation, near the other buildings herein authorized, a good steam circular saw-mill, with a grist-mill and shingle machine attached to the same, to cost not exceeding $8,000. ARTICLE V The United States agrees that the agent for said Indians shall in the future make his home at the agency building; that he shall reside among them, and keep an office open at all times for the purpose of prompt and diligent inquiry into such matters of complaint by and against the Indians as may be presented for

investigation under the provisions of their treaty stipulations, as also for the faithful discharge of other duties enjoined on him by law. In all cases of depredation on person or property he shall cause the evidence to be taken in writing and forwarded, together with his findings, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, whose decision, subject to the revision of the Secretary of the Interior, shall be binding on the parties to this treaty. ARTICLE VI If any individual belonging to said tribes of Indians, or legally incorporated with them, being the head of a family, shall desire to commence farming, he shall have the privilege to select, in the presence and with the assistance of the agent then in charge, a tract of land within said reservation, not exceeding three hundred and twenty acres in extent, which tract, when so selected, certified, and recorded in the “Land Book” as herein directed, shall cease to be held in common, but the same may be occupied and held in the exclusive possession of the person selecting it, and of his family, so long as he or they may continue to cultivate it. Any person over eighteen years of age, not being the head of a family, may in like manner select and cause to be certified to him or her, for purposes of cultivation, a quantity of land, not exceeding eighty acres in extent, and thereupon be entitled to the exclusive possession of the same as above directed. For each tract of land so selected a certificate, containing a description thereof and the name of the person selecting it, with a certificate endorsed thereon that the same has been recorded, shall be delivered to the party entitled to it, by the agent, after the same shall have been recorded by him in a book to be kept in his office, subject to inspection, which said book shall be known as the “Sioux Land Book.” The President may, at any time, order a survey of the reservation, and, when so surveyed, Congress shall provide for protecting the rights of said settlers in their improvements, and may fix the character of the title held by each. The United States may pass such laws on the subject of alienation and descent of property between the Indians and their descendants as may be thought proper. And it is further stipulated that any male Indians over eighteen years of age, of any band or tribe that is or shall hereafter become a party to this treaty, who now is or who shall hereafter become a resident or occupant of any reservation or territory not included in the tract of country designated and described in this treaty for the permanent home of the Indians, which is not mineral land, nor reserved by the United States for special purposes other than Indian occupation, and who shall have made improvements thereon of the value of two hundred dollars or more, and continuously occupied the same as a homestead for the term of three years, shall be entitled to receive from the United States a patent for one hundred and sixty acres of land including his said improvements, the same to be in the form of the legal subdivisions of the surveys of the public lands. Upon application in writing, sustained by the proof of two disinterested witnesses, made to the register of the local land office when the land sought to be entered is within a land district, and when the tract sought to be entered is not in any land district, then upon said application and proof being made to the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and the right of such Indian or Indians to enter such tract or tracts of land shall accrue and be perfect from the date of his first improvements thereon, and shall continue as long as be continues his residence and improvements and no longer. And any Indian or Indians receiving a patent for land under the foregoing provisions shall thereby and from thenceforth become and be a citizen of the United States and be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of such citizens, and shall, at the same time, retain all his rights to benefits accruing to Indians under this treaty. ARTICLE VII

In order to insure the civilization of the Indians entering into this treaty, the necessity of education is admitted, especially of such of them as are or may be settled on said agricultural reservations, and they, therefore, pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school, and it is hereby made the duty of the agent for said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly complied with; and the United States agrees that for every thirty children between said ages, who can be induced or compelled to attend school, a house shall be provided, and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher. The provisions of this article to continue for not less than twenty years. ARTICLE VIII When the head of a family or lodge shall have selected lands and received his certificate as above directed, and the agent shall be satisfied that he intends in good faith to commence cultivating the soil for a living, he shall be entitled to receive seeds and agricultural implements for the first year, not exceeding in value one hundred dollars, and for each succeeding year he shall continue to farm, for a period of three years more, he shall be entitled to receive seeds and implements as aforesaid, not exceeding in value twenty-five dollars. And it is further stipulated that such persons as commence farming shall receive instruction from the farmer herein provided for, and whenever more than one hundred persons shall enter upon the cultivation of the soil, a second blacksmith shall be provided, with such iron, steel, and other material as may be needed. ARTICLE IX At any time after ten years from the making of this treaty, the United States shall have the privilege of withdrawing the physician, farmer, blacksmith, carpenter, engineer, and miller herein provided for, but in case of such withdrawal, an additional sum thereafter of ten thousand dollars per annum shall be devoted to the education of said Indians, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs shall, upon careful inquiry into their condition, make such rules and regulations for the expenditure of said sums as will best promote the education and moral improvement of said tribes. ARTICLE X In lieu of all sums of money or other annuities provided to be paid to the Indians herein named under any treaty or treaties heretofore made, the United States agrees to deliver at the agency house on the reservation herein named, on or before the first day of August of each year, for thirty years, the following articles, to wit: For each male person over 14 years of age, a suit of good substantial woollen clothing, consisting of coat, pantaloons, flannel shirt, hat, and a pair of home-made socks. For each female over 12 years of age, a flannel shirt, or the goods necessary to make it, a pair of woollen hose, 12 yards of calico, and 12 yards of cotton domestics. For the boys and girls under the ages named, such flannel and cotton goods as may be needed to make each a suit as aforesaid, together with a pair of woollen hose for each. And in order that the Commissioner of Indian Affairs may be able to estimate properly for the articles herein named, it shall be the duty of the agent each year to forward to him a full and exact census of the Indians, on which the estimate from year to year can be based. And in addition to the clothing herein named, the sum of $10 for each person entitled to the beneficial effects of this treaty shall be annually appropriated for a period of 30 years, while such persons roam and

hunt, and $20 for each person who engages in farming, to be used by the Secretary of the Interior in the purchase of such articles as from time to time the condition and necessities of the Indians may indicate to be proper. And if within the 30 years, at any time, it shall appear that the amount of money needed for clothing, under this article, can be appropriated to better uses for the Indians named herein, Congress may, by law, change the appropriation to other purposes, but in no event shall the amount of the appropriation be withdrawn or discontinued for the period named. And the President shall annually detail an officer of the army to be present and attest the delivery of all the goods herein named, to the Indians, and he shall inspect and report on the quantity and quality of the goods and the manner of their delivery. And it is hereby expressly stipulated that each Indian over the age of four years, who shall have removed to and settled permanently upon said reservation, one pound of meat and one pound of flour per day, provided the Indians cannot furnish their own subsistence at an earlier date. And it is further stipulated that the United States will furnish and deliver to each lodge of Indians or family of persons legally incorporated with the, [sic] who shall remove to the reservation herein described and commence farming, one good American cow, and one good well-broken pair of American oxen within 60 days after such lodge or family shall have so settled upon said reservation. ARTICLE XI In consideration of the advantages and benefits conferred by this treaty and the many pledges of friendship by the United States, the tribes who are parties to this agreement hereby stipulate that they will relinquish all right to occupy permanently the territory outside their reservations as herein defined, but yet reserve the right to hunt on any lands north of North Platte, and on the Republican Fork of the Smoky Hill river, so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase. And they, the said Indians, further expressly agree: 1st. That they will withdraw all opposition to the construction of the railroads now being built on the plains. 2d. That they will permit the peaceful construction of any railroad not passing over their reservation as herein defined. 3d. That they will not attack any persons at home, or travelling, nor molest or disturb any wagon trains, coaches, mules, or cattle belonging to the people of the United States, or to persons friendly therewith. 4th. They will never capture, or carry off from the settlements, white women or children. 5th. They will never kill or scalp white men, nor attempt to do them harm. 6th. They withdraw all pretence of opposition to the construction of the railroad now being built along the Platte river and westward to the Pacific ocean, and they will not in future object to the construction of railroads, wagon roads, mail stations, or other works of utility or necessity, which may be ordered or permitted by the laws of the United States. But should such roads or other works be constructed on the lands of their reservation, the government will pay the tribe whatever amount of damage may be assessed by three disinterested commissioners to be appointed by the President for that purpose, one of the said commissioners to be a chief or headman of the tribe.

7th. They agree to withdraw all opposition to the military posts or roads now established south of the North Platte river, or that may be established, not in violation of treaties heretofore made or hereafter to be made with any of the Indian tribes. ARTICLE XII No treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described which may be held in common, shall be of any validity or force as against the said Indians unless executed and signed by at least three-fourths of all the adult male Indians occupying or interested in the same, and no cession by the tribe shall be understood or construed in such manner as to deprive, without his consent, any individual member of the tribe of his rights to any tract of land selected by him as provided in Article VI of this treaty. ARTICLE XIII The United States hereby agrees to furnish annually to the Indians the physician, teachers, carpenter, miller, engineer, farmer, and blacksmiths, as herein contemplated, and that such appropriations shall be made from time to time, on the estimate of the Secretary of the Interior, as will be sufficient to employ such persons. ARTICLE XIV It is agreed that the sum of five hundred dollars annually for three years from date shall be expended in presents to the ten persons of said tribe who in the judgment of the agent may grow the most valuable crops for the respective year. ARTICLE XV The Indians herein named agree that when the agency house and other buildings shall be constructed on the reservation named, they will regard said reservation their permanent home, and they will make no permanent settlement elsewhere; but they shall have the right, subject to the conditions and modifications of this treaty, to hunt, as stipulated in Article XI hereof. ARTICLE XVI The United States hereby agrees and stipulates that the country north of the North Platte river and east of the summits of the Big Horn mountains shall be held and considered to be unceded Indian territory, and also stipulates and agrees that no white person or persons shall be permitted to settle upon or occupy any portion of the same; or without the consent of the Indians, first had and obtained, to pass through the same; and it is further agreed by the United States, that within ninety days after the conclusion of peace with all the bands of the Sioux nation, the military posts now established in the territory in this article named shall be abandoned, and that the road leading to them and by them to the settlements in the Territory of Montana shall be closed. ARTICLE XVII It is hereby expressly understood and agreed by and between the respective parties to this treaty that the execution of this treaty and its ratification by the United States Senate shall have the effect, and shall be construed as abrogating and annulling all treaties and agreements heretofore entered into between the respective parties hereto, so far as such treaties and agreements obligate the United States to furnish and provide money, clothing, or other articles of property to such Indians and bands of Indians as become parties to this treaty, but no further.

In testimony of all which, we, the said commissioners, and we, the chiefs and headmen of the Brule band of the Sioux nation, have hereunto set our hands and seals at Fort Laramie, Dakota Territory, this twenty-ninth day of April, in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-eight. N. G. TAYLOR, W. T. SHERMAN, Lieutenant General WM. S. HARNEY, Brevet Major General U.S.A. JOHN B. SANBORN, S. F. TAPPAN, C. C. AUGUR, Brevet Major General ALFRED H. TERRY, Brevet Major General U.S.A. Attest: A. S. H. WHITE, Secretary. Executed on the part of the Brule band of Sioux by the chiefs and headm[e]n whose names are hereto annexed, they being thereunto duly authorized, at Fort Laramie, D. T., the twenty-ninth day of April, in the year A. D. 1868. MA-ZA-PON-KASKA, his X mark, Iron Shell. WAH-PAT-SHAH, his X mark, Red Leaf. HAH-SAH-PAH, his X mark, Black Horn. ZIN-TAH-GAH-LAT-WAH, his X mark, Spotted Tail. ZIN-TAH-GKAH, his X mark, White Tail. ME-WAH-TAH-NE-HO-SKAH, his X mark, Tall Man. SHE-CHA-CHAT-KAH, his X mark, Bad Left Hand. NO-MAH-NO-PAH, his X mark, Two and Two. TAH-TONKA-SKAH, his X mark, White Bull. CON-RA-WASHTA, his X mark, Pretty Coon. HA-CAH-CAH-SHE-CHAH, his X mark, Bad Elk. WA-HA-KA-ZAH-ISH-TAH, his X mark, Eye Lance. MA-TO-HA-KE-TAH, his X mark, Bear that looks behind. BELLA-TONKA-TONKA, his X mark, Big Partisan. MAH-TO-HO-HONKA, his X mark, Swift Bear. TO-WIS-NE, his X mark, Cold Place. ISH-TAH-SKAH, his X mark, White Eye. MA-TA-LOO-ZAH, his X mark, Fast Bear. AS-HAH-HAH-NAH-SHE, his X mark, Standing Elk. CAN-TE-TE-KI-YA, his X mark, The Brave Heart. SHUNKA-SHATON, his X mark, Day Hawk. TATANKA-WAKON, his X mark, Sacred Bull. MAPIA SHATON, his X mark, Hawk Cloud. MA-SHA-A-OW, his X mark, Stands and Comes. SHON-KA-TON-KA, his X mark, Big Dog. Attest: ASHTON S. H. WHITE, Secretary of Commission. GEORGE B. WITHS, Phonographer to Commission.

GEO. H. HOLTZMAN. JOHN D. HOWLAND. JAMES C. O’CONNOR. CHAR. E. GUERN, Interpreter. LEON T. PALLARDY, Interpreter. NICHOLAS JANIS, Interpreter. Executed on the part of the Ogallalla band of Sioux by the chiefs and headmen whose names are hereto subscribed, they being thereunto duly authorized, at Fort Laramie, the 25th day of May, in the year A. D. 1868. TAH-SHUN-KA-CO-QUI-PAH, his mark, Man-afraid-of-his-horses. SHA-TON-SKAH, his X mark, White Hawk. SHA-TON-SAPAH, his X mark, Black Hawk. EGA-MON-TON-KA-SAPAH, his X mark, Black Tiger OH-WAH-SHE-CHA, his X mark, Bad Wound. PAH-GEE, his X mark, Grass. WAH-NON SAH-CHE-GEH, his X mark, Ghost Heart. COMECH, his X mark, Crow. OH-HE-TE-KAH, his X mark, The Brave. TAH-TON-KAH-HE-YO-TA-KAH, his X mark, Sitting Bull. SHON-KA-OH-WAH-MEN-YE, his X mark, Whirlwind Dog. HA-KAH-KAH-TAH-MIECH, his X mark, Poor Elk. WAM-BU-LEE-WAH-KON, his X mark, Medicine Eagle. CHON-GAH-MA-HE-TO-HANS-KA, his X mark, High Wolf. WAH-SECHUN-TA-SHUN-KAH, his X mark, American Horse. MAH-KAH-MAH-HA-MAK-NEAR, his X mark, Man that walks under the ground. MAH-TO-TOW-PAH, his X mark, Four Bears. MA-TO-WEE-SHA-KTA, his X mark, One that kills the bear. OH-TAH-KEE-TOKA-WEE-CHAKTA, his X mark, One that kills in a hard place. TAH-TON-KAH-TA-MIECH, his X mark, The Poor Bull. OH-HUNS-EE-GA-NON-SKEN, his X mark, Mad Shade. SHAH-TON-OH-NAH-OM-MINNE-NE-OH-MINNE, his X mark, Whirling hawk. MAH-TO-CHUN-KA-OH, his X mark, Bear’s Back. CHE-TON-WEE-KOH, his X mark, Fool Hawk. WAH-HOH-KE-ZA-AH-HAH, his X mark, EH-TON-KAH, his X mark, Big Mouth. MA-PAH-CHE-TAH, his X mark, Bad Hand. WAH-KE-YUN-SHAH, his X mark, Red Thunder. WAK-SAH, his X mark, One that Cuts Off. CHAH-NOM-QUI-YAH, his X mark, One that Presents the Pipe. WAH-KE-KE-YAN-PUH-TAH, his X mark, Fire Thunder. MAH-TO-NONK-PAH-ZE, his X mark, Bear with Yellow Ears. CON-REE-TEH-KA, his X mark, The Little Crow. HE-HUP-PAH-TOH, his X mark, The Blue War Club.

SHON-KEE-TOH, his X mark, The Blue Horse. WAM-BALLA-OH-CONQUO, his X mark, Quick Eagle. TA-TONKA-SUPPA, his X mark, Black Bull. MOH-TOH-HA-SHE-NA, his X mark, The Bear Hide. Attest: S. E. WARD. JAS. C. O’CONNOR. J. M. SHERWOOD. W. C. SLICER. SAM DEON. H. M. MATHEWS. JOSEPH BISS NICHOLAS JANIS, Interpreter. LEFROY JOTT, Interpreter. ANTOINE JANIS, Interpreter. Executed on the part of the Minneconjou band of Sioux by the chiefs and headmen whose names are hereunto subscribed, they being thereunto duly authorized. HEH-WON-GE-CHAT, his X mark, One Horn. OH-PON-AH-TAH-E-MANNE, his X mark, The Elk that Bellows Walking. HEH-HO-LAH-ZEH-CHA-SKAH, his X mark, Young White Bull. WAH-CHAH-CHUM-KAH-COH-KEEPAH, his X mark, One that is Afraid of Shield. HE-HON-NE-SHAKTA, his X mark, The Old Owl. MOC-PE-A-TOH, his X mark, Blue Cloud. OH-PONG-GE-LE-SKAH, his X mark, Spotted Elk. TAH-TONK-KA-HON-KE-SCHUE, his X mark, Slow bull. SHONK-A-NEE-SHAH-SHAH-ATAH-PE, his X mark, The Dog Chief. MA-TO-TAH-TA-TONK-KA, his X mark, Bull Bear. WOM-BEH-LE-TON-KAH, his X mark, The Big Eagle. MATOH, EH-SCHNE-LAH, his X mark, The Lone Bear. MA-TOH-OH-HE-TO-KEH, his X mark, The Brave Bear. EH-CHE-MA-KEH, his X mark, The Runner. TI-KI-YA, his X mark, The Hard. HE-MA-ZA, his X mark, Iron Horn. Attest: JAS. C O’CONNOR, WM. D. BROWN, NICHOLAS JANIS, ANTOINE JANIS, Interpreters. Executed on the part of the Yanctonais band of Sioux by the chiefs and headmen whose names are hereto subscribed, they being thereunto duly authorized:

MAH-TO-NON-PAH, his X mark, Two Bears. MA-TO-HNA-SKIN-YA, his X mark, Mad Bear. HE-O-PU-ZA, his X mark, Louzy. AH-KE-CHE-TAH-CHE-KA-DAN, his X mark, Little Soldier. MAH-TO-E-TAN-CHAN, his X mark, Chief Bear. CU-WI-TO-WIA, his X mark, Rotten Stomach. SKUN-KA-WE-TKO, his X mark, Fool Dog. ISH-TA-SAP-PAH, his X mark, Black Eye. IH-TAN-CHAN, his X mark, The Chief. I-A-WI-CA-KA, his X mark, The One who Tells the Truth. AH-KE-CHE-TAH, his X mark, The Soldier. TA-SHI-NA-GI, his X mark, Yellow Robe. NAH-PE-TON-KA, his X mark, Big Hand. CHAN-TEE-WE-KTO, his X mark, Fool Heart. HOH-GAN-SAH-PA, his X mark, Black Catfish. MAH-TO-WAH-KAN, his X mark, Medicine Bear. SHUN-KA-KAN-SHA, his X mark, Red Horse. WAN-RODE, his X mark, The Eagle. CAN-HPI-SA-PA, his X mark, Black Tomahawk. WAR-HE-LE-RE, his X mark, Yellow Eagle. CHA-TON-CHE-CA, his X mark, Small Hawk, or Long Fare. SHU-GER-MON-E-TOO-HA-SKA, his X mark, Fall Wolf. MA-TO-U-TAH-KAH, his X mark, Sitting Bear. HI-HA-CAH-GE-NA-SKENE, his X mark, Mad Elk. Arapahoes. LITTLE CHIEF, his X mark. TALL BEAR, his X mark. TOP MAN, his X mark. NEVA, his X mark. THE WOUNDED BEAR, his X mark. WHIRLWIND, his X mark. THE FOX, his X mark. THE DOG BIG MOUTH, his X mark. SPOTTED WOLF, his X mark. SORREL HORSE, his X mark. BLACK COAL, his X mark. BIG WOLF, his X mark. KNOCK-KNEE, his X mark. BLACK CROW, his X mark. THE LONE OLD MAN, his X mark. PAUL, his X mark. BLACK BULL, his X mark. BIG TRACK, his X mark. THE FOOT, his X mark.

BLACK WHITE, his X mark. YELLOW HAIR, his X mark. LITTLE SHIELD, his X mark. BLACK BEAR, his X mark. WOLF MOCASSIN, his X mark. BIG ROBE, his X mark. WOLF CHIEF, his X mark. Witnesses: ROBERT P. MCKIBBIN, Captain 4th Infantry, and Bvt. Lieut. Col. U. S. A., Commanding Fort Laramie. WM. H. POWELL, Brevet Major, Captain 4th Infantry. HENRY W. PATTERSON, Captain 4th Infantry. THEO E. TRUE, Second Lieutenant 4th Infantry. W. G. BULLOCK. MAH-PI-AH-LU-TAH, his X mark, Red Cloud. WA-KI-AH-WE-CHA-SHAH, his X mark, Thunder Man. MA-ZAH-ZAH-GEH, his X mark, Iron Cane. WA-UMBLE-WHY-WA-KA-TUYAH, his X mark, High Eagle. KO-KE-PAH, his X mark, Man Afraid. WA-KI-AH-WA-KOU-AH, his X mark, Thunder Flying Running. Witnessess: W. MCE. DYE, Brevet Colonel U.S. Army, Commanding. A. B. CAIN, Captain 4th Infantry, Brevet Major U.S. Army. ROBT. P. MCKIBBIN, Captain 4th Infantry, Bvt. Lieut. Col. U. S. Army. JNO. MILLER, Captain 4th Infantry. G. L. LUHN, First Lieutenant 4th Infantry, Bvt. Capt. U.S. Army. H. C. SLOAN, Second Lieutenant 4th Infantry. Source: “Treaty of Fort Laramie with Sioux, Etc., 1851.” 11 U.S. Statutes at Large: Laws and Treaties—Vol. II: Treaties. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904, pp. 594–596.

Red Cloud’s Speech at Cooper Union, New York (1870) As one of the most influential of the Sioux chiefs, Red Cloud had been on a tour of the East to visit President Ulysses S. Grant. While in New York, he was persuaded to speak at the Cooper Union, one of the popular lyceums in the United States at the time. He was given a warm welcome and standing ovation by the New York audience. Below is the text of his speech given in 1870. My brethren and my friends who are here before me this day, God Almighty has made us all, and He is here to bless what I have to say to you today. The Good Spirit made us both. He gave you lands and He gave us lands; He gave us these lands; you came in here, and we respected you as brothers. God Almighty made you but made you all white and clothed you; when He made us He made us with red skins and poor; now you have come.

When you first came we were very many, and you were few; now you are many, and we are getting very few, and we are poor. You do not know who appears before you today to speak. I am a representative of the original American race, the first people of this continent. We are good and not bad. The reports that you hear concerning us are all on one side. We are always well disposed to them. You are here told that we are traders and thieves, and it is not so. We have given you nearly all our lands, and if we had any more land to give we would be very glad to give it. We have nothing more. We are driven into a very little land, and we want you now, as our dear friends, to help us with the government of the United States. The Great Father made us poor and ignorant and made you rich and wise and more skillful in these things that we know nothing about. The Great Father, the Good Father in heaven, made you all to eat tame food and made us to eat wild food and gives us the wild food. You ask anybody who has gone through our country to California; ask those who have settled there and in Utah, and you will find that we have treated them always well. You have children; we have children. You want to raise your children and make them happy and prosperous; we want to raise [ours] and make them happy and prosperous. We ask you to help us to do it. At the mouth of the Horse Creek, in 1852, the Great Father made a treaty with us by which we agreed to let all that country open for fifty-five years for the transit of those who were going through. We kept this treaty; we never treated any man wrong; we never committed any murder or depredation until afterward the troops were sent into that country, and the troops killed our people and ill-treated them, and thus war and trouble arose; but before the troops were sent there we were quiet and peaceable, and there was no disturbance. Since that time there have been various goods sent from time to time to us, the only ones that ever reached us, and then after they reached us (very soon after) the government took them away. You, as good men, ought to help us to these goods. Colonel Fitzpatrick of the government said we must all go to farm, and some of the people went to Fort Laramie and were badly treated. I only want to do that which is peaceful, and the Great Fathers know it, and also the Great Father who made us both. I came to Washington to see the Great Father in order to have peace and in order to have peace continue. That is all we want, and that is the reason why we are here now. In 1868 men came out and brought papers. We are ignorant and do not read papers, and they did not tell us right what was in these papers. We wanted them to take away their forts, leave our country, would not make war, and give our traders something. They said we had bound ourselves to trade on the Missouri, and we said, no, we did not want that. The interpreters deceived us. When I went to Washington I saw the Great Father. The Great Father showed me what the treaties were; he showed me all these points and showed me that the interpreters had deceived me and did not let me know what the right side of the treaty was. All I want is right and justice.… I represent the Sioux Nation; they will be governed by what I say and what I represent.… Look at me. I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the Nation. We do not want riches, we do not ask for riches, but we want our children properly trained and brought up. We look to you for your sympathy. Our riches will … do us no good; we cannot take away into the other world anything we have … we want to have love and peace.… We would like to know why commissioners are sent out there to do nothing but rob [us] and get the riches of this world away from us? I was brought up among the traders and those who came out there in those early times. I had a good time for they treated us nicely and well. They taught me how to wear clothes and use tobacco, and to use firearms and ammunition, and all went on very well until the Great Father sent out another kind of men—

men who drank whisky. He sent out whiskymen, men who drank and quarreled, men who were so bad that he could not keep them at home, and so he sent them out there. I have sent a great many words to the Great Father, but I don’t know that they ever reach the Great Father. They were drowned on the way, therefore I was a little offended with it. The words I told the Great Father lately would never come to him, so I thought I would come and tell you myself. And I am going to leave you today, and I am going back to my home. I want to tell the people that we cannot trust his agents and superintendents. I don’t want strange people that we know nothing about. I am very glad that you belong to us. I am very glad that we have come here and found you and that we can understand one another. I don’t want any more such men sent out there, who are so poor that when they come out there their first thoughts are how they can fill their own pockets. We want preserves in our reserves. We want honest men, and we want you to help to keep us in the lands that belong to us so that we may not be a prey to those who are viciously disposed. I am going back home. I am very glad that you have listened to me, and I wish you good-bye and give you an affectionate farewell. Source: New York Times, July 17, 1870.

Excerpt from Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881) Published in 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson’s book A Century of Dishonor mobilized public opinion for reform of U.S. Indian policy in the late 19th century, much as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for the antislavery movement 30 years before. Following is an excerpt from Jackson’s book. There are within the limits of the United States between two hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand Indians, exclusive of those in Alaska. The names of the different tribes and bands, as entered in the statistical table so the Indian Office Reports, number nearly three hundred. One of the most careful estimates which have been made of their numbers and localities gives them as follows: “In Minnesota and States east of the Mississippi, about 32,500; in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory, 70,650; in the Territories of Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, 65,000; in Nevada and the Territories of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, 84,000; and on the Pacific slope, 48,000.” Of these, 130,000 are self-supporting on their own reservations, “receiving nothing from the Government except interest on their own moneys, or annuities granted them in consideration of the cession of their lands to the United States.” … Of the remainder, 84,000 are partially supported by the Government—the interest money due them and their annuities, as provided by treaty, being inadequate to their subsistence on the reservations where they are confined.… There are about 55,000 who never visit an agency, over whom the Government does not pretend to have either control or care. These 55,000 “subsist by hunting, fishing, on roots, nuts, berries, etc., and by begging and stealing”; and this also seems to dispose of the accusation that the Indian will not “work for a living.” There remains a small portion, about 31,000, that are entirely subsisted by the Government. There is not among these three hundred bands of Indians one which has not suffered cruelly at the hands either of the Government or of white settlers. The poorer, the more insignificant, the more helpless the band, the more certain the cruelty and outrage to which they have been subjected. This is especially true of the bands on the Pacific slope. These Indians found themselves of a sudden surrounded by and caught up in the great influx of gold-seeking settlers, as helpless creatures on a shore are caught up in a

tidal wave. There was not time for the Government to make treaties; not even time for communities to make laws. The tale of the wrongs, the oppressions, the murders of the Pacific-slope Indians in the last thirty years would be a volume by itself, and is too monstrous to be believed. It makes little difference, however, where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its dark stain. The story of one tribe is the story of all, varied only differences of time and place; but neither time nor place makes any difference in the main facts. Colorado is as greedy and unjust in 1880 as was Georgia in 1830, and Ohio in 1795; and the United States Government breaks promises now as deftly as then, and with an added ingenuity from long practice. One of its strongest supports in so doing is the wide-spread sentiment among the people of dislike to the Indian, of impatience with his presence as a “barrier to civilization” and distrust of it as a possible danger. The old tales of the frontier life, with its horrors of Indian warfare, have gradually, by two or three generations’ telling, produced in the average mind something like an hereditary instinct of questioning and unreasoning aversion which it is almost impossible to dislodge or soften.… President after president has appointed commission after commission to inquire into and report upon Indian affairs, and to make suggestions as to the best methods of managing them. The reports are filled with eloquent statements of wrongs done to the Indians, of perfidies on the part of the Government; they counsel, as earnestly as words can, a trial of the simple and unperplexing expedients of telling truth, keeping promises, making fair bargains, dealing justly in all ways and all things. These reports are bound up with the Government’s Annual Reports, and that is the end of them.… The history of the Government connections with the Indians is a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises. The history of the border white man’s connection with the Indians is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs committed by the former, as the rule, and occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliation by the latter, as the exception. Taught by the Government that they had rights entitled to respect, when those rights have been assailed by the rapacity of the white man, the arm which should have been raised to protect them has ever been ready to sustain the aggressor. The testimony of some of the highest military officers of the United States is on record to the effect that, in our Indian wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been made by the white man. … Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed and palliated. Every offense committed by an Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination can throw around it. Against such influences as these are the people of the United States need to be warned. To assume that it would be easy, or by any one sudden stroke of legislative policy possible, to undo the mischief and hurt of the long past, set the Indian policy of the country right for the future, and make the Indians at once safe and happy, is the blunder of a hasty and uninformed judgment. The notion which seems to be growing more prevalent, that simply to make all Indians at once citizens of the United States would be a sovereign and instantaneous panacea for all their ills and all the Government’s perplexities, is a very inconsiderate one. To administer complete citizenship of a sudden, all round, to all Indians, barbarous and civilized alike, would be as grotesque a blunder as to dose them all round with any one medicine, irrespective of the symptoms and needs of their diseases. It would kill more than it would cure. Nevertheless, it is true, as was well stated by one of the superintendents of Indian Affairs in 1857, that, “so long as they are not citizens of the United States, their rights of property must remain insecure against invasion. The doors of the federal tribunals being barred against them while wards and dependents, they can only partially exercise the rights of free government, or give to those who make, execute, and construe the few laws they are allowed to enact, dignity sufficient to make them respectable. While they continue

individually to gather the crumbs that fall from the table of the United States, idleness, improvidence, and indebtedness will be the rule, and industry, thrift, and freedom from debt the exception. The utter absence of individual title to particular lands deprives every one among them of the chief incentive to labor and exertion—the very mainspring on which the prosperity of a people depends.” All judicious plans and measures for their safety and salvation must embody provisions for their becoming citizens as fast as they are fit, and must protect them till then in every right and particular in which our laws protect other “persons” who are not citizens.… However great perplexity and difficulty there may be in the details of any and every plan possible for doing at this late day anything like justice to the Indian, however, hard it may be for good statesmen and good men to agree upon the things that ought to be done, there certainly is, or ought to be, no perplexity whatever, on difficulty whatever, in agreeing upon certain things that ought not to be done, and which must cease to be done before the first steps can be taken toward righting the wrongs, curing the ills, and wiping out the disgrace to us of the present conditions of our Indians. Cheating, robbing, breaking promises—these three are clearly things which must cease to be done. One more thing, also, and that is the refusal of the protection of the law to the Indian’s rights of property, “of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When these four things have ceased to be done, time, statesmanship, philanthropy, and Christianity can slowly and surely do the rest. Till these four things have ceased to be done, statesmanship and philanthropy alike must work in vain, and even Christianity can reap but small harvest. Source: Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (New York: 1881).

Dawes Act (1887) The 1887 Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, is regarded as the most significant piece of federal legislation related to the land rights of Native Americans. Named after its main sponsor, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, the objectives of the law were to promote Native assimilation to U.S. culture and open Native lands to non-Native settlement. An act to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their use, either by treaty stipulation or by virtue of an act of Congress or executive order setting apart the same for their use, the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows: To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section; To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; and To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section:

Provided, That in case there is not sufficient land in any of said reservations to allot lands to each individual of the classes above named in quantities as above provided, the lands embraced in such reservation or reservations shall be allotted to each individual of each of said classes pro rata in accordance with the provisions of this act: And provided further, That where the treaty or act of Congress setting apart such reservation provides the allotment of lands in severalty in quantities in excess of those herein provided, the President, in making allotments upon such reservation, shall allot the lands to each individual Indian belonging thereon in quantity as specified in such treaty or act: And provided further, That when the lands allotted are only valuable for grazing purposes, an additional allotment of such grazing lands, in quantities as above provided, shall be made to each individual. Section 2. That all allotments set apart under the provisions of this act shall be selected by the Indians, heads of families selecting for their minor children, and the agents shall select for each orphan child, and in such manner as to embrace the improvements of the Indians making the selection, where the improvements of two or more Indians have been made on the same legal subdivision of land, unless they shall otherwise agree, a provisional line may be run dividing said lands between them, and the amount to which each is entitled shall be equalized in the assignment of the remainder of the land to which they are entitled under his act: Provided, That if any one entitled to an allotment shall fail to make a selection within four years after the President shall direct that allotments may be made on a particular reservation, the Secretary of the Interior may direct the agent of such tribe or band, if such there be, and if there be no agent, then a special agent appointed for that purpose, to make a selection for such Indian, which selection shall be allotted as in cases where selections are made by the Indians, and patents shall issue in like manner. Section 3. That the allotments provided for in this act shall be made by special agents appointed by the President for such purpose, and the agents in charge of the respective reservations on which the allotments are directed to be made, under such rules and regulations as the Secretary of the Interior may from time to time prescribe, and shall be certified by such agents to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in duplicate, one copy to be retained in the Indian Office and the other to be transmitted to the Secretary of the Interior for his action, and to be deposited in the General Land Office. Section 4. That where any Indian not residing upon a reservation, or for whose tribe no reservation has been provided by treaty, act of Congress, or executive order, shall make settlement upon any surveyed or unsurveyed lands of the United States not otherwise appropriated, he or she shall be entitled, upon application to the local land-office for the district in which the lands arc located, to have the same allotted to him or her, and to his or her children, in quantities and manner as provided in this act for Indians residing upon reservations; and when such settlement is made upon unsurveyed lands, the grant to such Indians shall be adjusted upon the survey of the lands so as to conform thereto; and patents shall be issued to them for such lands in the manner and with the restrictions as herein provided. And the fees to which the officers of such local land-office would have been entitled had such lands been entered under the general laws for the disposition of the public lands shall be paid to them, from any moneys in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, upon a statement of an account in their behalf for such fees by the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and a certification of such account to the Secretary of the Treasury by the Secretary of the Interior. Section 5. That upon the approval of the allotments provided for in this act by the Secretary of the Interior, he shall cause patents to issue therefor in the name of the allottees, which patents shall be of the legal effect, and declare that the United States does and will hold the land thus allotted, for the period of twenty-five years, in trust for the sole use and benefit of the Indian to whom such allotment shall have been made, or, in case of his decease, of his heirs according to the laws of the State or Territory where

such land is located, and that at the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of said trust and free of all charge or incumbrance whatsoever: Provided, That the President of the United States may in any case in his discretion extend the period. And if any conveyance shall be made of the lands set apart and allotted as herein provided, or any contract made touching the same, before the expiration of the time above mentioned, such conveyance or contract shall be absolutely null and void: Provided, That the law of descent and partition in force in the State or Territory where such lands are situate shall apply thereto after patents therefor have been executed and delivered, except as herein otherwise provided; and the laws of the State of Kansas regulating the descent and partition of real estate shall, so far as practicable, apply to all lands in the Indian Territory which may be allotted in severalty under the provisions of this act: And provided further, That at any time after lands have been allotted to all the Indians of any tribe as herein provided, or sooner if in the opinion of the President it shall be for the best interests of said tribe, it shall be lawful for the Secretary of the Interior to negotiate with such Indian tribe for the purchase and release by said tribe, in conformity with the treaty or statute under which such reservation is held, of such portions of its reservation not allotted as such tribe shall, from time to time, consent to sell, on such terms and conditions as shall be considered just and equitable between the United States and said tribe of Indians, which purchase shall not be complete until ratified by Congress, and the form and manner of executing such release prescribed by Congress: Provided however, That all lands adapted to agriculture, with or without irrigation so sold or released to the United States by any Indian tribe shall be held by the United States for the sole purpose of securing homes to actual settlers and shall be disposed of by the United States to actual and bona fide settlers only tracts not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres to any one person, on such terms as Congress shall prescribe, subject to grants which Congress may make in aid of education: And provided further, That no patents shall issue therefor except to the person so taking the same as a homestead, or his heirs, and after the expiration of five years occupancy thereof as such homestead; and any conveyance of said lands taken as a homestead, or any contract touching the same, or lieu thereon, created prior to the date of such patent, shall be null and void. And the sums agreed to be paid by the United States as purchase money for any portion of any such reservation shall be held in the Treasury of the United States for the sole use of the tribe or tribes Indians; to whom such reservations belonged; and the same, with interest thereon at three per cent per annum, shall be at all times subject to appropriation by Congress for the education and civilization of such tribe or tribes of Indians or the members thereof. The patents aforesaid shall be recorded in the General Land Office, and afterward delivered, free of charge, to the allottee entitled thereto. And if any religious society or other organization is now occupying any of the public lands to which this act is applicable, for religious or educational work among the Indians, the Secretary of the Interior is hereby authorized to confirm such occupation to such society or organization, in quantity not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres in any one tract, so long as the same shall be so occupied, on such terms as he shall deem just; but nothing herein contained shall change or alter any claim of such society for religious or educational purposes heretofore granted by law. And hereafter in the employment of Indian police, or any other employees in the public service among any of the Indian tribes or bands affected by this act, and where Indians can perform the duties required, those Indians who have availed themselves of the provisions of this act and become citizens of the United States shall be preferred. Section 6. That upon the completion of said allotments and the patenting of the lands to said allottees, each and every number of the respective bands or tribes of Indians to whom allotments have been made shall have the benefit of and be subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which they may reside; and no Territory shall pass or enforce any law denying any such Indian within its

jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens, whether said Indian has been or not, by birth or otherwise, a member of any tribe of Indians within the territorial limits of the United States without in any manner affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property. Section 7. That in cases where the use of water for irrigation is necessary to render the lands within any Indian reservation available for agricultural purposes, the Secretary of the Interior be, and he is hereby, authorized to prescribe such rules and regulations as he may deem necessary to secure a just and equal distribution thereof among the Indians residing upon any such reservation; and no other appropriation or grant of water by any riparian proprietor shall be permitted to the damage of any other riparian proprietor. Section 8. That the provisions of this act shall not extend to the territory occupied by the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Osage, Miamies and Peorias, and Sacs and Foxes, in the Indian Territory, nor to any of the reservations of the Seneca Nation of New York Indians in the State of New York, nor to that strip of territory in the State of Nebraska adjoining the Sioux Nation on the south added by executive order. Section 9. That for the purpose of making the surveys and resurveys mentioned in section two of this act, there be, and hereby is, appropriated, out of any moneys in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, to be repaid proportionately out of the proceeds of the sales of such land as may be acquired from the Indians under the provisions of this act. Section 10. That nothing in this act contained shall be so construed to affect the right and power of Congress to grant the right of way through any lands granted to an Indian, or a tribe of Indians, for railroads or other highways, or telegraph lines, for the public use, or condemn such lands to public uses, upon making just compensation. Section 11. That nothing in this act shall be so construed as to prevent the removal of the Southern Ute Indians from their present reservation in Southwestern Colorado to a new reservation by and with consent of a majority of the adult male members of said tribe. Source: Dawes Act of 1887. U.S. Statutes at Large, 24 (1887): 388–391.

Wounded Knee Massacre: Testimony of the Sioux (1890) Many historians consider the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890, the final event in Native American resistance to white expansion. The attack was prompted by a meeting of militant Sioux warriors at the Pine Ridge reservation in Minnesota in early December 1890. Fearing an Indian uprising, the federal government ordered U.S. troops to arrest one of the group’s leaders, Sitting Bull. The arrest turned into a fiasco, and Sitting Bull was killed. The Indians retreated to Wounded Knee camp, where they surrendered. However, disagreements over the terms of surrender led to the outbreak of gunfire, although both sides later swore they had not fired the first shot. In the end, more than 150 Indians were killed, and the spirit of Indian resistance was definitively crushed. This account of the massacre was made by Turning Hawk, Captain Sword, Spotted Horse, and American Horse, four Sioux Indians involved in the event, before the commissioner of Indian affairs.

Turning Hawk [speaking through an interpreter]: Mr. Commissioner, my purpose today is to tell you what I know of the condition of affairs at the agency where I live. A certain falsehood [the Ghost Dance] came to our agency from the west, which had the effect of a fire upon the Indians, and when this certain fire came upon our people, those who had farsightedness and could see into the matter made up their minds to stand up against it and fight it. The reason we took this hostile attitude to this fire was because we believed that you yourself would not be in favor of this particular mischief-making thing; but just as we expected, the people in authority did not like this thing and we were quietly told that we must give up or have nothing to do with this certain movement. Though this is the advice from our good friends in the East, there were, of course, many silly young men who were longing to become identified with the movement, although they knew that there was nothing absolutely bad, not did they know there was anything absolutely good, in connection with the movement. In the course of time, we heard that the soldiers were moving toward the scene of the trouble. After awhile, some of the soldiers finally reached our place and we heard that a number of them also reached our friends at Rosebud. Of course, when a large body of soldiers is moving toward a certain direction they inspire a more or less amount of awe, and it is natural that the woman and children who see this large moving mass are made afraid of it and be put in a condition to make them run away. At first we thought that Pine Ridge and Rosebud were the only two agencies where soldiers were sent, but finally we heard that the other agencies fared likewise. We heard and saw that half our friends at Rosebud agency, from fear at seeing the soldiers, began the move of running away from their agency toward ours [Pine Ridge], and when they had gotten inside of our reservation, they there learned that right ahead of them at our agency was another large crowd of soldiers, and while the soldiers were there, there was constantly a great deal of false rumor flying back and forth. The special rumor I have in mind is the threat that the soldiers had come there to disarm the Indians entirely and to take away all their horses from them. That was the oft-repeated story. So constantly repeated was this story that our friends from Rosebud, instead of going to Pine Ridge, the place of their destination, veered off and went to some other direction toward the “Bad Lands.” We did not know definitely how many, but understood there were 300 lodges of them, about 1,700 people. Eagle Pipe, Turning Bear, High Hawk, Short Bull, Lance, No Flesh, Pine Bird, Crow Dog, Two Strike, and White Horse were the leaders. The people, after veering off in this way, many of them who believe in peace and order at our agency, were very anxious that some influence should be brought upon these people. In addition to our love of peace, we remembered that many of these people were related to us by blood. So we sent out peace commissioners to the people who were thus running away from their agency. I understood at the time that they were simply going away from fear because of so many soldiers. So constant was the word of these good men from Pine Ridge agency that finally they succeeded in getting away half of the party from Rosebud, from the place where they took refuge, and finally were brought to the agency at Pine Ridge. Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, Little Wound, Fast Thunder, Louis Shangreau, John Grass, Jack Red Cloud, and myself were some of these peacemakers. The remnant of the party from Rosebud not taken to the agency finally reached the wilds of the Bad Lands. Seeing that we had succeeded so well, once more we went to the same party in the Bad Lands and succeeded in bringing these very Indians out of the depths of the Bad Lands and were being brought toward the agency. When we were about a day’s journey from our agency we heard that a certain band of Indians from the Cheyenne River agency was coming toward Pine Ridge in flight [those are considered to be from Big Foot’s band].

Captain Sword: Those who actually went off of the Cheyenne River agency probably number 303, and there were [some] from the Standing Rock reserve with them, but as to their number I do not know. There were a number of Oglallas, old men and several school boys, coming back with that very same party, and one of the very seriously wounded boys was a member of the Oglalla boarding school at Pine Ridge agency. He was not on the warpath, but was simply returning to his agency and to his school after a summer visit to his relatives on the Cheyenne River. Turning Hawk: When we heard that these people were coming toward our agency we also heard this. These people were coming toward Pine Ridge agency, and when they were almost on the agency they were met by the soldiers and surrounded and finally taken to the Wounded Knee creek, and there at a given time their guns were demanded. When they had delivered them up, the men were separated from their families, from their tipis, and taken to a certain spot. When the guns were thus taken and the men thus separated, there was a crazy man, a young man of very bad influence and in fact a nobody, among that bunch of Indians [who] fired his gun, and of course the firing of a gun must have been the breaking of a military rule of some sort, because immediately the soldiers returned fire and indiscriminate killing followed. Spotted Horse: This man shot an officer in the army; the first killed this officer. I was a voluntary scout at that encounter and I saw exactly what was done, and that was what I noticed; that the first shot killed an officer. As soon as this shot was fired the Indians immediately began drawing their knives, and they were exhorted from all sides to desist, but this was not obeyed. Consequently the firing began immediately on the part of the soldiers. Turning Hawk: All the men who were in a bunch were killed right there, and those who escaped that first fire got into the ravine, and as they went along up the ravine for a long distance they were pursued on both sides by the soldiers and shot down, as the dead bodies showed afterwards. The women were standing off at a different place from where the men were stationed, and when the firing began, those of the men who escaped the first onslaught went in one direction up the ravine, and then the women, who were bunched together at another place, went entirely in a different direction through an open field, and the women fared the same fate as the men who went up the deep ravine. American Horse: The men were separated, as has already been said, from the women, and they were surrounded by the soldiers also. When the firing began, of course the people who were standing immediately around the young man who fired the first shot were killed right together, and then they turned their guns, Hotchkiss guns, etc., upon the women who were in the lodges standing there under a flag of truce, and of course as soon as they were fired upon they fled, the men fleeing in one direction and the women running in two different directions. So that there were three general directions in which they took flight. There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babies were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed. All the Indians fled in these three directions, and after most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there. Of course we all feel very sad about this affair. I stood very loyal to the government all through those troublesome days, and believing so much in the government and being so loyal to it, my disappointment

was very strong, and I have come to Washington with a very great blame on my heart. Of course it would have been all right if only the men were killed; we would almost feel grateful for it. But the fact of the killing of the women, and more especially the killing of the young boys and girls who are to go to make up the future strength of the Indian people, is the saddest part of the whole affair and we feel it very sorely. I was not there at the time before the burial of the bodies, but I did not go there with some of the police and the Indian doctor and a great many people, men from the agency, and we went through the battlefield and saw where the bodies were from the track of the blood. Turning Hawk: I had just reached the point where I said that the women were killed. We heard, besides the killing of the men, of the onslaught also made upon the women and children, and they were treated as roughly and indiscriminately as the men and boys were. Of course this affair brought a great deal of distress upon all the people, but especially upon the minds of those who stood loyal to the government and who did all that they were able to do in the matter of bringing about peace. They especially have suffered much distress and are very much hurt at heart. These peacemakers continued on in their good work, but there were a great many fickle young men who were ready to be moved by the change in the events there, and consequently, in spite of the great fire that was brought upon all, they were ready to assume any hostile attitude. These young men got themselves in readiness and went in the direction of the scene of battle so they might be of service there. They got there and finally exchanged shots with the soldiers. This party of young men was made up from Rosebud, Oglalla (Pine Ridge), and members of any other agencies that happened to be there at the time. While this was going on in the neighborhood of Wounded Knee—the Indians and soldiers exchanging shots—the agency, our home, was also fired into by the Indians. Matters went on in this strain until the evening came on, and then the Indians went off down by White Clay creek. When the agency was fired upon by the Indians from the hillside, of course the shots were returned by the Indian police who were guarding the agency buildings. Although fighting seemed to have been in the air, yet those who believed in peace were still constant in their work. Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, who had been on a visit to some other agency in the north or northwest, returned, and immediately went out to the people living about White Clay creek, on the border of the Bad Lands, and brought his people out. He succeeded in obtaining the consent of the people to come out of their place of refuge and return to the agency. Thus the remaining portion of the Indians who started from Rosebud were brought back into the agency. Mr. Commissioner, during the days of the great whirlwind out there, these good men tried to hold up a counteracting power, and that was “Peace.” We have now come to realize that peace has prevailed and won the day. While we were engaged in bringing about peace our property was left behind, of course, and most of us lost everything, even down to the matter of guns with which to kill ducks, rabbits, etc., shotguns, and guns of that order. When YoungMan-Afraid brought the people in and their guns were asked for, both men who were called hostile and men who stood loyal to the government delivered up their guns. Source: Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1891, volume 1, pp. 179–181. Extracts from verbatim stenographic report of council held by delegations of Sioux with Commissioner of Indian Affairs, at Washington, February 11, 1891.

Glossary

Abrogate: to repeal or ignore a law of formal agreement. The Supreme Court case Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock established the legal precedent that Congress could abrogate treaties with Native Americans. Adamic: biblical reference to Adam in paradise. Aide-de-camp: personal aide or assistant to a person of high rank, usually a senior military officer. Allegorical: literary or artistic device in which the scene depicted overtly represents or symbolizes larger concepts. Allotment: policy of land distribution that was part of a program of forced assimilation of American Indians by the U.S. government in which tribes were forced to give up collective ownership; the process is most often associated with the 1887 General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act. American Bible Society: Protestant organization founded in 1816 whose mission was to disseminate the Bible; frequently involved in missionary work among Indian groups. Annuity: payment to be made by the federal government every year, generally as part of a treaty. Many annuities intended as payments to Indian groups in the 19th century were instead used to initiate unwanted programs or to purchase unwanted goods. Antebellum: existing before war; in the North American context, this generally refers to the period before the American Civil War. Anthropogenic: caused by human beings. Armyworm: larvae of various species of moths in the Noctuidae family that feed on crops like hay, barley, corn, millet, oats, and wheat. Barnburners: group of abolitionist Whigs and discontented New York Democrats who broke ranks in 1848 to form the Free-Soil Party. Bartlett Boundary Survey: group headed by John Russell Bartlett that, between 1850 and 1853, was responsible for surveying the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Bascom Affair: in which Lieutenant George Bascom falsely accused Apache war chief Cochise of kidnapping a local rancher’s son. The lieutenant attempted to take Cochise captive in 1861, but the Apache escaped by cutting an exit in the tent with his knife; known to the Apaches as the Cut the Tent Affair.

Bluegrass System: Henry Clay’s political and economic stimulus for central Kentucky. After Clay was elected in 1810 to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Bluegrass System became the model for the American System. Boston Grenadier Corps: a Boston militia unit formed before the Revolutionary War that was expected to defend the city in the case of an attack from a foreign power. Braddock’s Defeat: Edward Braddock’s failed campaign to capture Fort Duquesne from the French and their Indian allies in the Ohio Valley in 1755. Central Bank: part of Henry Clay’s American System, it was guided by the belief that the nation’s finances needed to be tightly controlled so that an educated business class could best determine how to use the nation’s resources; viewed by many as elitist, and opposition to it gave rise to the belief in the “common man” under the Jacksonian Democrats. Chattel Slavery: a system in which people can be bought and sold against their will and forced to work. Cherokee Phoenix: Cherokee-language newspaper that was frequently the forum for various leaders to articulate their strategies regarding Euro-American encroachment on Cherokee land. Elias Boudinot eventually resigned the editorship in 1832 after he began advocating for the establishment of a new Cherokee homeland in the West. Common Sense: Thomas Paine’s 1776 anonymously authored pamphlet in which he attacked British principles of monarchical government and hereditary rule. Congregationalist: form of Protestant Christianity whose primary organizational structure is centered around the belief that each distinct congregation can govern its own affairs. Nineteenth-century American Congregationalists were frequently involved in social reform movements such as abolition, Indian “civilization” programs, and women’s suffrage. Conquistador: soldiers and explorers sent to the New World under the auspices of the Spanish Empire in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Continental Divide: largest of the hydrological divides in the Americas that separates the watersheds that drain into the Pacific Ocean from those that drain into the Atlantic; generally runs along the largest ridges of the Rocky Mountains. Cooper: a tradesman who makes wooden vessels bound together with metal hoops such as wine casks or barrels. “Corrupt Bargain”: phrase used by supporters of Andrew Jackson during the election of 1824 describing what they argued was the unconstitutional election of John Quincy Adams as president. Jackson’s supporters believed that in exchange for Speaker of the House Henry Clay’s manipulation of Congress to get Adams elected (with no clear winner in the electoral votes, the decision was turned over the House of Representatives), Adams named Clay his secretary of state. Council of Forty-Four: Cheyenne political institution made up of four chiefs drawn from each of the tribe’s 10 bands plus four principal chiefs drawn from among their predecessors.

Counting Coup: term referring to the Plains Indian practice of gaining honor; the most prestigious form required that a warrior touch his enemy with a hand or bow, thus proving his bravery. Crimean War: conflict between Russia and an alliance of Great Britain, France, Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire between October 1853 and February 1856. Cumberland Gap: pass through Appalachian Mountains just north of where the present states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia meet, which became first major route to what was then considered “the West.” Curtis Act: 1898 law sponsored by Kansas (and Kansa Indian) senator that dissolved Indian Territory tribal governments, leaving no mechanism for the enforcement of tribal law. Cutworms: larvae of various species of moths in the Noctuidae family that can devastate vegetable seedlings in spring. Dahlonega Gold Rush: largest gold rush in the United States up to that time, putting intense pressure on Cherokee resources. This rush was one of the precursors to the watershed U.S. Supreme Court decisions known as “the Marshall Trilogy” and the eventual removal of Southeastern Indians. Diaspora: a people of common descent scattered over a wide geographic area; or a movement of people from their homeland. Dominion: the territory of a sovereign government. Doolittle Commission: following Colonel John Chivington’s massacre of peaceful bands of Plains Indians, Congress created a commission headed by Senator James R. Doolittle to assess the condition of the Plains tribes. The 1867 report found that many of the causes of cases of Indian hostility could be traced to the “aggressions of lawless white men.” Draconian: in reference to seventh-century BCE Athenian statesman Draco, a punishment that is excessively harsh. Dred Scott: abbreviation of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), decision by U.S. Supreme Court in which Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that Congress could not prohibit slavery in new territories and no black person could be a citizen of the United States. Embargo: diplomatic measure of partial or complete prohibition of commerce with a particular country. “Empire of Liberty”: Thomas Jefferson’s articulation of American exceptionalism that he argued would stop the growth of the British Empire by creating a republic of small independent yeomen or farmers. Enlightenment: a system of thought that began in Europe in the late 17th century and that emphasized reason and individualism rather than faith and tradition. The political ideals of the Enlightenment can be seen in the American Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, while its promotion of rational and orderly governance was exemplified by the system of land dispersal known as the Rectangular Survey. Entail: restriction on the sale or inheritance of an estate requiring that it will pass in its entirety to the owner’s heirs.

Envoy Extraordinary: a diplomatic rank of a person at the head of a mission not considered a representative of the head of state but having full authority to represent the government (plenipotentiary powers). Etiology: study of causation. Etymology: explanation of word origins. Expropriation: the action by which a state exercises its sovereignty by claiming the property rights of an individual, group, or tribe. Fee Patent Land: land that is not held in trust and therefore salable and taxable. Filibusterer: a person who participates in a military expedition into a foreign state, without the authority of his or her own government, with the intent to overthrow the existing government. Folio: a book or pamphlet made up of one or more full sheets of paper, on each of which four pages of text are printed, two on each side; each sheet is then folded once to produce two leaves. Francophone: French-speaking person. “Friends of the Indian”: generalized label for groups that advocated for Indian policy reform at the end of the 19th century; held famous meeting in Lake Mohonk, New York, in 1883 that established many of the principles used in the General Allotment Act of 1887, including the end to tribal ownership of land. Georgia Compact of 1802: an agreement in which state representatives ceded the western half of Georgia’s territorial claim to the federal government in exchange for a payment of $1.25 million and the promise that all American Indian land titles in the state would be extinguished. Ghost Dance: religious revival begun by a Paiute Indian by the name of Wovoka in the 1880s. It preached the return of the old ways and asked for the reappearance of the buffalo; its practice by Sioux in 1890 was the ostensible reason for the presence of the cavalry who would initiate the Indian slaughter at Wounded Knee. Gift Economies: systems in which gift exchange and reciprocal relationships determine wealth and status. Golden Spike: ceremonial spike used to tie the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad together at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1969, marking the completion of the first American transcontinental railroad system. Great Father: translation of term used by many Native groups in the 18th and 19th centuries to denote the American president or U.S. government more generally. While Americans representatives generally focused on the discipline they believed the term connoted, Indians were more concerned with the implications of the paternal obligations. Grist Mill: both the mechanism by which, and the building in which, grain is ground into flour. Guerrilla Tactics: form of warfare that relies on small-scale, covert attacks rather than a large unified front. Hudson River School: a mid-19th-century style of art that owed its artistic heritage to romanticism and

naturalism. Originating with artists who lived along the Hudson River, the style depicted landscapes in a detailed, realistic manner that idealized nature. Hudson’s Bay Company: British trading company that became one of the largest colonizing influences in North America. Hydraulic Mining: extracting minerals through the use of water shot through high-pressure hoses. Iconoclast: someone who actively engages in the subversion of established norms or conventions. Indian Reorganization Act: sometimes known as the Indian New Deal, 1934 federal legislation that reversed the allotment practices in place since the 1887 Dawes Act. Pushed by Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier Sr., the act called for greater autonomy and self-sufficiency for Indian groups. In Perpetuity: legal term for never-ending. Many treaties promised Native peoples that lands would be theirs in perpetuity, only to be forcibly removed at a later date. Intestate: dying without a will. Iroquoia: lands traditionally held by a confederation of Iroquoian-speaking peoples known collectively as Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouse. This confederation, made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscaroras, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, was the most powerful Native American group on the frontier of the British colonies in America from the 16th to 18th centuries. Jesuit: a Roman Catholic order of religious men who gained prominence in New France in the 17th century for their missionary work to Indians. The Jesuits were particularly active among the Hurons. Johnson Affair: 1837 massacre in which trader John Johnson lured a group of Apaches into his camp with promises of trade and instead had his men open fire, killing 20. The event helped solidify Apache resistance to American encroachment. Keelboat: also called a poleboat, this long, narrow riverboat is built with a small keel (elevated ridge or spine on the underside of the boat) in order to travel in shallow waters. Know-Nothings: formally known as the American Party, this nativist political party grew out of secretive clubs, such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, which strove to stop immigration and limit political participation of German and Irish Catholics. The term “Know-Nothing” originated in the secretive nature of the party whose members were said to respond to inquiries of the group’s activities with the reply, “I know nothing.” Laissez-faire: originated in 18th-century France; an economic theory that the capitalist system should be driven only by market forces and that government intervention should be as minimal as possible. Pure laissez-faire economics led to great disparity in the distribution of wealth in the late 19th century. Land in Trust: an arrangement whereby a person or entity agrees to hold ownership of a piece of land for the benefit of a second party; the Dawes Act stipulated that Indian lands would be held in trust for 25 years, ostensibly to protect Native people from speculators. Legislative Censure: formal procedure in which a government official is reprimanded by Congress.

Liberty Party: breaking away from the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 to form its own political party premised on the abolition of slavery, this group’s major historical contribution was its candidate’s victory in New York in 1844. Liberty candidate James G. Birney received 15,800 votes, many of which would have gone to Henry Clay, giving him the majority of electoral votes and thus winning the presidency over the actual victor, James K. Polk. Major Crimes Act: 1885 law that placed seven major crimes (including murder) under federal jurisdiction, even if they occurred on Indian reservations. It was one of the first legislative acts aimed directly at limiting tribal sovereignty established in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832. Masthead: portion of a publication, printed in a fixed position in each edition, listing organization’s information such as owner, place of publication, and statement of purpose. Matriarch: the most prominent or important female in a family or organization. Missouri Constitutional Convention: meetings held between 1861 and 1865 that formed a provisional state government after pro-Confederate governor Clairborne Fox Jackson refused to accept the state legislature’s vote against secession in 1861. In 1865, the convention abolished slavery in the state and approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Mulatto: a historically specific term, generally considered derogatory in a 21st-century North American context, used to denote a person who has both Anglo and African ancestry. In the 18th-century American South, the term could also be applied to persons of African and Native American descent. North West Company: fur trading company that competed with Hudson’s Bay Company for control of western Canada. Nullification: used to describe political policy that would allow states to veto federal tariffs they found unfavorable; generally refers to the Nullification Crisis of 1832, one of the precursors to the American Civil War, which pitted states’ rights advocates against those who believed in a stronger federal government. Old Southwest: term used after American Revolution to designate region west of the Appalachian Mountains and south of the Ohio River, which eventually became the states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. 100th Meridian: line of longitude that approximately separates an area of low annual precipitation to its west from wetter conditions to the east, thus marking an important ecological and cultural transition. For much of the 19th century, the line marked the beginning of what was thought to be the uninhabitable “Great American Desert.” Pahá Sapa: center of the Sioux universe known as Black Hills to Euro-American settlers; the region is spiritually significant for many Indian peoples. Panic of 1837: a financial crisis brought about by speculative lending practices, decline in cotton prices, and a collapsing land bubble. One of the primary ramifications was that many were willing to “Go West,” as newspaper editor Horace Greeley exhorted. Parfleche: a rawhide bag used by Native groups to store and carry food and other items.

Paxton Boys: group of vigilantes who became infamous for their unprovoked attacks on unarmed Conestoga Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1763. Placer Mining: the simplest mining process, which relies on water to separate heavy minerals from lighter sediment. “Play-off” Strategy: political and economic tactic of the 17th and 18th centuries in which Native leaders pitted potential European trading partners and allies against one another. This “play-off” was used by many groups including the Iroquois and Choctaw Confederations against Spanish, English, and French colonial powers. Plenary Power: legal authority of a governing body to exercise power while at the same time allowing no avenue for recourse. The United States established plenary power over Native peoples in United States v. Kagama (1886). Polygamy: the practice of having more than one wife. Pontiac’s Rebellion: popular name of pan-Indian uprising in the Ohio Valley in 1763 that was, at least partially, led by the Ottawa Indian Pontiac. Popular Sovereignty: political doctrine holding that government is created to carry out the will of the people. In an American context, the term is generally applied to a controversial proposal by Stephen A. Douglas that people living in the newly created Kansas Territory could decide through their legislature whether they would enter the Union as a free or slave-holding state. Preemptive Rights: a legal framework used by many colonial powers in North America and later the expanding American state, which gave potential settlers exclusive right to purchase or otherwise lawfully obtain land from indigenous peoples. Presidio: Spanish military fort; the creation of the first four forts was concurrent with the founding of missions at the same locations, founded for their explicit protection. Primogeniture: the legal requirement that fathers, upon death, pass their entire estates to their eldest sons or special lines of heirs. Reconstruction: refers to the period of American history between the end of the Civil War and 1877 (though some historians mark the beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863), in which Congress directed the reconstruction of Southern governance and society. Red Sticks: an English term for a group of Muscogee Creek people who led a resistance movement against American encroachment in the first decades of the 19th century. Made up of primary of those living in “Upper Towns,” the Red Sticks got their name from the color of their war clubs. Right of Deposit: the legal right to use a port for storing and transferring to oceangoing vessels goods destined for export. Safety Valve Theory: belief in the 19th century that acquiring western land would relieve unemployment pressure in the East. Saltpeter: the natural mineral source of the chemical potassium nitrate, it is the key ingredient in gunpowder.

Scrip: substitute for legal tender in places where regular money is unavailable; generally given as a form of credit. Second Continental Congress: representatives of the colonies and later the fledging United States (1775–1789), responsible for conducting the American Revolutionary War and adopting the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation. Second National Bank: modeled after Alexander Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States, it was created in 1816 to regulate public credit issued by private banks; opposing the national bank became one of the hallmarks of Jacksonian Democrats. Seer Stones: physical rocks that, according to Mormon theology, helped Joseph Smith receive directions from God. The stones, named Urim and Thummim, helped Smith “translate” the golden plates he reportedly found in New York in 1823. Sierra Club: organization begun by John Muir in 1892 for the purpose of protecting “wild” places in the American West. The club was foundational in the establishment of many of the national parks in the American West. Sluice Box: tool used in placer mining in which water is channeled across ridges at the base of a box, causing water to eddy into small basins, slowing the current so that gold may settle and be collected. Sodality: military societies of indigenous groups in which membership is determined by criteria other than kinship. Sooner: person who claimed land in what was then Indian Territory before the start of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush. Stereograph: cards that consisted of two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical prints, paired to produce the illusion of a single three-dimensional image when viewed through a device called a stereoscope. Photography of all types was important in promoting western expansion. Subsidiary: company in which more than half of its stock is owned by another corporation. Surveyor General: military title given to the official responsible for overseeing territorial surveys. Sutter’s Mill: sawmill owned by John Sutter famous for its association with the beginning of the California gold rush in 1848. By 1855, the gold rush was responsible for bringing more than 300,000 people from around the globe to California. Syllabary: a set of written symbols that represent syllables or sounds that make up words in a language. The most famous American example was the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah in the 1820s. Termination: federal policy in the 1950s that sought to “terminate” the legal standing of Indian tribes. Theocracy: a form of government in which a deity is officially recognized as the civil ruler and official policy is governed by officials regarded as divinely guided, or is pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religion or religious group. Tintypes: an early form of print photography that saw its heyday in the 1860s. It was made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated in a light-sensitive emulsion. Photography of all types was

important in promoting western expansion. “Touching the Pen”: phrase used by many Native groups to denote participation in a treaty. Topographic Map: map depicting elevations, landforms, and waterways. Travois: frame structure made by lashing poles together, used by many Plains Indian groups for transporting goods and skins. Treaty of Fort Wise: 1861 treaty entered into between a small number of Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho Indians and the United States in which much of the land designated for the tribes in 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie was ceded to back to the federal government. Most Cheyennes and Arapahos disapproved of the treaty, and their various responses led to the Colorado War of 1864 and the Sand Creek Massacre. Trust Responsibility: legal principle that guides U.S. congressional policies and judicial decisions toward Native people, which holds that the federal government must look after the welfare of Native people; first articulated by Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831). Ungulate: meaning roughly “hoofed animal,” it classifies a diverse group of large mammals that use the tips of their toes to sustain their body weight. Unicameral: a form of government that consists of only one legislative body or parliament. Unilineal Descent Systems: form of kinship in which lineage is defined by one parent; either patrilineal or matrilineal system. Upper Louisiana: administrative district created after the sale of Louisiana Territory to the United States, which later became part of the state of Missouri. Victorian: relating to the years of rule by Great Britain’s Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the term implied a set of cultural values based on tradition and morality that many found oppressive. Virginia Military Reserve: approximately 4.2-million-acre area of land in what is now the state of Ohio that was reserved by Virginia to use as payment for veterans of the American Revolutionary War. Wampum: literally meaning white-strings or white-shells, beads derived from shellfish that formed a key role in intercultural relations in the American Northeast, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. West Point: term used to denote the U.S. Military Academy that was founded in 1802 in West Point, New York.

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Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Viking, 2010. Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Otis, D. S. The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007. Powers, Thomas. The Killing of Crazy Horse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Robbins, William G. Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994. Rohrbough, Malcolm J. Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Satz, Ronald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. Schubert, Frank N. Vanguard of Expansion: Army Engineers in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1819–1879. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980. Shipps, Jan. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Thompson, Gerald. The Army and the Navajo: The Bosque Redondo Reservation Experiment 1863–1868. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1976. Tonkovich, Nicole. The Allotment Plot: Alice C. Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, and Nez Perce Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Trennert, Robert A. Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846–51. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975. Tucker, Robert W., and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Turner, Frederick Jackson. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays. Edited by John Mack Faragher. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Unrau, William, and H. Craig Miner. The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution, 1857–1871. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1978. Unruh, John D. The Plains Across: The Overland Immigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Utley, Robert. A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Watson, Blake A. Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Weeks, William Earl. The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Vol. 1. Dimensions of the Early American Empire, 1754–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. West, Elliot. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Topeka: University of Kansas Press, 1998. West, Elliot. The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story. New York: Oxford, 2011. West, Elliot. The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. White, Richard. “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (1978): 319–332. Wishart, David. An Unspeakable Sadness; The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

Chronology: 1868–1945

1868–1878 1890 1892 1892

1892 1893 1895

1895

1895 1896 1896 1897

1897 1898–1900 1898

Ten Years’ War in Cuba, independence movement that served as forerunner of the 1895 insurrection. Captain Alfred T. Mahan publishes The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. Cuban Revolutionary Party is formed in New York City and Philadelphia, soon spreads to Florida. Formal request is made to Spanish administrators of the Philippines for reforms. The appeal is denied and the organization promoting reform is banned by Spanish authorities. Andres Bonifacio forms the Katipunan, a secret brotherhood whose mission is Philippine independence from Spain through armed revolutionary struggle. World’s Columbian Exposition takes place in Chicago. United States compels Great Britain to accept favorable resolution of Venezuelan boundary dispute, reasserting the terms of the Monroe Doctrine and hegemonic control of the hemisphere. Revolutionary movement for Independencia o muerte (Independence or death) established in Cuba and suppressed by Spanish authorities. President Grover Cleveland proclaims U.S. neutrality in the Cuban fight for independence. José Martí and Máximo Gómez Baez return to Cuba to fight for independence. Cuban War of Independence begins; lasts until 1898. U.S. Congress calls for recognition of Cuban revolutionary movement as legitimate belligerents and for supporting their goal of independence from Spain. The Grito de Balintawak calls for revolutionary insurrection against the Spanish in the Philippines. Armed struggle begins, spreads throughout the country. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World begin printing stories fanning anti-Spanish sentiment and calling for U.S. support of the Cuban rebels. Following William McKinley’s inauguration in March, Theodore Roosevelt is appointed assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy. Boxer Rebellion takes place in China. Spain grants limited autonomy to Cuba.

1898 1898

1898

1898

1898

1898 1898

1898 1898 1898

1898 1898 1898 1898 1898 1898 1899 1899

The New York Journal publishes Spanish minister Enrique Dupuy de Lóme’s letter criticizing President McKinley. On February 15 the USS Maine explodes in Havana harbor. A subsequent U.S. inquiry in late March finds an explosion caused the sinking of the Maine. The U.S. government issues ultimatum to Spain to leave Cuba. New York Journal on April 4 calls for U.S. entry into the war in Cuba. One week later, President McKinley asks Congress for U.S. intervention on the side of the rebels. Congress concurs but refuses to recognize the Cubans as belligerents. On April 19 Congress adopts a Joint Resolution for war with Spain. Included is the Teller Amendment, named after Colorado senator Henry M. Teller, denying U.S. intention to control Cuba and pledging to leave upon the conclusion of the war. President McKinley on April 21 orders a blockade of Cuba, and Spanish forces in Santiago de Cuba mine Guantánamo Bay. Within four days a state of war exists between the two countries. On May 1 Commodore George Dewey leads U.S. forces in defeating the Spanish squadron in Manila Bay, the Philippines. In May a joint resolution is introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives calling for the annexation of Hawai‘i. Annexation resolutions are passed in June. Also in May, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long issues orders to the commander of the USS Charleston to capture Guam on the way to Manila. Emilio Aguinaldo returns to the Philippine Islands from exile in Hong Kong. Finding chaos in the islands, Aguinaldo declares a dictatorial government. United States sends first U.S. forces from San Francisco to the Philippines. In June, U.S. forces land at Guantánamo, Cuba. Within weeks U.S. and Cuban forces defeat the Spanish at San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill and achieve final victory at Santiago de Cuba. On July 17, the U.S. occupation of Cuba begins and lasts until May 20, 1902. Philippines declare independence from Spain. President McKinley determines not to return the Philippines to Spain. That summer, the American Anti-Imperialist League organizes with a prominent membership that includes Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. In August a peace protocol ending hostilities in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines between the United States and Spain is signed. Senator Albert Beveridge gives the “March of the Flag” address to a group of Indiana Republicans. In December, Spain and the United States sign the 1898 Treaty of Peace in Paris, formally ending the Spanish-American War. President McKinley directs U.S. forces to use force if necessary to establish U.S. sovereignty over the Philippines. Emilio Aguinaldo declared president of the Philippine Republic following constitutional convention; United States refuses to recognize the government. United States claims and takes naval command of Wake Island.

1899

1899 1899 1899–1913 1900 1901 1901

1902

1902 1903

1904 1904–1905 1905 1906–1909 1907–1909 1909–1912 1912 1912–1933 1912–1941 1914 1914 1914

1914

Following the killing of three Filipinos by U.S. forces, the Philippine Republic declares war on the United States. Battle of Manila, largest of the PhilippineAmerican War, takes place. Treaty of Paris ratified in the U.S. Senate. U.S. secretary of state John Hay sends the first of the “Open Door Notes” seeking U.S. access to free trade rights in China. Moro Rebellion between Philippine indigenous ethnic groups and the U.S. military. General Arthur MacArthur Jr. becomes military governor and William Howard Taft arrives as civilian governor-general of the Philippines. Emilio Aguinaldo surrenders to U.S. forces and declares allegiance to the United States. Passage of the Platt Amendment by the U.S. Congress, subsequently accepted by Cuba. Largely written by Elihu Root, the Platt Amendment authorized U.S. military intervention in the island nation until revoked in 1934. Philippine-American War ends. After more than three years of brutal guerrilla warfare, more than 4,200 U.S. soldiers, 20,000 Filipino soldiers, and 200,000 Filipino civilians are dead. Philippine Organic Act is signed, authorizing the administration of the U.S. territorial Insular Government governing the islands until 1935. Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty signed by U.S. and Panamanian officials authorizing construction of the Panama Canal and granting U.S. sovereignty in the Panama Canal Zone. Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine firmly asserts U.S. hegemonic control of the Caribbean. Russo-Japanese War. U.S. Marines land in Honduras. Under Platt Amendment authority, U.S. forces occupy Cuba, directing its affairs. U.S. Navy’s “Great White Fleet” circumnavigates the globe, December 16, 1907– February 22, 1909. U.S. president William Howard Taft promotes the policy of dollar diplomacy. United Fruit Company begins operations in Honduras. U.S. Marines’ intervention in Nicaragua (except for brief interruption in 1925). U.S. forces deployed to China to protect American interests amid growing fears of Communist revolution. Nearly 6,000 troops in China in 1927. Panama Canal opens. U.S. forces invade and occupy Veracruz, Mexico. On June 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria-Hungary’s throne, and his wife, Sophie, are assassinated by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip while the couple is visiting Sarajevo, Bosnia. The assassination sets in motion the events leading to World War I. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson proclaims neutrality. Tarzan of the Apes is published in book form.

1915 1915 1915

1915–1934 1916 1916–1917

1916–1924 1917

1917

1917 1917

1917 1917 1917

1917 1918 1918 1918 1918 1918

Women’s Peace Party and Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace formed. “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” becomes a popular song, influential in the pacifist movement attempting to prevent U.S. intervention in World War I. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson warns Germany it will be held accountable for loss of American lives due to U-boat attacks. In May, the British civilian ocean liner Lusitania is torpedoed and sinks, killing 1,198 persons, including 128 Americans. U.S. military intervention in Haiti. U.S. president Wilson warns Germany about unrestricted submarine warfare. His campaign declares, “He kept us out of war,” and he wins a close reelection. During the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa leads a raid into Columbus, New Mexico. U.S. major general John “Jack” D. Pershing then leads a “punitive” expeditionary force of 4,800 men in an unsuccessful attempt to capture him in northern Mexico. U.S. Marines occupy Dominican Republic. In January, British intercept Zimmermann Telegram in which Germany offers to help Mexico recover territory lost to the United States in exchange for support in First World War. In February, Germany declares submarine blockade of Britain. U.S. Senate refuses to grant President Wilson power to wage unrestricted naval warfare against Germany. In April, President Wilson asks Congress for declaration of war against Germany. Committee on Public Information established, along with United States adopting Selective Service, initiating forced conscription for military service in World War I. Congress passes the Espionage Act of 1917. First American Expeditionary Forces land in France. In Russia, Bolshevik Socialists overthrow provisional Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky government. New government signs armistice with Germany. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin condemns World War I for the imperialist objectives of its belligerents. In 1917, he publishes Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. U.S. intervention in World War I leads to harshly repressive attacks on the Industrial Workers of the World and other antiwar organizations and individuals. President Woodrow Wilson declares his Fourteen Points as the blueprint for a global permanent peace at the conclusion of World War I. U.S. forces help stop major German offensive. Sedition Act is passed by the U.S. Congress. Eugene V. Debs makes antiwar speech in Canton, Ohio, in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, World War I ends with the signing of the Armistice. Paris Peace Conference follows at Versailles, where

U.S. president Wilson is hailed for his messianic vision of global peace outlined in the Fourteen Points. 1918 1919 1919–1920 1920–1921 1920 1922 1923 1927 1928 1933 1933 1935–1937 1936 1936–1939 1938 1938–1941 1939 1939

1940

1940–1941 1941

U.S. forces land in Panama to defend United Fruit interests. Schenck v. United States decided in U.S. Supreme Court. U.S. forces participate in the civil war in Russia, which fails to overthrow the Bolsheviks. U.S. forces intervene in Guatemala, help support coup d’etat. The U.S. Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles with the Lodge Reservations. Washington Naval Conference aimed at naval disarmament held in Washington, D.C. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes renounces the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Roosevelt Corollary repudiated by U.S. government. Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of solving geopolitical conflict is signed by the United States, Germany, and France. New U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt announces “Good Neighbor” Policy toward Latin America. Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Nazi Germany. Neutrality Acts are passed by Congress. Nye Commission Report is issued, charging that the profiteering of munitions companies helped lead the United States into World War I. Spanish Civil War; United States remains officially neutral with Americans deeply divided. Mexico nationalizes its oil industry, including many U.S. oil corporation investments. The Empire of Japan territorially expands throughout the South Pacific and South Asia, threatening U.S. access to free trade and economically vital natural resources. World War II begins; the United States is neutral but President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepares the nation for war. Physicists and Leó Szilárd advise President Roosevelt to explore the possibility of developing a nuclear fission weapon for possible use against Nazi Germany, which they warn may also be conducting research for an atomic bomb. It is the beginning of the Manhattan Project. United States establishes diplomatic presence in Saudi Arabia. King Abdulaziz allows United States to construct airfields on Saudi soil, and U.S. oil companies begin to eye oil fields in the country. America First Committee, pressing Roosevelt not to intervene in World War II, organizes and generates support across the country. Time-Life publishing magnate and internationalist Henry Luce publishes his vision of an “American Century” in Life.

1941 1941 1942

1942 1942 1943 1944 1945 1945 1945 1945 1945

Lend-Lease Act “to Further Promote the Defense of the United States” is passed in March. Pearl Harbor is attacked on December 7. The United States declares war on Japan the next day and on Germany on December 11. The first of the seven award-winning films in the documentary series Why We Fight, produced by Frank Capra, is released to bolster American morale in World War II. The Japanese seize the Aleutian islands of Kiska and Attu in June. Northwest Defense Projects commence with the first stage of the Alaska-Canada Highway. Tehran Conference is held. Bretton Woods Conference is held in July. President Roosevelt meets with Saudi Arabian king Abdulaziz aboard U.S. Navy cruiser Quincy. Nazi Germany surrenders in April. Atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August; Japanese surrender and the end of World War II follow. Yalta and Potsdam conferences are held. Ho Chi Minh declares the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

1. Spanish-American and PhilippineAmerican Wars

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In the 1890s, an extraordinary confluence of forces combined to elevate the United States to the status of global imperial power. First, the imperial colonialism of European nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as Japan’s newfound territorial expansion in the late 19th century provide the global context within which to see the rise of America’s own overseas ambitions. A number of influential intellectuals and other elites believed that the United States was well positioned to take its place as an imperial force alongside Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—and in doing so would enjoy the economic benefits of raw materials, new markets, and cheap labor that accrued to all colonial powers. By the mid-1890s, expanding investments by large-scale American agribusiness operations in places like Hawai‘i and Spanish-controlled Cuba pointed toward deepening economic engagement overseas and, inexorably, the military power to protect those interests. Simultaneously with the colonial scramble of European powers, the influential American strategist and champion of naval power Captain Alfred T. Mahan (1840–1914) was arguing for a buildup of U.S. naval strength. Mahan theorized that the nation’s surplus production demanded access to overseas ports and new markets, as well as strategically located colonial territories that could provide raw materials and serve as refueling stations for U.S. ships and eventually markets themselves. This imperial vision required a merchant marine fleet to deliver American goods and a large navy to protect it. Proponents of American imperialism like Mahan, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy, and future assistant secretary of the navy and U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt successfully pushed for a redirection of American sea power away from the defense of coastal waters that relied on lightly armed cruisers, and toward a larger fleet emphasizing battleships to rival the great imperial navies of Europe. Congress was persuaded to accelerate a navy modernization program and as a result, from 1889 to 1900 the U.S. Navy moved from the 12th largest in the world to the third. The emerging consensus for a muscular U.S. internationalism coincided with a severe economic depression at home that triggered volatile labor-capital conflict and social disruption, producing fears of a second civil war. Grim economic conditions made radical ideologies such as socialism increasingly appealing and brought growing strength for labor unions, the strongest third-party political movement (Populism) in the nation’s history, and rising demands for protective legislative reform. Although most big businesses preferred tariff and other policy changes as a means of protecting overseas investments, many politicians came to believe that territorial expansion would bring economic boom and the added bonus of calming domestic turmoil and marginalizing the radical impulses then gaining strength in American society.

Further stoking interest was the declaration in 1890 by the U.S. Census Bureau that the western frontier—the lifeblood of two centuries of American expansionist ideology—was now officially “closed.” In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the entire basis of American democracy, its endlessly expanding possibilities, and America’s national character had been built on the process of westward movement. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” made an overseas imperial extension of territory not simply desirable, but seemingly essential. In addition, some Manifest Destiny proponents never surrendered their belief that additional regions of the hemisphere belonged in the American fold. Moreover, extending the Frontier Thesis abroad through armed conflict reinforced the thinking of male elites like Roosevelt who asserted that America’s engagement in the armed struggle for world power would reinvigorate a once-“virile” culture that was growing “effeminate” and ensure the survival of the nation. Turner delivered his address at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago commemorating the 400th anniversary of the landing of Christopher Columbus and showcasing America as one of the great nations of the world. The fair’s architectural landscape was dominated by the monumental “White City” of Beaux Arts classically styled buildings that were both inspiring and imposing, suggestive of empire. Further, the fair was suffused with social Darwinism—a racially charged ideology that had been used by European nations to help justify the colonization of Africa. Fairgoers could walk the Midway Plaisance and view an ethnological display that presented the whole of humanity through an imperial, racially hierarchical lens. By the turn of the century the mindset for overseas adventurism had thus been well cultivated in American society. And in combination with the ongoing socioeconomic disruptions, it was arguably only a matter of time before a confrontation somewhere in the hemisphere would inaugurate the age of overseas empire. It turned out to be Cuba. Situated less than 100 miles from the coast of Florida, the Spanish colony had been effectively exempt from the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Cuban insurgents began fighting in the late 1860s for their independence from Spain. The “Ten Years’ War” (1868–1878) was costly for both sides but ended in defeat for the rebels. The United States in those years was Cuba’s strongest trade partner, absorbing more than three-quarters of the total exports from the island in the 1880s. Nearly 100 percent of the sugar crop came to the United States by 1895. The Cuban insurrection shattered the island’s economy, driving down prices and opening the door further to deeper U.S. investment in key sectors, including sugar, tobacco, mining, and infrastructure. The U.S.-led modernization also served to supplant many of the Spanish Cuban elites with new American economic overlords. Cuba was therefore already economically dependent on the United States at the time the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Leading directly to that dramatic turning point was the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). The political movement for Cuba’s independence had been gathering momentum for decades. At the end of the Ten Years’ War, colonial officials deported to Spain José Martí—a revolutionary poet, strategist, and national hero—desperately hoping to silence the revolt. Soon Martí was in the United States, organizing the Cuban junta and by 1892 the Cuban Revolutionary Party: an amalgamation of political refugees and other Cuban and Puerto Rican nationals building political support for a liberation of both Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain that would not end in annexation by the United States—a position adopted by many exiles, but fiercely resisted by Martí. By 1895 economic conditions in Cuba had badly deteriorated, helping to transform the liberation movement into what Martí declared as the Cuban Provisional Government. Martí planned an invasion of the island he hoped would incite a decisive uprising of Cubans. Martí was killed in the first weeks of fighting, which descended into a brutal guerrilla war against 200,000 Spanish soldiers. After efforts to

isolate the insurgency proved unsuccessful, the Spanish prime minister sent the notorious General Valeriano Weyler to crush the rebellion. Weyler’s strategy relied on depriving the rebels of military assistance and popular support from the people by rounding up Cubans by the thousands and “reconcentrating” them into camps strategically located near military garrisons. There they died by the thousands, mostly from starvation and disease. Not only did Weyler’s policy not achieve a military victory, it further galvanized support among Americans for Cuban independence. In 1896, President Grover Cleveland proclaimed a policy of neutrality and nonannexation of Cuba and futilely offered the United States as a mediator in the conflict. Congress, by contrast, passed a resolution recognizing the Cubans as a legitimate belligerent force and supporting their independence. That sentiment was a clear reflection of public opinion that moved steadily toward U.S. intervention—helped by the American press. Continued reports of atrocities committed by Weyler’s forces, many exaggerated, filled the hugely influential and rival leading newspapers of New York City—Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The so-called “yellow journalism” of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers produced a seemingly endless stream of horror stories detailing in lurid fashion the alleged savagery of Spanish troops against the underdog Cubans. The papers’ jingoistic editorializing often drew comparisons between the Cuban struggle and that of the American colonists of the 1770s. William McKinley’s election in 1896 changed little, as the new president maintained the neutral position of the United States. Reflecting the interests of most big businesses that were invested in the island, McKinley preferred Spanish restoration of stability to U.S. intervention in Cuba. But the longer the war dragged on, the more U.S. business concerns on the island were being hurt. A McKinley emissary sent to Cuba confirmed the desperately grim situation. McKinley publicly protested the Spanish Crown’s “uncivilized and inhuman” conduct of the war, but did not condemn its colonial occupation of the island. Late in 1897, a new government in Spain brought hope for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Madrid recalled Weyler and offered a modified autonomy and other reforms to Cuba. However, within weeks, Spanish military officials in Havana rioted against their own government’s new policy, dashing any hopes in the McKinley administration that Spain could restore stability to the island. Newspapers decried the “anarchy” consuming Cuba. The president ordered the USS Maine to Havana to protect American lives and interests. The ship had been sent to Key West, Florida, months before as relations with Spain continued to deteriorate. That decision was part of a larger global deployment and strategic repositioning of U.S. ships in other regions where Spain’s hold on its last colonial possessions was increasingly tenuous. Two final events led the nation to war. On February 9, 1898, the New York Journal published a letter purloined from the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lome. Though private correspondence to a friend, in the letter de Lome demeaned President McKinley as a “weak … would-be politician.” The sensationalized account of the letter further inflamed the nationalistic war-hungry atmosphere, as many Americans demanded a bellicose response to what seemed an insult to the American president. More significantly, late in the evening of February 15, 1898, a powerful explosion sank the Maine in Havana Harbor, killing 266 sailors. McKinley promised an investigation and encouraged a tempered response even as he sent to Congress a $50 million request for military appropriations that was immediately approved. When the official investigation reported in late March that an internal explosion had sunk the Maine, most Americans naturally assumed the Spanish were responsible. Although most investigations have since found the explosion to be the result of an internal accident, most Americans in 1898 were not in the mood for patient inquiry. The president still hoped for a peaceful solution, but the

jingoistic atmosphere pressured him to deliver a forceful response. On March 27 he cabled his terms for avoiding war to Spain, including the key condition of Cuban independence, which the Spanish reply simply ignored. McKinley’s subsequent war message to Congress still held out hope for a negotiated resolution, but on April 19, the body passed a resolution declaring Cuban independence and authorizing military force. Six days later the United States formally declared war. As a naval blockade of the island commenced, an amendment offered by Colorado senator Henry Teller stipulated that the United States would not assert control over Cuba.

THE ART OF IMPERIALISM: EDWARD MORAN’S RETURN OF THE CONQUERORS (1899) Return of the Conquerors is the title of a painting by Edward Moran (1829–1901), one of the great maritime-naval artists in American art history. Completed in 1899, Moran’s painting was one of a series of 13 paintings executed by the artist that depict, as he titled the series, The Marine History of the United States. Moran did not choose the number 13 by happenstance. Our national symbols are suffused with the motif: the original colonies and stars on the flag numbered 13; 13 warships constituted the first navy; the national seal features an eagle grasping 13 arrows in its talons and 13 leaves on its olive branch; there were 13 rattles on the snake of the first American flag, with the motto “Don’t tread on me.” The series represents various episodes in the seagoing exploration and expansion of the nation—beginning with Leif Eriksson and Christopher Columbus, continuing through the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, and finally Return of the Conquerors, the climactic final work illustrating America’s recent imperial triumph in the Spanish-American War. Return of the Conquerors depicts the arrival in New York Harbor of the majestic, victorious U.S. naval fleet on September 29, 1899. The viewer is inspired by the sight of both the Atlantic and Pacific squadrons of the U.S. Navy steaming dead ahead—toward what had become the second largest city in the world, the metropolitan-financial capital of a great imperial power. New York City’s presence is signified by the faint visage of the Statue of Liberty in the background. The USS Olympia, made famous by its role in the Battle of Manila Bay, leads the squadron. Helping to dress the Brooklyn is a signal flag reading, “The Maine is Avenged and Cuba is Free.”

The conflict in Cuba lasted just 10 weeks—a “splendid little war,” said ambassador to Great Britain and future secretary of state John Hay. The quick victory came despite the fact that when war was declared, the U.S. Army numbered fewer than 30,000 men. McKinley’s call for 125,000 volunteers was met by nearly a quarter-million men as National Guard units spilled onto the island and helped the Cuban insurgents to quickly overwhelm the Spanish. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who had been advocating and helping to plan for war in Cuba for several years, joined the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry under the command of Colonel Leonard Wood—a unit that soon became famously known as “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” once the future president took command. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away lay the Philippines—for 330 years under the yoke of Spanish colonial rule. As in Cuba, the Crown was facing revolt. The first armed encounter of the Philippine Revolution took place in August 1896. After just a few months of conflict, a fragile truce between Filipino rebels and colonial authorities ended (as with Martí) in the exile of revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo and his followers. When the United States declared war on Spain, McKinley ordered Commodore George Dewey and a fleet of seven ships to the Philippines. On May 1, Dewey stunningly defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in just a few hours. Within days, Emilio Aguinaldo returned to the Philippines. On June 12, he issued the Philippine Declaration of Independence and in late July established a revolutionary government. Aguinaldo’s forces controlled the main island of Luzon, except for Manila and Cavite. Following Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay, the U.S. War Department raised and deployed to the archipelago an expeditionary army of 11,000 to take Manila. On August 13, American military

officials accepted Spain’s surrender—with no participation from the Philippine revolutionaries. The signing on December 13, 1898, of the Treaty of Paris brought a formal end to the Spanish-American War. Along with Cuba and the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island were also ceded to the United States in exchange for $20 million. The same watershed year of 1898 also saw the annexation of Hawai‘i, bringing an end to the long struggle to wrest control of the islands by American businessmen and missionaries, and providing American naval ships with a strategically located fueling station in the Pacific. Independence would be a long time coming for both Cuba and the Philippines. Although the United States did not annex Cuba, the Platt Amendment, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1901 and subsequently imposed upon the Cuban constitution, gave the United States the right to intervene militarily in order to defend the island—presumably from another colonization attempt from a Western European power—and for the “protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Coupled with an infusion of American investments in agriculture and mining, the sweeping language of the Platt Amendment paved the way for a series of U.S. military interventions and occupations and U.S.-supported dictatorships for the next halfcentury. In addition, the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay was established following the war. Holding the Philippines would be a more complicated and bloody affair. Because the sprawling archipelago of the Philippines was halfway around the world, and with Americans having little identification with the anti-imperial movement of Aguinaldo, the idea of taking on the Philippines as an American colony or territory generated fervent debate. President McKinley agonized over what to do: returning the islands to the Spanish was unthinkable, as was the notion of turning them over to another imperial power. Granting Filipinos any form of sovereignty seemed equally absurd, as they were clearly “unfit” for any sort of self-government. In the end, McKinley—as he told the story to a group of ministers —received a divine message from “Almighty God” to settle on the annexation of the Philippines, promising to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them.” McKinley was far from alone. In the midst of the bloody Philippine-American War that was to follow, one of the most bombastic proponents of American imperialism, Senator Albert Beveridge, urged the nation to embrace its role “in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.” On the other side stood the American Anti-Imperialist League, whose membership featured such luminaries as Jane Addams and Mark Twain. Organized in 1898, their platform declared “that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free.” For their part, most Filipinos held the same desire for sovereign independence they had long sought from Spain. On February 4, 1899, fighting broke out between American and Filipino soldiers, and in June the First Philippine Republic declared war on the United States. The Philippine-American War would drag on for three long years of often-savage fighting. The more protracted Moro Rebellion between U.S. forces and Moro Muslim peoples lasted until 1913. The Philippine-American War would end in victory for the United States, but it came at tremendous cost: 6,165 U.S. military personnel and more than 34,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives, and at least 200,000 Filipino civilians died in the conflict. Atrocities were committed on both sides. The Anti-Imperialist League publicized reports from U.S. soldiers of having engaged in torture and the destruction of whole villages inhabited by women and children. Such accounts shot through the debate in both directions—justified by proponents of the war as necessary against an “uncivilized” savage population, while also fueling the anti-imperialists’ campaign to end the war and the occupation of the archipelago. The American victory brought the Philippines into the American sphere as an unincorporated territory with restricted self-government under the Philippine Organic Act of 1902. During the first years of the occupation, two American-led “Philippine Commissions” effectively served as the governing body, with

American leadership itself shifting between military and civilian authority. Additional measures followed in 1916 and 1934 granting incremental steps toward the eventual independence that came following World War II. Historians mourn the general amnesia that characterizes the national memory of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, despite their significance in the history of U.S. foreign relations. Whether or not Harvard professor and anti-imperialist William James was correct in his caustic declaration that America would “puke up its ancient soul” by becoming an imperial power, it is undeniable that these two conflicts produced a profound change that went much deeper than the material acquisition of its first overseas territories. As the Washington Post declared on the eve of the war, “a new consciousness … of strength—and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength…. Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting” had come upon the American people. As events in the coming century would confirm, once the “taste of empire [was] in the mouth of the people” and they had crossed the threshold of this “strange destiny,” there would be no turning back.

African American Military Units Prior to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and subsequent Philippine-American War, African Americans had participated in every American war since the Revolution. Black soldiers enthusiastically fought for their country, motivated by a sense of patriotic duty, the desire for adventure and travel, and the ability to earn a steady salary. In addition, many African Americans, soldiers and civilians, hoped that black participation in such conflicts would help advance the goal of political and social equality that had been so long denied. While military service did provide opportunities for some, black soldiers were also often denied promotions. African American regiments were almost always led by white officers, as the military denigrated the courage and initiative of black soldiers. Black military service did allow African Americans to make claims to citizenship and equality, however, and black veterans were integral proponents of civil rights. In 1866, Congress passed a law mandating the maintenance of four black infantry and two cavalry regiments, the Ninth and Tenth Calvaries. After a reorganization of the nation’s armed forces in 1869, the four black infantry regiments were consolidated into two, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantries. Over the next three decades, these regiments served primarily in the West, fighting Native American tribes, including the Apaches, Kiowas, Comanches, and Cheyennes, and patrolling the Mexican border. The men of the Tenth Cavalry were dubbed “Buffalo Soldiers” by their Indian adversaries, and the moniker eventually came to refer to all the black regiments.

The Ninth U.S. Cavalry, the famous regiment of African American soldiers, ca. 1898. During the Spanish-American and PhilippineAmerican Wars, service by African American soldiers divided the black community. Most believed that service to the nation would help “prove” their worthiness for freedom and equal opportunity at home, while many African American leaders, newspapers, and soldiers condemned the military operations as imperialist and suffused with racism. (Library of Congress)

When war broke out with Spain in 1898 over the fate of Cuba, the government created 10 black volunteer regiments, known as “immunes” because they were believed to be immune to tropical diseases like yellow fever. Black Americans responded enthusiastically, viewing the conflict as an opportunity for adventure, economic gain, and a chance to demonstrate patriotism and bravery. For some black soldiers in the regular army regiments, however, participation in the Spanish-American War was a painful reminder that they were not considered to be the equals of white soldiers. After serving bravely during the Battle for the San Juan Heights, the soldiers of the Tenth Infantry were decried as cowardly by Theodore Roosevelt in his serialized account of the war. Roosevelt declared that the white officers of the Tenth had been killed, and that black soldiers had begun to drift away from the fighting, until he threatened to shoot any man who went to the rear. In a letter refuting the charges of cowardice, Presley Holliday, a member of the Tenth Cavalry, reported that Roosevelt was informed that the black soldiers had been ordered to the rear and had even apologized to the men of the regiment. While the U.S. Army was fighting Spain in Cuba, the U.S. Navy was halfway around the world, defeating the Spanish fleet in Manila. As part of the 1898 peace settlement with Spain, the United States gained the colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. When Filipino nationalists demanded independence and refused to accept America as a new colonial authority, the four black regular regiments were sent to the islands, as well as two regiments of black volunteers, to quell the revolution and pacify the population. At the order of William Howard Taft, the governor-general of the Philippines, all of the black regiments were removed in 1902. However, both the Twenty-Fourth Infantry and the Ninth Cavalry returned to serve in the Philippines. While the resistance was largely quelled by the spring of 1902, pockets of resistance continued to engage U.S. troops for more than a decade. The annexation of the Philippines provoked an anti-imperial response from many Americans, including a number of influential African Americans. While some viewed the conflict as another opportunity to demonstrate patriotism and enact masculinity, others linked the rising racial violence at home with the imperial war abroad. In letters home, black soldiers in the Philippines noted that white soldiers even used the same racial epithets to refer to African Americans and Filipinos. The conflict between pursuing self-interest and empathy with Filipinos as an oppressed colored people resulted in ambivalent and often contradictory attitudes toward the empire.

The African American regiments were often subject to poor treatment and discrimination in the United States, both from the army in which they served and from the communities where they were stationed. As the Indian Wars drew to a close, African American regiments were increasingly stationed in nearby towns and cities. Even outside the South, where Jim Crow was becoming the law of the land by the 1890s, white residents were often hostile to the presence of black soldiers. The tension between local communities and black regiments at times erupted into violent confrontation. The most infamous altercation occurred in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906. In the Brownsville Affair, soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, who returned from the Philippines in 1902, were accused of killing a white bartender and wounding a policeman. Tensions had been running high between the regiment and the white residents of the town as a result of the discriminatory treatment black soldiers had received. When the men of the regiment insisted that they did not know who had participated, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered three companies, 167 soldiers in all, dishonorably discharged. Black soldiers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines certainly suffered from racial discrimination and even violence at the hands of white officers and soldiers. Still, many black soldiers reported economic opportunities unavailable at home, as well as acceptance and respect from the native population among whom they lived. Some soldiers chose to marry Filipino women and to remain in the islands for the rest of their lives. African American regiments continued to serve in American wars, including World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Black regiments began to be merged with white regiments after President Harry Truman issued an executive order in 1948 calling for the integration of the armed forces. Sarah Steinbock-Pratt See also: Roosevelt, Theodore, and the Rough Riders; Primary Documents: “Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts” (October 3, 1899)

Further Reading Gatewood, Willard B., Jr. Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Gatewood, Willard B., Jr. “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Mitchell, Michele. “‘The Black Man’s Burden’: African Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood 1890–1910.” International Review of Social History 44 Supplement (1999): 77–99. Ngozi-Brown, Scott. “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow and Social Relations.” Journal of Negro History 82, no 1 (Winter, 1997): 42–53.

Aguinaldo, Emilio (1869–1964) Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy was a Filipino general, independence leader, politician, and president of the First Philippine Republic. Born March 22, 1869, to a wealthy Chinese-mestizo family in Kawit (Cavite Province), Emilio Aguinaldo was the seventh of eight children. He left school at 13 and his father, Carlos Aguinaldo y Jamir, a gobernadorcillo (town mayor), died when he was 14. In 1896, he married Hilaria del Rosario, who later established the Hijas de la Revolucion (Daughters of the Revolution) organization that would raise funds for medicine and other supplies for wounded soldiers of the Philippine Revolution. In 1895, Emilio Aguinaldo joined the Katipunan, a secret organization established in 1892 to fight for the independence of the Philippines from Spain. Known as “Magdalo,” he became its leader in Cavite Province. In August 1896, the Katipunan started the Philippine Revolution and the armed uprising. While

the Katipunan troops were defeated by Spaniards in other places, Emilio Aguinaldo, who was made a general, successfully led his troops in Cavite Province. Emilio Aguinaldo came into conflict with Andres Bonifacio, the Katipunan supreme leader. In March 1897, the two Katipunan factions met in Tejeros and elected the former as president of the revolutionary government. Suspecting a possibly fraudulent poll, Andres Bonifacio refused to recognize Emilio Aguinaldo’s election. But two months later, he and his younger brother were arrested and charged with sedition and treason. On Emilio Aguinaldo’s orders, they were executed on May 10, 1897. As a consequence of enduring internal rivalries, Emilio Aguinaldo’s forces were repeatedly defeated and Cavite Province fell into Spanish hands in June 1897. The revolutionary government had to retreat to Biak-na-Bato (Bulacan Province) and to negotiate a truce. Through the Pact of Biak-na-Bato (December 14, 1897), Emilio Aguinaldo and his government agreed to surrender their weapons, to dissolve the rebel government, and to be exiled. In return, they received legal amnesty and $800,000 (Mexican) indemnity. On December 31, Emilio Aguinaldo and other revolutionary officials reached Hong Kong (then under British rule). There, Emilio Aguinaldo conceptualized the first flag of the Philippines and Marcela Agoncillo (a Filipino exile living there with her husband) was asked to sew it. Despite Emilio Aguinaldo’s exile and the truce signed between the belligerents, revolutionary activities continued in the Philippine archipelago. Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War (April 25, 1898) and the U.S. victory over the Spanish navy in the Battle of Manila Bay (May 1, 1898), Emilio Aguinaldo was back in the Philippines (May 19, 1898). On June 12, 1898, from the balcony of his house in Kawit, he declared the Philippines independent and proclaimed himself the unelected president. He resumed command of Filipino troops against the Spanish. But on December 10, 1898, in the Treaty of Paris, Spain surrendered in return for $20 million and gave the Philippines and other colonial possessions to the United States. On January 23, 1899, Emilio Aguinaldo was officially inaugurated as the first president of the Philippine Republic with Apolinario Mabini as prime minister. However, the United States did not recognize the new independent Philippine state. On February 4–5, 1899, Emilio Aguinaldo’s troops fought for the first time against U.S. forces (Battle of Manila), and on June 2, 1899, the PhilippineAmerican War was declared. For two years, Emilio Aguinaldo and his followers were able to resist U.S. forces. But they faced internal dissent that was often violently resolved. For example, Emilio Aguinaldo was suspected in the assassination of General Antonio Luna (June 5, 1899), commander of the Philippine Revolutionary Army. On March 23, 1901, U.S. efforts to capture the Filipino leader were successful. The American military infiltrated Emilio Aguinaldo’s headquarters at Palanan on the northeast coast of Luzon and seized the president. On April 1, 1901, the First Philippine Republic ended with Emilio Aguinaldo’s formal surrender and his swearing allegiance to the United States. By July 4, the Philippine-American War officially came to a conclusion, even if hostilities continued until 1913.

Filipino Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy led the fight for independence, first against Spain and then the United States. He was president of the short-lived Republic of the Philippines from 1898 to 1901. Following the defeat of his forces by the United States, Aguinaldo’s dream of independence for the Philippines would take another half century to realize. (North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy)

After his surrender, Emilio Aguinaldo reunited with his wife, Hilaria, who had been captured by the United States in 1900, and they retired to their farm in Cavite. Hilaria died in 1921, and in 1930 Emilio Aguinaldo married Maria Agoncillo, the niece of a prominent Filipino diplomat. Under U.S. rule, Emilio Aguinaldo continued to campaign for the independence of the Philippines. Through his organization, the Asociacion de los Veteranos de la Revolucion (Association of Revolutionary Veterans), he secured access to land and pensions for former revolutionary and independence fighters. In 1935, the Philippine Commonwealth held its first elections. Emilio Aguinaldo ran for president, but was defeated by Manuel Quezon. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942–1945), Emilio Aguinaldo cooperated with the Japanese authorities. After the recapture of the archipelago by the United States, he was arrested and imprisoned, but quickly pardoned and released by the new ruling power. Despite his wartime collaboration, Emilio Aguinaldo was appointed by President Elpidio Quirino to the Council of State in 1950. After his term, he returned to his work on behalf of veterans. His last public appearance of note was in 1962, when President Diosdado Macapagal moved the celebration of Independence Day from July 4 to June 12, the date of Emilio Aguinaldo’s declaration of the First Philippine Republic. Before he died on February 6, 1964, Emilio Aguinaldo donated to the government his house in Kawit, where he had proclaimed Philippines independence in 1898. It is now a museum. Historians today are ambivalent regarding Emilio Aguinaldo’s legacy. He was a relentless Philippines independence leader, but his ruling style was authoritarian. Gwenola Ricordeau

See also: Manila Bay, Battle of; Philippine Revolution; Primary Documents: Emilio Aguinaldo’s Manifesto Protesting the U.S. Claim of Sovereignty over the Philippines (1899)

Further Reading Aguinaldo, Emilio. My Memoirs. Manila: C. A. Suntay, 1967. Aguinaldo, Emilio. True Account of the Philippine Revolution. Manila: Philippine Historical Association, 1969. Medina, Isagani R. Preliminary Bibliography on Emilio Aguinaldo. Manila: National Historical Commission, 1969. Quirino, Carlos. The Young Aguinaldo, from Kawit to Biyák-na-bató. With a preface by Nick Joaquin. Manila: Aguinaldo Centennial Year, 1969. Saulo, Alfredo B. Emilio Aguinaldo. Generalissimo and President of the First Philippine Republic—First Republic in Asia. Quezon City, Philippines: Phoenix, 1983.

American Anti-Imperialist League The American Anti-Imperialist League was formally organized on November 19, 1898, to oppose imperialism, specifically the territorial expansion of the United States via the acquisition of foreign colonies. Founded in Boston, the organization expanded to other cities across the United States and came to include a number of well-known American leaders, intellectuals, and politicians among its members. After peaking at a membership of more than 50,000 nationwide, the league declined after the insurrection in the Philippine Islands was suppressed in 1902, and eventually disbanded in 1921. After the United States went to war with Spain in April 1898, Gamaliel Bradford, a retired banker, wrote a letter that was published in the Boston Evening Transcript on June 2, 1898. Bradford solicited support to organize a meeting of individuals who opposed American colonial expansion, which was seen as the likely result of the Spanish-American War. Bradford’s efforts resulted in a meeting in historic Faneuil Hall in Boston on June 15, 1898, to organize opposition to the embrace of imperialistic policies by the United States. Bradford believed that imperialism violated basic tenets of the United States, including the right to self-government. Rather than oppose colonialism on economic or humanitarian grounds, Bradford and others contended that such a policy would lead to a rise in militarism and more frequent wars. At the initial meeting in Boston, a committee was established to create a formal organization. Bradford and the committee contacted public leaders in a variety of fields around the country to build opposition to territorial expansion of the United States by the acquisition of colonies, such as the Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Hawai‘i. These efforts resulted in the formation of the Anti-Imperialist League on November 19, 1898. The league’s platform of the following year asserted: We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is “criminal aggression” and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government. (Platform of the Anti-Imperialist League) Based primarily in Boston, the league’s first president was former U.S. senator George S. Boutwell, former governor of Massachusetts and congressman. The league included a number of public figures, who served as vice presidents of the organization. Their stature increased the legitimacy of the organization and encouraged public support for its principles. The list of vice presidents included industrialist Andrew

Carnegie, former president Grover Cleveland, labor organizer Samuel Gompers, presidential aspirant William Jennings Bryan, American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, and former Iowa governor William Larabee. Other prominent members included Jane Addams, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, William James, and Mark Twain. The organization included a broad ideological spectrum of Americans united in a common view against empire. Opponents described the members of the Anti-Imperialist League as “mugwumps”—sanctimonious political independents. But the league’s members were not deterred. The league spread its anti-imperialist views via meetings, speeches, and pamphlets. Its vice presidents appeared at public gatherings to counter growing support for the war with Spain and the acquisition of a colonial empire. Numerous individuals considered the views expressed by the league’s members radical, if not revolutionary. Mark Twain, for example, a vice president for nearly 10 years, wrote a short antiwar story titled “The War Prayer,” which was not published until after his death due to what was perceived as an extreme antiwar message. By early 1899, the organization had semiautonomous local organizations established throughout the United States. It boasted a national membership of more than 25,000. Many of these groups operated under separate names, such as the Anti-Imperialist League of New York or the (Chicago) Central AntiImperialist League. Each of these groups published its own materials, elected its own officers, and conducted its own meetings and lectures, usually with little or no coordination. The headquarters of the American Anti-Imperialist League were in Chicago until November 1904, when the main offices returned to Boston for the remainder of its existence. Even when the group was headquartered in Chicago, antiimperialist sentiments remained centered in New England. The league’s various affiliated chapters published a significant number of political pamphlets and broadsheets, which argued against U.S. adoption of imperialist policies. These publications quoted many of the nation’s founders in asserting that the country’s imminent embrace of an imperialist foreign policy was contrary to the foundation upon which the nation was built. The New York City group especially published a large number of leaflets and other proselytizing pieces, authored by many leading politicians and intellectuals. The league supported William Jennings Bryan, an anti-imperialist, during the presidential election of 1900. However, many of the league’s members did not support Bryan’s opposition to the gold standard. Some members, therefore, sought to establish a third party to promote both anti-imperialism and the gold standard. These efforts failed, however, when the new “National Party” candidate soon dropped out of the race. After the United States acquired the Philippine Islands from Spain as part of the peace treaty ending the Spanish-American War, it refused to grant the islands independence. The Philippine Insurrection, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, followed. The league opposed the struggle to “pacify” the Philippines, which included the use of harsh counterinsurgency methods. While opponents claimed the league was more worried about the effect of colonialism on the United States than on the native peoples, in fact most members of the league were appalled at the brutal policies followed by American forces toward Filipinos. League vice president Andrew Carnegie offered to buy the independence of the Philippines by writing a check to the United States for $20 million, the price paid to Spain for the islands. The New York Times described the proposal as “wicked.” In 1901, the league urged President Theodore Roosevelt to allow Aguinaldo to come to the United States to argue why his country should be granted independence. President Roosevelt rebuffed these efforts. Over the next few years, the American Anti-Imperialist League disseminated information and evidence regarding the methods being used by the United States to suppress the rebellion in the Philippines. The league published accounts from American soldiers of the brutal procedures used on

suspected Filipino insurrectionists, including the “water cure.” While most Americans were indifferent to these reports, some, including President Roosevelt, considered the league’s efforts dishonorable and even traitorous. Indeed, the U.S. government went to great lengths to suppress the dissemination of the league’s views. When one of the league’s prominent members, Edward Atkinson, asked for a list of soldiers who had served in the Philippines so that he could send them a copy of his writings, the War Department did not respond. Atkinson nevertheless sent copies to those officers and officials in the Philippines that he could identify. The postmaster general then ordered that all of Atkinson’s materials be seized from the mail—an act of censorship that generated substantial publicity for Atkinson and his pamphlets. When league president George Boutwell died in 1905, Moorfield Storey succeeded him. Storey, a white, Harvard-educated lawyer who served as the first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1909 to 1915, remained president of the American AntiImperialist League for the rest of its existence. After reaching a peak nationwide membership of approximately 50,000, the league’s membership and success at promoting an antiwar, anti-imperialist message declined, especially after the end of the Philippine Insurrection in 1902. The league no longer had a clear focus for its anti-imperialist, antiwar message. Indeed, despite having opposed war throughout its existence, the league did not oppose the entry of the United States into World War I. The American Anti-Imperialist League dissolved in 1921. Notwithstanding its broad-based support among many intellectuals and politicians of the day— support that crossed party lines and ideological views—the league was not able to generate significant enthusiasm for its views among the mass of the population during its existence. National leaders who supported American expansionism following the Spanish-American War and in the early years of the 20th century successfully opposed its positions. The American public either generally supported colonial expansion or did not care about inconsistencies with the nation’s founding precepts or the methods being used to impose colonial rule. Insufficient grassroots support existed for the American Anti-Imperialist League’s positions during the heyday of American imperialism. As a result, while it was an important intellectual movement at the end of the 19th and in the first part of the 20th centuries, the American AntiImperialist League ultimately made little difference in American public opinion or national policies during its existence. Alan M. Anderson See also: Aguinaldo, Emilio; Manila Bay, Battle of; McKinley, William; Paris, Treaty of (1898); Yellow Journalism; Primary Documents: Andrew Carnegie’s “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways” (1898); Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1899)

Further Reading Cullinane, Michael Patrick. Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism: 1898–1909. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League, October 18, 1899. Papers of the American Anti-Imperialist League. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Historical Collection. http://wps.pearsoncustom.com/wps/media/objects/2428/2487068/documents/doc_t057.html. Accessed October 16, 2014. Tompkins, E. Berkeley. Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970. Zwick, Jim. Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League. Conshohocken, PA: Infinity, 2007.

Beveridge, Albert J. (1862–1927)

Albert J. Beveridge was a gifted orator, an ardent imperialist, a U.S. senator, a Progressive reformer, career politician, writer, and historian. Born on October 6, 1862, in Highland County, Ohio, Beveridge grew up in Indiana where the family moved after the U.S. Civil War. The Beveridge family fell upon hard financial times after the war and the young Beveridge had to find work in lumber camps and the surrounding farms to help support the family. Determined to get an education, he enrolled at Indiana Asbury University (later DePauw) and financed his education through summer work and by winning various oratorical contests. He graduated in 1885 and moved to Indianapolis to become a law clerk. He was admitted to the Indiana bar in 1887. Beveridge’s oratory skills served him well and he entered politics in support of James G. Blaine in 1884. As his fame grew, Beveridge became a popular speaker across Indiana and the eastern United States. His work on behalf of the Republican Party in Indiana led to his election to the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1911. He followed Theodore Roosevelt into the Progressive Party in 1912 and remained active in politics throughout his life. He wrote numerous articles on both foreign and domestic issues as well as biographies of John Marshall and Abraham Lincoln. He died in 1927. Beveridge gained national attention as an early and ardent spokesman for American imperialism. In April 1898, just days before the declaration of war against Spain, Beveridge heralded the call for American imperialism in a speech before the Middlesex Club of Boston, Massachusetts. In advance of popular sentiment, he stunned the crowd by calling publicly for not only the acquisition of Cuba but the Philippines as well. Months later, in the victorious aftermath of the war, Beveridge made American imperialism the theme of his speaking tour on behalf of the Republicans in Indiana. In the keynote speech of the campaign, the “March of the Flag,” Beveridge placed the recent territorial acquisitions squarely within the thrust of American expansion since 1789. Expounding on themes that would soon be echoed by other imperialists, Beveridge implored the American people to embrace their divine destiny as “God’s chosen people” and to build “the commercial empire of the Republic!” To the anti-imperialists who said the United States should not “govern a people without their consent,” he boldly claimed that “the rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government.” The Filipinos, he held, were not.

In addition to advocating progressive policies like child labor legislation at home, U.S. senator and historian Albert J. Beveridge was a strong champion for the rise of U.S. imperial power at the turn of the century. (Library of Congress)

Elected to the Senate in 1899, Beveridge played a large role in shaping American imperial policy. To gain a better understanding of the issues involved, he made an inspection tour of the Philippine archipelago prior to officially taking office. He presented his observations and the conclusions drawn from his travels in his maiden speech to the Senate on January 9, 1900. He began with a declaration that the “Philippines are ours forever.” He then went on to elaborate on the commercial, ideological, moral, and strategic reason for the United States to remain in the Philippines. He spoke of the untouched agricultural and mineral wealth of the islands, their strategic importance in accessing the Asia trade and controlling the Pacific, and the moral duty of the United States to spread civilization. The speech met with widespread praise but also roused the opposition of the anti-imperialists. His knowledge of the Philippines led to his appointment to the Committee on the Philippines. Senator Beveridge was influential in shaping the Platt Amendment for Cuba and in defending the U.S. Army against charges of cruelty and slaughter in the Philippine-American War. Beveridge also embraced Progressive reform measures. During his Senate career, he was instrumental in advancing Progressive legislation dealing with railroad rates, the inspection of meatpacking houses, child labor, and tariff reform. His efforts, especially his attempt to reform the tariff, alienated the Republican establishment. After serving two terms in the Senate, Beveridge lost his bid for a third term in 1910. When Theodore Roosevelt broke with the Republican Party in 1912, Beveridge reluctantly joined the former president and his supporters in founding the Progressive Party. He delivered the keynote speech at the National Progressive Convention and ran unsuccessfully as the Progressive candidate for the governorship of Indiana. Despite the losses in 1912, Beveridge remained a part of the Progressive Party until he rejoined the Republican Party in 1916.

Beveridge wrote extensively about his travels and the political and social questions that confronted the American people. He partially financed his Philippines trip in 1899 and a trip across Europe and Asia in 1901 by writing articles for various publications. Prior to the American entry into World War I, Beveridge embarked on a tour of Europe to report on the war firsthand and to interview the leaders of the major combatants. Those interviews and his general observations about the conflict became the basis for a series of articles written for the American public. The articles often contradicted the official propaganda from the combatants in Europe and even the Woodrow Wilson administration. At the end of World War I, Beveridge emerged an outspoken opponent of the League of Nations and any attempt at internationalism, which he felt might infringe upon American nationalism. The “Nationalism versus Internationalism” theme became the staple of his writings and speeches against the League of Nations. After the defeat of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles in the Senate, Beveridge continued to publicly and privately oppose other forms of internationalism such as the World Court, the Washington Naval Conference, and the Four Powers Treaty. In the years following his senatorial career, Beveridge turned increasingly to writing historical biographies. Pursuing an interest dating back to his days as a law clerk, Beveridge first wrote a fourvolume biography of John Marshall. The Life of John Marshall earned a Pulitzer Prize. Beveridge began a four-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1922. At the time of his death on April 27, 1927, he had finished the first two volumes, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858. The American Historical Association created the Beveridge Award in his honor in 1928. James Pruitt See also: American Anti-Imperialist League; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Platt Amendment; Roosevelt, Theodore; Root, Elihu; Taft, William Howard; Versailles, Treaty of; Washington Naval Conference; Primary Documents: Albert Beveridge’s “March of the Flag” (1898)

Further Reading Bowers, Claude G. Beveridge and the Progressive Era. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. Braeman, John. Albert J. Beveridge: American Nationalist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

Bryan, William Jennings (1860–1925) William Jennings Bryan, the anti-imperialist crusader and U.S. secretary of state, was born to notable attorney Silas L. Bryan and Mariah Elizabeth Bryan on March 19, 1860. Bryan’s political career began with his election to Congress in 1890 as a Democrat. An advocate of populist causes, he espoused the removal of high tariffs and, most famously, “free silver” as a solution to the problems of rural Americans in the 1890s. After his famous “Cross of Gold” speech of July 9, 1896, Bryan became the presidential candidate that fall, but he lost to Republican candidate William McKinley—an election that launched a three-decade period of presidential dominance for the Republican Party. Although Bryan was defeated, he had garnered support with a solid base in the South and the Plains states. Although Bryan was a colonel in the Nebraska regiment during the Spanish-American War of 1898, he never served in combat, his “Silver Regiment” from Nebraska plagued by typhoid and malaria in Florida before ever reaching Cuba. This was fortuitous for Bryan, as he became a vocal anti-imperialist, harshly critical in particular of American policy toward the Philippines when that secondary war commenced. He declared only that his volunteering for service in Cuba was for love of country but that the annexation of

the island and other former Spanish colonial possessions violated the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and American values. Bryan became an outspoken leader of the American Anti-Imperialist League. Thus it stunned his fellow anti-imperialists when Bryan supported the Treaty of Paris that called for annexation of the Philippines. Bryan asserted that the archipelago stood a greater chance of receiving its freedom under American occupation than if it remained in Spanish hands. His critics were livid and charged him with shallow political opportunism in his earlier anti-imperialist statements. Nevertheless, he ran again as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 1900, this time on a platform featuring anti-imperialism. But Bryan lost to McKinley again, this time more decisively, suggesting in part the public’s embrace of the nation’s newly claimed position as an imperial power. In truth, foreign policy played less of a role in the campaign than Bryan had hoped, as economic issues were the overriding concerns of 1900. Moreover, most Americans seemed indifferent to Bryan’s criticism of European colonial domination and his appeal that the United States hold its moral high ground as a truly democratic nation that stood for self-determination and respected the sovereignty of all peoples. Undaunted by his electoral defeat, Bryan maintained his popular lecture program, reiterating his views regarding a range of issues. In 1901, Bryan founded a weekly newspaper, The Commoner, which editorialized on various topics such as consumer protection, regulation of trusts, and anti-imperialism. Bryan made a third unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1908 and served as the secretary of state during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), when he once again stood with antiwar, anti-imperialist Americans who, like him, tried unsuccessfully to keep the United States from entering World War I. Although the foreign policy record of William Jennings Bryan is complicated, marked with some contradiction and a general failure to keep his country from becoming an imperial world power, this does not diminish his extraordinary life as one of America’s great public servants. Patit Paban Mishra and Andrew J. Waskey See also: American Anti-Imperialist League

Further Reading Brands, H. W. The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s. St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1995. Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Knopf, 2006. Leinwand, Gerald. William Jennings Bryan: An Uncertain Trumpet. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Williams, Wayne C. William Jennings Bryan: A Study in Political Vindication. Eastbourne, UK: Gardners Books 2007.

Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in The economic relationship between the United States and Cuba predates the existence of either nationstate. During the 17th and 18th centuries, when both were part of European empires, a clandestine trade in Cuban products arose along the southeast coast of North America; as much as 45 percent of Cuba’s products left the island as contraband. In the later 18th century, thanks to the arrival not only of thousands of whites from Saint-Domingue fleeing the Haitian Revolution, but also tens of thousands of enslaved Africans, the production of sugar for mass markets defined the island’s economy. As luck would have it, a mass market eager for Cuban products existed to the north: the United States not only absorbed Cuba’s ever-expanding supply of products, but also supplied the foodstuffs and manufactured goods Cubans needed, and during the 19th century, the United States became Cuba’s principal trading partner. In 1865,

Cuba exported 65 percent of its sugar to the United States; in 1877, the United States absorbed 82 percent of Cuba’s total exports. Americans also invested in Cuba, modestly at first, but as Cuba’s struggle for independence—a series of wars lasting from 1868 to 1898—severely damaged the island’s economy, Americans bought properties of all kinds at bargain prices. By 1895 U.S. investment in Cuba totaled about $30 million and included both Havana’s waterworks and lighting system, in addition to holdings in sugar and tobacco. Capital from the United States transformed the sugar industry, bringing innovations and new efficiencies. U.S. capital also dislodged the planters from their place of social and political dominance. In 1895 members of the creole bourgeoisie owned only 20 percent of Cuban sugar mills, while 94 percent of the Cuban sugar crop found its way to the United States. Though not yet independent, Cuba was nonetheless an economic satellite of the United States on the eve of U.S. intervention in the Cuban armed struggle to defeat their Spanish colonial overlords. Cuba became an independent republic in 1902, a fact that only increased Cuban dependence on U.S. capital and trade. In 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, U.S. investments in Cuba stood at close to $1.2 billion. The Castro regime effectively eliminated American economic influence in Cuba, and thanks to the embargo imposed in the early 1960s, now enshrined in congressional legislation, the economic relationship between the United States and Cuba remains tenuous at best. Joseph J. Gonzalez See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Primary Documents: President Grover Cleveland’s Final Message to Congress: “American Interest in the Cuban Revolution” (1896)

Further Reading Gott, Richard E. A New History of Cuba. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention (1895–1902) The Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898) against Spain followed decades of revolutionary ferment that had sporadically flared into open rebellion, most notably in the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) and the Little War (1879–1880). Such widespread discontent stemmed from economic and societal forces that destabilized Cuba in the latter half of the 19th century and with which the Spanish government of the island proved either unwilling or unable to cope. Although the Cuban economy during that period remained predominately agricultural, sugar became the primary staple crop and shifted the agricultural base away from the large cattle ranches and a more diversified crop yield. The seasonal nature of sugar production combined with the complete emancipation of the slave labor force in 1880 generated massive numbers of unemployed workers who either lingered in the countryside or migrated to the cities in search of work. The continued mechanization of sugar cultivation added to their numbers. The landowners fared little better as the Ten Years’ War resulted in a substantial destruction of property and machinery, led to increasing indebtedness to Spanish financiers, and made it difficult to secure capital. In the face of these difficulties, Spanish authorities resisted appeals by indigenous leaders and steadfastly maintained an archaic form of mercantilism that kept Cuba from expanding its exports and importing cheaper finished goods from abroad. The end of a reciprocity trade agreement with the United States on sugar was the final blow that opened the door to revolution on February 24, 1895.

The discontent with and eventual insurrection against Spain led to the development of three distinct power centers in the Cuban Revolution. The theoretical head of the Cuban insurrection was the Cuban Provisional Government, also known as the Council of Government, which proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Cuba and adopted a constitution on September 16, 1895. The Cuban junta, headquartered in New York, dealt almost exclusively with the U.S. government and handled the public relations campaign designed to enlist American support for Cuban independence. The junta raised funds, purchased supplies, enlisted volunteers, lobbied governmental officials, and fed sensational stories to the American media that helped to generate the move toward intervention. The Cuban Liberation Army led by Maximo Gomez and controlled through various regional leaders constituted the third power center. By 1898 the Cuban Liberation Army and Spanish military forces had reached a stalemate, with the Spanish in control of the major towns and the insurgents in control of the countryside. A number of factors drew American attention to the Cuban struggle and generated support for its independence. From the start public opinion in the United States largely favored the rebels as many Americans identified the Cuban struggle with their own revolution. Sensational stories in the press, led by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, encouraged that sentiment by lionizing the Cubans and highlighting every Spanish atrocity, both real and invented. The effort by Spanish general Valeriano Weyler to deny the rebels the support of the populace by interning Cuban civilians in concentration camps gave the Cuban junta a steady supply of stories to feed the American press. Stories of disease and famine in the camps helped galvanize the American public. Economic interests also played a role as many Americans held investments in the Cuban sugar industry and various mining ventures. Many of these investments had developed in the early 1890s when the level of Cuban trade with the United States surpassed that with Spain. Although President William McKinley had endorsed Cuban independence during his 1896 presidential campaign, he moved cautiously as president. After rioting broke out in Havana in January 1898, McKinley dispatched the USS Maine as a show of force and to protect American citizens and their interests in the city. On February 15, 1898, as the Maine rested at anchor in Havana Harbor, an explosion tore through the ship and killed 266 American sailors. When the initial American investigation concluded that an external mine had caused the explosion, the clamor for war in the United States became too much. On April 20, 1898, President McKinley sent an ultimatum to Spain demanding its immediate withdrawal from the island and Cuban independence. The Spanish government balked at the demand and broke off relations with the United States. The United States responded with a naval blockade of the island. The Spanish declared war on April 23, 1898. The United States declared war two days later. The declaration of war by the United States revealed a lack of communication and coordination among the Cuban leadership. After Congress passed the declaration of war on April 25, 1898, Tomás Estrada Palma, head of the Cuban junta in New York, immediately pledged Cuban support of the American war effort and placed the Cuban Liberation Army under American command without consulting either the army or the home government. When the Cuban Provisional Government learned of Palma’s actions, it dispatched Vice President Domingo Mendez Capote to the United States to supersede Palma as the ranking Cuban delegate in Washington. Nevertheless, it endorsed his decision and on May 12, 1898, ordered the Liberation Army to submit to American authority. Consulted by neither Palma nor the home government, Cuban military leaders denounced the decision but complied. After the defeat of Spain, the American leadership exploited the division in the Cuban ranks to ensure their occupation of the island met little resistance. While ignoring the Cuban Provisional Government, the Americans sought and won the cooperation of key leaders in the Cuban junta and Liberation Army.

The American occupation of Cuba lasted from July 17, 1898, until the United States transferred control to the newly elected Cuban government under President Tomás Estrada Palma on May 20, 1902. In the immediate aftermath of the American intervention, policymakers in Washington and within the occupational government deliberated over how to proceed with the occupation. President McKinley originally envisioned that the United States would, for a time, simply replace Spain at the top of the governmental structure and the existing insular government would continue to function under American auspices with only a minimal amount of interference at the local level. However, a group of Progressives and ardent imperialists led by Theodore Roosevelt saw Cuba as an opportunity to demonstrate American leadership abroad and the value of Progressive reforms. They hoped to replicate in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines the work of the British Empire in Egypt and India. These Progressives supported the policies of General Leonard Wood and wanted a more activist role in which the U.S. Army—through the office of the military governor—fundamentally reshaped Cuba in accordance with Progressive principles as a prerequisite for independence. The American occupation of Cuba went through three distinct periods. The initial phase of occupation, July 17, 1898, to January 1, 1899, witnessed the divergence between the minimalist approach espoused by Washington and the activist approach pursued by Leonard Wood as the governor of Santiago Province. The debate over occupation policy lasted until McKinley’s appointment of Major General John R. Brooke as military governor seemingly settled the question in favor of the minimalists. Brooke assumed command on January 1, 1899. However, he proved unable to rein in his subordinates and lost control of occupation policy by June 1899. When it became clear that his administration would not produce a free, independent, and self-governed Cuba or even chart a potential path to that objective, the McKinley administration reversed course and adopted the Progressive model. The appointment of Elihu Root as secretary of war and his elevation of Leonard Wood to the position of military governor on December 20, 1899, initiated the third and final phase of the U.S. occupation.

As military governor of Cuba, Wood faced two important and interrelated challenges—the formation of an occupation government that would advance his Progressive agenda and the framing of a Cuban government to eventually replace the occupation. He began by creating a unitary state designed to make Progressive reform easier to implement at all levels of government. Under the unitary state system, as opposed to the American federal system, the central government dictated policy to all levels of the state and no other governmental body (regional or local) had exclusive control over a policy area. In the occupation government, authority and power flowed from the military governor through a “Cuban Cabinet” to the provincial civil governors and eventually to the local municipalities. The office of the military governor exercised legislative, executive, and judicial power with policy decisions taking the form of civil orders and circulars issued to the general public. Although the Cuban Cabinet had a hand in the development of public policy and supervised the daily operation of the military government, it functioned under the direction and supervision of the governor and submitted to his ultimate authority. Wood adopted the unitary model almost by default. The top-down administration harmonized well with the command structure of the U.S. Army, the instrument of imperial governance that had served by default as the government after the initial chaos of the war. It also reflected the Progressive preference for a strong executive and a powerful central government. Wood pursued a Progressive agenda in Cuba because he felt that fundamental changes had to occur within Cuba before it could prosper and survive as an independent nation. Funded largely by Cuba’s customs revenue, the occupation government launched a massive program of public works designed to ease unemployment, improve public health and sanitation, and encourage economic development. Projects included an extensive program of road construction, harbor improvements, the construction of sewer systems and aqueducts for fresh water, the building of public schools and hospitals, and various other infrastructure improvements. The American administration reformed and expanded primary, secondary, and even higher education in Cuba. The American Yellow Fever Commission led by Major Walter Reed, surgeon, U.S. Army, confirmed the theory previously advanced by Dr. Carlos Finlay of Havana that infected mosquitoes spread the disease. The conclusions drawn from their study led to the development of countermeasures that effectively reduced the extent and severity of yellow fever epidemics, thereby greatly enhancing the ability of the United States to project its power into the region. Prohibited by the Teller Amendment from directly annexing the island, the United States moved in 1900 to create a functioning civil government for an independent Cuban state. As a prelude to general elections, the military government conducted a census of the island and limited suffrage to those 21 years of age or older who could read and write, owned property valued at $250 or higher, or who had served honorably in the Cuban army. Local boards of elections conducted municipal elections on June 16, 1900. The success of the municipal elections paved the way for calling a constitutional convention. On September 15, 1900, the Cubans elected delegates to a constitutional convention, which began on November 5, 1900. The purpose of the convention was “to frame and adopt a constitution for the people of Cuba, and, as a part thereof, to provide for and agree with the Government of the United Sates upon the relations to exist between that Government and the government of Cuba, and to provide for the election by the people of officers under such a constitution and the transfer of government to the officers so elected” (Establishment of Free Government in Cuba, 8). The drafting of the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba went rather quickly and was completed in less than three months; however, the proceedings ground to a halt over the question of relations between the United States and Cuba. The Cubans felt that the question should be settled independently of the constitution. The United States disagreed and wanted the Cuban convention to endorse the Platt Amendment, which extended a virtual U.S. protectorate over the island, by incorporating it directly into the Cuban constitution. Initially, the Cubans balked but Secretary of War

Elihu Root remained firm on the issue. When it became apparent that the United States would not grant independence without Cuban acceptance of the Platt Amendment, the Cubans reluctantly complied on June 12, 1901. On May 20, 1902, the United States handed power over to the Republic of Cuba headed by President Tomás Estrada Palma. James Pruitt See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Platt Amendment; Roosevelt, Theodore; Teller Amendment; USS Maine; Weyler y Nicolau, Valeriano; Wood, Leonard; Yellow Journalism; Primary Documents: Lyrics to “The Battle of Santiago,” by Charles F. Alsop (1898); Albert Beveridge’s “March of the Flag” (1898); President William McKinley’s “The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” (1898)

Further Reading Establishment of Free Government in Cuba. Office of Insular Affairs, War Department, compiled. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904. Healy, David F. The United States in Cuba, 1898–1902: Generals, Politicians, and the Search for Policy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963. May, Ernest R. Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Perez, Louis A. Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983.

Great White Fleet The Great White Fleet was a powerful armada of 16 modern battleships and accompanying cruisers, torpedo boat destroyers, and supply ships sent on a 14-month cruise around the world in December 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt. The purpose of this massive show of naval force by the United States was first and foremost to demonstrate American sea power. European nations—particularly Great Britain and Germany—were rapidly building their naval armaments, and Roosevelt wanted both these nations to know that the United States had joined them as a global imperial power that now boasted a modern navy. Roosevelt also wanted the American people to brandish a stronger self-image as a benign but powerful military force in the world. The entire fleet—painted entirely in white except for their bows—had been built since the Spanish-American War and a number of them were fortified by modern steel armor plate. In addition, U.S. naval officials wanted to demonstrate that they could successfully move a significant portion of their naval power to the Pacific to bolster a light naval presence in the region. The voyage was also driven by rising tensions between the United States and Japan emerging partly from rising American interest in Asia and because of the role Roosevelt had played in ending the RussoJapanese War and eliminating Russian reparations to a victorious Japan. Another issue was unchecked Japanese immigration to the U.S. west coast, which was provoking racial animosity and tension. In addition, U.S. officials feared Japan had its eye on the Philippines, recently acquired in the SpanishAmerican War. With Roosevelt watching from his presidential yacht, the Great White Fleet left Hampton Roads, Virginia, on December 16, 1907. The president had put together the largest fleet of steam-powered steel battleships for one of the most impressive demonstrations of naval power in history. The fleet headed for the tip of South America. Because the United States had not yet established a global chain of naval supply stations, logistical support for fueling an armada that burned 1,500 tons of coal daily was a tremendous challenge.

The Great White Fleet made 20 port calls on 6 continents, including a visit at Yokohama, Japan. The imposing armada was well received by Japanese officials, and the call was credited with helping to reduce tensions between the United States and Japan even as it asserted America’s growing interest in Asia. The fleet returned to its home port in February 1909 after a voyage of 43,000 nautical miles, having established the U.S. Navy’s ability to move a large force around the world and demonstrating that America had arrived as a major modern sea-based power. Ken B. Taylor See also: Mahan, Alfred Thayer; Roosevelt, Theodore; Russo-Japanese War

Further Reading Crawford, Michael J., ed. The World Cruise of the Great White Fleet. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 2008. Hart, Robert C. The Great White Fleet: Its Voyage Around the World, 1907–1909. New York: Little, Brown, 1965. Lohr, Thomas. “The U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet Served a Foreign Policy Purpose in 1907.” Military History (March 2006): 64–67.

Guam The southernmost island of the Mariana archipelago and the largest island in Micronesia, the American territory of Guam lies in the North Pacific Ocean some 1,500 miles east of the Philippines and 3,000 miles west of Hawai‘i. The island was settled approximately 5,000 years ago by an Indo-Malayan people known as the Chamorros, who called their new home Guåhån. Explorer Ferdinand Magellan visited the island in 1521, and it was claimed as a colony by Spain in 1565. Subsequently Guam served as a stopover for the Manila galleons, trading ships that sailed between the Spanish possessions of Mexico and the Philippines. American involvement in Guam dates from the 19th century, when the island was visited regularly by American whalers. Samuel J. Masters was appointed American consul in 1854, but proved temperamentally ill-suited to the post and abandoned it in 1856. At the conclusion of the brief SpanishAmerican War in 1898, Spain ceded Guam to the United States under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. The Department of the Navy took over the administration of the island, using it as a coaling and cable station. The American occupation of Guam and the Philippines (which also passed to the control of the United States as a result of the Spanish-American War) had established the United States as a rival to Japan in the North Pacific. This rivalry came to a head with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Japanese forces invaded Guam a few hours later, and the island’s military governor, George J. McMillin, was forced to surrender on December 10. The Japanese proceeded to change the island’s name to Omiya Jima (Great Shrine Island) and instituted a harsh regime of occupation under which as many as 2,000 Chamorros may have died. The liberation of Guam began on July 21, 1944, when the United States launched an invasion by landing several companies of marines. During the battles that raged until August 10, nearly 1,800 Americans and more than 18,000 Japanese troops were killed. Under the provisions of the Guam Organic Act of 1950, the Department of the Navy turned over the island’s administration to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the island’s residents became American citizens, and an elective unicameral legislature was established. In 1968 the office of governor, which had until then been appointed by the president, also became elective. Guam is an unincorporated territory of the United States, and although its citizens cannot vote in U.S. presidential elections, its residents elect

one non-voting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1969 residents of the Northern Mariana Islands voted for political union with Guam, but the majority of voters on Guam rejected the proposal. Grove Koger See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Paris, Treaty of (1898)

Further Reading Carano, Paul, and Pedro C. Sanchez. A Complete History of Guam. Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1964. Maga, Timothy P. Defending Paradise: The United States and Guam, 1898–1950. New York: Garland, 1988. Rogers, Robert F. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Rev. ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011.

Hay, John (1838–1905) John Milton Hay was born October 8, 1838, in Salem, Indiana, and raised in Warsaw, Illinois, where his early education was directed by a local clergyman, the Reverend Stephen Childs. He entered an academy in nearby Pittsfield and in 1852 attended the college at Springfield, before moving on to Brown University. When he graduated from Brown in 1858 he was named Class Poet, having integrated himself into the literary set of Providence, Rhode Island. Hay returned to Warsaw to study law under the supervision of his uncle, Milton Hay. It was there that he first encountered Abraham Lincoln. Following Lincoln’s election as president in 1860, Hay served as his private secretary until 1864, as a diplomat in European capitals between 1865 and 1870, and then as a journalist at the New York Tribune. In 1874, he married Clara Stone, the daughter of a prominent industrialist from Cleveland. Appointed assistant secretary of state in 1878, Hay and his wife moved back to Washington. In 1881, he briefly returned to the Tribune to serve as editor. Hay was named U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in 1897, a role he served until he was appointed secretary of state by President William McKinley the next year. Following McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Hay stayed on as a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet, where he remained until his death in 1905. Although best remembered for a comment written to President Roosevelt in which he described the Spanish-American War as a “splendid little war,” Hay was a crucial policymaker at the heart of the U.S. government. Among his most significant contributions to American foreign policy were negotiating the Treaty of Paris; ending the Spanish-American War (1898); announcing the “Open Door” policy toward China in 1900; coordinating the Western response to the Boxer Rebellion; and facilitating an end to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). He also laid the diplomatic groundwork for the construction of an American isthmian canal in Central America. Convinced of the need to forge a strong relationship with Great Britain, Hay settled a number of long-running disputes with that nation, including the issue of the boundary between the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia in 1903. His work improving U.S.-British relations is often seen as crucial to the changing diplomatic landscape of the early 20th century. Hay died in 1905 at his summer home in New Hampshire. He had been in ill health throughout his time as secretary of state, and many believed that the workload might have hastened his death. Patrick Kirkwood See also: Boxer Rebellion; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; McKinley, William; Open Door Policy; Panama/Panama Canal; Paris, Treaty of (1898)

Further Reading

Clymer, Kenton J. John Hay: The Gentleman as Diplomat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975. Mihalkanin, Edward S. American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Mitchell, Martha. Encyclopedia Brunoniana. Providence, RI: Brown University Library, 1993. Thayer, William R. The Life and Letters of John Hay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.

MacArthur, Arthur, Jr. (1845–1912) Arthur MacArthur Jr. was an American army officer who served in numerous capacities and ultimately as the military governor-general of the Philippines. MacArthur was born on June 2, 1845, in Chicopee Falls in Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of a future governor and judge in Wisconsin. Four years later the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where MacArthur Sr. established a law practice and also entered local politics. In 1861, MacArthur Jr. was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Twenty-Fourth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment at the age of 16. He subsequently saw action in the Western Theater of the Civil War during the Stones River Campaign (Battle of Murfreesboro), the Chattanooga Campaign, the Battle of Chickamauga, the Atlanta Campaign, and at Franklin, Tennessee. He was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery during the Battle of Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga on November 25, 1863. After the war, MacArthur returned to Wisconsin to study law, but soon returned to the army. From 1866 to 1884 MacArthur was posted to assignments in Pennsylvania, New York, Utah Territory, Louisiana, and Arkansas. During this period his wife, Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur, bore three sons: Arthur MacArthur III (1876–1923) became a captain in the navy in World War I; Malcolm MacArthur (1878–1883) died of measles; and Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) eventually became a five-star general of the army. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 occurred while MacArthur was serving as adjutant general of the Third Corps. Sent to the Philippines, he played a major role in the Battle of Manila (1898). However, the Philippine independence movement declared the Philippines independent of Spanish rule on June 12, 1898. Despite largely Democratic Party congressional opposition to annexation on constitutional and moral grounds, the Philippines were annexed with Republican support. The Philippine-American War (1899–1902) ensued. MacArthur commanded the Department of Northern Luzon and had to fight a guerrilla war against the insurgents. MacArthur led the expedition that resulted in the capture of Filipino resistance leader Emilio Aguinaldo in March 1901, compelling Aguinaldo to swear allegiance to the United States. The insurgency ended soon thereafter, although some resistance by Filipino commanders continued. President William McKinley then appointed MacArthur military governor of the Philippines. However, William Howard Taft arrived as the civilian governor. Taft and MacArthur were often at odds on the way to conduct military actions and civilian affairs during the Philippine occupation. Eventually MacArthur was relieved of command and transferred to command the Department of the Pacific. He was also promoted to lieutenant general. Between 1902 and 1906 MacArthur served in a number of posts. Although he was the highest-ranking officer in the army, he was passed over for the army chief of staff post by Secretary of War William Howard Taft. On June 2, 1909, MacArthur retired from the army. He died of a heart attack on September 5, 1912, during an address in Milwaukee. He was subsequently buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Patit Paban Mishra and Andrew J. Waskey See also: Philippine Revolution; Taft, William Howard

Further Reading Linn, Brian McAllister. The Philippine War: 1899–1902. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000. MacArthur, Douglas. Reminiscences. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Manila Bay, Battle of (1898) The Battle of Manila Bay occurred May 1, 1898, between the Asiatic Squadron of the United States and the Pacific Squadron of Spain, the first combat between the two nations in the Spanish-American War. The American naval squadron commanded by Commodore George Dewey easily defeated an inferior Spanish naval force led by Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasaron. The victory led to the U.S. takeover of the Philippine Islands and ultimately the subsequent Philippine-American War. Dewey became a national hero, feted from coast to coast. The American Asiatic Squadron consisted of the protected cruisers USS Olympia, USS Boston, and USS Raleigh. In addition, Dewey commanded the gunboats USS Petrel and USS Concord. Shortly before the declaration of war, Dewey was reinforced with the protected cruiser USS Baltimore and the revenue cutter McCulloch. Dewey had gathered his ships in Hong Kong. After the United States declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898, Great Britain, neutral in the conflict, ordered the American squadron to leave Hong Kong immediately. Dewey’s ships, however, lacked adequate supplies of ammunition and fuel. He therefore took his squadron to Mirs Bay on the coast of China, where he prepared his forces for battle, awaited intelligence updates, and loaded additional supplies of coal. His ships, however, were at about 60 percent of their full capacity of ammunition when he began steaming toward the Philippines on April 27. He knew little of the Spanish forces he would face upon reaching the Philippines.

The Spanish government had sent Admiral Montojo to the Philippines to assume command of the Spanish Pacific Squadron and to strengthen its defenses. Montojo commanded out-of-date unprotected

cruisers, a wooden warship, and a few gunboats—all manned by ill-trained crews. On April 25 Montojo moved his forces to nearby Subic Bay where he had ordered guns removed from some of his more decrepit ships and emplaced as shore batteries. But these efforts could not be completed in time. Moreover, the Spanish government compounded Montojo’s difficulties by transferring a number of his ships to Cuba. Aware that his meager forces could not be adequately defended at Subic Bay, on April 29 Montojo moved his squadron. However, rather than array his ships under the protective cover of the shore batteries and forts that protected Manila Bay—which also would have risked bombardment of Manila itself—Montojo placed his vessels near Cavite and the forts at Sangley Point. Any ships that sank there would settle on the shallow bottom, allowing his seamen a better chance to survive. The U.S. squadron arrived on April 30. Dewey sent two ships to reconnoiter Subic Bay, where they discovered the Spanish squadron was gone. He therefore assumed that the enemy’s vessels were in Manila Bay. Dewey decided to enter the harbor at night to obtain the maximum degree of surprise. Dewey’s ships began their transit into Manila Bay at approximately 11:00 p.m. on April 30, led by the Olympia. Although all lights on the vessels were dimmed, funnel soot flared on the McCulloch, which caused two shore batteries to see the American squadron and to fire a few shots. The American ships returned fire, and the Spanish battery fell silent. Montojo had arranged his two cruisers, wooden warship, and five gunboats in a curved line near Sangley Point. The American ships mounted 56 heavy guns, compared with only 37 on the Spanish ships, some of which were old muzzle-loading cannon. As Dewey’s ships approached Manila harbor, Montojo ordered his flagship to change its position, which required that two mines be exploded. The Americans saw the detonations, thereby learned the location of Montojo’s ships, and changed course to engage them.

USS OLYMPIA Authorized during the naval modernization program of U.S. Navy secretary William Collins Whitney (1885–1889), the USS Olympia was a fast-moving protected cruiser built primarily for the purpose of interrupting an enemy’s merchant shipping, which in the 1880s was still the focus of U.S. naval warfare. Commissioned at the dawn of America’s overseas expansion, Olympia served famously as Commodore George Dewey’s (1837–1917) flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay. It was on her deck that Dewey ordered the ship’s captain, Charles V. Gridley (1844–1898), to “fire when ready, Gridley,” which commenced the quick and decisive victory over the Spanish squadron. The cruiser’s role in the battle enshrined it and the crew in glory. Further, Olympia’s shift away from its original defensive posture as a commerce-raiding home cruiser symbolized the larger transformation of the United States into an imperial power and gave the cruiser a significant place in the history of American expansion. Olympia served as the flagship of the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Squadron from its commissioning in 1895 through the conclusion of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Removed from active service that year, it was recommissioned in 1902 and assigned to the North Atlantic Squadron. Soon after, Olympia was deployed to Honduras in an imperial expeditionary mission to defend U.S. interests. The ship performed coastal defensive patrol during World War I, after which it was sent to Russia in 1918 as part of the Allied force that intervened in the Russian civil war. Its last mission was carrying the remains of the Unknown Soldier from France to Arlington National Cemetery in 1921. Olympia was decommissioned for good in 1922 and eventually became a floating exhibit at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where efforts to preserve the ship are ongoing.

The Spanish ships and forts opened fire on Dewey’s ships shortly after 5:00 a.m. But the American squadron was outside the range of the Spanish guns. Dewey directed his vessels to hold their fire until 5:40 a.m., when he turned to Charles V. Gridley, captain of the Olympia, and said, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” The American squadron commenced firing, and the ships ran an oval racetrack course in front of the Spanish ships, initially firing their gun turrets and port-side guns at the Spaniards. After passing the

Spanish forces, the American ships turned and headed back, this time firing to the starboard. The Americans repeated this process five times. All the while, the Spanish returned ineffective fire. Aware of his desperate situation, Montojo ordered his ships to try to ram the Americans. However, such efforts merely focused the American fire on a single ship, to devastating effect. Montojo’s flagship, the Reina Cristina, tried initially and was put out of action. Four other Spanish vessels suffered severe casualties, were sunk, or were otherwise put out of action. After a break in the action of several hours, the engagement was renewed but the remaining Spanish ships offered little resistance. At about 12:30 p.m., the Spanish forces surrendered. The only American loss of life during the operation was a sailor who had died of a heart attack the night before. Nine other Americans were wounded. By contrast, more than 160 Spanish seamen had been killed, with more than 210 wounded, including Montojo. Dewey sent a force of marines ashore, who easily captured the nearby arsenal and harbor. More significantly, his reports that the Philippines could easily be seized resulted in the dispatch of additional troops, who landed a few months later and occupied Manila by mid-August. Dewey’s victory, the first in the Spanish-American War, made him a national hero. Special medals were presented to the men serving under him, and the U.S. Congress promoted Dewey to the rank of admiral of the navy, a rank awarded to no one in the U.S. Navy before or since. After the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain for $20 million as part of the peace treaty ending the SpanishAmerican War and then failed to grant independence to the islands, the Philippine Insurrection, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, followed. Alan M. Anderson See also: Aguinaldo, Emilio; American Anti-Imperialist League; McKinley, William; Paris, Treaty of (1898); Yellow Journalism

Further Reading Hagan, Kenneth J. This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. New York: Free Press, 1991. Leeke, Jim. Manila and Santiago: The New Steel Navy in the Spanish-American War. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009. Sargent, Nathan. Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Foundation, 1947. Trask, David F. The War with Spain in 1898. New York: Free Press, 1981.

Martí, José (1853–1895) José Martí, considered a national hero in Cuba, was an intellectual, journalist, publisher, professor, poet, and political activist who was instrumental in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain in the 19th century. He wrote on liberty, freedom, democracy, contemporary political issues such as the possible threat of U.S. expansionism, and a range of cultural topics, and was a founding member and ideological contributor to the pro-independence Cuban Revolutionary Party. In 1895, he was fatally wounded in the first armed conflict of the Cuban War of Independence. José Julián Martí y Pérez was born in Havana on January 28, 1853. His father, Mariano Martí Navarro, was originally from Valencia, Spain, and his mother, Leonor Pérez Cabrera, was a native of the Canary Islands. As a young student in Havana, he developed his ideas about Cuban independence and began writing on political issues. Martí’s studies were interrupted in 1868 when Spanish colonial authorities closed schools. In late 1869, at the age of 16, Martí was accused of treason, arrested, and sentenced to six years’ hard labor in a prison quarry. In 1870, Spanish authorities deported him to Spain,

where he continued his studies at the universities of Zaragoza and Madrid and earned degrees in philosophy and law by 1874. During the late 1870s, Martí traveled and worked in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Honduras. He returned to Cuba in 1878 at the end of the Ten Years’ War, but was arrested in 1879 and charged with conspiracy in connection with an uprising in Santiago de Cuba, leading to his second deportation to Spain. With Spain still in control of Cuba and the goal of Cuban independence not yet achieved, Martí moved to New York in 1880. In the 1880s, Martí wrote and published extensively on independence and related issues, and worked as a diplomat and consul for several Latin American countries. Within the United States, Martí developed ties with other Cubans living in exile, including the émigré community in Florida, and actively opposed Cuba’s annexation to the United States and U.S. expansionism into Latin America in general. By 1891 Martí was a chosen delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and for the next few years, he continued writing, speaking, and raising funds for independence and organizing exiled Cubans in several countries. During this time he wrote and spoke specifically about Spain and the United States cooperating in preventing Cuba’s independence, and participated in the preparation of an armed expedition of three ships. These ships were intended to launch an uprising that would begin the Cuban Revolution. In January 1895, an initial expedition of three ships was apprehended by U.S. authorities at the port of Fernandina in Florida. A second armed expedition, with Martí among its troops, left the Dominican Republic and landed in Cuba by April 11. The expedition reached Dos Ríos in May, and on May 19, 1895, Martí was killed in combat against Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos. Lora Stone See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Cuba, War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Primary Documents: José Martí’s “Our America” (1891)

Further Reading Kirk, John M. José Martí: Mentor of the Cuban Revolution. Halifax: Fernwood, 2012. Montero, Oscar. José Martí: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pérez, Louis A. José Martí in the United States: The Florida Experience. Tempe: ASU Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1995.

McKinley, William (1843–1901) When William McKinley became president in March 1897, he inherited a diplomatic policy that emphasized neutrality over Cuban insurrections against Spain. As McKinley took office, Spanish treatment of the Cuban people was generating a palpable anger and frustration among many Americans. Under the instruction of McKinley, General Stewart L. Woodford, the American minister to Spain, expressed America’s disapproval of the callous treatment of Cubans by the Spanish and urged Spain to grant autonomy to the Cubans. Spain replied by agreeing to allow Cuban autonomy but under the precepts of continued Spanish rule and diplomatically reminded the United States of the U.S. policy of neutrality. As riots grew in Havana, however, the chances of such a resolution seemed out of reach. Reports of riots, maltreatment, and starvation influenced President McKinley to send the battleship USS Maine to the Cuban port of Havana to protect American citizens and business interests stationed in Cuba. Headlines produced by American periodicals fueled the flames of an existing anti-Spanish sentiment in the United States. Some Republicans and Democrats in Congress were calling on McKinley

to seek a congressional declaration of war against Spain. Cries for war climaxed when, on February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana’s harbor.

William McKinley, 25th president of the United States, oversaw the nation’s rise as an imperial power from 1897 to 1901. Initially a reluctant imperialist, McKinley ultimately declared war on Spain, orchestrated a campaign to build popular support for taking the Philippines, and overcame anti-imperialist opposition to win Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris. (Library of Congress)

McKinley remained hesitant about declaring war on Spain, however, because of the presence of American citizens and economic interests in Cuba. Despite McKinley’s hesitation, Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898. The fighting between the United States and Spain did not begin in Cuba, but instead at Manila Bay in the Philippines. Unbeknown to Congress and McKinley, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt sent instructions to George Dewey, a commander in the U.S. Navy, to depart from Hong Kong for the Spanish-owned Philippines once Congress and the president signed a declaration of war against Spain. Once war was declared, Dewey launched successful attacks against the Spanish in the Philippines. After less than four months of fighting and thousands of American casualties due to illness and combat, the Spanish-American War came to an end on August 12, 1898. Although the United States established a military government in Cuba following the war, the Teller Amendment (1898) prevented it from taking full control of the island. Three years later, however, Congress passed the Platt Amendment, which allowed the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs. Congress did territorialize the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico at McKinley’s urging. Much debate surrounded this blatant display of American imperialism and expansionism, and in 1899, verbal backlash turned into violence during the Philippine-American War. At McKinley’s urging, the United States gained control of the islands through the Treaty of Paris. In the context of the debate between annexationists and anti-imperialists, and drawing on a century of Manifest Destiny ideology, McKinley famously defended his decision to push for U.S. annexation. In a racially and religiously charged address

to a group of ministers, McKinley recounted that God had delivered a divine message about the Filipinos, instructing the president not to leave the presumably racially unfit Filipinos to govern themselves and not to allow them to fall to another imperial power. Not receiving the same divine message, Filipino revolutionaries found themselves once again fighting for independence. The war quickly escalated at the Battle of Manila in February 1899. Filipino rebellions lasted for more than three years. Philippine independence would not occur until the signing of the Treaty of Manila in 1946. McKinley’s involvement and responses to international conflict highlight the ways in which his presidency ultimately embraced imperialism. His decisions came at a cost—not the least of which was the thousands of American, Cuban, and Filipino lives lost to achieve this first stage of overseas U.S. expansion. Allison L. Robinson See also: Paris, Treaty of (1898); Philippine Revolution; USS Maine; Primary Documents: “Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts” (October 3, 1899)

Further Reading Bradford, James C. Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War and Its Aftermath. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993. Coletta, P. E. Threshold to American Internationalism: Essays on the Foreign Policies of William McKinley. New York: Exposition Press, 1970. Miller, Richard H. American Imperialism in 1898: The Quest for National Fulfillment. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970. Spielman, William Carl. William McKinley: Stalwart Republican. New York: Exposition Press, 1954.

Moro Rebellion (1899–1913) The Moro Rebellion was an ongoing armed conflict between the Moro Muslim population of the southern Philippines and the U.S. military. At the end of the Spanish-American War (1898), Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. Spain and the United States both attempted colonization and conversion of the Philippines, with Spain emphasizing conversion of Moro Muslims to Catholicism, and the United States focusing more on assimilation of all Filipinos through modernization of social institutions. The transition from Spanish to U.S. control was not abrupt, but was rather part of an ongoing expansion of U.S. economic interests and the global economy into the Philippines. Similarly, the Moro Rebellion was not a short, centralized conflict, but rather an escalation of historical conflicts with colonizing nations that ultimately included the United States. The people referred to as Moros inhabited the southern region of the Philippines. They differed from people of the northern region in that they were Islamic and were not as thoroughly colonized by the Spanish. In actuality, they were not one group, but 13 different cultural-linguistic groups that shared adherence to Islam as a common identifier. Following the arrival of Arabian traders to the Philippines as early as 1380, the first mosque was established on Mindanao, the southernmost island, and conversion to Islam was widespread over the next hundred years. When the Spanish began expeditions to the Philippines in the 16th century, they associated the largely Muslim population with “Moros” (Moors), a term initially used to refer to the Arab and Berber Muslims who were forced to leave Spain in the late 15th century. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, relations in the Philippines were contentious between the Spanish in the northern region and the Muslim population in the southern region. From 1650 to 1850, Spain tried to exert political and religious control over Muslim territory, while Muslim rulers conducted military raids

against the northern Spanish region, often involving abductions for the slave trade. By the 19th century, Spain had gained military advantage through technological advancements and had successfully placed military and naval units in positions to protect the northern regions. These military units were also used to establish claims to the southern Muslim-controlled islands of Sulu and Mindanao. During this time, the Spanish Crown issued statements encouraging tolerance toward Islam and retention of traditional Muslim leaders, while at the same time attempting to colonize the region and establish political authority. Muslim political authorities never recognized Spanish authority, and by the time of the Spanish-American War (1898), there was still no formal understanding between Muslims and Spanish about who actually controlled the southern region of the Philippines. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898, the Spanish-American War ended and Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. The general state of the Philippines at that time was unrest, revolution, and a move toward a distinct Filipino national identity, as evidenced by the Philippine Revolution (1872– 1901). President William McKinley, in office from 1897 to 1901, believed that annexation of the Philippines should include attempts to Christianize and modernize Filipinos, but U.S. military and civilian officials soon realized that a majority were already Christian and many had adopted elements of Western culture. At the end of the 19th century, the Philippines’ population was estimated at around 8 million, with about a fifth being Muslims who had systems of land ownership, education, and administration that were all different from those of the Philippines’ Christian regions. Americans continued using the Spanish term “Moros” to refer to this Muslim population, and after some initial attempts to repress Islam, U.S. officials became more interested in abolishing only those Moro practices, such as slavery, that were contrary to U.S. law. The Moro Rebellion began in 1899 when U.S. soldiers arrived during William McKinley’s administration, and ended in 1913 with disarmament of the Moros and withdrawal of most U.S. troops during Woodrow Wilson’s administration. The United States wanted to defeat Filipino nationalists in the northern region and initially avoided actions that might provoke resistance by the Moros, who made up most of the population of the Sulu Archipelago and the southern half of the large island of Mindanao. U.S. policy at this time tended toward accommodations such as the Bates Agreement of 1899, in which the sultan of Sulu was named the governing authority in the Sulu Islands with the condition that he recognize U.S. sovereignty. President McKinley formed the Philippine Commission, which created the Moro Province comprised of southern Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, and placed it under the command of a military governor. Efforts were directed at building support for U.S. authority by expanding commerce, improving education, and developing public health institutions in Moro Province. However, armed conflict between U.S. forces and Moros increased, and many U.S. military officers supported a show of force. Major General Leonard Wood, the first governor of Moro Province (1903–1906), friend of President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), and a former military governor of U.S.-occupied Cuba, was instrumental in replacing the Moro legal code with U.S. laws, restoring a tax on adult males, and enforcing antislavery laws. Moros’ armed resistance to Wood’s policies took several forms, including guerrilla warfare, ambushes on trails and roads, raids on U.S. encampments for weapons, and a few cases of suicide attacks. Wood’s replacement, Brigadier General Tasker Bliss (1906–1909), replaced coercion with diplomacy, resulting in a marked decrease in armed conflict between Moros and U.S. troops. In 1909, Bliss was replaced by Brigadier General John J. Pershing (1909–1913), who continued policies that emphasized diplomacy, including dividing U.S. military forces into smaller units distributed throughout Moro Province. In 1911, Pershing implemented a new law requiring Moros to surrender their firearms and forbidding them to carry edged weapons. Some Moros refused to disarm, and fighting broke

out between them and U.S. enforcement troops. In June 1913, the Battle of Bud Bagsak marked the end of the Moro Rebellion’s organized resistance to U.S. control. During Woodrow Wilson’s administration (1913–1921), civilians began replacing military officers in the provincial government, and U.S. military forces withdrew. Lora Stone See also: Paris, Treaty of (1898); Philippine Revolution; Wood, Leonard

Further Reading Fulton, Robert. Moroland, 1899–1906: America’s First Attempt to Transform an Islamic Society. Bend, OR: Tumalo Creek Press, 2007. Go, Julian, and Anne Foster, eds. The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Linn, Brian. The Philippine War, 1899–1902. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Paris, Treaty of (1898) The Treaty of Paris was the agreement signed by the United States and Spain that ended the SpanishAmerican War on December 10, 1898. The treaty ceded Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. The United States paid Spain $20 million for the Philippines, but acquired the other territories without paying Spain anything. Despite the fact that movements and individuals in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines had led their colonies’ fight for independence from Spain for decades, they had no say in the treaty negotiations. Only representatives of Spain and the United States wrote, debated, and signed the treaty. Final congressional ratification of the treaty occurred on April 11, 1989. Cuba and Puerto Rico became Spanish colonies or possessions in 1493 and 1492, respectively, the Philippines in 1521, and Guam in 1565. Revolutionary forces in Cuba and Puerto Rico jointly initiated the fight for independence from Spain in 1868. Although their efforts failed, they continued the struggle to end Spanish control of their islands. In 1897 Spain determined that the only way it could maintain control of its Caribbean colonies was by granting them limited autonomy. To prevent Cuban and Puerto Rican forces from transforming autonomy into independence, the United States proclaimed that it supported Puerto Ricans’ and Cubans’ anticolonial demands. To back its words with deeds, the United States sent the battleship USS Maine to Havana, Cuba, in 1898. Although the question of who blew up the ship in February 1898 and why has not been fully answered, it is clear that President William McKinley seized on the explosion to declare war on Spain. McKinley’s declaration of war reflected the U.S. desire to possess the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “I earnestly hope that no truce will be granted and peace will only be made on consideration of Cuba being independent, Porto Rico [sic] ours, and the Philippines taken away from Spain” (quoted in Ayala and Bernabe, 14). Eager to seize the Spanish colonies for itself, the United States sent military forces to engage Spanish troops in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The Filipino struggle for independence followed a slightly different course. Spanish colonialism in the Philippines began in 1565. Filipinos revolted against Spain in 1896. Unlike Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spain did not grant the Philippines autonomy. U.S. troops under Commodore George Dewey entered the fight in 1898 when they bombarded and subsequently defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Cuban, Puerto Rican, and U.S. forces were also victorious in the Caribbean. The war formally ended on December 10, 1898, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

The Treaty of Paris ended the war and resulted in the U.S. acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, territories that the United States had long coveted. However, the treaty did not resolve the status issue for either the islands or their inhabitants. As earlier conquests of Native American and Mexican lands show, the U.S. government and people were not averse to capturing other nations’ territory and population, nor were they unwilling to fully incorporate them into the U.S. political system. However, most U.S. citizens and politicians wanted to preserve the United States as a white nation. The land taken from native peoples and Mexico only became U.S. states once a majority white population dominated them. Since few white Americans lived in the newly acquired territories and it was unlikely that they would ever outnumber the native populations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, the question that prevailed was what political relationship the newly conquered territories and their inhabitants would have to the United States. This question engendered heated debates and sharp disagreements among American political and economic elites. One point, however, was clear. Neither the U.S. government nor the majority of the American people considered admitting any territory into the union unless white people constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. The two sides active in the debate have come to be known as the anti-imperialists and the imperialists. The question as to whether or not the United States was or should be an imperialist nation dominated the 1900 presidential election. Williams Jennings Bryan, candidate of the Democratic Party, argued that the permanent possession of colonies violated the spirit and the law of the U.S. Constitution. He stated that the United States could not legally obtain possession of the former Spanish colonies. Bryan publicly opposed annexation of the Philippines. William S. McKinley, the Republican candidate, countered that the flag did not follow the Constitution. In other words, the United States could conquer new lands without making them states and incorporating them into the federal system. McKinley won the election, which some interpreted as the American people’s endorsement of an imperialist foreign policy. In 1901, in Downes v. Bidwell, the Supreme Court confirmed that, following the Treaty of Paris, Puerto Rico was no longer a foreign country; instead it was now part of the United States and subject to its power. It did not, however, receive the constitutional protections of a U.S. state, nor would it follow the path to statehood charted by either the Northwest Territory or northern Mexico. Instead, the Supreme Court ruling declared, “the island of Puerto Rico is a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.” Six months later, in Pepke v. United States, the Supreme Court applied the same ruling to the Philippines. The United States applied its legal system to all four territories. A parallel issue concerned the political status of the inhabitants of the recently conquered territories. Although they, like their land, came under the control of the U.S. government, the United States failed to offer or guarantee them political rights. Indeed, according to Article IX of the Treaty of Paris: “The civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the U.S. shall be determined by the Congress.” Interpretations of what it meant to belong to, but not be a part of the United States varied somewhat depending on the territory, as did the political status of the native population. Although the United States granted Cuba nominal independence, it militarily occupied the island until 1902. In that year the United States imposed the Platt Amendment on Cuba. The amendment, written and endorsed by the U.S. Congress, legislated three important provisions that defined U.S.-Cuban relations. It sanctioned unilateral U.S. military involvement in Cuba; it established the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay; and it gave the United States the power to control Cuban foreign policy and the economy. Following the 1906 election

of Tomás Estrada Palma, a Cuban ruled the island. However, the United States militarily intervened in Cuba from 1906 to 1909, in 1912, and from 1917 to 1922. The U.S. military occupied Puerto Rico and ruled the island through a military government until 1900. In that year the Foraker Act established a civilian-run government for the island. However, from then until 1947 Washington, D.C., appointed an American as the governor. Puerto Ricans first elected a Puerto Rican, Luis Muñoz Marín, as governor in 1948. Puerto Rico was an unincorporated territory, a status it maintained until 1952, when it became a free associated state. In 1917 the U.S. Congress made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens or partial citizens, since they were not granted the right to vote in any federal election. As of 2013 Puerto Ricans living on the island could not vote in any federal election, although Puerto Ricans living on the mainland could do so. Guam became and remains an unincorporated territory. It served the U.S. Navy as a station en route to the Philippines, a function it had played for centuries as a Spanish colony. Similar to Puerto Ricans, the people of Guam are U.S. citizens, but they cannot vote in federal elections. The U.S. military occupied the Philippines following the Treaty of Paris. Filipino forces resisted U.S. rule and the United States ruthlessly repressed them. Estimates of Filipinos who died during or as a result of the war are 34,000 troops and from 200,000 to 1 million civilians. The Philippines became a commonwealth in 1935 and achieved independence in 1946 after World War II and the defeat of the Japanese. Filipinos were never U.S. citizens. In 1930, the Harvard-educated lawyer Pedro Albizu Campos was elected president of the proindependence Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico. Albizu Campos drew on his legal training and political beliefs to declare that the Treaty of Paris was null and void. He based his argument on the fact that in 1898 Puerto Rico was autonomous and no longer a Spanish possession. As a result, he claimed, Spain could not legally turn the island over to the United States since it no longer owned it. Margaret Power See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Guantánamo Bay; Philippine Revolution; Platt Amendment; Puerto Rico

Further Reading Albizu Campos, Pedro. “Nulidad del Tratado de Paris.” In Laura Albizu-Campos Meneses and Fr. Mario A. Rodríguez León, eds. Pedro Albizu Campos Escritos. San Juan: Publicaciones Puertorriqueños, 2007. Ayala, César J., and Rafael Bernabe. Puerto Rico in the American Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Burnett, Christina Duffy, and Burke Marshall. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. McCoy, Alfred W., and Francisco A. Scarano. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

Philippine Commissions, First (1899–1900) and Second (1900–1916) Following its military victory over Spain in July 1898, the United States claimed the Philippine Islands. Annexationists argued that keeping them would give U.S. businesses access to a growing market and boost the country’s newfound claim to be a global power. Antiexpansionists, on the other hand, insisted that annexation violated the principles of liberty and freedom from foreign domination upon which the American republic had been founded. As for the Philippine population, a significant proportion was unwilling to trade Spanish rule for American rule. Emilio Aguinaldo, the most powerful rebel leader, asserted that during the war U.S.

officials had promised the Filipinos independence if they helped defeat the Spanish. The Americans denied this. Aguinaldo and other rebels then began preparing to resist American occupation, and so commenced the bloody four-year Philippine-American War. President William McKinley formed the first Philippine Commission as a means of restoring order and convincing Filipinos that U.S. rule would be more just than that of the Spanish. McKinley appointed Dr. Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cornell University, as its head. Schurman was an antiexpansionist as were the other four members: Rear Admiral George Dewey, victor at the Battle of Manila Bay; Major General Elwell S. Otis, military commander in the archipelago; Colonel Charles Denby, former minister to China; and Dean C. Worcester, a zoologist from the University of Michigan, who knew the islands well. The commission began its work in January 1899. Its powers were vague—“to assist in the peaceful extension of American authority and the establishment of civil and peaceful government among the people.” Actual power resided with the military under General Arthur MacArthur, the military commander of the islands. The commission dissolved in January 1900, in part because Schurman returned to his duties at Cornell. The next month McKinley, concerned about the growing insurrection, named fellow Ohio Republican William Howard Taft (1857–1930), a federal circuit judge who had previously served as solicitorgeneral, president of the Second Philippine Commission. Unlike the previous commission, the second was given enormous powers, including controlling the island’s budget and laws; its powers expanded after the insurrection ended in 1902. Future secretary of war Luke Edward Wright (1846–1922) was charged with revising the Civil and Criminal Codes, and U.S. judge and ambassador Henry Clay Ide (1844–1921) was responsible for formulating new internal revenue laws. Taft was an unlikely choice. He was an antiexpansionist, but assumed the position in hopes that humanitarian treatment of the Filipinos could usher in a new, more benign kind of colonialism. It was no mean task. Most of the islands were pacified by July 1902, but it would be another decade before peace was restored to the southern part of the archipelago where Muslims constituted a majority. In 1901 Taft became governor-general and stayed on until February 1904, arguing that civilian, not military, rule offered the best means of showing the Filipinos that American government would be more just than Spanish rule had been. General Arthur MacArthur (1845–1912), who had succeeded Otis as commanding general of the Division of the Philippines and military governor, in May 1900 disagreed. Many U.S. soldiers, who fought Filipino guerrillas throughout the archipelago for more than a decade, had a low opinion of the commissions. In their view, force was what the natives respected. “I’m only a common soldier-man in the blasted Philippines,” ran a popular U.S. marching song. “I like the word Fraternity, … but still I draw the line, He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine.” MacArthur feuded with Taft and the commission from the time the governor arrived in the islands. Compounding the military men’s ire was the fact that they had already begun to make reforms in education, law, and health care. President Theodore Roosevelt, a longtime friend of Taft’s, sided with the governor. On June 21, 1900, the civilian administration was declared the new governing body in the islands, and on July 4, Roosevelt sacked MacArthur and replaced him with General Adna Romanza Chaffee, who proved more cooperative. At the urging of the Boston-based Anti-Imperialist League, the Senate’s Philippines Committee conducted hearings from January to June 1902 into allegations that war crimes had been committed in the islands. Major Cornelius Gardener of the Thirteenth Infantry and a provincial governor was denied an opportunity to appear before the committee headed by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), an arch-

expansionist. The report Gardener sent instead painted a favorable picture of the work of the commission, contrasting it sharply with the work of military officials, which it argued was only fueling the antiAmerican insurgency. It read in part: The laws that have been enacted by it are everywhere favorably commented upon by the natives. The efforts being made for the general education of the people are appreciated…. The attitude of the Army, is, however, decidedly hostile to the provincial and municipal government … and to civil government in these islands in general…. Outrages committed by officers and soldiers against natives in an organized municipality and province, are often not punished … loyal natives begin to fear that local self-government promised them will not last long, and that any slight disturbance in a province may at any time may be made the pretext to again place it under military rule, and this is just the thing the insurgents … most desire. (Gardener, 881–885) Historians have given the commissions mixed reviews with most giving the Second Commission higher marks, perhaps partly because of the much greater powers it wielded. The commission introduced civil reform, a legal code, and a legislature to the Philippines, and other reforms that softened the fact of American indirect control of the islands that lasted until after World War II. Matthew McMurray See also: Aguinaldo, Emilio; American Anti-Imperialist League; Jones Act (Philippine Autonomy Law of 1916); Philippine Organic Act (Philippine Bill of 1902); Philippine Revolution; Taft, William Howard

Further Reading Escalante, Rene R. The Bearer of Pax Americana: The Philippine Career of William H. Taft, 1900–1903. Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 2007. Gardener, Cornelius. “Affairs in the Philippine Islands: Hearings Before the Committee on the Philippines,” 57th Congress, Senate, 1st Session, Doc. 331, part 2, pp. 881–885. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902. Linn, Brian MacAllister. The Philippine War, 1899–1902. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Seekins, Donald M. “The First Phase of United States Rule, 1898–1935.” In Ronald E. Dolan, ed. Philippines: A Country Study. 4th ed. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993.

Philippine Organic Act (Philippine Bill of 1902) The Philippine Organic Act was popularly referred to as the Philippine Bill of 1902 and sometimes the “Cooper Act” for its author, Henry Allen Cooper, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representative from Wisconsin. It was approved by the Senate and the House on July 1, 1902. During debate prior to the vote, Cooper recited the late Filipino poet Dr. José Rizal’s Mi ultimo adios (“My last farewell”), which the latter had written on the eve of his execution by the Spanish on December 30, 1896. The bill’s passage effectively marked the official end of the Philippine-American War, and President Theodore Roosevelt’s “pardon” of all Filipinos taking part in the conflict followed three days later on the Fourth of July. The act provided that the Philippine Commission would serve as the upper house of a Philippine Legislature and allowed for the creation of an elected Philippine Assembly (equivalent to the House of Representatives). The powers of the Assembly would be checked by the American-dominated commission, as well as the governor-general of the Philippines (then the future president William Howard Taft). However, even this limited grant of supervised self-government was only to occur after stringent

conditions had been met, primarily the following: (1) the end of hostilities in the archipelago; (2) the completion and publication of a census; and (3) two years of continued peace and official recognition of the authority of the United States. The census was conducted throughout 1903 and eventually published in 1905. The first elections for the Philippine Assembly were not held until July 30, 1907 (five years after passage of the bill), and the first meeting of the First Philippine Legislature—comprising the elected assembly and the unelected commission as oversight chamber—was convened on October 16, 1907, in the Manila Grand Opera House. The popular assembly was elected only from the provinces inhabited primarily by Catholic “Malay” Filipinos, rather than Moros (an indigenous Muslim people of the Philippines concentrated on the southern island of Mindanao) and “other non-Christian tribes.” The election was based on a very limited electorate, the right to vote being determined by a complex web of Christianity, the ability to speak English or Spanish, and property requirements. Other provisions of the bill included a definition of Philippine citizenship; a guarantee of limited rights and liberties; and the creation of two posts for resident Philippine commissioners to represent the views of the Filipino people to the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill also established the extent and limits of insular (Philippine) judicial authority. Such limited extensions of liberty were often used by American contemporaries to draw what were in fact small distinctions between the imperial practices of the United States and those of European powers. Patrick Kirkwood See also: Moro Rebellion; Philippine Commissions, First (1899–1900) and Second (1900–1916); Taft, William Howard

Further Reading Craig, Austin. Lineage, Life and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot: A Study of the Growth of Free Ideas in the Trans-Pacific American Territory. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book, 1914. Fradera, Josep M. “Reading Imperial Transitions: Spanish Contraction, British Expansion and American Irruption.” In Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, pp. 34–62. Karnow, Stanley. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. New York: Random House, 1990.

Philippine Revolution (1896–1898) The Philippine Revolution, the first against Western colonial rule in Asia, was directed against Spain, which had colonized the archipelago since 1565. The roots of the Philippine Revolution can be found in the regular and numerous, yet isolated, revolts against the colonial power and in 19th-century economic and political changes. The opening of the country to global trade, the simultaneous Suez Canal inauguration in 1869, and the consequent shortening of travel time contributed to the import of revolutionary and liberal ideas from abroad (especially from Europe and Cuba), while the political rule remained autocratic. In a context of a rising Filipino nationalism and a growing movement against the Spanish friars’ power and for the nationalization of Philippine parishes, three Filipino priests were executed publicly by garrote on February 17, 1872, for their supposed complicity in a mutiny at Cavite. Shortly thereafter, Filipinos living in Spain launched the Propaganda movement. Chief among its aims were the representation of the Philippines in the Spanish Cortes (parliament), secularization of the clergy, legalization of Spanish and Filipino equality, the abolition of the polo (labor service), and the guarantee

of basic freedoms. This nascent Filipino nationalism was mostly advocated by ilustrados (educated Filipino men from high society)—among whom the most prominent and inspiring was José Rizal, a writer and leader of great moral and intellectual vision. On July 7, 1892, a revolutionary secret society (patterned after Freemasonry) was established: the Katipunan (Kataas-taasang, Kagalang-galangna Katipunanngmga Anak ng Bayan, Highest and Venerable Society of the Children of the People). Despite having been influenced by the Liga Filipina (founded by José Rizal on July 3, 1892), the Katipunan did not seek reforms from Spain; its goal instead was independence through armed struggle. Unlike the propagandists, most katipuneros came from the lower and middle classes. Historians fiercely disagree on the importance of the movement and its numbers by 1896, and their estimations range from a few hundred to 400,000. The exact date and location of the event considered to be the revolution’s outbreak are also still violently disputed, and the official celebration has had, from time to time, to adjust to historiographic progress. Whether the event is referred to as the “Cry of Balintawak” and estimated to have occurred on August 26, 1896, or as the “Cry of Pugad Lawin” on August 23, it is agreed that the revolution broke out when a group of katipuneros tore up their cedulas (community tax certificates) while shouting patriotic cries. The first real encounter between Spanish and Filipino forces happened at the Battle of San Juan del Monte (also referred to as the Battle of Pinaglabanan or Battle of San Juan) that took place on August 30, 1896. While the revolution spread from Manila and Cavite to Laguna, Batangas, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Nueva Ecija, hundreds suspected of revolutionary activities were arrested, jailed, sent into exile, or killed. Most notably, José Rizal, wrongly implicated as the leader of the revolution, was tried for rebellion, sedition, and conspiracy and executed by a firing squad on December 30, 1896.

Andres Bonifacio, a Katipunan founder and its supreme leader, led the revolution in its early stages. However, an internal power struggle led to the division of revolutionary forces into two factions, the Magdiwang and the Magdalo. With the execution of Andres Bonifacio in May 1897, who was charged with sedition and treason, the leadership of the revolution fell into the hands of a katipunero from Cavite, General Emilio Aguinaldo, who had distinguished himself on the battlefields in Cavite, at that time the heartland of the revolution. Soon thereafter, Emilio Aguinaldo and his troops faced a succession of defeats and had to retreat. They finally settled in Biak-na-Bato (Bulacan Province), where they established what became known as the Republic of Biak-na-Bato, with a constitution based on the first Cuban constitution. Between November 18 and December 15, the warring forces negotiated the Pact of Biak-na-Bato. Besides the cessation of hostilities, the revolution leadership agreed to be exiled to Hong Kong (under British rule) in return for a compensation of 400,000 Mexican pesos. Due to sporadic skirmishes, the truce failed in many parts of the archipelago. Shortly after the United States began the naval blockade of Cuba (April 21, 1898), the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish forces in the Battle of Manila Bay (May 1, 1898). On May 19, Emilio Aguinaldo returned to the Philippines and resumed hostilities against the Spanish. By June, the revolutionary movement had gained control over most of Luzon (the main island), except Manila. On June 12, Emilio Aguinaldo issued the Philippine Declaration of Independence from his house in Kawit (Cavite Province). For the first time, the Filipino flag was unfurled and the national anthem was played.

On July 23, a revolutionary government was established. Spanish rule officially came to an end with the Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898), which concluded the Spanish-American War. The Philippines were ceded to the United States and neither Spain nor the United States recognized Philippine independence. At Barasoain Church in Malolos (Bulacan), the revolutionary movement organized a Congreso Revolucionario, whose delegates were all ilustrados. On January 21, 1899, the Congreso proclaimed the constitution and two days later, the Philippine First Republic (or Malolos Republic) was inaugurated in Malolos with Emilio Aguinaldo as president and Apolinario Mabini as prime minister. On February 4–5, 1899, hostilities broke out between U.S. and Filipino forces (Battle of Manila). On June 2, the Malolos Congress proclaimed a Declaration of War against the United States and the Philippine-American War began. Gwenola Ricordeau See also: Aguinaldo, Emilio; Manila Bay, Battle of; Propaganda, Spanish-American and PhilippineAmerican Wars; Paris, Treaty of (1898)

Further Reading Agoncillo, Teodoro. The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan. Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1955. Ileto, Reynaldo. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979. Majul, Cesar. The Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine Revolution. Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1957. Soriano, Rafaelita Hilario, ed. Women in the Philippine Revolution. Quezon City, Philippines: Printon Press, 1995.

Platt Amendment (1901) The United States occupied Cuba following its defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Spanish withdrawal from the island. Americans withdrew, too, three years later. But first they insisted the emerging Cuban government include several stipulations in its new constitution. Senator Orville Platt, chairing the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, required Cubans to acknowledge the United States’ right to oversee their foreign relations, its right to intervene in their internal affairs, and its right to buy or lease a naval base at Guantánamo Bay. The William McKinley administration dismissed Cuban objections that this infringed upon Cuban sovereignty, notifying Cuban leaders that they could either accept it or Americans would continue occupying the island indefinitely. Although reflective of turn-of-the-century geopolitical realism, the roots of this imperial posture go deeper. Americans from Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams to proslavery filibusterers and naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan had coveted Cuba throughout the 19th century. They believed the island fell within the United States’ natural borders, and that it would inevitably become an American territory or state. Further, it offered a commanding position in the Caribbean, potentially dominating strategic trade routes and communication lines at the Florida Straits, the Windward Passage, and the Yucatán Channel. It possessed valuable natural resources, especially its own fresh water supply. Moreover, in part due to these attributes, American financers and commercial interests had steadily invested capital there. However, Americans had also long experienced anxiety when contemplating Cuba and its importance. They knew that western European imperialists, especially Britain and France, coveted it for the same reasons they did. Congress passed a no-transfer resolution in 1810, expressing concern that a declining

Spain might cede the island to Britain or France. When the James Monroe administration recognized Mexico and several South American republics in 1823, it also warned the Russian and western European governments not to attempt reconquest, declaring the entire Western Hemisphere closed to further colonization. The United States lacked the naval power to enforce this for the time being. But Monroe’s doctrine coincided with British policy, and the new Latin American republics consolidated their independence; Spain retained only Guam, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico after the 1820s. Anxieties over external hemispheric encroachment worsened following the Civil War, as imperial rivalries escalated in East Asia and Africa, and new, ambitious powers arose in Germany and Japan. In Cuba, nationalists attempted to win independence from Spain from 1868 forward, finally succeeding between 1895 and 1898, culminating with the larger Spanish-American War. The United States, too, had emerged as an ambitious power: purposeful, economically formidable, and possessing a world-class navy by the mid-1890s. Indeed, the U.S. Navy dominated the Caribbean basin by century’s end. In the last quarter of the century, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia repeatedly intervened in Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua, usually to collect debts. The Grover Cleveland administration, claiming American preeminence in the region, intervened to settle these disputes, compelling Britain, for example, to arbitrate its boundary dispute with Venezuela in 1895. The British complied, and the United States subsequently assumed a police role in the region, intervening often and with an increasingly heavy hand through the 1920s. Meanwhile, the United States intervened in Cuba’s independence war in summer 1898, quickly defeating Spain and occupying Cuba and the Philippines. When Congress declared war, it also declared America’s war aims. Senator Henry Teller attached an amendment to the war resolution. Teller clarified that the United States intended to settle Cuba’s independence war, pacifying the island. Teller disclaimed any intent to annex Cuba or exercise political control there. Once Americans had achieved the defeat of Spain, they would withdraw from the island and leave it to its own people. Teller’s amendment represented an anti-imperial ideal the United States would abandon three years later. Imperial rivalries had accelerated by the turn of the century, focusing, above all, on China. Portugal, Britain, and France had since the late 15th century established a series of seaborne trade and communications lines to China—either through the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Malacca Straits, or, alternatively, around the Straits of Magellan or the Cape of Good Hope. By the 19th century, the quickening interest in constructing a Central American canal contributed to these intensifying imperial rivalries, with Cuba lying in the center of these new trade and communications lines linking western Europe, the United States, and China. The Cuban and Philippine independence wars coincided with all of this, and, in the view of key American strategists, Spain’s withdrawal left a dangerous power vacuum that any number of imperial powers would rush to fill if unchecked. If another power filled the void, it might use its position in Cuba or the Philippines to deny the United States access to these trade and communications lines in war or even in peace. The Platt Amendment reflected Americans’ decision to preempt this. This decision rested on 19th-century Western assumptions that Americans reject today. Americans in the Spanish-American War era considered Cubans not only as weak, vulnerable to great-power intervention, but they also regarded them as racially and culturally inferior, incapable of responsible selfgovernment. This required American protection and tutelage, which many characterized as “the white man’s burden” at the time. The Platt Amendment codified this in American law and forced it into the Cuban constitution. It remained operational until the Franklin Roosevelt administration abrogated it in a revised U.S.-Cuban treaty in 1934, and Cubans subsequently revised their constitution.

The Platt Amendment remains a pivotal moment in American foreign relations history. Latin American nationalists, anti-imperialists, and some historians cite the Platt Amendment when illustrating and critiquing U.S.–Latin American relations in their narratives. They cite it as an example demonstrating selfishness in American foreign relations, imperialism, racism, and pretensions to cultural superiority with respect to Latin Americans. James Lockhart See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Good Neighbor Policy; Guantánamo Bay; Teller Amendment; Primary Documents: Platt Amendment (1901)

Further Reading Davis, Harold, John Finan, and F. Taylor Peck. Latin American Diplomatic History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Langley, Lester. America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future. Boston: Little, Brown, 1897. Pérez, Louis, Jr. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Propaganda, Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars The Spanish-American War (April–August 1898) was the first conflict in which military action was heavily promoted by the media, especially newspapers and the new medium of film, and the first in which war coverage became almost a daily thing. Prior to the explosion of the USS Maine, members of both the media and military were calling for intervention by the United States to assist the Cuban revolutionaries who were trying to win independence from Spain. American newspapers ran rather sensational stories that depicted atrocities allegedly committed by the Spanish, depicting everything from Cubans placed in concentration camps to stories of gruesome murders, rapes, and slaughter. American involvement actually started when the USS Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260. The explosion became a sensation in the American press, which immediately blamed the Spanish. It served as a rallying point for the American people to “Remember the Maine,” a highly effective propaganda slogan—this despite the fact that subsequent investigations never conclusively placed the blame on any one party. In the context of worsening relations with Spain in 1898, the media’s treatment of the loss of the battleship accelerated the pace toward war. In the days following the explosion, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal ran a story claiming that the Spanish planted a torpedo beneath the USS Maine and blew it up from shore. This and subsequent stories fired up American public opinion, with expected divided results: those who wanted to attack the Spanish and those who leaned toward confirmation of an actual attack. The most important propaganda tool of the era was newspapers, the “yellow press,” which brought the casualties down to the level of the average reader with lurid front-page headlines and pictures. One of these papers, New York World, had an eight-page comic section that included the famous “Yellow Kid” strip among four colored pages. This helped to coin the term “yellow press.” It was also a term often used to characterize sensationalist, lurid, jingoistic, and sometimes fabricated or embellished news stories by chiefly large-circulation newspapers to stir up support for the Cuban rebels and encourage the United States to go to war with Spain in the 1890s.

The efforts of William Hearst’s New York Journal to promote the war with Spain are now regarded as classic propaganda; he used name calling, atrocity stories, and appeals to American honor and sympathy for the underdog to inflame public opinion against Spain, depicting the nation as a harsh and inhumane imperialist power and a U.S. enemy. One of the major factors given for the initiation of U.S. hostilities against Cuba were the propagandistic efforts of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, then involved in a circulation war. The World and the New York Journal, along with other newspapers that published material from these two New York City newspapers, exerted a strong influence on America’s decision to go to war by stirring up interventionist enthusiasm. During the 1898 conflict in which the United States went to war with Spain, the U.S. Army provided bulletins to the press, highly patriotic films, and phony pictorial “news” accounts to galvanize patriotic support in the United States. The power of film in this war with its “actuality” and “documentary” effects freed propagandists for the first time from nearly complete reliance on publications and on the printed word. Typified by The Campaign in Cuba (actually filmed in New Jersey), these efforts showed a flagrant disregard for the truth. The films—the first ever in a U.S. military conflict—were used effectively for propagandistic purposes. Highly patriotic films such as Tearing Down the Spanish Flag! electrified U.S. audiences. The tremendous popularity of this film, which was actually filmed on a New York City rooftop, produced a host of imitators once war began. As the conflict in Cuba turned toward war in the Philippines the following year, the propaganda of war enthusiasts was countered with a vigorous public relations offensive by those opposed to America’s newfound imperialist impulse. The taking of the Philippines as part of the cession by Spain at the conclusion of hostilities in Cuba—met with fierce resistance by Filipinos—provoked the formation of the Anti-Imperialist League. Its Chicago platform warned of imperialism, militarism, press censorship, and the undermining of representative government. The league challenged administration censorship while war correspondents complained their reports attributing responsibility for the outbreak of the Philippine-American War were suppressed. The league adopted modern techniques of persuasion, publishing pamphlets, broadsides, and public letters. They also published a collection of antiexpansionist verse titled Liberty Poems that included work by, among others, Mark Twain. American newspapers on the whole were divided on the decision to extend sovereignty over the Philippines. Literary Digest magazine said its informal survey of 192 daily newspapers showed that 44 percent supported annexing the Philippines, 33 percent opted for just establishing a naval station there, while 23 percent favored other resolutions, such as establishment of an American protectorate or selling the islands outright. However, news coverage was less extensive than that of the Spanish-American War as expenses associated with reporting on a far-flung conflict in Asia along with the guerrilla nature of the fighting did much to discourage any sustained coverage, although it did not hinder the U.S. press. Martin J. Manning See also: Aguinaldo, Emilio; American Anti-Imperialist League; Roosevelt, Theodore, and the Rough Riders; USS Maine; Yellow Journalism; Primary Documents: “The Big Type War of the Yellow Kids” (1898)

Further Reading Auxier, George W. “The Propaganda Activities of the Cuban Junta in Precipitating the Spanish-American War, 1895–1898.” Durham, NC, 1939; reprinted from the Hispanic American Historical Review 19, no. 3 (August 1939). Langellier, John P. Uncle Sam’s Little Wars: The Spanish-American War, Philippine Insurrection and Boxer Rebellion, 1898–1902. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002.

Wilkerson, Marcus M. Public Opinion and the Spanish-American War: A Study in War Propaganda. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1932. Wisan, Joseph E. The Cuban Crisis as Reflected in the New York Press, 1895–1898. New York: Octagon Books, 1965.

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919), and the Rough Riders Theodore Roosevelt is often invoked by historians as the preeminent symbol of turn-of-the-20th-century virile masculinity. This perception originates in part from his political program, one that was framed in terms of restoring and strengthening what was perceived by Roosevelt and many of his contemporaries to be a degenerating sense of national manhood that was sapping American civilization of its capacity to meet the imposing challenges of the day both at home and abroad. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, the future president became known as Colonel Roosevelt, the charismatic leader of a regiment of volunteers known as the Rough Riders. As a politician and an advocate of American imperialism, he used masterfully the language of a virile American superiority to advance his political ideas. Skillfully, Roosevelt constructed his political image as one that embodied not only physical vigor, but also intellectual acumen and clear moral conviction. Behind this image, there was a genuine formidable personal force as Roosevelt determined to prove to himself and the nation the meaning of a strenuous life of moral virtue. This constellation of attributes collectively gives life to the very special place that Theodore Roosevelt holds in the pantheon of heroic figures in American history. The Spanish-American War offered Roosevelt an extraordinary opportunity to live out his philosophy. As the fearless Colonel Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt embraced the glare of publicity that was showered upon him and his Rough Riders. In 1897, just before the war broke out, Roosevelt was appointed assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy. Due to the lackluster leadership of the secretary (John D. Long), when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, Roosevelt moved aggressively to prepare the Navy for war—recruiting sailors, ordering ammunition, and helping to make the case to Congress that the situation in Cuba demanded decisive—and Navy-led—American military intervention. In May 1898, shortly after the declaration of war with Spain, Roosevelt, then 39 years old, father of six young children, left his sick wife, resigned his post in Washington, and enlisted to fight in the war. Roosevelt’s decision captured the attention of newspapers all over the country and helped galvanize patriotic support for the conflict ahead. Roosevelt, commissioned at the rank of lieutenant colonel, joined the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry—a regiment then commanded by Colonel Leonard Wood. When Wood was repositioned to take command of the Second Cavalry Brigade, the unit quickly became known as “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” The term had been used in popular stories to describe Western horsemen; most famously Buffalo Bill Cody had called his Wild West show “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” Roosevelt could not have been more delighted at that nickname. He had maintained his image as a tough frontiersman. His monumental work The Winning of the West depicted the frontier Indian wars as the foundation of white American manhood—earned through violent warfare with savage Indians. Roosevelt later described his Rough Riders as the heirs and descendants of those Indian fighters, effectively extending the Western frontier of conquest to Cuba. The Rough Riders represented a motley mix of college men, former college star athletes, Texas Rangers, cowboys, prospectors, and Native Americans. Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt armed and trained the men so effectively at their post in San Antonio, Texas, that they were deployed to Cuba almost immediately. When the men reached Santiago de Cuba in mid-June, they joined the Fifth Corps, another unit of exceptionally well-trained and enthusiastic volunteers and regular army soldiers.

Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders pose at the summit of San Juan Hill, Cuba, in 1898. Also known as the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the Rough Riders were recruited largely by Roosevelt and consisted of a varied assortment of both upper- and lower-class citizen soldiers. Despite some later criticism of Roosevelt for the high casualty rate suffered by his men, the Rough Riders helped elevate him to the status of national hero. (Library of Congress)

The unit first saw combat at Las Guásimas on the road to Santiago. A quick victory brought the first wave of sensationalized news of the Rough Riders to the United States. Soon thereafter the Rough Riders, bravely and very effectively supported by troops from four African American regiments, encountered fierce Spanish resistance at both El Caney and San Juan Hill. It was here in the confusion of battle that Roosevelt famously led an assault on the adjacent Kettle Hill. Losses were heavy, as 89 Rough Riders were either killed or wounded in the attack. The Spanish soon withdrew and the American Navy closed in and ensured the final surrender of Santiago. The assault on the hill instantly made Roosevelt a national hero. For Roosevelt, that act of courage demonstrated his commitment to an America whose character was most profoundly shaped by its bloodstained frontier experience. He had written about frontiersmen who overcame supposedly inferior Indian warriors, and now Roosevelt’s Rough Riders—extending that interior American empire abroad— had defeated a likewise lesser Spanish enemy. Thanks to Roosevelt’s writing talent—he told the Cuba story in a book published in 1905—the Rough Riders became a legendary symbol of the brave American warrior, as well as the newfound martial spirit of imperialism that Roosevelt epitomized. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were vividly portrayed by Cody’s hugely popular Wild West Show, which had inspired the name, cultivating the heroic myth of the Rough Riders as real sons of the American West who had now righteously extended America’s Manifest Destiny overseas. Finally, Roosevelt’s war hero image melded perfectly with the ambitions of the virile imperialism he held for the nation. His regiment successfully combined primitive Western masculinity with advancing heights of Anglo-Saxon civilization from which America was born. The logic behind Roosevelt’s story of the Rough Riders’ formation revolved around a Darwinian vision of struggle and a manly duty. When Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt became president, he forged an American expansionism that would, beyond its material strategic interests, also advance the virile fighting qualities without which the American people would not survive. Thus, Roosevelt served as the most influential and important advocate of both imperialism and nationalism to expand the American influence internationally. Łukasz Albański

See also: African American Military Units; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Roosevelt, Theodore

Further Reading Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 2001. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders and Men of Action. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Winning of the West. Vol. 1. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889.

Social Darwinism Social Darwinism denotes a set of ideas about social, economic, and international relations policies that were derived from evolutionary science and became influential in the last third of the 19th century to the 20th-century interwar period. These ideas argued that human societies could be understood in biological, especially evolutionary, terms. Some of the ideas that fell under the category of social Darwinism included interventionist social policies like eugenics, anti-interventionist economic theories that supported laissez-faire capitalism, and proimperial foreign policy. Social Darwinism in the United States and Europe borrowed from a range of evolutionary theorists, including the English Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), in addition to Charles Darwin himself (1809–1882). The extent to which orthodox Darwinism corresponded with social Darwinism, as well as the accuracy of the term, has been cause for debate among historians. While Darwin argued that the laws of natural selection occurred in civilization as they did everywhere else, he did not believe that evolutionary theory should be used as a model for policymaking. By contrast, the concepts of the “survival of the fittest” and the “struggle for existence” were originally conceived by Spencer, whose economic and evolutionary theories were closely linked. Although the term “social Darwinism” was not initially used to describe these ideas, historians have conventionally defined it by its use of the conflict paradigm as a way to explain the interaction between humans in a given society. Those individuals (or sometimes “races” or nations) who were the most “fit,” it argued, would triumph, while the unfit or less efficient, industrious, strong, or intelligent would be swept away through competition. This concept was popular in Anglo-American intellectual circles that included Spencer, the English eugenicist Karl Pearson (1857–1936), and Americans like sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) and eugenicists Charles Davenport (1866–1944) and Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943). Darwin’s understanding of “fitness” implied the extent to which an organism was able to survive in its environment, while social Darwinists expanded this idea to the ability to compete in the marketplace or in society more generally. The ideas that appealed to biology as their intellectual authority did not necessarily coincide with each other. Spencer and Sumner, both ardently in support of the free market and opposed to interventionism, were anti-imperialist. This complicates any understanding of social Darwinism as a coherent ideology. Much like science itself, Darwin’s ideas enjoyed a great amount of prestige in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This meant that many policy ideas borrowed from the language of Darwin and other theorists because they formed the intellectual mainstream of the age. The influence of social Darwinism extended beyond the intelligentsia. The evolutionary language of struggle and neo-Malthusian factors such as competition for resources was often used as a narrative by American leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) to explain the decline of Native American

nations and the success of European, and later American, settlement in North America. Conceived in these terms, it was strongly tied to the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” and provided a biologically determinist justification for American expansion and imperialism. According to this understanding, the Anglo-Saxon race and American civilization would inevitably supplant Native and Latin Americans because of its superior industriousness, efficiency, morality, and fighting ability. Many American intellectuals had studied at universities in Germany, where the interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theories were particularly influential as a way of explaining social relations. This led to a transnational exchange of ideas that took place from the late 19th century to the 20th-century interwar period. The discipline of eugenics—another trend under the umbrella of social Darwinism— became influential in American public policy during the 1920s and 1930s. Eugenics was a discipline that applied theories of evolutionary “fitness” to suggest methods for improving the physical and mental qualities of a society or race. Davenport, who was among the most prominent American eugenicists, argued strongly against mixed-race marriages. Miscegenation among blacks and whites was already illegal in many states, but eugenic thought had a major role in pushing for the institution and sterilization of those considered mentally, morally, or physically unfit in the 1920s and 1930s. Many eugenicists also supported racial limits on immigration, especially for Mexicans and Latin Americans. On the other hand, the meaning of evolutionary progress in human societies was contested by a number of intellectuals. Stressing concepts based on Darwinian thought like mutual aid and collective social organization, some social Darwinists in the United States and elsewhere used the language of biology and evolution to support ideas as wide ranging as anarchism, capitalism, socialism, militarism, and pacifism. The demonization of Germany in public opinion during the First World War led some American evolutionary biologists, like Vernon Kellogg (1867–1937), to accuse German leaders of appropriating Darwin and the concept of struggle to reinforce their own pro-war agenda. Evolutionary theory subsequently lost its appeal as a way of explaining international relations in American intellectual circles. The intellectual opponents of evolutionary theory used these arguments to argue that “Darwinism” was inherently a theory of conflict and struggle, but a number of its apologists, like zoologist William Patten (1861–1932), responded by interpreting the development of American democracy and its “efficiency” and “cooperation” in evolutionary terms. While the concept of social Darwinism was largely constructed after the fact by historians, the influence of biology and evolutionary thought formed part of the intellectual climate of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Since these were often unspoken assumptions that had been taken for granted by the public and intelligentsia, it is difficult to pinpoint what social Darwinism was, which figures should be included in its ranks, and whether the term is useful in describing a unified set of intellectual trends. Guy Massie See also: Anglo-Saxonism; Roosevelt, Theodore; Tarzan

Further Reading Crook, Paul. Darwin’s Coat-Tails: Essays on Social Darwinism. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Kellogg, Vernon. “War and Human Evolution: Germanized.” North American Review 207, no. 748 (March 1918): 354–369. Koch, H. W. “Social Darwinism as a Factor in the ‘New Imperialism.’” In H. W. Koch, ed. The Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalry and German War Aims. London: Macmillan Education, 1984. Sumner, William Graham. “Sociology.” In Albert Galloway Keller, ed. War and Other Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919.

Teller Amendment (1898) In response to President William McKinley’s message to Congress calling for war against Spain, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution eight days later on April 19, 1898, which included a clause named for Senator Henry M. Teller. The Teller Amendment recognized U.S. military intervention in Cuba against Spain as necessary and legitimate, but also “disclaimed” any intention to take control of the island. The precise wording of the document, however, left the door open for significant U.S. involvement in Cuban affairs in the following years. Expansionists in the United States had long coveted Cuba. The Spanish colony generated tremendous export earnings through the sale of sugarcane and other agricultural goods produced (until 1886) primarily on slave plantations. But this European possession in the heart of the Caribbean also represented to many a compromise of the sanctity of the Monroe Doctrine and a threat to the security of the United States. Cuban nationalists—from a variety of backgrounds seeking different goals that often conflicted with one another—had been struggling for independence from Spain for decades, but it was not until the 1890s that Spain’s grip on the prized colony began to loosen. On February 15, 1898, a U.S. battleship, the USS Maine, suddenly exploded and sank to the bottom of Havana Harbor. The causes of the explosion could not be determined, but prominent U.S. journalists sensationalized the catastrophe and brazenly blamed Spain for the sinking and for abusing Cuban insurgents. Fearful of the Spanish threat in nearby waters, many U.S. citizens and politicians called for war. Political debate about how the United States should deal with the Cuban situation intensified. President McKinley addressed Congress on April 11, 1898, requesting authority to use force against Spain in defense of U.S. interests, arguing that commerce and peace were threatened. Congressional consensus supported military intervention to repel Spanish forces, but many members sought limits and conditions on the use of force and on the end goals of the U.S. role on the island. While expansionists saw opportunity in occupying or even annexing Cuba, isolationists and other opponents of annexation feared a number of problems would result from incorporation of the former slave colony into the United States. Over the next eight days, Congress debated and negotiated the terms of the resolution in response to McKinley’s plea. Antiannexationist fears were manifold. Senator Teller, a Republican from Colorado, sought to protect the financial interests of the thriving beet sugar sector in Western states by preventing competition from Cuban sugarcane. Others expounded ethnocentric and racist theories, suggesting that annexation of the Spanish-speaking, Catholic, and largely black population of Cuba would weaken the white Anglo hierarchy of the United States. For instance, Senator Benjamin Tillman, the populist Democrat from South Carolina, openly declared that commingling of the black and white races would only cause injury to both. Senator Orville Platt, a Republican from Connecticut, suggested that Cubans “by reason of race and characteristic” would not assimilate effectively in the United States (quoted in Coolidge, 345). All of these fears shaped the ultimate resolution of the issue. On April 19, 1898, both houses passed the joint resolution; the following day, President McKinley signed it. The short resolution included four points. The first three called for recognition of Cuban rights to independence, Spain’s withdrawal of all interests and forces from Cuba, and empowerment of the U.S. president to use military force for these purposes. The fourth—the Teller Amendment—limited the purposes of the resolution, providing that the United States would not exercise control over the island “except for the pacification thereof” and would leave Cuba’s government to its people. The resolution appeared both to support McKinley’s proposition and to prohibit U.S. occupation of Cuba.

Perceiving the congressional act as a declaration of war, the Spanish government responded with its own declaration of war against the United States on April 24. The conflict continued through August, when Spain’s military strength was overwhelmed. In the ensuing Treaty of Paris, Spain lost a number of holdings, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. While the United States achieved its military and political objectives in liberating Cuba from Spain, it did not leave control of the island to Cubans as stipulated in the Teller Amendment. Although the United States never annexed or incorporated Cuba as a state, it continued its heavy influence on the island for decades. The “except for the pacification thereof” clause of the Teller Amendment created a loophole for Congress to justify ongoing involvement in Cuban affairs. In 1901, the Platt Amendment replaced the Teller Amendment and limited Cuban autonomy to borrow money and to conduct its own foreign policy, established a U.S. military base at Guantánamo, and authorized the U.S. president to use the military to intervene in Cuban internal affairs. Further, the Permanent Reciprocity Treaty (1903) provided for favorable tariff reductions and trade conditions between Cuba and the United States with the exclusion of most European competition. Involvement in Cuba remained so broad and significant that many historians consider the island to have been a virtual colony of the United States. Gregory S. Crider See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Guantánamo Bay; McKinley, William; Monroe Doctrine; Paris, Treaty of (1898); Platt Amendment; USS Maine

Further Reading Coolidge, Louis Arthur. An Old-Fashioned Senator: Orville H. Platt of Connecticut. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1910. Schoultz, Lars. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. U.S. Congress. “The Teller Amendment (1898).” In Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, eds. Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 73–74. Originally published in U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, “Public Resolution—No. 21.” Washington, DC: GPO, 1901, p. 763.

Twain, Mark (1835–1910) Mark Twain, the pseudonym adopted by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is remembered as America’s greatest humorist and one of its finest novelists of the late 19th century, but he also was an ardent antiimperialist who wrote one of the most scathing indictments of war in American history, The War Prayer, in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Philippine Insurrection in 1900. Twain was a world traveler not unfamiliar with the political climate in other countries or their relationship to the United States. His first major travel narrative, Innocents Abroad (1869), displayed a mocking irreverence toward Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, which the author expressed in equal parts defensiveness and fascination. For example, Twain’s descriptions of Tangiers expressed his obvious delight while his knowledge of Christian schisms and his Protestant background fueled a constant scorn of anything having to do with Roman Catholicism, which unfortunately repeated a 19th-century prejudice of Twain and many of his contemporaries. In A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain returned to the Old World but presented it as more of a warning rather than as a description of his travels, saying, for example, that by imitating European aristocrats, Americans endanger their democracy. In his last major travel narrative, Following the Equator (1897), Twain promoted an agenda to liberate people from the prejudice that lay behind European imperialism,

which he first expounded in an 1895–1896 world lecture tour in which his popular and humorous lectures earned him the money to repay creditors. Much of Twain’s anti-imperialist sentiments became especially blatant in late 1900 when American forces invaded the Philippines, a definite transformation from his earlier leanings. In remarks he made to the New York Herald (October 15, 1900), he noted that he was originally “a red-hot imperialist” who “wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific…. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? … Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries…. But I have thought some more … and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem…. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” In December 1900, when he introduced Winston Churchill to his first American lecture audience, Twain believed that England’s current war in South Africa (the Boer War) was as wrong as America’s involvement in the Philippines.

In addition to his stature as one of the most acclaimed writers of the late 19th century and America’s first great humorist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, became an ardent anti-imperialist largely as a result of the Philippine-American War. (Library of Congress)

In Following the Equator (1897), Twain’s final travel book, Twain noted the contempt of whites for native traditions along with the striking similarity between slavery and the colonial experience. In “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” his criticism of the Philippine-American War, which first appeared in North American Review (February 1901), and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” which became a widely circulated piece of propaganda for the cause of Congo reform, Twain exposed the imperialist powers and condemned what he considered the unspeakable crimes that were perpetrated for what Twain called the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust.”

As the 19th century ended and the 20th century began, Twain further criticized his country, along with several European powers, for the imperialist adventures they had pursued around the world, and he became vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, a political organization that opposed Spain’s cession of the Philippines to the United States. For this group, Twain wrote many political pamphlets. The Incident in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which 600 Moros were killed. Another of Twain’s works appeared in a collection of antiexpansionist verse titled Liberty Poems. His most famous anti-imperialist publication was the The War Prayer, which describes a patriotic church service held to send the town’s young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory are double-edged: by praying for victory they are also praying for the destruction of the enemy—for the destruction of human life. Twain apparently dictated it around 1899 at the time that the United States was attempting to crush the Philippine Insurrection. He submitted it to Harper’s Bazaar for publication, but in March 1905 the magazine rejected the story as “not quite suited to a woman’s magazine.” Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Twain could not publish The War Prayer elsewhere; it remained unpublished until Twain’s literary executor collected it in the volume Europe and Elsewhere (1923). It has since become a staple of antiwar literature and it has been reprinted in Twain anthologies. Twain’s other major anti-imperialist publication started as a series of incomplete texts, compiled as The Mysterious Stranger, a Romance, which was mostly written in 1898, a version of which was first published posthumously in 1916. It relates the story of an angel’s (Satan) visit to the village of Eseldorf in Austria in 1590; he appears to three boys as a handsome youth, and the boys have revelations of the meanness of mankind and the evils of the world. Twain uses the voice of Satan to indict the martial spirit along with the hysteria and brutalization that accompanies war. Martin J. Manning See also: American Anti-Imperialist League

Further Reading Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Twain, Mark. Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays. Foreword by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Twain, Mark. A Tramp Abroad. Following the Equator [and] Other Travels. Edited by Roy Blount Jr. New York: Library of America, 2010. Zwick, Jim, ed. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

USS Maine The USS Maine was a second-class battleship sent to protect U.S. interests in Cuba during the revolution of Cubans against Spanish control. On February 15, 1898, while stationed in Havana Harbor, the ship was virtually destroyed in a massive explosion that killed many of the sailors aboard the ship. The cause of the detonation of the explosives stored in the ship was never conclusively determined. However, in the United States the Spanish were blamed for the explosion and many influential Americans pressed for war with Spain. The loss of the Maine became a precipitating factor in the United States declaring war on Spain two months later.

The Maine was built over a lengthy period of time due to a number of complicating factors. This led to the ship being somewhat outdated at the time of its commissioning in 1895, even though many of the innovations of European warships were implemented in its construction. The Maine was in operation in the North Atlantic before being sent to Cuba in January 1898 during the Cuban War of Independence. The ship was at anchor in Havana Harbor for three weeks when the explosion took place during the night of February 15. More than 260 of the sailors on the ship were killed in the explosion, with fewer than 90 surviving. One month later, a board of inquiry determined that a mine was the cause of the explosion. Public sentiment in the United States was quickly aroused against Spain for the ship’s loss. Major American publishing entrepreneurs used the explosion of the Maine to sell newspapers. Using what later was referred to as “yellow journalism,” newspapermen manipulated the U.S. public with less than ethical reporting tactics. William Randolph Hearst offered a large reward to anyone who would give information that led to the conviction of those responsible for the loss of the U.S. sailors. The publicity and resultant public pressure fanned the flames of animosity toward Spain and proved the final catalyst for the declaration of war on April 25. Numerous other inquiries were instigated over the next few years, but proof that the Spanish had any involvement in the explosion was never established. In 1974, U.S. Navy admiral Hyman Rickover, who had a great interest in the USS Maine, began to study the matter. Rickover’s full-scale investigation determined that spontaneous combustion of coal near a bunker containing explosive charges was the cause of the explosion. Ken B. Taylor See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; McKinley, William; Yellow Journalism; Primary Documents: New York Journal and Advertiser Article Calls Sinking of the Maine the “Work of an Enemy” (1898)

Further Reading Blow, Michael. A Ship to Remember: The Maine and the Spanish-American War. New York: William Morrow, 1992. DePalma, Anthony. “Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” New York Times Upfront 145, no. 10 (February 18, 2013): 16–19. Rickover, Hyman George. How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995.

Weyler y Nicolau, Valeriano (1838–1930) General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau served as chief of the army for Spanish forces during the final Cuban War for Independence. Assigned in 1896 to put down the Cuban independence movement, Weyler initiated various strategies, most notably his Reconcentración (Reconcentration) policy, that took the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Portrayed as a barbarian in American newspapers due to his brutal campaign, the general inadvertently influenced numerous Americans into supporting an interventionist policy, transforming the Cuban War for Independence into the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War (1895– 1898, 1898–1902) and ultimately replacing Spain’s imperial presence with that of the United States for the next six decades. In 1895, Cuban revolutionaries José Martí, Máximo Gómez, and Antonio Maceo spearheaded the last Cuban War of Independence. Following the February 25 Grito de Baire (Shout of Baire), insurgents rose up on the western part of the island while receiving reinforcements and supplies from the east. Initially, the Spanish Crown deployed General Arsenio Martínez de Campos, mediator of the previous uprising’s

truce. However, many in the Spanish government opposed such moderate strategies and lobbied for his resignation.

Spanish general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau served as governor general of Cuba from 1896 to 1897. During the Cuban War for Independence, his harsh policies of forcing thousands of supposedly loyal Cuban citizens into “reconcentration” camps further inflamed the population against Spanish rule, and fueled the war fever in the United States that led to U.S. intervention and the Spanish-American War. (Library of Congress)

In February 1896, Weyler arrived in Cuba with 200,000 troops and full authority to begin a “total war” campaign to suppress the insurgency. His greatest challenge was isolating insurgents and distinguishing guerrillas from civilians in the countryside. Guerrillas repeatedly threatened to destroy sugar and tobacco crops unless the managers provided resources. To prevent such bribes, Weyler demanded that these businesses simply stop production, severely weakening the island’s economy. Additionally, throughout the countryside he ordered the burning of crops and destruction of supplies that would be useful to guerrillas. He thus eliminated important harvests that were necessary for Cuban cities and civilian populations. His most notorious policy was the Reconcentración designed to separate rural civilians from insurgents. With barbed wire and watchtowers, the general established barriers and trenches to separate the countryside into more manageable areas. Next, Spanish troops pushed Cubans from rural regions into designated settlement areas to be monitored. As Weyler’s forces moved thousands of rural Cubans into urban areas, Cuban cities were already suffering from inadequate sanitation facilities and insufficient food supplies. The addition of around 400,000 reconcentrados (reconcentrated persons) created a crisis of overpopulation, starvation, and disease. Tens of thousands of civilians died, yet the insurgency grew. Pro-Cuban newspapers in the United States utilized Weyler’s policies as a form of propaganda against the Spanish government to obtain moral and material support from Americans. Quickly, journalists named Weyler “the Butcher” for his Reconcentración policy. One political cartoon presented Cuba as a starved

and abused woman, surrounded by victims of the Reconcentración, reaching out for Uncle Sam. Another newspaper portrayed a gravestone of Cubans with a looming, bestial Weyler leaning over it. Journalists who visited Cuba during the insurgency reported that Weyler’s policy harmed innocent women and honorable ladies. Allegedly, his troops violated proper codes of chivalric behavior by drinking alcohol, harassing women, and killing civilians. When the Spanish government incarcerated a prominent young Cuban woman, Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, with male prisoners, numerous Americans responded vociferously against what appeared to be a similar violation of popular codes of honor and treatment of women. Pro-Cuban newspapers, such as the New York Journal, presented both the arrest of Cisneros and Weyler’s Reconcentración as causes for intervening against the Spanish to liberate Cuba: “The only minds [the Cisneros story] does not revolt belong to creatures that are neither men nor women but Weylers” (Hoganson, 58). By portraying Cubans as victims of the inhumane “Butcher,” journalists captured American sympathy and lobbied for U.S. intervention. Newspaper propaganda against Weyler succeeded in drawing American sympathy for the Cuban cause. Most vocal were American politicians who were lobbied by journalists and constituents. Decrying the Reconcentración, Utah senator Frank Cannon castigated Weyler as “the ravisher of women … and the crucifier of children,” and Kansas representative William Vincent scorned the “brutal butcher Weyler for purposefully starv[ing] thousands of … innocent women and children to death” (Pérez, 69, 70). Indiana representative Alexander Hardy complained that General Weyler had “never fought a battle in honorable warfare” (Hoganson, 51). Most interesting was that the American South, immersed in its own racially based policies of segregation and disfranchisement against persons of African descent, denigrated Weyler rather than many of the Cuban guerrillas, such as Antonio Maceo, who were of African descent. Even U.S. president William McKinley responded to the pro-Cuban and anti-Weyler propaganda. Warning that Weyler pursued an “uncivilized and inhumane” policy against the island’s population, McKinley demanded that Spain uphold the “military codes of civilization” (Offner, 48). The inability of Weyler to end the insurgency and popular revulsion against his “total war” policies caused his replacement in October 1897, but Weyler’s policies had already brought many Americans to the insurgents’ cause. The next year, with the explosion of the Maine, a group of American congressmen came together and sang “Hang General Weyler to a Sour Apple Tree as We Go Marching On.” Many Americans volunteered to fight and free Cuba from the Spanish, as epitomized in the Teller Amendment. After assisting, though, American fears of allegedly immature and racially inferior peoples, coupled with U.S. economic interests on the island, influenced the writing of the Platt Amendment. For more than a half-century, American forces would repeatedly occupy the island and control the island’s government, hindering the very independence that many Americans had previously supported. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Martí, José; McKinley, William; Platt Amendment; Teller Amendment; USS Maine; Yellow Journalism

Further Reading Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Offner, John L. An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Tone, John Lawrence. War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Wood, Leonard (1860–1927) Leonard Wood was a physician, career military officer, colonial administrator, and prominent public figure. Born on October 9, 1860, Wood grew up in Massachusetts and attended Pierce Academy in Middleboro. After his father’s death in 1880, Wood entered Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1883. After an internship at Boston City Hospital and less than a year of private practice, Wood accepted an appointment as a contract surgeon with the U.S. Army in 1885. Over the next 36 years, Wood rose through the ranks to become a major general and hold the office of army chief of staff. He led troops in the last campaign against Geronimo, in the Spanish-American War, and in the Philippines. During World War I, he oversaw the training and equipping of troops destined for the European battlefield. As a leading proponent of American imperialism, he served as both civil and military governor in Cuba and the Philippines. A close friend and political ally of Theodore Roosevelt, he wrote and spoke publicly in support of American involvement abroad. Although Wood entered the military as a short-term contract surgeon, he was determined to build a military career and to eventually transfer to combat operations. Toward these goals, Wood became an avid student of military science, often volunteered for difficult field service, and courted powerful friends who could advance his professional interests. On his first appointment, Wood participated in the last campaigns against the Apaches in the Southwest. His exemplary service in the final four-month campaign against Geronimo brought Wood to the attention of General Nelson A. Miles, who became his friend and mentor. Wood then went on to serve at a variety of small posts until assigned to Washington, D.C., in 1895.

Major General Leonard Wood was a physician, career military officer, colonial administrator in Cuba and the Philippines, and prominent public advocate for the projection of U.S. imperial interests abroad. (National Archives)

In Washington, D.C., Wood joined a growing cadre of younger, emerging leaders who promoted Progressive reform at home and American imperialism abroad. As an assistant attending surgeon to Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, Wood moved freely among the high-ranking officials of the federal government and made several powerful friends. During this time he met and became close friends with then undersecretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt. When the revolution in Cuba evolved into the Spanish American War in 1898, Wood and Roosevelt leveraged their political connections to secure command of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, more popularly known as the Rough Riders. Wood served throughout the subsequent Santiago campaign and participated in the battles of Las Guásimas and San Juan Heights and the siege of Santiago. The Spanish-American War marked the beginning of a decade of service for Wood on the imperial frontier. During that decade, Wood established himself as an able colonial administrator, a Progressive reformer, and the foremost proconsul of the American empire. When the war ended on July 16, 1898, Wood remained in Cuba and took command of the occupation of Santiago de Cuba and later Santiago Province. In December 1899, Secretary of War Elihu Root appointed Wood civil and military governor of the whole island. In that post, Wood launched an extensive program of reforms designed to transform the island along Progressive lines. In close association with Root, Wood conducted local and national elections and supervised the organization and subsequent work of the Cuban Constitutional Convention. Wood played a leading role in securing Cuban acceptance of the Platt Amendment. After the creation of the Republic of Cuba on May 20, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt sent Wood to the Philippines to extend direct American control over the predominantly Muslim inhabitants of the Moro Province. Moro resistance to Wood’s administration led to several violent clashes that eventually climaxed in the First Battle of Bud Dajo in 1906. Wood spent the next two years as head of the Philippine Division (1906– 1908) and then returned to the United States. Commissioned a major general in 1904, Wood assumed command of the Department of the East in 1908 and became the U.S. Army chief of staff in 1910. There he pushed to complete the reorganization of the U.S. Army that had begun with the General Staff Act of 1903. Over the next four years, Wood secured the supremacy of the chief of staff within the army command structure, streamlined the means of reporting within the army, restructured the General Staff Corps, and initiated the consolidation of frontier posts in the American West. In 1914, Wood returned to command the Department of the East where he spearheaded the Preparedness movement following the onset of World War I. Wood’s outspoken participation in the movement, his criticism of the U.S. policy of neutrality, and his close association with Theodore Roosevelt alienated President Woodrow Wilson. When the United States entered the war on April 5, 1917, Wilson publicly snubbed Wood, the senior army officer, by appointing General John J. Pershing to lead the newly commissioned American Expeditionary Force. Wood spent the remainder of the war in Kansas training troops for the European battlefield. Following the war, Wood benefited from the political resurgence of the Republican Party. After the death of Theodore Roosevelt in January 1919, Wood assumed the Progressive mantle and emerged as the Republican frontrunner for the presidential nomination. The momentum almost carried him to the nomination but a deadlocked convention eventually gave Senator Warren G. Harding the nomination. In 1921 Wood retired from the army and accepted an appointment by President Harding to what became the Wood-Forbes Mission to study the question of independence for the Philippines. When the mission reported that the Philippines were not yet ready for self-rule, Harding asked Wood to remain as governorgeneral of the archipelago. He remained in that position until his death on August 7, 1927. James Pruitt

See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Preparedness Movement; Roosevelt, Theodore; Roosevelt, Theodore, and the Rough Riders; Root, Elihu; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Hagedorn, Hermann. Leonard Wood: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931. Lane, Jack C. Armed Progressive: General Leonard Wood. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978. McCallum, Jack. Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Yellow Journalism “Yellow journalism” is a term that describes a type of media reporting that typically involves few or no accurate or well-researched facts and instead presents sensational, misleading, and exaggerated stories primarily intended to sell more newspapers. The use of this journalistic technique began in the 1880s and was centered in New York City. It reached its peak during the latter half of the 1890s and often is inaccurately credited with engendering the Spanish-American War. By 1910, the use of yellow journalism had faded as the general public gradually rejected its methods and approach to news reporting. Although its use began in late 19th-century newspapers, the term continues to be used as a derogatory description for any journalism that presents news in an unprofessional, misleading, or exaggerated manner. Yellow journalism also is referred to as the yellow press. The archetypal yellow journalism newspaper of the late 1800s usually was characterized by florid, eye-catching headlines; a focus on crime and scandal; the use of unnamed sources and little or no fact-checking in stories; self-aggrandizement of the newspaper; and large, often extreme or even imaginary illustrations. The newspapers sold for one or two cents an issue and were directed primarily toward the lower classes. This approach to news reporting was intended to increase circulation, advertising, and profits for the publisher. The term yellow journalism had its genesis in the fight for increased circulation between the New York World, published by Joseph Pulitzer, and the New York Journal, published by William Randolph Hearst, primarily during the latter half of the 1890s. Pulitzer acquired the New York World in 1883 and set out to make the newspaper an entertaining read, often with sensational headlines. But Pulitzer also believed newspapers should promote social reform. He charged only two cents a copy and gave readers two or even three times the number of pages as other penny broadsheets. By 1885, the New York World was the largest-circulation newspaper in New York City. Hearst, who had acquired the San Francisco Examiner in 1887, was aware of the success of Pulitzer’s newspaper and adopted a similar approach. In 1895, Hearst purchased the New York Journal and followed Pulitzer’s strategy. Hearst sold his newspaper for only one cent, while providing as many pages of stories as Pulitzer. The Journal’s circulation increased, causing Pulitzer to lower the price of the World to a penny. Both newspapers were similar in philosophical approaches, favoring the Democratic Party, labor, and immigrants. Erwin Wardman, editor of the New York Press, is credited with creating the term yellow journalism. It appears to have its roots in an 1896 Sunday edition of the New York World featuring a color comic strip titled “Hogan’s Alley.” The comic strip featured a bald kid in a bright yellow nightshirt who was nicknamed “The Yellow Kid.” When the strip became very popular, Hearst hired Richard F. Outcault, the cartoonist, to work for the New York Journal. Pulitzer then retained another cartoonist to continue the comic strip for the World. As a result, New York City newspapers featured two Yellow Kid comic strips. Wardman and other more serious newspapers then started using the term yellow journalism to describe

the sort of exaggerated and misleading reporting engaged in by the New York World and New York Journal. Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s approach to news reporting often is credited with leading to the SpanishAmerican War. But this is an overstatement. Few if any newspapers elsewhere in the country followed the yellow journalism standards of the World or the Journal, which were based in New York City. Neither was much of a factor in shaping public opinion outside of New York City, even among the nation’s decision makers. Nevertheless, both newspapers extensively covered via extreme and sensationalist stories the often brutal conditions in Cuba, then under Spanish control. Hearst first advocated U.S. intervention after the Cuban rebellion began in 1895. Pulitzer, not wanting to cede a circulation-increasing story to Hearst, followed suit. Both newspapers covered the Spanish efforts to suppress the rebellion and the increasingly harsh conditions on the island with extreme and often lurid illustrations and stories, often having little or no basis in fact. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, the World and the Journal each featured large illustrations on their front page speculating as to the cause, and in the case of the Journal offering a $50,000 reward for identification of the perpetrators who destroyed the Maine. When the United States finally declared war on Spain, Hearst and the Journal famously declared on its front page, “How do you like the Journal’s war?” But neither Hearst, nor Pulitzer, nor yellow journalism properly can be recognized as the primary cause or source of the American declaration of war. While they certainly promoted and supported intervention in Cuba and war with Spain, they were not the reasons that led President William McKinley to ask for a declaration of war against Spain.

“STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER” “Stars and Stripes Forever” is a patriotic military march song written in 1896 by American composer and conductor John Philip Sousa (1854–1932). It is the most famous piece composed by Sousa, known as the “March King” for his mastery of that musical form. The march is in many ways the music of imperialism, having its earliest roots in the military music of both the Ottoman and British Empires. Employing percussive instruments such as drums and cymbals, the music had a syncopated cadence that was useful in helping soldiers to march in step. When introduced in Europe, it had the added effect of frightening civilians. American use of the form dates to the iconic fife and drum of the Revolutionary War, but became most prevalent around the time of the Civil War—when John Philip Sousa frequently heard the sound of military marching bands in the streets of Washington, D.C., where he was growing up—and peaked around the turn of the century during America’s ascendancy to imperial power status. Also the composer of “Semper Fidelis,” the U.S. Marine Corps official march, John Philip Sousa was inspired to write “Stars and Stripes Forever” on a return voyage from Europe in December 1896. Having just read of the death of his band’s manager, he suddenly heard the tune in his head. Sousa later wrote of how stirring he found the moment of arrival back in the United States: “in a foreign country the sight of the Stars and Stripes seems the most glorious in the world.” The tune was immediately popular, finding especially wide appeal in the highly nationalistic atmosphere that emerged in 1898 with the onset of the Spanish-American War. In 1987, Congress designated “Stars and Stripes Forever” the official national march of the United States.

Following the declaration of war, Hearst traveled to Cuba with the American invasion forces as a war correspondent. His reports of the fighting and the conditions faced by American troops were serious and accurate, a major departure from his newspaper’s earlier yellow journalism. However, Hearst’s reputation and personal standing suffered a serious blow when two of his reporters published separate stories in the New York Journal intimating the assassination of President William McKinley. When the president was assassinated in September 1901, many critics accused Hearst and his yellow journalism with having inspired the assassin. Hearst was haunted for the remainder of his life by the incident.

At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, Pulitzer determined to return the New York World to its original Progressive roots, campaigning for social change. When he died in 1911, the newspaper was widely respected and would continue as a leading reformist and liberal paper until it stopped publication in 1931. Upon his death, Pulitzer established the Pulitzer Prize for journalistic excellence and also created the school of journalism at Columbia University. Alan M. Anderson See also: Aguinaldo, Emilio; Manila Bay, Battle of; McKinley, William; Propaganda, Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars; Paris, Treaty of (1898); USS Maine

Further Reading Campbell, W. Joseph. Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Morris, James McGrath. Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Spencer, David R. The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS José Martí’s “Our America” (1891) A renowned author and dedicated Cuban patriot, José Martí wrote this short piece, titled “Our America,” in 1891. At the time, he was deeply involved in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain, which culminated in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Martí did not live to see it, however, as he was killed by Spanish troops in 1895 for his revolutionary activities. His lyrical style of prose did much to foster the modern literature movement in Latin America, and his reputation was only enhanced by his patriotic death. The villager fondly believes that the world is contained in his village, and he thinks the universal order good if he can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his sock—unaware of the giants with seven-league boots who can crush him under foot, or the strife in the heavens between comets, which streak through space, devouring worlds. What remains of the parochial in America must awake. These are not times for sleeping in a nightcap, but rather with weapons for a pillow, like the warriors of Juan de Castellanos: weapons of the mind, which conquer all others. Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stone. There is no prow that can cleave a cloud-bank of ideas. An energetic idea, unfurled in good season before the world, turns back a squadron of ironsides with the power of the mystic banner of the judgment day. Nations that do not know one another should make haste to do so, as brothers-in-arms. Those who shake their fists at each other, like jealous brothers who covet the same land, or the cottager who envies the squire his manor, should clasp hands until they are one. Those who allege the sanction of a criminal tradition to lop off the lands of their brother, with a sword dipped in his own blood, had best return the lands to the brother punished far beyond his due, if they do not want to be called thieves. The honorable do not seek money in satisfaction of debts of honor, at so much a slap. We can no longer be a people like foliage, living in the air, heavy with blossoms, bursting and fluttering at the whim of light’s caress, or buffeted and tossed by the tempest: the trees must form ranks so the giant with the seven-league boots

shall not pass! It is the hour of muster and the united march. We must advance shoulder to shoulder, one solid mass like the silver lodes in the depth of the Andes. Only the seven-month birthling will lack the courage. Those who do not have faith in their country are seven-month men. They cannot reach the first limb with their puny arms, arms with painted nails and bracelets, arms of Madrid or Paris; and they say the lofty tree cannot be climbed. The ships must be loaded with these destructive insects, who gnaw the marrow of the country that nourishes them. If they are Parisians or Madrilenians, let them stroll along the Prado under the lamplights, or take sherbet at Tortoni’s. These carpenter’s sons who are ashamed of their father for his trade! These American sons who are ashamed of the mother that loves them because she wears an Indian apron, and disown their sick mother, the scoundrels, abandoning her on her sick bed! Well, who is the man worthy of the name? The one who stays with his mother to nurse her in her sickness, or the one who puts her to work out of the sight of the world and lives off her labors in the decadent lands, affecting fancy cravats, cursing the womb that carried him, displaying the sign of traitor on the back of his paper cassock? These children of our America, which will be saved by its Indians, and goes from less to more, these deserters who take up arms in the armies of North America, which drowns its Indians in blood, and goes from more to less! These delicate beings, who are men but do not want to do the work of men! The Washington who forged this land, did he go to live with the English, to live with them during the years in which he saw them coming against his own country? These incroyables of their honor, who trail it through alien lands, like their counterparts in the French Revolution, with their dancing, their affectations, their drawling speech! For in what lands can a man take greater pride than in our long-suffering republics of America, raised up from among the mute Indian masses by the bleeding arms of a hundred apostles to the sounds of battle between the book and the thurible [metal censer in which incense is burned]. Never in history have such advanced and unified nations been forged in less time from such disordered elements. The fool in his pride believes that the earth was created to serve him as a pedestal because words flow easily from his pen, or his speech is colorful, and he charges his native land with being worthless and beyond salvation because its virgin jungles do not provide him with a means to travel continually abroad, driving Parisian ponies and lavishing champagne, like a tycoon. The incapacity does not lie with the nascent country, which seeks suitable forms and greatness that will serve, but with those who attempt to rule nations of a unique character, and singular, violent composition, with laws that derive from four centuries of operative liberty in the United States, and nineteen centuries of French monarchy. A decree by Hamilton does not halt the charge of the llanero’s pony. A phrase of Sièyes does nothing to quicken the stagnant blood of the Indian race. One must see things as they are, to govern well; the good governor in America is not one who knows how government is conducted in France or Germany, but who knows the elements of which his country is composed and how they can be marshaled so that by methods and institutions native to the country the desirable state may be attained wherein every man realizes himself, and all share in the abundance that Nature bestowed for the common benefit on the nation they enrich with their labor and defend with their lives. The government must be the child of the country. The spirit of the government must be the same as that of the country. The form of government must conform to the natural constitution of the country. Good government is nothing more than the true balance between the natural elements of the nation. For that reason, the foreign book has been conquered in America by the natural man. The natural men have vanquished the artificial, lettered men. The native-born half-breed has vanquished the exotic Creole. The struggle is not between barbarity and civilization, but between false erudition and nature. The natural man is good. He respects and rewards superior intelligence, as long as his submission is not turned against him, or he is not offended by being disregarded, a thing the natural man does not forgive, prepared

as he is to regain by force the respect of whoever has wounded his pride or threatened his interests. Tyrants in America have risen to power serving these scorned natural elements of their countries, to derive from them the proper form of government, and govern accordingly. To be a governor of a new country means to be a creator. In nations of cultured and uncultured elements, the uncultured will govern, because it is their habit to strike and resolve all doubts by force, whenever the cultured prove incapable in office. The uncultured mass is lazy, and timid in matters of the mind. It asks only to be well-governed. But if the government hurts it, it rebels and governs itself. How can the universities be expected to produce governors, if there is not one university in America that teaches the rudimentary in the art of government, which is the analysis of the elements peculiar to America? Young men go out into the world wearing Yankee or French spectacles, and hope to govern by guesswork a nation they do not know. In the political race, all entries should be scratched who do not demonstrate a knowledge of the political rudiments. The prize in literary contests should not go to the best ode, but to the best study of the political factors in one’s country. Newspapers, universities, and schools should foment the study of their country’s dynamic factors. They have only to be stated, straightforward and in plain language. For whoever disregards any portion of the truth, whether by ignorance or design, is doomed to fall; the truth he lacked grows in the negligence and brings down whatever was erected without it. It is easier to determine the elements and attack the problem, than to attack the problem without knowing the elements. The natural man arrives, indignant and strong, and topples the authority based on books because he was not governed according to the obvious realities of the country. Knowledge holds the key. To know one’s country, and govern it with that knowledge, is the only alternative to tyranny. The European university must give way to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught until it is known by heart, even if the Archons of the Greeks go by the board. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece that is not ours: we need it more. Nationalist statesmen must replace cosmopolitan statesmen. Let the world be grafted on our republics; but the trunk must be our own. And let the vanquished pedant hold his tongue: for there are no lands in which a man can take greater pride than in our long-suffering American republics. With the rosary as our guide, our head white and our body mottled, both Indian and Creole, we intrepidly entered the community of nations. We set out to conquer liberty under the standard of the Virgin. A priest, a handful of lieutenants, and a woman raised the Mexican Republic on the shoulders of the Indians. A few heroic students, instructed in French liberty by a Spanish cleric, raised Central America against Spain under a Spanish general. In the oriflammed habits of monarchy, Venezuelans and Argentinians set out, from north and south, to deliver nations. When the two heroes collided, and the continent almost rocked, one, and not the lesser, turned back. But when the wars ended, heroism, by being less glorious, became rarer; it is easier for men to die with honor than to think with order. It was discovered that it is simpler to govern when sentiments are exalted and united, than in the wake of battle when divisive, arrogant, exotic, and ambitious ideas emerge. The forces routed in the epic conflict sought, with the feline cunning of their species, and utilizing the weight of realities, to undermine the new structure, which embraced at once the rude and singular provinces of our half-breed America, and the cities of silken hose and Parisian frock coat, beneath the unfamiliar flag of reason and liberty, borrowed from nation[s] skilled in the arts of government. The hierarchical constitution of the colonies resisted the democratic organization of the republics. The capitals of stock and collar kept the countryside of horsehide boots cooling its heel in the vestibule. The cultured leaders did not realize that the revolution had triumphed because their words had unshackled the soul of the nation, and that they had to govern with that soul, and not against it or without it. America began to suffer, and still suffers, from the effort of trying to find an adjustment between the discordant and hostile elements it inherited from a despotic and perverse

colonizer, and the imported ideas and forms which have retarded the logical government because of their lack of local reality. The continent, disjointed by three centuries of a rule that denied men the right to use their reason, embarked on a form of government based on reason, without thought or reflection on the unlettered hordes which had helped in its redemption; it was to be the reason of all in matters of general concern, not the reason of the university over the reason of the province. The problem of the Independence was not the change in forms, but the change in spirit. It was necessary to make common cause with the downtrodden, to secure the new system against the interests and habits of rule of the oppressors. The tiger, frightened off by the powder flash, returns at night to the haunts of his prey. When he dies, it is with flames shooting from his eyes and claws unsheathed. But his step cannot be heard, for he comes on velvet paws. When the prey awakes, the tiger is upon him. The colony lives on in the republic; and our America is saving itself from its grave errors—the arrogance of the capital cities, the blind triumph of the scorned country people, the influx of foreign ideas and formulas, the wicked and unpolitic disdain in which the aboriginal race is held—through the superior virtue, backed by the necessary conviction, of the republic that struggles against the colony. The tiger lurks behind each tree, waiting at every turn. He will die with his claws unsheathed and flames shooting from his eyes. But “these countries will be saved,” as the Argentine Rivadavia announced, whose sin was to be gentlemanly in crude times; a silk scabbard does not become the machete, nor can the lance be discarded in a country won by the lance, for it becomes angry, and presents itself at the door of Iturbide’s congress demanding that “the blond one be made emperor.” These countries will be saved because a genius for moderation, found in Nature’s imperturbable harmony, seems to prevail in the continent of light, where there emerges a new realistic man schooled for these realistic times in the critical philosophy, which in Europe has succeeded the literature of sect and opinion in which the previous generation was steeped. We were a strange sight with the chest of an athlete, the hands of a coxcomb, and the brain of a child. We were a masquerade in English trousers, Parisian vest, North American jacket, and Spanish hat. The Indian circled about us in silent wonder, and went to the mountains to baptize his children. The runaway Negro poured out the music of his heart on the night air, alone and unknown among the rivers and wild beasts. The men of the land, the creators, rose up in blind indignation against the scornful city, against their own child. We were all epaulets and tunics in countries that came into the world with hemp sandals on their feet and headbands for hats. The stroke of genius would have been to couple the headband and tunic with the charity of heart and daring of the founding father; to rescue the Indian; to make a place for the able Negro, to fit liberty to the body of those who rose up and triumphed in its name. We were left with the judge, the general, the scholar and the prebendary. As if caught in the tentacles of an octopus, the angelic young men lunged toward Heaven, only to fall back, crowned with clouds, in sterile glory. The natural people, driven by instinct, swept away the golden staffs of office in blind triumph. The European or Yankee book could not provide the answer to the Hispanic-American enigma. Hate was tried, and the countries wasted away, year by year. Exhausted by the senseless struggle between the book and the lance, of reason against dogma, of the city against the country, of the impossible rule by rival city cliques over the natural nation alternately tempestuous and inert, we begin almost without realizing it to try love. The nations stand up and salute each other. “What are we like?” they ask; and they begin to tell one another what they are like. When a problem arises in Cojimar, they do not send to Danzig for the answer. The frock coat is still French, but thought begins to be American. The youth of America roll up their sleeves and plunge their hands into the dough; it rises with the leavening of their sweat. They understand that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. “Create” is the password of this generation. The wine is from the plantain, and if it proves sour, it is our wine! It is understood that the forms of government must accommodate themselves to the natural elements of the country, that absolute

ideas must take relative forms if they are to escape emasculation by the failure of the form, that liberty, if it is to be viable, must be sincere and complete, that the republic which does not open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, must die. The tiger within enters through the fissure, and the tiger from without. The general restrains his cavalry to a pace that suits his infantry, for if the infantry be left behind, the cavalry is surrounded by the enemy. Politics is strategy. Nations should live in continual self-criticism, because criticism is healthy; but always with one heart and one mind. Go down to the unfortunate and take them in your arms! Dissolve what is clotted in America with the fire of the heart! Make the natural blood of the nations course and throb through their veins! Erect, with the happy, sparkling eyes of workingmen, the new Americans salute one another from country to country. The natural statesman appears, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply what he reads, not to copy. Economists study the problems at their origin. Orators begin to be lofty. Dramatists bring native characters to the stage. Academies consider practical subjects. Poetry shears off its romantic locks and hangs its red vest on the glorious tree. Prose, lively and discriminating, is charged with ideas. Governors study Indian in republics of Indians. America is escaping all its dangers. The octopus still sleeps on some republics; but others, in contrast, drain the ocean from their lands with a furious, sublime haste, as if to make up for lost centuries. Some, forgetting that Juárez rode in a mule-drawn coach, hitch their coach to the wind and entrust the reins to a soap-bubble; poisonous luxury, the enemy of liberty, corrupts the frivolous and opens the door to the outlander. In others, where independence is threatened, an epic spirit produces a heightened manliness. Still others spawn a rabble-in-arms in rapacious wars against their neighbors which may yet turn and devour them. But there is yet another danger which does not come from within, but from the difference in origins, methods and interests between the two halves of the continent. The hour is fast approaching when our America will be confronted by an enterprising and energetic nation seeking close relations, but with indifference and scorn for us and our ways. And since strong countries, self-made by the rifle and the law, love, and love only, strong countries; since the hour of recklessness and ambition, of which North America may be freed if that which is purest in her blood predominates, or on which she may be launched by her vengeful and sordid masses, her tradition of expansion or the ambition of some powerful leader, is not so near at hand, even to the most timorous eye, that there is not time to show the self-possessed and unwavering pride that would confront and dissuade her; since her good name as a republic in the eyes of the world puts on the America of the North a brake which cannot be removed even by the puerile grievances, the pompous arrogance, or parricidal discords of our American nations, the pressing need for our America, is to show herself as she is, one in soul and purpose, swift conqueror of a suffocating tradition, stained only by the blood drawn from hands that struggle to clear away ruins, and the scars left us by our masters. The scorn of our formidable neighbor, who does not know us, is the greatest danger for our America; and it is imperative that our neighbor know us and know us soon, so she shall not scorn us, for the day of the visit is at hand. Through ignorance, she might go so far as to lay hands on us. From respect, once she came to know us, she would remove her hands. One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. If not, the worst prevails. Nations should have a pillory for whoever fans useless hates; and another for whoever does not tell them the truth in time. There can be no racial hate, because there are no races. The rachitic thinkers and theorists juggle and warm over the library-shelf races, which the open-minded traveler and well-disposed observer seek in vain in Nature’s justice, where the universal identity of man leaps forth from triumphant love and the turbulent lust for life. The soul emanates equal and eternal, from bodies distinct in shape and color. Whoever foments and propagates antagonism and hate between races, sins against Humanity. But as nations take shape among other different nations, they acquire distinctive and vital characteristics of thought and habit, of expansion and conquest, of vanity and greed, which from the latent state of national

preoccupation could be converted in a period of internal unrest, or precipitation of the accumulated character of the nation, into a serious threat to the neighboring countries, isolated and weak, which the strong country declares perishable and inferior. The thought is father to the deed. But it must not be supposed, from a parochial animus, that there is a fatal and ingrained evil in the blond nation of the continent, because it does not speak our tongue, nor see the world as we do, nor resemble us in its political faults, which are of a different order, nor favorably regard the excitable, dark-skinned people, nor look charitably, from its still uncertain eminence, on those less favored by History, who climb the road of republicanism by heroic stages. The self-evident facts of the problem should not be obscured for it can be resolved, to the benefit of peaceful centuries yet to come, by timely study and the tacit, immediate union of the continental soul. The hymn of oneness sounds already; the actual generation carries a purposeful America along the road enriched by their sublime fathers; from the Rio Grande to the straits of Magellan, the Great Semi, seated on the flank of the condor, sows the seeds of the new America through the romantic nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea! Source: José Martí, “Nuestra America,” Revista Ilustrada, January 1, 1891.

President Grover Cleveland’s Final Message to Congress: “American Interest in the Cuban Revolution” (1896) Although the strife in Cuba was not a major issue in the presidential campaign of 1896, its importance for America was already recognized by political leaders. In his final presidential message to Congress on December 7, 1896, Grover Cleveland reviewed the unpleasant history of Spanish-Cuban relations and outlined what he felt were the alternatives open to the United States. Cleveland reflected popular opinion in his earnest attempt to explore every peaceful means for a solution to the Cuban crisis. The president realized that Cuba’s proximity bound its fate to the United States, but his message, a portion of which appears below, expressed his hope that U.S. intervention would not be necessary. The insurrection in Cuba still continues with all its perplexities. It is difficult to perceive that any progress has thus far been made toward the pacification of the island or that the situation of affairs as depicted in my last annual message has in the least improved. If Spain still holds Havana and the seaports and all the considerable towns, the insurgents still roam at will over at least two-thirds of the inland country. If the determination of Spain to put down the insurrection seems but to strengthen with the lapse of time and is evinced by her unhesitating devotion of largely increased military and naval forces to the task, there is much reason to believe that the insurgents have gained in point of numbers and character and resources, and are none the less inflexible in their resolve not to succumb without practically securing the great objects for which they took up arms. If Spain has not yet reestablished her authority, neither have the insurgents yet made good their title to be regarded as an independent state. Indeed, as the contest has gone on, the pretense that civil government exists on the island, except so far as Spain is able to maintain it, has been practically abandoned. Spain does keep on foot such a government, more or less imperfectly, in the large towns and their immediate suburbs. But, that exception being made, the entire country is either given over to anarchy or is subject to the military occupation of one or the other party. It is reported, indeed, on reliable authority that, at the demand of the commander in chief of the insurgent army, the putative Cuban government has now given up all attempt to exercise its functions, leaving that government confessedly (what there is the best reason for supposing it always to have been in fact) a government merely on paper. Were the Spanish armies able to meet their antagonists in the open or in pitched battle, prompt and

decisive results might be looked for and the immense superiority of the Spanish forces in numbers, discipline, and equipment could hardly fail to tell greatly to their advantage. But they are called upon to face a foe that shuns general engagements, that can choose and does choose its own ground, that, from the nature of the country, is visible or invisible at pleasure, and that fights only from ambuscade and when all the advantages of position and numbers are on its side. In a country where all that is indispensable to life in the way of food, clothing, and shelter is so easily obtainable, especially by those born and bred on the soil, it is obvious that there is hardly a limit to the time during which hostilities of this sort may be prolonged. Meanwhile, as in all cases of protracted civil strife, the passions of the combatants grow more and more inflamed, and excesses on both sides become more frequent and more deplorable. They are also participated in by bands of marauders, who, now in the name of one party and now in the name of the other, as may best suit the occasion, harry the country at will and plunder its wretched inhabitants for their own advantage. Such a condition of things would inevitably entail immense destruction of property, even if it were the policy of both parties to prevent it as far as practicable. But while such seemed to be the original policy of the Spanish government, it has now apparently abandoned it and is acting upon the same theory as the insurgents, namely, that the exigencies of the contest require the wholesale annihilation of property that it may not prove of use and advantage to the enemy. It is to the same end that, in pursuance of general orders, Spanish garrisons are now being withdrawn from plantations and the rural population required to concentrate itself in the towns. The sure result would seem to be that the industrial value of the island is fast diminishing, and that unless there is a speedy and radical change in existing conditions, it will soon disappear altogether. That value consists very largely, of course, in its capacity to produce sugar—a capacity already much reduced by the interruptions to tillage which have taken place during the last two years. It is reliably asserted that should these interruptions continue during the current year and practically extend, as is now threatened, to the entire sugar-producing territory of the island, so much time and so much money will be required to restore the land to its normal productiveness that it is extremely doubtful if capital can be induced to even make the attempt. The spectacle of the utter ruin of an adjoining country, by nature one of the most fertile and charming on the globe, would engage the serious attention of the government and people of the United States in any circumstances. In point of fact, they have a concern with it which is by no means of a wholly sentimental or philanthropic character. It lies so near to us as to be hardly separated from our territory. Our actual pecuniary interest in it is second only to that of the people and government of Spain. It is reasonably estimated that at least from $30 million to $50 million of American capital are invested in plantations and in railroad, mining, and other business enterprises on the island. The volume of trade between the United States and Cuba, which in 1889 amounted to about $64 million, rose in 1893 to about $103 million, and in 1894, the year before the present insurrection broke out, amounted to nearly $96 million. Besides this large pecuniary stake in the fortunes of Cuba, the United States finds itself inextricably involved in the present contest in other ways, both vexatious and costly. Many Cubans reside in this country and indirectly promote the insurrection through the press, by public meetings, by the purchase and shipment of arms, by the raising of funds, and by other means, which the spirit of our institutions and the tenor of our laws do not permit to be made the subject of criminal prosecutions. Some of them, though Cubans at heart and in all their feelings and interests, have taken out papers as naturalized citizens of the United States, a proceeding resorted to with a view to possible protection by this government and not unnaturally regarded with much indignation by the country of their origin.

The insurgents are undoubtedly encouraged and supported by the widespread sympathy the people of this country always and instinctively feel for every struggle for better and freer government and which, in the case of the more adventurous and restless elements of our population, leads in only too many instances to active and personal participation in the contest. The result is that this government is constantly called upon to protect American citizens, to claim damages for injuries to persons and property, now estimated at many millions of dollars, and to ask explanations and apologies for the acts of Spanish officials, whose zeal for the repression of rebellion sometimes blinds them to the immunities belonging to the unoffending citizens of a friendly power. It follows from the same causes that the United States is compelled to actively police a long line of seacoast against unlawful expeditions, the escape of which the utmost vigilance will not always suffice to prevent. These inevitable entanglements of the United States with the rebellion in Cuba, the large American property interests affected, and considerations of philanthropy and humanity in general, have led to a vehement demand in various quarters for some sort of positive intervention on the part of the United States. It was at first proposed that belligerent rights should be accorded to the insurgents—a proposition no longer urged because untimely and in practical operation clearly perilous and injurious to our own interests. It has since been and is now sometimes contended that the independence of the insurgents should be recognized. But imperfect and restricted as the Spanish government of the island may be, no other exists there—unless the will of the military officer in temporary command of a particular district can be dignified as a species of government. It is now also suggested that the United States should buy the island—a suggestion possibly worthy of consideration if there were any evidence of a desire or willingness on the part of Spain to entertain such a proposal. It is urged, finally, that, all other methods failing, the existing internecine strife in Cuba should be terminated by our intervention, even at the cost of a war between the United States and Spain—a war which its advocates confidently prophesy could be neither large in its proportions nor doubtful in its issue. The correctness of this forecast need be neither affirmed nor denied. The United States has nevertheless a character to maintain as a nation, which plainly dictates that right and not might should be the rule of its conduct. Further, though the United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity, it is in truth the most pacific of power and desires nothing so much as to live in amity with all the world. Its own ample and diversified domains satisfy all possible longings for territory, preclude all dreams of conquest, and prevent any casting of covetous eyes upon neighboring regions, however attractive. That our conduct toward Spain and her dominions has constituted no exception to this national disposition is made manifest by the course of our government, not only thus far during the present insurrection but during the ten years that followed the rising at Yara in 1868. No other great power, it may safely be said, under circumstances of similar perplexity, would have manifested the same restraint and the same patient endurance. It may also be said that this persistent attitude of the United States toward Spain in connection with Cuba unquestionably evinces no slight respect and regard for Spain on the part of the American people. They in truth do not forget her connection with the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, nor do they underestimate the great qualities of the Spanish people, nor fail to fully recognize their splendid patriotism and their chivalrous devotion to the national honor. They view with wonder and admiration the cheerful resolution with which vast bodies of men are sent across thousands of miles of ocean, and an enormous debt accumulated, that the costly possession of the Gem of the Antilles may still hold its place in the Spanish Crown.

And yet neither the government nor the people of the United States have shut their eyes to the course of events in Cuba or have failed to realize the existence of conceded grievances, which have led to the present revolt from the authority of Spain—grievances recognized by the queen regent and by the Cortes, voiced by the most patriotic and enlightened of Spanish statesmen, without regard to party, and demonstrated by reforms proposed by the executive and approved by the legislative branch of the Spanish government. It is in the assumed temper and disposition of the Spanish government to remedy these grievances, fortified by indications of influential public opinion in Spain, that this government has hoped to discover the most promising and effective means of composing the present strife, with honor and advantage to Spain and with the achievement of all the reasonable objects of the insurrection. It would seem that if Spain should offer to Cuba genuine autonomy—a measure of home rule which, while preserving the sovereignty of Spain, would satisfy all rational requirements of her Spanish subjects —there should be no just reason why the pacification of the island might not be effected on that basis. Such a result would appear to be in the true interest of all concerned. It would at once stop the conflict…. It would keep intact the possessions of Spain without touching her honor, which will be consulted rather than impugned by the adequate redress of admitted grievances. It would put the prosperity of the island and the fortunes of its inhabitants within their own control without severing the natural and ancient ties which bind them to the mother country, and would yet enable them to test their capacity for selfgovernment under the most favorable conditions. It has been objected, on the one side, that Spain should not promise autonomy until her insurgent subjects lay down their arms; on the other side, that promised autonomy, however liberal, is insufficient, because without assurance of the promise being fulfilled. But the reasonableness of a requirement by Spain of unconditional surrender on the part of the insurgent Cubans before their autonomy is conceded is not altogether apparent. It ignores important features of the situation—the stability two years’ duration has given to the insurrection; the feasibility of its indefinite prolongation in the nature of things and as shown by past experience; the utter and imminent ruin of the island, unless the present strife is speedily composed; above all, the rank abuses which all parties in Spain, all branches of her government, and all her leading public men concede to exist and profess a desire to remove. Facing such circumstances, to withhold the proffer of needed reforms until the parties demanding them put themselves at mercy by throwing down their arms has the appearance of neglecting the gravest of perils and inviting suspicion as to the sincerity of any professed willingness to grant reforms. The objection on behalf of the insurgents—that promised reforms cannot be relied upon—must of course be considered, though we have no right to assume, and no reason for assuming, that anything Spain undertakes to do for the relief of Cuba will not be done according to both the spirit and the letter of the undertaking. Nevertheless, realizing that suspicions and precautions on the part of the weaker of two combatants are always natural and not always unjustifiable, being sincerely desirous in the interest of both as well as on its own account that the Cuban problem should be solved with the least possible delay, it was intimated by this government to the government of Spain some months ago that, if a satisfactory measure of home rule were tendered the Cuban insurgents and would be accepted by them upon a guarantee of its execution, the United States would endeavor to find a way not objectionable to Spain of furnishing such guarantee. While no definite response to this intimation has yet been received from the Spanish government, it is believed to be not altogether unwelcome, while, as already suggested, no reason is perceived why it should not be approved by the insurgents. Neither party can fail to see the importance of early action, and both must realize that to prolong the present state of things for even a short period will add enormously to the time and labor and expenditure

necessary to bring about the industrial recuperation of the island. It is therefore fervently hoped on all grounds that earnest efforts for healing the breach between Spain and the insurgent Cubans, upon the lines above indicated, may be at once inaugurated and pushed to an immediate and successful issue. The friendly offices of the United States, either in the manner above outlined or in any other way consistent with our Constitution and laws, will always be at the disposal of either party. Whatever circumstances may arise, our policy and our interests would constrain us to object to the acquisition of the island or an interference with its control by any other power. It should be added that it cannot be reasonably assumed that the hitherto expectant attitude of the United States will be indefinitely maintained. While we are anxious to accord all due respect to the sovereignty of Spain, we cannot view the pending conflict in all its features and properly apprehend our inevitably close relations to it and its possible results without considering that, by the course of events, we may be drawn into such an unusual and unprecedented condition as will fix a limit to our patient waiting for Spain to end the contest, either alone and in her own way or with our friendly cooperation. When the inability of Spain to deal successfully with the insurrection has become manifest, and it is demonstrated that her sovereignty is extinct in Cuba for all purposes of its rightful existence, and when a hopeless struggle for its reestablishment has degenerated into a strife which means nothing more than the useless sacrifice of human life and the utter destruction of the very subject matter of the conflict, a situation will be presented in which our obligations to the sovereignty of Spain will be superseded by higher obligations, which we can hardly hesitate to recognize and discharge. Deferring the choice of ways and methods until the time for action arrives, we should make them depend upon the precise conditions then existing; and they should not be determined upon without giving careful heed to every consideration involving our honor and interest or the international duty we owe to Spain. Until we face the contingencies suggested, or the situation is by other incidents imperatively changed, we should continue in the line of conduct heretofore pursued, thus in all circumstances exhibiting our obedience to the requirements of public law and our regard for the duty enjoined upon us by the position we occupy in the family of nations. A contemplation of emergencies that may arise should plainly lead us to avoid their creation, either through a careless disregard of present duty or even an undue stimulation and ill-timed expression of feeling. But I have deemed it not amiss to remind the Congress that a time may arrive when a correct policy and care for our interests, as well as a regard for the interests of other nations and their citizens, joined by considerations of humanity and a desire to see a rich and fertile country, intimately related to us, saved from complete devastation, will constrain our government to such action as will subserve the interests thus involved and the same time promise to Cuba and its inhabitants an opportunity to enjoy the blessings of peace. Source: United States Department of State. Papers Relating to Foreign Relations of the United States, 1896, pp. xxvii–lxii.

General Calixto Garcia’s Letter to General William R. Shafter (1898) By the time of the of the Spanish-American War, General Calixto Garcia had spent the better part of the last 30 years of his life fighting to defeat the Spanish and for the liberation of the Cuban people. By the spring of 1898 he and his forces, having fought tenaciously, controlled the interior of Oriente Province, played a major role in preparing for the landing of U.S. forces at Santiago, and helped to ensure their early military success; indeed, once U.S. Marines moved into the interior and away from Calixto’s troops, they struggled to contend with the tactics of the Spanish. Nevertheless, once the

Spanish surrender came U.S. forces did not permit Garcia to enter Santiago. Here he voices his great sense of betrayal to U.S. General William Shafter. Sir: On May 12 the government of the Republic of Cuba ordered me, as commander of the Cuban army in the east to cooperate with the American army following the plans and obeying the orders of its commander. I have done my best, sir, to fulfill the wishes of my government, and I have been until now one of your most faithful subordinates, honoring myself in carrying out your orders as far as my powers have allowed me to do it. The city of Santiago surrendered to the American army, and news of that important event was given to me by persons entirely foreign to your staff. I have not been honored with a single word from yourself informing me about the negotiations for peace or the terms of the capitulation by the Spaniards. The important ceremony of the surrender of the Spanish army and the taking possession of the city by yourself took place later on, and I only knew of both events by public reports. I was neither honored, sir, with a kind word from you inviting me or any officer of my staff to represent the Cuban army on that memorable occasion. Finally, 1 know that you have left in power in Santiago the same Spanish authorities that for three years I have fought as enemies of the independence of Cuba. I beg to say that these authorities have never been elected at Santiago by the residents of the city; but were appointed by royal decrees of the Queen of Spain. I would agree, sir, that the army under your command should have taken possession of the city, the garrison and the forts. I would give my warm cooperation to any measure you may have deemed best under American military law to hold the city for your army and to preserve public order until the time comes to fulfill the solemn pledge of the people of the United States to establish in Cuba a free and independent government. But when the question arises of appointing authorities in Santiago de Cuba under the special circumstances of our thirty years strife against Spanish rule, I cannot see but with the deepest regret that such authorities are not elected by the Cuban people, but are the same ones selected by the Queen of Spain, and hence are ministers appointed to defend Spanish sovereignty against the Cubans. A rumor, too absurd to be believed, General, describes the reason of your measure and of the orders forbidding my army to enter Santiago for fear of massacres and revenge against the Spaniards. Allow me, sir, to protest against even the shadow of such an idea. We are not savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare. We are a poor, ragged army as ragged and poor as was the army of your forefathers in their noble war for independence, but like the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown, we respect our cause too deeply to disgrace it with barbarism and cowardice. In view of all these reasons, I sincerely regret being unable to fulfill any longer the orders of my government, and, therefore, I have tendered today to the commander-in-chief of the Cuban army, Maj. Gen. Maximo Gomez, my resignation as commander of this section of our army. Awaiting his resolution, I have retired with all my forces to Jiguani. I am respectfully yours, Calixto Garcia Source: Edward S. Ellis, The History of Our Country: From the Discovery of America to the Present Time. Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1900, pp. 2046–2049.

“The Big Type War of the Yellow Kids” (1898) In this satirical cartoon by Leon Barritt, New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer (l) and William Randolph Hearst (r), publisher of the New York Journal, are depicted critically for their mutually competitive role in whipping up popular support for the war in Cuba against Spain. Barritt famously dressed the publishers in the garb of “The Yellow Kid,” an immensely popular comic character drawn by Richard F. Outcault, originally of Pulitzer’s New York World who had moved to Hearst’s paper. The two papers’ sensationalized reporting on the war in Cuba, partly responsible for America’s imperial intervention, came to be known as “yellow journalism.”

Source: Library of Congress.

New York Journal and Advertiser Article Calls Sinking of the Maine the “Work of an Enemy” (1898) Published February 17, 1898, in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal just two days after the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, this article is an example of the sort of jingoistic bias, inflammatory rhetoric, and poor investigative reporting for which yellow journalism was notorious. The Maine’s sinking—critical to the U.S. decision to intervene in Cuba—was later judged by a thorough naval investigation to have likely resulted from an internal accident. DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY Assistant Secretary Roosevelt Convinced the Explosion of the War Ship Was Not an Accident. The Journal Offers $50,000 Reward for the Conviction of the Criminals Who Sent 258 American Sailors to Their Death. Naval Officers Unanimous That the Ship Was Destroyed on Purpose. NAVAL OFFICERS THINK THE MAINE WAS DESTROYED BY A SPANISH MINE. George Eugene Bryson, the Journal’s special correspondent at Havana, cables that it is the secret opinion of many Spaniards in the Cuban capital, that the Maine was destroyed and 258 men killed by means of marine mine or fixed torpedo. This is the opinion of several American naval authorities. The Spaniards, it is believed, arranged to have the Maine anchored over one of the harbor mines. Wires

connected the mines with a … magazine, and it is thought the explosion was caused by sending an electric current through the wire. If this can be proven, the brutal nature of the Spaniards will be shown by the fact that they waited to spring the mine after all the men had retired for the night. The Maltese cross in the picture shows where the mine may have been fired. Mine or a Sunken Torpedo Believed to Have Been the Weapon Used Against the American Man-OfWar—Officer and Men tell Thrilling Stories of Being Blown into the Air Amid a Mass of Shattered Steel and Exploding Shells—Survivors Brought to Key West Scou[t] the Idea of Accident—Spanish Officials Protest Too Much—Our Cabinet Orders a Searching Inquiry—Journal Sends Divers to Havana to Report Upon the Condition of the Wreck. Was the Vessel Anchored Over a Mine? Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt says he is convinced that the destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor was not an accident. The Journal offers a reward of $50,000 for exclusive evidence that will convict the person, persons or government criminally responsible for the [destruction] of the American battleship and the death of 258 of its crew. The suspicion that the Maine was deliberately blown up grows stronger every hour. Not a single fact to the contrary has been produced…. Source: New York Journal and Advertiser, February 17, 1898.

Lyrics to “The Battle of Santiago” by Charles F. Alsop (1898) At the time of the Spanish-American War, popular music for most Americans was enjoyed primarily in the home, usually sung and performed on piano from sheet music made publicly affordable by publishing houses across the country. One such venture, the Philadelphia Sunday Item, got its start in 1898. That year they published “The Battle of Santiago” by composer Charles F. Alsop, a stirring patriotic song commemorating the key naval battle that destroyed the Caribbean Squadron of the Spanish navy. Alsop had already penned the popular tune “In Manila Bay” as a tribute to George Dewey’s great victory in the Philippines. “The Battle of Santiago,” Words and Music, Charles F. Alsop, 1898 Off Santiago harbor, Our fleet in grandeur lay, The blockade safely keeping The Spanish foe at bay, Below the watch was happy, With song and laughter gay; And some a line or two did pen To loved ones far away. But, suddenly, the scene was changed By long desired attraction, As, loud and shrill, the bo’sun piped: “Clear!—clear the decks for action!” Then, as they took their places, With swiftly-flying feet, This cry for vengeance quick and sure Was heard throughout the fleet:

[chorus] “Let’s stand by our guns! Remember the Maine! We’re out to lick the Spanish, boys, And drive them back to Spain! For justice we fight; and, While we’re Yankees true, The Spanish shall not hold the Isle of Cuba!” In answer to this slogan, We flew to meet the foe Right under Morro’s frowning guns, We let our broadsides go. Schley led our fleet to glory; While Shafter’s gallant band Of twenty thousand boys in blue Assailed the foe on Land! Loud shrieked the shells—the cannon roared, Our enemy to slaughter! Proud Spain a lesson learned from us; For Freedom’s worth we taught her! Her forts and fleet we silenced; Then, with this stirring cry, O’er Santiago—grandly won! We let Old Glory fly: [repeat chorus] Source: “The Battle of Santiago,” Words and music, Charles F. Alsop, 1898.

Albert Beveridge’s “March of the Flag” (1898) Albert J. Beveridge was a historian, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, brilliant orator, and Republican U.S. senator from Indiana (1899–1911). Though a champion of Progressive Era domestic policies, Beveridge is best remembered as a fervent supporter of American imperialism. His famous “March of the Flag” address on September 16, 1898, at a meeting of the Indiana Republican Party launched his narrowly won campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. It is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would inclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe, a greater England with a nobler destiny. It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing working folk of all the earth; a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heavendirected purposes—the propagandists and not the misers of liberty. It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history heroic with faith in our mission and our future; a history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into unexplored lands and savage wilderness; a history of soldiers who carried the flag across blazing deserts

and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset; a history of a multiplying people who overran a continent in half a century; a history of prophets who saw the consequences of evils inherited from the past and of martyrs who died to save us from them; a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today. Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than a party question. It is an American question. It is a world question. Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Have we no mission to perform no duty to discharge to our fellow man? Has God endowed us with gifts beyond our deserts and marked us as the people of His peculiar favor, merely to rot in our own selfishness, as men and nations must, who take cowardice for their companion and self for their deity—as China has, as India has, as Egypt has? Shall we be as the man who had one talent and hid it, or as he who had ten talents and used them until they grew to riches? And shall we reap the reward that waits on our discharge of our high duty; shall we occupy new markets for what our farmers raise, our factories make, our merchants sell—aye, and please God, new markets for what our ships shall carry? Hawaii is ours; Porto Rico is to be ours; at the prayer of her people Cuba finally will be ours; in the islands of the East, even to the gates of Asia, coaling stations are to be ours at the very least; the flag of a liberal government is to float over the Philippines, and may it be the banner that Taylor unfurled in Texas and Fremont carried to the coast. The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer, The rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent. How do they know what our government would be without their consent? Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them? And, regardless of this formula of words made only for enlightened, self-governing people, do we owe no duty to the world? Shall we turn these peoples back to the reeking hands from which we have taken them? Shall we abandon them, with Germany, England, Japan, hungering for them? Shall we save them from those nations, to give them a self-rule of tragedy? They ask us how we shall govern these new possessions. I answer: Out of local conditions and the necessities of the case methods of government will grow. If England can govern foreign lands, so can America. If Germany can govern foreign lands, so can America. If they can supervise protectorates, so can America. Why is it more difficult to administer Hawaii than New Mexico or California? Both had a savage and an alien population: both were more remote from the seat of government when they came under our dominion than the Philippines are today. Will you say by your vote that American ability to govern has decayed, that a century’s experience in self-rule has failed of a result? Will you affirm by your vote that you are an infidel to American power and practical sense? Or will you say that ours is the blood of government; ours the heart of dominion; ours the brain and genius of administration? Will you remember that we do but what our fathers did—we but pitch the tents of liberty farther westward, farther southward—we only continue the march of the flag? The march of the flag! In 1789 the flag of the Republic waved over 4,000,000 souls in thirteen states, and their savage territory which stretched to the Mississippi, to Canada, to the Floridas. The timid minds of that day said that no new territory was needed, and, for the hour, they were right. But Jefferson, through

whose intellect the centuries marched; Jefferson, who dreamed of Cuba as an American state, Jefferson, the first Imperialist of the Republic—Jefferson acquired that imperial territory which swept from the Mississippi to the mountains, from Texas to the British possessions, and the march of the flag began! The infidels to the gospel of liberty raved, but the flag swept on! The title to that noble land out of which Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana have been carved was uncertain: Jefferson, strict constructionist of constitutional power though he was, obeyed the Anglo-Saxon impulse within him, whose watchword is, “Forward!’’: another empire was added to the Republic, and the march of the flag went on! Those who deny the power of free institutions to expand urged every argument, and more, that we hear, today; but the people’s judgment approved the command of their blood, and the march of the flag went on! A screen of land from New Orleans to Florida shut us from the Gulf, and over this and the Everglade Peninsula waved the saffron flag of Spain; Andrew Jackson seized both, the American people stood at his back, and, under Monroe, the Floridas came under the dominion of the Republic, and the march of the flag went on! The Cassandras prophesied every prophecy of despair we hear, today, but the march of the flag went on! Then Texas responded to the bugle calls of liberty, and the march of the flag went on! And, at last, we waged war with Mexico, and the flag swept over the southwest, over peerless California, past the Gate of Gold to Oregon on the north, and from ocean to ocean its folds of glory blazed. And, now, obeying the same voice that Jefferson heard and obeyed, that Jackson heard and obeyed, that Monroe heard and obeyed, that Seward heard and obeyed, that Grant heard and obeyed, that Harrison heard and obeyed, our President today plants the flag over the islands of the seas, outposts of commerce, citadels of national security, and the march of the flag goes on! Distance and oceans are no arguments. The fact that all the territory our fathers bought and seized is contiguous, is no argument. In 1819 Florida was farther from New York than Porto Rico is from Chicago today; Texas, farther from Washington in 1845 than Hawaii is from Boston in 1898; California, more inaccessible in 1847 than the Philippines are now. Gibraltar is farther from London than Havana is from Washington; Melbourne is farther from Liverpool than Manila is from San Francisco. The ocean does not separate us from lands of our duty and desire the oceans join us, rivers never to be dredged, canals never to be repaired. Steam joins us; electricity joins us—the very elements are in league with our destiny. Cuba not contiguous? Porto Rico not contiguous! Hawaii and the Philippines no[t] contiguous! The oceans make them contiguous. And our navy will make them contiguous. But the Opposition is right—there is a difference. We did not need the western Mississippi Valley when we acquired it, nor Florida! nor Texas, nor California, nor the royal provinces of the far northwest. We had no emigrants to people this imperial wilderness, no money to develop it, even no highways to cover it. No trade awaited us in its savage fastnesses. Our productions were not greater than our trade. There was not one reason for the land-lust of our statesmen from Jefferson to Grant, other than the prophet and the Saxon within them. But, today, we are raising more than we can consume, making more than we can use. Therefore we must find new markets for our produce. And so, while we did not need the territory taken during the past century at the time it was acquired, we do need what we have taken in 1898 and we need it now. The resource[s] and the commerce of the immensely rich dominions will be increased as much as American energy is greater than Spanish sloth. In Cuba, alone, there are 15,000,000 acres of forest unacquainted with the ax, exhaustless mines of iron, priceless deposits of manganese, millions of dollars’ worth of which we must buy, today, from the Black Sea districts. There are millions of acres yet unexplored.

The resources of Porto Rico have only been trifled with. The riches of the Philippines have hardly been touched by the fingertips of modern methods. And they produce what we consume, and consume what we produce—the very predestination of reciprocity—a reciprocity “not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” They sell hemp, sugar, cocoanuts, fruits of the tropics, timber of price like mahogany; they buy flour, clothing, tools, implements, machinery and all that we can raise and make. Their trade will be ours in time. Do you indorse that policy with your vote? Cuba is as large as Pennsylvania, and is the richest spot on the globe. Hawaii is as large as New Jersey; Porto Rico half as large as Hawaii; the Philippines larger than all New England, New York, New Jersey and Delaware combined. Together they are larger than the British Isles, larger than France, larger than Germany, larger than Japan. If any man tells you that trade depends on cheapness and not on government influence, ask him why England does not abandon South Africa, Egypt, India. Why does France seize South China, Germany the vast region whose port is Kaou-chou? Our trade with Porto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines must be as free as between the states of the Union, because they are American territory, while every other nation on earth must pay our tariff before they can compete with us. Until Cuba shall ask for annexation, our trade with her will, at the very least, be like the preferential trade of Canada with England. That, and the excellence of our goods and products; that, and the convenience of traffic; that, and the kinship of interests and destiny, will give the monopoly of these markets to the American people. The commercial supremacy of the Republic means that this Nation is to be the sovereign factor in the peace of the world. For the conflicts of the future are to be conflicts of trade—struggles for markets— commercial wars for existence. And the golden rule of peace is impregnability of position and invincibility of preparedness. So, we see England, the greatest strategist of history, plant her flag and her cannon on Gibraltar, at Quebec, in the Bermudas, at Vancouver, everywhere. So Hawaii furnishes us a naval base in the heart of the Pacific; the Ladrones another, a voyage further on; Manila another, at the gates of Asia—Asia, to the trade of whose hundreds of millions [of] American merchants, manufacturers, farmers, have as good right as those of Germany or France or Russia or England; Asia, whose commerce with the United Kingdom alone amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars every year; Asia, to whom Germany looks to take her surplus products; Asia, whose doors must not be shut against American trade. Within five decades the bulk of Oriental commerce will be ours. No wonder that, in the shadows of coming events so great, free-silver is already a memory. The current of history has swept past that episode. Men understand, today, the greatest commerce of the world must be conducted with the steadiest standard of value and most convenient medium of exchange human ingenuity can devise. Time, that unerring reasoner, has settled the silver question. The American people are tired of talking about money—they want to make it…. There are so many real things to be done—canals to be dug, railways to be laid, forests to be felled, cities to be builded [sic], fields to be tilled, markets to be won, ships to be launched, peoples to be saved, civilization to be proclaimed and the [fl]ag of liberty [fl]ung to the eager air of every sea. Is this an hour to waste upon triflers with nature’s laws? Is this a season to give our destiny over to wordmongers and prosperity-wreckers? No! It is an hour to remember our duty to our homes. It is a moment to realize the opportunities fate has opened to us. And so [it] is a[n] hour for us to stand by the Government. Wonderfully has God guided us. Yonder at Bunker Hill and Yorktown His providence was above us. At New Orleans and on ensanguined seas His hand sustained u[s.] Abraham Lincoln was His minister and His was the altar of freedom the Nation’s soldiers set up on a hundred battlefields. His power directed Dewey in the East an[d] delivered the Spanish fleet into our hands, as He delivered the elder Armada into

the hands of our English sires two centuries ago [Note—actually in 1588]. The American people can not use a dishonest medium of exchange; it is ours to set the world its example of right and honor. We can not fly from our world duties; it is ours to execute the purpose of a fate that has driven us to be greater than our small intentions. We can not retreat from any soil where Providence has unfurled our banner; it is ours to save that soil for liberty and civilization. Source: Beveridge, Albert. “Stirred by His Words: Mr. Beveridge’s Magnificent Presentation of War Issues.” Indianapolis Journal (September 17, 1898).

President William McKinley’s “The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” (1898) On December 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Spanish-American War. Spain ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States, with the United States paying $20 million for the Philippines. On December 21 (January 4, 1899, in the Philippines), President McKinley delivered this proclamation stating the noble and peaceful intentions of the Americans in the Philippines—“not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends.” The speech was not well received in the country, as Filipino rebels would soon engage in a brutal four-year war against their new imperial overlords. December 21, 1898 In performing this duty [the extension of American sovereignty throughout the Philippines by means of force] the military commander of the United States is enjoined to make known to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands that in succeeding to the sovereignty of Spain, in severing the former political relations, and in establishing a new political power, the authority of the United States is to be exerted for the securing of the persons and property of the people of the Islands and for the confirmation of all private rights and relations. It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, cooperate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support and protection. All others will be brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be, but without severity, so far as may be possible…. Finally, it should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of a free people, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of the benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In the fulfillment of this high mission, supporting the temperate administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority, to repress disturbance and to overcome all obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the people of the Philippine Islands under the flag of the United States. Source: The Statutes at Large of the United States of America from March 1897 to March 1899 and Recent Treaties, Conventions, Executive Proclamations, and the Concurrent Resolutions of the Two Houses of Congress, Volume XXX, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899. Copy courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress, Asian Division.

“Ten Thousand Miles from Tip to Tip” (1898) At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the Philadelphia Press published this cartoon dramatically illustrating the extent of the new American empire. The majestic national symbol of the bald eagle is perched astride a 10,000-mile expanse of territory stretching from Cuba to the Philippines. A crudely drawn miniature map shows the modest reach of the nation just a century before.

Source: U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913.

Andrew Carnegie’s “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways” (1898) A national debate following the Spanish-American War centered on whether the United States should become a global imperial power that extended all the way to the Philippines. Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie originally wrote the following article for the prestigious North American Review in August 1898. Here Carnegie voices many of the practical, economic, as well as moral arguments of the American Anti-Imperialist League that he had recently helped to establish. With ethnocentrically colored language typical of the era, he inveighs against the burdens and dangers of empire. Twice only have the American people been called upon to decide a question of such vital import as that now before them. Is the Republic, the apostle of Triumphant Democracy, of the rule of the people, to abandon her political creed and endeavor to establish in other lands the rule of the foreigner over the people, Triumphant Despotism? Is the Republic to remain one homogeneous whole, one united people, or to become a scattered and disjointed aggregate of widely separated and alien races? Is she to continue the task of developing her vast continent until it holds a population as great as that of Europe, all Americans, or to abandon that destiny to annex, and to attempt to govern, other far distant parts of the world as outlying possessions, which can never be integral parts of the Republic?

Is she to exchange internal growth and advancement for the development of external possessions which can never be really hers in any fuller sense than India is British or Cochin China French? Such is the portentous question of the day. Two equally important questions the American people have decided wisely, and their flag now waves over the greater portion of the English-speaking race; their country is the richest of all countries, first in manufactures, in mining, and in commerce (home and foreign), first this year also in exports. But, better than this, the average condition of its people in education and in living is the best. The luxuries of the masses in other lands are the necessaries of life in ours. There are two kinds of national possessions, one colonies, the other dependencies. In the former we establish and reproduce our own race. Thus Britain has peopled Canada and Australia with Englishspeaking people, who have naturally adopted our ideas of self-government. With dependencies it is otherwise. The most grievous burden which Britain has upon her shoulders is that of India, for there it is impossible for our race to grow. The child of English-speaking parents must be removed and reared in Britain. The British Indian official must have long respites in his native land. India means death to our race. The characteristic feature of a dependency is that the acquiring power cannot reproduce its own race there. If we could establish colonies of Americans, and grow Americans in any part of the world now unpopulated and unclaimed by any of the great powers, and thus follow the example of Britain, heart and mind might tell us that we should have to think twice, yea, thrice, before deciding adversely. Even then our decision should be adverse; but there is at present no such question before us. What we have to face is the question whether we should embark upon the difficult and dangerous policy of undertaking the government of alien races in lands where it is impossible for our own race to be produced. As long as we remain free from distant possessions we are impregnable against serious attack; yet, it is true, we have to consider what obligations may fall upon us of an international character requiring us to send our forces to points beyond our own territory. Up to this time we have disclaimed all intention to interfere with affairs beyond our own continent, and only claimed the right to watch over American interests according to the Monroe Doctrine, which is now firmly established. This carries with it serious responsibilities, no doubt, which we cannot escape. European nations must consult us upon territorial questions pertaining to our continent, but this makes no tremendous demand upon our military or naval forces. We are at home, as it were, near our base, and sure of the support of the power in whose behalf and on whose request we may act. If it be found essential to possess a coaling-station at Puerto Rico for future possible, though not probable, contingencies, there is no insuperable objection. Neither would the control of the West Indies be alarming if pressed upon us by Britain, since the islands are small and the populations must remain insignificant and without national aspirations. Besides, they are upon our own shores, American in every sense. Their defense by us would be easy. No protest need be entered against such legitimate and peaceful expansion in our own hemisphere, should events work in that direction. I am no “Little” American, afraid of growth, either in population or territory, provided always that the new territory be American, and that it will produce Americans, and not foreign races bound in time to be false to the Republic in order to be true to themselves. To reduce it to the concrete, the question is: Shall we attempt to establish ourselves as a power in the far East and possess the Philippines for glory? The glory we already have, in Dewey’s victory overcoming the power of Spain in a manner which adds one more to the many laurels of the American navy, which, from its infancy till now, has divided the laurels with Britain upon the sea. The Philippines have about seven and a half millions of people, composed of races bitterly hostile to one another, alien races, ignorant of our language and institutions. Americans cannot be grown there….

Let another phase of the question be carefully weighed. Europe is to-day an armed camp, not chiefly because the home territories of its various nations are threatened, but because of fear of aggressive action upon the part of other nations touching outlying “possessions.” France resents British control of Egypt, and is fearful of its West African possessions; Russia seeks Chinese territory, with a view to expansion to the Pacific; Germany also seeks distant possessions; Britain, who has acquired so many dependencies, is so fearful of an attack upon them that this year she is spending nearly eighty millions of dollars upon additional war-ships, and Russia, Germany, and France follow suit. Japan is a new element of anxiety; and by the end of the year it is computed she will have sixty-seven formidable ships of war. The naval powers of Europe, and Japan also, are apparently determined to be prepared for a terrific struggle for possessions in the far East, close to the Philippines—and why not for these islands themselves? Into this vortex the Republic is cordially invited to enter by those powers who expect her policy to be of benefit to them, but her action is jealously watched by those who fear that her power might be used against them. It has never been considered the part of wisdom to thrust one’s hand into the hornet’s nest, and it does seem as if the United States must lose all claim to ordinary prudence and good sense if she enter this arena and become involved in the intrigues and threats of war which make Europe an armed camp. What it means to enter the list of military and naval powers having foreign possessions may be gathered from the following considerations. First, look at our future navy. If it is only to equal that of France it means fifty-one battle-ships; if of Russia, forty battle-ships. If we cannot play the game without being at least the equal of any of our rivals, then eighty battle-ships is the number Britain possesses. We now have only four, with five building. Cruisers, armed and unarmed, swell the number threefold, Britain having two hundred and seventy-three ships of the line built or ordered, with three hundred and eight torpedo-boats in addition; France having one hundred and thirty-four ships of the line and two hundred and sixty-nine torpedo-boats. All these nations are adding ships rapidly. Every armor- and gun-making plant in the world is busy night and day. Ships are indispensable, but recent experience shows that soldiers are equally so. While the immense armies of Europe need not be duplicated, yet we shall certainly be too weak unless our army is at least twenty times what it has been—say five hundred thousand men. Even then we shall be powerless as against any one of three of our rivals—Germany, France, and Russia. This drain upon the resources of these countries has become a necessity from their respective positions, largely as graspers for foreign possessions. The United States to-day, happily, has no such necessity, her neighbors being powerless against her, since her possessions are concentrated and her power is one solid mass…. From every point of view we are forced to the conclusion that the past policy of the Republic is her true policy for the future; for safety, for peace, for happiness, for progress, for wealth, for power—for all that makes a nation blessed. Not till the war-drum is silent, and the day of calm peace returns, can the issue be soberly considered. Twice have the American people met crucial issues wisely, and in the third they are not to fail. Source: Carnegie, Andrew. “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways.” In The Gospel of Wealth (New York: Century, 1901).

“Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts” (October 3, 1899) Thousands of African American soldiers participated in both the Spanish-American and PhilippineAmerican Wars. Many of those soldiers later wrote with bitter regret of having killed people of darker

skin, ostensibly to liberate them while they themselves were not fully free in the United States. African Americans at home also participated in the anti-imperialist struggle to the extent they could in an era marked by violent racial repression, especially in the American South. The following open letter from leading African Americans in Massachusetts to President McKinley expresses many of these concerns. Sir:—We, colored people of Massachusetts in mass meeting assembled to consider our oppressions and the state of the country relative to the same, have resolved to address ourselves to you in an open letter, notwithstanding your extraordinary, your incomprehensible silence on the subject of our wrongs in your annual and other messages to Congress, as in your public utterances to the country at large. We address ourselves to you, sir, not as suppliants, but as of right, as American citizens, whose servant you are, and to whom you are bound to listen, and for whom you are equally bound to speak, and upon occasion to act, as for any other body of your fellow-countrymen in like circumstances. We ask nothing for ourselves at your hands, as chief magistrate of the republic, to which all American citizens are not entitled. We ask for the enjoyment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness equally with other men. We ask for the free and full exercise of all the rights of American freemen, guaranteed to us by the Constitution and laws of the Union, which you were solemnly sworn to obey and execute. We ask you for what belongs to us by the high sanction of Constitution and law, and the Democratic genius of our institutions and civilization. These rights are everywhere throughout the South denied to us, violently wrested from us by mobs, by lawless legislatures, and nullifying conventions, combinations, and conspiracies, openly, defiantly, under your eyes, in your constructive and actual presence. And we demand, which is a part of our rights, protection, security in our life, our liberty, and in the pursuit of our individual and social happiness under a government, which we are bound to defend in war, and which is equally bound to furnish us in peace protection, at home and abroad. We have suffered, sir,—God knows how much we have suffered!—since your accession to office, at the hands of a country professing to be Christian, but which is not Christian, from the hate and violence of a people claiming to be civilized, but who are not civilized, and you have seen our sufferings, witnessed from your high place our awful wrongs and miseries, and yet you have at no time and on no occasion opened your lips in our behalf. Why? we ask. Is it because we are black and weak and despised? Are you silent because without any fault of our own we were enslaved and held for more than two centuries in cruel bondage by your forefathers? Is it because we bear the marks of those sad generations of AngloSaxon brutality and wickedness, that you do not speak? Is it our fault that our involuntary servitude produced in us widespread ignorance[,] poverty and degradation? Are we to be damned and destroyed by the whites because we have only grown the seeds which they planted? Are we to be damned by bitter laws and destroyed by the mad violence of mobs because we are what white men made us? And is there no help in the federal arm for us, or even one word of audible pity, protest and remonstrance in your own breast, Mr. President, or in that of a single member of your Cabinet? Black indeed we are, sir, but we are also men and American citizens. From the year 1619 the Anglo-Saxon race in America began to sow in the mind of the negro race in America seeds of ignorance, poverty and social degradation, and continued to do so until the year 1863, when chattel slavery was abolished to save the union of these states. Then northern white men began, in order to form a more perfect union, to sow this self-same mind of the negro with quite different seeds,— seeds of knowledge and freedom; seeds garnered in the Declaration of Independence for the feeding of the nations of the earth, such as the natural equality of all men before the law, their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the derivation of the power of all just governments from the consent of the governed. These seeds of your own planting took root in the mind and heart of the negro,

and the crop of quickening intelligence, desire for wealth, to rise in the social scale, to be as other men, to be equal with them in opportunities and the free play of his powers in the rivalry of life, was the direct and legitimate result. The struggle of the negro to rise out of his ignorance, his poverty and his social degradation, in consequence of the growth of these new forces and ideas within him, to the full stature of his American citizenship, has been met everywhere in the South by the active ill-will and determined race-hatred and opposition of the white people of that section. Turn where he will, he encounters this cruel and implacable spirit. He dare not speak openly the thoughts which rise in his breast. He has wrongs such as have never in modern times been inflicted on a people and yet he must be dumb in the midst of a nation which prates loudly of democracy and humanity, boasts itself the champion of oppressed peoples abroad, while it looks on indifferent, apathetic, at appalling enormities and iniquities at home, where the victims are black and the criminals white. The suppression, the terror wrought at the South is so complete, so ever-present, so awful, that no negro’s life or property is safe for a day who ventures to raise his voice to heaven in indignant protest and appeal against the deep damnation and despotism of such a social state. Even teachers and leaders of this poor, oppressed and patient people may not speak, lest their institutions of learning and industry, and their own lives pay for their temerity at the swift hands of savage mobs. But if the peace of Warsaw, the silence of death reign over our people and their leaders [in] the South, we of Massachusetts are free, and must and shall raise our voice to you and through you to the country, in solemn protest and warning against the fearful sin and peril of such explosive social conditions. We, sir, at this crisis and extremity in the life of our race in the South, and in this crisis and extremity of the republic as well, in the presence of the civilized world, cry to you to pause, if but for an hour, in pursuit of your national policy of “criminal aggression” abroad to consider the “criminal aggression” at home against humanity and American citizenship, which is in the full tide of successful conquest [in] the South, and the tremendous consequences to our civilization, and the durability of the Union itself, of this universal subversion of the supreme law of the land, of democratic institutions, and of the precious principle of the religion of Jesus in the social and civil life of the Southern people. With one accord, with an anxiety that wrenched our hearts with cruel hopes and fears, the colored people of the United States turned to you when Wilmington, N.C., was held for two dreadful days and nights in the clutch of a bloody revolution; when negroes, guilty of no crime except the color of their skin and a desire to exercise the rights of their American citizenship, were butchered like dogs in the streets of that ill-fated town; and when government of the people[,] by the people and for the people perished in your very presence by the hands of violent men during those bitter November days, for want of federal aid, which you would not and did not furnish, on the plea that you could not give what was not asked for by a coward and recreant governor. And we well understood at the time, sir, notwithstanding your plea of constitutional inability to cope with the rebellion in Wilmington, that where there is a will with constitutional lawyers and rulers there is always a way, and where there is no will there is no way. We well knew that you lacked the will, and, therefore, the way to meet that emergency. It was the same thing with that terrible ebullition of the mob spirit at Phoenix, S.C., when black men were hunted and murdered, and white men shot and driven out of that place by a set of white savages, who cared not for the Constitution and the laws of the United States any more than they do for the constitution and the laws of an empire dead and buried a thousand years. We looked in vain for some word or some act from you. Neither word nor act of sympathy for the victims was forthcoming, or of detestation of an outrage so mad and barbarous as to evoke even from such an extreme Southern organ as is the News and Courier, of Charleston, S.C., hot and stern condemnation. Hoping against hope, we waited for your annual message to Congress in December last, knowing that the Constitution imposed upon you a duty to give,

from time to time, to that body information of the state of the Union. That, at least, we said, the President will surely do; he will communicate officially the facts relative to the tragic, the appalling events, which had just occurred in the Carolinas to the Congress of the United States. But not one word did your message contain on this subject, although it discussed all sorts and conditions of subjects, from the socalled war for humanity against Spain to the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the national capital in 1900. Nothing escaped your eye, at home or abroad, nothing except the subversion of the Constitution and laws of the Union in the Southern States, and the Flagrant and monstrous crimes perpetrated upon a weak and submissive race in defiance of your authority, or in virtual connivance therewith. Yes, sir, we repeat, or in virtual connivance therewith. And, when you made your Southern tour a little later, and we saw how cunningly you catered to Southern race prejudice and proscription; how you, the one single public man and magistrate of the country, who, by virtue of your exalted office, ought under no circumstances to recognize caste distinctions and discriminations among your fellow-citizens, received white men at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., and black men afterward in a negro church; how you preached patience, industry moderation to your long-suffering black fellow-citizens, and patriotism, jingoism and imperialism to your white ones; when we saw all these things, scales of illusion in respect to your object fell from our eyes. We felt that the President of the United States, in order to win the support of the South to his policy of “criminal aggression” in the far East, was ready and willing to shut his eyes, ears and lips to the “criminal aggression” of that section against the Constitution and the [law] of the land, wherein they guarantee civil rights and citizenship to the negro, whose ultimate reduction to a condition of fixed and subject serfdom is the plain purpose of the Southern people and their laws. When, several months subsequently, you returned to Georgia, the mob spirit, as if to evince its supreme contempt for your presence and the federal executive authority which you represent, boldly broke into a prison shed, where were confined helpless negro prisoners on a charge of incendiarism, and brutally murdered five of them. These men were American citizens, entitled to the rights of American citizens, protection and trial by due process of law. They were, in the eye of the law, innocent until convicted by a jury of their peers. Had they been in legal custody in Russia or Spain or Turkey they had not been slaughtered by a mob under like circumstances; for the Russian military power, or the Spanish or the Turkish, would have guarded those men in their helpless and defenceless condition from the fury of the populace who were seeking their blood. Sir, they were men; they were your brothers; they were God’s children, for whom Jesus lived and died. They ought to have been sacred charges in the hands of any civilized or semi-civilized State people. But almost in your hearing, before your eyes (and you the chief magistrate of a country loudly boastful of its freedom, Christianity and civilization), they were atrociously murdered. Did you speak? did you open your lips to express horror of the awful crime and stern condemnation of the incredible villainy and complicity of the constituted authorities of Georgia in the commission of this monstrous outrage, which outbarbarized barbarism and stained through and through with indelible infamy before the world your country’s justice, honor and humanity? Still later considering the age, the circumstances and the nation in which the deed was done, Georgia committed a crime unmatched for moral depravity and sheer atrocity during the century. A negro, charged with murder and criminal assault, the first charge he is reported by the newspapers to have admitted, and the second to have denied, was taken one quiet Sunday morning from his captors, and burned to death with indescribable and hellish cruelty in the presence of cheering thousands of the so-called best people of Georgia, men, women and children, who had gone forth on the Christian Sabbath to the burning of a human being as to a country festival and holiday of innocent enjoyment and amusement. The downright ferocity and frightful savagery of that American mob at Newnan outdoes the holiday humor and thirst for blood of

the tiger-like populace of Pagan Rome, gathered to witness Christian martyrs thrown to lions in their roaring arenas. The death of Hose was quickly followed by that of the negro preacher, Strickland, guiltless of crime, under circumstances and with a brutality of wickedness almost matching in horror and enormity the torture and murder of the first; and this last was succeeded by a third victim, who was literally lashed to death by the wild, beast-like spirit of a Georgia mob, for daring merely to utter his abhorrence of the Palmetto iniquity and slaughter of helpless prisoners. Did you speak? Did you utter one word of reprobation of righteous indignation, either as magistrate or as man? Did you break the shameful silence of shameful months with so much as a whisper of a whisper against the deep damnation of such defiance of all law, human and divine; such revulsion of men into beasts, and relapses of communities into barbarism in the very center of the republic, and amid the sanctuary of the temple of American liberty itself? You did not, sir but your Attorney-General did, and he only the throw out to the public, to your meek and long-suffering colored fellow-citizens, the cold and cautious legal opinion that the case of Hose has no federal aspect! Mr. President, has it any moral or human aspect, seeing that Hose was a member of the negro race, whom your Supreme Court once declared has no rights in America which white men are bound to respect? Is this infamous dictum of that tribunal still the Supreme law of the land? We ask you, sir, since recent events in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia and Louisiana, as well as in Georgia and the Carolinas, indeed throughout the South, and your own persistent silence, and the persistent silence of every member of your Cabinet on the subject of the wrongs of that race in those States, would appear together to imply as much. Had, eighteen months ago, the Cuban revolution to throw off the yoke of Spain, or the attempt of Spain to subdue the Cuban rebellion, any federal aspect? We believe that you and the Congress of the United States thought that they had, and therefore used, finally, the armed force of the nation to expel Spain from that island. Why? Was it because “the people of the Island of Cuba are, and of right ought to be free and independent?” You and the Congress said as much, and may we fervently pray, sir, in passing, that the freedom and independence of that brave people shall not much longer be denied them by our government? But to resume, there was another consideration which, in your judgment, gave to the Cuban question a federal aspect, which provoked at last the armed interposition of our government in the affairs of that island, and this was “the chronic condition of disturbance in Cuba so injurious and menacing to our interests and tranquility, as well as shocking to our sentiments of humanity.” Wherefore you presently fulfilled “a duty to humanity by ending a situation, the indefinite prolongation of which had become insufferable.” Mr. President, had that “chronic condition of disturbance in Cuba so injurious and menacing to our interest and tranquility as well as shocking to our sentiments of humanity,” which you wished to terminate and did terminate, a federal aspect, while that not less “chronic condition of disturbance” in the South, which is a thousand times more “injurious and menacing to our interests and tranquility,” as well as far more “shocking to our sentiments of humanity,” or ought to be, none whatever? Is it better to be Cuban revolutionists fighting for Cuban independence than American citizens striving to do their simple duty at home? Or is it better only in case those American citizens doing their simple duty at home happen to be negroes residing in the Southern States? Are crying national transgressions and injustices more “injurious and menacing” to the Republic, as well as “shocking to its sentiments of humanity,” when committed by a foreign state, in foreign territory, against a foreign people, than when they are committed by a portion of our own people at home? There were those of our citizens who did not think that the Cuban question possessed any federal aspect, while there were others who thought otherwise; and these, having the will and power eventually found a way to suppress a menacing danger to the country and a wrong against humanity at the same time. Where there is

a will among constitutional lawyers and rulers, Mr. President, there is ever a way; but where there is no will, there is no way. Shall it be said that the federal government, with arms of Briareus, reaching to the utmost limits of the habitable globe for the protection of its citizens, for the liberation of alien islanders and the subjugation of others, is powerless to guarantee to certain of its citizens at home their inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, because those citizens happen to be negroes residing in the Southern section of our country? Do the colored people of the United States deserve equal consideration with the Cuban people at the hands of your administration, and shall they, though late, receive it? If, sir, you have the disposition, as we know that you have the power, we are confident that you will be able to find a constitutional way to reach us in our extremity, and our enemies also, who are likewise enemies to great public interests and national tranquility. I. D. BARNETT, President. EDWARD E. BROWN, Vice-President. EDWARD H. WEST, Secretary. ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKE. EDWIN G. WALKER JAMES H. WOLFF. EMERY T. MORRIS WILLIAM O. ARMSTRONG. THOMAS P. TAYLOR AND OTHERS. Source: Barnett, I. D., et al. Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts (October 3, 1899). Statement read by Archibald M. Grimke at Charles Street Church, Boston, Massachusetts. First printed in I. D. Barnett et al., Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts (n.p.: n.p., n.d.), pp. 2–4,10–12. www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/barnettmckinley.html.

Emilio Aguinaldo’s Manifesto Protesting the U.S. Claim of Sovereignty over the Philippines (1899) Immediately upon hearing President William McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation” on January 4, 1899, and learning that U.S. General Elwell S. Otis had been given governing military authority over the Philippines, Filipino revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo responded with a brief but unequivocal statement of protest. General Otis received the document as an effective declaration of war against U.S. forces. January 5, 1899 General Otis styles himself Military Governor of these Islands, and I protest one and a thousand times and with all the energy of my soul against such authority. I proclaim solemnly that I have not recognized either Singapore or in Hong Kong or in the Philippines, by word or in writing, the sovereignty of America over this beloved soil. On the contrary, I say that I returned to these Islands on an American warship on the 19th of May last for the express purpose of making war on the Spaniards to regain our liberty and independence. I stated this in my proclamation of the 24th of May last, and I publish it in my Manifesto addressed to the Philippine people on the 12th of June. Lastly, all this was confirmed by the American General Merritt himself, predecessor of General Otis, in his Manifesto to the Philippine people some days before he demanded the surrender of Manila from the Spanish General Jaudenes. In that Manifesto it

is distinctly stated that the naval and field forces of the United States had come to give us our liberty, by subverting the bad Spanish Government, And I hereby protest against this unexpected act of the United States claiming sovereignty over these Islands. My relations with the United States did not bring me over here from Hong Kong to make war on the Spaniards for their benefit, but for the purpose of our own liberty and independence…. Source: The Statutes at Large of the United States of America from March 1897 to March 1899 and Recent Treaties, Conventions, Executive Proclamations, and the Concurrent Resolutions of the Two Houses of Congress, Volume XXX, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899. Copy courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress, Asian Division.

Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1899) The American Anti-Imperialist League was founded in June 1898, triggered by the Spanish-American war and the U.S. occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Although most Americans supported overseas expansion, many citizens, including prominent figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James, and Jane Addams, found appalling the very idea of America as an imperial power. Founded upon the following platform, the American Anti-Imperialist League they helped to form campaigned unsuccessfully against the annexation of the Philippines. We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is “criminal aggression” and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government. We earnestly condemn the policy of the present National Administration in the Philippines. It seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands. We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war. We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror. We protest against the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods. We demand the immediate cessation of the war against liberty, begun by Spain and continued by us. We urge that Congress be promptly convened to announce to the Filipinos our purpose to concede to them the independence for which they have so long fought and which of right is theirs. The United States have always protested against the doctrine of international law which permits the subjugation of the weak by the strong. A self-governing state cannot accept sovereignty over an unwilling people. The United States cannot act upon the ancient heresy that might makes right. Imperialists assume that with the destruction of self-government in the Philippines by American hands, all opposition here will cease. This is a grievous error. Much as we abhor the war of “criminal aggression” in the Philippines, greatly as we regret that the blood of the Filipinos is on American hands, we more deeply resent the betrayal of American institutions at home. The real firing line is not in the suburbs of Manila. The foe is of our own household. The attempt of 1861 was to divide the country. That of 1899 is to destroy its fundamental principles and noblest ideals. Whether the ruthless slaughter of the Filipinos shall end next month or next year is but an incident in a contest that must go on until the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rescued from the hands of their betrayers. Those who dispute about standards of value while the foundation of the Republic is undermined will be listened to as little as those who would wrangle about the small economies of the household while the house is on fire. The training of a great people for a

century, the aspiration for liberty of a vast immigration are forces that will hurl aside those who in the delirium of conquest seek to destroy the character of our institutions. We deny that the obligation of all citizens to support their Government in times of grave National peril applies to the present situation. If an Administration may with impunity ignore the issues upon which it was chosen, deliberately create a condition of war anywhere on the face of the globe, debauch the civil service for spoils to promote the adventure, organize a truth-suppressing censorship and demand of all citizens a suspension of judgment and their unanimous support while it chooses to continue the fighting, representative government itself is imperiled. We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the forcible subjugation of any people. We shall oppose for reelection all who in the White House or in Congress betray American liberty in pursuit of un-American ends. We still hope that both of our great political parties will support and defend the Declaration of Independence in the closing campaign of the century. We hold, with Abraham Lincoln, that “no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism.” “Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it.” We cordially invite the cooperation of all men and women who remain loyal to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Source: “Platform of the American Anti-lmperialist League.” In Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers of Carl Schurz. Vol. 6. Edited by Frederick Bancroft (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), p. 77, note 1.

Platt Amendment (1901) Following the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, most Cubans anticipated the independence they had long been fighting for. At the beginning of the conflict, the U.S. Congress had passed the Teller Amendment promising the Cuban people noninterference from the United States. That pledge was broken in 1901 with the imposition into the Cuban constitution of the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to intervene in the nation’s affairs to protect “life, property and individual liberty.” Over the next half-century, that language would be expressed in repeated U.S. military intervention and occupation of Cuba and indirect control of the country’s affairs. Whereas the Congress of the United States of America, by an Act approved March 2, 1901, provided as follows: Provided further, That in fulfillment of the declaration contained in the joint resolution approved April twentieth, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, entitled “For the recognition of the independence of the people of Cuba, demanding that the Government of Spain relinquish its authority and government in the island of Cuba, and withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters, and directing the President of the United States to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect,” the President is hereby authorized to “leave the government and control of the island of Cuba to its people” so soon as a government shall have been established in said island under a constitution which, either as a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, shall define the future relations of the United States with Cuba, substantially as follows:

“I. That the government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, nor in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonization or for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgement in or control over any portion of said island.” “II. That said government shall not assume or contract any public debt, to pay the interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking fund provision for the ultimate discharge of which, the ordinary revenues of the island, after defraying the current expenses of government shall be inadequate.” “III. That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.” “IV. That all Acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy thereof are ratified and validated, and all lawful rights acquired thereunder shall be maintained and protected.” “V. That the government of Cuba will execute, and as far as necessary extend, the plans already devised or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented, thereby assuring protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the southern ports of the United States and the people residing therein.” “VI. That the Isle of Pines shall be omitted from the proposed constitutional boundaries of Cuba, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty.” “VII. That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.” “VIII. That by way of further assurance the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the United States.” Source: “The Platt Amendment.” In Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Vol. 8. Edited by C. I. Bevans (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 1116–1117.

“Columbia’s Easter Bonnet” (1901) This cartoon appeared in April 1901 in Puck, a well-known fashionable and politically savvy middleclass magazine. The image depicts America as the newfound and newly adorned imperial power, represented in the personified guise of a uniformed and well-armed female—and presumably moral, virtuous—Columbia. The cartoon reflects a broad national effort to answer with rhetoric and imagery the principled objections to America having taken up the role of global power.

Source: Library of Congress.

2. American Expansion into Latin America and Asia, 1899–1945

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Accompanying America’s armed intervention in Cuba and the Philippines was a quickening interest in U.S. economic expansion into Latin America and Asia. Beginning around the turn of the century, American business interests accelerated the pace of investment in the Caribbean and Central and South America in such sectors as sugar, bananas, and mining. For the next several decades, U.S. foreign policy in the region would therefore focus on two goals: trying to establish and maintain stable political environments that would help ensure both the region’s democratic development on U.S. terms and the related protection of American assets; and advancing the related commercial interests and geostrategic position of the United States vis-à-vis the world’s other great imperial powers. The construction of a canal across Central America, crucial to the latter goal, ultimately came through the engineering of both what became the Panama Canal and the internal politics of Colombia. Despite U.S. rhetoric that preached the moral uplift, democratic advancement, and mutual defense of the Americas as the chief objectives of U.S. policy, the underlying goals of political stability and deepening economic engagement quite often necessitated at least indirect manipulation of political processes and U.S. military intervention and long-term occupation. Over the course of just over a halfcentury—from Argentina in 1890 to repeated interventions in every nation in Central America in the 1920s and 1930s—U.S. troops landed some 36 times somewhere in Latin America. The “gunboat diplomacy” of the Americans reflected the deepening socioeconomic divisions in Latin America where “banana republic” oligarchies and the thin upper strata of society were overwhelmingly the chief incountry beneficiaries of U.S. investments and deployment of American forces. In the Pacific, U.S. interests had been well advanced by the geostrategic stepping-stones that came with the victories in the Spanish- and Philippine-American wars: Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. In addition, Hawai‘i had been annexed separately and the small Pacific atoll of Wake Island taken incidentally as a result of the Spanish-American War. Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i, was the shining jewel in a chain of naval bases and refueling stations long envisioned for a large, modern U.S. Navy. The Philippines were less important for their commercial benefits than their exquisite location in the South Pacific. Indeed, powerful U.S. agricultural interests resisted the sale and corporate development of what were still public lands in the archipelago for fear that overproduction of items like coconut oil and sugar from the Philippines would flood the American market and drive down prices. Nevertheless, during the four decades of American supervision and “tutelage,” the Philippines’ export market for a number of goods became increasingly dependent on American consumers. More important, the victory in the

Philippines gave the United States an imposing military presence in the archipelago, fortifying the U.S. capability to gain strategic commercial access to China. Thus well positioned at China’s front door, the United States was able to assert its commercial interests in China at a propitious time. China’s Qing dynasty had been weakened by years of conflict and already had surrendered part of its economic sovereignty. The imperial powers of Japan, Russia, France, Britain, Germany, and Italy compelled China’s rulers to accept economic “concessions,” resulting in each foreign power claiming a geographic sphere of influence in the country where each would exclusively dictate its own economic terms. In September 1899, President William McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, sent a round of diplomatic notes to all six powers asking for an “Open Door” to trade opportunities in China. Hay’s Open Door request came not in the form of a treaty, but asked that each nation respect the principle of equal access and nondiscriminatory trading privileges in terms of tariff rate and port duties as well as the sovereign right of the Chinese to collect duties from all invested nations. Except for Britain’s qualified affirmative reply and Russia’s outright refusal, all other nations sent evasive responses that they would comply with the Open Door only if the others did. That was enough for the audacious Hay to announce in March 1900 that all nations had accepted the U.S. vision of an Open Door in China.

FORDLANDIA Fordlandia (1928–1945) was a failed industrial enterprise established in the Brazilian rainforest by American automobile magnate Henry Ford (1863–1947) in an effort to secure a dependable supply of cheap rubber for his Ford Motor Company automobiles. Even as Ford engineered near-total domination of his industry, Dutch and British industrialists in East Asia had mastered a colonial stranglehold on rubber. This development frustrated Ford’s determination to control every aspect of automobile manufacturing and thus impelled him to establish Fordlandia. In 1929 Ford purchased sight unseen from the Brazilian government more than 3,900 square miles of land along a tributary of the Amazon River. He then shipped massive earthmoving equipment, hundreds of prefabricated homes, and more—everything necessary to construct a Midwestern American–style industrial community. The sprawling complex eventually featured a library, golf course, hospital, and business district that resembled in many respects Dearborn, Michigan —home to the Ford Motor Company. As with Ford plants elsewhere, Fordlandia workers were paid relatively well but their lives were severely controlled: mandatory square dancing (replacing the indigenous samba), coercive English language classes and sing-alongs, prohibition of alcohol, and the serving of a very American diet in the cafeterias featuring hamburgers and soda. Surveillance of the workers in their private lives to ensure total compliance and nonunionism completed the picture of what appeared to be an American company town. Ford company engineers oversaw the planting of more than 200 rubber trees per acre—overly dense planting that generated a raft of problems from insect infestation to blight. A subsequent effort at a new plantation called Belterra showed promise by around the end of World War II, but by that time synthetic rubber had effectively supplanted the need for a source of natural latex, and Ford cut his losses and sold both operations at a great loss.

The Open Door, as well as American resolve to flex its muscle in the Asian sphere, was severely tested just a few months later with the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion. An anti-Western, anti-imperialist, and passionately nationalist uprising that began among members of the Righteous Harmony Society in Shandong, the Boxers were determined to drive all foreigners from China. The Boxers overwhelmed Beijing, sending foreign nationals into their legations where they remained under siege for weeks. The United States played a critical role in one of two military expeditionary forces raised among the foreign powers that successfully suppressed the rebellion. President McKinley’s redeployment of 2,000 soldiers from the fighting in the Philippines was important in several respects: this was the first time the United States had ever gone to war with China; the redeployment came without congressional authorization; and

because of the expedition’s success and the important role played by U.S. forces, the mission restored the Open Door and confirmed the United States as an imperial force to be reckoned with in the Asian sphere. Although best known of all U.S. presidents for wielding a “big stick” foreign policy, President Theodore Roosevelt was not alone in the first decades of the 20th century in pursuing a muscular foreign policy. From 1909 to 1932, Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover all pursued to some degree policies of armed intervention. Having first established a national reputation as a virile warrior through his celebrated experiences during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt brought to the White House the expectation that he would pursue an aggressive foreign policy. He did not disappoint. Roosevelt was far from the first statesman to believe that American values would have a beneficent effect on the course of world affairs, but his presidency came at precisely the moment when that conviction could be asserted—first and foremost diplomatically (“walk softly” preceding the “big stick”), but backed by a strong military. Roosevelt’s decision to send the navy’s “Great White Fleet” (1907–1909) on its unprecedented circumnavigation was meant to demonstrate America’s emergence as one of the world’s preeminent naval powers. Theodore Roosevelt presided over the critical first years of the United States as the colonial overlord of the Philippines, making the important decision to appoint William Howard Taft as the archipelago’s first civilian governor. His Roosevelt Corollary strengthened the 1823 Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. In perhaps his greatest achievement in the international arena, Roosevelt brought to fruition the long-standing determination of the United States and European powers to build a canal across Central America that would link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The commercial value such a passage would bring for merchant ships—avoiding the 8,000-mile journey around the tip of South America at Cape Horn—had long been appreciated, but the significance of a canal for military purposes was heightened during the recent Spanish-American War. The United States and Great Britain reached agreement in 1901 on the construction of an American-controlled trans-isthmus canal through either the Colombian province of Panama or Nicaragua. That accord was arranged without the participation of officials from either Colombia or Nicaragua. When the Colombian government rejected U.S. terms for the construction and operation of the canal, Roosevelt sent military aid and a fleet of warships to support a separatist revolt in Panama. Faced with the prospect of armed conflict with the United States, Colombia acquiesced and the new Republic of Panama signed the agreement authorizing construction of the canal and a sovereign 10-mile-wide Canal Zone where a strategically important U.S. military base would be built. Although immediately hailed as one of the great engineering wonders of its age, over the course of the century, the canal became a concrete symbol of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. The Roosevelt foreign policy record in the Far East was more complicated. His successful mediation of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 helped to ensure stability and a balance of power in the region and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. The related Taft-Katsura Agreement—not a formal treaty, but a discussion between the prime minister of Japan and U.S. secretary of war Taft—acknowledged Japanese dominance over Korea at the end of the war in return for its recognition of U.S. hegemony in the Philippines. These developments reaffirmed the imperial powers’ spheres of influence in the greater region but effectively violated the principle of the Open Door in Asia. After more than a decade of territorial expansion and armed military intervention in Latin America, the South Pacific, and Asia, the foreign policy of William Howard Taft (1909–1913) pledged “dollar diplomacy.” The policy promised to exchange “dollars for bullets,” offering loans from large American banks for needed development, particularly in Central America. The policy advanced U.S.-led economic

development and consequently regional political stability that advanced American hegemony in the hemisphere. Notwithstanding the “dollars for bullets” rhetoric, to protect U.S. business interests, dollar diplomacy inevitably invited and ultimately justified exactly the kind of U.S. military intervention Taft hoped to avoid. Most notably, in Nicaragua, Taft’s administration in 1909 supported the overthrow of liberal president José Santos Zelaya after he sought the building of a Nicaraguan canal that might compete with the Panama Canal. A new regime then acquiesced to effective U.S. control of the nation’s economy in exchange for a generous American loan. Within two years a popular rebellion compelled Taft to send 2,700 marines to quell the uprising, provide stability, and protect U.S. investments. In sum, dollar diplomacy was perceived in both Central and South America, as well as in Asia where it met very mixed success, as a heavy-handed economic bludgeon to advance U.S. economic interests. To be sure, big business has never been the sole driving force of American foreign policy. And yet it is undeniably true that as in all empires, the increasingly international projection of U.S. military force over the course of the past century has been inextricably intertwined with the global expansion of U.S. transnational corporations. The rise of America as an imperial power in the early 20th century coincided with a period of rapid overseas investment. From the Spanish-American War through World War I alone (1898–1918), U.S. corporate investments abroad—from Latin America and Europe to Africa and Asia— increased 500 percent to more than $2.5 billion. Distinguished U.S. Marine Corps general Smedley Butler (1881–1940) asserted in a famously popular public lecture, “War Is a Racket,” that he believed that much of his tenure in the U.S. military had been fundamentally in the service of American corporations, not the nation’s genuine security. “I was a racketeer, a gangster for American capitalism,” he declared. Earlier in his career, Major Butler had been part of a number of U.S. military interventions throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, from Puerto Rico to Honduras (1903) to Nicaragua (1909), where he helped lead a brief occupation that came in response to President Zelaya’s decision to pursue European backing for a rival canal. A U.S.-backed conservative government replaced Zelaya and accepted American terms, but popular resistance in 1912 threatened stability and American forces returned. They did not leave until 1933. Throughout the period, a small wealthy class benefited handsomely, while the vast majority of the poor grew increasingly restive under U.S.-backed regimes and increased Americanization of their culture. A small number turned toward armed rebellion. The greatest threat to U.S. imperial control of the country came with the 1929–1932 rebellion led by the legendary Augusto César Sandino. Against overwhelming odds, Sandino’s guerrilla forces put up tremendous resistance with the help of growing numbers of the rural peasantry. The rise of what many in Latin America decried as “Yankee Imperialism” in the early 20th century paralleled the rise of “banana republics” throughout much of the region, Central American nations in particular. The term derived from the overwhelming influence that U.S.-based agribusiness operations led by the United Fruit Company (UFCO) wielded in those nations’ political institutions, as well as in aspects of society such as labor and race relations. By far the largest landholder in Central America, the UFCO (“El Pulpo,” or “the Octopus” to many in the region) owned vast acreages of land in the region by World War II—400,000 acres in Honduras and more than 550,000 acres in Guatemala, nearly one-half the country. Though the company created many jobs in railroad construction and on its plantations and generally paid reasonably good wages relative to other industries, the UFCO came to be resented bitterly by increasing numbers of peasants whose economic options and lives were dominated by El Pulpo. For decades, the company’s “Great White Fleet” of 100 banana reefers—the largest private navy in the world —carried countless tons of fruit as well as upper-class vacationing Americans. Taking the name from the

U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet following its celebrated circumnavigation, the UFCO fleet symbolized for many Latin Americans the imperial relationship of the United States to the land and people of the region. Though benignly paternalistic in some ways, the company tolerated no dissent from its workers and little more from governments. This was most horrifically demonstrated in the December 6, 1928, “Banana Massacre” of a large group of striking UFCO workers at one of its operations near Santa Marta, Colombia. The Colombian military did the shooting, but the general who gave the order later claimed he only did so to prevent a landing of American forces stationed offshore that were poised to intervene to protect UFCO property and American personnel. Estimates of the number of casualties vary, but the best evidence suggests the number was in the hundreds. U.S. relations with its nearest neighbor to the south, Mexico, during this half-century were marked by deepening economic investments—primarily in railroads, mining, and oil. U.S.-financed Mexican rail systems were linked to U.S. border hubs, facilitating the shipment of mainly Mexican raw materials north and American products heading to Mexico. By the time of World War I, American corporations owned the lion’s share of all silver, lead, gold, and copper mines in Mexico. U.S. and British corporations profited well from their investments in a booming oil industry. Broadly speaking, Mexico enjoyed explosive economic growth, driven partly by foreign investments, but the benefits remained highly concentrated in the hands of an oligarchic few in Mexican society. Although President Woodrow Wilson promised a moralistic, human rights–centered foreign policy in Latin America, his administration was marked by vigorous interventionism. He deployed troops or presided over protracted occupations of Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Interference in the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) proved to be problematic and bloody. The overthrow of President Porfirio Díaz in 1911 and the subsequent failed reforms of Francisco I. Madero destabilized the country and appeared to threaten substantial U.S. assets and American citizens, many working for the oil industry near Tampico. When General Victoriano Huerta bloodily overthrew Madero, Wilson ordered naval forces to the region. In April 1914 misjudgments on both sides surrounding the arrest of eight U.S. sailors by Mexican authorities in the so-called “Tampico Affair” ultimately triggered the shelling of Veracruz, a U.S. Marine landing, and a six-month occupation. A second crisis followed when the new government of Venustiano Carranza faced a mounting challenge from one of his generals, legendary Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa. As part of a campaign to provoke U.S. intervention that he hoped would help him seize national power, Villa launched a raid of towns along the U.S. border. In March 1916 he burned the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and killed 16 Americans, inciting Wilson to order General John J. Pershing and 6,000 men on a punitive expedition to capture Villa. Carranza supported the mission initially, but protested as Pershing led his men deeper into Mexico. With events in World War I dominating his foreign policy agenda, Wilson ordered Pershing home. Relations with Mexico reached another, albeit less bloody crisis during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945). FDR’s “Good Neighbor Policy” promised an end to U.S. military intervention and political interference in Latin American nations. Although not universally applied, the implementation of Good Neighbor brought an end to U.S. occupations in Haiti and Nicaragua and the revocation of the Platt Amendment in Cuba. The policy faced its most difficult test in Mexico in the oil expropriation crisis of the 1930s. Long-standing labor unrest among Mexican workers in that country’s oil industry, overwhelmingly dominated by foreign corporations (including major U.S. companies), produced a strike in 1937. The industry refused the demands of the petroleum workers and would not recognize their collective bargaining rights. Supportive of the strike, President Lazaro Cárdenas nevertheless sought a mediated solution through Mexico’s national arbitration board because of its devastating impact on the Mexican economy. When the oil companies refused to pay the workers even Cárdenas’s negotiated

reduction in lost wages and challenged his authority as president, he ordered the expropriation of all oil company assets and the nationalization of the industry. The companies demanded compensation for their assets and called for an embargo on Mexican oil. By 1939 the country was selling the bulk of its oil to Nazi Germany. Overlooking U.S. corporations’ own complicity doing the same thing, Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanded a tough response including the suspension of silver purchases from Mexico. But with the onset of World War II, President Roosevelt feared a diplomatic crisis that could drive Mexico to direct support of the Axis powers and thus pressured the oil companies to accept reduced compensation, which they did in 1942. Helped along by Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, by the time of World War II relations with Latin American nations were more favorable than they had been in a half-century. Positive steps forward did not, however, completely dissolve the suspicions that many in the region continued to harbor toward the Colossus of the North.

American Samoa The unincorporated U.S. territory of American Samoa comprises the eastern islands of the Samoan archipelago and lies approximately 2,500 miles south-southwest of Hawai‘i in the South Pacific Ocean. Apparently peopled by settlers from the Fiji Islands about 1000 BCE, the archipelago was visited by Dutch and French explorers in the 18th century and by British missionaries in the early 19th. British, German, and American traders and land agents became active in the islands in the later 19th century, leading to friction among the three powers and exacerbating existing conflicts among various native factions. Hoping to forestall European occupation, Samoans allowed American envoy Colonel Albert Steinberger to install himself as premier in 1875, but when it was discovered that he was colluding with German traders, he was deported through the efforts of the American consul and the London Missionary Society. Subsequently the Samoans agreed to the construction of an American coaling station at Pago Pago on the island of Tutuila in 1878. Angered by continued German aggression over the following decade, the administration of President Grover Cleveland eventually dispatched three American warships to the Upolu Island harbor of Apia, where they encountered one British and three German warships. In mid-March 1889 a typhoon struck the island, ending the standoff by destroying all six American and German ships. In the typhoon’s aftermath, representatives of the three nations met a few months later to sign the Treaty of Berlin, which ostensibly guaranteed Samoan independence subject to oversight by the three foreign powers. The Treaty of Berlin was superseded a decade later by the Tripartite Convention, which partitioned the Samoan Islands between Germany and the United States, with Britain abandoning its claims in return for other German territorial concessions. The U.S. Navy assumed control of the islands east of 171 degrees west longitude, installing a series of military governors to rule the islands and transforming the base at Pago Pago into a full-scale naval base. Armed forces from New Zealand invaded German Samoa in 1914 at the beginning of World War I, with New Zealand subsequently ruling the islands as a League of Nations mandate. By the 1920s independence movements had developed in both divisions of the archipelago. With the beginning of World War II, the U.S. Marine Corps transformed American Samoa into a training and staging area, and although no fighting took place on the islands, Samoan men participated in a variety of Allied operations in other parts of the Pacific.

The Department of the Interior took control of American Samoa in 1951. Residents voted to accept a constitution in 1966, and the office of governor became elective in 1977. In the meantime, the western islands of the archipelago had become the independent nation of Samoa in 1962. Grove Koger

Further Reading Gray, Captain J. A. C. Amerika Samoa: A History of American Samoa and Its United States Naval Administration. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1960. Kennedy, Joseph. The Tropical Frontier: America’s South Sea Colony. University Station, Mangilao, Guam: Micronesian Area Research Center, 2009. Shaffer, J. Robert. American Samoa: 100 Years under the United States Flag. Honolulu, HI: Island Heritage, 2000.

Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) The Boxer Rebellion was a Chinese anti-Western, anti-imperialist, and proto-nationalist movement that was led by the so-called Boxers, who were members of the Righteous Harmony Society (Yihetuan). It was the first military clash between the United States and China. The United States had been involved economically and politically in China since the 1830s, when the first Americans, including Christian missionaries like Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801–1861), entered China. After the Opium War (1839–1842) between Britain and China, U.S. citizens were granted the right of extraterritoriality as a part of the Treaty of Wangxia in 1844. This made U.S. merchants, missionaries, and diplomats immune to possible prosecution by the Chinese law. In the following decades, the United States hoped for Chinese industrialization and modernization, which had been seen in Japan, to create a new market for American goods. Following the 1850s, U.S. foreign policy changed its focus. Commercial expansion instead of territorial expansion would provide the needed markets for the American industries. In addition, the success of the United States in the Spanish-American War (1898) made way for the acquisition of the Philippines and generated a broader American interest in the political affairs of Asia. The last years of the 19th century saw the influence of the United States nearing that of other European powers in China and, as a consequence of the Boxer Rebellion, the United States became involved deeply in Chinese affairs. China had suffered from Western imperialism since the first Opium War (1839–1842), as Western powers increasingly became immersed in Chinese trade. Along with commercial interests, many missionaries accompanied diplomatic missions, trying to convert the Chinese to Christianity. This was resisted by the Boxer movement, which emerged in Shandong. In 1897, the Boxers attacked foreign buildings, Chinese Christians, officials associated with Western railroads, and foreign diplomats. Although the alien powers urged the Chinese government to save their diplomats in China, the empress dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who then led the Manchu Qing dynasty, supported the Boxer movement. The foreign diplomats in Beijing had to retreat and take up a position of defense in the embassy buildings. To free the diplomats, an international expeditionary force was deployed in Tianjin on July 14, 1900. A second expeditionary force was sent to relieve the diplomats in Beijing. The United States played an especially significant role during the campaign, with 2,000 American soldiers, redeployed from the American conflict in the Philippines, participating in the expeditionary force. Beyond the U.S. determination to retain its share of imperial commercial and missionary interests in China, a successful Boxer rebellion against Western imperial interests there could have emboldened the insurgency in the Philippines, and therefore underscored the importance of President William McKinley’s decision to send

U.S. forces (which came, it should be noted, without a declaration of war or McKinley even consulting Congress). With the Germans, Japanese, and French fighting a brutal war of recrimination against the Boxers, the United States was perceived as just one more imperial force. Despite U.S. rhetorical claims of its benign interests in China, the Manchu dynasty declared war on the United States, seeing no difference in its actions. It is not known how many Chinese died as a consequence of the Boxer Rebellion and its aftermath (150,000 has been estimated). After the suppression of the Boxers, the Boxer Protocol was signed on September 7, 1901. That document, signed between the Qing Empire and the eight-nation alliance that had sent military forces in the Boxer Rebellion, became known as one of the Unequal Treaties that were later denounced as favoring imperial interests by the emerging forces of the Chinese Revolution—a movement that would ultimately succeed under Mao Zedong in 1949. Frank Jacob See also: China, Early Cold War (1946–1954); McKinley, William

Further Reading Bickers, Robert A., and R. G. Tiedemann, eds. The Boxers, China, and the World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Cohen, Paul A. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Butler, Smedley Darlington (1881–1940) Major General Smedley Butler attained legendary status in the U.S. Marine Corps during the era of gunboat diplomacy, when the marines served as a colonial landing force, fighting small wars in Central America and the Caribbean, the Philippines, and China. Butler remains one of only two marines to receive two Congressional Medals of Honor. The Marine Corps continues to honor Butler as a quintessential roughneck marine in its oral traditions. At the same time, anti-imperialists and some historians embrace Butler as a heroic dissenter who bravely denounced U.S. military interventions in the early 20th century as irredeemably corrupt, serving only Wall Street’s selfish interests. Butler often spoke combatively, more like a Marxist ideologue than a legendary marine general with warships named for him. In an oft-cited passage, for example, Butler disavowed war as “a racket” and compared Wall Street to Al Capone. Both interpretations accurately, if selectively, represent Butler’s colorful life. Butler was born into an elite Quaker family in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in July 1881. His father, Congressman Thomas Butler, served on the House Naval Affairs Committee, supported Butler’s decision to enlist in the marines in the spring of 1898, and helped promote his career thereafter. Butler had attained a high-school education and was 16 years old when the marines commissioned him as a second lieutenant and deployed him to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He served in the Philippine counterinsurgency where he earned promotion to first lieutenant and tattooed the marines’ eagle, globe, and anchor on his chest. Then Butler served in the international coalition that relieved the foreign legations in Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, seeing combat and earning promotion to captain at 19 years old. Meanwhile, the United States began systematically intervening in the Caribbean basin, using warships and marine expeditionary forces. The Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations preferred marines over regular, slow-moving army infantry units because they could rapidly deploy marine expeditionary forces, and because marine landings seemed easier to portray as something less than an invasion and occupation,

entailing, they believed, less liability in U.S.-Latin American relations. Thus the marines excelled as a colonial landing force that projected American power into the Caribbean, intimidating regional governments, seizing customs houses, training national constabularies, and suppressing insurgents often in the 20th century’s first two decades.

At the time of his death in 1940, Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. By that time, however, he was better known for his outspoken criticism of the causes and consequences of U.S. wars and militarism generally. (Library of Congress)

Butler led most of these expeditions, earning promotion to major in 1908. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor when leading marines at Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914, and then again after Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt recommended him for his storming local rebel strongholds in Haiti in 1915 and 1916. He deployed to France during the First World War’s final months, receiving wartime promotion to brigadier general at 37 years old, the youngest general in marine history. The Coolidge administration reluctantly granted Butler a leave of absence that permitted him to serve as Philadelphia’s reform-minded chief of police in 1924 and 1925 before returning to the marines and commanding the marine expeditionary force that deployed to China in 1927 and 1928. The force was positioned there to protect American property and evacuate Americans should the worsening civil war threaten them. Butler returned to the United States as commander at the Quantico, Virginia, marine base in 1929, now a major general of the Marine Corps—the highest rank attainable short of commandant. In 1930, the Herbert Hoover administration appointed a Naval Academy graduate commandant, bypassing Butler, who had coveted the position. By this time Butler was speaking publicly, mostly lecturing on marine adventures and crime fighting stories, but gradually dissenting against the educated professional officer corps—contemptuously dismissing “swivel-chair admirals,” for example—and openly opposing American imperialism as well. When it became clear Butler would not become

commandant, he spoke more brazenly and defiantly, articulating views he had long confined to private correspondence, soon leading to an international incident. Before an audience in Philadelphia in January 1931, Butler repeated a story Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. had told him, alleging that Italy’s Benito Mussolini had once run over a child with his car and, without stopping or even looking back, explained that, where the affairs of state were concerned, no single life mattered. This prompted angry protests from the Italian government. President Hoover ordered Butler arrested, pending court-martial, but the president dropped the charges and allowed Butler to retire later that year. The antagonism between Butler and Hoover worsened within the larger context of the Depression’s unfolding in the early 1930s. American banking and financial interests, mostly concentrated on Wall Street, had disproportionately influenced American politics and foreign relations from approximately the 1880s through the crash in 1929. Public opinion turned bitterly against Wall Street thereafter. In 1932 General Butler addressed the Bonus Expeditionary Force, encamped in Washington, D.C., to demand early payment of its World War I bonus. Butler counseled perseverance and lawfulness. The Hoover administration, by contrast, declared the Bonus marchers Communist-controlled and allowed General Douglas MacArthur to forcefully disperse them. Butler alleged that Wall Street interests had attempted to recruit him as part of a conspiracy to mobilize the Bonus marchers into a paramilitary force against the newly elected Roosevelt administration, establishing a Wall Street–controlled dictatorship. Evidence of the alleged plot remains inconclusive. On the one hand, although Butler often spoke hyperbolically, he never lied. On the other hand, his charges remain undocumented, and even he seemed less than certain when reporting them. Butler spent his final years promoting isolationism, opposing the Roosevelt administration’s preparations for war. He died in June 1940. Thus Butler was in the end a complex figure, representing both an iconic and condescendingly anti-intellectual fighting marine who led many expeditions in the era of gunboat diplomacy and, seemingly paradoxically, an unrelenting anti–Wall Street and anti-imperialist voice in the 1930s. James Lockhart See also: American Anti-Imperialist League; Boxer Rebellion; Panama/Panama Canal; Primary Documents: Roosevelt Corollary (1904); General Smedley Butler’s Memorial Day Speech, “War Is a Racket” (1933)

Further Reading Denton, Sally. The Plots against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012. Schmidt, Hans. Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. Simmons, Edwin. The United States Marines. 4th ed. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002.

Chicago Columbian Exposition (1893) The Columbian Exposition was not the first American world’s fair, but it remains the most famous. The first U.S. fair was the 1876 Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia. The Columbian Exposition built on the model of the Centennial Exposition and earlier European fairs to launch a six-month-long celebration of Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean. Like the fairs of the coming decades, the

Columbian explicitly celebrated American expansionism. The city of Chicago hosted the fair to boost its economic fortunes and to declare itself a city on par with its eastern counterparts. It also sought to demonstrate its recovery from the 1871 fire and from the perceived social disorder that produced the 1886 Haymarket Massacre. Other, more well-established cities fought for the honor to win the event, but Chicago won and erected an event that would affect American culture in a multitude of ways for many years to come. The fair recorded more than 27 million admissions during the six months it was open. Forty-six foreign nations sent exhibits or erected their own pavilions on the grounds. The extensively landscaped site occupied 630 acres in Jackson Park. Famed landscape architect Daniel Burnham laid out the fairgrounds, and an elite group of architects, including Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, George B. Post, and Louis Sullivan, designed the buildings. The classic architecture of the fairgrounds inspired city planners for years to come and served as a model for the Progressive Era’s “City Beautiful” movement.

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing in America. The fair served as a grand showcase of America’s rise as one of the world’s leading industrial-technological nations. Suffused as well with ethnocentric supremacy and imperial splendor, the Chicago World’s Fair announced that the United States was poised to extend its economic and military power overseas by decade’s end. (Library of Congress)

The fair was divided into two parts: the impressive Beaux Arts White City of official buildings and displays and the amusement section, or Midway. Each served its own didactic purpose. The official buildings impressed visitors with their colossal scale and classical lines that evoked an imperial aura. Inside those buildings, states, nations, and businesses displayed historical artifacts, cultural treasures, and the newest technological innovations. The Midway introduced visitors to the study of ethnology through its anthropological exhibits featuring living exhibits of so-called primitive peoples. This juxtaposition of the modern with the primitive and the technological with the exotic provided much of the cultural power of the fair. It helped to justify white American dominance over nonwhite peoples, most notably, in 1893, African Americans and American Indians, and seemed to summon the United States to the grander imperial ambitions of its European counterparts who were in those years colonizing parts of Africa and Asia. The fair also helped to introduce Americans to modern ways of living and to the importance of technology in everyday life—most famously, electricity—seen in the stunning lighting of the radiant White City. The Midway also introduced visitors to the newest innovations in popular entertainment. Inexpensive entertainment proliferated in the late 19th century, thanks both to technology and to a rising standard of

living across the nation. Fairs sped up this process by introducing visitors to a range of new thrills. The 250-foot-high Ferris Wheel quickly became a popular icon. The performances of “Little Egypt” at the “Streets of Cairo” exhibit scandalized visitors and popularized a new vogue in exotic dancing. It launched protests from the city’s more modest factions and women’s rights activists, making the fair a flash point in debates over female sexuality and popular entertainment. The nearby performances of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show combined with the Midway convinced entrepreneurs of the possibilities of the modern carnival, which would soon become a fixture at later fairs and in permanent locales like Coney Island. The fair spawned musical developments as well. Dvorak’s New World Symphony was composed in honor of the fair. John Philip Sousa performed numerous times at the fair, as he would at later expositions. Scott Joplin began to develop ragtime while working at the exposition. The ethnic villages of the Zone inspired later fair designers to incorporate similar attractions into their fairs, solidifying the racial hierarchy presented by these attractions. Presenting nonwhite peoples alongside popular entertainments like the Ferris Wheel and Comanche, the stuffed horse (survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn), reinforced the idea that the peoples of these supposedly primitive cultures were inferior to the white American visitors who viewed them. Rather than taking their cultures seriously, the Midway presented them as an exotic sideshow. The fair’s racial messages extended far beyond the Midway. The White City celebrated the dominance of white Americans. African Americans vehemently protested their exclusion from the planning process. No blacks sat on any of the fair’s central committees or on any state fair commissions. Some leaders, such as Ida B. Wells, therefore urged a boycott of the fair’s “Colored People’s Day.” Others, including elder statesman Frederick Douglass, wanted to use the fair to highlight the accomplishments of the black community. After he delivered a withering speech condemning white racism, he and Wells reconciled and wrote a pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, which denounced the fair’s exclusion of blacks. One of the most famous buildings at the fair was the Woman’s Building, designed by Sophia Hayden, the first woman to graduate with a degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inside this building, the Lady Managers of the Exposition displayed women’s work from around the nation for all to see. Even here, however, divisions of class and race were obvious, with African American women excluded from the planning process and the elite white women of the Woman’s Board dominating the rhetoric around the building. An early conflict between a more radical prosuffrage group and the society-dominated Lady Managers highlighted some of these divisions. But the building provided an important public venue for female artists to display their work and for the acknowledgment of the practical work that women did to contribute to society. As such, it has been lauded as an important moment in the development of women’s culture and in the women’s rights movement. The fair introduced visitors to a range of new ideas, from women’s rights to anthropology. Two hundred twenty-eight congresses met in conjunction with the fair. Here, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address on the frontier thesis during the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The World’s Congress of Representative Women brought together women from around the nation to discuss women’s issues. Representatives from the world’s religions met to exchange ideas at the World’s Parliament of Religion. These discussions brought the nation’s most prominent thinkers together and publicized their discussions through the local and national press. Despite the presence of foreign nations, the overwhelming focus of the fair was on American dominance of the continent and its continuing moves toward modernity and progress. The Pledge of Allegiance was first delivered at the fair’s dedication day, reflecting its intensely nationalistic character. The Columbian Exposition profoundly influenced the United States. Its exhibits ended up in museums

across the nation; its architectural legacy affected the design of the nation’s public buildings and the urban landscape for the next generation; and it established a model for the expositions of the next half-century. Abigail Markwyn See also: World’s Fairs; Primary Documents: Chicago World’s Fair (1893)

Further Reading Appelbaum, Stanley. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record. New York: Dover, 1980. Badger, Reid. The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition and American Culture. Chicago: N. Hall, 1979. Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Dollar Diplomacy “Dollar diplomacy” is the term used to characterize the foreign policy of William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913). In essence, the policy aimed to shift the goals of U.S. foreign policy away from additional territorial expansion that had been the rule since the 1890s, and toward the complementary objective of advancing U.S. commercial interests in South and Central America, the Caribbean region, and Asia. Led by Taft’s secretary of state and corporate lawyer Philander C. Knox (1853–1921), dollar diplomacy offered loans from large American banks for needed development in, for example, Honduras and Cuba. The policy served U.S. strategic interests by ostensibly advancing U.S.-led economic development and consequently regional political stability (especially in the region of the Panama Canal, then under construction), and fortifying the policy articulated by the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary to deny Europeans access to the Western Hemisphere. Although Taft stated in his 1912 State of the Union address that his policy had substituted “dollars for bullets” to protect U.S. business interests, dollar diplomacy inevitably invited and ultimately justified exactly the kind of U.S. military intervention Taft said he wanted to avoid. Most notably, in Nicaragua, Taft’s administration in 1909 supported the overthrow of liberal President José Santos Zelaya after he sought the building of a Nicaraguan canal that might compete with the U.S.-built Panama Canal, effectively defying the Monroe Doctrine. A new Conservative regime in 1910 was then forced to submit to U.S. terms in exchange for a generous American loan: a U.S. naval base and U.S. control of customs and effectively of the country’s economy. Within two years a popular rebellion compelled Taft to send 2,700 marines to quell the uprising, provide stability, and protect U.S. investments. The policy of dollar diplomacy sought also to economically insert a firmer U.S. foothold in China, although those efforts ended with very mixed success. Taft’s stated goal there was to safeguard the territorial integrity of the country and promote the Open Door policy of his successors. With his corporate background, Taft and Secretary of State Knox were able to engineer the entry of a U.S. banking conglomerate into the financing of a European-sponsored railroad from Hukuang to Canton. There were also efforts to have U.S. firms join in other Japanese and Chinese railroad and mining ventures in Manchuria and elsewhere but these failed. Even the eventual success of the Hukuang loan—coming only after two years of failed negotiations and a desperate direct appeal to the Chinese prince regent— alienated the Chinese, German, British, and French partners on the project. Because the Japanese perceived it as Taft’s attempt to quash their own deepening investment in China, relations with that nation

also soured. Despite—or because of—Taft’s and Knox’s extensive efforts, U.S. trade with China actually fell during his administration. Dollar diplomacy, though it ostensibly rejected the notion of the United States as a European-style empire, served as a financial instrument of advancing U.S. hegemonic control in Latin America. The policy was perceived in both Central and South America and Asia as a heavy-handed economic bludgeon to advance U.S. economic interests. In some ways, dollar diplomacy also anticipated other patterns of international economic diplomacy in the coming century, including the ways in which loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to deepen the relationship of dependency and hegemonic control exercised by U.S. and Western economic interests over underdeveloped nations in the post–World War II era. Chris J. Magoc See also: Monroe Doctrine; Nicaragua; Open Door Policy; Roosevelt, Theodore; Taft, William Howard

Further Reading Gould, Lewis H. The William Howard Taft Presidency. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. Mulhollan, Page Elliott. Philander C. Knox and Dollar Diplomacy, 1909–1913. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Nearing, Scott, and Joseph Freeman. Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism. New York: B. W. Huebsch and Viking Press, 1966 (1928).

Dominican Republic (1893–1945) U.S. involvement in the Dominican Republic began with an attempt at annexation (1869–1871) and increased exponentially in the 1890s due to the threat of European encroachment and the strategic imperative of guarding the Panama Canal. This interference culminated in a military occupation (1916– 1924) that helped usher in the reign of infamous dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina (1930–1961). The Santo Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC) played a key role in regularizing U.S. intervention when it took over the nation’s foreign debt in 1893. For the next six years the SDIC worked with President Ulises Heureaux, a dictator who remained in power through fraud and repression, to modernize the Dominican economy by promoting export agriculture, rationalizing land tenure, and building infrastructure. Heureaux and the company agreed to convert the existing debt by issuing bonds to be sold in Europe. In exchange, the SDIC was granted the right to collect customs at the nation’s ports. Over the next few years, however, the SDIC brokered a series of new loans that increased the debt, even while its control of customs destabilized the regime and threatened Dominican sovereignty. When Heureaux was assassinated in 1899, the company lost its greatest ally in the Dominican Republic and stood universally despised. Two years later, a new government headed by Juan Isidro Jiménes expelled the SDIC from the country. Between 1901 and 1905, the economic disaster left by Heureaux inflamed political instability and left the country unable to meet its financial obligations. When Washington backed the SDIC by insisting that payments to the company take precedence over other debts, it raised the specter of armed intervention by European governments. As this would have challenged U.S. regional hegemony, President Theodore Roosevelt announced a new foreign policy in 1904, later coined the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The policy asserted an obligation by the United States to exercise police power over nations in the Western Hemisphere and to intervene in their affairs if they could not fulfill their international obligations. Roosevelt soon put policy into practice by committing the United States to taking over

Dominican customs collections. The final treaty, ratified in 1907, formalized U.S. control of the Dominican treasury. Stability returned briefly to the Dominican Republic in 1906 with the election of Ramón Cáceres. But in 1911 his assassination provoked another cycle of revolutions that plunged the economy back into crisis and attracted ever-increasing U.S. intervention. For the next five years, the United States attempted to impose reform through diplomatic pressure and the threat of force. In 1912, a special U.S. commission withheld revenue from the customs receivership, forcing the resignation of President Eladio Victoria. Two years later, the United States helped arrange the reelection of Juan Isidro Jiménes. The new president faced an impossible situation. To ensure stability in the republic, the Woodrow Wilson administration pressured Jiménes to accept a series of unpopular reforms. Wilson demanded that the Dominican Republic disband its military and replace it with a U.S.-controlled constabulary. Two U.S. officials would be placed in the Dominican government, one of whom would oversee the national budget. When Jiménes tried to implement the reforms, his efforts, combined with partisan intrigue, led to his downfall. In 1916, Minister of War Desiderio Armas rebelled and Jiménes faced impeachment in the Dominican Congress. When U.S. Marines landed to put down the rebellion, Jiménes refused to collaborate, choosing instead to resign on May 7, 1916.

U.S. Marine Corps patrol boats on the Ozoma River, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, ca. 1919. Typical of America’s hegemonic control of much of Latin America throughout the first half of the century, the Dominican Republic was subjected to United States military occupation from 1916 until 1924. (National Archives)

Unlike in neighboring Haiti, where the United States intervened in 1915, it was difficult for Washington to find collaborators among the Dominican political elite. Unable to impose reform on the Dominican Congress, Wilson acquiesced to the establishment of a U.S. military government, which was proclaimed on November 29, 1916. Over the next eight years, the military government embarked on a works program, privatized communally held lands, and disarmed the populace. Together with the newly fashioned Guardia Nacional, U.S. Marines pacified the gavilleros or guerrillas in the east. Yet the end of World War I and the resulting economic depression curtailed many of the government’s programs, and by 1920 the United States faced growing international and domestic criticism for the occupation. In May of that year, the Dominican National Union (UND) held a “Patriotic Week” to demand a U.S. withdrawal. The subsequent arrest of renowned poet Fabio Fiallo lent ammunition to an effective international propaganda campaign waged by the nationalists. When the occupation became a campaign issue during the 1920 elections, the United States began to search for a way out of the Dominican Republic. The plan

for withdrawal, known as the Hughes-Peynado Plan, was signed in 1922, and the last U.S. Marine left Dominican soil on September 18, 1924. The occupation’s greatest legacy was the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Trujillo was a protégé of the U.S. Marines and an officer in the Guardia Nacional. In 1927, President Horacio Vásquez promoted him to commander of the Dominican National Police (later renamed the Dominican National Army). In 1930, revolution broke out again and General Trujillo ordered the army not to engage the rebels, even while assuring President Vásquez and the U.S. minister of his loyalty. Trujillo announced his candidacy for the subsequent election of May 1930 and embarked on a campaign of intimidation that ensured his victory. He then used his control of the military to centralize the state and transform it into a vehicle for personal enrichment. Like other Latin American dictators of the period, including fellow U.S. Marine protégé Anastasio Somoza García of Nicaragua, Trujillo benefited from the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy and his ties with the U.S. military. Despite his reputation as one of the hemisphere’s most brutal dictators, Trujillo carefully cultivated a relationship with the United States by allying the Dominican Republic with Washington during World War II and the early Cold War. Thanks in part to this relationship, Trujillo was able to maintain himself in power for more than 30 years, until his assassination in 1961 unleashed another cycle of political upheaval. Micah Wright See also: Dollar Diplomacy; Good Neighbor Policy; Haiti; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Roosevelt, Theodore; Somoza García, Anastasio; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Calder, Bruce J. The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic During the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924. Austin: University of Texas, 1984. Mejía, Luis F. De Lilís a Trujillo: Historia contemporánea de la República Dominicana. Caracas: Editorial Elite, 1944. Roorda, Eric Paul. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930– 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Veeser, Cyrus. A World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America’s Rise to Global Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Education As the United States expanded its territorial interests overseas, federal administrators wrestled with the challenges of incorporating indigenous populations into the American empire. Education played an important role in this process. Colonial administrators promoted education as a means of promoting democratization and economic advancement. Education would “civilize” local populations to prepare them for self-governance or for American citizenship. Expansionists used these arguments to mobilize popular support. They stressed that expansion benefited local populations by teaching them democracy. Education also served economic ends. Promoters claimed education would modernize local economies, providing markets for American goods. The tensions between these goals shaped expansionists’ educational strategies throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Establishing state-supported public schools was the cornerstone of American educational projects abroad. Officials assumed that children would more easily absorb American ideals and practices. Administrators, many of whom were university-educated professionals, enthusiastically exported Progressive Era bureaucratic reforms aimed at centralizing and standardizing schools. Despite the federal government’s involvement in creating colonial schools, selecting curricula, and appointing teachers,

administrators strongly believed that these schools should transition to a system fully funded through local taxes. This approach often resulted in underfunded schools, particularly when local communities felt excluded from making decisions about the schools. Educational efforts across the American empire reflected domestic educational practices, but they also helped shape these practices. The influence of Samuel Chapman Armstrong is an excellent example. Armstrong was the son of American missionaries who had settled in Hawai‘i in the 1830s. As a youth, he observed the policies his father, Richard Armstrong, employed educating Native Hawaiians at the Hilo Boarding School and as the kingdom’s minister of public instruction. The younger Armstrong returned to the United States and applied his father’s notions of educating Polynesians to African Americans and Native Americans at Hampton Institute. Hampton’s model of industrial education influenced not only domestic efforts to educate Native Americans and African Americans at institutions like Tuskegee Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, but also became a model for schooling in American colonies. Thus practices developed by missionaries in what would become an American territory circulated into domestic education and back out to the colonies. Curricula in the schools through the early 20th century reflected the goals of Americanization and the transformation to a capitalist economy. Literacy and English language instruction were key. Classes included other core academic subjects like math, history, civics, geography, music, and drawing, as well as Progressive Era innovations such as hygiene, physical training, and nature study. Democratic, capitalist, and Christian values were embedded throughout the coursework as part of the process of Americanizing and “civilizing” local populations. Colonial schools also included vocational education programs, designed to develop workers for U.S. economic interests. Administrators in the Philippines undertook one of the most ambitious vocational programs, ultimately enrolling more than a million students in coursework such as basketry, embroidery, and agriculture. These programs met with limited success, due in part to local resistance. Many Hawaiian residents, for example, perceived the territory’s vocational agriculture programs as a way to limit Asian and Native Hawaiian children to careers as plantation laborers. Parents refused to enroll their children in the programs or allowed enrollment only when vocational courses were accompanied by a full academic curriculum. Teachers played a critical role in the implementation of educational programs. In their daily interactions with students, they negotiated between the ideologies of Americanization and the needs and wants of local communities. Expansionists hoped teachers would model American values, and they recruited white American teachers for oversea classrooms. But during the early 20th century, there were never enough American teachers for classrooms across the empire. Administrators tried various strategies to Americanize local teachers enough to have them effectively teach American values to their students. Colonial governments established teacher-training institutions and, in some cases, brought teachers to U.S. schools. Whether teachers came from the mainland United States or were local, they rarely understood “Americanization” to mean the same thing as colonial administrators. Indeed, many local teachers saw education as a way to resist colonialism and confirm the cultural and national identities of their communities. In addition, although colonial administrators envisioned education as flowing in one direction—from teacher to student—some American teachers abroad recognized that their encounters taught them much about their students’ cultures and the U.S. role in the world. Schools, therefore, became a central place of negotiation over the goals of colonialism and the aspirations of the colonized. Architects of American expansion have continued to see education as critical to the success of their plans. Education played a central role in the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after World War II. U.S. officials believed that the ideology taught in these nations’ schools had contributed significantly to their mobilization for war. U.S. occupation officials redesigned the curriculum and governance of the schools,

from primary programs through the universities. Establishing democratic and capitalist-friendly education also would buffer Western Europe and Asia against the spread of communism. Most recently, the rebuilding of Iraq and efforts to combat the Taliban in Afghanistan included plans for intense educational efforts. These efforts have been hampered, however, by the uneven work of for-profit companies awarded contracts for the building and running of schools. As in the past, U.S. officials believe that education, and schools in particular, will build support for alliances with the United States. Even without outright territorial occupation, the United States has used educational strategies to promote positive views of the nation abroad. During the 1960s, efforts to expand soft diplomacy led to the establishment of the Peace Corps and the Fulbright Institute of International Education. Although these programs largely rejected the explicit Americanization aims of earlier educational efforts, government officials designed them to combat the spread of communism and build alliances. These programs emphasize partnerships with host countries and stress that the programs are as much an educational experience for volunteers and grant recipients as they are for communities in the host country. Education, in multiple forms, continues to be a critical tool to spread American ideals and support diplomatic goals. Michelle M. K. Morgan See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Carlisle Indian School; Private Military Contractors

Further Reading Angulo, A. J. Empire and Education: A History of Greed and Goodwill from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Del Moral, Solsiree. Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Zimmerman, Jonathan. Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Good Neighbor Policy The Good Neighbor policy refers to a period of U.S. foreign policy during the Great Depression characterized by nonintervention in Latin America and the Caribbean. Although the policy is most often associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt—who used the phrase in his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1933—the shift in U.S. foreign policy toward interregional cooperation with Latin American and Caribbean nations began during the Herbert Hoover administration. The shift toward a policy of nonintervention marked a significant change from the policy of overt imperialism that began during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1898–1901). For 30 years following these wars, the United States directly intervened with military force in many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, including Cuba, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Puerto Rico. The policy of direct intervention into the domestic affairs of independent nations and U.S. territories had been part of the foreign policy of six presidents: William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. While the construction of the Panama Canal had been a guiding component of U.S. foreign policy before World War I, military intervention continued after the war as a means of protecting American financial investments in the region—which had grown to more than $3.5 billion by 1928. During the decade, U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua and Haiti, and helped organize and train the National Guard of the Dominican Republic.

Domestically, however, support for interventionist foreign policy had begun to wane, as Latin American resistance to U.S. policy grew, U.S. military objectives went unrealized, and the American public lost its taste for overseas imperial conflict. While Senate hearings in 1925 and 1927 registered disapproval of intervention in Latin America, the election of Herbert Hoover in 1928 signaled a new direction in U.S.–Latin American relations, as Hoover viewed U.S. intervention in the region as an ineffective and overly expensive policy. Against the backdrop of rising nationalism throughout Latin America in the decades following the Mexican Revolution, the earlier policies of imperial expansion and dollar diplomacy were increasingly viewed by U.S. policymakers as powerless to protect American financial interests and incapable of spreading democracy and free trade—which had long been the official rhetoric of U.S. expansion. Although the signs of domestic displeasure with imperialism were important, it was the global economic crisis of the Great Depression that steered the official change in U.S. foreign policy. Seeking to revive American exports amid the falling domestic economy, President Hoover sought a new direction in Latin American relations. Released during his presidency, the Clark Memorandum of 1930 renounced the “Roosevelt Corollary” of the Monroe Doctrine, in which Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 had declared the United States to be the police power of the Western Hemisphere. Although the Clark Memorandum did not immediately reverse all U.S. actions in the region, it was a symbolic break with the policy of direct intervention that had guided three decades of foreign policy. A more concrete change toward the Good Neighbor policy was announced by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and can be seen as part of his New Deal strategy for recovering from the Depression. Domestically, the New Deal represented a decisive break from past policies toward the protection of the underprivileged. Internationally, the Good Neighbor policy attempted to reframe diplomatic relations with Latin America and the Caribbean while, at the same time, strengthen economic ties throughout the hemisphere. Sometimes criticized as seeking to tie Latin American countries to the U.S. economy, the change in policy in the region lasted throughout the rest of the 1930s. As the threat of war in Europe and Asia escalated throughout the decade, the need for strong interAmerican alliances increased as well, and the Good Neighbor policy resulted in several new diplomatic treaties and trade agreements with nations across Latin America and the Caribbean. These included treaties with Nicaragua, removing U.S. troops in 1933; Cuba, repealing the Platt Amendment in May 1934; Haiti, removing U.S. troops in October 1934; Panama, renouncing the right to intervention in 1936; and the Dominican Republic, renouncing the right to economic supervision in 1940. In all, Good Neighbor treaties and trade agreements were signed with 15 different Latin American nations. Along with the withdrawal of U.S. military forces and renouncing of previously assumed U.S. rights in the region came the diplomatic recognition of new governments in Cuba (1933–1934), El Salvador (1934), Bolivia (1943–1944), and Argentina (1943–1945). In addition to these examples, the Good Neighbor policy coincided with a reconstruction of the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico as well. Here, the semicolonial status of the nonincorporated territory underwent significant changes, as New Deal policy was extended to the island, resulting in the construction of locally owned public works, long-term improvements in public health, and a series of new Puerto Rican–led social and political movements. How to interpret the Good Neighbor policy remains under debate. While it resulted in an unprecedented hemispheric alliance against the Axis powers during World War II—codified in agreements at the Pan-American Conference at Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1933; the Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936; and the Pan-American Conference at Lima, Peru, in 1938—many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean fell into brutal military dictatorships

during the 1930s as U.S. intervention receded. For example, the rise of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua can both be seen as unintended consequences of the Good Neighbor policy. After World War II, as new political and economic conditions reshaped the global geopolitical landscape, the Cold War replaced the Good Neighbor policy as the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Geoff Burrows See also: Dollar Diplomacy; Monroe Doctrine; Platt Amendment; Somoza García, Anastasio; Primary Documents: Roosevelt Corollary (1904); President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Statement on the Good Neighbor Policy in Cuba (August 13, 1933)

Further Reading Crawley, Andrew. Somoza and Roosevelt: Good Neighbor Diplomacy in Nicaragua, 1933–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Guerrant, Edward O. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1950. Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wood, Bryce. The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.

Haiti (1893–1945) Haiti endured various forms of American imperialism during the first half of the 20th century. Americans generally viewed Haitians as racially inferior and politically immature because of the people’s African heritage. Consequently, U.S. officials claimed Haiti required American tutelage and leadership and repeatedly applied numerous policies, from gunboat diplomacy to dollar diplomacy to military interventionism. Such heavy-handed actions shaped the image of the United States not only in Haiti, but throughout Latin America. Before 1910, U.S. officials remained indirectly involved in Haitian politics, even as Germany and France served as primary sources of financial credit and culture. Still, U.S. policymakers worried about Haiti’s internal affairs. Whenever a political faction challenged the current administration, leaders hired peasant mercenaries, cacos, with international loans imposed upon the government. To U.S. officials, such politics demonstrated the nation’s supposed inability to govern itself. From the turn of the century until 1915, U.S. naval forces appeared in Haitian waters multiple times as instruments of gunboat diplomacy to coerce favorable agreements from the nation. In 1910, U.S. authorities began claiming a greater responsibility in Haiti. Under U.S. president William Howard Taft, policymakers encouraged Latin American nations to obtain loans through U.S. banks rather than European lenders. Through this dollar diplomacy, U.S. officials sought to provide resources for regional stability, reduce foreign influence, and expand their leadership in the Western Hemisphere. American power, prestige, and investments in Haiti over the past decade had grown to such an extent that U.S. officials demanded to be included in negotiations for an international loan to Haiti and the reorganization of the Bank of Haiti. France and Germany resisted, and nationalist Haitians opposed all of these powers’ determining the country’s finances. U.S. policymakers persisted and succeeded in expanding loans from the National City Bank and other U.S. institutions to decrease European involvement, the goal of dollar diplomacy. Haitians resented such U.S. interference in their country’s internal affairs.

In 1915, Haiti’s caco politics took an unexpected turn. Haitian president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam directed his forces to capture political rivals and their families. On July 27, 1915, some opponents stormed the presidential palace. Inside the French embassy, Sam ordered the execution of 167 political prisoners. Opponents then stormed the French embassy, brought Sam outside, and beat the president to death, leaving his body cut up in Port-au-Prince. U.S. officials ordered Rear Admiral William B. Caperton to deploy his forces and occupy the capital city. Believing that Haiti required more guidance than that under dollar diplomacy, on July 28 U.S. policymakers initiated a military intervention that would last for more than 20 years. Under Caperton’s command, American forces aimed to pacify the nation and establish U.S. dominance in Haiti. American officials identified and arrested influential cacos and political leaders and purchased quantities of arms to try to disarm potential opponents. By early 1916, authorities had imposed a 9 p.m. curfew, executing many violators. Outside Port-au-Prince, officials initiated a corvée labor system, forcing rural Haitians to provide unpaid labor building roads. To expand American markets in Haiti, authorities demanded that foreign merchants utilize U.S. goods. German merchants who refused faced a deportation process that, though terminated in early 1916, separated families. Exercising martial law, Caperton demanded that the Haitian Congress elect Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave as president, for authorities believed him pliable. Through military superiority and a client president, American officials secured most of their goals, including a 1918 U.S.-authored constitution that removed the country’s historic tradition of denying foreigners the right to own Haitian lands. Although these measures quelled earlier uprisings, American forces initiated another campaign as the early 1920s witnessed a renewed effort by cacos and other opponents of U.S. policies. This time, U.S. policy came under heavy scrutiny. Haitian leaders and activists wrote articles to American newspapers and lobbied the U.S. Congress, and the Union Patriotique d’Haiti (Patriotic Union) worked alongside James Weldon Johnson and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to publicize the occupation. After Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding excoriated Democratic vice presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s claiming to have authored the 1918 Haitian constitution without Haiti’s own input, Progressive senators formed the McCormick Committee, a congressional organization from August 1921 to March 1922 that examined the U.S. occupations in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. At these hearings, Americans heard testimony from Americans and Haitians about atrocities committed by the U.S. military. Marines such as Major Smedley Butler reported the torture and murder of both prisoners and civilians, reports that Haitian and American anti-imperialists used to demand an official U.S. withdrawal. The occupation did not yet end as U.S. policy now sought primarily to prevent further public outcry. American officials repeatedly noted that the presence of marines undermined the American image in Latin America. Beginning during the occupation, marines recruited Haitians and built a local military police force, the Gendarmerie. After a decade of training and appointing compliant officers to the Gendarmerie, U.S. officials utilized the military, as well as pro-American client presidents, to scale down the American presence without sacrificing U.S. interests. When U.S. marines fired on an unarmed protest on December 6, 1929, renewed international criticism and congressional investigations again brought intense criticism of the occupation and incited anti-Americanism feelings. U.S. marines officially withdrew on August 15, 1934, marking the end of direct military interventionism in Haiti. However, American authorities could now rely upon the Gendarmerie, similar to U.S.-supported dictators and police forces in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Additionally, it was only during the Second World War that U.S. officials returned the administration of Haitian finances back to the Haitian government. Aaron Coy Moulton

See also: Butler, Smedley Darlington; Dollar Diplomacy; Dominican Republic (1893–1945); Gunboat Diplomacy; Roosevelt, Theodore; Social Darwinism

Further Reading Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Schmidt, Hans. The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Jones Act (Philippine Autonomy Law of 1916) The Jones Act (or Philippine Autonomy Law of 1916) was named for Democratic congressman William Atkinson Jones of Virginia, who chaired the Committee on Insular Affairs in the U.S. House from 1911 to 1918. Passed in August 1916, it replaced the Philippine Organic Act of 1902. Jones was well known for his support for liberalizing the American empire. His other noteworthy legislative accomplishment was the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917, which conferred citizenship rights on the people of Puerto Rico. The Jones Act served as the basis of constitutional government in the Philippines until 1934, when the framework of the Commonwealth of the Philippines and a future transition to independence was set forth in the Tydings-McDuffie Act. The 1916 act officially declared the U.S. intention to relinquish its sovereignty over the islands and recognize Filipino independence “as soon as a stable government can be established therein.” As such, it was the first formal promise made to that effect, although it echoed earlier statements made by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Such explicit promises for the future full sovereignty of the Philippines was a deep disappointment to many prominent Americans then in the archipelago who opposed independence. The chief provisions of the bill included a recognition of the territorial integrity of the islands; a definition of Philippine citizenship; establishment of an extended Bill of Rights; and the creation of an elected senate (removing the American-dominated Philippine Commission from its role of revising chamber). It also redefined and reinforced the role of the governor-general and judiciary to ensure that executive (largely American) and judicial (mixed, but American-led) authority remained distinct from legislative power (now wholly Filipino). While it took place in a colonial setting, the act should be seen in the wider context of Woodrow Wilson’s developing democratic view of international relations—best marked by the president’s declaration of the Fourteen Points in January 1918. That landmark declaration outlined the principles of free trade, open agreements, democracy, and self-determination as U.S. war aims, following the country’s entry into World War I the previous year. Filipino leaders such as Manuel L. Quezon, who as a resident commissioner to the House of Representatives had a hand in drafting the Jones Act, saw it as a significant step forward toward independence, but insufficient as it did not include a timetable. However, Quezon, alongside others, was able to use the emerging Wilsonian principle of self-determination to great effect to forward the Nacionalista effort to obtain independence from his new post in the Philippine Senate. Patrick Kirkwood See also: Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Philippine Commissions, First (1899–1900) and Second (1900–1916); Philippine Organic Act (Philippine Bill of 1902); Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934

Further Reading Brands, H. W. Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Shelton, Charlotte Jean. “William Atkinson Jones 1849–1918: Independent Democracy in Gilded Age Virginia.” PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1980.

Lodge Corollary (1912) The Lodge Corollary was a bill adopted by a vote of 51–4 in the U.S. Senate on August 2, 1912, as a further articulation and extension of the Monroe Doctrine under the direction of Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. The Monroe Doctrine, one of the major foundations of American foreign policy since 1823, prohibited the colonization or interference by any European nations in sovereign states of the Western Hemisphere, and asserted the right of the United States to intervene on such occasions as required. Thus the Lodge Corollary expanded the language of the Monroe Doctrine specifically to foreign corporate acquisitions of territory, on the basis that any territorial holdings on the American continents by foreign nationals could serve as a wedge that might, in time, threaten the communications or security of the United States. The circumstances for the Lodge Corollary have as their basis a mixture of racial prejudice, the sensationalist yellow journalism of the Hearst newspapers in California, and the political and personal opportunism of the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Henry Cabot Lodge. The Magdalena Bay area near the Baja Peninsula just south of the State of California served as the locus that provoked the various forces leading to the adoption of the Lodge Corollary. Since the early 1890s it had been used by the U.S. Navy as a coaling station and to conduct target practice maneuvers. When in 1911 a Japanese syndicate expressed interest in purchasing a section of land on the western coast of Mexico for its fishing capabilities, the Hearst newspapers Los Angeles Examiner and San Francisco Examiner proceeded to intervene and stir up public sentiment against the deal. President William H. Taft and the State Department were already well aware of the arrangement, and while convinced it was not the prelude to Japanese colonization or military actions, expressed worry about how the public would respond. Racist sentiment against the Japanese was prevalent on the West Coast, and newspaper reports stimulated a flurry of public outrage by reporting that tens of thousands of Japanese were preparing to colonize the region using fishing boats that could be easily converted to naval combat ships. Despite clear and emphatic denials by both the president of Mexico and the Japanese ambassador to the United States, as well as the executive branch’s own assessment, that the commercial venture posed no risk, Lodge submitted a formal request to the president in April 1912 for any information related to the issue. After months of deliberation Lodge came to the conclusion that the region offered little in the way of commercial value. Yet he argued that the Japanese acquisition, while containing at this moment no inherent danger, might one day impinge upon the security of the nation. The involved Japanese commercial interests immediately backed down in the face of his articulation of the Lodge Corollary. In actuality, other factors also probably drove Lodge’s actions. The more minor of these include a long tradition of agitation by Lodge against the Japanese “menace” and an attempt to aid his friend, Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer, in the face of recent shrinking of navy construction projects by the

government. Overarching pressure by Lodge, however, probably also developed from a desire to protect the soon-to-open Panama Canal from any enemy—real or not. The influence of the Lodge Corollary remained visible throughout the rest of the 1910s and 1920s. Whatever its original intent, it marked a definitive extension of the principles of the Monroe Doctrine and the first time the latter was leveled specifically at an Asian nation or a corporate entity. Ry Marcattilio-McCracken See also: Lodge, Henry Cabot; Mexico; Monroe Doctrine; Panama/Panama Canal; Taft, William Howard; Yellow Journalism

Further Reading Bailey, Thomas A. “The Lodge Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” Political Science Quarterly 48, no. 2 (June 1933): 220–239. Chamberlin, Eugene Keith. “The Japanese Scare at Magdalena Bay.” Pacific Historical Review 24, no. 4 (November 1955): 345–359. Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Zimmerman, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer (1840–1914) Alfred Thayer Mahan served as a U.S. Navy captain during the Civil War and president of the U.S. Naval War College, but is best known as an extraordinarily influential geopolitical strategist and historian whose theories and voluminous writings on the importance of sea power influenced the strategic thinking and foreign policies of governments the world over. Mahan’s most important work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, was published in 1890—a propitious moment in world history, as major European powers, as well as Japan, Russia, and the United States were each at varying stages of a major imperial quest to expand their respective overseas colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Mahan’s central thesis that naval power had been pivotal to the rise of the British Empire buttressed the arguments of naval leaders of all imperial powers, helping to fuel a sea-based arms race for the next half-century. Ironically, German and Japanese leaders would be instructing their naval commanders to steep themselves in Mahan’s works right through the period leading to World War II. In the United States, Captain Mahan’s argument that naval power had been essential to the dominance of the British Empire reflected the overseas expansionist thinking of other political and intellectual elites of his time, including American presidents Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley. In 1890 Harrison’s navy secretary Benjamin Tracy launched the construction of the first of America’s modern battleships—an effort that accelerated by the end of the decade with the onset of the Spanish-American War. Theodore Roosevelt met Mahan a decade before becoming president in 1901 and was likewise enamored of the compelling argument that sea power would drive America’s imperial expansion. His decision to send the fleet of 16 American battleships on a circumnavigation of the globe in 1907–1909—the famous Great White Fleet—symbolized the successful adoption of Mahan’s ideas by the U.S. government. Timing was key to the widespread acceptance of Mahan’s argument. The 1890s in the United States was an era of convulsive, often violent class conflict and economic depression and disruption. Fears of class warfare were further exacerbated by the declaration of the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890 of the “closing of the frontier,” which fueled desires among many elites, including most famously historian Frederick Jackson Turner, for the overseas extension of Manifest Destiny: ever-expanding new American

frontiers abroad that promised new markets, natural resources, and economic opportunities for investment. Mahan’s strategically focused interpretation of the era of British imperial conquest of lands and resources stoked interest in a muscular, sea-based projection of American military power that would secure U.S. access to key strategic points on the globe, help ensure new economic opportunity at home, and consequently quell social unrest. The opportunity that presented itself at the end of the decade with the Spanish-American (and subsequent Philippine-American) War brought the United States possession of many of the very territories that Mahan had argued for that might serve as naval bases and coaling stations for an expanded U.S. Navy: the Philippine Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Recent scholars have argued that Mahan was less interested in absolute supremacy of the seas than in American leadership in a transnational relationship of diplomatically arranged access to free markets backed by U.S. naval power. Mahan died in 1914 soon after the outbreak of World War I but his legacy lives on through the continued teaching of his ideas in military academies around the world. The memory of Alfred T. Mahan remains revered in the U.S. Navy more than a century after his death, with several ships and an academic building at the Naval Academy named for him. Chris J. Magoc See also: Roosevelt, Theodore; Tracy, Benjamin Franklin; Turner, Frederick Jackson; Primary Documents: Excerpt from Captain Alfred T. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660– 1783 (1890)

Further Reading Hattendorf, John B., ed. The Influence of History on Mahan. Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991. Seager, Robert. Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977.

McKinley Tariff Act (1890) The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 owes its enactment to both long-term economic ideologies and shortterm political pressures. Since the end of the Civil War, tariffs on imports—most importantly raw metals, wool, and sugar—had remained high. Dominated by Republicans, Congress from 1877 to 1900 continuously pushed for increasingly protective measures, though their efforts remained somewhat arbitrary in determining the exact terms of those protections. Democratic president Grover Cleveland’s annual message to Congress in 1887, devoted wholly to the tariff question and pushing for lower duties across the board, sparked a strong Republican response that would manifest in the Tariff Act of 1890. The primary effects of the legislation would dramatically increase protection for specific U.S.manufactured goods, positively impact the American consumer, and give form to a more flexible and robust tariff system, which advanced U.S. economic imperial interests. One of the central thrusts of the tariff was to respond to the changing international market and consequences of the Western world’s industrial revolutions. For example, since the last major tariff in 1883, increasingly high-grade wool had seen significant devaluation and thus was able to enter American markets subject to only a small duty. This largely resulted from three parallel and interrelated processes: first, the drop in the market price of wool; second, lower manufacturing costs; and third, purposeful undervaluation of wool by international producers to get into the United States under lowered tariff classifications. The Tariff Act of 1890 effectively changed this. At the same time that higher-grade cotton manufactures—disproportionally made outside the country—became subject to higher duties, low-grade cotton manufactures saw duties lowered.

Because such goods were made inexpensively and abundantly in the United States and were more likely to be exported, this decreased duty increased the ability of these goods to compete in foreign markets. Wool was not the only recipient of such measures, but remains a good representative. In the agricultural sector the duty on both barley and sugar changed substantially, but for different reasons. In the case of barley it was tripled to protect northern farmers from their Canadian competition, while in the case of sugar the duty was virtually eliminated and, further, a bounty was paid to domestic raw sugar producers by the government. Thus, what had been a revenue-raising measure responsible for $55 million of income before 1890 now turned into an $8 million expense. The rationale for this dramatic shift was in part to quell consumers in the West who would not be happy about higher prices for fine manufactures. Yet there were segments of the manufacturing sector that remained more or less immune from the tariff. Because of the dramatic progression of the mining industry and the introduction of the Bessemer process, iron, steel, and copper enjoyed relative insulation from foreign goods. The final component of the Tariff Act of 1890 was its most versatile and potent. At the last minute, a reciprocity provision entered the language of the bill that allowed the president to enact duties on sugar, coffee, tea, molasses, and hides if any foreign country enacted its own tariffs that unjustly harmed U.S. exports. Thus, this provision, because of macroeconomic forces, simultaneously protected American consumers while effectively boosting prices for American producers. In its entirety, the Tariff Act of 1890 served as the most complete expression of pre–World War II economic policy; by the end of the first third of the 20th century, the United States would be forced to reprise its global role in dramatic ways. Ry Marcattilio-McCracken See also: Dollar Diplomacy

Further Reading Lake, David A. “International Economic Structures and American Foreign Economic Policy, 1887–1934.” World Politics 35, no. 4 (July 1983): 517–543. Reitano, Joanne R. The Tariff Question in the Gilded Age: The Great Debate of 1888. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Taussig, F. W. The Tariff History of the United States. 8th ed. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964.

Mexico (1893–1945) Relations between the United States and Mexico between the period 1893 to 1945 began and ended with major U.S. investment, economic growth, and neocolonial dependency. In between lay the long and bloody Mexican Revolution, as it slowly evolved from violent pitched battles (1910–1920) to a more “institutionalized” conflict (1920–1940) that was largely set aside when the Second World War (1939– 1945) broke out. In the early 1890s, the United States began seeking outlets for ever-increasing amounts of industrialized goods. Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico (1884–1911, known as the Porfiriato), in turn sought to increase exports of raw goods and began by building consulates along the American border: Rio Grande City, Eagle Pass, and Laredo. America responded with more than $1 billion in investments, principally in railroads, mining, and oil. As the era of the Porfiriato opened, Mexico had less than 400 miles of track. By the opening shots of the revolution, this figure had risen to nearly 15,000 miles, an average annual increase of roughly 12

percent. American business interests provided an estimated 80 percent of the capital and engineering to build these rail companies, linking them to hubs in the United States. The raw goods exported on these newly built railroads consisted mainly of mineral products, such as silver, gold, copper, and lead, largely owned by American companies such as the Guggenheim Smelting and Refining Company and the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company. By 1910 mineral extracts reached 270 million pesos, up from a mere 26 million when Díaz took office. By then, three-fourths of all mining operations belonged to companies north of the border, dictating the flow of materials in that direction. By the eve of the revolution, Mexico was producing 8 million barrels of oil. French, Germans, British, and Americans all became involved in petroleum extraction, although it was the latter two that benefited most. With the growing importance of railroads, land prices subsequently skyrocketed. Land companies flocked to survey lands and, in exchange, began the process of land monopolization. By 1910 the land had been transferred into the hands of 1 percent of the population, although 85 percent of Mexicans were living in rural areas. The resultant economic growth expanded foreign trade from 50 million pesos at the beginning of the Porfiriato to a whopping 488 million by 1910. Although debt also continued to rise (from 52 to 441 million pesos between 1884 to 1910), servicing the debt declined from 38 percent (1895) to 5 percent (1910) of government income as interest payments were reduced from 8 percent (1888) to 4 percent (1910). Thus, regardless of the mounting debt during this period, economic growth made Mexico appear ever more attractive to investors on Wall Street, and a large portion of American investments at this time went into Mexico. For those in government office, times were good. But for the rest, the destructive effects and hypocrisy of a sham democracy became increasingly evident. When James Creelman interviewed Díaz in 1908 for Pearson’s Magazine, the Mexican president declared his belief that Mexico was ready for democracy. The election of 1910 therefore saw Francisco Madero oppose the dictator, only to find himself in jail. Fleeing to the United States, he launched his uprising later that year. By 1913, Díaz had been ousted and Madero was in possession of the National Palace. Resistance to Madero continued, and U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson invited both Madero’s general, Victoriano Huerta, and rebel leader Bernardo Reyes to the U.S. embassy, where Huerta was convinced to switch sides in exchange for receiving the presidency. This Pact of the Embassy thus directly led to Madero’s assassination in February 1913. In March, the newly inaugurated U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, recalled Ambassador Wilson and refused to recognize the new Huerta regime. He sent the forces arrayed against Huerta—the Constitutionalists—money and weapons to aid in his defeat. When it was delayed, however, Wilson endeavored to speed things up through more direct actions. The U.S. Navy, seeking a pretext for intervention, stationed the USS Dolphin offshore near Veracruz. Captain Ralph T. Earle in April 1914 sent a number of sailors onshore for supplies. These soldiers were arrested and, after a short incarceration, released with an apology. Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo demanded an additional apology in the form of hoisting an American flag and a 21-gun salute. Huerta’s government agreed—if the U.S. Navy did likewise. The United States refused on the grounds that this would be tantamount to recognition of Huerta’s regime. With this as a pretext along with attempts to prevent German delivery of weapons for Huerta, the U.S. Marines invaded and blockaded Veracruz, leading to the deaths of 19 U.S. and 200 Mexican soldiers. Cut off from external support, Huerta resigned on July 8, 1914, and by November the U.S. occupation had ended. The forces opposing Huerta now began opposing each other, with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata on one side and Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregón on the other. Wilson supported Carranza and

his followers while shunning Villa and Zapata. Pancho Villa now began to experience a reversal of fortunes and blamed the United States. Thus in May 1916, he crossed over into Columbus, New Mexico, with an estimated 485 men and set fire to the town, killing 18 Americans before withdrawing back into Mexico. Wilson responded by sending General John J. Pershing and a force of more than 6,000 to capture Villa. By February 1917 it became apparent that they were not going to be able to capture him without an expenditure of much more than the $130 million already spent on the failed venture. Within weeks, the United States was involved in the great European war and the troops were recalled. American troops were extremely unpopular in Mexico, and in January 1917, prior to Pershing’s withdrawal, Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a coded telegram to Mexico offering an alliance: if Mexico were to join Germany in the war, ally itself against the United States, and help lead Germany to victory, the territories lost to Mexico in the Mexican-American War would be returned. When the “Zimmermann Telegram” was intercepted by British intelligence and made known to the American people, it became one of the great justifications for U.S. intervention in World War I. Mexico, alas, remained neutral.

Encampment of U.S. Army troops in Mexico out to capture Pancho Villa, during the Mexican Expedition. U.S. troops had been dispatched to Mexico in an attempt to punish Villa and his supporters following an attack on the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916. (Library of Congress)

At the heart of the Mexican Revolution lay the Constitution of 1917, which declared in part that only indigenous or naturalized Mexicans could own land, water, or the rights to exploit the resources of the country. As a result, the United States refused to extend recognition to the government of Mexico. The Mexican Supreme Court in 1921 declared that this law would not be applied retroactively, a position codified in the 1923 Bucareli Agreements. With this the United States recognized the regime of President Alvaro Obregón and the American companies, most importantly oil interests, kept possession of their lands. In 1936, Mexican oil workers went on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The new president, Lazaro Cárdenas, ordered the matter settled by an arbitration board. The settlement favored the workers and the companies were ordered to increase salaries and pensions. The Mexican Supreme Court denied the companies’ appeals, though the companies refused to comply. As a result, President Cárdenas nationalized the holdings of 17 oil companies in March 1938. Although American companies protested, within the framework of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor,” noninterventionist policy in Latin America, they were ultimately forced to acquiesce.

It was at this point that events in Europe once again took center stage as World War II began in 1939. Mexico, in 1939, broke off diplomatic relations with the Axis powers and joined the United States–Allied effort. The Mexican Air Force Squadron 201 trained in the United States and was assigned to the Fifth Air Corps, flying missions in the Philippines and Formosa. The United States also received access to strategic military bases. Mexico’s chief contribution to the war, however, lay in the production of raw goods for U.S. factories: zinc, copper, lead, mercury, graphite, cadmium, and more. With so many Americans entering the factories, a labor shortage occurred in the agricultural sectors. Thus was born the Bracero Program, in which 300,000 Mexicans were invited across the border from 1942 to 1945 to work as agricultural laborers in 25 different American states. The story of the Bracero Program is complex, encompassing both opportunity and economic, often racist exploitation of the Mexican workforce that evoked the historic imperial U.S.–Mexico relationship. Kim Richardson See also: Good Neighbor Policy; Mexican-American War; Zimmermann Telegram; Primary Documents: President Woodrow Wilson’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Mexican Affairs (August 27, 1913); Standard Oil’s Reply to Mexico: Standard Oil Puts Forth Its Position on Expropriation of Oil Leases by the Mexican Government (1940)

Further Reading Ai Camp, Robert. Mexico: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Holden, Robert H., and Eric Zolov. Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pike, Fredrick B. The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Ronnin, C. Neale, ed. Intervention in Latin America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.

Nicaragua (1893–1945) Nicaragua in this half-century experienced numerous forms of American imperialism. Whether heavyhanded imposition or negotiations, American influences acted through various agents from U.S. Marines to Protestant missionaries, and shaped various sectors of Nicaragua from its military to its culture. Consequently, many Nicaraguans opposed the U.S. presence, best epitomized in the Sandino rebellion of 1927. Others encouraged the U.S. presence and made use of American resources. Liberal president José Santos Zelaya (1893–1909) set the foundation for Nicaraguan-U.S. relations. In the late 1800s, Nicaragua’s Bluefields emerged as a banana enclave under Minor Keith’s Tropical Trading and Transport Company with U.S.-managed plantations. In 1894, Zelaya imposed an export tax on the region’s bananas. Not surprisingly, U.S. settlers opposed Zelaya’s actions. Although American planters and banana interests lobbied the American government to undermine Zelaya, U.S. officials defended Zelaya in the hopes that he would support the construction of a U.S. canal in Nicaragua. When he expelled a British consul and British forces occupied the port of Corinto, Zelaya relied upon American influence to obtain Britain’s withdrawal. In October 1898, Zelaya granted a significant concession to U.S. firm W. R. Grace for the Nicaraguan Canal Syndicate. When the United States instead supported a Panamanian canal, Zelaya claimed Nicaragua’s interests had been betrayed. He sought British loans and turned to foreign powers to construct a Nicaraguan canal. Inviting other nations into the Western Hemisphere, Zelaya challenged the Monroe Doctrine and would

have established a commercial rival of the U.S.-owned Panama Canal. When Conservatives led by Bluefields governor Juan B. Estrada declared their 1909 rebellion, Americans in Nicaragua provided aid. After government forces executed mercenaries Lee Roy Cannon and Leonard Broce, U.S. president William Taft supported the rebellion and helped replace Zelaya with a Conservative government under Estrada and Adolfo Díaz. Despite its support, the U.S. government refused to recognize Estrada’s government without important concessions, including a U.S. naval base in Nicaragua, American control of Nicaraguan finances, and exclusive rights to any canal. Although they had no desire to build a Nicaraguan canal, U.S. officials prevented any other power from building a canal to compete against the Panama Canal. Submitting to the concessions, Conservatives received U.S. recognition in November 1910. In July 1912, Nicaragua faced another Conservative-Liberal civil war. Americans requested U.S. assistance, and President Díaz believed U.S. forces would bolster his Conservative government. Taft ordered the deployment of 2,700 U.S. Marines. Led by officers such as Smedley Butler, marines helped end the civil war in August 1912, but U.S. forces remained, initiating a 20-year occupation. Welcomed by many Conservatives, their presence sparked anti-American dissent from Nicaraguan liberals and antiimperialists throughout Latin America. In León and Granada, however, elite Conservatives resented the U.S. presence after Nicaraguan women embraced American fashion and culture by wearing short skirts, getting bobbed haircuts, and playing basketball, and after Protestant missionaries established communities in Catholic areas. Claiming such American influences challenged traditional Nicaraguan values and elite control of peasants, Conservative organizations, such as the Catholic Knights, encouraged violent attacks upon Protestant churches in the late 1910s and 1920s.

AUGUSTO CÉSAR SANDINO Augusto César Sandino, known also as Augusto Nicolas de Sandino y Calderon (1895–1934), was an anti-imperialist leader of the Nicaraguan people and one of the most revered figures in that nation’s history. Sandino’s roots as a revolutionary hero date to July 1912, when a popular revolt against President Adolfo Diaz was crushed by U.S. Marines. During the Battle of Coyotepe Hill, marines killed revolutionary Benjamin Zeledon and then wheeled his body on an oxcart to burial. The young Sandino witnessed the event, which incited him to fight for an end to U.S. intervention. In Nicaragua’s “Constitutional War” of 1926–1927, U.S. warships returned to the country, and Augusto Sandino emerged as a brilliant strategist for the forces of the Liberal Party. When that conflict ended, the defeated Liberals accepted the continued presence of U.S. troops. For Sandino the fight had just begun, as he and his “Defending Army of National Sovereignty” mounted a fierce guerrilla campaign against U.S. Marines and the U.S.-trained National Guard. Sandino’s exploits became legendary in the Latin American press. Though he admired Americans greatly, Sandino was not surprisingly vilified as a “bandit” in the United States. In 1933 U.S. troops withdrew without having defeated Sandino. Sandino’s forces then accepted the election of Juan Batista Sacasa, who extended to the revolutionaries an olive branch of peace and a swath of arable land. However, just one year before, the future dictator Anastasio Somoza García had assumed command of the National Guard, and he ordered the assassination of Sandino on February 21, 1934. The legacy of Augusto Sandino endured. Founded in 1961, the revolutionary Sandinista Liberation Front took its inspiration from Sandino’s courage and employed the image of Sandino in his outsized cowboy hat and his anti-imperialist ideology in its ultimately successful revolution against the Somoza dictatorship in the late 1970s.

The most famous attack against American imperialism was Augusto César Sandino’s 1927–1932 rebellion. During a Liberal-Conservative conflict in the mid-1920s, U.S. officials threatened military action to force the Liberals’ acquiescence to a truce and disarmament. Sandino refused, and Nicaraguans and Latin American anti-imperialists, such as Salvadoran Farabundo Martí and Dominican Gregorio Urbano Gilbert Suero, joined Sandino in the Segovias and conducted raids on American forces and firms. Over the next five years, U.S. Marines followed Sandino’s troops and Sandino’s guerrilla warfare took on

U.S. firepower and airplanes. Despite losses of life on both sides, Sandino persisted as Americans increasingly questioned the U.S. occupation. With the Great Depression and Sandino’s insurgency, U.S. officials agreed to withdraw in 1933 after Liberal Juan Sacasa’s inauguration. In negotiations, Sandino demanded the dismantling of what he termed an instrument of American imperialism, an American-trained army of Nicaraguans called the National Guard. Its leader, Anastasio Somoza, had utilized his contacts with influential U.S. officials to lead the National Guard and felt threatened by Sandino. Through the National Guard, Somoza orchestrated the assassination of Sandino on February 21, 1934, a 1936 coup against Sacasa, and an almost 20-year dictatorship. Under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration, U.S. officials adhered to a policy of noninterference and refused to intervene further in Nicaraguan affairs. With U.S. recognition and the National Guard, Somoza consolidated his power, claimed U.S. favor, and built a network of domestic allies. Though claiming to admire American ideals of democracy, Somoza incorporated fascist elements into his government. Only with the official declaration of war against the Axis powers did Somoza declare his government’s official opposition to international fascism and support of the Allies. During the Second World War, anti-Somocista exiles in Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the United States lobbied U.S. officials to end relations with Somoza. Exiles referred to American ideals of democracy used against fascist dictatorships to criticize the U.S.-Somoza alliance, including the words of FDR, the Atlantic Charter, and the Four Freedoms. Some exiles even purchased surplus U.S. war matériel and plotted to overthrow the dictator. When Somoza arrested dissident Liberals in 1944, U.S. officials pressured him to withdraw from the next election. As the war ended, Somoza found himself facing not only armed exiles, but also an American government now questioning alliances with Central American and Caribbean dictators after having fought international fascism. It would only be with the Cold War that Somoza would reestablish his cordial relationship with U.S. officials. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Butler, Smedley Darlington; Dollar Diplomacy; Good Neighbor Policy; Panama/Panama Canal; Somoza García, Anastasio; Primary Documents: Protest by Women of Palacagüina, Nicaragua, Against Destruction of Their Church by U.S. Marines (1929)

Further Reading Gobat, Michel. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Leonard, Thomas M. Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Walter, Knut. The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Open Door Policy The Open Door policy was an agreement drawn up in 1899 between China’s Qing dynasty leaders and the imperial powers that had interests in China. The principle behind it was that all nations should have equal access to any of the ports open to trade in China as laid out in the Anglo-Chinese treaties of Nanjing (1842) and Wangxia (1844). The Open Door principle was initiated in 1899 by U.S. secretary of state John Hay, who wrote to representatives of all nations trading in China at that time asking them to agree to the promotion of equal opportunity international trade in China. The United States felt it needed to secure its commercial operations in China at this time as the partition of China by European powers and Japan seemed imminent following the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). U.S. officials feared that in the

scramble for power each foreign power would seek to monopolize trading, effectively curtailing its newfound interest in foreign markets and imperial expansion since the economic depression of the 1890s. The United States was also strategically interested in China after its acquisition of Hawai‘i, and then the Philippines and Guam following the Spanish-American War. Specifically, the Open Door policy suggested that first, each great power should be allowed free access to a treaty port; second, only the Chinese government should collect taxes on trade; and finally, no foreign power should be exempt from paying harbor dues or railroad charges. However, each nation receiving Hay’s Open Door note—France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, and Japan—was noncommittal, stating that it would need to first witness the compliance of other nations. Undeterred, in 1900, Hay announced that each of those nations approached had effectively granted consent in principle and that the policy should therefore be upheld. However, the imperial powers continued to compete for special concessions within China, such as railroad rights, mining rights, and loans. Due to the fact that the Open Door policy was always a principle rather than a formally adopted treaty or law, it was never effectively enforced and from the outset was flouted. In 1900 the antiforeigner Boxer Rebellion threatened the idea of the Open Door policy, especially as it gained the backing of the empress dowager Cixi. The swift manner in which a coalition of foreign forces overpowered the Boxers and their official supporters did little to aid relations between Chinese and foreigners. To little avail, John Hay wrote to the foreign powers emphasizing the importance of respecting China’s territorial and administrative integrity, his aim being to prevent them from dividing China into individual colonies that would threaten U.S. trade interests. The signing of the Versailles Treaty following the end of World War I that transferred previously German-owned concessions in Shandong Province to Japan, rather than returning them to China, triggered mass protests and further weakened the Open Door policy. In 1931 the Japanese seized Manchuria, setting up the puppet state of Manchuko and breaking the Open Door policy with impunity. By 1936 when the Japanese entered Shanghai, the policy was all but forgotten. So, while the Open Door policy contributed to the idea of equal trading rights and a “special” SinoAmerican relationship, because it had always been nonbinding it failed to prevent the United States or other powers from claiming ownership of Chinese territory and preferential trade conditions. It is worth noting that at the time Hay was pushing the Open Door policy, the U.S. government was implementing increasingly strict rules on Chinese immigration to the United States. This meant that opportunities for Chinese merchants and workers in the United States were fewer, despite Hay’s rhetoric of equal opportunity for all. The Open Door policy was rendered meaningless when Mao Zedong took control of China in 1949 and halted relations with most other countries apart from the USSR, from whom he took political leadership until 1958. In addition, of course, his centrally planned command economy had no need to trade with other nations, many of which would have declined to do so out of loyalty to the capitalist world. When Deng Xiao Ping assumed power in China in 1978 he began a series of policy changes referred to as “opening up,” which saw China gradually begin trading globally again. “Special Economic Zones” were created and foreign direct investment was welcomed. These policies are generally agreed to be the reason for China’s huge economic success today, and it is certainly the case that China’s trade and markets are once again intrinsically linked to global economic trends. Alison Hulme See also: Boxer Rebellion; Hay, John; Versailles, Treaty of; Primary Documents: Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Note (1899)

Further Reading McKee, Delber L. Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy, 1900–1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Sung, Yun-Wing. The China–Hong Kong Connection: The Key to China’s Open Door Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Panama/Panama Canal Since the early 16th century, the geographic location known as Panama has elicited interest from major colonial powers. The Spanish Empire longed for an easier route to access its colonies’ opulent goods, but lacked the technological advancements needed for a waterway through Panama. After the independence wars of 1821, Panamanians within the main state of Colombia continued to envision the region as a center for trade. Panamanian nationalists, they imagined Panama as a hanseatic country, a place of international commerce dependent on its close encounters with Europeans. The Panamanians hoped that constructing a canal would guarantee modernization and progress. Likewise, the governing body in Colombia understood Panama’s value and importance in a burgeoning world market. As a young republic amid growing imperial powers, Colombia viewed Panama as a new foothold from which to enjoy the rapidly developing trading posts spreading along the Central and South American coasts. This interest in transforming Panama into a hub for goods and international networking extended far beyond the projects of Panamanians and their governing body in Colombia. In an age of imperialist conquests, the British, French, and Americans dictated the construction of a canal. Undermining the Colombian government, these nations competed for bids to build the passageway. In 1878, Ferdinand de Lesseps, architect of the Suez Canal, challenged North American control when he revealed plans to build a sea-level canal across the isthmus. Even though an 1846 treaty granted Britain and the United States an opportunity to design a canal, Colombians permitted de Lesseps’s venture. The scheme attracted thousands of laborers from around the world, most notably West Indian workers. These men and their families traveled great distances and created communities in Colón and Panama City, Panama. For more than a decade, de Lesseps tried to emulate his famed Suez Canal’s structure in Panama. He encountered extraordinary challenges in building a sea-level system rather than a multitiered lock passageway. The landscape’s varying elevations and unpredictable mudslides hindered the progress. In addition, disease ravaged the thousands of West Indian laborers and Frenchmen who fought against malaria and yellow fever. The inhospitable working conditions and mudslides prevented de Lesseps from completing the project. In 1889, de Lesseps abandoned his partially dug canal and returned to France, his reputation in ruins. De Lesseps’s failure permitted the United States to intervene and propose its own plan for a canal through the isthmus. In comparison to other powers, the United States’ involvement in the affair grew out of its own aspirations for a massive continental and commercial empire. The U.S. canal project became one of the most pivotal moments in U.S. expansion in the 20th century. Prior to considering Panama, North Americans examined other areas to build a canal. In 1884, a small faction of the U.S. Senate mulled a waterway through the fragile state of Nicaragua. By the late 1880s, the United States’ priority to develop and expand its control throughout the Western Hemisphere was coming to fruition. In an effort to save his investment and prevent a canal in Nicaragua, Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, chief engineer of de Lesseps’s project, embarked on a mission to have the United States buy the claims from the New Panama Canal Company and build the canal. The Colombian government refused to collaborate with the United Sates or agree with Bunau-Varilla’s negotiations. Under Bunau-Varilla’s stipulations, a new treaty would give the

United States a 99-year lease on a six-mile strip called the Canal Zone, and the Colombian government would receive a $10 million payment plus an annual payment of $250,000. The Theodore Roosevelt administration mulled over different methods of purchasing the rights. Throughout 1903 and with U.S. assistance, Panamanians concocted a plan to separate Panama from Colombia. Despite numerous separatist movements in Panama’s history, leading Panamanians struggled to secure a free nation. Amid the turmoil between Colombia and the United States, revolutionaries moved forward with plans for independence. These included Dr. Manuel Amador Guerro, a physician associated with the Panama Railroad; Jose Agustin Arango, the railway’s attorney; and other oligarchy leaders. President Roosevelt and his cabinet seized the opportunity to work with the revolutionary junta. Panama offered President Roosevelt a chance to establish negotiations without Colombian objections. To prevent Colombians from quashing the revolution, the United States would use force under its 1846 treaty to maintain transit rights across the isthmus and ensure the success of the outbreak. On November 3, 1903, Panamanians revolted and quickly seized the isthmus. A day before the attack, the USS Nashville appeared off Colón to prevent Colombian soldiers from interfering with an independent Panama. The United States’ involvement and demonstration of military force in liberating Panama became an unprecedented move that defined Washington’s Latin American policy for nearly half a century. President Roosevelt and his leading negotiator, John Hay, focused on securing a canal treaty with Panamanians, and specifically, the Frenchman Bunau-Varilla. While the Panamanian republic worked toward establishing itself, it sent Bunau-Varilla to Washington with instructions to draft a treaty that would not interfere with Panama’s sovereignty, territory, and integrity. He also was required to wait for the approval of Amador and Panamanian official Federico Boyd. Bunau-Varilla ignored these guidelines and completed a treaty before Amador and Boyd reached Washington. Before their arrival, the Frenchman drafted a treaty quickly enough so that the Senate would not grow restless and before isthmian politics delayed talks. Bunau-Varilla’s treaty defied Panamanian instructions. The proposed document guaranteed Panama a payment equal to what the United States would have paid Colombia. Bunau-Varilla’s company also profited from the sale of its equipment. The United States would oversee Panamanian affairs and have authority over a strip of land known as the Canal Zone. Under these conditions, Panama became a protectorate of the United States. After much deliberation and fighting between senators, more than half of the Senate supported the treaty 66–14. On February 23, 1904, Roosevelt and the Senate recognized the Hay–Bunau-Varilla treaty of 1903 authorizing construction of a Panama Canal. For 10 years, canal construction reshaped the dense jungle, mountains, and swampy lands of Panama. From May 1904 to August 1914, three chief engineers devised various methods of completing the project. Each engineer was required to work alongside the newly created Isthmian Canal Commission, which fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. secretary of war. They also faced overseeing the Zone, a territory 10 miles wide that housed workers and facilities for medical care, education, and leisure activities. John Wallace was the first chief engineer. During his one-year term, Wallace experienced a chaotic period. Poorly organized and in its early stages of development, the Canal Zone government and the canal project discouraged Wallace. John Stevens assumed the role between 1905 and 1907. Although Stevens lasted two years, he first introduced the idea of a lock system rather than a sea-level canal. The last engineer, George Washington Goethals, saw the project to completion and carried out all the major construction. Under Goethals, immense changes occurred so his team could complete the canal. To avoid a fate similar to the French, U.S. engineers worked with surveyors, geographers, doctors, and sanitation workers to eradicate any problems that could slow down the project. Doctors and scientists took extreme measures to contain yellow fever, malaria, and bouts of pneumonia. Dr. William Crawford Gorgas was appointed chief sanitary officer to combat the tropical diseases that killed many U.S. and

European workers. Gorgas used pioneering research that linked mosquitoes to spreading yellow fever and malaria. During the 10-year construction of the canal, Gorgas ordered workers to drain, or cover with kerosene, any stagnant water that could allow mosquitoes to lay eggs. The sanitation workers also fumigated and quarantined facilities in the Canal Zone. Washington invested $20 million in Gorgas’s efforts and in dispensing prophylactic quinine in Canal Zone hospitals. The doctor’s success in Panama proved instrumental in advancing the canal project toward completion.

Under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel George Goethals, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers played a major role in the construction of the Panama Canal. Completed in 1913, the canal immediately served vital commercial and strategic purposes for the United States, but it also became a symbol of America’s imperialistic policies toward Panama specifically and Latin America more broadly. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

In contrast to its forward-thinking sanitation and disease prevention methods, the commission implemented segregation policies that were very much of their time. While some argued that segregation maintained the healthy well-being of outsiders and natives of the region, it also created a differential pay scale. The different wages were designated as “gold” and “silver.” The commission paid skilled workers with untaxed U.S. gold currency, and they received better treatment than their American counterparts— indeed, they lived more comfortably than most skilled laborers in the United States. Each family or individual on the Gold Roll received free furnished quarters, health care, schooling for their children, and six weeks’ vacation with pay. However, Gold Roll workers worked long hours that far exceeded the mandate of an eight-hour workday. The Canal Commission, above all else, denied the workers the right to strike. If anyone considered leading a strike, the commission threatened laborers with deportation. Men on the Silver Roll endured far worse treatment. Eastern and Mediterranean Europeans, West Indians, and Asians were part of the Silver Roll, the racist policies of which emulated the Jim Crow laws of the United States. Unskilled, Silver workers excavated the canal, lived in deplorable conditions, and spent years apart from loved ones. Despite the ban on unionization, Silver men often rioted and protested, but the Silver-Gold system remained in place until 1955. Although World War I overshadowed the crossing of the first ship through the channel in 1914, the United States garnered international prestige for its successful venture. After its completion, the canal served as a conduit for maritime commerce and military power. For the purposes of trade, the canal was open internationally to serve the interests of commercial ventures but was militarily limited to the U.S. Navy. The United States opened several military bases in Panama to ensure open access to the canal—and to assert Washington’s military power in the Western Hemisphere. The timing of the outbreak of World War I heightened the necessity of securing the canal. The difficulty of arming the canal during the war motivated U.S. officials to pressure Panama into revising the treaty to include adding new military bases. Until the United States pulled out of the Canal Zone in 1999, the military presence made Panamanians resentful and hostile. Many Panamanians believed the canal rightfully belonged to Panama and increasingly challenged and protested U.S. occupation. World War II only reinforced local frustrations as the U.S. military activity in the Canal Zone increased. On December 12, 1947, students, the People’s

Party, and other associations gathered in the thousands to protest the Filós-Hines treaty (permitting the United States a more indefinite occupation of additional military bases created during World War II). The worst confrontation between the U.S. military and students was the Flag Riot that occurred on January 9, 1964, known as Martyrs Day. Panamanian students from the university and the Instituto Nacional entered the Canal Zone to raise the Panamanian flag. Students from Balboa High School located in the Zone stopped the Panamanians and desecrated the Panamanian flag. Three days of rioting transpired, during which 24 Panamanians and 5 U.S. soldiers died. In 1974, a regime change in Panama that placed the National Guard in power ushered in a new wave of Panamanian pride that championed the nationalization of the canal. Between 1974 and 1977, General Omar Torrijos, de facto leader of Panama, started negotiations with U.S. president Jimmy Carter. On September 7, 1977, President Carter and General Torrijos signed the Torrijos-Carter (Panama Canal) Treaty, which committed the United States to turning over full control of the canal to Panama effective December 31, 1999. While tensions remained high between the United States and Panama, Washington honored the treaty and pulled out of Panama. In 2000, the canal started undergoing renovations and remains an international engineering landmark. Miriam Elizabeth Villanueva See also: Hay, John; Panama Canal (Torrijos-Carter) Treaties; Panama Invasion; Roosevelt, Theodore; Primary Documents: Excerpt from “The Panama Canal a Sound Business Proposition,”a San Francisco Call Article Outlining the Expected Economic Benefits of the Panama Canal (1908)

Further Reading Conniff, Michael L. Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Greene, Julie. The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Major, John. Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Parker, Matthew. Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time—the Building of the Panama Canal. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Puerto Rico In 1898, U.S. troops invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. They defeated Spain and took control of Puerto Rico, as well as Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam. Puerto Rico remains an unincorporated U.S. territory, although since 1952 Puerto Rico’s official status has been a commonwealth or free associated state. The United States claimed at the time of the Spanish-American War that it supported Puerto Rico’s efforts to end Spanish colonialism and become an independent nation. However, the United States held an imperial interest in Puerto Rico that predated the war. In the early 1890s, American politicians called for the acquisition of Puerto Rico. Control of Puerto Rico both reflected and facilitated Washington’s expansion into the Caribbean and Central America. Puerto Rico’s location on the Mona Channel and between the Greater and Lesser Antilles provided the United States with a point of entry into the region and access to Central America, where it planned to build a canal. For the first half of the 20th century, the United States ruled Puerto Rico directly. In 1900 it passed the Foraker Act, which established a civilian government in Puerto Rico. The Foraker Act allotted Puerto Rico a U.S.-appointed governor, who was an Anglo from the mainland. The Foraker Act also set up the Puerto Rican Supreme Court and a nonvoting resident commissioner—elected by Puerto Ricans living on

the island—who serves in the U.S. House of Representatives. The resident commissioner may participate in House discussions and may serve on committees, but is not allowed to vote. The U.S. government passed the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, which (with no input from the island) imposed U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans. Although Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, those who live on the island cannot vote in federal elections. Those who migrate to the mainland can vote. In 1946, the U.S. government named a Puerto Rican, Jesús Piñero, as governor. At the end of World War II, national liberation struggles around the world demanded an end to colonial rule. New nations in Asia and Africa replaced what had been European colonies. In 1948 Puerto Ricans elected their own governor for the first time, Luis Muñoz Marín. And in the face of the global demand for independence and the need to portray itself as a democratic force in the context of the Cold War, the United States worked with Muñoz Marín and other members of his Popular Democratic Party (PPD) to engineer a change in Puerto Rico’s status. Puerto Ricans obtained their own constitution and, in 1952, became a free associated state or commonwealth. As citizens, male Puerto Ricans were drafted to fight in U.S. wars from World War I to Vietnam. Nationalistic Puerto Ricans opposed the draft and refused to participate in the U.S. military beginning in the 1940s. Between 1940 and 1948 roughly 80 Puerto Rican nationalists were imprisoned as a result. The antidraft movement escalated in the 1960s, when resistance to the Vietnam War swept Puerto Rico, as it did the United States. Many Puerto Ricans combined their rejection of the draft and the Vietnam War with calls for the United States to leave Puerto Rico. U.S. rule in Puerto Rico led to a dramatic shift in the island’s economy, as trading relations with the United States replaced Spanish ones and U.S. capital penetrated and dominated the island. From the beginning of the century, Puerto Rico’s principal exports—sugar, tobacco, and needlework—went primarily to the United States. By 1930, “almost 95 percent of Puerto Rico’s external trade was with the United States” (Ayala and Bernabe, 33). U.S. sugar companies took over Puerto Rican land, simultaneously driving peasants and small landowners off the land and capitalizing production. The loss of land and livelihood led much of the rural population to migrate first to urban centers on the island and then to the United States, especially the greater New York City area, where they found low-wage work in the garment industry. In the late 1940s Governor Muñoz Marín, working closely with U.S. corporations, launched Operation Bootstrap. The program, which promised to modernize the island, improve Puerto Ricans’ standard of living, and create jobs, promoted labor-intensive industry and produced large profits for U.S. businesses. U.S. manufacturers were lured to the island by a mix of low wages, exemptions from federal and insular taxes, and unrestricted access to the U.S. market (Ayala and Bernabe, 179). This project produced moderately higher wages for Puerto Ricans who worked in the new industries and modernized the island’s infrastructure. However, it failed to improve fundamentally the Puerto Rican economy and intensified the island’s dependence on the United States. Since Puerto Ricans no longer produced the agricultural goods they needed, they were forced to import them from the United States at high prices. At the same time, Puerto Rico shipped the majority of its products to the United States. The lack of environmental regulations was another feature of the program. Combined, these features made Operation Bootstrap attractive to U.S. manufacturers, produced some improvements for the population, and led to increased pollution on the island. The economic model the United States developed in Puerto Rico neither required nor created sufficient jobs for poor and unemployed Puerto Ricans. However, factories on the mainland were eager to hire them and pay them low wages. To encourage the exodus of Puerto Ricans from the island, U.S. airlines offered them low-cost airfares. So many Puerto Ricans flew from San Juan (the capital) to New

York City in the 1940s and 1950s that the flight became known as the guagua aerea, or air bus. Puerto Ricans left the warmth of their island and families because they believed they would find good jobs and a better life in the United States. Instead, most migrants obtained low-paying jobs, had poor working conditions, lacked benefits, and received racist treatment from the white society. Nevertheless, driven by desperation and hope, Puerto Ricans continued to migrate to the United States. As of 2012, more Puerto Ricans lived on the mainland than in Puerto Rico. The population is concentrated in New York City and its suburbs; older industrial cities throughout the Northeast, such as Hartford and Philadelphia; in Florida, especially in and around Orlando; and Chicago. Puerto Rico was important to U.S. plans to dominate the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War. The U.S. Navy built the Roosevelt Roads Naval Air Station in Ceiba, along the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, and used it for military practice. It also took over the adjacent island of Vieques and herded the population into the middle of the island while it carried out target practice on and around the ends of the island. These military installations facilitated U.S. control over the Caribbean and adjacent countries and played a role in U.S. military engagements around the world. Because Vieques and Roosevelt Roads were located in tropical environments, their conditions matched those of many of the countries in which the United States militarily intervened. Thus, they served as ideal training grounds for U.S. military personnel. Indeed, U.S. military forces who served in Korea and Vietnam received training in Vieques as did those who participated in the 1954 overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, the 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, and the 1983 invasion of Grenada. In addition to Puerto Rico’s change from an outright colony to a free associated state, the U.S. government employed a variety of measures and forces to ensure its control of Puerto Rico. At different points, various branches of the U.S. military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, and the Insular Police, the Puerto Rican police force that the United States established in 1899, were active in repressing those organizations and individuals who rejected U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. The proindependence Nationalist Party was the main target of these attacks from the 1930s to the 1950s. From the 1950s to the present, the U.S. government and Puerto Rican repression have targeted the independence movement; students who protested the draft in the 1960s and 1970s or, in 2010–2012, tuition hikes; and peaceful protesters who demonstrated against the U.S. Navy’s bombardment of Vieques. Repressive measures have included surveillance, threats, the loss of jobs, the denial of the right to voice support for independence and other forms of censorship, arrests, imprisonment, torture, and targeted assassinations. In 1948, the U.S. Congress passed Law 53, known as the Ley de Mordaza or the Gag Law. The law, which Puerto Ricans had no say in, made it illegal to support independence for Puerto Rico, including publicly saying that you did so. Beginning in the 1950s, the Insular Police conducted massive surveillance of those it knew or suspected supported independence, known as independentistas. It amassed thousands of files, known as las carpetas, on independentistas and used the information collected to harass them. The U.S. government and the Insular Police have used more brutal methods to repress the independence movement. When members of the Nationalist Party staged a peaceful march on Palm Sunday in 1937, the police opened fire on them, wounding somewhere between 150 and 200 people and killing 19. The event is known as the Ponce Massacre, after the southern Puerto Rican city in which it took place. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments imprisoned hundreds of Puerto Ricans who opposed U.S. colonial rule. From the 1930s to the 1950s, members and leaders of the Nationalist Party were the prime targets. Pedro Albizu Campos, the president of the party, spent 28 years in Puerto

Rican and U.S. jails. Other Nationalists also served lengthy prison terms, some because they advocated independence, others because they participated in armed actions against the U.S. government. In 1950, the Nationalist Party launched an uprising in Puerto Rico in an unsuccessful attempt to end U.S. colonial rule of the island. Two Puerto Ricans attacked Blair House, where President Harry Truman was residing temporarily. The assaults led to the arrest of more than 1,100 Puerto Ricans on the island and in the United States, including the leadership of the Nationalist Party. After four Nationalists attacked the U.S. Congress in 1954, Puerto Rican Nationalists were once again arrested. The four who attacked Congress served 25 years in prison, until President Jimmy Carter commuted their sentences in 1979. Support for independence waned in the 1950s, but surged again in the 1960s and 1970s, both on the island and the mainland. Much of the independence movement publicly advocated for an end to U.S. colonialism. Some activists formed armed clandestine organizations that carried out bombings directed at property, not people, in Puerto Rico and the United States. This, in turn, led to renewed surveillance, infiltration, arrests, and imprisonment of proindependence supporters. One organization, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), carried out a series of attacks against U.S. corporations, banks, police, and military buildings from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, when members of the group were arrested near Chicago. The proindependence activists were convicted of seditious conspiracy, conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government in Puerto Rico by force, and sentenced to disproportionately long sentences. In 1999 President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of most of the prisoners. As of 2013, only one, Oscar López, remained in jail. Puerto Ricans across the political spectrum called for his release. The status of Puerto Rico continues to be an unresolved issue that generates strong opinions among Puerto Ricans. While many Puerto Ricans support the commonwealth, others argue that the island should become the 51st state; only a small number call for independence. But the U.S. economic model has not worked for the majority of Puerto Ricans. In 2011, unemployment reached almost 16 percent. In 2013, per capita income was roughly $15,000, half that of Mississippi. Crime was on the rise, and the most significant new economic initiative of 2012–2013 was to turn the island into a tax haven for the wealthy. Margaret Power See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention

Further Reading Ayala, César J., and Rafael Bernabe. Puerto Rico in the American Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. McCaffrey, Katherine T. Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Power, Margaret. “The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Transnational Solidarity: Latin American Anti-Colonialism vs. the United States during the Cold War in Latin America.” In Jessica Stites Mor, ed. Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Ramos-Zayas, Ana Yolanda. National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919) The 26th president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York to Martha Bulloch and Theodore Roosevelt Sr. on October 27, 1858. After graduating from Harvard University, he entered politics as a Republican Party member in 1881 and served in the New York state legislature until 1884. Roosevelt also served as New York City police commissioner and became assistant secretary of the navy

in 1897 before being elected governor of New York in 1898. In 1900, he was nominated to run for vice president with Republican William McKinley. An ardent imperialist, Roosevelt’s presence on the ticket made a muscular U.S. foreign policy a more pronounced element of the successful Republican campaign that fall. Roosevelt became president of the United States on September 14, 1901, upon the assassination of McKinley. Roosevelt was a diehard nationalist patriot whose rhetoric and policy positions often bordered on jingoism. Envisioning a dominant position for his country among the nations of the world, Roosevelt believed that an expansionist, bellicose national ethos was necessary to both reinvigorate America’s national frontier character and advance America’s long-term national interests. When he became New York City police commissioner in 1895, the rebellion in Cuba was stirring and Roosevelt expressed his desire to join the force in case of a war with Spain. By the time the Spanish-American War was declared in 1898, he was serving as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy. Organizing a regiment known as the Rough Riders, Roosevelt left Washington and went to Cuba as a lieutenant colonel, famously showing his mettle at San Juan Hill. The episode transformed Roosevelt into a major national political figure and an effective advocate for an expansionist U.S. role in the world. Coincident with the Roosevelt presidency, the beginning of the 20th century ushered in a new epoch in the history of American relations with the world. Roosevelt’s jingoism caught the spirit of the age, as the nation seemed invigorated with the success of the war with Spain—despite the protracted conflict in the Philippines and a vigorous anti-imperialist counter-movement at home. After becoming president, Roosevelt was prepared to defend and expand American interests not only in the Western Hemisphere but globally, although he was equally determined to avoid military conflict—hence the Roosevelt slogan, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Following the military intervention of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy in the Venezuela Crisis of 1902–1903, Roosevelt buttressed the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary, which declared the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of a Latin American nation that could not pay its debts (the issue that had precipitated European intervention). In his annual message to the American Congress on December 6, 1903, the president proclaimed that any action by Latin American nations that could invite aggressive European encroachment would lead to American (presumably military) intervention to keep the Europeans out of the region. The episode unequivocally announced U.S. supremacy in the hemisphere. Further, Roosevelt worked with his secretary of war, Elihu Root, to enlarge and modernize the U.S. Army. They established the Army War College, created more rigorous standards for the promotion of officers, and instituted a general staff to coordinate all military planning and mobilization. Further inspired by the concepts of the great naval strategist Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), Roosevelt doubled the strength of the U.S. Navy and in 1908–1909 sent the Great White Fleet around the world to showcase the growing military power of the United States—by then the third largest naval power in the world. Roosevelt and Mahan were determined to no longer have the United States depend on Great Britain for its maritime defense.

Theodore Roosevelt was selected as William McKinley’s running mate in 1900, and became the fifth vice president to assume the role of president after the assassination of McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt became president only three years after gaining national recognition as the leader of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. (Library of Congress)

As president, Roosevelt advanced a foreign policy that promoted stability in the international arena, close Anglo-American cooperation, a clear and realist geopolitical vision, the superiority of supposed “civilized” nations (evidenced, for example, by the Roosevelt stamp of approval on Korea’s takeover by Japan, which he saw as a rising, superior, militaristic nation), the expansion of overseas markets, and international arbitration to avoid and settle conflicts. This final foreign policy goal was made clear in Roosevelt’s attempts to settle a dispute over land rights and oil leases in Mexico through the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, his participation as a peacemaker in the Moroccan Crisis of 1905– 1906 between France and Germany, and more dramatically, Roosevelt’s role in helping to end the RussoJapanese War. Clearly, however, most notable was the wielding of the “big stick,” which became a source of bitter resentment for many in Latin America, particularly as the years unfolded and U.S. interventionism in the region broadened. The United States had a long-standing desire to build a canal across Central America to facilitate easier access to Asian markets for the United States and to fortify hemispheric defenses. Following an abortive attempt in Nicaragua, Roosevelt turned his attention toward the province of Panama in Colombia. With American support, Panama secessionists freed themselves from Colombia. The independence was recognized by the United States and an agreement was signed to construct an interoceanic thoroughfare. In 1914, the canal was opened and the United States controlled both the canal and the 10-mile-wide Panama Canal Zone. A milestone in American imperialism, the Hay–Bunau-Varilla treaty of November 18, 1903, empowered the United States to build, own, and defend the canal and intervene in Panama to preserve its political stability. Elsewhere in Latin America, the Roosevelt Corollary was put into practice in a crisis relating to the Dominican Republic. The Caribbean nation was deeply in debt to European bondholders and also in

political turmoil after the assassination of its president in 1899. Roosevelt was apprehensive that Germany or Great Britain might apply naval force to coerce payment. Determined to avoid that outcome, the Dominican Republic was forced in 1905 to accept appointment of a U.S. customs receiver. The American administration allocated 55 percent of the revenue to pay foreign creditors and the rest to the Dominican government, which was compelled to implement various reforms. U.S. policy was resented throughout Latin America. However, American financial supervision of the country went on until 1941. In addition, it was also during the Roosevelt administration that the Platt Amendment (imposed on the Cuban constitution following occupation) authorized the United States the right to interfere in Cuba to maintain its “independence.” The United States would intervene in the political affairs of Cuba eight times over the next 30 years. The United States became the greatest consumer of Cuban sugar and also exported a sizable volume of consumer goods to Cuba. The imperialist policy of Roosevelt had made Cuba a quasi-colony of the United States, reflective of Roosevelt’s Latin American policy overall, which established the terms of U.S. hegemonic dominance of the region for the next several decades. Beyond the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt was most concerned with Germany and Japan, whom he considered potential adversaries of the United States. In the Asia-Pacific region, the president endeavored to preserve an “Open Door” policy and prevent the dominance of any single nation. He achieved a diplomatic triumph by agreeing to mediate in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on September 5, 1905, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the United States. For his role in brokering the treaty, Roosevelt was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. Also in the Asian theater, in the Root-Takahira Agreement of 1908 the United States and Japan agreed not to violate the territorial integrity of China and to maintain the status quo in the Pacific. Overall, President Theodore Roosevelt left an indelible mark on the history of American international relations. From a tradition of comparative isolation, he established unchallenged American hegemony in Latin America, asserted American influence, and projected its interests globally. The United States never looked back and over the course of the next century would emerge as the preeminent world power. Patit Paban Mishra and Andrew J. Waskey See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Great White Fleet; Mahan, Alfred Thayer; Open Door Policy; Panama/Panama Canal; Root, Elihu; Russo-Japanese War; Primary Documents: Roosevelt Corollary (1904); President Theodore Roosevelt on International Relations in the Western Hemisphere, State of the Union Address (December 3, 1906)

Further Reading Dalton, Kathleen. Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Mishra, Patit Paban. “Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919).” In Research and Discovery: Landmarks and Pioneers in American Science. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008. Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1979. Roosevelt, Theodore. An Autobiography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1985. Thomas, Evan. The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearts, and the Rush to Empire, 1898. New York: Little, Brown, 2010. Zimmerman, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Root, Elihu (1845–1937) Elihu Root was a corporate lawyer, political legal adviser, an effective cabinet-level administrator and reformer, U.S. senator, and an elder statesman of the Republican Party. Born February 15, 1845, to Oren

Root and Nancy Whitney Buttrick, Root grew up in New York and attended Hamilton College. He graduated from New York University School of Law in 1867 and established a successful legal practice. Root established the reputation of having a keen legal mind with the ability to grasp the essentials of a situation and logically formulate a course of action. For those reasons, in the turbulent aftermath of the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley personally recruited Root to serve as secretary of war (1899–1904). After the death of John Hay, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Root to serve as secretary of state (1905–1909). Elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, Root served from 1909 to 1915. During World War I and its aftermath, Root shaped Republican foreign policy and served as its leading statesman. He died in 1937. When appointed secretary of war in 1899, Root was charged with formulating American colonial policy following the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. In undertaking the task, Root showed a remarkable ability to understand the complexity of the issues, formulate a legislative course of action, and then guide those policies through the U.S. Senate. Root adopted a different policy for each of the three former Spanish possessions. Along with Senator Joseph B. Foraker, he drafted and then oversaw the passage of the Foraker Act (1900), which determined relations between the United States and Puerto Rico until 1917. Intent on fulfilling the Teller Amendment, Root guided the administration’s policy in Cuba. As one of the primary authors of the Platt Amendment, which extended an American protectorate over the island, Root first formulated the foreign policy principles behind what eventually became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In the Philippine archipelago, Root faced the difficulties involved in winning an imperial war against an insurgency and balancing the demands of a civil-military government in the midst of hostilities. As secretary of war, Root found it necessary to reform the primary instrument of imperial policy—the U.S. Army. To meet the increasing demands of a global colonial empire, Root oversaw the expansion of the U.S. Army from a prewar strength of 28,000 to an authorized strength of between 60,000 and 100,000. In an attempt to promote efficiency in projecting American power abroad, he attacked the byzantine system of army bureaus by creating a General Staff Corps led by a chief of staff who oversaw military planning. To support war planning, Root revived the military education system, created the Army War College, and established the Joint Army-Navy Board. Root further strengthened the military establishment in 1903 by reforming the militia system and creating the federally funded National Guard. Although each of these reforms met with opposition from elements of the military establishment and members of Congress, Root was able to draft the legislation needed to achieve his goals and advance that legislation through Congress. Although President Theodore Roosevelt directed much of his own foreign policy, Root still wielded significant influence as secretary of state from 1905 to 1909. Roosevelt largely dealt in broad strokes and left the supervision and implementation of his policies to Root. He also relied heavily on Root to ensure Senate approval. Within the Department of State, Root oversaw the reform of the American consular service. His most notable achievements came in dealing with Japan—the Gentleman’s Agreement to limit Japanese immigration and the Root-Takahira Notes that formalized relations between the two empires in the Pacific. In 1906 Root embarked on a goodwill tour of South America designed to revitalize the American image in that region. Although a Progressive reformer, Root’s Progressivism had limits and he often opposed efforts that he felt challenged the American constitutional system of governance. During the Progressive insurgency of 1912, he opposed Roosevelt’s electoral challenge to President William Howard Taft and aligned himself with the more conservative Old Guard wing of the Republican Party. As chair of the Republican National Convention, Root presided over the process that ensured conservative control of the party machine. When

Roosevelt bolted the convention to launch the Progressive Party, it destroyed the intimacy he and Root had enjoyed for years. One of Root’s major contributions to foreign affairs was his attempt to create a mechanism to peacefully resolve international disputes. A lawyer by training and disposition, Root wanted to create a legal framework that would build consensus among nations and foster cooperation rather than conflict. As secretary of state, he negotiated a series of bilateral arbitration treaties between the United States and other countries to move toward that goal. In recognition of his efforts, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. At the end of World War I, Root generally supported the principles behind the League of Nations as the most likely mechanism for promoting world peace. However, like Henry Cabot Lodge and many other Republicans, he pressed for revisions to Article 10 of the League Covenant. During the ensuing political battle over the League of Nations, Root consistently supported the mild reservationist position and urged Wilson to compromise. After the failure of the Treaty of Versailles and the election of President Warren G. Harding, Root used his influence as an elder statesman of the Republican Party to push the United States toward greater cooperation with the League of Nations. He was instrumental in creating the Permanent Court of International Justice (World Court) at The Hague and served as a delegate to the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922). Although his direct involvement waned over the years, Root served as a guiding force in a strong internationalist American foreign policy until his death in 1937. James Pruitt See also: Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Platt Amendment; Roosevelt, Theodore; Teller Amendment; Washington Naval Conference; Wood, Leonard

Further Reading Jessup, Philip C. Elihu Root. 2 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938. Leopold, Richard W. Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954.

Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) The United States, namely President Theodore Roosevelt, played a pivotal role in concluding the RussoJapanese War, for which he became the first American to earn a Nobel Peace Prize. The mediation between Russia and Japan was an extension of American foreign policy, which was going through an overhaul during Roosevelt’s presidency, as the nation was becoming a world power. After expanding across the continental United States over the course of the 18th century, the United States was late on the international scene, lagging behind most of Western Europe in the race to colonize other nations and peoples. The United States won territories as a result of the Spanish-American War and also had annexed Hawai‘i, but it was under Roosevelt’s administration that America looked to become a major player. Roosevelt’s diplomacy was always aimed at furthering American interests, and he saw the Russo-Japanese War, which had broken out in 1904 with a surprise attack by Japanese forces on the Russian naval base of Port Arthur on the Korean Peninsula, as a way to maintain a balance of power in the region, while advancing America’s image and long-term strategic interests. At times leading up to the conflict, Roosevelt viewed both the Japanese and Russians as potential threats to American power in Asia, though after Japan did not oppose the annexation of Hawai‘i, his stance toward them softened considerably—even if he did believe them to be racially inferior to

Americans, Western Europeans, and Russians. When the war broke out, Roosevelt hoped for a Japanese victory, but with no end in sight, the president soon posited himself as a viable mediator. Roosevelt first approached the Japanese, believing they would trust the United States based on a cooperative relationship dating to the 1860s. His entreaty to Russia was at first refused, since Czar Nicholas II was in complete denial of the utter failure and disastrous position of his military, but eventually he agreed. Roosevelt suggested the navy yard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the negotiations. Initially, Japan asked for reparations, as well as numerous territorial concessions that Roosevelt knew would anger the Russians. Roosevelt did not want to cripple Russia, especially since a revolution had erupted due to the unrest caused by the unpopular war. Roosevelt again met with the Japanese and convinced them to drop the request for reparation payments by noting that another year of war would cost more than any payment secured from Russia. In the end, both sides agreed to terms. Roosevelt was pleased, but anti-American riots shook Japan, and numerous politicians and highranking members of the U.S. military feared Japan’s potential to expand as a hegemonic power in the region. For his role in the mediation, Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize. In the process he also had achieved his goal of asserting American leadership on the stage of international politics and diplomacy. Seth A. Weitz See also: Roosevelt, Theodore; Primary Documents: Excerpt from the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905)

Further Reading Holmes, James R. Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2006. Jukes, Geoffrey. The Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905. Oxford: Osprey, 2002.

Somoza García, Anastasio (1896–1956) Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza García (1896–1956) was a general, dictator, and patriarch of the dynasty that ruled Nicaragua from 1937 to 1979. Somoza used his position as director of the U.S.-created Guardia Nacional (National Guard) to overthrow President Juan Bautista Sacasa in 1936. Inaugurated on January 1, 1937, he held the presidency nearly continuously until his death on September 29, 1956. Somoza was the son of a coffee planter and Conservative senator. He received his college education at the Pierce School of Business Administration in Philadelphia, where he perfected the colloquial English that would help to ingratiate him with U.S. officials. It was during this time that he met his wife, Salvadora Debayle Sacasa. Upon the couple’s return to Nicaragua, Somoza worked as a privy inspector for the Rockefeller Foundation. But in 1926, Liberal general José María Moncada led a revolution to overthrow Conservative Emiliano Chamorro, allowing Tacho an opportunity for advancement by joining the rebels. Although his sole military campaign ended in defeat and capture, Somoza claimed the rank of general and attached himself to Moncada’s staff. In this role, he made a favorable impression upon U.S. secretary of war Henry L. Stimson, who arrived in Nicaragua to resolve the Liberal uprising, and charmed the U.S. minister Matthew Hanna. As the United States proceeded to occupy the country, their support proved important to his political career. After Moncada became president in 1928, Somoza was appointed first consul to Costa Rica and later vice minister of foreign relations. During the occupation, Tacho made himself invaluable to American officials as an interpreter and go-between, thus cementing U.S. backing and ensuring his selection as jefe director of the Guardia. Both Somoza and incoming president Juan Batista Sacasa were sworn in the day before the withdrawal of the last U.S. Marines, on January 1, 1933. Sacasa’s first priority was to reunite the country by negotiating an end to the insurgency led by Augusto C. Sandino. Because Sandino publicly denounced the Guardia as an unconstitutional agent of U.S. imperialism, Somoza opposed a peace treaty that left the revolutionary free and armed. When his protests went unheeded, Somoza ordered Sandino’s assassination on February 21, 1934. Although he initially claimed ignorance of the plot, Tacho later admitted his role and insinuated that the killing was approved by the United States. Thereafter, Somoza and Sacasa engaged in an open rivalry that ended when Somoza ordered an attack on the Presidential Palace. Sacasa surrendered after three days of fighting on June 2, 1936, and “voluntarily” resigned a few days later. Unsurprisingly, given that the Guardia supervised the December elections, Somoza won a landslide victory and was inaugurated on January 1, 1937. Somoza used the presidency and his control of the Guardia to centralize the Nicaraguan state and transform it into a vehicle for personal enrichment. During his reign, the role of the Guardia expanded to include supervision of the railroads, telegraph services, and internal revenue. Somoza encouraged Guardia personnel to enrich themselves through graft, thereby cementing the force’s loyalty. Through an elaborate system of kickbacks and the threat of force, he soon became the wealthiest man in the country. Informal but effective press censorship shielded the regime from open criticism, while an intelligence service harassed the opposition and potential dissidents. While maintaining a veneer of democracy, Somoza’s regime perpetuated itself through the judicious use of intimidation and manipulation. In 1939, he called a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. The new version extended the presidential term to six years and exempted Somoza from the prohibition against reelection. The assembly was then seated

as the congress for 1939–1947 and the newly minted congressmen were induced to appoint him president for the same term, thus doing away with the need for elections. Like other Latin American strongmen of the era, including fellow marine protégé Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina of the Dominican Republic, Somoza benefited from the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy and later U.S. preoccupation with hemispheric defense during World War II. Given the anti-Americanism engendered by the occupations of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), Haiti (1915–1934), and Nicaragua, U.S. policy in the 1930s coalesced around the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of its neighbors. Washington recognized any government with de facto control, democratically elected or otherwise. Moreover, Somoza proved adept at projecting an image of U.S. support to ward off internal opposition. Taking advantage of the outbreak of World War II, he secured U.S. military aid, which both modernized the Guardia Nacional and assured the country that he still held Washington’s favor. The sole breach of Somoza’s partnership with the United States came at the end of the war. In 1944, Tacho confined the leaders of a Liberal faction to their homes after it became apparent that they would seek to nominate a candidate to succeed him. The show of force provoked an immediate public backlash that threatened the regime. Soon after, the Harry Truman administration threatened to break off relations unless Tacho withdrew from the next election. Nevertheless, Somoza retained his hold on the Guardia and his political influence. Rather than allow the presidency to pass out of his hands, he engineered the election of Leonardo Argüello, whom he believed would be easily manipulated. When the new president proved to be less than accommodating, Somoza unleashed another coup. After less than a month in office, Argüello was replaced by the more tractable Benjamín Lacayo Sacasa. Although Washington initially refused to recognize the new government, diplomatic relations were swiftly restored after Somoza replaced Sacasa with Víctor Román y Reyes. In 1950, in what became known as the Pact of the Generals, Somoza became president for the final time by negotiating an arrangement with the Conservative opposition whereby they would be given a share in the government in return for a new constitution that permitted Somoza’s election. In 1956, Somoza’s bid for yet another term was cut short when he was assassinated by a young exile named Rigoberto López Pérez during his official nominating ceremony in León. Despite being airlifted to the Gorgas Hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, Tacho died on September 28. His son, Luis Somoza Debayle, had himself elected by congressional acclamation the same day. Under Luis and his brother Anastasio “Tachito” Debayle, the Somoza dynasty endured until 1979. Micah Wright See also: Dominican Republic (1893–1945); Good Neighbor Policy; Nicaragua (1893–1945); Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Stimson, Henry L.

Further Reading Crawley, Eduardo. Dictators Never Die: A Portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza Dynasty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Diederich, Bernard. Somoza and the Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981. Millett, Richard. Guardians of the Dynasty: A History of the U.S. Created Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua and the Somoza Family. New York: Orbis Books, 1977. Walter, Knut. The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Standard Fruit Company

The Standard Fruit Company (SFC) was a multinational fruit importation company started in 1924 from the Vaccaro Brothers Company. The main endeavor of SFC was the importation of tropical foodstuffs from Central America to markets in the United States and Europe. Along with the United Fruit Company and Cuyamel Fruit Company, SFC emerged as one of the three large multinational banana companies that ran the trade in Central America during the 19th and 20th centuries. The dominant position enjoyed by these companies—along with the kleptocratic governments and uneven development that accompanied their history—gave rise to the term “banana republic” that defined the region for decades. Unlike the United Fruit Company, the SFC has received little attention concerning its role in the subjugation of Latin America to the whims of multinational companies producing for American and European consumption. One of SFC’s main production centers was located in the tropical coastal-climate nation of Honduras. In the early decades of the 20th century, the company entered into a hyperexploitive relationship with the state as it constructed railroads and other public works endeavors, ostensibly in the name of social development, but in reality serving only to bolster the profit-making capabilities of the company. In exchange for setting up railroads and communications lines the company was given unparalleled access to the country’s most fertile land. Due to the geography being composed mainly of interior highlands unsuitable for most farming practices, SFC constructed its infrastructure projects solely on the coastal lowlands. This situation prevented much of the population from receiving the benefits of the railroads and telephone lines while SFC and other foreign companies monopolized the best farmland. However, SFC was not always so successful in its imperialist aims. In 1923 SFC would join forces with the Mexican Fruit and Steamship Company to form the new Mexican-American Fruit and Steamship Company. This was a political move on behalf of SFC to diversify its holdings to avoid charges of monopoly by the Mexican government. It also worked to circumvent Mexican law prohibiting ownership of agricultural land by foreign companies. Once it had its foot in the door of the Mexican fruit enterprise, SFC would begin to undermine the league labor system of the Tabascan state, claiming it drove up labor costs. The Tabascan government did not bend to the whim of SFC, and the company eventually boycotted bananas from the state, hoping to strong-arm labor and the state into submission. Eventually SFC made concessions ending its Tabascan boycott. The Mexican state then used money from the banana trade to finance public works benefiting its citizens. This stands in contrast to the story of fruit companies in Honduras and other countries. The business would be known by many different names but eventually settled on the one we know today, Dole Food Company. Cory C. Martin See also: United Fruit Company

Further Reading Karnes, Thomas L. Tropical Enterprise: The Standard Fruit and Steamship Company in Latin America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Ridgeway, Stan. “States Monoculture, Monopoly, and the Mexican Revolution: Tomás Garrido Canabal and the Standard Fruit Company in Tabasco (1920–1935).” Mexican Studies 17, no. 1 (2001): 143–169. Tucker, Richard. Insatiable Appetite: The US and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World. Berkley: University of California Press, 2000.

Taft, William Howard (1857–1930)

William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the 10th chief justice of the United States (1921–1930)—the only person to serve in both positions. Born September 15, 1857, Taft grew up in Mt. Auburn, Ohio, and studied at Yale and Cincinnati Law School. In 1886 Taft married Helen “Nellie” Herron, the daughter of an Ohio judge. He received his first judicial appointment in 1887 and in 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed him U.S. solicitor general. Two years later, Taft took up a position as a U.S. Sixth Circuit judge. When hostilities broke out between the United States and Spain in 1898, what seemed to Taft a remote conflict was about to have a significant impact on his career. In 1900, with the United States now in possession of the former Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, President William McKinley summoned Taft to Washington and, much to the latter’s surprise, asked him to lead a commission that would prepare the transfer from military to civil U.S. rule in the Philippines. Taft was doubtful of the wisdom of creating a U.S. overseas empire, but accepted the annexation of former Spanish territories as a fait accompli, which obliged the nation to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and do its “duty” to the Filipino people. From 1901 to 1903 Taft served as the first U.S. civil governor of the archipelago and gradually evolved what was later dubbed his “policy of attraction.” This policy aimed to win over Filipinos to long-term U.S. rule through a variety of methods, including the involvement of Filipinos in different levels of government and campaigning for lower tariffs between the United States and the islands. Through benevolent governance, Taft hoped that after a century or so the Filipino people’s desire for independence would wane and they would become what Canada was then to Great Britain: a self-governing dominion within its empire. Taft also felt that it was America’s responsibility to create in the Philippines a beacon of U.S.-inspired enlightenment for the rest of Asia. In late 1903, Taft was recalled from the Philippines to serve as President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war. Taft undertook duties far beyond those of previous holders of this position, and for many it seemed that Taft served as Roosevelt’s deputy when the president was not in the country. In 1905 Roosevelt sent Taft on a diplomatic mission to the Far East to confirm the stability of the region in the face of an ambitious Japan. The United States accepted Japanese sovereignty over the Korean peninsula and the Japanese in turn recognized U.S. control over the Philippines. During this trip Taft also visited the Philippines and was unimpressed with the performance of his successor, Governor Luke Wright, leading to Wright’s eventual resignation. On his next visit in 1907, Taft oversaw the opening of the new Philippine Assembly, which became the lower house of the Philippine legislature. The Assembly was one of the fruits of Taft’s policy of attraction and was comprised entirely of Filipino politicians. Although Taft’s overseas experience centered on the Philippines, Roosevelt utilized his secretary of war elsewhere. In 1906 Taft was sent to govern Cuba temporarily, and in 1907 he oversaw the beginning of the construction of the Panama Canal. Despite Roosevelt’s growing trust in Taft, the two began to disagree over the best policy for the Philippines. Taft felt that the tariff on Philippine sugar needed to be decreased and was adamant that the United States should not promise future independence to the Philippines—positions that veered from both Roosevelt’s views and popular opinion. Nonetheless, Roosevelt handpicked Taft as his successor to run as the Republican candidate for president in 1908. When a victorious Taft took office in 1909 he was confident that his aims for a long-term imperial presence in the Philippines were secured for the foreseeable future. Perhaps Taft’s most famous contribution to U.S. expansionism during his presidency was his advocacy of a different type of imperialism from that under way in the Philippines: “dollar diplomacy.” Aided by his secretary of state, former lawyer Philander C. Knox, Taft aimed not to expand U.S. territory any further, but rather to extend the influence of the United States by economic means. Taft felt that the nation’s

interests were best served by maintaining the stability of its trading partners, particularly in Latin America and the Far East, and that this above all else would improve the fortunes of U.S. overseas investments as well as U.S. political influence. Following his defeat in the 1912 presidential election Taft spent some years in academia, but continued to fight vigorously, though unsuccessfully, to prevent the passage of the Jones Act, primarily because it promised Philippine independence. During this time Taft also served as the first president of the League to Enforce Peace, providing Democratic president Woodrow Wilson with significant bipartisan support for what later became the League of Nations. In 1921, newly elected Republican president Warren G. Harding appointed Taft chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, a position he served until his death in 1930. Overall, Taft was unsuccessful in realizing his vision of a long-term intervention in the Philippines that might result in a voluntary and lasting imperial connection, and the rejection of this vision was echoed in subsequent U.S. interventions overseas throughout the 20th century. Conversely, Taft’s advocacy of dollar diplomacy was something that would arguably come to guide U.S. foreign relations, particularly with Latin America, well after his death in 1930. Adam D. Burns See also: Dollar Diplomacy; Jones Act (Philippine Autonomy Law of 1916); Panama/Panama Canal; Philippine Commissions, First (1899–1900) and Second (1900–1916); Philippine Organic Act (Philippine Bill of 1902); Roosevelt, Theodore

Further Reading Burns, Adam D. An Imperial Vision: William Howard Taft and the Philippines, 1900–1921. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, UK, 2010. Gould, Lewis L. The William Howard Taft Presidency. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Scholes, Walter V., and Marie V. Scholes. The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.

Tracy, Benjamin Franklin (1830–1915) Born near Owego, New York, on April 26, 1830, Benjamin Franklin Tracy attended Owego Academy and pursued a career in law and politics. Supported by Thomas C. Platt, a prominent Republican, he won election to the New York Assembly in 1861. Tracy raised the 109th New York Volunteers for the Union Army during the Civil War and was commissioned its colonel in 1863. He led the regiment ably during the Wilderness Campaign, received the Medal of Honor, and ended the war a brigadier general. Afterward, Tracy resumed his legal career and remained active in the Republican Party. He interrupted his practice to serve as the federal district attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 1866 to 1873 and as chief justice of the New York Court of Appeals from 1881 to 1883. In 1889, newly elected president Benjamin Harrison appointed him secretary of the navy. As secretary of the navy, Tracy embraced the sea power theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan and worked to reform and modernize the U.S. naval fleet. The American navy’s first steel ships entered service during his tenure, and Tracy formed them into a Squadron of Evolution, which developed and practiced new fleet maneuvers and tactics. Building on the work of William C. Whitney, his immediate predecessor, he

instituted reforms and abolished the spoils system in the navy yards, requiring hiring based on merit rather than political connections. Tracy called for a dramatic expansion of the U.S. Navy and a reorientation of its strategy. Heeding the advice of Mahan and other naval officers, he argued against the nation’s traditional naval strategy of coastal defense and raids on an enemy’s commerce. Instead, he advocated an offensive, high seas strategy that aimed to engage enemy fleets and project American power overseas. Tracy successfully negotiated larger naval budgets and in 1890 won approval for the construction of three large, 10,000-ton battleships, the nation’s first. Two more followed in 1892. Building these armored warships required special steel, and Tracy developed close relationships with the captains of the steel industry, which arguably marks the beginning of what President Dwight Eisenhower later called the military-industrial complex. Securing bases for the growing fleet proved more difficult. The governments of Haiti and Santo Domingo rejected American offers, but Tracy did secure a coaling station in Samoa. He also supported the efforts of American businessmen to seize power in Hawai‘i, which they did shortly before Tracy left office. Afterward, Tracy resumed his legal career. In 1896, he chaired the New York City Charter Commission, which unified the city’s five boroughs. After his unsuccessful bid to become the city’s mayor the following year, he resumed his private legal practice. He died following a stroke on August 6, 1915, in New York City. Stephen K. Stein See also: American Samoa; Mahan, Alfred Thayer; Military-Industrial Complex

Further Reading Cooling, Benjamin F. Benjamin Franklin Tracy, Father of the American Fighting Navy. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973. Herrick, Walter R. The American Naval Revolution. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966.

Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 Named for its authors, Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland and Representative John McDuffie of Alabama, the Tydings-McDuffie Act was federal legislation enacted by the Seventy-Third Congress of the United States and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 24, 1934. The law provided a 10-year framework for Philippine independence (the Southeast Asian island chain had been under American control since the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the Spanish-American War and ceded Spanish colonies to the United States), reclassified the immigration status of Filipinos living in the United States, and set strict limitations on future immigration. The law was the result of heightened anti-immigrant nativism in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. Unlike other ethnic Asian groups such as the Chinese and Japanese who had long faced immigration restrictions, Filipinos could not be barred from entry into the United States due to the status of the Philippines as an American protectorate. Many white Americans resented this special position. They viewed Filipinos as an economic threat that siphoned white jobs and drove down wages and working conditions. There was also growing consternation over increasing social interactions between Filipino men and white women, which at times led to cohabitation and interracial marriage. Anti-Filipino sentiment reached new levels in the wake of the Great Depression. Many white Americans reasoned that banning immigration from the Philippines and repatriating Filipino migrants would ease the growing unemployment of the 1930s. These calls were echoed by members of Congress.

Due to the Philippines’ colonial status, however, drafting such legislation proved to be much more complicated than with previously excluded groups. Ultimately, anti-immigrant authorities came to the conclusion that to obtain their goal of a more ethnically exclusive America they must join with anticolonialists and Filipino nationalists in supporting calls for Philippine independence. In doing so, the ideals of Filipino exclusion and independence were made inseparable. The Tydings-McDuffie Act represents the last in a long line of federal legislation aimed at preventing Asian immigration to the United States. Immediately upon its passing any Filipino wishing to enter the United States was subjected to the same quotas and restrictions that had long curtailed other Asian groups. When the Philippines officially became an independent nation on July 4, 1946, Filipinos living in America lost their special status and thousands were deported. Tydings-McDuffie and other pieces of exclusionary legislation remained in effect throughout the next two decades. It wouldn’t be until the end of the Second World War before some policymakers finally began to accept the idea of granting citizenship to certain Asian groups as a reward for their country’s service to the Allied powers. Andrew Scott Barbero See also: Philippine Commissions, First (1899–1900) and Second (1900–1916); Primary Documents: Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934)

Further Reading Frank, Sarah. Filipinos in America. Minneapolis: Lerner, 2005. Ong Hing, Bill. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

United Fruit Company The United Fruit Company (UFCO) emerged at the turn of the 20th century and embodied the influence transnational U.S. enterprises could wield in Latin America. Revisionist historians depicted UFCO as a corrupt entity that, with the help of U.S. officials, manipulated unstable governments and powerless peasants into providing profitable contracts and immense wealth at the expense of Latin American growth and stability. However, contemporary research demonstrates that UFCO worked with host governments and elites for favorable arrangements and faced resistance from popular movements. Nevertheless, UFCO became for many in Latin America el pulpo, the octopus, monopolizing the banana trade, controlling transport industries, and shaping labor polices and racial ideologies. Consequently, UFCO represented qualities of American imperialism beyond those of the U.S. government. Multiple factors contributed to UFCO’s birth, and one was Latin Americans’ pursuit of economic development. Since the early 1800s’ wars for independence from Spain, many nations endured civil wars, lapsed debts, and other difficulties. In the last half of the century, many Latin American political leaders hoped to emulate the United States and especially Europe. Some reformers, termed “positivists,” studied European history. They believed that, if they applied the policies of stable industrial states, their nations would achieve U.S. or European “progress.” Many Latin American governments therefore offered lands, low taxes, and cheap labor to multinational firms for mining and shipping. From Mexico to Ecuador, officials identified the railroad as the most important technology. As in America, the railroad created new markets, provided sources of income and employment, and connected disparate peoples and regions. In

this pursuit of modernity and development, Latin American governments invited European and U.S. capital and businesses to develop their countries’ resources. Costa Rica’s railroad set the foundation for the rise of the UFCO. With British loans and American engineers, the government helped establish in the 1870s the Atlantic Railway Company. As the government encouraged U.S. immigration, one American financier, Henry Meiggs, brought his nephew, Minor Keith, to work on the railroad. Costa Rican elites hoped Americans would immigrate and Costa Ricans would relocate to construction sites, but strenuous work in a hot tropical environment discouraged most laborers from staying. Instead, black British West Indians migrated to the railroad. There, they grew agricultural goods, most notably bananas, for domestic consumption and local markets. As U.S. demand for bananas grew in the late 1800s, Keith converted these bananas into shipping cargo for the railway, providing a source of revenue in the absence of complete rail lines and sufficient passengers. Costa Rican dictator Tomás Guardia provided favorable contracts to Atlantic Railway but by 1876 depleted the necessary funds for completion. When British creditors called in both Costa Rica’s and Keith’s debts, the two parties reached an 1884 agreement to finish the railroad. For Costa Rica, Keith renegotiated the country’s debts with Britain. In return, Keith received a 99-year lease on the railroad and 800,000 acres of land at Limón, approximately 7 percent of the nation’s territory. Keith also established the Tropical Trading and Transport Company, which by the 1890s exported a million banana bunches and entered into Colombia, Panama, and Nicaragua. Similarly, Andrew W. Preston organized the Boston Fruit Company in 1885 with favorable concessions in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In 1898, hurricanes destroyed Boston Fruit’s new lands in Venezuela, and creditors again called Keith’s debts. Costa Rica’s president, Rafael Yglesias Castro, provided a loan to rescue Keith, and Keith merged his company with Boston Fruit to form the United Fruit Company in March 1899.

Bananas being loaded onto the United Fruit Company’s Northern Railway in Costa Rica, ca. 1915. United Fruit became for many in Latin America “el pulpo,” the octopus, monopolizing the banana trade, controlling transport industries, and shaping labor polices and racial ideologies in a number of countries throughout the region. (Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images)

UFCO pursued similar policies in Guatemala. Since the late 1860s, Liberals and Justo Rufino Barrios’s dictatorship had used cheap taxes and labor laws to develop coffee estates, court foreign capital, and force Mayan Indians off their traditional lands to work in coffee. American merchants bought bananas from individual vendors and planters, in contrast to coffee from large plantations. Barrios invited American contractors to build the Northern Railroad, but international coffee prices plummeted in 1897, halting the railway’s construction. Seizing power, Liberal dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera asked Keith

and UFCO to complete the railroad. In 1904, Keith agreed to finish the Northern Railroad in return for a 99-year lease and 168,000 acres of land. With the railroad’s completion in 1908, UFCO converted those acres into large-scale banana plantations. This marked the rise of large banana plantations in Guatemala and the beginning of the nation’s tumultuous relationship with UFCO. People often described Honduras as the archetypical “banana republic” due to the impact of banana interests in the country. In the mid-1800s, banana cultivation in Honduras appeared relatively small. When banana production skyrocketed in the 1880s, Honduran banana farmers on the country’s North Coast and many transnational business firms, most notably Samuel “Sam the Banana Man” Zemurray’s bananaexporting Cuyamel Fruit Company, profited from low taxes and duty exemptions. When UFCO lobbied to build Honduras’s National Railroad, Honduran farmers protested UFCO’s attempt to monopolize the country’s transportation. Honduran president Miguel Dávila not only refused to grant UFCO contracts to build the railroad, but Dávila agreed to a U.S. government–sponsored financial reorganization plan that would have increased duties on banana companies. As a result, in 1910 Zemurray and UFCO subsidiaries provided money, arms, and men to former president Manuel Bonilla and hired bands of U.S. mercenaries, including Lee Christmas and Guy “Machine Gun” Maloney, to invade Honduras and overthrow Dávila. The newly installed Bonilla gave Zemurray and UFCO various land concessions and contracts. Over the next years, Zemurray and UFCO continued to involve themselves in the country’s political affairs, going so far as to smuggle guns, attempt further revolts, and encourage Guatemalan-Honduran border disputes into the mid-1920s. Throughout Central America, large UFCO plantations developed into so-called “banana enclaves.” Because many governments lacked resources or infrastructure for courts or social services on distant coastal and tropical lands, UFCO officials oversaw such affairs. In Colombia and elsewhere, managers often provided housing, community programs, and even medical facilities at a cost to employees. UFCO claimed to pay better wages than other agricultural enterprises and boasted of providing immunizations governments could not afford. On the other hand, UFCO relied upon seasonal labor, quickly firing workers and cutting wages during off-seasons and economic hardships. Furthermore, UFCO controlled railroads and shipping and purchased majority stakes in other banana firms, thus marginalizing local banana producers, eliminating competitors, and dominating the market. UFCO also influenced racial ideologies. UFCO welcomed the migration of black West Indians, familiar with banana cultivation and fluent in Spanish, to banana plantations. There, West Indians experienced a form of American “Jim Crow” segregation laws where they were limited to menial jobs, denied entrance to white organizations and buildings, and subject to violent assaults and lynching by Americans and Hispanics. West Indian and Hispanic migrant women sold their domestic labor as laundresses, cooks, and prostitutes. UFCO and public officials in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica, and elsewhere often blamed migrant women for spreading disease and weakening community morals. However, these women built mutual aid societies and kinship networks and claimed to have their own standards of honor, even defending themselves in court. UFCO applied Jim Crow against Hispanics as well. Americans often treated both West Indians and Hispanics as allegedly inferior nonwhites, despite Hispanics’ own claims of superiority to West Indians. Other UFCO officials relied upon West Indians as English speakers and experienced workers and provided them better work than Hispanics. When Hispanic unions organized to protest poor working conditions and low pay, UFCO utilized West Indians as strikebreakers. These policies divided UFCO workers and led to workers’ opposing one another rather than coming together against UFCO. Inadvertently for UFCO, these sentiments contributed not only to extreme violence between the two groups but to an emerging Hispanic, antiblack nationalism in Central America during the 1920s.

Illustrated in Guatemala’s 1923 Puerto Barrios strike, Hispanics protested and lobbied public officials against UFCO. Rather than opposing UFCO, politicians in Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama focused this blame upon black immigrants. While UFCO faced this nationalist opposition and labor protests, banana diseases forced UFCO to acquire new territory and agree to exclude black labor in return for needed land concessions. Throughout Latin America, UFCO’s history in Guatemala remains a popular point of any discussion of U.S. imperialism and the power of transnational U.S. enterprises in the region. Thanks to favorable relationships with Guatemalan elites and dictators Manuel Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico, UFCO benefited from lax tax enforcement and generous contracts. Owning the country’s telegraph system and two of the three ports, UFCO and its subsidiary International Railroads of Central America also owned 690 of the 719 miles of Guatemalan railroads. These arrangements gave UFCO less expensive transport costs and a monopoly on banana production over independent and rival banana producers. Because of UFCO’s monopoly and close relationships with dictators, participants in the 1944 Guatemalan Revolution and later activists and reformers associated UFCO with the dictatorships. Workers on UFCO plantations organized, and Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo passed the 1947 Labor Code that provided protection to agricultural laborers on large estates such as those of UFCO. UFCO officials complained to U.S. officials that the Labor Code and Arévalo were Communist-inspired. Although sympathetic, U.S. officials refused to intervene directly. As a result, UFCO utilized its lobbyists and hired the “father of public relations” Edward Bernays to smear Arévalo. UFCO also began conspiring with the region’s dictators and important Guatemalan exiles to overthrow the Arévalo government. When Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz passed Decree 900 in 1952, implementing an agrarian reform that gave underutilized lands to peasants for development, including more than 400,000 acres of UFCO property, UFCO again funded conspiracies and lobbied U.S. officials to intervene in Guatemala. Some historians have claimed that UFCO caused the Dwight Eisenhower administration to initiate Operation PBSUCCESS and overthrow the Guatemalan government because Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, and others had worked with or had relations with UFCO. However, much of the latest research shows that the Eisenhower administration opposed the Guatemalan government based upon Cold War and anticommunist policies, not UFCO requests, and approved an antitrust suit against UFCO. Regardless, UFCO continues to be tied to the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954. In Colombia and Ecuador, UFCO faced numerous challenges. During a strike in Ciénaga for better working conditions, Colombian military forces in December 1928 fired into banana laborers. Though the number of casualties and direct causes remain disputed, the Banana Massacre entered into popular memory through such works as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and contributed to the rising Hispanic nationalism that often targeted UFCO. In response, UFCO began developing plantations in Ecuador. Originally, UFCO pursued the same policies it had elsewhere. However, growing peasant resistance and increased international attention after the 1954 overthrow of the Guatemalan government led UFCO officials to new policies. Through the construction of better housing and more competitive wages, UFCO hoped to develop stable middle-class families obligated to UFCO. However, at places such as the Tenguel plantation in Mollepongo, peasant activism, alongside the U.S. antitrust lawsuit, encouraged UFCO to sell its lands. In both Colombia and Ecuador, UFCO created a system of subcontracting where peasants sold bananas for UFCO distribution, freeing UFCO from dealing with diseases, production, or overused lands. Such burdens now fell upon peasants and local banana producers who continue to sell their products to UFCO’s successor, Chiquita Brands. Aaron Coy Moulton

See also: Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in; Dulles, Allen; Dulles, John Foster

Further Reading Chapman, Peter. Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World. New York: Canongate, 2007. Colby, Jason M. The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Putnam, Lara. The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Striffler, Steve, and Mark Moberg, eds. Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Venezuela (1893–1945) Venezuela declared itself independent from Spain in 1811 and achieved independence in fact after Simón Bolívar decisively beat the Spanish army in the Battle of Carabobo in 1821. Initially, Venezuela became part of the Republic of Gran Colombia—a state already created by Bolívar in 1819 and encompassing large parts of northern South America and parts of southern Central America—but separated in 1830 to form a sovereign country of its own. In the wake of independence, Venezuela remained a fragile state, frequently torn by civil wars and revolutions, which impeded its economic development and led to political instability. As a result, Venezuela became the site of two significant international crises in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Venezuela Crisis of 1895 was caused by a border dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain, which claimed Guayana Esequiba in eastern Venezuela as part of British Guiana. While there had been disagreement over the border ever since Great Britain acquired the Dutch settlements of Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice in South America in 1814 and consolidated them into the single colony of British Guiana in 1831, it was only after gold was found in the disputed territory that the controversy escalated. Looking for help, William L. Scruggs, lobbyist for the Venezuelan government in Washington, called for U.S. mediation in the conflict, arguing that Britain’s attempts to extend its colonial territory westward would violate the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which defined any future colonization attempts in the Western Hemisphere by European powers as a threat to U.S. security. Facing mounting public pressure amid fears that Britain would close the Orinoco River to American trade if it took control of eastern Venezuela, the American government decided to become involved in the affair to convince European powers—in an age of resurgent European imperialism—to stay away from Latin America. For that sake, President Grover Cleveland and Secretary of State Richard Olney reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine in what has been called “the Olney Corollary,” arguing that—due to its unrivaled power and hegemonic position in the Americas—the United States had a right to intervene in any international matters in Latin America and hence insisted on mediating the border dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela. The British government, for its part, was fearful of a war with the German Empire and a second Boer War after the publication of the Kruger Telegram, in which the German Kaiser Wilhelm II congratulated the president of the Transvaal Republic, Paulus Krüger, in January 1896 for repulsing a raid of 600 British irregulars under the command of Leander Starr Jameson. Wishing to avoid a conflict with the United States in this situation, it agreed to submit the boundary dispute to arbitration, thereby implicitly accepting the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. In November 1896, the United States and Great Britain signed an agreement establishing an arbitration commission consisting of two members chosen by the British government, two members chosen by the American government on

behalf of Venezuela, and one neutral member chosen by these four. Venezuela therefore did not have an influence on the outcome, and the tribunal that convened in 1898 indeed awarded the larger part of the disputed area to British Guiana in 1899. The significance of the first Venezuela crisis lay both in the British acceptance of American predominance in the Western Hemisphere, which paved the way for the Anglo-American rapprochement in the early 20th century, and in the fact that it constituted America’s first intervention in Latin America under the Monroe Doctrine. Furthermore, America’s intervention in the first Venezuela Crisis indirectly led to the second Venezuela Crisis of 1902–1903. Venezuela’s president, Cipriano Castro, who had violently seized power in 1899, refused to pay Venezuela’s foreign debts and compensate foreigners who had suffered losses in the preceding Venezuelan civil war, believing that the United States would prevent a European military intervention in light of the experience in the years 1895 and 1896. When, however, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy promised not to seize any territory, the United States approved of a naval blockade of Venezuela by these powers in 1902. With the small Venezuelan navy being quickly captured, Castro offered to submit some of the outstanding claims to international arbitration. Initially Germany refused to agree to settle the matter through arbitration. However, in light of Britain’s acceptance of the proposal, Castro’s intransigence, and the possibility of American intervention in case German troops landed in Venezuela to forcibly collect the debts, Germany relented. On February 13, 1903, an agreement was concluded in which Venezuela pledged 30 percent of its customs duties to settle the claims. Mixed commissions were set up to adjudicate the claims. The second Venezuela Crisis led to the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the United States had a right to intervene in Latin American states if they failed to meet their international obligations, thus giving European nations a reason for armed interventions in the Western Hemisphere. Jasper M. Trautsch See also: British Guiana; Monroe Doctrine; Roosevelt, Theodore

Further Reading Gibb, Paul. “Unmasterly Inactivity? Sir Julian Pauncefote, Lord Salisbury, and the Venezuela Boundary Dispute.” Diplomacy and Statecraft 16, no. 1 (2005): 23–55. Humphreys, R. A. “Anglo-American Rivalries and the Venezuela Crisis of 1895.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (1967): 131–164. Maass, Matthias. “Catalyst for the Roosevelt Corollary: Arbitrating the 1902–1903 Venezuela Crisis and Its Impact on the Development of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 20, no. 3 (2009): 383–402. Mitchell, Nancy. “The Height of the German Challenge: The Venezuela Blockade, 1902–3.” Diplomatic History 20, no. 2 (1996): 185–209.

Washington Naval Conference (1922–1923) The Washington Naval Conference took place in Washington, D.C., from November 22, 1922, through February 6, 1923. Representatives from the following nine nations entered into treaties that limited the size of nations, adjusted international relations in the Pacific, and affirmed international support for the Open Door policy in China: Britain, United States, Japan, China, Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Portugal. The conference is best known for the resulting Washington Naval Treaty that established limits on the relative strength of capital ships between the British, Americans, and Japanese. Capital ships, also known as battleships or battle cruisers, were the largest warships of the time, equipped with heavy armor and large guns.

The First World War reduced the Royal Navy’s strength in British politics as politicians and naval officers disagreed about the navy’s performance during the war. The war also exhausted Britain’s financial strength and made Parliament wary of expensive naval construction programs. In the United States, shipyards devoted the bulk of their wartime resources to building destroyers for use against Germans submarines instead of working on capital ships. As a result, by the end of the war the U.S. Navy had congressional approval for a sizable capital ship building program but had made little progress in actually completing these ships, authorized in 1916. A second building program was authorized in 1918 that would bring the U.S. Navy’s strength near that of the Royal Navy, traditionally the world’s strongest navy. In Japan, the war harmonized previous political divisions behind support for a naval building program, but successive governments proved reluctant to raise taxes for the fleet, slowing the pace of shipbuilding. The result was that while some progress in capital ship construction had been made by November 1918 in all three nations, much of the proposed shipbuilding had not yet occurred. Early calls and proposals for naval arms limitation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference failed due to disagreements about the relative strength of fleets and the types of ships to be limited. However, in each nation attitudes began to change in the early 1920s. Postwar British leaders decided to pursue arms limitation talks with the Americans and to prepare for further naval construction simultaneously. In July 1920, Japan embarked on a large construction program designed to bring the Imperial Navy up to 16 capital ships. In the United States, recently elected president Warren Harding called for a conference with Britain and Japan to discuss naval arms limitation in 1921. In doing so, the president sought to assert his leadership in Washington while simultaneously reacting to congressional concerns about the high costs of the U.S. Navy’s building programs. Britain agreed to attend as a means of delaying the decisions of whether to continue building capital ships or to focus on improving Britain’s economic position. Japanese agreement to attend the conference stemmed from similar concerns about shipbuilding costs as well as Prime Minister Hara Kei’s drive to capitalize on strong public sentiment supporting arms limitation. Thus the Washington Conference convened in response to a unique coalescence of domestic and international factors in Japan, Britain, and the United States. On the opening day of the conference, American secretary of state Charles Hughes proposed that all three nations cancel their naval construction programs, agree to a 10-year holiday from new capital ship construction, and scrap ships to reach and maintain a ratio of 5 to 5 to 3 in American, British, and Japanese capital ship strength, respectively. In making this proposal, the Americans benefited from the ability to read secret Japanese diplomatic communications, from which they determined the Japanese delegation’s negotiating strategy, instructions, and willingness to compromise on various issues. The Japanese delegation accepted Hughes’s proposals in exchange for British and American commitments to not fortify or expand their naval bases in the Pacific. The Japanese viewed fortifications on Anglo-Saxon naval bases in the Pacific as a means to restrict their navy’s area of operations. American representatives, aware that Congress had proved reluctant to fund island fortifications in the past, agreed to the nonfortification proposal on the condition that Hawai‘i be exempt. Due to the older average age of their fleet, the British were allowed to build two new battleships to replace two of the ships being scrapped. In addition, limits were placed on aircraft carrier construction for each nation, although Japan, Britain, and the United States were each allowed to convert two ships already under construction into aircraft carriers. The Washington Naval Conference produced three major treaties: the Five Power Treaty (better known as the Washington Naval Treaty), the Four Power Treaty, and the Nine Power Treaty. The Washington Naval Treaty averted a looming arms race between Great Britain, Japan, and the United States in capital ship construction by limiting fleet sizes in capital ships and aircraft carriers. The treaty

also gave the U.S. Navy official parity with the Royal Navy for the first time. The Four Power Treaty functionally ended the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, a central objective for the American delegation. In its place, the Four Power Treaty stated that disagreements in the Pacific were to be settled by diplomacy and consultation. The Nine Power Treaty pledged each nation to respect China’s territorial and economic integrity, the Open Door policy. The Washington Naval Treaty remained in effect until 1936, when Japan withdrew from the treaty. Japan’s withdrawal inaugurated a significant increase in warship construction in Britain, Japan, and the United States. Corbin Williamson See also: Hughes, Charles Evans; Mahan, Alfred Thayer; Open Door Policy; Versailles, Treaty of

Further Reading Buckley, Thomas. The United States and the Washington Conference, 1921–1922. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970. Dingman, Roger. Power in the Pacific: The Origins of Naval Arms Limitation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

World’s Fairs Late 19th- and early 20th-century World’s Fairs offered some of the most strident cultural declarations of American imperial ambitions. Between 1898 and 1916 expositions in Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego each displayed visions of American progress and cultural dominance to millions of visitors. The exposition genre declined in the late 20th century, but these events were of enormous cultural and social contemporary significance. Cities poured millions of dollars into staging them and visitors traveled long distances to catch a glimpse of the spectacles contained therein. They introduced visitors to the newest technologies, ideas, foods, and entertainments—all in the context of a national narrative of expansion and conquest. During the summer of 1898, as Americans read of U.S. victories in the Spanish-American War, the city of Omaha hosted the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. Although designed long before the war began, the event took full advantage of the situation to celebrate recent successes of the American military and the burgeoning American empire. Amusement concessions featured the sinking of the USS Maine, the bombarding of Cuban forts, and relics from the Philippines. By late summer, the Philippine exhibit even featured 16 “Manila warriors” on their way to Washington, D.C. Even more striking was the enormous American Indian Congress, a display modeled on the colonial exhibits of recent European fairs. The accompanying Indian encampment combined ethnological exhibits of Indians living their daily lives in full view of fairgoers, along with mock battles between Indians and whites. The exhibit emphasized the “vanishing” nature of Indians while praising the paternal efforts of the federal government at bringing civilization to Indian peoples. Just three years later, Americans flocked to Buffalo to attend the Pan-American Exposition, a conscious attempt by organizers to foster goodwill among the nations of Latin America and the United States, and to introduce American visitors to the newly acquired territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The Pan-American Exposition is best known as the site of the assassination of William McKinley, but it also served as a full-fledged celebration of American imperialist ambitions that introduced many Americans to the nations of Latin America. The most impressive exposition display of American imperialism appeared at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis. The fair commemorated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase

and as such, emphasized American expansionism, both at home and abroad. Not only did it emphasize the inevitability of Manifest Destiny and American dominance of the continent, but it also showcased American efforts at bringing “civilization” to the peoples in its newly acquired foreign territories. It did this most explicitly through the Philippine Reservation, where close to a thousand Filipinos lived during the fair. A nearby living exhibit of Indians completed the display, for any who might miss the connection between American attempts to domesticate so-called primitive peoples both at home and abroad. The St. Louis Fair offered the most extensive anthropological exhibits of any world’s fair, and these exhibits reinforced the fair’s emphasis on social Darwinism and racial hierarchy. A series of expositions held on the West Coast drew attention to the development of the West and to the growing links between the United States and the Pacific. The 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco, and San Diego’s 1915–1916 Panama-California Exposition each emphasized the commercial ties between the United States and Asia. Each of these fairs explicitly celebrated American progress, both economic and social. They embodied the Progressive impulse toward scientific management and faith in the inevitability of progress as defined by mainstream America. By 1915, the independence of Cuba and increasing debate over possible independence for the Philippines meant that the celebration of American imperialism focused more on economic growth rather than on the physical territories under U.S. control. Increasing debate over assimilation policy and a cultural consensus that Indians were close to “vanishing” resulted in less visible roles for live Indians at these fairs, and an emphasis instead on the symbolic nature of the Indian as a relic of an ancient, but now conquered, civilization. After San Francisco won the right to the PPIE, San Diego developed the PanamaCalifornia Exposition as a more regional event that did much to create a regional Southwestern identity that drew on a romanticized Spanish past.

World’s Fairs offered strident cultural declarations of America’s imperial ambitions. Between 1898 and 1916 expositions in Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego each displayed visions of American progress and cultural dominance to millions of visitors. (Library of Congress)

Each of these fairs featured an active entertainment section (or Midway) that included both popular attractions like rides, dance halls, talking horses, restaurants, and theaters, as well as ethnic villages. These villages, such as “Somaliland,” “Samoan Village,” and the “Hopi Indian Village” of the PPIE, featured peoples from so-called primitive nations living their daily lives in full view of fairgoers. The

presence of these attractions in the entertainment section of these fairs reinforced the fair’s larger messages about race and American culture. This presentation of nonwhite, non-Western cultures as exotic entertainment, rather than as representatives of nations or cultures equal to the United States, reinforced the fairs’ message about race and progress. White Americans were destined to dominate not only the continent, but also the world, according to these fairs, and they occupied the top of the racial hierarchy popularly supported by ideas of social Darwinism and scientific racism. Such a formulation left little room for nonwhite Americans, as African Americans repeatedly discovered when they attempted to insert themselves into the spectacle of these fairs. Although these events offered opportunities for outside groups to celebrate their ethnic, racial, religious, or political identities through “special day” events such as parades, speeches and pageants, it proved very difficult for minority groups to find a space on the fairgrounds. All of these fairs, from Buffalo to San Diego, shared a number of key characteristics. All featured exhibits from foreign nations, states, and businesses. Each was at the core an effort by the host cities to boost their locale and to make a profit. Not all were profitable, but each drew tourists by the thousands and brought national and international attention to the cities. And each proclaimed American dominance in an age of imperial expansion. Abigail Markwyn See also: Chicago Columbian Exposition; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Social Darwinism

Further Reading Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1984. Rydell, Robert W., John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle. Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 2000.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Excerpt from Captain Alfred T. Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (1890) U.S. Navy captain during the Civil War, professor and president of the U.S. Naval War College, Alfred Thayer Mahan is best known as an influential geopolitical strategist and historian whose theories and voluminous writings on the importance of sea power influenced the strategic thinking and foreign policies of governments the world over. Mahan’s most important work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, was published in 1890—a propitious moment in the global history of imperialism. Theodore Roosevelt, a young assistant secretary of the navy, was particularly impressed with its arguments. Here Mahan asserts that the federal government had a responsibility to secure for America a modern navy that was essential to the nation’s commercial growth as a world power. To turn now from the particular lessons drawn from the history of the past to the general question of the influence of government upon the sea career of its people, it is seen that that influence can work in two distinct but closely related ways.

First, in peace: The government by its policy can favor the natural growth of a people’s industries and its tendencies to seek adventure and gain by way of the sea; or it can try to develop such industries and such sea-going bent, when they do not naturally exist; or, on the other hand, the government may, by mistaken action check and fetter the progress which the people left to themselves would make. In any one of these ways the influence of the government will be felt, making or marring the sea power of the country in the matter of peaceful commerce; upon which alone, it cannot be too often insisted, a thoroughly strong navy can be based. Secondly, for war: The influence of the government will be felt in its most legitimate manner in maintaining an armed navy, of a size commensurate with the growth of its shipping and the importance of the interests connected with it. More important even than the size of the navy is the question of its institutions, favoring a healthful spirit and activity, and providing for rapid development in time of war by an adequate reserve of men and of ships and by measures for drawing out that general reserve power which has before been pointed to, when considering the character and pursuits of the people. Undoubtedly under this second head of warlike preparation must come the maintenance of suitable naval stations, in those distant parts of the world to which the armed shipping must follow the peaceful vessels of commerce. The protection of such stations must depend either upon direct military force, as do Gibraltar and Malta, or upon a surrounding friendly population, such as the American colonists once were to England, and, it may be presumed, the Australian colonists now are. Such friendly surroundings and backing, joined to a reasonable military provision, are the best of defences [sic], and when combined with decided preponderance at sea, make a scattered and extensive empire, like that of England, secure; for while it is true that an unexpected attack may cause disaster in some one quarter, the actual superiority of naval power prevents such disaster from being general or irremediable. History has sufficiently proved this. England’s naval bases have been in all parts of the world; and her fleets have at once protected them, kept open the communications between them, and relied upon them for shelter. Colonies attached to the mother-country afford, therefore, the surest means of supporting abroad the sea power of a country. In peace, the influence of the government should be felt in promoting by all means a warmth of attachment and a unity of interest which will make the welfare of one the welfare of all, and the quarrel of one the quarrel of all; and in war, or rather for war, by inducing such measures of organization and defence as shall be felt by all to be a fair distribution of a burden of which each reaps the benefit. Such colonies the United States has not and is not likely to have. As regards purely military naval stations, the feeling of her people was probably accurately expressed by an historian of the English navy a hundred years ago, speaking then of Gibraltar and Port Mahon. “Military governments,” said he, “agree so little with the industry of a trading people, and are in themselves so repugnant to the genius of the British people, that I do not wonder that men of good sense and of all parties have inclined to give up these, as Tangiers was given up.” Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting-places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea…. The question is eminently one in which the influence of the government should make itself felt, to build up for the nation a navy which, if not capable of reaching distant countries, shall at least be able to keep clear the chief approaches to its own. The eyes of the country have for a quarter of a century been turned from the sea; the results of such a policy and of its opposite will be shown in the instance of France and of England. Without asserting a narrow parallelism between the case of the United States and either of these, it may safely be said that it is essential to the welfare of the whole country that the conditions of

trade and commerce should remain, as far as possible, unaffected by an external war. In order to do this, the enemy must be kept not only out of our ports, but far away from our coasts. Source: Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897), pp. 3–27.

Chicago World’s Fair (1893) For those who visited the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, there were not enough superlatives available to describe the spectacles they had seen. Taking place in a decade of rising angst about America’s identity now that the western frontier had “closed” and the “great nations” of the world were engaging in the imperialist scramble for colonial possessions in Africa, the fairground was bound to be permeated with imperial reflections of the “taste for empire,” as one enthusiast put it. And so it was: from the classical Beaux Arts architecture of “The White City” to the live ethnology exhibits of hierarchically ranked human races to historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address that celebrated the righteousness of America’s Manifest Destiny.

Source: 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—The World’s Columbian Exposition, “The White City.” Library of Congress.

Secretary of State John Hay’s Open Door Note (1899) In a circular letter written on September 6, 1899, from U.S. secretary of state John Hay to the U.S. ambassadors in Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, Hay articulated what became known as the Open Door policy in regard to China. In the second half of the 19th century, these European powers and Japan had carved up China into spheres of influence, within which each country dominated trade relations. The Open Door policy advocated that these spheres of influence be disregarded so that trade would flow more freely. The U.S. ambassadors announced the new policy to their host countries, receiving evasive promises of compliance from the European powers and an outright rejection from Japan. Nevertheless, Hay announced the acceptance and enactment of the policy in March 1900. At the time when the Government of the United States was informed by that of Germany that it had leased from His Majesty the Emperor of China the port of Kiao-chao and the adjacent territory in the

province of Shantung, assurances were given to the ambassador of the United States at Berlin by the Imperial German minister for foreign affairs that the rights and privileges insured by treaties with China to citizens of the United States would not thereby suffer or be in anywise impaired within the area over which Germany had thus obtained control. More recently, however, the British Government recognized by a formal agreement with Germany the exclusive right of the latter country to enjoy in said leased area and the contiguous “sphere of influence or interest” certain privileges, more especially those relating to railroads and mining enterprises; but as the exact nature and extent of the rights thus recognized have not been clearly defined, it is possible that serious conflicts of interest may at any time arise not only between British and German subjects within said area, but that the interests of our citizens may also be jeopardized thereby. Earnestly desirous to remove any cause of irritation and to insure at the same time to the commerce of all nations in China the undoubted benefits which should accrue from a formal recognition by the various powers claiming “spheres of interest” that they shall enjoy perfect equality of treatment for their commerce and navigation within such “spheres,” the Government of the United States would be pleased to see His German Majesty’s Government give formal assurances, and lend its cooperation in securing like assurances from the other interested powers, that each, within its respective sphere of whatever influence — First. Will in no way interfere with any treaty port or any vested interest within any so-called “sphere of interest” or leased territory it may have in China. Second. That the Chinese treaty tariff of the time being shall apply to all merchandise landed or shipped to all such ports as are within said “sphere of interest” (unless they be “free ports”), no matter to what nationality it may belong, and that duties so leviable shall be collected by the Chinese Government. Third. That it will levy no higher harbor dues on vessels of another nationality frequenting any port in such “sphere” than shall be levied on vessels of its own nationality, and no higher railroad charges over lines built, controlled, or operated within its “sphere” on merchandise belonging to citizens or subjects of other nationalities transported through such “sphere” than shall be levied on similar merchandise belonging to its own nationals transported over equal distances. The liberal policy pursued by His Imperial German Majesty in declaring Kiao-chao a free port and in aiding the Chinese Government in the establishment there of a customhouse are so clearly in line with the proposition which this Government is anxious to see recognized that it entertains the strongest hope that Germany will give its acceptance and hearty support. The recent ukase of His Majesty the Emperor of Russia declaring the port of Ta-lien-wan open during the whole of the lease under which it is held from China to the merchant ships of all nations, coupled with the categorical assurances made to this Government by His Imperial Majesty’s representative at this capital at the time and since repeated to me by the present Russian ambassador, seem to insure the support of the Emperor to the proposed measure. Our ambassador at the Court of St. Petersburg has in consequence, been instructed to submit it to the Russian Government and to request their early consideration of it. A copy of my instruction on the subject to Mr. Tower is herewith inclosed for your confidential information. The commercial interests of Great Britain and Japan will be so clearly observed by the desired declaration of intentions, and the views of the Governments of these countries as to the desirability of the adoption of measures insuring the benefits of equality of treatment of all foreign trade throughout China are so similar to those entertained by the United States, that their acceptance of the propositions herein outlined and their cooperation in advocating their adoption by the other powers can be confidently expected. I inclose herewith copy of the instruction which I have sent to Mr. Choate on the subject.

In view of the present favorable conditions, you are instructed to submit the above considerations to His Imperial German Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, and to request his early consideration of the subject. Source: U.S. Department of State. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1899 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899), pp. 129–130.

Map of “Greater America” (1899) In the era following the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, various publishers featured maps showing the far-flung extent of U.S.territory. These cartographic projections sometimes carried grandiose titles; less important in a “Greater America,” it seems, were proportionate scaling and spelling.

Source: Marshall Everett, ed. Exciting Experiences in Our Wars with Spain and the Filipinos (Chicago: Book Publishers Union, 1899), p. 395.

Roosevelt Corollary (1904) On December 6, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt described his foreign policy agenda in his fourth annual message to the U.S. Congress. A modification of the Monroe Doctrine, the policy came to be called the Roosevelt Corollary and declared that the United States could exercise its position as an “international police power” in an effort to protect the nations of Latin America from European aggression. The Roosevelt Corollary thus justified U.S. intervention throughout the Western Hemisphere. … The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide

from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not merely safe-guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs its duty toward others. Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first to the cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced. One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless shortcomings. If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to do. Within the Nation the individual has now delegated this right to the State, that is, to the representative of all the individuals, and it is a maxim of the law that for every wrong there is a remedy. But in international law we have not advanced by any means as far as we have advanced in municipal law. There is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought. Either it is necessary supinely to acquiesce in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality and aggression, or else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly to stand up for its rights. Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations, it would be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm. If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament would have to be kept up to serve the purposes of international police; and until international cohesion and the sense of international duties and rights are far more advanced than at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows that a self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind; and on the other hand that it should keep prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced stage of international relations would come under the head of the exercise of the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil…. It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct

themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it. In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions and wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil and religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic, so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental rights—it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishenef, or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.

Source: Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress for 1904; House Records HR 58A-K2; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives; Record Group 233; Center for Legislative Archives; National Archives.

Excerpt from the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905) The Theodore Roosevelt foreign policy record in the Far East was complicated. His successful mediation of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 helped to ensure stability and a balance of power in the region and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. The related Taft-Katsura Agreement—not a formal treaty, but a discussion between the prime minister of Japan and U.S. secretary of war William Taft— acknowledged Japanese dominance over Korea at the end of the war in return for its recognition of U.S. hegemony in the Philippines. These developments reaffirmed the imperial powers’ spheres of influence in the greater region but effectively violated the principle of the Open Door in Asia. … COUNT KATSURA and Secretary Taft had a long and confidential conversation on the morning of July 27…. First, in speaking of some pro-Russians in America who would have the public believe that the victory of Japan would be a certain prelude to her aggression in the direction of the Philippine Islands, Secretary Taft observed that Japan’s only interest in the Philippines would be, in his opinion, to have these islands governed by a strong and friendly nation like the United States, … Count Katsura confirmed in the strongest terms the correctness of his views on the point and positively stated that Japan does not harbor any aggressive designs whatever on the Philippines…. Second, Count Katsura observed that the maintenance of general peace in the extreme East forms the fundamental principle of Japan’s international policy. Such being the case, … the best, and in fact the only, means for accomplishing the above object would be to form good understanding between the three governments of Japan, the United States and Great Britain…. Third, in regard to the Korean question Count Katsura observed that Korea being the direct cause of our war with Russia, it is a matter of absolute importance to Japan that a complete solution of the peninsula question should be made as the logical consequence of the war. If left to herself after the war, Korea will certainly draw back to her habit of improvidently entering into any agreements or treaties with other powers, thus resuscitating the same international complications as existed before the war. In view of the foregoing circumstances, Japan feels absolutely constrained to take some definite step with a view to precluding the possibility of Korea falling back into her former condition and of placing us again under the necessity of entering upon another foreign war. Secretary Taft fully admitted the justness of the Count’s observations and remarked to the effect that, in his personal opinion, the establishment by Japanese troops of a suzerainty over Korea to the extent of requiring that Korea enter into no foreign treaties without the consent of Japan was the logical result of the present war and would directly contribute to permanent peace in the East. His judgment was that President Roosevelt would concur in his views in this regard, although he had no authority to give assurance of this…. Source: National Archives, Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of State, July, Part III, 1905.

President Theodore Roosevelt on International Relations in the Western Hemisphere, State of the Union Address (December 3, 1906) Theodore Roosevelt had long established himself as a man who believed in martial conflict as necessary to both advancing the nation’s interests and fortifying one’s “manly” character. As president

he established a foreign policy of vigorous international engagement backed by the willingness to use military power, particularly a strong navy. Here in his sixth State of the Union Address in December 1906, he spoke to several ongoing challenges facing the United States in the Philippines and especially in the Western Hemisphere. These were largely the result of America’s increasingly imperial actions in the region. Still, the president does not shrink from America’s imperial presence and reaffirms the need for the “honorable” and judicious use of military power. … So far our action in the Philippines has been abundantly justified, not mainly and indeed not primarily because of the added dignity it has given us as a nation by proving that we are capable honorably and efficiently to bear the international burdens which a mighty people should bear, but even more because of the immense benefit that has come to the people of the Philippine Islands. In these islands we are steadily introducing both liberty and order, to a greater degree than their people have ever before known. We have secured justice…. We are constantly increasing the measure of liberty accorded the islanders, and next spring, if conditions warrant, we shall take a great stride forward in testing their capacity for self-government by summoning the first Filipino legislative assembly; and the way in which they stand this test will largely determine whether the self-government thus granted will be increased or decreased; for if we have erred at all in the Philippines it has been in proceeding too rapidly in the direction of granting a large measure of self-government. We are building roads. We have, for the immeasurable good of the people, arranged for the building of railroads. Let us also see to it that they are given free access to our markets. This nation owes no more imperative duty to itself and mankind than the duty of managing the affairs of all the islands under the American flag—the Philippines, Porto Rico [sic], and Hawaii—so as to make it evident that it is in every way to their advantage that the flag should fly over them…. Last August an insurrection broke out in Cuba which it speedily grew evident that the existing Cuban Government was powerless to quell. This Government was repeatedly asked by the then Cuban Government to intervene, and finally was notified by the President of Cuba that he intended to resign; that his decision was irrevocable; that none of the other constitutional officers would consent to carry on the Government, and that he was powerless to maintain order. It was evident that chaos was impending, and there was every probability that if steps were not immediately taken by this Government to try to restore order the representatives of various European nations in the island would apply to their respective governments for armed intervention in order to protect the lives and property of their citizens. Thanks to the preparedness of our Navy, I was able immediately to send enough ships to Cuba to prevent the situation from becoming hopeless; and I furthermore dispatched to Cuba the Secretary of War and the Assistant Secretary of State, in order that they might grapple with the situation on the ground. All efforts to secure an agreement between the contending factions, by which they should themselves come to an amicable understanding and settle upon some modus vivendi—some provisional government of their own —failed. Finally the President of the Republic resigned. The quorum of Congress assembled failed by deliberate purpose of its members, so that there was no power to act on his resignation, and the Government came to a halt. In accordance with the so-called Platt amendment, which was embodied in the constitution of Cuba, I thereupon proclaimed a provisional government for the island, the Secretary of War acting as provisional governor until he could be replaced by Mr. Magoon, the late minister to Panama and governor of the Canal Zone on the Isthmus; troops were sent to support them and to relieve the Navy, the expedition being handled with most satisfactory speed and efficiency. The insurgent chiefs immediately agreed that their troops should lay down their arms and disband; and the agreement was carried out. The provisional government has left the personnel of the old government and the old laws, so

far as might be, unchanged, and will thus administer the island for a few months until tranquillity can be restored, a new election properly held, and a new government inaugurated. Peace has come in the island; and the harvesting of the sugar-cane crop, the great crop of the island, is about to proceed. When the election has been held and the new government inaugurated in peaceful and orderly fashion the provisional government will come to an end. I take this opportunity of expressing upon behalf of the American people, with all possible solemnity, our most earnest hope that the people of Cuba will realize the imperative need of preserving justice and keeping order in the Island. The United States wishes nothing of Cuba except that it shall prosper morally and materially, and wishes nothing of the Cubans save that they shall be able to preserve order among themselves and therefore to preserve their independence. If the elections become a farce, and if the insurrectionary habit becomes confirmed in the Island, it is absolutely out of the question that the Island should continue independent; and the United States, which has assumed the sponsorship before the civilized world for Cuba’s career as a nation, would again have to intervene and to see that the government was managed in such orderly fashion as to secure the safety of life and property. The path to be trodden by those who exercise self-government is always hard, and we should have every charity and patience with the Cubans as they tread this difficult path. I have the utmost sympathy with, and regard for, them; but I most earnestly adjure them solemnly to weigh their responsibilities and to see that when their new government is started it shall run smoothly, and with freedom from flagrant denial of right on the one hand, and from insurrectionary disturbances on the other…. In many parts of South America there has been much misunderstanding of the attitude and purposes of the United States towards the other American Republics. An idea had become prevalent that our assertion of the Monroe Doctrine implied, or carried with it, an assumption of superiority, and of a right to exercise some kind of protectorate over the countries to whose territory that doctrine applies. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Yet that impression continued to be a serious barrier to good understanding, to friendly intercourse, to the introduction of American capital and the extension of American trade. The impression was so widespread that apparently it could not be reached by any ordinary means…. It must ever be kept in mind that war is not merely justifiable, but imperative, upon honorable men, upon an honorable nation, where peace can only be obtained by the sacrifice of conscientious conviction or of national welfare. Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness; but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another’s keeping. Neither can a nation, which is an entity, and which does not die as individuals die, refrain from taking thought for the interest of the generations that are to come, no less than for the interest of the generation of to-day; and no public men have a right, whether from shortsightedness, from selfish indifference, or from sentimentality, to sacrifice national interests which are vital in character. A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence in wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, yet it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war may be far better than not to have fought at all. As has been well and finely said, a beaten nation is not necessarily a disgraced nation; but the nation or man is disgraced if the obligation to defend right is shirked. … The United States Navy is the surest guarantor of peace which this country possesses. It is earnestly to be wisht [sic] that we would profit by the teachings of history in this matter. A strong and wise people will study its own failures no less than its triumphs, for there is wisdom to be learned from the study of both, of the mistake as well as of the success. For this purpose nothing could be more

instructive than a rational study of the war of 1812, as it is told, for instance, by Captain Mahan. There was only one way in which that war could have been avoided. If during the preceding twelve years a navy relatively as strong as that which this country now has had been built up, and an army provided relatively as good as that which the country now has, there never would have been the slightest necessity of fighting the war; and if the necessity had arisen the war would under such circumstances have ended with our speedy and overwhelming triumph. But our people during those twelve years refused to make any preparations whatever, regarding either the Army or the Navy. They saved a million or two of dollars by so doing; and in mere money paid a hundredfold for each million they thus saved during the three years of war which followed—a war which brought untold suffering upon our people, which at one time threatened the gravest national disaster, and which, in spite of the necessity of waging it, resulted merely in what was in effect a drawn battle, while the balance of defeat and triumph was almost even. I do not ask that we continue to increase our Navy. I ask merely that it be maintained at its present strength; and this can be done only if we replace the obsolete and outworn ships by new and good ones, the equals of any afloat in any navy. To stop building ships for one year means that for that year the Navy goes back instead of forward. The old battle ship Texas, for instance, would now be of little service in a stand-up fight with a powerful adversary. The old double-turret monitors have outworn their usefulness, while it was a waste of money to build the modern single-turret monitors. All these ships should be replaced by others; and this can be done by a well-settled program of providing for the building each year of at least one first-class battle ship equal in size and speed to any that any nation is at the same time building; the armament presumably to consist of as large a number as possible of very heavy guns of one caliber, together with smaller guns to repel torpedo attack; while there should be heavy armor, turbine engines, and in short, every modern device. Of course, from time to time, cruisers, colliers, torpedo-boat destroyers or torpedo boats, Will have to be built also. All this, be it remembered, would not increase our Navy, but would merely keep it at its present strength. Equally of course, the ships will be absolutely useless if the men aboard them are not so trained that they can get the best possible service out of the formidable but delicate and complicated mechanisms intrusted [sic] to their care. The marksmanship of our men has so improved during the last five years that I deem it within bounds to say that the Navy is more than twice as efficient, ship for ship, as half a decade ago. The Navy can only attain proper efficiency if enough officers and men are provided, and if these officers and men are given the chance (and required to take advantage of it) to stay continually at sea and to exercise the fleets singly and above all in squadron, the exercise to be of every kind and to include unceasing practise [sic] at the guns, conducted under conditions that will test marksmanship in time of war…. Source: Theodore Roosevelt. “Sixth Annual Message,” December 3, 1906. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29547.

Excerpt from “The Panama Canal a Sound Business Proposition,” a San Francisco Call Article Outlining the Expected Economic Benefits of the Panama Canal (1908) After 10 years of construction, the 48-mile-long Panama Canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the Isthmus of Panama was completed in 1914 and hailed as one of the engineering wonders of the world. Though it would become in Panama and throughout Latin America a concrete symbol of U.S. imperial policies in the region, those were not concerns of the writer of this article for the San Francisco Call in 1908, midway through the canal’s construction.

PROFESSOR EMORY R. JOHNSON OF THE FIRST CANAL COMMISSION ESTIMATES THAT THE FIRST TEN YEARS WILL SHOW A PROFIT OF $150,000,000. THE MOST RECENT ESTIMATE OF THE CANAL’S COST IS PLACED AT $300,000,000 Considered merely as an investment the Panama Canal gives every promise of being an exceptionally profitable business enterprise. The strategic value of this waterway between the two oceans, both in peace and war, is of course generally accepted. With the United States controlling the canal zone Uncle Sam will have his finger eventually on the greatest artery of trade in the world, and it is generally believed that almost any expenditure would be justified for this reason alone. As to the actual return upon the hundreds of millions of dollars which are being poured into the canal zone, many have serious misgivings. The government experts who have made a special study of the situation believe that the canal will pay handsomely from the first and that the profit will increase in years to come. Such estimates may be made with reasonable accuracy. The experience of the Suez canal is of great assistance in such estimates, while the government reports on trade among all the countries affected by the canal supply a definite basis for calculation. It is conservatively estimated that the canal will yield an income of $100,000,000 during the first 10 years of its operation. With the impetus which the canal will doubtless give to trade in this period alone it is believed that the income may even be at the rate of $15,000,000 a year or more. The cost of building the canal has been variously estimated; the most recent figure mentioned authoritatively has been a maximum of $300,000,000. Speaking in round numbers it seems reasonable to calculate a return of 3 per cent upon this enormous expenditure in the first 10 years of its operation alone. In years to come the profit may reasonably be estimated at considerably in excess of this figure. The data upon which these estimates are based have been collected by Prof. Emory R. Johnson of the first canal commission, who has made a special study of the probable income of the canal. His estimates are doubtless the most reliable obtainable. The toll for ships passing through the canal has not yet been definitely fixed, but it is probable that it will be regulated at $1 per vessel ton net. This figure may vary slightly, but it is safe to assume for a general calculation. It is also assumed for the purpose of such an estimate that the first ship will pass from sea to sea through the canal on January 1, 1915. According to Professor Johnson’s estimates there will be by [the] end of 1914 some 6,998,773 tons of traffic which will use the canal passing in both directions. The data upon which this estimate is made will be reviewed later. Now counting the increase in traffic at 6 1/2 per cent for the next 10 years, which is considered reasonable, there will be by 1924, some 11,372,941 tons…. The fixing of the toll rate is one of the most serious problems before the canal commission. If the rate be too high it will be difficult to deflect trade from its present courses, while if it be too low the income on this enormous investment will of course suffer. It will come as a surprise to most laymen in the matter to learn that the toll for the Suez canal is considerably higher than can be charged at Panama. The charge for passing through the Suez canal is 8 1/2 francs ($1.70), or nearly twice the probable charge at Panama. Incidentally, the traffic receipts of the Suez canal from 1870 to date amount to about $385,000,000. The receipts for 1870 were only $995,750, as against $7,689,214 in 1880. In 1890 the receipts had risen to $12,927,912, and by 1900 they had grown to $17,490,356. A similar increase in the traffic and the income at Panama would obviously bring to the United States a most gratifying return upon its investment. Since 1900 the receipts of the Suez canal have increased at the rate of about $2,000,000 a year. From 1891 to 1901, inclusive, the receipts were $174,786,109. In view of these figures the estimate of $100,000,000 income for the first 10 years of the Panama canal is obviously very conservative….

The Isthmian canal commission has made an exhaustive study of the trade routes affected by the canal, which forms the basis for these calculations. The commission points out that the [e]ffect of the canal on the present route will be a double one. The canal will facilitate the movement of commerce around the world. It will cause vessels sailing from Europe, as well as from the eastern part of the United States to carry on trade with the [O]rient. An immense amount of commerce which now plies between Europe or [the] eastern coast of North America and South America may be expected in the future, after passing through the Panama canal, to continue on and make the circuit of the globe after passing through the Suez canal. There is always more commercial advantage to the merchant in following this route than to return over the first line of traffic. The Panama canal will thus start in motion an enormous fleet of merchant vessels constantly around the world. The canal is expected to attract and deflect four great lines of trade, whose volume may be calculated with reasonable accuracy. The traffic between Europe and the Pacific coasts of North and South America may reasonably be expected to use the canal. The great fleet which plies between Europe and the [O]rient will find for the most part a shorter and more direct rout [sic] by way of Panama. The third great line of trade is that between Atlantic and Pacific America. At present this is largely confined to the trade between the east and west coasts [of] the United States, but with the impetus which the canal will give it is hoped the trade with South America on both seaboards will be brought into more continuous communication with both shores of the North American continent. There is also the trade between Atlantic America and the [O]rient, which is even now rapidly increasing. Source: “The Panama Canal a Sound Business Proposition,” The San Francisco Call (San Francisco, CA), April 19, 1908.

President Woodrow Wilson’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Mexican Affairs (August 27, 1913) President Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy was characterized by a highly moralistic and vigorous interventionism. Here he addresses the U.S. Congress on recent actions taken in the decade-long Mexican Revolution. In 1913, Mexico fell to the harshly repressive military rule of General Victoriano Huerta, whose government was embraced by European governments as a stabilizing force. Wilson, by contrast, condemned the regime and soon deployed U.S. forces to Mexico. Most striking about this passage is Wilson’s determined effort to cloak U.S. actions entirely in the altruistic terms of U.S. “friendship”—belying the deep U.S. investments in the country that were threatened by the volatile conditions there. Gentlemen of the Congress: It is clearly my duty to lay before you, very fully and without reservation, the facts concerning our present relations with the Republic of Mexico. The deplorable posture of affairs in Mexico I need not describe, but I deem it my duty to speak very frankly of what this Government has done and should seek to do in fulfillment of its obligation to Mexico herself, as a friend and neighbor, and to American citizens whose lives and vital interests are daily affected by the distressing conditions which now obtain beyond our southern border. Those conditions touch us very nearly. Not merely because they lie at our very doors. That of course makes us more vividly and more constantly conscious of them, and every instinct of neighborly interest and sympathy is aroused and quickened by them; but that is only one element in the determination of our duty. We are glad to call ourselves the friends of Mexico, and we shall, I hope, have many an occasion, in happier times as well as in these days of trouble and confusion, to show that our friendship is genuine and

disinterested, capable of sacrifice and every generous manifestation. The peace, prosperity, and contentment of Mexico mean more, much more, to us than merely an enlarged field for our commerce and enterprise. They mean an enlargement of the field of self-government and the realization of the hopes and rights of a nation with whose best aspirations, so long suppressed and disappointed, we deeply sympathize. We shall yet prove to the Mexican people that we know how to serve them without first thinking how we shall serve ourselves…. The present circumstances of the Republic, I deeply regret to say, do not seem to promise even the foundations of such a peace. We have waited many months, months full of peril and anxiety, for the conditions there to improve, and they have not improved. They have grown worse, rather. The territory in some sort controlled by the provisional authorities at Mexico City has grown smaller, not larger. The prospect of the pacification of the country, even by arms, has seemed to grow more and more remote; and its pacification by the authorities at the capital is evidently impossible by any other means than force. Difficulties more and more entangle those who claim to constitute the legitimate government of the Republic. They have not made good their claim in fact. Their successes in the field have proved only temporary. War and disorder, devastation and confusion, seem to threaten to become the settled fortune of the distracted country. As friends we could wait no longer for a solution which every week seemed further away. It was our duty at least to volunteer our good offices … in effecting some arrangement which would bring relief and peace and set up a universally acknowledged political authority there. Accordingly, I took the liberty of sending the Hon. John Lind, formerly governor of Minnesota, as my personal spokesman and representative, to the City of Mexico, with the following instructions: Press very earnestly upon the attention of those who are now exercising authority or wielding influence in Mexico the following considerations and advice: The Government of the United States does not feel at liberty any longer to stand inactively by while it becomes daily more and more evident that no real progress is being made towards the establishment of a government at the City of Mexico which the country will obey and respect. The Government of the United States does not stand in the same case with the other great Governments of the world in respect of what is happening or what is likely to happen in Mexico. We offer our good offices, not only because of our genuine desire to play the part of a friend, but also because we are expected by the powers of the world to act as Mexico’s nearest friend. We wish to act in these circumstances in the spirit of the most earnest and disinterested friendship…. We are seeking to counsel Mexico for her own good and in the interest of her own peace, and not for any other purpose whatever. The Government of the United States would deem itself discredited if it had any selfish or ulterior purpose in transactions where the peace, happiness, and prosperity of a whole people are involved. It is acting as its friendship for Mexico, not as any selfish interest, dictates. The present situation in Mexico is incompatible with the fulfillment of international obligations on the part of Mexico, with the civilized development of Mexico herself, and with the maintenance of tolerable political and economic conditions in Central America. It is upon no common occasion, therefore, that the United States offers her counsel and assistance. All America cries out for a settlement…. The Government of the United States will be glad to play any part in this settlement or in its carrying out which it can play honorably and consistently with international right. It pledges itself to recognize and in every way possible and proper to assist the administration chosen and set up in Mexico in the way and on the conditions suggested…. Source: Woodrow Wilson. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress on Mexican Affairs,” August 27, 1913. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65371.

Protest by Women of Palacagüina, Nicaragua, Against Destruction of Their Church by U.S. Marines (1929) Repeated and prolonged U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua was bitterly resented by generations of people throughout the country. This testimony of protest from a group of women in Palacagüina followed the rampage through the local Catholic Church by U.S. Marines during their occupation of the village. It is revealing of the fact that generations of Nicaraguans—including the legendary rebel fighter Sandino—found much to admire about America but could not understand the imperial policies of its government. Palacagüina, June 23, 1929 The Commandant American Forces in Nicaragua Managua Sir: In the month of March, 1928, this town was occupied by a column of marines of your command quartered since that time in our Holy Church. Although we have not looked with favor upon such occupation, we have had to accept it in order to further the pacification and peace which we need so badly in order to live, but the marines who occupy our church, instead of improving it, have dedicated themselves to its utter destruction, tearing down the altars and columns of concrete, which, although of no architectural merit, are of great value to us because of memories and legends associated with them. This conduct on the part of the marines, which has cost us so much in the past, is not in accord with our customs nor with American culture. We believe that you, the North Americans, sons of a rich and powerful country in all phases of life, would be moved to anger to see your work being destroyed in the manner that ours is in our church. For these reasons we pray that the Commander of Marines resident in Nicaragua will give orders to stop prevent the consummation of the ruin of our only work, which, although humble, holds for us cherished memories. Very respectfully, Guadalupe Córdoba. Ramona Centeno (X) Telefora R. Roque (X) Adela Iglecia (X) Visenta Cruz Telefora de los Reyes Córdoba. Francisca García. Agustina Cruz (X) [illegible] who cannot sign her name: Betruana [—illegible] Sirila Calderón who cannot sign her name: María de la [—] Witnessed by Mrs. [—] Calderón [—ita] de Jesus Valdibia who cannot sign their names: Adelaida Jarquín Ysabel González [et al] Source: National Archives, Record Group 127/Entry 206/Box2, United States Marines and Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, 1927–1932. June 23, 1929.

General Smedley Butler’s Memorial Day Speech, “War Is a Racket” (1933)

The most decorated marine in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps at the time of his death, General Smedley Butler (1881–1940) was also an outspoken critic of U.S. military intervention and what he termed “the business of war.” Having led or been part of U.S. military interventions throughout Latin America, he believed that much of his tenure had fundamentally been in the service of American corporations that were heavily invested in the region, not the nation’s genuine security. In this version of a public lecture he gave hundreds of times, he damns the causes of World War I as being driven by profit and warns against the possibility of another European war—a position that put him squarely in the mainstream of American opinion in the mid-1930s. WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations…. Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the “open door” policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000. Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war—a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men. Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit—fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends. But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children? What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits? Yes, and what does it profit the nation? Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twentyfive-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars…. The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war. The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits—ah! that is another matter—twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent—the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it. Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket— and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples: Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people—didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent…. Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914–1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad. There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times. Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910–1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914–1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year. Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910–1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period. Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910–1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000. A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent….

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public—even before a Senate investigatory body…. It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few. The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface. Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying “for some time” methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee—with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator—to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure. Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses—that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life…. In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army. So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side … it is His will that the Germans be killed. And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies … to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious. Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end all wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.” Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month. All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill … and be killed…. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation[’]s manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation —it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane

builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted—to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get. Let the workers in these plants get the same wages—all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers—yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders—everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches! … Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket—that and nothing else. Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people—those who do the suffering and still pay the price—make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers. Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn’t be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant—all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war—voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms—to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war. There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide —and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote. A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only. At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that “We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation.” Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only. Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh. The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast. The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles. The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She

never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can’t go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation. To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. We must take the profit out of war. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes…. Source: Smedley Butler. “War Is a Racket,” Round Table Press, 1935.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Statement on the Good Neighbor Policy in Cuba (August 13, 1933) Through his “Good Neighbor” approach, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to redirect U.S. foreign policy in Latin America away from repeated U.S. intervention and military occupation. His challenge became acute in Cuba soon after his inauguration, as the authoritarian and pro-U.S. regime of Gerardo Machado faced widespread revolt—an event that normally would have provoked military intervention. Instead, FDR pursued quiet mediation through his special envoy to Havana, Sumner Welles, who skillfully maneuvered Machado’s exit and the successful peaceful transfer of power to a new government. Though he deployed U.S. naval forces to the region, they did not intervene, and in 1934 FDR rescinded the Platt Amendment that had long justified U.S. intervention. Latest advices are to the effect that domestic disturbances, including acts of violence, are occurring in some parts of Cuba among certain elements of the population. In these circumstances, I feel constrained as a matter of special precaution and solely for the purpose of safeguarding and protecting the lives and persons of American citizens in Cuba, to order certain vessels to points on the Cuban Coast. The change of Government now taking place in Cuba is in entire accord with the recognized Constitution and laws of that country, and no possible question of intervention or of the slightest interference with the internal affairs of Cuba has arisen or is intended by this precautionary step to protect, if necessary, the lives of American citizens, pending the restoration of normal conditions of law and order by the Cuban authorities. I am giving strict instructions accordingly to the Commanders of each vessel. The American people deeply sympathize with the people of Cuba in their economic distress, and are praying that quiet and strict order may soon prevail in every part of Cuba. The American Government will lend all aid feasible, through constituted Cuban authorities, for the relief of the distressed people of the island. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Statement on the Good-Neighbor Policy in Cuba,” August 13, 1933. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14502.

Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934)

Passed in the second year of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, the Tydings-McDuffie Act provided a framework for Philippine independence, reclassified the immigration status of Filipinos living in the United States, set strict limitations on future immigration, and yet retained an imperial relationship of dependency between the archipelago and the United States. AN ACT To provide for the complete independence of the Philippine Islands, to provide for the adoption of a constitution and a form of government for the Philippine Islands, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, Convention to Frame Constitution for Philippine Islands Section 1. The Philippine Legislature is hereby authorized to provide for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, which shall meet in the hall of the house of representative[s] in the capital of the Philippine Islands, at such time as the Philippine Legislature may fix, but not later than October 1, 1934, to formulate and draft a constitution for the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands, subject to the conditions and qualifications prescribed in this Act, which shall exercise jurisdiction over all the territory ceded to the United States by the treaty of peace concluded between the United States and Spain on the 10th day of December 1898, the boundaries of which are set forth in article III of said treaty, together with those islands embraced in the treaty between Spain and the United States concluded at Washington on the 7th day of November 1900. The Philippine Legislature shall provide for the necessary expenses of such convention. Character of Constitution—Mandatory Provisions Sec. 2. (a) The constitution formulated and drafted shall be republican in form, shall contain a bill of rights, and shall, either as a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, contain provisions to the effect that, pending the final and complete withdrawal of the sovereignty of the United States over the Philippine Islands— (1) All citizens of the Philippine Islands shall owe allegiance to the United States. (2) Every officer of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall, before entering upon the discharge of his duties, take and subscribe an oath of office, declaring, among other things, that he recognizes and accepts the supreme authority of and will maintain true faith and allegiance to the United States. (3) Absolute toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured and no inhabitant or religious organization shall molested in person or property on account of religious belief or mode of worship. (4) Property owned by the United States, cemeteries, churches, and parsonages or convents appurtenant thereto, and all lands, buildings, and improvements used exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes shall be exempt from taxation. (5) Trade relations between the Philippine Islands and the United States shall be upon the basis prescribed in section 6. (6) The public debt of the Philippine Islands and its subordinate branches shall not exceed limits now or hereafter fixed by the Congress of the United States; and no loans shall be contracted in foreign countries without the approval of the President of the United States. (7) The debts, liabilities, and obligations of the present Philippine government, its Provinces, municipalities, and instrumentalities, valid and subsisting at the time of the adoption of the

(8) (9) (10) (11) (12)

(13) (14)

constitution, shall be assumed and paid by the new government. Provision shall be made for the establishment and maintenance of an adequate system of public schools, primarily conducted in the English language. Acts affecting currency, coinage, imports, exports, and immigration shall not become law until approved by the President of the United States. Foreign affairs shall be under the direct supervision and control of the United States. All acts passed by the Legislature of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall be reported to the Congress of the United States. The Philippine Islands recognizes the right of the United States to expropriate property for public uses, to maintain military and other reservations and armed forces in the Philippines, and, upon order of the President, to call into the service of such armed forces all military forces organized by the Philippine government. The decisions of the courts of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall be subject to review by the Supreme Court of the United States as provided in paragraph (6) of section 7. The United States may, by Presidential proclamation, exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands and for the maintenance of the government as provided in the constitution thereof, and for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty and for the discharge of government obligations under and in accordance with the provisions of the constitution….

Submission of Constitution to the President of the United States Sec. 3. Upon the drafting and approval of the constitution by the constitutional convention in the Philippine Islands, the constitution shall be submitted within two years after the enactment of this Act to the President of the United States, who shall determine whether or not it conforms with the provisions of this Act…. Source: Philippine Independence Act, Pub. L. 73–127, 48 Stat. 456, enacted March 24, 1934.

Standard Oil’s Reply to Mexico: Standard Oil Puts Forth Its Position on Expropriation of Oil Leases by the Mexican Government (1940) In 1936, Mexican oil workers went on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. President Lazaro Cárdenas ordered federal arbitration, which favored the workers. The matter was appealed and reached Mexico’s highest court but the companies remained obstinate, provoking President Cárdenas to nationalize the holdings of 17 foreign oil companies. The protest of Standard Oil to the Cárdenas government reflects the concerns of other American companies that were heavily invested in the nation’s oil industry. The Real Issue It will be recalled that the seizure of the American and other foreign oil properties in Mexico in March, 1938, was the culmination of a long series of confiscatory acts depriving foreigners of property and rights acquired in good faith under the laws and Constitution of Mexico; that for years the Mexican Government had been seeking to squeeze out the foreign owners and take over these oil properties; that seven months before the seizure was made the American oil companies wrote to the Department of State in Washington stating that the ultimate aim of Mexico was confiscation; that the seizure was carried out in

violation of the Mexican law of expropriation and of the Mexican Constitution itself; that, in addition, the Mexican Government has denied that any compensation is due for the value of the oil in the subsoil of the seized properties—which obviously constitutes the chief value of any oil property—on the specious but unsound ground that the owners of the land had no “property right” in this oil; although they admittedly had the exclusive and irrevocable right to extract it. Brief Makes Sweeping Challenges, Denials and Assertions The Mexican Government, in its brief, challenges the companies’ contention that the real issue is Mexico’s confiscation of the oil properties. It bases its denial on the fact that Mexico has declared its intention to pay a just compensation, which allegedly it is economically able to pay, and contends that this declaration of intention validates the seizure as a lawful act of expropriation. It then proceeds to set forth the proposition that the real issue is whether the companies shall continue to operate their properties protected by what the author of the brief picturesquely describes as an “illegal and privileged system of spoliation and abuse, not only to the detriment of the working classes and of the sovereignty and dignity of Mexico, but also with injurious effect on the friendly and cordial relations which are maintained and fostered by the governments and peoples of both nations.” The brief goes on to assert that the companies have obstructed the payment of just compensation by their opposition to an impartial valuation. It charges them with not desiring compensation but wanting, rather, to continue operating their properties under a “privileged and illegal” regime. Finally, the brief presents a series of charges against the companies to the effect that they are endeavoring to deceive public opinion, and that they have threatened American manufacturers so that these will not sell their products to the Government of Mexico. In conclusion, the first chapter states that the negative and destructive effort of the companies in sowing mistrust contrasts with the cooperation and friendship of two great nations. These charges, if true, would be serious, but it needs only a cursory review of the facts in the case to demonstrate that the charges are as unfounded as they are misleading. Mexico Has Failed to Make Payments Mexico not only has failed to make any cash payments but has maintained as the central point of its entire position its refusal to make any payments whatever for the “expropriated” exclusive right of the companies to extract oil from their properties. Although the concessions are listed among the properties expropriated no value has been assigned to them. The elimination of the subsoil rights makes plain the fact that the Cárdenas Administration has no intention to make a fair or adequate compensation for the property which it has seized. In other words, the Government’s declaration of its “intention to pay” is grossly misleading, as it expressly refuses intended payment for the major value of the properties. The protection and safeguard of these subsoil rights was the crux and goal of all the discussions, negotiations, international agreements, statutes and decisions from 1917 on. Nothing could have been more solemnly assured and guaranteed. Mexico now repudiates the whole legal structure thus consecrated in the most formal documents. What the companies have sought and still seek is that Mexico’s solemn commitments, recorded in agreements, the Constitution and the laws of the country, shall be applied properly and impartially. They deny Mexico’s right to repudiate them. They have stated that if the laws of Mexico were fairly and justly applied, the Government would be unable to carry out the expropriation inasmuch as it lacks the economic capacity to provide the necessary indemnity, not only for the surface installations but also for the subsoil rights which alone give an oil property value and for which alone it is sought. In spite of this fact, the Mexican brief makes the statement that the companies desire to continue operating their properties

protected by an illegal and privileged regime of spoliation to the detriment of the working classes. Were this just another manifestation of Mexican demagoguery designed to justify a high-handed confiscation, it would be unworthy of attention. To show how far it is from the truth it is sufficient to recall the statement of the President of Mexico, Lazaro Cárdenas, published in the press in Mexico on February 29, 1940, wherein he said that the oil workers enjoy an especially privileged situation in comparison with other organized workers of the country. It is a matter of record that the oil workers in the service of the expropriated companies enjoyed wages and working conditions superior to those of the workmen of any other industry in Mexico. To call this spoliation to the detriment of the working classes is manifestly absurd…. Companies Seek Friendly Relations with Mexico The companies at all times have sought to maintain the friendliest possible relations with the Mexican Government. It goes without saying that they are better off when relations between the two countries are friendly than when, as in recent years, they have been strained. It follows, therefore, that the Government’s statement that the companies wish to continue under a regime that would be detrimental to the dignity and the sovereignty of Mexico and to the good and loyal relations of friendship which are maintained and developed by the Governments and peoples of both nations, lacks any substantiation. The so-called “expropriation” does not tend to develop friendly relations between the peoples and the Governments. It is difficult to see how the reparation of an injury could endanger the friendly relations between two nations…. Source: The Reply to Mexico. New York: Standard Oil Co., 1940.

3. World War I and the Interwar Era

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Although the United States had become a hemispheric imperial force by the second decade of the 20th century, the international events of 1914–1939 further established the nation as a truly global power. In no small part because it was presided over by Woodrow Wilson, the first internationalist U.S. president, the First World War—known for a generation as the Great War or the World War—positioned the United States at war’s end to play a major role in reshaping both the world map and the rulebook of international relations. However, Wilson’s unbending leadership style and American resistance toward further entanglement with European affairs prompted Senate rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and U.S. participation in the League of Nations, leading U.S. foreign policy into a period long described as “isolationist.” That term is to some degree a misnomer: without question, pacifist and isolationist sentiments dominated the American polity during the interwar era of the 1920s and 1930s. And yet coincident with a relative withdrawal from active engagement on the world stage, the nation remained a hemispheric imperial power with far-flung strategic interests it sought to secure. The U.S. Navy, after a brief postwar retrenchment, soon became the largest in the world. Moreover, the post–World War I era saw American corporations dramatically increasing their overseas investments, further establishing the context for a more potent projection of U.S. military power. More than a century later, the shocking events that transpired on the European continent during the summer of 1914 continue to absorb the attention of many historians, scholars of imperialism among them. The June 28, 1914, assassination by a Bosnian Serb nationalist of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, set in motion a chain of events that by summer’s end engulfed Europe and much of the world in World War I. Underlying the geopolitical tinderbox of Europe was nearly a half-century of empire building. Since the 1870s, an increasingly fierce competition to acquire colonies had been waged by the great powers of Europe, Russia, and Japan. The imperial rivalry triggered an arms race—in particular, a buildup of offensive naval forces between Britain and Germany. Equally important, the quest for geostrategic advantage over rivals produced a series of diplomatic crises that became gradually more severe, as well as a tangled web of secret alliances between and among nations that proved combustible. In combination, these developments turned the archduke’s assassination, an event incited by the nationalist aspirations of the peoples of the Balkan region, into the four-year conflagration that resulted in 16 million dead. After a relatively quiescent period for imperialism in the first part of the 19th century, by 1875 the fever for colonies had returned with a vengeance. With the Industrial Revolution having entered its second explosive phase, Great Britain, France, the new nations of Germany (especially) and Italy, Portugal, along with Russia and Japan, all engaged in a new quest for raw materials, markets, and geostrategic advantage —including the positioning of key naval bases. The imperialist impulse reached its zenith in Africa,

where it was cloaked in racially charged ideologies that intersected with Americans’ own Manifest Destiny dogma. Backed by ever-growing militaries, the “scramble for Africa” succeeded with astonishing rapidity: in 1875, Europeans had colonized about 10 percent of the continent; by 1900 seven nations held imperial control over 90 percent of Africa. Following the archduke’s assassination, Austria-Hungary determined to punish Serbia, whose defense had been pledged by Russia. Soon the obligations of defense alliances drew one country after another into the conflict, ultimately along two opposing sides: the Triple Entente (“the Allies”) of the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian empire, and the Central powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and soon the Ottoman Empire. Italy had been allied with those two great powers but opted, along with Japan, to join the Triple Entente. Germany, whose penetration into West Africa and growing military force in the years leading up to the war had been viewed with growing alarm, entered the war through its alliance with Austria-Hungary. Fierce anti-German belligerents and industrialists in Britain and France looked to crush that nation’s rising economic and political power and prepared for war. Hoping to secure a quick victory before the British could send reinforcements and Russia could mobilize, Germany launched an attack on France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. As waves of soldiers poured in from all sides, the illusion of a decisive victory evaporated. By early 1915, through the forceful and all-encompassing nature of colonial imperialism, 60 nations were involved. Alliances that had served the interests of each empire and maintained a balance of power suddenly exploded in a “total war” that involved the first widespread use of modern technologies such as chemical weapons, machine guns, tanks, aerial bombardment, and submarine warfare. At the center of the conflict was a grinding war of attrition fought in trenches extending hundreds of miles from Switzerland to the English Channel. When war erupted, President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) declared that the United States would remain “impartial in thought as well as deed.” A number of factors, however, made that position increasingly difficult to maintain. At the outset, the militaristic pomp and territorial ambitions of Germany seemed to most Americans the greater threat. Further, influential elites identified with the British political system and possessed strong economic ties that helped draw the United States into war on the side of the Triple Entente. In October 1915 Wilson lifted the ban on bank loans to all warring powers, a decision overwhelmingly favoring the Allies. Banker J. P. Morgan Jr., who had already loaned Russia $12 million, was soon serving as purchasing agent and banker of far greater sums to the Triple Entente. A Morgan syndicate loaned more than a half-billion dollars to the British. Driven by massive war orders from the Allies, industrial and agricultural production in the United States boomed, and by 1916 Americans held a clear financial stake in a Triple Entente victory. Armed disruption in that trans-Atlantic trade played a central role in the U.S. decision to enter the war in 1917. International law allowed the naval transport of nonmilitary goods to warring parties. However, Britain controlled the seas and its navy immediately blockaded German ports, and trade to the Central powers came to a virtual halt. Britain forbid shipment to Germany of all foodstuffs and raw materials, blacklisted American firms that dealt with the Central powers, and occasionally stopped U.S. ships and confiscated cargoes. Although President Wilson protested these events as a clear violation of U.S. neutrality, he did not retaliate by suspending British loans or exports. Wilson’s decision served the economic interests of most Americans, but for critics of his policy betrayed the pretense of U.S. neutrality. British propaganda exaggerated German atrocities and painted the Allies as noble defenders of liberty. German actions on the high seas reinforced the worst anti-German prejudices held by many Americans. The Unterseeboot (undersea boat, a submarine) strained the guidelines of traditional maritime law as Germany declared the right to sink without warning any British ship they believed

carried war-related cargo. Although the Germans initially pledged not to sink U.S. ships, the right of Americans to sail on ships of belligerent nations was clearly endangered. In March 1915, after an American was killed when a British ship was torpedoed, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan urged Wilson to forbid Americans to travel in war zones, but the president refused. Bryan soon resigned. Two months later came the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger ship, killing 1,198 persons, 128 of them Americans. Although the incident confirmed for many the image of Germans as uncivilized barbarians, the ship had been carrying a large cache of war munitions. Former president Theodore Roosevelt called the sinking of the Lusitania an “act of piracy” and like others in the “preparedness movement,” urged Wilson to plan for war. Resisting such calls for now, the president demanded only that Germany protect passenger vessels and pay for American losses, to which Germany acquiesced. U-boat attacks subsided, but only temporarily. When in March 1916 the French steamer Sussex was torpedoed, injuring several Americans, President Wilson issued an ultimatum to Germany that they cease attacks against passenger and cargo ships or face the severing of relations and possible U.S. intervention. Again, Germany backed down but their “Sussex Pledge” was conditioned on the United States compelling Britain to end the blockade. Wilson refused, but Germany and the United States remained at peace through the 1916 election year. This allowed the president to win narrow reelection on the slogan that “He Kept Us Out of War”—even as he and the Congress quietly prepared for war. Equally significant were Wilson’s diplomatic efforts to convince the Allies that the settlement ending the war should be a “peace without victory” that would deny belligerents the spoils of triumph and spare losers the worst of defeat. Even before U.S. intervention, therefore, Wilson was angling to preside over the establishment of what he envisioned as a new Progressive postwar order. In this he was influenced by a vigorous American peace movement, with which Wilson remained at least intellectually aligned. Simultaneously, women suffragists’ demands for an electoral voice intersected with the central role women played in the peace movement, and the Progressive reform agenda of the era, much of which Wilson supported. The popularization of women’s legitimate voice in matters of war and peace was heard in the 1915 hit song, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Wilson welcomed to the White House Jane Addams, one of the founders of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). With its roots in 1915 amid the widespread shock and horror of the war, the WILPF applauded Wilson’s May 1916 idealistic proposal for an “association of nations” dedicated to the pursuit of peace and territorial integrity and equal respect for all nations. Early in 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, part of an offensive strategy to break the stalemate and win the war, but one that also risked U.S. intervention. In February 1917, British authorities intercepted the so-called Zimmermann Telegram—a communiqué from Germany’s foreign minister to its ambassador to Mexico, instructing the minister to propose to Mexico that in the event of U.S. intervention—increasingly likely with Germany’s renewed U-boat attacks—Mexico should join the Central powers. Germany would fund its participation and ensure that Mexico won back its lost territory from the Mexican War. Despite recent hostilities with the United States, Mexico rejected the proposal. Still, the revelation outraged Americans and pushed the nation closer to war. On April 2, Woodrow Wilson addressed the Congress, seeking a declaration of war against Germany. U.S. involvement in a “war to end all wars,” said the president, would “make the world safe for democracy.” Overwhelming approval came four days later. Wilson’s claim that the war would ensure a more democratic world was aided by the collapse in February of Czar Nicholas’s autocratic regime in Russia, replaced temporarily by the liberal-democratic Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky government. However, a few months later came the Bolshevik (“October”) Revolution of Vladimir Lenin, which led to

the establishment of the anti-Western, Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin withdrew Soviet participation in the war, signed a peace treaty with Germany, and publicly condemned the war as a conflict not for democracy but between capitalist-imperialist powers serving their own interests, indifferent to the working classes who did the fighting. Lenin revealed secret treaty discussions alleging that France and Britain were no better than Germany in plotting to exploit the war to enlarge their respective national territories and empires, damaging claims of a high-minded purpose for the war. Lenin’s condemnation prompted Wilson to attempt to restore the credibility of the Allied cause and incidentally position the United States as the central arbiter of the postwar peace. In January 1918, he proposed his Fourteen Points, which reaffirmed the American commitment to a war for democracy and self-rule for all nations, renounced territorial aggrandizement as a legitimate war aim, and called for a League of Nations to ensure permanent global peace and security. Wilson’s proposal helped reclaim at least a portion of the moral high ground of public opinion but was greeted with indifference by Allied leaders. When the United States intervened in World War I, it had the 17th-largest army in the world. However, within months the number of men under arms grew from 100,000 to 5 million—a combination of 2 million volunteers and 3 million young men drafted into America’s newly established “Selective Service” system. Many of America’s young men were galvanized by propaganda aiming at their patriotic impulses. In just over two years of existence, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI) penetrated Americans’ lives through posters, moving pictures, lectures, rallies, mail, telegraph, and early radio to deliver patriotic, often German-vilifying messages about the need for Americans to volunteer, ration, plant victory gardens, and produce for victory. Most importantly the CPI preached national unity and no dissension, popularly reinforcing the legislative mechanisms of the Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917– 1918) that attempted to silence the antiwarmovement and antigovernment criticism. The highly chauvinistic atmosphere suppressed anti-imperialist, antiwar activity, while also leveling an attack on unions that intensified after the war. Although they arrived late in the war, U.S. “doughboys” made a critical difference in the spring of 1918—just as Germany launched its largest offensive of the war. Advancing at an unprecedented pace, German troops were within striking distance of Paris when the Americans arrived to help save the city. They then fought in a number of other key battles and led weary Allied forces in a huge offensive that fall across the Argonne Forest. The counterassault helped compel Germany to accept the Armistice that ended the war—signed at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Wilson’s Fourteen Points served as the basis for peace discussions that commenced at Versailles just outside Paris. Welcomed enthusiastically across Europe, Wilson possessed an international prestige that November that is nearly without equal among American presidents. His vision of a democratic world of collective security, shrunken militaries, open diplomacy, and sovereignty for all nations prompted declarations of “savior” and “Wilson the Just.” Oppressed, colonized peoples from the Middle East to Southeast Asia saw the Fourteen Points as a means of ensuring their long-sought independence. Inside the Paris Peace Conference, the reception was far more muted. In the end, the Treaty of Versailles only selectively endorsed the principles of self-determination. The sovereignty of Belgium and Poland, for example, was affirmed, while the former Muslim Ottoman Empire was partitioned by the new League of Nations. Britain and France were the greatest beneficiaries of the new era of Western penetration into “the Middle East.” Wilson could not stop the transfer of German-held Asian colonies to the Japanese, nor a number of other territorial annexations. Nor could he prevent the Allies from severely punishing Germany with steep reparations, the loss of additional territory, and effective disarmament— decisions that would have far-reaching consequences.

Wilson left Versailles generally undeterred, for he had won the league, which he believed could overcome all flaws in the treaty. Determined to achieve U.S. Senate ratification of the Versailles Treaty, Wilson faced intense opposition from the Republican Party—one wing of which believed the United States had been duped into a war for European greed and ambition and wanted the United States to disentangle itself from international affairs. Also vocal were old-guard conservatives led by the formidable Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Skeptical of the very principles underlying the Fourteen Points, they believed the treaty’s premises threatened America’s sovereignty and status as a world power. Lodge offered amendments but this proved futile. Wilson demanded passage of the treaty as it was, campaigning tirelessly for it until collapsing with a brain hemorrhage. In the end, the treaty failed to win Senate passage. The League of Nations went forward without the United States—a significant deficiency that helped doom that body over the next two decades. Echoing the isolationists in the Treaty of Versailles debate, Americans turned inward after the war. Troubling events abroad—the growing bitterness in Germany over its punishing defeat and resultant growth of the dangerously nationalistic and racist National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party, the installation of the Italian Fascist prime minister Benito Mussolini in 1922, and the increasingly aggressive territorial ambitions of the Japanese Empire—all seemed far away. Despite the weakness of the League of Nations, interest among policymakers remained high in measures that might contain the size of navies and prevent small regional conflicts from erupting into world wars—hence the Washington Conference of 1921–1922, and the idealistic but futile Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. The American peace movement enjoyed mainstream support. Americans read antiwar novels such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and nonfiction works like Walter Mills’s America, Road to War that critically examined the economic forces behind U.S. intervention. Foreign tracts leveled munitions makers “merchants of death.” In 1934, U.S. congressman Gerald Nye led an investigation into the veracity of such allegations. Citizen disillusionment deepened over a horrific conflict that took the lives of more than 116,000 Americans and wounded more than 232,000. Simultaneously with the cultural turn away from world affairs, the interwar era saw dramatically escalating overseas investment by American corporations. In Africa, U.S. investments increased nearly tenfold, from $13 billion in 1914 to $124 in 1940. U.S. manufacturing concerns invested heavily in Europe, nearly doubling in the 1920s alone. Petroleum companies looked to penetrate the British-FrenchDutch hold on the oil fields of the Middle East and East Indies. By the early 1930s, U.S. oil company investments in the Middle East, Mexico, and Venezuela made the industry overall the second-largest sector of the U.S. overseas economy. In sum, American business increasingly globalized its operations in the interwar era, laying the groundwork for far more prodigious overseas ventures to commence at the conclusion of World War II.

Addams, Jane (1860–1935) Laura Jane Addams, author, activist, social worker, pacifist, and anti-imperialist, was born September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. She devoted her life to service and reform, pursuing causes from women’s suffrage to world peace. Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881. She received a baccalaureate degree from the same institution, then known as Rockford College (now Rockford University), in 1882. Many observers credit Addams with helping to establish the profession of social work. While this may be an overstatement, Addams was one of the most widely recognized proponents of social welfare

during the Progressive Era. She also served as the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work, an office to which she was elected in 1910. In this regard, Addams was one of numerous figures of her time who believed both the future of the nation and the fate of democracy hinged on recognizing the interdependence of members of distinct socioeconomic classes. For both ethical and practical reasons, Addams contended that privileged members of society ignored the disadvantaged at their own peril. Through a variety of means, she struggled to render U.S. society more equitable toward all its members. Jane Addams is best known for her work in the settlement house movement, a Progressive initiative dedicated to understanding and mitigating the plight of immigrants and the poor. During her international travels, Addams took note of the settlement models in place elsewhere, most notably Toynbee Hall in London, which proved a formative influence in her development as an agent of change. In 1889, Addams searched Chicago, Illinois, to identify a location at which she might open a settlement house in partnership with Ellen Gates Starr, a classmate from the seminary. Hull House opened its doors on September 18, 1889, founded as a center for urban service, training, and inquiry. Hull House staff (known as “residents”) devoted their careers to the protection of the nation’s most vulnerable populations. Among the best known of Hull House’s residents are Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, and Alice Hamilton. Based on her efforts at Hull House, Addams worked with social welfare colleagues to establish the National Federation of Settlements. Beyond her efforts in these regards, Addams maintained a strong profile as a humanitarian and social critic. She lent support to multiple Progressive causes, including efforts to promote public health, address the problems of child labor, advance the political rights of women, guard against the exploitation of immigrants, safeguard industrial-age workplace conditions, ensure sanitation standards, improve the legal standing of youth within the court system, and combat government corruption. In this context, Addams also helped found numerous organizations intended to support a more just society, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Jane Addams was a leader of progressive reform in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Best known for the establishment of Hull House, one of the first social welfare settlement houses in the nation, Addams was also an outspoken, determined opponent of imperialism and militarism. (Library of Congress)

In addition, Addams was a tireless opponent of imperialism and a staunch advocate of international peace. In 1914, she joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nonviolence alliance. Addams also played a key role in the development of the Central Anti-Imperialism League, a regional affiliate of the national organization, the Anti-Imperialism League. This group originated in the 1890s, when dissenters questioned the Spanish-American War and other acts of American imperialism. Even when her views were publicly denounced as unpatriotic, as was the case during World War I, Addams persisted in her contention that imperialism would inevitably lead to conflict, militarism, and war. Addams became involved with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, attending the group’s annual congresses and serving as its president. When she stepped down from that post in 1929, Addams was named honorary president for life. She went on to support the Progressive Party and the Peace Party, political entities advocating a more equitable and peaceful world. In 1931, she became the first American woman to be recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize, which she received with Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Both advocated pacifism, disarmament, and an end to war. Throughout her career, Jane Addams worked as a public intellectual, striving to achieve a pervasive impact by bringing her insights to bear in the lived world. For this reason, Addams’s outlook and philosophy have caused some observers to characterize her as an American pragmatist. Not content to understand a problem, or merely to soften its effects, she committed to work toward lasting change at the levels of policy and law. Addams died of cancer on May 21, 1935, and was buried in her hometown of Cedarville, Illinois. Linda S. Watts

See also: American Anti-Imperialist League; Peace Movement, World War I; Peace Movement (1930s)

Further Reading Brown, Victoria Bissell. The Education of Jane Addams. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Jane Addams and the Dream of Democracy: A Life. New York: Perseus, 2002. Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Lasch, Christopher, ed. The Social Thought of Jane Addams. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

Africa, U.S. Interests in U.S. interests in Africa grew as a result of its involvement in World War I. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination occurred on June 28, 1914, at a time when U.S. interests and policies were shifting away from the country’s professed isolationism. President Woodrow Wilson reacted to the outbreak of war in Europe by declaring U.S. policy one of neutrality. However, the war rendered this position impractical. The policy shift from neutrality to engagement primarily affected Europe and Latin America, but spilled over into America’s approach to Africa. At the beginning of the war, the United States had minimal involvement on the continent; by war’s end, U.S. diplomatic efforts attempted to apply Wilsonian views to Germany’s former African colonies while simultaneously appeasing its allies. Official U.S. foreign policy generally avoided overseas entanglements until the late 19th century. In Africa, European nations completed their massive colonial land grab by 1900, often referred to as the “scramble for Africa.” The United States, focused on its own economic concerns and internal development, did not participate. However, U.S. policymakers and economic elites understood colonialism’s economic advantages, which was made abundantly clear with the Spanish-American War (1898) and its aftermath. By the first decade of the 20th century, the United States was an international power with foreign colonial possessions. U.S. economic interests in Africa grew throughout the early 20th century. In 1900, American investment in Africa was very low—the least of any world region. One estimate places American investment at only $1 million in 1900. As the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, the government and private corporations invested abroad to obtain raw materials for manufacture. Africa contained such resources. In 1914, American investment had increased dramatically to $13 million, focused mainly in Egypt and South Africa. Low investment was caused by preferential tariffs and geographical distance until 1916. The Shipping Act expanded U.S. freight and shipping lines, allowing increased trade with Africa by 1920. Slow, steadily rising investment levels continued during the interwar period, with American investment reaching $124 million by 1940. The United States had an established record of humanitarian assistance in Africa when the war began. War prevented humanitarian activity in Africa, acquiring a more ideological outlook in the postwar years. In 1914 the U.S. government sent Brigadier General William Crawford Gorgas, surgeon general of the U.S. Army, to South Africa to eradicate malaria in the country’s mining camps. Fatalities endangered the lucrative venture of diamond and gold mining. Upon implementing his recommendations, malaria incidents dropped to 1 percent. These efforts exemplified the type of humanitarian assistance the United States was most prepared to offer African colonies—assistance that linked U.S. economic interests with humanitarian benefit. American involvement in the Congo exemplified how the United States applied its own internal social values to African colonies. Belgian king Leopold II arranged for the Congo Free State to be established in 1885, stipulating he would improve the quality of life in the colony. Instead, he tortured, murdered, and

abused the local peoples for his own purposes. With Americans outraged, the U.S. government intervened, seeking to end many of the abusive customs there, such as slave trade and wife purchase. Other abuses were perpetrated on rubber farmers, negatively impacting U.S. economic interests. Indirect U.S. and other international pressures caused the Belgian government to annex the Congo. Though this case occurred prior to the war, it represents how Americans applied antislavery and pro–human rights values to African nations. President Wilson tried to continue this trend, despite resistance from European nations who lorded over much of the continent.

W. E. B. DUBOIS, “THE AFRICAN ROOTS OF WAR” “The African Roots of War” was an article written by the great African American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and author W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) in which he argued that the imperialist scramble for the riches of the African continent had been a central cause of World War I. Appearing in the May 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the article emphasized first and foremost the centrality of Africa to the course of human civilization and world history. DuBois then argued that though the Balkans might have been the immediate trigger for the conflagration of the Great War, the European belligerents’ ongoing quest over the previous three decades to colonize and divide the natural riches of Africa was a fundamental source of the conflict. DuBois then took aim at what he termed the “paradox of democratic despotism” that he argued had been carried on for decades in Africa by the presumably “superior” governments of Europe. He wrote, for example, that conflicts between British and French invaders at Fashoda on the Nile River and between Britain and Dutch Afrikaners in the Boer Wars, though often cloaked in the popular press in the self-serving racialized language of “the white man’s burden” of the era, were ultimately

wars of imperial conquest that led directly to World War I. Gold, diamonds, and the many other natural riches of the African continent represented, he said, an unappreciated source of the imperialist conflict that World War I truly was. In recent years the DuBois article has received renewed attention from scholars of World War I and imperialism, as well as from critics of the newfound interest in, and the militarized presence of the United States in Africa.

The case of Liberia represents an intersection of U.S. humanitarian, economic, and political interests —at the center of which was the issue of slavery. Some popular support existed for the resettlement abroad of former slaves, and after the Civil War (1865), the recently freed slaves. Although uncertainty prevailed as to its economic viability and resources, Liberia offered a repatriation opportunity for African American volunteers. As early as 1819 Congress provided funding for the establishment of Liberia for that purpose. Ultimately, Liberia’s expatriate settlements were mismanaged financially and experienced encroachment from Britain and France. Prior to World War I, the United States had overseen the treasury, finalized boundaries with European colonies, and assisted in creating the Liberian military. Later, in the 1920s, the United States offered economic aid and financed resettlement for immigrating populations. Many American companies benefited from the relationship, particularly Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, which claimed vast rubber operations in the country. In January 1918, President Wilson’s Fourteen Points outlined his high-minded vision for the postwar world. Wilson advocated self-determination for Germany’s former colonies, but was unable to convince the European victors to adopt this position. Many of the former colonies’ fates had long since been decided. For example, the Anglo-French Treaty (1914) divided Cameroon and Togoland between the British and French; the Treaty of London (1915) promised Italy land in Africa for joining the cause. Thus, the United States adapted its postwar strategy toward Africa to be dual-purposed: to recognize Europe’s colonial interests and leave an aperture to pursue its own economic, cultural, and strategic interests on the continent. Responding to the European stance that self-determination was not possible for Africa, Wilson reconciled the competing positions through the League of Nations (1920). Article 22 of the league’s covenant contained provisions to mirror self-determination. Germany’s former colonies would be governed as mandates, the intent being that advanced nations would tutor less developed nations. Central African areas joined the second mandate, while Southwest Africa joined the third. The mandate ranking reflected development levels, with less advanced nations requiring more resources and time for tutelage. The mandate system was the closest compromise to self-determination that the United States could make without damaging European diplomatic relations. There U.S. relations on the African continent would remain until the next global conflict. Laura Steckman See also: Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Duigan, Peter, and L. H. Gann. The United States and Africa: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dumbuya, Peter A. “The United States and West Africa: The Institutionalization of Foreign Relations in an Age of Ideological Ferment.” In Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola, eds. The United States and West Africa: Interactions and Relations. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008, pp. 237–254. Herring, George C. From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Julien, Claude. America’s Empire. Translated by Renaud Bruce. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971.

American League to Limit Armaments

America in the early 20th century was a clubbable society in which citizens often came together in civic, religious, social, and political settings to discuss and act on issues of the day. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 found most Americans in favor of the nation hewing to its traditional role of nonentanglement in foreign affairs, but others believed the United States might be drawn into the war inadvertently if the belligerents perceived military weakness or judged America incapable of protecting itself. It was natural, then, for like-minded individuals in both camps to join together and promote their respective points of view. Advocates supporting the concept of preparedness demanded that the nation take pragmatic steps to eliminate actual or perceived vulnerabilities in the nation’s defenses. One of the most important preparedness organizations was the National Security League, formed in 1914. S. Stanwood Menken, a corporate lawyer visiting Europe when the war started, was prompted by his experiences there to review the state of American military readiness. He was soon joined by like-minded prominent individuals such as Theodore Roosevelt and former army chief of staff Leonard Wood to create an organization to educate the public on the need for preparedness, to lobby political leaders for universal military service, and to secure increased spending on the army and navy. Other Americans believed such actions defied logic. If the nation intended to remain neutral, there was little reason to spend large sums on preparation for war. Even defensive preparations for war, they thought, were wasteful and diverted money from better uses. In any case, they argued, increasing the availability of weapons made war more rather than less likely. President Woodrow Wilson, in his December 8, 1914, State of the Nation address spoke forcefully in support of America’s nonmilitaristic traditions while dismissing the preparedness fears, saying of national defense, “There is no new need to discuss it. We shall not alter our attitude toward it because some amongst us are nervous and excited” (Wilson, 1914). Organizations like the National Security League seemed to their opponents to be drawing America down a path leading to war. The American League to Limit Armaments was one of a number of antipreparedness groups that formed to oppose their program. The American League to Limit Armaments held its inaugural meeting on December 18, 1914, in New York City. Membership in the league included a broad mix of Progressive intellectuals, social reformers, religious leaders, and antiwar advocates. The first meeting of the league was opened by the Episcopalian bishop of New York, David H. Greer, and presided over by Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler. Other attendees included anti-imperialist journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, activist social worker Lillian D. Wald, and Socialist and feminist Crystal Eastman. By 1914, many people believed that resorting to war was an outmoded method for settling national differences. International peace conferences at The Hague (1899, 1907) and the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in which the United States played a prominent role, offered peaceful substitutes for force, and recent experience had proven arbitration’s utility in settling international disagreements. Most notably perhaps, the Geneva Conventions that preceded World War I established rules of armed conflict, showing that even war might have its scope limited by international agreement. Leading members of the League to Limit Armaments had long associations with efforts to substitute negotiation for conflagration. League president Nicholas Murray Butler served for five years as chair of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration. Secretary L. Hollingsworth Wood, in addition to his civil rights work, was a Quaker of the Orthodox Society of Friends in New York, which had long participated in the movement for international peace. The support of these and many other prominent Americans at the beginning of the war gave international peace efforts a respectable popular character and social prestige. Industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford gave substantial financial support to

peace efforts. However, this popular view of peace advocacy shifted as events altered America’s view of the war. Judging by the writings of the league’s president and news accounts of the organization, the league was not a pacifist organization, and it assessed its ability to affect the war under way in Europe as limited. In March 1915, the league announced its long-term intention to pursue the restriction of armies and navies throughout the world by international agreement, but only after the European war ended. A New York Times article quotes an unnamed league spokesman who said, “We are not, as an organization, proposing methods of attempting to bring peace to Europe until Europe is ready to stop fighting of its own accord, nor are we committed to other proposals looking toward the abolition of war” (“Campaign to Limit Armaments Begun,” March 15, 1915). This long view taken by the league eventually caused some of its members to shift support, joining or forming new organizations to pursue peace with a more single-minded intensity. One organization whose lineage passed through the league was the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), formed in 1915. One outspoken league critic of the Wilson administration as it moved closer to war was the leader of the Woman’s Peace Party, Crystal Eastman. Eastman helped found the AUAM as well as the National Civil Liberties Bureau, an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of conscientious objectors and war protesters, which evolved into the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. As popular opinion increasingly favored intervention in the war, the cost of continuing antiwar and antipreparedness advocacy rose as their association with American tradition fell. Faced with fading support from average Americans, growing support for punishing Germany, a fear of being labeled as German sympathizers, and increasing suppression by the Wilson administration, Butler, Wald, and others accommodated themselves to the war effort. By early 1917 even Henry Ford agreed to turn his factories to war work, and Wilson’s April war speech helped cement this view as he dismissed neutrality as an untenable position for the nation to hold. Larry A. Grant See also: Committee on Public Information (CPI); Peace Movement, World War I; Preparedness Movement; Sedition Act; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Butler, Nicholas Murray. The Preparedness of America. New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1915. “Campaign to Limit Armaments Begun.” New York Times, March 15, 1915. Wilson, Woodrow. Second Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1914. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3793. Accessed October 16, 2014.

American Red Cross as Agent of U.S. Expansion The American Red Cross (ARC) was founded in May 1881 in Washington, D.C., by Clara Barton. The American group was organized as a humanitarian agency to provide emergency and disaster relief in the United States and overseas, as well as to serve as a relief auxiliary to the U.S. military. Over the next 50 years, the ARC became one of the leading forces in U.S. international humanitarianism and an important player in American cultural expansion. Although still a prominent domestic relief agency today, the American Red Cross became less vital as a transnational cultural influence after World War II as other international philanthropic institutions and government-sponsored development programs rose to the fore.

Although never actually a government agency, in June 1900 the American Red Cross became a semiofficial organization, receiving a congressional charter to uphold the Geneva Conventions (the international treaties governing the conduct of war) during wartime. This charter was renewed in 1905. The ARC was also mandated to “carry on a system of national and international [emphasis added] relief in time of peace and apply the same in mitigating the sufferings caused by pestilence, famine, fire, floods, and other great national calamities, and to devise and carry on measures for preventing the same” (ARC Congressional Charter). The American Red Cross organization had already been providing money, materials, and personnel for international emergency/disaster situations for more than a decade, notably in the Russian famine of 1891–1892, as well as in the first Armenian crisis (1894) and the Cuban Uprising (1895–1898), events in which Clara Barton herself served. As scholars have argued, the linkage between the American Red Cross and the American government led to blurred lines at home between “patriotic duty” and individual choice in supporting the charitable organization. As America’s international profile became a national concern after the turn of the 20th century, lines similarly blurred between the humanitarian and other strategic influences the American Red Cross could wield overseas. The “soft power” exercised through the ARC’s humanitarian assistance programs became increasingly entwined with American political and economic interests, yielding benefits for business and diplomatic affairs as well as in philanthropic matters.

A Red Cross nurse stands by the bedside of a wounded soldier at Christmas time during World War I. Founded in 1881, the American Red Cross became not only the leading representative of U.S. international humanitarianism, but also an important agent of American cultural expansion. (Library of Congress)

The American Red Cross grew exponentially during World War I. As patriotic sentiment swept the country, the Red Cross organization took advantage of the new nationalist and internationalist fervor to galvanize Americans to join the Red Cross as members, to volunteer time and effort, and to donate significant sums of money and material. The number of local ARC chapters exploded, and across America, men, women, and children volunteered—and were drafted—to collect supplies, roll bandages, send care packages overseas, and establish veterans’ hospitals under the Red Cross banner. The ARC helped create a “home front” in a war fought far away, as well as to nurture ideas about America’s international role. The ARC’s overseas presence similarly expanded, and American faces and largesse were spread across the globe, reaching the most vulnerable in their hour of need, and making an implicit (and sometimes explicit) case for the benefits of “the American Way.” During the war, Americans overseas were equally inspired to make their U.S. patriotism felt. In response, and to take advantage of this opportunity to enlist even more Americans to the cause, the ARC called for the creation of foreign chapters to help in the war effort. These chapters fell under the aegis of

the ARC’s newly formed Territorial, Foreign and Insular Division (the “Fourteenth Division”). The rationale for this expansion extended beyond the war, however, as Henry P. Davison, ARC War Council chair and future founder of the League of Red Cross Societies, explained. “One result [of the creation of these new chapters] will be to stamp a new Americanism upon the world,” he predicted. This effort, he continued, would have “an undying effect” around the globe (Fourteenth Division Bulletin 1). Although the American Red Cross had certainly sent Red Cross workers abroad in the past, this was the first time that a national Red Cross Society had publically moved to establish its own chapters on foreign soil. This new initiative to maintain U.S. Red Cross organizations on non-U.S. territory was a blow to the sovereignty of the host countries, as well as a violation of international Red Cross policy. The International Committee of the Red Cross had stringent guidelines for the creation of Red Cross groups, guidelines that the ARC was clearly bending with its newly expanded Fourteenth Division. As early as the 1890s, Gustav Moynier, head of the international organization, had stated: “We can only recognize a single Society per state, and this Society must have a national character; … this [is an] essential condition” (Boissier, 420). The American Red Cross itself forbade the establishment or maintenance of agencies representing any other national Red Cross Society at home in the United States; this charter was directly contradicted by its own post-1917 policy of encouraging American chapters overseas. Despite these issues, the Fourteenth Division was a terrific success. At its height, this ARC initiative was responsible for establishing more than 150 chapters in six American territories and more than 20 foreign countries, enlisting 100,000 American members, 125,000 junior members, and more than 50,000 associate members (non-Americans enrolled in overseas chapters). In China, for example, the American Red Cross call was eagerly answered by American communities scattered across the country, and 14 chapters and six branches of the American Red Cross in China were quickly formed by American men and women anxious to be a part of the American war effort. In addition, almost 50,000 Chinese became members of these ARC chapters, despite the prior existence of a national Chinese Red Cross Society. With its Fourteenth Division, the American Red Cross intended to showcase ARC work internationally, and in so doing to bring its civilizing force with it to supposedly “uncivilized” countries like China. Although many wartime ARC overseas chapters remained in service after the war, they were all shut down by 1924. Although the ARC’s Washington headquarters was responsible for that development, it seemed indicative of the pattern of isolationism that would prevail in the nation’s foreign policy for the next decade and a half. Caroline Reeves

Further Reading Boissier, Pierre. Histoire du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge de Solférino à Tsoushima. Paris: Plon, 1963. “How the Fourteenth Finds Its Own.” Fourteenth Division Bulletin 1 (April 1918). Hutchinson, John F. Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996. Irwin, Julia. Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Baruch, Bernard (1870–1965) Bernard Baruch was a Wall Street speculator and political insider best known for advising multiple presidents, directing America’s World War I economy, and forging America’s first global nuclear policy. Baruch firmly promoted strict economic interventionism during both world wars, and he served a vital role on the United Nation’s Atomic Committee where he devised the Baruch Plan and called for

international regulation of atomic weapons. Born on August 19, 1870, and raised in Camden, South Carolina, Baruch attended the City College of New York at the age of 14 and then worked as a stock market investor in the late 19th century. Baruch’s career as a prolific investor acquainted him with many political insiders, ultimately launching his career as a political consultant and adviser. His first civic job was as a trustee for City College of New York, which caught the eye of Woodrow Wilson’s administration. When World War I erupted, Wilson appointed Baruch to the Advisory Commission under the Council of National Defense, eventually promoting Baruch to the chair of the War Industries Board (WIB) in 1917. As chair Baruch favored strict economic regulation, worked to suppress wartime inflation, and sought to control production and distribution of essential materials. Baruch’s wartime economic measures promoted military needs over civilian, and allowed the United States to trade with allies and later join the war effort. After the war, Baruch went to the Paris Peace Conference as an American delegate with Woodrow Wilson. Despite having a post on the Reparations Commission, Baruch was unable to prevent the European allies from punishing Germany with fatefully severe reparations. During the 1920s and 1930s, Baruch worked again as a Wall Street speculator and political financier, but Franklin D. Roosevelt called upon Baruch when hostilities broke out in Europe in the late 1930s. Working as the chair of the War Productions Board, Baruch applied his lessons from the First World War and again issued strict controls for America’s wartime economy. The streamlining of essential industries and rationing efforts ensured American military success during World War II, and it also laid the foundation for the growth of defense spending during the Cold War. Appointed to the United Nations’ Atomic Committee after the war, Baruch in 1946 strengthened the original Acheson-Lilienthal Report on the international control of atomic weapons by emphasizing inspections, enforcement, and sanctions for violators. The Baruch Plan called for the Soviet Union to sign the agreement before America would disarm and release its atomic information. The Soviets refused this blatant attempt to maintain American atomic hegemony, and the Baruch Plan ultimately guaranteed the failure of arms talks in the immediate postwar era. In sum, Baruch led the regulation of the American wartime emergency economy in the first half of the 20th century, laid the foundation for the militaryindustrial complex, and attempted to broker a U.S.-led atomic peace during the early Cold War. John Huntington See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons (1946–1954); Military-Industrial Complex

Further Reading Grant, James. Bernard M. Baruch: The Adventures of a Wall Street Legend. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Leffler, Melyvn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Schwarz, Jordan A. The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Committee on Public Information (CPI) World War I was the first international conflict in which full-scale use of propaganda was employed by all of the governments concerned. From the war’s inception, both Germany and Great Britain tried to get the United States as its ally and geared much propaganda to that effect while all the warring nations organized campaigns to win the support of their own people for the war effort, such as the pro-German

reportage that appeared in books, in films, in pamphlets, in periodicals, and in newspapers; the last included the New York Evening Mail, secretly purchased by representatives of the kaiser in 1915. German propaganda operations in the United States, aimed at keeping America out of the war, were helped considerably by George S. Viereck. In Germany, a group of staff officers at the High Command was assigned to generate propaganda on the home front. They began by issuing completely fictitious news bulletins about the “alleged” sabotaging of German water supplies by French, British, and Russian troops and managed to convince most German citizens that the German armies were acting in self-defense. Germany also attempted a few short-wave broadcasts in the new communication medium of radio. World War I, historically significant as the beginning of modern mass propaganda, failed to be, as President Wilson had promised, the “war to end all wars,” but it marked a significant break with the past. The public lies about national aims, the wasteful policy of attrition, and the breaking down of social barriers as the costly, bloody conflict continued helped explain the onset of postwar disillusionment. Before the United States entered the war, the propaganda posters that raised men and money for the war effort in Europe began appearing in America. The Allies, including France, Great Britain, and Russia, sought American intervention as they fought the Central powers, led by Germany, but the organizational arrangements for foreign and domestic propaganda that emerged in these countries differed in important respects. The United States was the last major power to enter World War I but it was the first to establish an open, fully coordinated propaganda unit. Once the United States entered the war in 1917, the major U.S. propaganda effort was conducted by the Committee on Public Information (CPI), an independent agency created by President Woodrow Wilson and established by Executive Order 2594, April 13, 1917, one week after the United States entered the war. The committee was given the staggering task of “holding fast the inner lines” by encouraging and then consolidating the revolution of opinion that changed the United States from an antimilitaristic democracy to an organized war machine. CPI was the first official propaganda agency in American history, but it was not the first attempt at official propaganda. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln imposed the first official U.S. government censorship of news media during wartime. He issued an executive order, based on national emergency, that punished journalists for disloyalty, such as reporting unfavorable or inaccurate battle news. Lincoln also dispatched special agents to European countries to counter propaganda gains made by the Confederacy. The CPI’s main purposes were to release government news during World War I, sustain morale, and administer voluntary press censorship. CPI’s work was curtailed after July 1, 1918, and it was officially abolished by Executive Order 3154, on August 21, 1919. Domestic activities discontinued after the Armistice was signed, on November 11, 1918. Foreign operations were discontinued on June 30, 1919. Inter-Allied coordination of their separate propaganda efforts was virtually nonexistent, so CPI focused its attention on both its domestic and foreign audience. The committee instituted voluntary press censorship, produced films, hired speakers, distributed literature that praised the nations allied with the United States, commissioned posters, bought newspaper ads, and sent agents to targeted countries. Advertising executive George Creel was appointed the civilian chair “to sell the war to America” with the assistance of the secretaries of state, war, and the navy. It was a post he held until it was disbanded in 1919. Creel believed he was fighting “for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions, and the battle line ran through every home in the country.” While “holding fast the inner lines,” as Wilson mandated, Creel “advertised” America abroad: its aims, its ideals, its struggles, and its achievements. To assist him, he hired Will Irwin, Carl Byoir, and other prominent journalists; supervised a system of newspaper and magazine censorship that fell into three categories (dangerous, questionable, and routine); operated a 24-hours-a-day news bureau that distributed press releases, communiqués,

casualty lists, and interviews; and directed patriotic advertising campaigns (“Don’t talk … spies are listening” “Halt the Hun”). Creel’s salesmanship was criticized by writers such as H. L. Mencken and I. F. Stone, but he was also defended by others for his honesty and efficiency. World War I was the first full-scale use of leaflet propaganda; it was employed by all of the governments concerned, and it became a major military instrument as all the warring nations organized campaigns to win the support of their own people for the war effort. Along with the CPI, the Propaganda Section (or Psychological Section), General Headquarters, American Expeditionary Forces (U.S. Army), under Captain Heber Blankenhorn, concentrated on morale and surrender leaflets. Another war item that CPI used quite effectively was the poster; individual governments flooded their countries with millions of propaganda posters designed to encourage public support for total victory. Without the radio and television of later configurations, the poster was an important instrument of mass persuasion in World War I. Before the United States entered the war, the propaganda posters that raised men and money for the war, a staple of military recruiting efforts, began appearing in America. The poster had a simple message: failure to enlist was akin to treason. Recruiting propaganda of the same sort found its way into popular music and vaudeville entertainment. Probably the most famous poster was American painter James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want You for the US Army” (1917), which shows “Uncle Sam,” still a staple of military recruiting, pointing a finger directly at the viewer. This poster was used in both world wars and eventually more than four million copies were distributed. It became an important propaganda tool for the CPI. American artists who volunteered their talents to the war effort included Norman Rockwell, James Montgomery Flagg, and Charles Dana Gibson. CPI distributed more than 100 million of these patriotic posters and other publications, including the Official Bulletin, first published in May 1917, to increase support for the war. CPI’s Domestic Section instituted voluntary press censorship, hired speakers (especially notable were the “Four Minute Men” who gave speeches of that length) supporting Liberty Bond sales drives, distributed literature that praised the nations allied with the United States, commissioned posters, and bought newspaper ads. Creel also recognized the importance of films and arranged for cooperation between the fledgling motion picture industry, including newsreel companies, and the military. Films were used to great effect during World War I by all the warring parties. Official filmmakers carefully cut in scenes shot in training camps or staged after battles to make sure that the public saw only positive images. The American film industry produced silent films whose message was blatant: the German or the Hun was the villain and the American, British, or French soldier always was the good guy protecting the innocent victim from the ravages of the hated enemy. Although the Domestic Section was responsible for promoting the war on the home front, the Foreign Section was responsible for working with other countries, especially in the distribution of U.S. propaganda, and in sending agents to targeted countries. These were quite far-reaching; besides the major targets (Germany, France, England, Italy), there was Mexico, Switzerland, Holland, Spain, Scandinavia (especially Denmark), “the Orient” (identified as China and Japan), South America, and Russia. CPI also assigned commissioners in cities considered important to the information effort, including Paris, Rome, Madrid, The Hague, London, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Lima. Its mandate included: • • •

Improve morale in Allied countries and the shipment of propaganda materials. Monitor censorship activities in the United States and Allied countries. Distribute newspaper clippings and press releases; manuals prepared by the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division; maps, posters, and newspapers collected for use in foreign

•

propaganda. Manage the activities of the New York offices of the Foreign Press Service; the Foreign Mail Service; the Division of Films; and the New York and Washington offices of the Division of Work with the Foreign Born.

Naturally, Germany was the focus of much of CPI’s overseas efforts, including the highly effective leaflets that were attached to hydrogen balloons, dropped from airplanes, and shot from guns to get the American message to the German people. In Russia, CPI conducted an anti-Bolshevik propaganda campaign following the collapse of the czarist regime and effectively used various media to cooperate with educators, labor organizations, and corporate leaders to create an effective internal propaganda campaign and an even more aggressive one overseas. In September 1918, the U.S. government released to the press a collection of documents that purported to show that the Bolsheviks had received money both before and after the Russian Revolution. A month later, CPI released a pamphlet, The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, which contained translations of 68 documents and reproductions of many of them. The documents had been obtained in Russia by Edgar Sisson, the CPI representative, and came to be known as the “Sisson Documents.” In Switzerland, Vira Boarman Whitehouse was the first woman agent, as director of the Swiss office of the Committee on Public Information (1918). She wrote a book, A Year as a Government Agent (1920), about her experience. Creel appointed Whitehouse, who became the first woman to hold a high-ranking post in the U.S. Foreign Service, though the appointment did generate criticism. The propaganda program in Switzerland was opposed by the diplomatic community, which wanted it handled as a secret operation. To get around this, Whitehouse’s mission was stated as “studying conditions relating to women and children” rather than propaganda activities. She engaged the support of the Swiss press and skillfully employed German radical groups in Switzerland as a regular messenger service into Germany, often crossing the border herself to put U.S. material in the proper channels. With the end of the war, most Americans desired a return to “normalcy” and CPI was quickly abolished in 1919. There was a congressional attempt to suppress Creel’s 1920 public report, How We Advertised America, which described the true nature of CPI’s propaganda activities. The CPI director resisted that effort, proud of his wartime activities and determined to detail the history of the CPI’s foreign and domestic operations. However, the CPI performed one last function, with a more far-reaching impact; it started four reading rooms in Mexico City, an unsuccessful experiment that did not survive the immediate post–World War I years, but these reading rooms became the predecessor of the Biblioteca Benjamin Franklin that the U.S. government established in April 1942 in Mexico City. Martin J. Manning See also: “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”; Peace Movement, World War I; Preparedness Movement; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Committee on Public Information Propaganda Posters (1917)

Further Reading Creel, George. How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Mock, James R., and Cedric Larson. Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939.

Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980. Wolper, Gregg. “Woodrow Wilson’s New Diplomacy: Vira Whitehouse in Switzerland, 1918.” Prologue 24, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 226–239.

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926) Eugene V. Debs was an outspoken American labor leader, social activist, and political candidate whose public life spanned from 1875 to his death in 1926. Debs was active in several labor unions and the Socialist Party of America (SPA). In these roles, he led major strikes and received the Socialist Party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States on five occasions. As leader of the SPA, he subsequently became one of the nation’s most outspoken and controversial political dissenters—including pacifist opposition to what he and many other Americans saw as the imperialist aims of the belligerents of World War I. Debs ranks among the most well-known and influential labor activists and Socialists in American history, one whose anti-imperialism was marked with some degree of contradiction. The son of immigrants, Eugene Debs grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father, Daniel Debs, migrated to the United States from the Alsace region of France in 1849. After arriving in the United States, Daniel went against his relatively wealthy Protestant father’s orders and married Marguerite Bettrich, a Catholic. Although he was disinherited, Daniel’s income from ownership of a Terre Haute grocery store provided young Eugene with a relatively prosperous childhood. Debs’s involvement with organized labor began early in life. Unwilling to follow in his father’s footsteps as a storekeeper, Debs left school at age 15 for employment with the railroad. Debs soon emerged as a significant force in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF). From 1875 to 1893, he served in various administrative and leadership capacities with the BLF, including recording secretary, secretary treasurer, and managing editor of the union’s Fireman’s Magazine. Debs also entered local politics at this time. Voters elected him to the position of Terre Haute city clerk in 1879 and 1881, and as a member of the Indiana State Assembly in 1884. Debs decided against seeking reelection after one term in the state assembly.

Eugene Debs was a labor activist, anti-imperialist, and Socialist Party candidate for president in five elections. Although he had espoused imperial positions, he later strongly opposed U.S. entry into World War I. A 1918 Deb’s speech against the draft and U.S. involvement in the war resulted in a 10-year prison sentence for violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts. (Library of Congress)

In 1893, Debs founded the American Railway Union (ARU). As president of the ARU, he led a successful strike against Great Northern Railway in 1894 and led the ill-fated Pullman Strike of the same year. For his actions in the latter strike, Debs was convicted of violating a federal court order to end the strike and served six months in prison. During his prison time, Debs acquainted himself with Socialist literature. Formerly a Democrat, Debs publically announced himself as a Socialist in early 1897. He then took part in the formation of several Socialist organizations and political parties. These included the organization of the Social Democracy of America (1897), the Social Democratic Party of America (1989), and the Socialist Party of America (1901). In 1900, Debs entered the national political arena for the first time by seeking the presidency of the United States as the Socialist candidate. Although unsuccessful, his campaign established Debs as the primary spokesman for American socialism. Debs went on to become the SPA’s nominee for president in the elections of 1904, 1908, 1912, 1916, and 1920. He received his highest percentage of the vote (6 percent) in 1912, and his greatest number of votes cast (919,000) in the election of 1920. As the Socialist Party’s leading advocate, Debs often took controversial and, at times, seemingly contradictory stands on major issues. During and after the Spanish-American War (1898), for example, Debs opposed the possibility of U.S. annexation of Cuba and the eventual annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Yet, he supported U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i that same year. He also publicly supported French imperialistic campaigns in Indochina and Sudan in the 1880s. Such incongruity stemmed from his belief that Hawaiians wished to join the United States, his recognition of the strategic value of Hawai‘i as a coaling station for U.S. ships, and, in regard to Indochina and Sudan, the influence of racial attitudes of the times on Debs’s ideas.

In 1905 Debs supported and participated in the founding of the controversial and radical International Workers of the World (IWW) union. His ties to the IWW led to tension within the SPA. Many members of the Socialist Party viewed the IWW and its rhetoric as too revolutionary and out of touch with the American political reality. In light of such division, Debs’s support for the radical union soon wavered. The most controversial of Debs’s stances was his outspoken opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I. On June 26, 1918, in a speech in Canton, Ohio, Debs spoke against the draft and U.S. involvement in the war. Such public condemnation of the war effort violated the federal government’s recently implemented Espionage and Sedition Acts. As a result, Debs was tried, convicted, sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, and stripped of his citizenship rights. Denied clemency by the Woodrow Wilson administration, Debs spent the entire presidential campaign of 1920 in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He nevertheless continued a write-in campaign as the SPA’s nominee for the presidency of the United States and received approximately 919,000 votes. After taking office in 1921, President Warren G. Harding commuted Debs’s prison sentence to time served. President Harding did not, however, grant Debs a presidential pardon. Thus, Debs passed away, some five years later, without the rights of citizenship. Jonathan Foster See also: Espionage Act; Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); Sedition Act; Primary Documents: Speech Delivered by Eugene Debs in Canton, Ohio, in Violation of the Espionage Act (June 16, 1918)

Further Reading Corbin, David A. “Betrayal in the West Virginia Coal Fields. Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Party of America, 1912–1914.” Journal of American History 64 (March 1978): 987–1009. Freeberg, Michael. Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Morgan, H. Wayne. “The Utopia of Eugene V. Debs.” American Quarterly 11 (Summer 1959): 120–135. Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Espionage Act (1917) The Espionage Act is a U.S. federal law enacted on June 15, 1917, just over two months after the United States officially entered World War I. The law was passed ostensibly to outlaw treasonous interference with the American war effort, but its other intent was to suppress dissent in the United States during the First World War. As early as 1915, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson sought the means to maintain strong public support for his policies—even at the expense of suppressing constitutional liberties in America. In his State of the Union address on December 7, 1915, Wilson asked Congress to somehow strengthen the U.S. government’s power to crack down on Americans suspected of disloyalty. Wilson stated that the intentions of such individuals were to tarnish the good name of the U.S. government and to attack U.S. industry at a critical time of preparedness. As 1915 and 1916 wore on and the United States’ involvement in arms trading with the Entente allies grew and became more lucrative, Wilson’s mission to quiet dissenters in America became ever more pointed. When the nation entered the war on April 6, 1917, the last barrier preventing the president from imposing more severe restrictions on the activities of Americans was removed.

The Espionage Act was sold to the public as a measure to combat saboteurs and foreign agents hiding among the general populace. It made direct interference with the war effort and support for America’s enemies a crime, potentially punishable by death. The law explicitly criminalized the conveyance of information to America’s enemies and interference with military communications and the activities (or recruitment) of U.S. military personnel. These provisions were generally acceptable, differing little from other laws that preceded them. But the Espionage Act—particularly after its amendment in 1918 by the so-called Sedition Act—went much further. Its most controversial provision made it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag … or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States, or any language intended to bring the form of government … or the Constitution … or the military or naval forces … or the flag … of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute” (Espionage Act). In addition, the act gave the postmaster general authority to refuse or freeze mail that he deemed to be of a disloyal nature, opening the door to persecution of groups who relied on the mail to disseminate their opinions. These measures allowed the government dangerously wide latitude in the law’s enforcement. It was now possible for the government to determine anyone speaking against the war to be in violation of the Espionage Act and to be prosecuted. It had the effect of suppressing any and all opposition to the American war effort and to U.S. government policies more generally. The U.S. government not only had the law on its side, but also the capacity to deploy fear and intimidation to enforce that law. The U.S. Justice Department sent agents to investigate and intimidate countless Americans; undercover agents and informers clandestinely investigated those suspected of disloyalty. Particular groups were targeted; those with ethnic ties to the Central powers, especially German Americans, were natural targets under the Espionage Act. Many Germans and German Americans opposed a war against a country for which they still held great affection and in which many relatives still lived. Many cheered for a German victory in the early stages of the war and vocally pushed for neutrality as U.S. entry became imminent. The government increasingly viewed such expressions as disloyalty, and people of German descent came under investigation by the Justice Department. Other groups who opposed the war were especially targeted as well, namely Socialists and allegedly radical or subversive labor unions. Such groups generally argued that the war was driven by the greed and financial interests of bankers and war munitions manufacturers and opposed it vocally. Consequently members of these kinds of organizations—especially the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World—were frequently investigated and arrested. Eugene Debs, a prominent Socialist leader and fourtime presidential candidate, pointed out the irony of a nation suppressing the rights of free speech and freedom of assembly while fighting a war intended to, as the president proclaimed, “make the world safe for democracy.” Debs was promptly arrested under the Espionage Act for disloyalty, and he was held behind bars until his sentence was commuted in 1921. Other such groups falling under the broad scope of disloyalty or subversion were isolationists, pacifists, African Americans championing their civil rights, and outspoken clergy. The Espionage Act was hotly debated in Congress before the United States entered World War I, but the country’s entry into that conflict opened the floodgates and gave its supporters the momentum they needed to pass it. Many had reservations about the heavy-handed direction it was likely to take. In the end, President Wilson got the tool he wanted to render him capable of imposing “stern repression,” as he termed it, on disloyal Americans (Cooper, 190). Countless Americans were investigated or arrested under the Espionage Act during the First World War and in the “Red Scare” years following its cessation. Some measures of the Espionage Act appear to be justified for a nation engaged in one of the worst wars

in human history, but its application made it clear that its intent was as much to suppress dissent as to prevent interference with the war efforts of the nation. Those historical facts have continued to divide American attitudes about the law, major provisions of which remain on the books nearly a century later. Keven Gregg See also: Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); Peace Movement, World War I; Peace Movement (1930s); Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg; Sedition Act; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: The Conviction of Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare and North Dakota Politics (1918)

Further Reading Bausum, Ann. Unravelling Freedom: The Battle for Democracy on the Home Front During World War I. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2010. Cooper, John Milton, Sr., ed. Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War and Peace. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008. Espionage Act (Pub. L. 65-24, 40 Stat. 217, enacted June 15, 1917). Digital History. www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm? smtID=3&psid=3904. Accessed October 16, 2014. Thomas, William H., Jr. Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway) (1929) One of the great novels of the 1920s, A Farewell to Arms was written by Ernest Hemingway (1899– 1961). Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway followed his high school education with service in World War I, which had a profound impact on him, as it did for many of his generation. The aspiring writer served as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front and received the Italian Silver Medal for Bravery after rescuing a man injured during battle. Hemingway was a member of the so-called Lost Generation of writers whose members also included F. Scott Fitzgerald and T. S. Eliot. This generation’s youth were caught up in the struggle of World War I and were deeply shaken by its horrors. Further, the war shattered distinctly American notions of the perfectibility of the human condition—particularly the idea that virtue and hard work would be rewarded with a good life. The war, compounded by other aspects of modern American culture, alienated the Lost Generation of writers from society. Among his seven novels and two nonfiction pieces, Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms as a commemoration of his experiences with warfare and conflict during World War I. Published by Scribner Publishing Company in 1929, A Farewell to Arms is a narrative of a lieutenant named Frederic Henry. After being wounded in the knee during battle, Lieutenant Henry rests in a British Red Cross hospital. He soon falls in love with a British Red Cross nurse named Catherine Barkley. Upon his return to battle, Henry, along with other Italian soldiers, flees from the front after the Austrians break through their lines of defense. After Henry’s retreat, the Italian army takes him into custody for his supposed treason of fleeing the line instead of fighting the Austrians. After discovering that everyone interrogated for the crime of fleeing the battlefield is executed for disloyalty, Henry escapes with Catherine to Switzerland. The two pledge to live the rest of their lives away from a world at war. At the book’s conclusion, Lieutenant Henry, however, is left alone after Catherine’s death in childbirth. A Farewell to Arms quickly became one of the most influential books of its age for two reasons.First, the book embodied the World War I–era peace movement’s call for disarmament and world pacifism. This was seen in Henry’s choice of a life without violent warfare and death. Further, Hemingway’s book

captured the deconstruction of the prevailing utopian vision of idealism that had preceded the war. With its advanced weapons of warfare, World War I unleashedferocious and ever more destructive new methods of killing that produced a resurgence of realism in literature that was last felt at the conclusion of the American Civil War. A Farewell to Arms exemplified that new wave of realist work that defined much of Hemingway’s generation’sbest work. Cultural works such as this helped fuel revulsion toward war in general and reflectedand reinforced the period of isolationism in American foreign policy that defined the interwar era. Nina Teresi See also: “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”; Isolationism; Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis; Peace Movement, World War I

Further Reading Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929. Oldsey, Bernard S. Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979.

Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations (1918, 1919) In January 1918, the last year of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson, certain of eventual Allied victory, delivered his famous “Fourteen Points” address to Congress. His address outlined his vision for how the postwar world should be remade and what steps could be taken to ensure lasting peace. Although Wilson was initially hailed as a prophet of peace, by the end of the Paris Peace Conference the U.S. Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations; Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts led the faction of congressmen who objected to Wilson’s plan. Historians continue to debate the reasons and motivations for Lodge so strenuously objecting to Wilson’s plans for peace, particularly since both shared a desire for permanent peace. Three main facets emerge to explain some of the animosity between these great statesmen: an old-fashioned rivalry between the Republicans and the Democrats (at that particular historical moment, a Democratic president led a Republican Congress), fundamentally different ideas of how such a peace could be achieved, and finally, divergent views on the role the United States ought to take in this peace. In hindsight, defenders of Wilson see him as a visionary globalist or internationalist while painting Lodge as an American nationalist; detractors dismiss Wilson as a distant academic and acclaim Lodge as a perceptive and pragmatic politician. Even before that fateful day in Sarajevo, Wilson had envisioned a “new world order”; in his inaugural address of 1913, the president described an imminent future in which the United States would be cleansed, restored, and purified. Although the United States had reluctantly participated in the world war, in the end Wilson saw it as an opportunity to further his own vision; American participation was a crusade “to make the world safe for democracy.” Wilson outlined the Fourteen Points that he considered essential to the peace treaty. The first point called for open treaties (covenants) between nations, clearly a reaction to the network of secret alliances that had contributed to so many nations becoming embroiled in the war. Freedom of the seas, free trade, and disarmament were also included. Other points included were autonomy and self-government for nations, including an independent Polish State, and the restoration of

occupied lands, including Belgium, Italy, and France. Furthermore, Wilson desired that colonial territories be allowed to claim independence, though later he compromised his anti-imperialist strain by allowing that “mature” democracies could guide emerging (colonial) democracies. Wilson concluded that no ill will was directed toward Germany, only that it would accept its place equally among other “peaceloving” nations. One of the dominant reasons for Lodge’s objections to the president’s proposals was that he felt they exposed the president’s impracticality and naïveté; Wilson’s dreams of peace were built only on a foundation of religious fervor, high idealism, and academic intellect, and therefore lacked the necessary pragmatism and dose of realism needed to actually bring such a plan to fruition. Lodge had not wanted the League of Nations to be made part of the peace treaty, while Wilson had feared that if the league were not included, the promises of working on such a league after the treaty had been signed would be forgotten once the victorious European nations had obtained the demanded concessions, territories, and reparations. Wilson felt that the League of Nations, and American participation in it, was necessary to ensure a peaceful world.

U.S. president Woodrow Wilson delivers his Fourteen Points speech to Congress, on January 8, 1918. His address outlined an internationalist vision for how the postwar world should be remade and what steps could be taken to ensure lasting peace. Although the Treaty of Versailles bore little resemblance to the Fourteen Points and was in any event rejected by the U.S. Senate, in fundamental ways the Wilsonian vision has endured. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Following the actual conference at Versailles in 1919, Lodge responded to Wilson with his objections in a document titled “Reservations with Regard to the Treaty.” This document listed 14 objections; the main one (reservation 2) objected to Article X of the Treaty of Versailles. This article stated that an attack on a nation that was a member of the League of Nations would be construed as an attack on the league itself. Lodge asked his fellow senators if they were prepared to commit American military forces at the will of other nations. Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, also an outspoken critic of Wilson’s peace plans, feared that in becoming a member of the league, the United States would be committing American soldiers to fight other nations’ wars, even if there was no benefit to the United States. In essence, Lodge and Roosevelt did not want the power to declare war taken away from the U.S. Congress and given to an international council, nor did they want other nations placed in a position to influence American foreign policy and interfere with American sovereignty.

Similarly, Lodge and others were concerned that the Fourteen Points and the proposed treaty impinged upon the sovereignty of the Monroe Doctrine, leading to an amendment that Article X did not affect such previous “understandings.” As Lodge continued to campaign against Wilson’s version of the treaty, he gained other allies, not just Republicans following party lines, but also dedicated isolationists (such as Senator Hiram Johnson) and ethnic groups that felt Wilson had betrayed his principles at the Paris conference to ensure that the Fourteen Points and League of Nations were included in the treaty. In particular Irish Americans had hoped for home rule for Ireland, and German Americans, while perhaps not supporters of Kaiser Wilhelm II, were still disappointed in the reparations demanded of Germany and felt the treaty overtly favored the British. Lodge and his supporters (the key ones were styled “Irreconcilables”) demanded that Wilson renegotiate and convince three of the four major Allies to accept their reservations before the United States would ratify the treaty. In response to Lodge’s reservations, Wilson took his campaign to the American people. Intending to appeal to the average American citizen in person, Wilson sought to reach the entire nation and undertook a speaking tour. Following 40 speeches in 22 days, Wilson suffered a severe stroke and was unable to complete the tour. Nonetheless, he returned to Washington and continued to push for ratification of the treaty, rejecting overtures of compromise. The U.S. Senate never ratified the Treaty of Versailles and never joined the League of Nations. Jenna L. Kubly See also: Lodge, Henry Cabot; Monroe Doctrine; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918); Speech of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts Opposing U.S. Membership in the League of Nations (August 12, 1919)

Further Reading Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2003. Magee, Malcolm D. What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008. Thomas, Evan. The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst and the Rush to Empire, 1898. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.

Hughes, Charles Evans (1862–1948) Charles Evans Hughes was born on April 11, 1862, in Glens Falls, New York, and died on August 27, 1948, in Osterville, New York. A leader of the Republican Party, Hughes served as governor of New York from 1907 to 1910 and U.S. secretary of state from 1921 to 1925. As secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes was a central force in the international movement to disarm at the Washington Naval Conference from 1922 to 1923. He also opposed the National Origins Act of 1924 limiting immigration to the United States. Also called the Washington Disarmament Conference, the Washington Naval Conference was held from November 12, 1922, to February 6, 1923. An extension of the London Naval Conference of 1908 and held outside the jurisdiction of the League of Nations, the Washington Naval Conference called for specific actions of disarmament by nine countries, with the goal of fostering conditions of international peace. At the beginning of the conference, Charles Evans Hughes argued that the only way to internationally remove the global threat of weapons was to disarm. Hughes further proposed the 5:5:3 ratio limiting the number of ships to be allowed in the U.S., British, and Japanese navies. He called for a

10-year hiatus from building ships and also advocated for the deconstruction of 66 battleships owned by the three nations. In the wake of World War I, many Americans and Europeans applauded Hughes for his critical support for disarmament. Later, however, many blamed Hughes in part for the attacks on Pearl Harbor, suggesting that his role in limiting the size of the U.S. Navy emboldened the Japanese and invited the surprise attack on December 7, 1941. The National Origins Act of 1924 restricted the number of immigrants coming into the United States each year. It also required quotas of the exact number of newcomers, based on nationality, who immigrated to the United States prior to 1924. The act gave greater admittance to Nordic immigrants coming from Northern and Eastern Europe, whereas it refused entry to any Asian immigrants. Charles Evans Hughes believed the National Origins Act revived ethnocentric attitudes about immigrants long held by old-stock Americans that were detrimental to the nation. While the Washington Naval Conference had brought nations together and created strong relationships dependent on negotiation, Hughes believed the National Origins Act increased international antagonism as the United States denied entrance to immigrants coming from many countries present at the Washington Naval Conference. Nina Teresi See also: American League to Limit Armaments; Washington Naval Conference; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Leuchtenburg, William C. The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Perkins, Dexter. Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978. Preston, Andrew. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1914) Written by singer Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi in late 1914, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” reflects the vigorous opposition of the American antiwar movement toward the possibility of U.S. involvement in World War I. The song would become one of the most influential tunes of the U.S. antiwar movement as it symbolized resistance to bloody conflict resulting in the youthful and unnecessary deaths of millions of soldiers. Immensely popular, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” inspired a (less than successful) sequel, but also provoked many prowar politicians to publicly attack the antiwar movement. In “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” Alfred Bryan sings about an American mother’s despair over the death of her only son early in World War I. The mother grieves that she never wanted to raise her boy to become a soldier wearing a “musket on his shoulder.” Instead, she intended to rear her only son to be her “pride and joy.” Her final words shout that just because her son fought and died for the United States in World War I, the government could not lay claim to her son’s loyalty and life. Instead she cries plaintively, “Remember that my boy belongs to me!” The mother argues that a youthful life like her son’s should not be snuffed out for a suspect cause such as World War I. She believes nations should “arbitrate their future troubles” peacefully and lay down their weapons. Due to the aggressive nature of imperialistic nations contending for power, soldiers were dying “in vain.” Singing for many Americans (and Europeans as well), the mother pleads for the

geopolitical horror of needless war to cease—and implicitly for Americans not to join the cast of imperial powers sending their sons to death in the trenches of Europe. While the song reflected and reinforced broad American support for the antiwar movement, a number of politicians, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, refuted the song as well as the movement for its opposition to a just cause. Due to their nationalistic and at times jingoistic attitudes, politicians like Roosevelt believed antiwar Americans were effectively aiding the enemy. These politicians argued that the song and the movement were un-American and therefore against the United States’ cause of making the world—as President Woodrow Wilson put it upon the U.S. entrance into the war three years later in 1917 —safe for democracy. Those politicians rebuking the song created mocking parodies titled “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Coward” and “I Didn’t Raise My Dog to Be a Sausage.” These politicians and their supporters reflected the divided nature of the country as America moved toward war. Nina Teresi See also: Kellogg-Briand Pact; Peace Movement, World War I; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Lyrics to the Song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1915)

Further Reading Buchanan, Russell. “Theodore Roosevelt and American Neutrality, 1914–1917.” American Historical Review 43, no. 4 (July 1938): 775–790. Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Zeiger, Susan. “She Didn’t Raise Her Boy to Be a Slacker: Motherhood, Conscription, and the Culture of the First World War.” Feminist Studies 22, no. 1 (1996): 6–39.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was an industrial union founded in 1905 by a group of prominent American Socialists and radical labor leaders, including Daniel De Leon, Eugene Debs, and most notably William D. “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners. The organization expanded internationally to include chapters in Canada, Australia, and Europe, but it wielded its greatest influence in the United States. Nicknamed the Wobblies, it advocated the establishment of one big union— encompassing both skilled and unskilled workers—committed to replacing capitalism with a system where the workers would control the means of production and distribution. Its tactics relied heavily on direct action rather than politics to achieve these ends. Boycottsand strikes, which often turned violent during the union’s formative years, led to reprisals by industrialists and government authorities. But the IWW’s underlying message of class warfare appealed to exploited workers, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, and contributed to a growing membership. The union’s anticapitalist agenda clearly guided its response when the United States became involved in World War I, which the Wobblies described as “the boss’s war.” The IWW openly opposed U.S. involvement in the conflict, and many of its members spoke out in opposition to military conscription. As a matter of policy, the union, furthermore, rejected a no-strike pledge endorsed by more traditional labor unions and instead treated wartime industrial mobilization as a prime opportunity to strike to gain concessions for its members. This stance, which had the potential to seriously inhibit the war effort, aroused the suspicions of an American public caught up in the patriotic fervor of the time and led to charges of treason and even accusations that the union leadership was collaborating with the Germans. The Woodrow Wilson administration responded by taking steps to suppress union activities. In 1917, the Justice Department raided IWW offices across the country, arrested many of its leadership, and charged

them with violating the 1917 Espionage Act. Government prosecutors accused them of conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion. The resulting trials proved devastating to the union. The most prominent of these judicial proceedings took place in Chicago in 1918, where 101 union officials, including Haywood himself, were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years and fines of up to $20,000. The government’s campaign against the union continued into the postwar period. Many Wobblies were attracted to the teachings of Bolshevik communism that had triumphed in the 1917 Russian Revolution and thus became targets of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s raids during the 1919–1920 Red Scare. At the same time the union endured these government attacks, it was further weakened by organizational infighting within its ranks, particularly efforts by Communists to gain control of the leadership. As a consequence, membership steadily declined during the 1920s. While a diminished IWW survived, it was never able to regain the influence among the working class that it had experienced during the years prior to World War I. T. Michael Ruddy See also: Peace Movement, World War I

Further Reading Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Salerno, Salvatore. Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989. Winters, Donald E. The Soul of the Wobblies: The I.W.W., Religion, and American Culture in the Progressive Era, 1905–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Isolationism Isolationism is a concept used in international politics to describe a nation’s foreign policy whose penchant is to remain removed from affairs around the globe, in a region, or in regard to a specific nation. The concept is typically seen as the polar opposite of “interventionism,” active involvement in affairs external to one’s nation. Although commonly discussed solely as a foreign policy, isolationism is directly related to a nation’s domestic policies. In this light, isolationism also refers to a nation’s focus on developing its own progress, addressing internal needs, and avoiding foreign responsibilities. It is important to remember that isolationism, like most other concepts, is not an absolute descriptor. Nations often display a range of isolationist and interventionist qualities in their economic, political, military, and cultural policies, depending on the geopolitical context. In certain circles, particularly in the United States, “isolationism” carries largely negative connotations, which date back to the unwillingness of the United States to confront Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the 1930s. Because of these varieties, isolationism proves to be a complex term and is often oversimplified and used incorrectly to describe a nation’s beliefs and policy. In U.S. history, references to isolationism tend to allude to two eras in U.S. diplomatic history: the foreign policy of George Washington and John Adams (the Revolutionary War era) and the interwar period of 1918 to 1941. Both of these periods provide a national foreign policy narrative where isolationism is a “natural” tendency (epitomized in George Washington’s “Farewell Address”) and interventionism is a reluctant choice forced upon the United States in the 20th century (e.g., Pearl Harbor). This basic narrative is supported by an additional “imperialistic aberration” taken by the United States

during the Spanish-American War (1898). Historian David Fromkin summarizes the narrative, writing, “Ever since 1898, the fundamental question about American foreign policy has been whether the United States would choose to play a continuing role in foreign affairs” (Johnson, 38). The question is possible because there is a collective, popular belief that isolationism has long been the norm of U.S. foreign policy. This isolationist narrative in U.S. history (found in most high school textbooks) is problematic. First, explanations of Washington’s advice to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” fail to mention the U.S. condition at the time; a weak, indebted, and vulnerable nation. In this light, Washington’s policy addresses the international realities of the time, and not a universal diplomacy. Second, U.S. military intervention predates the 1898 “experiment with empire.” This includes military action taken in North Africa (1801–1805, 1815), the invasion of Canada (1812), the creation of Liberia (1820), the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), forcing Japan into trade relations (1850s), William Walker’s conquest of Nicaragua (1856–1857), continuous war with Native American nations (1840s– 1870s), and the Samoan Crisis (1887–1888). Third, between World War I and World War II, U.S. international relations included political, military, and economic intervention in the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), Guatemala (1920), Honduras (1919, 1924, 1925), and Panama (1921, 1925). U.S. involvement with Cuba in the 1920s and 1930s involved direct intersections of political, economic, and social institutions. Lastly, isolationism refers to various beliefs or policies that tend to contradict U.S. intervention realities since 1945. During the Cold War (1945–1991), the United States used military force to intervene 67 times. President Bill Clinton continued this policy, displaying military force in Somalia (1993), Iraq (1993–2000), Yugoslavia (1995 and 1999), Sudan (1998), and Afghanistan (1998). In the 21st century, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

HOLLYWOOD, WAR, AND FASCISM IN THE INTERWAR YEARS During the interwar years, the Hollywood film industry caught the shifting mood of Americans regarding international events. Reflecting first the profound disillusionment felt in the United States over the horrors and unsatisfying geopolitical aftermath of World War I, Hollywood produced a number of films that examined the terrifying human cost of the conflict. From the silent film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) to the 1930 films All Quiet on the Western Front and The Dawn Patrol, film dramatizations of the war tended either to be overtly antiwar, or to offer a nonglorifying depiction of the very real, devastating consequences of World War I for the men who fought it. Though silent, King Vidor’s breakthrough, The Big Parade (1925), incorporated footage from the war and dramatized battle scenes in ways that left many viewers shaking and in tears by film’s end. The film follows three soldiers’ journey from their innocent exuberance about war through the shocking horrors of trench and aerial warfare. In the end, the men are left shattered, and like audiences, had few remaining illusions about the nature of modern war. Despite the darkening picture of international events in the 1930s, the attention of Americans and that of Hollywood remained largely fixed on the Great Depression. A few films like Gabriel over the White House (1933) reflected the disquieting fact of domestic support in some quarters for an American fascism. It is revealing that the first film artist to criticize the imperialistic fascism of Mussolini’s Italy was the comic team of the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933). Similarly, although Warner Brothers in 1939 released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first blatantly anti-Nazi film produced by a major studio, it took the slapstick genius of the Three Stooges to first mock Adolf Hitler in their Columbia short film, You Nazty Spy (1940).

Thus long-standing claims of American isolationism have been challenged, with scholars of U.S. foreign relations largely rejecting the term “isolationism” as a valid description for U.S. foreign policy at any time in U.S. history. Representative of a growing number of scholars, historian William Appleman Williams argued that the “widely accepted assumption that the United States was isolationist from 1920

through 1932 was no more than a legend” (Williams, 1). Whether defined as militaristic, political, economic, or cultural, U.S. intervention was the norm, not the exception in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, the United States was actively participating in international affairs from its inception, and it never aimed to isolate itself from the world. Rather, the United States has always been “expansionist” and much less reluctant than previously assumed. The continental expansion during the 19th century and the Manifest Destiny ideology supporting it frame the United States as an empire. It is now commonplace for historians of U.S. foreign relations to identify the expansion and intervention in the 19th century with an overall U.S. foreign policy tradition into the 21st century. Continued use of the isolation–intervention dichotomy to describe foreign policy is outdated and oversimplified. The two poles constitute an old paradigm that focuses on two specific uses of isolationism to describe international relations: 1. Isolationism refers only to American affairs in military actions in Europe and not in other regions or nations; and 2. Isolationism is indicative of reluctant American interventionism. Another polar opposite currently associated with isolationism is “internationalism.” This second “I–I” binary frames isolationism as a synonym for unilateralism (a nation acting without international support). Scholar Jonathan Clarke argues that using this model to characterize U.S. foreign relations as “either fullblown internationalism or know-nothing isolationism, without any middle ground, is to choke off fresh thinking” (Clarke, 43). Therefore, the isolationism–internationalism model also lacks clarity around the use of the term for the actions of the U.S. superpower in a globalized world. What remains, however, is the persistence of a mythologized narrative about U.S. international identity. Professor Andrew Bacevich explains this myth: “Americans asserting themselves only under duress and then always for the noblest of purposes, reigns today as the master narrative explaining (and justifying) the nation’s exercise of global power” (Bacevich, 8). Craig J. Perrier See also: Manifest Destiny; also see volume 3, part 2; Primary Documents: Helen Keller’s Speech “Strike Against War,” Delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York City (January 5, 1916)

Further Reading Bacevich, Andrew J. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Braumoeller, Bear F. “The Myth of American Isolationism.” Foreign Policy Analysis (September 2010). Clarke, Jonathan. “Gone to the Lake: Republicans and Foreign Policy.” National Interest (Summer 1996). Dunn, David. “Isolationism Revisited: Seven Persistent Myths in the Contemporary American Foreign Policy Debates.” Review of International Studies (April 2005). Johnson, Paul. “Myth of American Isolationism: Reinterpreting the Past.” Foreign Affairs (1995). Restad, Hilde Eliassen. “Old Paradigms in History Die Hard in Political Science: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Exceptionalism.” American Political Thought (Spring 2012). Williams, William Appleman. “The Legend of Isolationism in the 1920’s.” Science and Society 18, no. 1 (Winter 1954): 1–20.

Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

In August 1928, nearly a decade after the end of the Great War, the United States, France, and 11 other nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or Pact of Paris. The signatories declared that they would not use war as an instrument of national policy unless in self-defense. The two architects of the treaty had very different careers and motives. Aristide Briand (1862–1932) was a French radical socialist, lawyer, and journalist who became an independent socialist shortly before the First World War. Celebrated by the Left and denounced by the Right as a “bleating pacifist,” he combined political skill with idealism. Briand served as foreign minister 15 times and continuously from 1925 to 1932. He played an important role in negotiating the Locarno Pact (1925), which demilitarized the Rhineland but gave German nationalists hopes of readjusting Germany’s eastern borders and helped Germany become a member of the League of Nations a year later. France and the Triple Entente had narrowly defeated Germany and the Central powers in the Great War and had suffered enormous human and material losses. For Briand and other French leaders another European war was unthinkable, but events in Germany and Italy in the late 1920s made it seem possible. In April 1927, he urged the United States to sign a bilateral treaty with France renouncing war as a means of settling disputes except in the case of self-defense. Various reasons have been suggested for Briand’s offer. The most plausible seem to have been his concern for French security in view of a reviving Germany, and his idealistic aspirations for an international union that would help prevent armed conflicts between nations. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg (1856–1937), a Republican lawyer and politician from Minnesota, approached the pact from very different circumstances. While he also saw the Great War as a catastrophe, he was determined to preserve the United States’ freedom of action in foreign policy. First elected to the U.S. Senate in November 1916, he was keenly interested in international affairs, and unlike many GOP senators, he was a proponent of the League of Nations. Kellogg did not favor the establishment of an international court and military force as some advocates of the league did, because they might lead to a revision of the Monroe Doctrine and interfere in domestic matters. This view ran counter to those of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) and other “irreconcilables,” and initially cost Kellogg a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, a position he coveted. In 1922, Kellogg was defeated in his bid for another term. President Calvin Coolidge then chose him for a variety of international posts, including, ultimately, secretary of state when Charles Evans Hughes abruptly resigned. In June 1927, Kellogg headed the U.S. delegation at the Geneva Naval Conference convened to prevent a naval arms race. Perhaps doomed by the boycott of France, the Geneva conference collapsed, a grave disappointment to all who attended, but one that impacted many leaders’ thinking on both sides of the Atlantic, including Kellogg. As one of Secretary Kellogg’s biographers has noted, Kellogg seized on the idea of an agreement prohibiting military conflict as the critical first step toward negotiating treaties on other more specific issues of geopolitical conflict, including placing limitations on military armaments by the respective big powers. Initially, Kellogg turned down the proposal for the pact because he felt a bilateral treaty would not have any practical effect. President Coolidge also saw the proposal as a bad idea. Perhaps the principal reason the Coolidge administration opposed a bilateral pact with France was the danger that it might help drag the United States into another overseas conflict. Although Americans had been involved in the Great War for less than a year and its human and material sacrifices paled in comparison to those of the other major powers, the experience had been a horrific and sobering one, which most of its citizens were determined not to repeat if they could. However, antiwar sentiments on both sides of the Atlantic gave life to Briand’s proposal and made it a subject of debate in the popular press. Initially, an isolationist

American public was cool to the proposal. But the indefatigable efforts of proponents generated public support and put pressure on the Coolidge administration to respond.

Representing the ultimate embodiment of the deep and widespread revulsion to war that followed World War I, the Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed in Paris, France, on August 27, 1928. Signatories to the pact (60 eventually) declared that they would not use war as an instrument of national policy unless in self-defense. The agreement’s numerous loopholes and lack of enforcement, coupled with the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s, doomed it to failure. (Bettmann/Corbis)

In January 1928, Kellogg and Briand presented the draft of a multilateral treaty. Besides France and the United States and “the principal Powers” it would be “open to adhesion by all the nations of the world.” The notion of a multilateral proposal seems to have come from J. Theodore Marriner, a State Department official and Kellogg associate. Some in the Coolidge administration welcomed Kellogg’s draft because they felt it would put an end to the issue. For instance, on May 11 William R. Castle Jr., the undersecretary of state, wrote that France would probably stop pushing the proposal now because it would endanger its special relationship with Washington. It was only after he and Coolidge were satisfied that the pact would not hamstring U.S. independence in the foreign sphere that Kellogg decided that the United States should become a signatory. Besides the United States and France, 12 nations signed the pact in Paris on August 27, 1928. Fortyeight other nations later signed it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact reflected the high ideals of humanists and pacifists, but lacked any means of enforcing its principles. With the rise of totalitarian and expansionist regimes in Europe and Asia in the 1930s, such as Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the high ideals of the pact were quickly shattered. Today, the treaty is often pointed to as an example of the impractical ineffectiveness of diplomacy in the interwar era. Matthew McMurray See also: American League to Limit Armaments; Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Washington Naval Conference; Primary Documents: Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

Further Reading Ferrell, Robert H. Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.

Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924), Anti-Imperialist Critique of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), outlined his antiimperialist theory in his seminal work titled Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, originally published in 1917. The book offered an explanation for the Great War (World War I), then in its third year. Lenin argued that the domination of industry and banks in the modern capitalist world served as imperialist forces that led inevitably to war. He observed that the imperial powers developed their economies and amassed capital at uneven levels; consequently, warfare remained the only recourse to correct the imbalance. Thus, Lenin’s interpretation reduced the cause of the great international conflict to capital, rather than merely territory or armaments. He argued that manufacturers, producers, and banks profited from imperialism and warfare. According to him, capitalist-driven imperialism was the driving force behind the growing “economic division” of the world. Further, Lenin named Great Britain, the United States, and Japan as the biggest capitalist, imperialist, and military aggressors. Writing in 1916, immediately prior to the Russian Revolution and during the First World War, Lenin worked hard to justify the international Socialist movement and its platform in the face of intense nationalism. He framed many of his arguments in response to the theories of leading Marxist philosopher Karl Kautsky who believed that imperial powers sought agrarian regions to feed their growing populations. Lenin dismissed this idea and found industrial and financial reasons for imperialism. He interpreted the war as a competition between British and German “financial marauders” for control over world capitalism and raw materials. Lenin explained the concentration of production into a small group of companies (i.e., monopolies and cartels) and its consequences as a necessary development on the path to socialism. Lenin summarized the process of capitalism as follows. Cartels control prices and thus entire sectors by eliminating competition. These cartels control the world’s raw materials, making everyone dependent on them. Furthermore, they also control the skilled workforce and employ the best engineers. World trade (through imperialism) makes its profits for a tiny minority of businessmen at the expense of workers and the colonized subjects. They help extract and transport raw materials from the colonies while creating debt for them in the process. Lenin took particular aim at the banks and financial sectors of capitalist nations. He noted that banks were also turning into monopolies as larger banks swallowed smaller ones, the end result being a few financial institutions acquiring the majority of a country’s deposits and wealth. This concentration of wealth allows a national bank to operate internationally and thus take control of another country’s assets in a process that parallels that of the industrial sector. Lenin viewed these changes in the financial sector as a new form of capitalism grounded in and buttressed by imperialist aggression. Instead of industrial monopolies making profits from their products and the exploitation of workers, bankers exported their capital abroad and made their profits from these exchanges in which nothing was produced. As advanced countries horde their “superabundance of capital,” the money sits idly and is not used to raise the standard of living for the populace. In the end, these massive financial-industrial monopolies would control raw materials, wealth, production, labor, and prices. In regard to American imperialism, Lenin used General Electric as an example of a huge conglomerate, itself owning hundreds of companies and controlling many vital aspects of production in both North America and Europe. The electrical companies not directly owned by General Electric operated in close collaboration through a network of agreements that ensured no American, European, or Russian had electricity without relying on General Electric. Considering the conditions in 1916, this translated to global control over electricity.

On the whole, Lenin focused on the connections he saw between the machinations of modern capitalism and the growing specter of imperialism—a central cause of the Great War. He argued that the monopolies and cartels had an “indissoluble bond” with imperialism. Further, the profits acquired from imperial colonies came from bonds that effectively made empires “usury” states, which loaned money to poor countries that could never hope to repay the debt. The empire usury states then used their armed forces and navies to guarantee payment. In other words, argued, Lenin, upper-class capitalist nations extracted “tribute” from the colonies. Lenin argued that all classes of people had come to accept capitalistic-imperialist ideology, including countless socialists who upon the outbreak of the war abandoned their universal goals and instead fought for their respective nations. Lenin also argued that capitalism sowed the seeds of its own destruction, and that imperialism represented the transition “to a higher socio-economic order” (i.e., communism). Thus, like Marx, Lenin’s determinism viewed civilization in stages, each one building upon the former, yet collapsing into the next. Lenin argued that while capitalism is based on free markets and competition, “imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” This final stage of capitalism, however, possesses “the tendency to stagnation and decay.” Capitalism, he said, did not necessarily spread new technologies that benefit everyone, but rather suppresses them for financial reasons. All of these factors would lead to a time when the state could assume control for the welfare of the people. The cartels would require the intervention and regulation of the state so that capital could work for the benefit of everyone. Lenin had lived during the Age of Empire, an era in which the great powers had divided control of the world’s territory, population, and material resources among themselves. His critique of imperialism had great significance for his contemporaries and later propaganda used by colonials who fought for their independence, yet world revolution never occurred and governments did not seize all economic means of production. In the short run, however, Lenin’s critique—combined with the first Bolshevik Decree on Peace in 1917, which called for an end to the imperialist territorial aggrandizement that Lenin argued was driving the war—put international pressure on Western Allied powers to at least accept the possibility of negotiating a more just peace. That postwar vision, embodied in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, called for (among its other provisions) no colonial annexations and indemnities, and self-determination for all nations—a dream that ultimately failed to come to pass. Mathew Wilson See also: Africa, U.S. Interests in; Debs, Eugene V.; Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Industrial Workers of the World; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917)

Further Reading Hobson, John Atkinson. Imperialism: A Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 (1902). Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 1996 (1917).

Lodge, Henry Cabot (1850–1924) Henry Cabot Lodge was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a wealthy and distinguished family with lineage extending to the highest levels of government in the early years of the republic. Lodge attended Harvard University, earning a law degree and a PhD in history. Before his election as a Republican to the

Massachusetts legislature in 1879, he practiced law, lectured, and published biographies of American statesmen. In 1893 he was elected to the U.S. Senate and represented the state until his death. Lodge steered a middle course between the Conservative and Progressive wings of his party. His closest friend was Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he shared views on many international policies. Unlike many New Englanders, he was convinced that America should expand its power overseas. He welcomed the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of an empire. When Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912, he had little experience in international affairs, and so sometimes consulted Lodge, one of the senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Their relations were often strained, however, as Lodge frequently found cause to question the president’s intellectual integrity and his understanding of international issues. Opposition to U.S. intervention in World War I in 1914–1915 from the Democratic Party and the Wilson administration provided one source of tension with Lodge, who, like Roosevelt, strongly favored American entrance into the war. Like much of the world, Wilson was horrified by the carnage of the war and determined to prevent another global conflict. His formulation of the Fourteen Points provided the basis for deliberations at Versailles of a permanent peace. It envisioned a strong U.S. role in the League of Nations (Article X) that was to ensure sovereignty for all nations, prevent regional conflict from erupting into global catastrophic wars, and generally govern postwar international relations. Lodge, who became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the basis of seniority during the war, held that the league and the Treaty of Versailles would limit U.S. freedom of action in world affairs, ran counter to the Monroe Doctrine, and was designed primarily to suit the interests of the imperial great powers. He also feared U.S. membership in the league would drag the nation into conflicts in which it had no legitimate interests. Instead of voting to reject the treaty outright, Lodge chose to attach a series of reservations to it. In the end, Wilson’s refusal to accept the reservations, coupled with divisions within both parties over the treaty, doomed its passage. Lodge bore the lion’s share of the blame for the vote. The platform at the 1920 Democratic National Convention blasted Lodge and the Senate Republicans for their role in sending Wilson’s efforts to defeat. Lodge, who was not an isolationist, proposed several alternatives to the League of Nations, none of which garnered much support. For example, he proposed a limited league that would not bind its signatories to engagements outside their spheres of interest and a World Court unaffiliated with the league. In 1921 Lodge served as a delegate to the Washington Naval Conference that unsuccessfully sought to slow the naval arms race between the great powers and Japan. Matthew McMurray See also: Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Isolationism; Roosevelt, Theodore; Washington Naval Conference; Primary Documents: Speech of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts Opposing U.S. Membership in the League of Nations (August 12, 1919)

Further Reading Garraty, John A. Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Widenor, William C. Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Lodge Reservations. See Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations

Peace Movement, World War I The earliest response in America to the war breaking out in Europe came from women involved in feminist causes, particularly efforts to secure the right to vote for women. On August 29, 1914, more than 1,500 women, often in silence with only the sound of a drum beating, marched in a parade in New York City to show their opposition to the war in Europe. Fanny Garrison Villard, the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, led the Parade Committee that organized the march for peace with the hope that it would turn into an all-female peace organization. Villard, like many female peace activists during this time, lamented that existing peace organizations were dominated by men. Thus, under the leadership of Villard, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Jane Addams, a group of women meeting in Washington, D.C., on January 10, 1915, formed the Woman’s Peace Party (WPP). Catt was the president of both the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, while Addams had revolutionized the emerging field of social work with the creation of Hull House in Chicago. Addams, in particular, expressed great concern for peace. In The Newer Ideals of Peace in 1907, she argued that women possessed the attributes necessary to bring about peace—a position shared by many feminists. Women, however, needed to be allowed to take part in the decision-making process in the first place, which could be achieved in part by granting women the right to vote.

Members of the Woman’s Peace Party, including Jane Addams, set sail for Europe in 1915 to attend a peace conference in The Hague, where they joined 1,200 women from around the world. The organization became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919 with Addams as its president, and is today the oldest women’s peace organization in the world. (Library of Congress)

The women involved with the WPP held the view that men had failed to understand a transition taking place in society where cooperation, not war, offered the best means to achieve peace. With this in mind, the WPP emphasized in their platform the idea of bringing together neutral nations to act as mediators and bring an end to the war. While meeting at The Hague for an International Congress of Women from April 28 to May 1, 1915, Addams led talks that explored, among other things, secrecy between and among the leaders of nations and the role economics played in a nation’s decision to go to war—two of the main intellectual and ideological currents of pacifist thought. In the end, the participants created a Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace that sent delegations of women to neutral and belligerent nations to garner support for their mediation plan. Despite a large petitioning campaign in late 1915 by

peace activists, Woodrow Wilson nonetheless equivocated when it came to enacting the mediation strategy. In response to Wilson’s lackluster attitude, activists formed a new organization known as the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm on January 26, 1916. Though several proposals came out of the conference, internal disorganization and the expanding war removed any chance that neutral nations would be able to bring an end to World War I—a fact that President Wilson himself was recognizing. Wilson’s intentions became clearer when he delivered an address on military preparedness in New York City on November 4, 1915, in which he called for greater spending for the army and navy. Even prior to Wilson’s call for increased military spending, the WPP included in its platform a plan for limiting armaments and nationalizing the production of arms. Many peace activists fought against military preparedness because they believed that militarism threatened democratic governance and took away money from social programs that benefited the most vulnerable. Additionally, many peace activists were of the mindset that the war in Europe came about as a result of the expansion of military arsenals and the rising levels of authoritarianism. Concerned by Wilson’s increasingly militaristic policies, Quakers and persons from other religious groups, social workers associated with the YMCA, and editors and journalists began meeting at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York City to discuss issues related to militarism. This group of activists would soon create the Anti-Preparedness Committee, with Crystal Eastman as its secretary. By 1916, the committee had approximately 15,000 members and spent more than $30,000 to fight Wilson’s preparedness campaign. Out of the committee came the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM). Known as the “brains” of the peace movement, the AUAM mailed pamphlets, held large assemblies in Carnegie Hall, and lobbied congressmen in Washington. At the Carnegie Hall meeting, which the AUAM organized following a quip by Wilson that opponents of his policy needed to achieve public support for their cause, Lillian Wald ridiculed officials who claimed that Germany would invade America and railed against the expanding military state in America.

WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM The oldest women’s peace organization in the world, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has its roots in the International Women’s Congress against World War I held in The Hague in April 1915. More than 1,200 women from 13 nations across the globe attended the congress. All voiced their opposition to the First World War and the underlying causes of imperialism, colonialism, and militarism that they declared had brought on the conflict. The formal establishment of WILPF in 1919 was prompted by the consensus among peace activists that the idealism contained in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points was being overwhelmed by the imperial territorial agendas of the war’s victorious powers. Attendees to WILPF’s gathering that year in Zurich, Switzerland, condemned the final terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which they declared presciently were merely sowing the seeds for another conflict. WILPF has remained an active opponent of imperialism and militarism through more than a century of conflict. Today WILPF has “sections” in nearly 40 nations that work to unite women on a range of issues from the connections between militarism and violence against women to environmental injustice that is often the cause of regional armed conflict. WILPF strongly supported the establishment of the United Nations at the end of World War II but has had an increasingly complicated relationship with the international assembly. Although a nongovernmental organization, WILPF maintains special consultative status with a number of UN entities while consistently calling for democratizing reforms that would, among other things, strengthen the influence of weaker nations, curb the growing influence at the UN of multinational corporations, and refocus the organization on meeting human needs in ways that can secure a more sustainable future and the permanent world peace first envisioned by its founders in 1915.

By late 1916, America’s continued trade with the Allies in Europe resulted in more and more attacks against U.S. ships by German U-boats. As war appeared more likely, the WPP and AUAM faced

difficulties as several prominent leaders left the organizations. Then, in April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, forcing peace activists to decide whether to support the cause or continue with their fight against militarism and a war that now engaged American citizens directly. The WPP experienced perhaps the most significant defections as Carrie Chapman Catt and other activists who prioritized suffrage over peace offered their support for the Allied cause as a means to garner greater support for the cause of women’s suffrage. Jane Addams and Lillian Wald did not support the war, though they did help the Wilson administration by crisscrossing the country to inform the public of the administration’s food and health policies. A large portion of the local branches of the WPP, too, either dissolved or took part in war relief work. When the war came to an end on November 11, 1918, the participants from the original Hague meeting in 1915 met again from May 12 to 17, 1919, in Zurich. At this meeting, women from the United States and other countries demanded that the Versailles Treaty include a “Women’s Charter,” which called for women to have the right to vote, economic rights, and the right to an education. Also out of this meeting came the formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, of which the WPP would become the American branch. Participants in Zurich elected Jane Addams as president and Emily Greene Balch, who had been fired from Wellesley College due to her opposition to the war, as the group’s first secretary-treasurer. Outside of the WPP, the Socialist Party officially opposed the war, but individual members, including Upton Sinclair, voiced approval of the war. The AUAM wholeheartedly opposed American entrance into World War I, but this organization, too, had been negatively impacted by the declaration of war. Several prominent members of the AUAM, including Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and Crystal Eastman, began focusing on conscientious objectors and those Americans who had been denied their civil liberties primarily because of their opposition to the war. These members would form the Civil Liberties Bureau within the AUAM, which led to the group’s dissolution as other members, such as Lillian Wald, spoke out against allying with absolute pacifists. AUAM’s demise owed much to the fact that Baldwin’s Civil Liberties Bureau separated from its parent organization in September 1917. Those members of AUAM who were weary of Baldwin’s group formed the Committee on Nothing at All, which would be renamed the following year as the League of Free Nations Association, and then eventually the Foreign Policy Association. Lillian Wald and other members involved in the Committee on Nothing at All came to be known as liberal internationalists. Liberal internationalists, who included Herbert Croly, founder of The New Republic, philosopher John Dewey, and historian Charles Beard, gave their support to Wilson’s war policies. Once the war came to an end, liberal internationalists argued, a peaceful world could be constructed through postwar planning, more open trade, and the expansion of democratic forms of government. While many prominent intellectuals joined the ranks of liberal internationalism, Randolph Bourne refused to follow suit. Bourne questioned how his liberal allies could believe that they would be able to harness and direct American policy once the war came to an end if they were unable to influence the government before the war. Furthermore, Bourne expressed concern over the rising level of patriotism in America. In his writings, Bourne argued that patriotism at home differed little from the use of military force abroad since patriotism allowed the government to make its people conform, but without using violence. When Wilson and the U.S. Congress declared war in April 1917, passage of the Espionage Act soon followed in June. The Espionage Act allowed the U.S. government to issue fines of up to $10,000 and 20 years in prison for disloyalty, refusal to serve in the armed forces, disruption of recruitment efforts, or “aiding the enemy” in any way. The bill also gave the government the authority to stop shipment in the

mail of material it deemed too critical of the U.S. government and its war efforts. As a result, the WPP’s magazine, Four Lights, was prohibited from the mail. The group most targeted, however, was the International Workers of the World (IWW). On September 5, 1917, for instance, the Justice Department raided IWW headquarters in 33 cities across the United States. Less than a month later, 133 IWW leaders faced arraignment in Chicago, accused of impeding the war effort. In addition to the more well-known cases that went to trial, thousands more Americans were pressured by the government to end their opposition to World War I, no matter how minor their protest of American policies. In one notable case, Joseph Mushotsky, a Russian American immigrant living in New York City in 1917, had been visited by an agent from the U.S. Justice Department. This agent had learned from witnesses that Mushotsky had made disparaging remarks against the government. The agent let it be known that the federal government would be keeping him under surveillance and that he would be imprisoned if he voiced any criticisms of the United States in the future. Mushotsky followed the instructions of the Justice Department agent and thus never faced prosecution. Under constant surveillance by federal officials and police groups, antiwar activism experienced a lull. While most antiwar groups reduced their visibility, a religious pacifist organization took their place. As antipreparedness groups opposed Wilson’s calls for a larger army and navy in 1915, religious pacifists met in Garden City, New York, in November 1915. Among those present was Henry T. Hodgkin, the chair of the British Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), who had organized the conference in Garden City. From this meeting came the American FOR, which was guided by the message of Jesus Christ to spread love and oppose violence in all forms. While Jane Addams and other well-known pacifists joined the ranks of the FOR, the organization also included younger activists, such as A. J. Muste, Evan Thomas, and John Nevin Sayre. A prevailing belief of FOR was that war should be rejected not only because it physically destroyed human personality through death, it also created, through an ever enlarged American state, uniform personalities as a result of its state-imposed demands for conformity during times of crisis. The FOR took the lead in helping conscientious objectors (COs) refusing military service. Out of the 3 million American men eligible for the draft, only 4,000 young men refused induction. Of these, approximately a third took part in noncombatant service and another third took part in civilian service projects. Four hundred and fifty COs received prison sentences, 54 of whom were released following review of their cases, and 940 were placed in segregated areas of military camps. A majority of the COs held in camps not only refused combat but also participation in noncombatant military service. Some of these absolute resisters sought an ethical way to fight against what they considered immoral. Therefore, Evan Thomas, a future chair of the War Resisters League, and others took part in hunger strikes. Besides the FOR, the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), founded in Philadelphia in 1917, helped COs by finding them work in war relief and reconstruction in Europe. More than 300 AFSC volunteers, for instance, planted crops in France during the war and rebuilt villages destroyed as a result of the conflict. Brian S. Mueller See also: Addams, Jane; Espionage Act; “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”; Industrial Workers of the World; Preparedness Movement; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Helen Keller’s Speech “Strike Against War,” Delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York City (January 5, 1916)

Further Reading Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993.

Chatfield, Charles. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York: Twayne, 1992. DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform in American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Thomas, William H., Jr. Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Preparedness Movement The preparedness movement refers to a national movement in the United States that came to prominence in 1915–1916 that urged American preparation for the nation’s participation in World War I. Proponents of preparedness used appeals to the public and to government officials to advocate a precautionary program to increase military readiness. The effort continued until America’s entry into World War I in April 1917 rendered it moot. The spirit of the preparedness movement originated in the efforts of Elihu Root during his tenure as secretary of war (1899–1904) to reform the U.S. Army. Others continued the work fitfully until the war years. Modernization of the army was a contentious proposition. While traditionalists of all political persuasions emphasized the United States’ long opposition to standing armies, fiscal conservatives and others argued against diversion of public funds from favored projects to prevent reformers like Root from carrying out a wholesale reorganization. Nevertheless, some changes, most notably the formation of a general staff, were achieved. In 1913, a voluntary training program began in the United States under the sponsorship of General Leonard Wood, chief of staff of the army. Two summer training camps were established offering student volunteers who paid their own expenses an introductory program of military training. These camps would form the model for the later Plattsburgh camps, one of the best known symbols of the preparedness movement.

Preparedness parade in Washington, D.C., 1916. Women wearing sashes bearing the names of the states they represent ride a float displaying the words “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary: Prepare.” The participation of women offered a rejoinder to the strong role of women like Jane Addams, Jeanette Rankin, and countless more in the pacifist movement to prevent U.S. participation in World War I. (Library of Congress)

The outbreak of war in Europe convinced more Americans of the need to do something about the state of the military, and the first step taken by many energetic individuals was to join with others in organizations like the American Defense Society, the American Rights Committee, the League to Enforce

Peace, and the National Security League to lobby for stronger naval and land forces. Some sought to forestall or ensure against accidental war and others to reinvigorate the modernization process. However, some, like former president Theodore Roosevelt, actively supported intervention in the war. Roosevelt wrote several books, including America and the World War (1915), to popularize the preparedness movement. Roosevelt made it clear that he believed the nation had a duty to intervene that followed logically from America’s earlier ratification of The Hague Conventions. In his view, nations should “act with the combined military strength of all of them against any recalcitrant nation … which transgresses at the expense of any other nation,” a point that he clearly applied to the invasion of Belgium (Roosevelt, 221). Further, the ex-president stated he would not have signed The Hague agreements if he had “supposed that signing these Hague conventions meant literally nothing whatever beyond the expression of a pious wish…. I would certainly not have permitted the United States to be a party to such a mischievous farce” (Roosevelt, 228). Roosevelt’s advocacy of intervention did not appeal widely even to those who supported an improved defense, and many other Americans rejected the whole program of preparedness. Antiwar spokesmen argued that the program would lead to militarism and a loss of America’s moral standing in the world. Besides, increased military spending would divert resources from more worthy uses, bolster existing inefficiencies, and enhance the very danger it was meant to mitigate. Opponents of preparedness also claimed that the program was being used by munitions manufacturers who hoped to profit from sales to the U.S. military as they were already doing in Europe. Moreover, antiwar advocates feared that an enlarged military might be used to protect the European investments of those allegedly unsavory forces. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration paid little attention to either the prewar training events or, with the coming of war, to calls for increased military preparedness. In his December 8, 1914, State of the Union address, Wilson addressed the question of national preparedness. “What is meant,” he asked, “by being prepared? Is it meant that we are not ready upon brief notice to put a nation in the field, a nation of men trained to arms? Of course we are not ready to do that; and we shall never be in time of peace so long as we retain our present political principles and institutions.” Wilson’s message was clear. America would not overturn its long antimilitarist tradition. Nevertheless, supporters of preparedness continued their efforts. In the summer of 1914, as Europe caught fire, an expanded training program took place at four camps scattered around the country. In 1915 the student program enlarged to accommodate interested older men, leading to camps held at Plattsburgh, New York. Regular army officers running the camps provided attendees with a program that included an introduction to military organization, physical fitness training, drill, and weapons instruction. The voluntary camps hosted thousands of interested students and professional men in 1915 and 1916. Preparedness advocates also seemed to make some progress when Wilson’s first secretary of war, Lindley Garrison, advocated a program to enlarge the army. And then the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat and the death of 128 Americans on May 7, 1915, provided the preparedness movement with a boost in public support. In addition to the threat posed by Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, political chaos in Mexico and the 1916 midterm election forced Wilson to accept a modest enlargement of the military establishment. On June 3, 1916, Congress passed and Wilson soon signed the National Defense Act of 1916. The regular force and the National Guard were enlarged, a reserve corps was created, and the president was given authority to mobilize the National Guard for the duration of a national emergency. The bill also established the Reserve Officers Training Corps and provided for some industrial and scientific preparations, but it did not include the “universal military service” provision desired by preparedness proponents.

The National Defense Act was viewed by antipreparedness advocates as so insignificant that the nation would continue to be too weak to go to war. The act was also seen in Berlin as proof that America was still an insignificant military power unable to threaten them. Ultimately, of course, unrestricted submarine attacks and the Zimmermann Telegram triggered the U.S. declaration of war in April 1917. Larry A. Grant See also: Peace Movement, World War I; Roosevelt, Theodore; Root, Elihu; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Speech of Former Secretary of War Elihu Root on the Need for U.S. Intervention (January 25, 1917)

Further Reading Finnegan, John P. Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. O’Toole, Patricia. When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Roosevelt, Theodore. America and the World War. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915.

Road to War: America, 1914–1917 (Walter Millis) (1935) Published in 1935, Walter Millis’s revisionist-based history titled Road to War: America, 1914–1917 critically analyzes the causes of America’s entrance into World War I. Before writing the book, Millis had worked as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, writing articles on current world affairs, especially those involving conflicts such as the Spanish-American War and World War I. In Road to War: America, 1914–1917, Millis first analyzes and deconstructs President Woodrow Wilson’s claim of neutrality between the two sides of the Triple Entente and Central powers nations when the war began in 1914. Millis argues that the United States was in fact inexorably preparing to enter the war on the side of the Triple Entente. Writing in bitter opposition to the war, Millis declares that U.S. involvement in World War I was driven not by what Wilson had claimed—to “make the world safe for democracy”—but rather by a desire to expand capitalistic democracy. Millis argues that even when the United States internationally proclaimed its neutrality in 1914, it had from the start favored the Triple Entente. This partiality toward the Entente came even as Wilson moved to engage the United States as an “Associative Power” and ultimately send American soldiers to fight. Millis claimed that an indirect, financially based favoritism of the Entente led to the successive events (e.g., the sinking of the Lusitania as well as the deaths of Americans on other vessels such as the Sussex) that eventually pushed the United States to stand firmly against the Central powers instead of remaining neutral. Like many involved in the World War I–era pacifist movement in the United States, Walter Millis critiqued politicians who supported the march to war, such as Theodore Roosevelt. Millis and other American pacifists saw World War I as a conflict fought between European hegemonic, imperial powers struggling for control over lands in Europe, Africa, and what became the modern Middle East. When published in 1935, Millis’s darkly critical narrative resonated with an American public still terribly disillusioned with the horrors of World War I and the apparent failed promise of that conflict. The weakness of the League of Nations (and Americans’ refusal to join) and the subsequent reconquest of lands by European colonial powers further embittered many. Millis was far from alone in writing books critical of the war’s origins. Finally, the well-publicized investigations by the congressional Nye Committee into the role of financiers and munitions makers in luring the United States into the conflict—

which were under way as Millis’s book was being published—led many to the cynical conclusion of the author that the war had been a waste and had only served to fatten the coffers of industrialists and bankers. Nina Teresi See also: A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway); Isolationism; Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis; Peace Movement, World War I; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Millis, Walter. Road to War: America, 1914–1917. New York: Fertig, 1970. Prefaces to Peace: A Symposium. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.

Russian Civil War, U.S.-Allied Intervention in (1918–1920) From 1918 to 1920, 14 nations, including the United States, intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the White Armies, fighting against the Bolshevik Red Armies. American participation, while not as numerous as that of other nations, was significant, and also controversial at home. In July 1918, to help bolster British and French troops already in Russia, the United States sent 5,000 troops known as the American North Russia Expeditionary Force to Arkhangelsk. This mission became known as the Polar Bear Expedition. Another 8,000 troops were sent from California and the Philippines to Vladivostok as the American Expeditionary Force Siberia. When World War I broke out in 1914, the Russian Empire was one of the key members of the Allied powers, alongside Great Britain and France. In the winter of 1917, Czar Nicholas II was overthrown and replaced with a provisional government, which vowed to keep Russia in the war. This was important to the British and French, as well as the United States, which joined the Allies in April 1917, as it meant the Germans would be forced to maintain a sizable force on the Eastern Front. However, when the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917 and subsequently signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, Germany and Austria-Hungary were free to move troops elsewhere. There was a great fear in London and Paris that Germany would transfer troops to Belgium and France and overrun the Allies before the United States could become heavily involved. Following this pattern of thought, the British and French decided to send troops and aid to those in Russia calling themselves the Whites, who opposed the Bolsheviks, or the Reds. Pressure quickly mounted on President Woodrow Wilson from both within the United States and from London and Paris to send American aid and troops to Russia. This caused a dilemma for Wilson. He wanted to keep Russia in the war and stop the potential spread of communism throughout Russia and Europe, but he had already published his Fourteen Points for Peace, which included national selfdetermination. If the United States intervened in Russian affairs, he would be violating his own principles. After debate within his administration, Wilson maintained any American troops and aid would be sent to Russia to secure and protect materials sold or loaned to the Imperial and later Provisional Russian government, to make sure they did not fall into German or Bolshevik hands. The president also announced that the Americans would launch an offensive to rescue the Czech Legion, which had been stranded on the

Trans-Siberian Railroad on their journey from prisoner of war camps to the Western Front to fight against Germany. Lastly, they would assist the British and French in their attempt to link up with White forces with an ultimate goal of reopening the Eastern Front and defeating both the Reds and the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Ultimately, Wilson was able to rally support by painting the endeavor as anti-German as well as antiBolshevik, even though over time it would become a purely anti-Bolshevik action. Aside from sending more than 15,000 troops, Wilson also used the Liberty Loan Act of 1917 to help underwrite the French and British campaigns, and allocated close to $10 million for use by White armies. The first American troops to arrive in Russia were part of the Polar Bear Expedition. These 5,000 troops were sent to England where they were specially trained for their mission, which was to assist British and French troops already in Russia. They arrived in Arkhangelsk on September 4, 1918, were supplied with Russian guns, and placed under British command.

Soldiers and sailors from several Allied nations line up in front of Allied headquarters in Vladivostock, Russia, in September 1918. Flags of the United States, France, Great Britain, and Japan fly from the Czecho-Slovak building in allied solidarity against the new Soviet government. World War I Triple Entente Allies, including the United States, fought together in the Russian Civil War in an effort to help overthrow the Bolsheviks. (National Archives)

When the American troops arrived, they were immediately used to aid in the rescue of the Czech Legion, which had been stranded in their journey across Siberia. The British commanders sent some of the troops up the Dvina River and others to the Vologda Railroad. Here they encountered Red Army troops and fought them for six weeks. Because the lines became long, they were difficult to supply and protect, and by the end of October, they were no longer able to maintain the offensive. They now shifted to a more defensive posture. They also realized that they would not be able to raise an effective local force of anti-Bolshevik soldiers, and gave up their other goal of linking up with the Czech Legion. In the winter, the Red Army went on the offensive, forcing the Americans as well as the other Allies to retreat. During the campaign the Americans suffered more than 200 casualties, of which more than 100 were killed. Many others died from disease. Following the armistice with Germany on November 11, 1918, family members began writing petitions to Congress asking for the immediate return of American troops from Russia. The press picked up the story and put pressure on the government as well. In the field the soldiers’ morale was low, and many began to openly question why they were in Russia. After hearing stories of mutinies among the British troops in Russia, Wilson began planning the withdrawal of American troops in February 1919. In

May 1919, 4,000 British troops arrived in Arkhangelsk to relieve the American troops, and in June the majority sailed for France and ultimately the United States. Unlike the Polar Bear Expedition, the American Expeditionary Force Siberia was not involved in much combat because of their commanding officer, General William Graves, who believed the 8,000 troops were sent there to provide protection for American property and to help the Czech Legion evacuate. At the time, some believed the American troops were sent to Siberia to keep an eye on the 72,000 Japanese soldiers in the region, who many felt were looking to exploit the chaotic situation and seize large chunks of Russian territory. Several years after the American troops were withdrawn from Russia, President Warren G. Harding called the expedition a mistake and blamed Wilson. Today, many ignore or look on the entire undertaking as a failure. Seth A. Weitz See also: Lenin, Vladimir, Anti-Imperialist Critique of

Further Reading Ullman, Richard. Intervention and the War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Willett, Robert L. Russian Sideshow: America’s Undeclared War, 1918–1920. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003.

Schenck (Charles) v. United States (1919) The landmark case Schenck v. United States (1919) set a precedent for potential governmental curtailment of First Amendment civil liberties during wartime, in particular, the freedom of speech. Although the case and the opinion handed down by the Supreme Court took place in early 1919, the events that led to the case occurred in August 1917, months after the United States had entered the First World War (1914–1918). President Woodrow Wilson had been hesitant to engage in the overseas conflict, considering it a European war. Given its stance of neutrality, the American government expected that U.S. ships could sail the seas safely; in 1917, however, the German navy began “unrestricted” submarine warfare. In addition, the contents of the infamous Zimmermann Telegram—in which the German government promised to aid Mexico in regaining territories lost to the United States—had been made public. Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917; American lives and merchandise had been sunk at sea. Once committed to war, Wilson and his government expected wholehearted support from every U.S. citizen. Wilson claimed the United States had no territorial ambitions in the war and had joined the war to “make the world safe for democracy.” Because of the purity of American motives for joining the war, Wilson expected that the United States would have a major voice in world affairs once the fighting ceased. Thus it was paramount that the United States and its allies were victorious and that U.S. citizens stand together in this “great crusade.” The Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) were created in an attempt to silence public voices that might undermine the war effort. The Wilson administration, the Justice Department, and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer tended to view any criticism of the government as treasonous. Charles Schenck was the general secretary of Philadelphia’s Socialist Party. In a reaction to the government’s draft (conscription) laws, the Socialist Party decided to print and distribute 15,000 copies

of a leaflet that would encourage its readers to call for the law’s repeal. The draft law was compared to slavery; the leaflet claimed only wealthy businessmen stood to profit from the war. The Supreme Court ruling was unanimous; Oliver Wendell Holmes, often remembered as a defender of civil liberties, wrote the opinion. Although Holmes acknowledged the First Amendment right of free speech, he argued that Schenck’s act did not occur in “ordinary times” and that “circumstances” (a nation at war) made such an act a crime. Furthermore, even the First Amendment would not protect someone from “falsely shouting fire in a theater and creating a panic.” Holmes’s opinion is also remembered for a second famous phrase: “clear and present danger.” Holmes felt that Schenck’s leaflet was intended to induce those eligible for conscription to both appeal the draft laws and perhaps, even more radically, refuse to join the military. Because American victory rested on having a sufficiently strong fighting army, Schenck’s actions were dangerous, “a hindrance … not to be endured,” as they potentially could undermine the stability of the American army. Jenna L. Kubly See also: Espionage Act; Sedition Act; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Alonso, Karen. Schenck v. United States: Restrictions on Free Speech. Springfield, NJ: Enslow, 1999. Bindler, Norman. The Conservative Court, 1910–1930 (The United States Supreme Court, Volume 6). Danbury, CT: Grolier Educational, 1995. Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Irons, Peter. A People’s History of the Supreme Court. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Kurland, Philip B., ed. Free Speech and Association: The Supreme Court and the First Amendment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Gary Marks. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Weaver, Russell L., et al. The First Amendment: Cases, Problems, and Materials. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Lexis Nexis, 2008.

Sedition Act (1918) The Sedition Act was a series of amendments to the Espionage Act of 1917, enacted on May 16, 1918. This series of amendments, henceforth referred to as the Sedition Act, forbade the deliberate expression of “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military and naval forces of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy,” or any speech that brought them “into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute” (Sedition Act). These measures were made to strengthen the Espionage Act and had the effect of greatly suppressing dissent and damaging the free expression of civil liberties during World War I. The motivation behind the Sedition Act was in part a reluctance among lower court judges to convict people for speech violations under the Espionage Act, which was aimed at treasonous actions that would undermine the war effort, such as spying. Seeing this, and desiring a legal means to prosecute “disloyal utterances,” Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory pushed the amendments that comprised the Sedition Act through Congress. The Sedition Act removed any remaining legal barriers to prosecute based on speech or action deemed disloyal by the U.S. government. The Justice Department was now absolutely free to continue what it had begun with the passage of the Espionage Act, intimidating people into altering the way they spoke or acted, clandestinely investigating people suspected of disloyalty, and making

arrests of those deemed to be acting disloyally. The Sedition Act intensified the wartime effort to root out suspected spies and traitors, who were rumored to have infiltrated every facet of American life. The federal government’s efforts were aided by citizens’ organizations that emerged in the hyperpatriotic wartime environment. After the passage of the Espionage Act, the Justice Department made official a vigilante-like organization called the American Protective League (APL), which charged its members with spying on their neighbors to assist the enforcement of the Sedition Act. Members were equipped with an official Justice Department badge and afforded much the same rights as a community police officer. By war’s end, the APL claimed to have 250,000 members, such was the fear that possessed American citizens and the enthusiasm with which many people in America responded to the Sedition Act. Similar organizations emerged across the country. With a noxious mix of fear, suspicion, prejudice, and superpatriotism, such groups were constantly looking to root out and punish disloyalty—with extralegal violence if necessary. In 1917, a German American in Illinois named Robert Prager was lynched by a town mob that suspected him of assisting the German war effort. When news of this reached Attorney General Gregory, he sought to assure the nation that such violence was not the fault of the Justice Department. Instead of cracking down on the vigilante mentality seen in Prager’s case that was emerging elsewhere, Gregory sought to push through additional amendments to the Espionage Act to accelerate the search for disloyalty and make penalties for subversion even more severe. The Sedition Act was not without its critics. Unfortunately, detractors were relatively few and were overwhelmed by the national climate of fear during both the war and the “Red Scare” that followed it. Just before the law’s passage, a Maryland senator attempted to add an amendment that made it clear that the constitutional right of free speech was not to be infringed upon in the act’s enforcement, but the Justice Department moved, successfully, to strike that amendment from the final version. More significantly, the law did inspire the formation of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which defended the rights of those accused of antiwar speech under the Sedition Act. The organization soon thereafter became the American Civil Liberties Union and worked to protect the rights of leaders of labor unions and other allegedly radical organizations who fell victim to the law during the Red Scare of 1920–1921. The vigor with which the government pursued people suspected of disloyalty or subversion under the Sedition Act spoke to the hysterical heights to which American patriotism had risen during the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution–inspired Red Scare that followed. Spies and traitors were suspected everywhere, and seemingly everyone was on the lookout for them. By war’s end, despite hundreds of arrests and countless lengthy prison sentences meted out, neither the Sedition Act nor its parent law, the Espionage Act, succeeded in catching a single spy. Collateral damage was extensive. Beyond the cost of civil liberties, German American culture was damaged by the suppression it underwent; the Socialist Party in America was weakened and would struggle to ever regain its prewar influence; radical labor unions would find little sympathy for their causes after the war, if they still existed at all. The Sedition Act is generally regarded by historians as the nadir of civil liberties in the nation’s history. It reflected a blatant disregard for rights guaranteed American citizens through the Bill of Rights, and offered sanction to the ugly vigilante spirit of wartime America. Fortunately, the Sedition Act amendments to the Espionage Act were written to apply only when the United States was at war, and thus only lasted a few years past the cease-fire in Europe in 1918. On December 13, 1920, the Sedition Act was officially repealed, ending a period in America when basic American liberties such as free speech and due process were left by the wayside in favor of rooting out the disloyal and suppressing wartime dissent. Major provisions of the Espionage Act itself, however, lived on, and the act gathered a complex legacy of its own in the decades ahead.

Keven Gregg See also: Debs, Eugene V.; Espionage Act; Industrial Workers of the World; Peace Movement, World War I; Schenck v. United States; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Bausum, Ann. Unravelling Freedom: The Battle for Democracy on the Home Front During World War I. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2010. Capozzola, Christopher. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ellis, Edward Robb. Echoes of Distant Thunder: Life in the United States 1914–1918. Toronto: Longman Canada, 1975. Thomas Jr., William H. Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Selective Service System On May 18, 1917, the Sixty-fifth United States Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917. This legislation formally established the Selective Service System. Designed as a temporary measure for World War I, the system instituted the second military draft in American history. Its predecessor, the Enrollment Act during the American Civil War, went into effect in 1863 and was generally unsuccessful. The vast majority of soldiers who fought in the Civil War were volunteers. In addition, unpopular facets of the Civil War draft such as cash bounties, hired substitutions, and purchased exemptions resulted in vociferous opposition, most notably the New York City draft riots that occurred during July 1863. In contrast, the Selective Service System enacted during World War I was only implemented in the absence of a viable volunteer system. Even though President Woodrow Wilson sought to rely on volunteers as much as possible, fewer than 100,000 men volunteered for military service during the first two months after the United States entered the war in April 1917. This number was far less than the Wilson administration’s estimated requirement of 1 million soldiers necessary to fight the war. As a result, conscription became an increasingly attractive policy option. Brigadier General Enoch H. Crowder, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, helped to draft the selective service bill. Senator George E. Chamberlain (D–OR) and Representative Julius Kahn (R–CA) sponsored the Selective Service Act of 1917. The approved bill initially authorized the president to draft 500,000 men for military service during World War I. It also allowed additional conscription later if circumstances warranted. From the outset, proponents of the bill viewed it as a temporary emergency measure that would exist only during the war. The Selective Service Act and the resultant system of conscription implied a universal military obligation for all military-age male citizens of the United States. Wary of the unpopular legacy of its Civil War predecessor, the Wilson administration and Congress purposely designed the Selective Service System to avoid many of the perceived problems with conscription that existed during the Civil War. As a result, the Selective Service System specifically banned cash bounties, hired substitutions, and purchased exemptions. On May 22, 1917, the federal government established the Office of the Provost Marshal General (OPMG) within the War Department and placed the Selective Service System under OPMG direction. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker named Enoch H. Crowder the provost marshal general. Even though the federal government instituted and guided the Selective Service System, local civilian boards were allowed to administer the draft. The federal government issued quotas to state boards. The state boards then directed district boards, representing counties and precincts, to fill the quotas. District boards

subsequently directed one of the more than 5,000 local civilian boards to select the specific draftees from among the local populace. Initially, the Selective Service System made liable for military service all males between the ages of 21 and 30. These early efforts resulted in an estimated 10 million males registered during 1917. The Selective Service System began actually drafting soldiers in September 1917. Concerned that such results were insufficient for the war effort, Congress amended the act on August 8, 1918. The amended act extended the age range liable for the draft to include all males from ages 18 to 45. This expanded age range resulted in more than 20 million registrants by the end of 1918. When World War I officially ended on November 11, 1918, so too did the rationale for the Selective Service System. Newton D. Baker ended draft calls for the army the same day and ceased draft calls for the navy two days later. Baker then ordered local civilian boards to begin closing on November 19, 1918. He added the stipulation that all local civilian boards had to be fully closed by December 10, 1918. On July 15, 1919, the secretary of war officially closed OPMG, thereby ending the Selective Service System of World War I. The Selective Service System was fairly successful. In all, more than 2.5 million men were drafted during World War I. This number represented more than half of all men who served during World War I. Although there was some notable resistance to the Selective Service System, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in the Selective Draft Law Cases that the court argued at the end of 1917 and decided in early 1918. These cases upheld both the specific Selective Service Act of 1917 and the more general policy of conscription in America. A generation later, the Selective Service System was again implemented by two laws, the first one passed in anticipation of U.S. participation in the Second World War: the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which also constituted the first peacetime draft in American history. It established the Selective Service System from 1940 until 1947. The second, the Military Selective Service Act of 1948, vaulted selective service over the U.S. Army’s proposed Universal Military Training (UMT) plan. As a result, it instituted the Selective Service System again during the Cold War, lasting from 1948 until the advent of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973. Even though the AVF remains the foundation of current U.S. military personnel policy, both the authority to draft and the Selective Service System itself remain in place today as a possible emergency measure. Both the AVF and the Selective Service System reflect the clear emergence of the United States as a preeminent world power beginning with World War I and the subsequent global projection of conventional armed forces repeatedly over the past century. William A. Taylor See also: Debs, Eugene V.; “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”; Peace Movement, World War I; Preparedness Movement; Roosevelt, Theodore; Root, Elihu; Schenck v. United States; Wood, Leonard

Further Reading Capozzola, Christopher. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Chambers, John W. To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America. New York: Free Press, 1987. Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Shenk, Gerald E. “Work, or Fight!” Race, Gender and the Draft in World War One. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Tarzan Tarzan is the main character in a series of stories told in books, movies, comics, and radio shows, originally created by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and first appearing in Tarzan of the Apes (1912). Burroughs wrote more than two dozen sequels during his lifetime, and the Tarzan story has been reinterpreted and revived many times since. The Tarzan stories typically took place in natural, primitive settings such as the “primeval forest” of the African jungle. The most prominent themes in Tarzan are the closeness of man to the natural world, disillusionment with modernity and civilization, and the struggle for existence among humans, animals, and the wilderness. Because of the success of Tarzan, Burroughs became the best-selling American author of the early 20th century. As the leading figure in a “postfrontier” generation of American pulp fiction writers, he was able to connect with a wide audience who yearned for adventure literature about savage, primitive landscapes. In many of Tarzan’s adventures, he fights and kills animals and humans, including a large number of African natives in Tarzan of the Apes. He tells Captain D’Arnot, the first white man he speaks to, that “None in all the jungle may face Tarzan of the Apes in battle, and live” (Burroughs, 204). Burroughs constantly refers to Tarzan’s inherent biological greatness as a son of British nobility, a symptom of the author’s strong ethnocentric, even eugenic views. Moreover, his success in the jungle—wherein “survival of the fittest” ruled—reflected well the racial overtones of the new imperialism. For example, most American imperialists viewed the recently completed struggle between Native Americans and the white “race” as a contest that inevitably led to the former “naturally” being supplanted from their lands. Tarzan was therefore a projection of the ideal Anglo-Saxon man that Theodore Roosevelt and others had imagined. The lord of the jungle’s savage upbringing gave him the same experience in taming the natural world that, in the mythologized frontier era, had developed the American national character. His success as a fighter and hunter reflected a sense of confidence in the biological greatness of AngloSaxondom. Burroughs’s character held the cure for the crisis of modernity, living the “strenuous life” that could maintain the fighting strength of the white race and counter the degenerative effects of civilization. Within Tarzan, however, are hints of dissent with European-style imperialism. In Tarzan of the Apes, King Leopold of Belgium—notorious by 1912 for the treatment of his subjects in the Congo—is called an “arch hypocrite” who committed “atrocities” and “crueler savagery.” Burroughs was also one of a number of authors who had written poems as a rebuttal to Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden.” Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Tarzan was part of the cultural and intellectual scaffolding of the new American imperialism. In Tarzan’s many jungle battles with Africans and Burroughs’s constant commentary on the character’s racial greatness, the story of the king of the apes was inseparable from the racist overtones that had underlain imperialism, the discourse of savagery and civilization, and paternalism over the racial “other” at home and overseas. Guy Massie See also: Africa, U.S. Interests in; Anglo-Saxonism; Frontier; Roosevelt, Theodore and the Rough Riders; Social Darwinism

Further Reading

Bederman, Gail. “Conclusion: Tarzan and After.” In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1914. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “Parables of Progress: Travelogues, Ghetto Sketches, and Fictions of the Foreigner.” In Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000, pp. 105–138. Vernon, Alex. On Tarzan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008.

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare Unrestricted submarine warfare occurred when belligerent governments instructed their naval officers to disregard traditional rules of engagement governing contact with civilian merchant shipping in declared war zones during the two world wars. Submarine commanders now attacked and sank these noncombatant vessels, often killing all aboard, and with little or no advance warning. Traditional rules of engagement had permitted such attacks against enemy warships, but they had expressly required naval commanders to detain and search merchant ships at sea, inspecting their registration papers and cargo, before attacking them. If a detained merchant ship was carrying contraband, commanders could either seize it, or they could evacuate its crew and see to the crew’s safety before sinking the ship. Submarines rendered these rules of engagement problematic, if not obsolete, after 1914. The German general staff resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare first, during the First World War. The British navy had blockaded Germany with surface warships in the North Atlantic. Although the United States reasserted its traditional position that it could freely trade with all parties, including belligerents—President Woodrow Wilson indeed insisted that free seas and free trade represented absolute, natural rights, even during wartime—the British blockade strictly limited American trade to Britain and France, denying the same to Germany. This not only nullified the Wilson administration’s claims to neutrality, but it also threatened Germany’s ability to continue fighting. The Germans deployed submarines to redress this imbalance. The German navy declared parts of the North Atlantic a war zone, instructing its submarine commanders to conduct unrestricted warfare there. The British, in turn, began arming their merchant ships, which now threatened the Germans’ lightly armed, thin-hulled submarines, especially when surfaced. The Germans subsequently escalated their tactics, now attacking all merchant ships, including passenger ships, from submerged positions. The German navy thus introduced and demonstrated “unrestricted submarine warfare.” These tactics enraged Wilson and the American public, and they ultimately provoked U.S. intervention. Germans exacerbated American outrage when they sank the passenger liner Lusitania in 1915 and then the cross-channel transport Sussex in 1916. Wilson denounced the Germans’ tactics as immoral, dishonorable, and terroristic. He demanded they discontinue them and instruct their submarine commanders to respect traditional rules of engagement in the North Atlantic. The German government pledged to comply. But Germans became desperate in 1917. The general staff directed the navy to resume unrestricted submarine warfare that year, calculating Germany would decide the war before the United States could intervene. The Wilson administration cited this as its primary casus belli when it asked Congress to declare war against Germany in April 1917. British, American, Japanese, French, and Italian delegates—working within a larger effort to cultivate peaceful relations among nations and prevent future wars—attempted to limit naval armaments in the

interwar years. The London Naval Treaty’s Article 22 confined naval officers to traditional rules of engagement and prohibited unrestricted submarine warfare. This remains international law today. This notwithstanding, all seafaring belligerents declared war zones, disregarded Article 22, and resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare during the Second World War. Each believed that dangerous wartime exigencies required this, and that their enemies would do so, rendering it a reality in an era of total warfare whether one judged it moral, honorable, or legal. Thus unrestricted submarine warfare became standard practice. Congress’s neutrality legislation implicitly recognized, and may even have encouraged, war zones and unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean in the late 1930s. Congress reflected Americans’ isolationist mood when it forbade American merchants’ sailing into belligerent waters after 1935. Although Congress intended to quarantine an escalating hostile trading environment, rendering American intervention in the coming war less likely, this legislation effectively announced the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from its traditional trading position, and it tacitly recognized German, and later British, war zones. American naval strategists had already accepted unrestricted submarine warfare by 1941. The American navy’s long-standing war plans against Japan remained premised upon a dramatic, fleet-action sea battle in the western Pacific, where the concentrated American battle fleet would sink its Japanese counterpart before establishing a traditional blockade that would enable the United States to dictate terms to Japan. But this became unrealistic after the naval treaties in the 1920s and Japanese rearmament in the 1930s changed the strategic situation in the western Pacific, where Japanese power had become formidable. Also, air power rendered battleships and cruisers obsolete, as the Pearl Harbor raid demonstrated. American naval commanders thus instructed their submarine fleets to wage unrestricted warfare against Japan. American submarines sank more merchant ships, tankers, and in some cases, civilian fishing boats, than Japan’s economy could sustain, steadily undermining Japan’s fighting capacity, even its ability to refuel its own warships, as the war continued. This partly explains the United States’ victory against Japan. Unrestricted submarine warfare represented but one blurring of the lines that had traditionally separated combatants and noncombatants, resulting in civilian suffering and death, both directly and indirectly. The American campaign against Japan not only targeted civilian merchant mariners and fishermen, but it also denied Japan basic food and energy resupply, resulting in the American occupation authority’s having to feed the Japanese population to avoid famine in the immediate postwar years. James Lockhart See also: Bryan, William Jennings; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s Note to the German Government in Response to Unrestricted Submarine Warfare (May 13, 1915)

Further Reading Blair, Clay. Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942. New York: Random House, 1996. Elleman, Bruce, and Sarah Paine, eds. Naval Blockades and Seapower: Strategies and Counter-Strategies, 1805–2005. New York: Routledge, 2006. Holwitt, Joel Ira. “Execute against Japan”: The US Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Submarine Warfare. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009.

Versailles, Treaty of (1919) The Versailles Treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in Paris, was the document that formally brought World War I to an end. Written and amended by the “Big Four” Entente allies—Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States—and signed by representatives of Germany, the treaty sought to prevent another massive European war, but in fact sowed the seeds of the next, far greater conflict.

In what served as the final act of World War I, and the overture to a much greater conflict, Allied plenipotentiaries sign the Versailles Treaty in the palace’s great Hall of Mirrors, June 28, 1919. By this point, Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points had run afoul of the Allies’ territorial ambitions, though the treaty did contain Wilson’s proposed League of Nations. (Wallace, DuncanClark, and Plewman, Canada in the Great War, 1919)

Although German delegates who signed the armistice bringing combat to a close on November 11, 1918, were under the impression that Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points would be the basis for a peace treaty, the European powers of the Big Four rejected this notion. Wilson’s plan called for a much milder “peace without victory,” but the European allies feared a German resurgence and thus set far harsher terms for peace. Because Germany was deemed by the Entente allies to be the nation most responsible for instigating the war, the allies imposed extremely strict measures upon it. France especially feared a German return to military prowess and sought to make it impossible for Germany ever again to rise to a position capable of waging large-scale war. Germany’s military was capped at 100,000 conscripted men and stripped of its strong officer corps. Its navy was barred from having vessels larger than 100,000 tons and was not permitted to possess any submarines, the weapon with which it had wrought such havoc during the war. Furthermore, Germany was not permitted to possess an air force or airborne military vessels of any kind. Lastly, it was decreed that Germany hold war crimes proceedings for Kaiser Wilhelm II and other German leaders, which resulted in a series of show trials in Leipzig, Germany, that most considered to be worthless and often did not even have the defendant present. France not only wanted to prevent Germany from ever again achieving a position of military strength, but its premier, Georges Clemenceau, desired that Germany’s economy be forever stunted as well. With a vastly reduced military capacity and without an economy to support that military, Clemenceau thought, Germany would never be in a position to wage war and attack France ever again. This economic crippling of Germany would be achieved through the Versailles Treaty’s Article 231, referred to as the “War Guilt Clause.” This demanded that Germany accept full responsibility for initiating World War I,

and as the nation solely responsible for doing so, pay for the expenses the war incurred. These payments, called reparations, amounted to countless billions of dollars and would be paid in increments to the damaged Allied nations for years to come. Clemenceau knew that Germany’s economy, already weakened, would likely not be able to handle such massive debts, but he so feared a German recovery and resumption of war with France that he nevertheless imposed these heavy-handed measures. Finally, the Versailles Treaty stripped Germany of a great deal of territory in Europe and abroad. Germany was forced to cede land to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and was forced to give up Alsace and Lorraine, which it had won in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. All of Germany’s overseas territory came under the authority of the League of Nations, and it was forced to give up, demilitarize, or grant foreign access to several key industrial zones. Many in Germany thought of the Treaty of Versailles not as a negotiation but as a Diktat, or dictated peace. Germany had little or no say in the negotiations at Versailles, and most Germans viewed it as an unfair punishment. Germany was indeed a main belligerent in the conflict, but few Germans accepted responsibility for the entire war. Many Germans felt betrayed by the peace, as the end result was far harsher than what Woodrow Wilson’s words led them to believe before the end of the war. Although people cheered the kaiser’s abdication at the end of the war, many also felt that Germany’s new democratic government had been forced upon them. Rather than fostering a civil and well-functioning peace, the Versailles Treaty fueled resentment and anger on both sides. Many historians have argued that the Versailles Treaty, instead of bringing Wilson’s “peace without victory,” fulfilling Clemenceau’s hopes of forever crippling Germany, or helping the European allies’ hopes of a peaceful Europe come to fruition, instead severely injured European continental relations. The colossal weight of the reparations payments levied upon Germany stunted its economy and exaggerated the effects of the worldwide economic depression that would wreak such havoc in 1929. These political and economic conditions, coupled with the demilitarization measures of Versailles, created an environment that bred extremism in Germany. Outside of Europe, the Versailles Treaty failed to curtail the rampant colonialism of the major powers of the world, which had played such a pivotal role in the buildup to World War I. Despite the optimism and idealism of Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points, the colonial powers of Europe had no intention of giving up their territories abroad or granting autonomy to those over whom they ruled. Although the main stated goal of the League of Nations, adopted under the Versailles Treaty despite American reservations, was to maintain world peace, granting sovereignty to the European-ruled peoples of the world was never an intended means of doing so. Thus, those living under imperialist rule in such areas of the world as Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East found that only the nation ruling them had changed, if anything had changed at all. The Versailles Treaty, despite being the document that formally ended one of the most destructive wars ever seen on Earth, produced an inherently flawed peace. Instead of fostering healing and reconciliation in Europe, it bred resentment and paved the way for extremism. Rather than addressing the problems of widespread imperialism, it settled for the comfortable status quo. The failure of this document to keep peace in the world would be shown just two decades later, when the dire consequences of its shortcomings would be played out on a global scale. Keven Gregg See also: Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Lenin, Vladimir, Anti-Imperialist Critique of; Wilson, Woodrow

Further Reading Andelman, David. A. A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Boemeke, Manfred F., Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Gläser, eds. The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1998. Graebner, Norman A., and Edward M. Bennett. The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2002.

Virgin Islands The Virgin Islands had long been inhabited by Taíno (Arawak) and Carib peoples before being visited by explorer Christopher Columbus in 1493. Various European countries colonized the islands over the next two centuries, but the diseases they introduced and the harsh manner in which they treated their new subjects doomed the Native American population. Britain occupied the northeastern islands of the group during the second half of the 17th century, while Denmark began the colonization of St. Thomas at about the same time and subsequently extended its rule to St. John and St. Croix. Like their counterparts throughout the region, Danish settlers relied on African slaves to work their plantations. The Danish West Indies (Dansk Vestindien or De Danskvestindiske Øer), as the islands were known, thrived until the mid-19th century. However, their economy went into decline shortly afterward. With an eye to their strategic value and fearful that they might pass into the hands of another, more antagonistic nation, U.S. secretary of state William H. Seward approached Danish authorities in 1865 regarding their sale. Over the next two years representatives negotiated a treaty for the purchase of St. Thomas and St. John for $7.5 million. Although Denmark proved willing, the U.S. Senate, roiled by the recent impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and cool to the idea of overseas expansion, rejected the treaty. Secretary of State John Hay initiated a new bid to purchase the islands in 1900. His efforts resulted two years later in a treaty providing for the sale of all three of the islands for $5 million. Although the Senate ratified the treaty on this occasion, Denmark’s upper house, the Landsthing, rejected it in a tie vote. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought fears that Germany might annex neighboring Denmark and build a submarine base in that country’s West Indian colony. Besides violating the Monroe Doctrine, such a move would threaten American waters as well as international shipping lanes and the new Panama Canal. More concerned than ever, U.S. officials renewed negotiations with their Danish counterparts regarding the future of the islands, with the result that the two countries signed the Convention between the United States and Denmark for the Cession of the Danish West Indies in 1916 and ratified it the following year. Under the provisions of the treaty, the United States paid $25 million for St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, and a number of nearby islets. When it took formal possession of the Virgin Islands on March 31, 1917, the country not only allayed a potential threat but also consolidated its growing power in the Caribbean region. Grove Koger See also: Hay, John; Monroe Doctrine; Panama/Panama Canal

Further Reading Boyer, William W. America’s Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs. 2nd ed. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010.

Dookhan, Isaac. A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States. Epping, UK: Caribbean Universities Press for the College of the Virgin Islands, 1974. Tansill, Charles Callan. The Purchase of the Danish West Indies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932.

Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924) Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States and a champion of world peace and democracy. He is ranked as one of the most successful and influential of American presidents, serving from 1913 to 1921 in a time of great change. Historians remember Wilson as an unwavering advocate of a strong internationalist role for the United States, an idealistic architect of a globalist and highly moralistic 20th-century American foreign policy that continues to this day. Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, on December 29, 1856, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet “Jessie” Woodrow Wilson. His father was a Presbyterian minister as was his mother’s father. The home in which Wilson grew up was religiously pious, scholarly, and deeply devoted to Presbyterianism. Wilson was 14 when his father became the president of the Presbyterian theological seminary at Columbia, South Carolina. He entered Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, at age 17, where he completed his freshman year. However, because his father was now the pastor of a large church in Wilmington, North Carolina, he was able to afford to go to Princeton (then New College of New Jersey). His studies were directed to prepare him for a public life. He graduated from Princeton in 1879 and then entered the University of Virginia Law School at Charlottesville, Virginia. Ill health caused Wilson to leave law school; however, in 1882, he opened a law practice in Atlanta, Georgia. He attracted only a few clients and spent most of his time reading and writing. By the spring of 1883 he concluded that he was not suited to be a lawyer, but wanted to be a college professor. He was accepted at Johns Hopkins where he studied history and political science, graduating in 1886 with his PhD. Wilson’s first book, Congressional Government: A Study of American Politics, was an analysis of American government and won wide praise. Before Wilson’s doctorate was awarded he met and married Ellen Louise Axson. They eventually had three daughters. Between 1885 and 1889 Wilson held teaching posts at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University. His publication of The State in 1889 led Princeton to appoint him to the post of professor of jurisprudence and political economy in 1890. In 1902 he was elected president of Princeton University, the first nonclergyman to hold the post. He launched efforts to make significant reforms and although many of them failed to come to pass, Wilson attracted the attention of state Democrat Party leaders who offered to support his candidacy for governor of New Jersey. His powerful campaign speeches aroused voters, who gave him a large margin of victory. As governor of New Jersey Wilson successfully pushed through a range of Progressive reforms that made him a rising national political figure in the Democratic Party and one who stood in 1912 as an attractive alternative to another presidential run by William Jennings Bryan, who had been defeated three times. At the Democratic Party convention in 1912 Bryan threw his support to Wilson, who eventually won the nomination and the election that fall against a divided Republican Party. Wilson became president in March 1913 at a time of enormous change in American life. Among the domestic Progressive reforms Wilson promoted were adoption of the income tax, direct election of senators to the U.S. Senate, and labor reforms. In foreign affairs Wilson persuaded Congress to repeal the Panama Tolls Act, which allowed American ships to use the canal toll free. He urged Congress to move toward independence for the Philippines, signing the Jones bill (1916) that moved the Philippines on a path toward independence.

At the same time, however, when it came to Latin America, Wilson and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, followed the policies of their predecessors that reinforced American hegemony throughout the region. For example, American troops were sent to Nicaragua to suppress popular rebellions. U.S. forces were also put in control of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Troubles along the border with Mexico became a crisis in the years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). President of Mexico for nearly four decades, Porfirio Díaz was overthrown in 1911. Díaz had welcomed significant U.S. and other foreign investment in Mexico. By the time Wilson became president, wealthy Americans owned more than a quarter of Mexican land and American industrial investments were 45 percent U.S.-owned. Despite heavy outside investment, most people in Mexico lived in squalor and had few political rights—conditions that begged for revolt, but as many Americans saw it, disorder, chaos, and anarchy that posed a threat just across the border. These facts, coupled with longstanding racial and religious prejudice that extended back at least to the Mexican-American War, invited U.S. intervention. Díaz’s overthrow was followed by a decade of violence that nearly brought Mexico and the United States to war several times.

Woodrow Wilson served as president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. He sought to pursue a foreign policy based on a high-minded morality that often infuriated U.S. allies abroad and political opponents at home. Although he sought to avoid U.S. involvement in World War I, once America entered the war, Wilson proclaimed the nation was fighting not for its own self-interest but to “make the world safe for democracy” and to “end all wars.” (Library of Congress)

Díaz’s successor, liberal reformer Francisco I. Madero, could not maintain order in the strife-torn country and with the support of the country’s elites, General Victoriano Huerta ousted Madero in 1913 and arranged his murder in prison. Although most Europeans recognized the Huerta government, Wilson, ever the moralist, refused to do so, believing him to be dictatorial. Wilson announced that for any revolutionary government in Latin America to win American approval they would have to demonstrate a willingness to govern by the rule of law. On that basis, Wilson maneuvered to force Huerta’s removal. In

1914 Wilson stationed U.S. naval forces off the coast of Mexico’s ports to interdict shipments of weapons to Huerta’s government. On April 9, 1914, several American sailors went ashore at Tampico and were arrested. Despite their immediate release, the U.S. admiral demanded an apology and a 21-gun salute to the American flag. Defiant, Huerta agreed—if the Americans also saluted the Mexican flag. Just as Congress was handing Wilson the right to use military force in Mexico, the president learned of a shipment of German weapons at Veracruz. Wilson ordered American warships to shell the harbor and for marines to land and seize control of Veracruz. On the eve of World War I in Europe, Mexico and the United States stood on the edge of a full-scale war of their own. Following mediation by Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, Wilson retreated, stating that he only wanted to help Mexico restore order and the rule of law. Huerta finally fled Mexico that summer, leaving Venustiano Carranza as president. Wilson recognized the new government. Early in 1916, however, Mexican general Francisco “Pancho” Villa, a champion of the poor, opposed Carranza’s authority and helped launch a popular revolt against the United States that he hoped would lead to his own ascension to the presidency. Moving into northern Mexico in 1916, Villa’s Division of the North raided border towns and executed a predawn raid on Columbus, New Mexico, that resulted in the deaths of 16 Americans and the burning of the town. Villa’s reasons for the attack included anger over the aid Wilson was giving to the Carranza forces. In response, Wilson deployed 6,000 American troops under General John Pershing to pursue Villa deep into Mexico. Although initially supportive of Wilson’s incursion, by the spring of 1917 the Carranza government ordered Mexican forces to oppose American forces for penetrating deeper into Mexico, and in turn Wilson—by now deeply engulfed in events in Europe—sent Pershing home. Although desirous of positive ends, Wilson’s moralistic and condescending intervention in the affairs of Mexico had only served to reinforce long-standing anti-American resentment among many in that nation. When World War I began in August 1914, Wilson followed a policy of neutrality. However, as German submarine warfare increased, and especially following the sinking of the HMS Lusitania and the loss of 128 Americans, the policy of neutrality increasingly collapsed. Wilson was able to secure a pledge from the Germans that they would not attack passenger ships or neutral vessels. With public opinion on his side, Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” The slogan turned hollow in 1917, however, as the Germans reopened unrestricted submarine warfare. In addition, the infamous Zimmermann Telegram that attempted to incite Mexico to make war on the United States led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war to make the world safe for democracy. By Congress declaring war on April 6, 1917, Wilson became an inspirational wartime leader. He stated with greater eloquence than any European leader the reasons the Allied democracies had for fighting, along with an idealistic hope for a better, more democratic and peaceful world following the war. On January 8, 1918, he delivered before Congress his Fourteen Points that included a call for a “League of Nations” united to keep world peace. The global impact of the speech was significant, inspiring colonized peoples everywhere that an end to their subjugation was at hand, as well as undermining German determination to continue the war. Wilson aspired to a kind of U.S.-led, benign, moral imperialism following the war. At once modifying but not abandoning the imperialistic policies of his predecessors, Wilson believed the United States was the most enlightened nation in the world and had a moral obligation to lead lesser nations down the path to self-determination. Similarly, his secretary of state, Bryan, aimed to spread the blessings of democracy abroad. Wilson’s moralistic foreign policy was to some critics another form of imperialism instead of what he saw—moral action for the greater good.

Further, while Wilson was promoting a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” it was disappearing at home. Supported by Wilson, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 in effect imposed censorship for supporting pacifism and made it a crime to oppose the war or to speak ill of the U.S. government. The Great War ended with the November 11, 1918, armistice; however, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 would take six months to draft the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans had signed the armistice with an eye to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but in the end, the details of the Treaty of Versailles—penned largely by the French—were punitive and would set the stage for the rise of Nazism in Germany between the world wars. At the Peace Conference Wilson faced Allied imperial powers seeking the spoils of the victors. To win support for a League of Nations Wilson compromised on several key points, weakening his moral authority in the eyes of many people. Wilson pinned his hopes on the League of Nations that he believed could curb the territorial ambitions of self-aggrandizing nations. In February 1919 Wilson returned to the United States to face a Senate that had to approve American participation by a two-thirds vote of ratification. However, following the election of 1918, isolationist Republicans—who, reflecting the mood of a war-weary nation, were in no mood to commit themselves to long-term “entangling” obligations to other nations—dominated the debate over its passage. After months of bitter debate, negotiation, and despite a national speaking tour by Wilson advocating for the treaty and the League of Nations, the treaty failed to be ratified. Further, in the midst of the campaign Wilson suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed. Wilson was an invalid for the remainder of his term of office and until his death on February 3, 1924. Andrew J. Waskey and Patit Paban Mishra See also: Bryan, William Jennings; Fourteen Points/Lodge Reservations; Mexico; Zimmermann Telegram; Primary Documents: President Woodrow Wilson’s Proclamation “Do Your Bit for America” (April 15, 1917); President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918)

Further Reading Berg, A. Scott. Wilson. New York: Penguin Group, 2013. Cooper, John Milton. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cooper, John Milton. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011. Knock, Thomas J. To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2003. Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Zimmermann Telegram (1917) The Zimmermann Telegram was an attempt by the German government to draw Mexico into war against the United States in January 1917. Just as animosities between the United States and Mexico were intensifying, German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann issued a secret, coded telegram proposing that in exchange for Mexico declaring war against the United States, Mexico—if successful in war—would regain lands lost to the United States during the 19th century. Mexico rejected the offer, but public exposure of details of the communiqué was a significant final factor in prompting the United States to enter World War I and declare war against Germany in April 1917.

The German government, already at war with the Triple Entente (United Kingdom, France, and Russia) in Europe since 1914, anticipated that the previously neutral United States would declare war against Germany in early 1917. As the British navy controlled Atlantic sea lanes, the German military intended to resume unrestricted submarine attacks by the first of February and expected the action would prompt a U.S. military response. The Germans hoped that a Mexican war against the United States would drain U.S. military resources, slow transport of arms and supplies to Europe, and generally weaken U.S. military force across the Atlantic. Because Mexico had been involved in border skirmishes with its northern neighbor and also appeared to have much to gain in Zimmermann’s proposal, the German foreign secretary reasoned that Mexico had cause to join in battle against the United States. The border conflicts reflected preexisting tensions between Mexico and the United States. Because President Woodrow Wilson had allowed the rivals of Mexican general Francisco “Pancho” Villa to cut across Arizona to attack Villa’s allies in the course of the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican general crossed the border and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916 at least in part to incite a response from the United States. Wilson answered by sending General John Pershing on a “punitive expedition” into Mexico, chasing Villa’s troops throughout the State of Chihuahua but failing to defeat or to capture them. Pershing’s futile expedition resulted in glorification of Villa as a Mexican nationalist hero, but also sparked heated animosity between Wilson and Mexican president Venustiano Carranza, who resented acts of foreign imperial aggression and breaches of Mexican national sovereignty. Zimmermann’s offer was an attempt to take advantage of this acrimony. In the coded telegram sent to the German ambassador in Mexico on January 16, 1917, Zimmermann instructed Heinrich von Eckardt to propose a military alliance with Mexico and to offer the Carranza administration funding to carry out war against the United States. The offer included a promise that Texas as well as Arizona, New Mexico, and other territories lost to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) would return to Mexico should the German-Mexican alliance prove victorious. Zimmermann also asked Eckardt to push Carranza to arrange an alliance between Japan and Germany. The German foreign secretary concluded the telegram by predicting that the “ruthless employment of our submarines” would lead to imminent victory over England and its allies. British intelligence intercepted and decoded the secret message, and the world responded. After the British government—which had long been urging U.S. alliance—made the telegram public, many in the United States distrusted the authenticity of the document. But Zimmermann himself admitted in March that he had dictated the telegram and that the German offer to fund Mexico’s war against the United States was genuine. Germany had already resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in late January and had sunk seven U.S. merchant vessels by April, and the telegram now documented publicly that the German Empire was preparing military alliances against the United States. American public opinion against Germany strengthened, and Congress declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917. Despite obvious tensions between Mexico and the United States, the Carranza administration rejected Zimmermann’s proposal. President Carranza’s staff advised that the Mexican military would be unable simultaneously to stabilize internal political challenges and to mount effective aggression against its northern neighbor, especially because the United States was Mexico’s most important supplier of arms and war matériel. Advisers also suggested that sustaining control over any conquered territories of the United States would prove costly and difficult. War against the United States also would isolate Mexico from other Latin American nations, which mostly remained neutral in World War I. After careful consideration, Carranza deemed Zimmermann’s proposal unfeasible. The primary historical significance of the Zimmermann Telegram is that it was a major contributing factor in moving the United States from a slowly eroding position of neutrality in World War I to its

ultimate declaration of war against Germany and a heavy commitment of troops and resources to the war in Europe. As a result, the U.S. government paid less attention to the political turmoil in Mexico. Only after declaring war against Germany did the United States withdraw troops from Mexico, transferring Pershing’s forces from Chihuahua to Europe in April 1917. Gregory S. Crider See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexico; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Zimmermann Telegram (January 1917)

Further Reading Boghardt, Thomas. The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War I. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012. Katz, Friedrich. The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Zimmermann, Arthur to von Eckardt, 16 January 1917. “The Zimmermann Telegram (1917).” In Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, eds. Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 113–114. Originally published in U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917, Supplement 1, The World War, “The Ambassador in Great Britain (Page) to the Secretary of State. 24 February 1917.” Washington, DC: GPO, 1931, pp. 147–148.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s Note to the German Government in Response to Unrestricted Submarine Warfare (May 13, 1915) On May 7, 1915, the British civilian ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German Uboat off the coast of Ireland, resulting in the deaths of 1,198 passengers, 128 of them Americans. President Woodrow Wilson responded with three diplomatic notes of protest, each one more contentious than the one before—ending in an ultimatum that all such attacks on nonbelligerent vessels cease. This first note contextualized the German attack and offered the Imperial government a chance to alter its position that U-boat attacks on vessels carrying munitions was allowable and no worse than the starvation-inducing British blockade of the German civilian population. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, under whose name this note was sent, agreed with the substance of the German position, believed the United States had betrayed itself as not genuinely neutral, and resigned after the second note. In view of recent acts of the German authorities in violation of American rights on the high seas which culminated in the torpedoing and sinking of the British steamship Lusitania on May 7, 1915, by which over 100 American citizens lost their lives, it is clearly wise and desirable that the government of the United States and the Imperial German government should come to a clear and full understanding as to the grave situation which has resulted. The sinking of the British passenger steamer Falaba by a German submarine on March 28, through which Leon C. Thrasher, an American citizen, was drowned; the attack on April 28 on the American vessel Cushing by a German aeroplane; the torpedoing on May 1 of the American vessel Gulflight by a German submarine, as a result of which two or more American citizens met their death; and, finally, the

torpedoing and sinking of the steamship Lusitania constitute a series of events which the government of the United States has observed with growing concern, distress, and amazement. Recalling the humane and enlightened attitude hitherto assumed by the Imperial German government in matters of international right, and particularly with regard to the freedom of the seas; having learned to recognize the German views and the German influence in the field of international obligation as always engaged upon the side of justice and humanity; and having understood the instructions of the Imperial German government to its naval commanders to be upon the same plane of humane action prescribed by the naval codes of other nations, the government of the United States was loath to believe—it cannot now bring itself to believe—that these acts, so absolutely contrary to the rules, the practices, and the spirit of modern warfare, could have the countenance or sanction of that great government. It feels it to be its duty, therefore, to address the Imperial German government concerning them with the utmost frankness and in the earnest hope that it is not mistaken in expecting action on the part of the Imperial German government which will correct the unfortunate impressions which have been created and vindicate once more the position of that government with regard to the sacred freedom of the seas. The government of the United States has been apprised that the Imperial German government considered themselves to be obliged by the extraordinary circumstances of the present war and the measures adopted by their adversaries in seeking to cut Germany off from all commerce, to adopt methods of retaliation which go much beyond the ordinary methods of warfare at sea, in the proclamation of a war zone from which they have warned neutral ships to keep away. This government has already taken occasion to inform the Imperial German government that it cannot admit the adoption of such measures or such a warning of danger to operate as in any degree an abbreviation of the rights of American shipmasters or of American citizens bound on lawful errands as passengers on merchant ships of belligerent nationality; and that it must hold the Imperial German government to a strict accountability for any infringement of those rights, intentional or incidental. It does not understand the Imperial German government to question those rights. It assumes, on the contrary, that the Imperial government accept, as of course, the rule that the lives of non-combatants, whether they be of neutral citizenship or citizens of one of the nations at war, cannot lawfully or rightfully be put in jeopardy by the capture or destruction of an unarmed merchantman, and recognize also, as all other nations do, the obligation to take the usual precaution of visit and search to ascertain whether a suspected merchantman is in fact of belligerent nationality or is in fact carrying contraband of war under a neutral flag. The government of the United States, therefore, desires to call the attention of the Imperial German government, with the utmost earnestness, to the fact that the objection to their present method of attack against the trade of their enemies lies in the practical impossibility of employing submarines in the destruction of commerce without disregarding those rules of fairness, reason, justice, and humanity which all modern opinion regards as imperative. It is practically impossible for the officers of a submarine to visit a merchantman at sea and examine her papers and cargo. It is practically impossible for them to make a prize of her; and, if they cannot put a prize crew on board of her, they cannot sink her without leaving her crew and all on board of her to the mercy of the sea in her small boats. These facts it is understood the Imperial German government frankly admit. We are informed that in the instances of which we have spoken time enough for even that poor measure of safety was not given, and, in at least two of the cases cited, not so much as a warning was received. Manifestly, submarines cannot be used against merchantmen, as the last few weeks have shown, without an inevitable violation of many sacred principles of justice and humanity.

American citizens act within their indisputable rights in taking their ships and in travelling wherever their legitimate business calls them upon the high seas, and exercise those rights in what should be the well-justified confidence that their lives will not be endangered by acts done in clear violation of universally acknowledged international obligations, and certainly in the confidence that their own government will sustain them in the exercise of their rights. There was recently published in the newspapers of the United States, I regret to inform the Imperial German government, a formal warning, purporting to come from the Imperial German Embassy at Washington, addressed to the people of the United States, and stating, in effect, that any citizen of the United States who exercised his right of free travel upon the seas would do so at his peril if his journey should take him within the zone of waters within which the Imperial German Navy was using submarines against the commerce of Great Britain and France, notwithstanding the respectful but very earnest protests of his government, the government of the United States. I do not refer to this for the purpose of calling the attention of the Imperial German government at this time to the surprising irregularity of a communication from the Imperial German Embassy at Washington addressed to the people of the United States through the newspapers, but only for the purpose of pointing out that no warning that an unlawful and inhumane act will be committed can possibly be accepted as an excuse or palliation for that act or as an abatement of the responsibility for its commission. Long acquainted as this government has been with the character of the Imperial German government and with the high principles of equity by which they have in the past been actuated and guided, the government of the United States cannot believe that the commanders of the vessels which committed these acts of lawlessness did so except under a misapprehension of the orders issued by the Imperial German naval authorities. It takes it for granted that, at least within the practical possibilities of every such case, the commanders even of submarines were expected to do nothing that would involve the lives of noncombatants or the safety of neutral ships, even at the cost of failing of their object of capture or destruction. It confidently expects, therefore, that the Imperial German government will disavow the acts of which the government of the United States complains, that they will make reparation so far as reparation is possible for injuries which are without measure, and that they will take immediate steps to prevent the recurrence of anything so obviously subversive of the principles of warfare for which the Imperial German government have in the past so wisely and so firmly contended. The government and the people of the United States look to the Imperial German government for just, prompt, and enlightened action in this vital matter with the greater confidence because the United States and Germany are bound together, not only by special ties of friendship but also by the explicit stipulations of the treaty of 1828 between the United States and the Kingdom of Prussia. Expressions of regret and offers of reparation in the case of the destruction of neutral ships sunk by mistake, while they may satisfy international obligations, if no loss of life results, cannot justify or excuse a practice, the natural and necessary effect of which is to subject neutral nations and neutral persons to new and immeasurable risks. The Imperial German government will not expect the government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment. Source: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915: Supplement (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928), 393–396.

Lyrics to the Song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” (1915) Written by lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” reflected and gave strength to rising pacifism in the United States. Resonating in the context of the antiwar and suffrage movements, the song’s lyrics call for a stronger women’s voice in the world in order to, presumably, prevent future wars. An enormously popular hit, the song galvanized the antiwar movement but also provoked great criticism from bellicose voices like that of former president Theodore Roosevelt. Ten million soldiers to the war have gone, Who may never return again. Ten million mothers’ hearts must break, For the ones who died in vain. Head bowed down in sorrow in her lonely years, I heard a mother murmur thro’ her tears: Chorus: I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier, I brought him up to be my pride and joy, Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder, To shoot some other mother’s darling boy? Let nations arbitrate their future troubles, It’s time to lay the sword and gun away, There’d be no war today, If mothers all would say, I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier. (Chorus) What victory can cheer a mother’s heart, When she looks at her blighted home? What victory can bring her back, All she cared to call her own? Let each mother answer in the year to be, Remember that my boy belongs to me! (Chorus) Source: Al Piantadosi and Alfred Bryan, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Recording: Edison Collection, Library of Congress.

Helen Keller’s Speech “Strike Against War,” Delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York City (January 5, 1916) Deaf and blind from birth, Helen Keller (1880–1968) became a hugely successful author, lecturer, and activist on behalf of women, the labor movement, and other causes of social and economic justice. Keller was also a leading early voice against U.S. involvement in World War I. In this excerpt from a notable 1916 speech at Carnegie Hall, she argued that the war, more than a year under way, was being fought for the benefit of imperial-capitalist interests and to the exploitative detriment of the working class. With rather cutting language, she cynically predicts that American workers would not be able to resist the patriotic call to arms.

… The future of the world rests in the hands of America. The future of America rests on the backs of 80,000,000 working men and women and their children. We are facing a grave crisis in our national life. The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists. You are urged to add to the heavy burdens you already bear the burden of a larger army and many additional warships. It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery and the dread-noughts and to shake off some of the burdens, too, such as limousines, steam yachts and country estates. You do not need to make a great noise about it. With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms…. Congress is not preparing to defend the people of the United States. It is planning to protect the capital of American speculators and investors in Mexico, South America, China, and the Philippine Islands. Incidentally this preparation will benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines. Until recently there were uses in the United States for the money taken from the workers. But American labor is exploited almost to the limit now, and our national resources have all been appropriated. Still the profits keep piling up new capital. Our flourishing industry in implements of murder is filling the vaults of New York’s banks with gold. And a dollar that is not being used to make a slave of some human being is not fulfilling its purpose in the capitalistic scheme. That dollar must be invested in South America, Mexico, China, or the Philippines. It was no accident that the Navy League came into prominence at the same time that the National City Bank of New York established a branch in Buenos Aires. It is not a mere coincidence that six business associates of J. P. Morgan are officials of defense leagues. And chance did not dictate that Mayor Mitchel could appoint to his Committee of Safety a thousand men that represent a fifth of the wealth of the United States. These men want their foreign investments protected. Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether [the] slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines. The South African War decided that the British should exploit the diamond mines. The Russo-Japanese War decided that Japan should exploit Korea. The present war is to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, China, Africa. And we are whetting our sword to scare the victors into sharing the spoils with us. Now, the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway…. “Friends,” it says, “fellow workmen, patriots; your country is in danger! There are foes on all sides of us. There is nothing between us and our enemies except the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Look at what has happened to Belgium. Consider the fate of Serbia. Will you murmur about low wages when your country, your very liberties, are in jeopardy? What are the miseries you endure compared to the humiliation of having a victorious German army sail up the East River? Quit your whining, get busy and prepare to defend your firesides and your flag. Get an army, get a navy; be ready to meet the invaders like the loyal-hearted freemen you are.” Will the workers walk into this trap? Will they be fooled again? I am afraid so. The people have always been amenable to oratory of this sort. The workers know they have no enemies except their masters. They know that their citizenship papers are no warrant for the safety of themselves or their wives and children. They know that honest sweat, persistent toil and years of struggle bring them nothing worth holding on to, worth fighting for. Yet, deep down in their foolish hearts they believe they have a country. Oh blind vanity of slaves! The clever ones, up in the high places know how childish and silly the workers are. They know that if the government dresses them up in khaki and gives them a rifle and starts them off with a brass band and

waving banners, they will go forth to fight valiantly for their own enemies. They are taught that brave men die for their country’s honor. What a price to pay for an abstraction—the lives of millions of young men; other millions crippled and blinded for life; existence made hideous for still more millions of human being[s]; the achievement and inheritance of generations swept away in a moment—and nobody better off for all the misery! This terrible sacrifice would be comprehensible if the thing you die for and call country fed, clothed, housed and warmed you, educated and cherished your children. I think the workers are the most unselfish of the children of men; they toil and live and die for other people’s country, other people’s sentiments, other people’s liberties and other people’s happiness! The workers have no liberties of their own; they are not free when they are compelled to work twelve or ten or eight hours a day; they are not free when they are ill paid for their exhausting toil. They are not free when their children must labor in mines, mills and factories or starve, and when their women may be driven by poverty to lives of shame. They are not free when they are clubbed and imprisoned because they go on strike for a raise of wages and for the elemental justice that is their right as human beings…. Source: New York Call, January 6, 1916.

Zimmermann Telegram (January 1917) In January 1917, as President Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention in Mexico continued, British intelligence services intercepted a secret, coded telegram issued by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann proposing that in exchange for Mexico declaring war against the United States, Mexico, once victorious, would regain lands lost to the United States during the 19th century. Although Mexico rejected the offer, revelations of the communiqué prompted widespread outrage in the United States and helped trigger the declaration of war against Germany in April. From 2nd from London #5747. “We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States of America is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.” Signed, ZIMMERMANN. Source: Charles F. Horne, ed. Source Records of the Great War. Vol. V. Washington: National Alumni, 1923.

Speech of Former Secretary of War Elihu Root on the Need for U.S. Intervention (January 25, 1917)

On January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson delivered an address to the U.S. Senate in which he condemned imperialism and territorial aggrandizement as acceptable goals or outcomes of the horrific world war that was now well into its third year and soon to include the United States. Seeking moral high ground for his nation from which to help determine the shape of the peace to follow, Wilson called for “peace without victory” in World War I and envisioned an international body that could enforce an enduring peace. Three days later, former secretary of state Elihu Root, an esteemed and vocal advocate of U.S. intervention, offered a skeptical reading of the president’s position, voicing particular concern about the possible loss of U.S. sovereignty in an international organization. The President has recently made a speech in the Senate, which we have all been reading, and I wish you to observe that the only way he sees out of the war that is devastating Europe is by preparation for war. There is much noble idealism in that speech of the President. With its purpose I fully sympathize. The kind of peace he describes is the peace that I long for. But the way he sees to preserve that peace is by preparation for war. Now, if some of our friends among the cornfields and the cotton fields and the mines and the citrus-fruit orchards will sit up and read this clause of the President’s speech, telling how we may prevent further wars, they may have reason to wonder whether they have not forgotten something. Here it is: “Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged, or any alliance hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no probable combinations of nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind.” Now, I hope that paragraph means what I hope it does. I do not understand it as intended to commit the United States to enter into a convention or treaty with the other civilized countries of the world which will bind the United States to go to war on the continent of Europe or of Asia or in any other part of the world without the people of the United States having an opportunity at the time to say whether they will go to war or not. There would be serious difficulties, I think insurmountable obstacles, to the making of any such agreement. One is, that agreement or no agreement, when the time comes, the people of the United States will not go into any war, and nobody can get them into any war unless they then are in favor of fighting for something. And nothing can be so bad as to make a treaty and then break it. What I understand by it is that a convention shall be made by which all the civilized nations shall agree with all their power to stand behind the maintenance of the peace thus agreed upon; and, if that peace be infringed upon, then each nation shall determine what it is its duty to do under the obligation of that agreement toward the maintenance of that peace. But observe that that is worthless, meaningless, unless the nations that enter into it keep the power behind it. It will be worthless agreement on our part if we have not a ship or a soldier that we can contribute to the war, if war there ought to be, for the maintenance of that peace. And it absolutely requires that we shall build up a force, a potential power of arms, commensurate with our size, our numbers, our wealth, our dignity, our part among the nations of the earth. There is just one other sentence of this speech about which I wish to say a word, and that is the declaration that the peace must be a peace without victory. Now, I sympathize with that. But the peace that the President describes involves the absolute destruction and abandonment of the principles upon which this war was begun…. Source: Elihu Root. “The United States and the War: Political Addresses,” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918, 24–26.

American Declaration of War Against Germany (April 6, 1917) On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to seek a declaration of war against Germany, citing the charge of unrestricted German submarine warfare and the provocative attempt to entice Mexico into the war against the United States. The Joint Congressional Resolution that came four days later formally brought United States involvement in the First World War. Joint Resolution Declaring that a state of war exists between the Imperial German Government and the Government and the people of the United States and making provision to prosecute the same. Whereas the Imperial German Government has committed repeated acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States of America; Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress Assembled, that the state of war between the United States and the Imperial German Government which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and that the President be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States. CHAMP CLARK Speaker of the House of Representatives THOS. R. MARSHALL Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate Approved, April 6, 1917 WOODROW WILSON Source: Horne, Charles F., ed. Source Records of the Great War. Vol. V. Washington: National Alumni, 1923.

Committee on Public Information Propaganda Posters (1917) On April 13, 1917, just one week after the U.S. declaration of war against Germany, President Woodrow Wilson established by executive order the Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the first official propaganda agency in American history. As part of its overall goal to both galvanize American support for World War I and quash dissent, the CPI deployed more than 100 million posters. Among other messages, the posters—artfully designed by some of America’s finest graphic artists—demonized the German enemy, inspired American men to respond positively to the newly named “Selective Service” system of forced conscription, and called on Americans to invest, plant, save, produce, and speak—always with the unifying and patriotic goal of an American-Allied victory.

Source: Library of Congress.

President Woodrow Wilson’s Proclamation “Do Your Bit for America” (April 15, 1917) With U.S. soldiers soon on their way to Europe, President Woodrow Wilson determined to rally the American people at home around the cause of World War I. In his proclamation that came nine days after the declaration of war, the president invoked the high-minded idealism that had become his signature call to Americans, obliquely eschewing any notion of a national self-interest of imperial aggression as motivation for U.S. involvement. My Fellow Countrymen The entrance of our own beloved country into the grim and terrible war for democracy and human rights which has shaken the world creates so many problems of national life and action which call for immediate consideration and settlement that I hope you will permit me to address to you a few words of earnest counsel and appeal with regard to them. We are rapidly putting our navy upon an effective war footing and are about to create and equip a great army, but these are the simplest parts of the great task to which we have addressed ourselves. There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for. We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be the rights of mankind and for the future peace and security of

the world. To do this great thing worthily and successfully we must devote ourselves to the service without regard to profit or material advantage and with an energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how great the task is and how many things, how many kinds and elements of capacity and service and self-sacrifice it involves. These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides fighting—the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless. We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our armies and our seamen, not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we have now made common cause, in whose support and by whose sides we shall be fighting. The Thousand Needs for Victory We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will every day be needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields and our mines and our factories with which not only to clothe and equip our own forces on land and sea, but also to clothe and support our people, for whom the gallant fellows under arms can no longer work; to help clothe and equip the armies with which we are cooperating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufactories there in raw material; coal to keep the fires going in ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of factories across the sea; steel out of which to make arms and ammunition, both here and there; rails for worn-out railways back of the fighting fronts; locomotives and rolling stock to take the place of those every day going to pieces; mules, horses, cattle, for labour and for military service everything with which the people of England and France and Italy and Russia have usually supplied themselves, but cannot now afford the men, the materials, or the machinery to make. It is evident to every thinking man that our industries—on the farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in the factories—must be made more prolific and more efficient than ever, and that they must be more economically managed and [b]etter adapted to the particular requirements of our tasks tha[n] they have been; … The importance of an adequate food supply, especially for the present years is superlative. Without abundant food, alike for the armies and the peoples now at war, the whole great enterprise upon which we have embarked will break down and fail. The world’s food reserves are low. Not only during the present emergency, but for some time after peace shall have come, both our own people and a large proportion of the people of Europe must rely upon the harvests in America…. A Democracy’s Chance to Make Good The course of trade shall be as unhampered as it is possible to make it, and there shall be no unwarranted manipulation of the nation’s food supply by those who handle it on its way to the consumer. This is our opportunity to demonstrate the efficiency of a great democracy, and we shall not fall short of it! This let me say to the middlemen of every sort, whether they are handling our foodstuffs or our raw materials of manufacture or the products of our mills and factories: The eyes of the country will be especially upon you. This is your opportunity for signal service, efficient and disinterested. The country expects you, as it expects all others, to forego unusual profits, to organize and expedite shipments of supplies of every kind, but especially of food, with an eye to the service you are rendering and in the spirit of those who enlist in the ranks, for their people, not for themselves.

I shall confidently expect you to deserve and win the confidence of people of every sort and station…. Statesmen and Armies Helpless Without Miners To the miner let me say that he stands where the farmer does—the work of the world waits on him. If he slackens or fails, armies and statesmen are helpless. He also is enlisted in the great service army. The manufacturer does not need to be told, I hope, that the nation looks to him to speed and perfect every process; and I want only to remind his employees that their service is absolutely indispensable and is counted on by every man who loves the country and its liberties. Let me suggest, also, that every one who creates or cultivates a garden helps and helps greatly, to solve the problem of the feeding of the nations—and that every housewife who practices strict economy puts herself in the ranks of those who serve the nation…. The Supreme Test Has Come In the hope that this statement of the needs of the nation and of the world in this hour of supreme crisis may stimulate those to whom it comes and remind all who need reminder of the solemn duties of a time such as the world has never seen before, I beg that all editors and publishers everywhere will give as prominent publication and as wide circulation as possible to this appeal. I venture to suggest, also, to all advertising agencies that they would perhaps render a very substantial and timely service to the country if they would give it wide-spread repetition. And I hope that clergymen will not think the theme of it an unworthy or inappropriate subject of comment and homily from their pulpits. The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together! Woodrow Wilson The White House Source: Woodrow Wilson. “Do Your Bit for America,” Proclamation, April 15, 1917. Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd, eds. The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925–1927).

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917) In 1917 Russian Communist revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline, a comprehensive theory of imperialism that in particular leveled a severe condemnation of imperial capitalist expansion as the root cause for the Great War. The volatile forces driving capitalist industrialization and modern finance, Lenin argued, had led the imperial powers toward militarizing their economies—inevitably setting the stage for the war. This excerpted passage includes Lenin’s critique of those he viewed as bourgeois intellectual defenders of imperialism, including Marxist philosopher Karl Kautsky. IX. CRITIQUE OF IMPERIALISM By the critique of imperialism, in the broad sense of the term, we mean the attitude of the different classes of society towards imperialist policy in connection with their general ideology. The enormous dimensions of finance capital concentrated in a few hands and creating an extraordinarily dense and widespread network of relationships and connections which subordinates not only the small and medium, but also the very small capitalists and small masters, on the one hand, and the

increasingly intense struggle waged against other national state groups of financiers for the division of the world and domination over other countries, on the other hand, cause the propertied classes to go over entirely to the side of imperialism. “General” enthusiasm over the prospects of imperialism, furious defence of it and painting it in the brightest colours—such are the signs of the times. Imperialist ideology also penetrates the working class. No Chinese Wall separates it from the other classes. The leaders of the present-day, so-called, “Social-Democratic” Party of Germany are justly called “social-imperialists”, that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds; but as early as 1902, Hobson noted the existence in Britain of “Fabian imperialists” who belonged to the opportunist Fabian Society. Bourgeois scholars and publicists usually come out in defence of imperialism in a somewhat veiled form; they obscure its complete domination and its deep-going roots, strive to push specific and secondary details into the forefront and do their very best to distract attention from essentials by means of absolutely ridiculous schemes for “reform”, such as police supervision of the trusts or banks, etc. Cynical and frank imperialists who are bold enough to admit the absurdity of the idea of reforming the fundamental characteristics of imperialism are a rarer phenomenon. Here is an example. The German imperialists attempt, in the magazine Archives of World Economy, to follow the national emancipation movements in the colonies, particularly, of course, in colonies other than those belonging to Germany. They note the unrest and the protest movements in India, the movement in Natal (South Africa), in the Dutch East Indies, etc. One of them, commenting on an English report of a conference held on June 28–30, 1910, of representatives of various subject nations and races, of peoples of Asia, Africa and Europe who are under foreign rule, writes as follows in appraising the speeches delivered at this conference: “We are told that we must fight imperialism; that the ruling states should recognise the right of subject peoples to independence; that an international tribunal should supervise the fulfilment of treaties concluded between the great powers and weak peoples. Further than the expression of these pious wishes they do not go. We see no trace of understanding of the fact that imperialism is inseparably bound up with capitalism in its present form and that, therefore [!!] [sic], an open struggle against imperialism would be hopeless, unless, perhaps, the fight were to be confined to protests against certain of its especially abhorrent excesses.” Since the reform of the basis of imperialism is a deception, a “pious wish”, since the bourgeois representatives of the oppressed nations go no “further” forward, the bourgeois representative of an oppressing nation goes “further” backward, to servility towards imperialism under cover of the claim to be “scientific”. That is also “logic”! The questions as to whether it is possible to reform the basis of imperialism, whether to go forward to the further intensification and deepening of the antagonisms which it engenders, or backward, towards allaying these antagonisms, are fundamental questions in the critique of imperialism. Since the specific political features of imperialism are reaction everywhere and increased national oppression due to the oppression of the financial oligarchy and the elimination of free competition, a petty-bourgeoisdemocratic opposition to imperialism arose at the beginning of the twentieth century in nearly all imperialist countries. Kautsky not only did not trouble to oppose, was not only unable to oppose this petty-bourgeois reformist opposition, which is really reactionary in its economic basis, but became merged with it in practice, and this is precisely where Kautsky and the broad international Kautskian trend deserted Marxism. In the United States, the imperialist war waged against Spain in 1898 stirred up the opposition of the “anti-imperialists”, the last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy who declared this war to be “criminal”, regarded the annexation of foreign territories as a violation of the Constitution, declared that the treatment of Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipinos (the Americans promised him the independence of his country, but later landed troops and annexed it), was “jingo treachery”, and quoted the words of Lincoln:

“When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs others, it is no longer self-government; it is despotism.” But as long as all this criticism shrank from recognising the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the foundations of capitalism, while it shrank from joining the forces engendered by large-scale capitalism and its development—it remained a “pious wish”…. Source: Lenin’s Selected Works, Progress Publishers, 1963, Moscow, Vol. 1, pp. 667–766.

Lyrics for the Song “Over There” (1917) Written in 1917 by the great American composer and producer George M. Cohan (1878–1942), “Over There” proved an enormously popular hit following the declaration of war that spring. With American soldiers shipping off to Europe to fight in World War I, Cohan inspired with a patriotic tune summoning American men to duty and evoking the glories of previous American martial experience. Verse 1 Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Take it on the run, on the run, on the run. Hear them calling you and me, Every Son of Liberty. Hurry right away, no delay, go today. Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad. Tell your sweetheart not to pine, To be proud her boy’s in line. Verse 2 Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun. Johnny, show the “Hun” you’re a son-of-a-gun. Hoist the flag and let her fly Yankee Doodle do or die. Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit. Yankee to the ranks from the towns and the tanks. Make your Mother proud of you And the old red-white-and-blue Chorus Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming The drums rum-tumming everywhere. So prepare, say a prayer, Send the word, send the word to beware We’ll be over, we’re coming over, And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there. Source: George M. Cohen. “Over There.” William Jerome Publishing Corp., 1917. Copyright Canada 1917 by Whaley, Royce and Co. for William Jerome Pub. Corp.

President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918) In January 1918, with the First World War grinding on into its fourth and final year, President Woodrow Wilson delivered his “Fourteen Points” address to Congress. Outlining an idealistic vision of a postwar world of permanent peace and security, Wilson called for, among other provisions: freedom of the seas, fewer trade restrictions, an end to secret alliances, the reconfiguration of borders among specific nations once under empire, and an “association of nations” to enforce a new international code of civilized behavior among the leading powers of the world. Wilson’s call for “equal weight” to be given to the colonized populations of the world seeking greater sovereignty was met with dubious skepticism from Allied leaders who were not prepared to renounce their colonial possessions and territorial ambitions. Though hailed for his vision as a kind of “savior” in many corners of Europe and beyond, Wilson was also criticized for being hypocritical in that the United States was not willing to surrender control of its own empire. It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow nor or at any other time the objects it has in view. We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secure once for all against their recurrence. What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. The programme of the world’s peace, therefore, is our programme; and that programme, the only possible programme, as we see it, is this: I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view. II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants. III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance. IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety. V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy. VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired. VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all. IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development. XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into. XII. The [T]urkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees. XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant. XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together against the Imperialists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end. For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; but only because we wish the right to prevail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be secured only by removing the chief provocations to war, which this programme does remove. We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is nothing in this programme that impairs it. We grudge her no

achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way her legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peace-loving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world,—the new world in which we now live,—instead of a place of mastery. Source: President Wilson’s Message to Congress, January 8, 1918; Records of the United States Senate: Record Group 4; Records of the United States Senate; National Archives.

Speech Delivered by Eugene Debs in Canton, Ohio, in Violation of the Espionage Act (June 16, 1918) In June 1918, with World War I in its final months, the great American labor leader, Socialist, and pacifist Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) addressed the Ohio state meeting of the Socialist Party. In this excerpt from the impassioned speech that led to his celebrated arrest under the Sedition Act, Debs sounded familiar refrains of the antiwar cause and enjoined his audience to continue speaking out as a matter of patriotic duty and conscience, despite the repressive wartime atmosphere. Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation. If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace…. You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain….

They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. And now among other things they are urging you to “cultivate” war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment…. And now for all of us to do our duty! The clarion call is ringing in our ears and we cannot falter without being convicted of treason to ourselves and to our great cause. Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth. Source: National Archives. The United States of America v. Eugene V. Debs, 06/29/1918–04/17/1919, Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685–2009, National Archives Identifier: 2641497.

Randolph Bourne’s The State (1918) Although he died young as a result of the worldwide influenza epidemic, Progressive-radical political theorist and writer Randolph Silliman Bourne (1886–1918) indelibly impacted the course of both multiculturalism and anti-imperial activism in the 20th century. Bourne had been a student of leading Progressive philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University who, echoing President Woodrow Wilson, supported military intervention as an instrument of a more progressive world. Sharply departing from Dewey, Bourne argued famously that “war is the health of the State.” In these lengthy excerpts from his posthumously published unfinished work, The State, Bourne delineates the distinctions among the nation, government, and the State, and lays out the intellectual foundations for his enduring argument that militarism had become essential to the modern condition of State power. I. To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday. Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good oldfashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has

become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men. With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves. The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part. The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government. In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population spreading over a certain geographical portion of the earth’s surface, speaking a common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization. Our idea of Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of a people, its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, its characteristic attitudes toward life. We are Americans because we live in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors have carried on a great enterprise of pioneering and colonization, because we live in certain kinds of communities which have a certain look and express their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that our civilization is different from contiguous civilizations like the Indian and Mexican. The institutions of our country form a certain network which affects us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way that these other civilizations do not. We are a part of Country, for better or for worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of physiological laws, and not in any way through our own choice. By the time we have reached what are

called years of discretion, its influences have molded our habits, our values, our ways of thinking, so that however aware we may become, we never really lose the stamp of our civilization, or could be mistaken for the child of any other country. Our feeling for our fellow countrymen is one of similarity or of mere acquaintance. We may be intensely proud of and congenial to our particular network of civilization, or we may detest most of its qualities and rage at its defects. This does not alter the fact that we are inextricably bound up in it. The Country, as an inescapable group into which we are born, and which makes us its particular kind of a citizen of the world, seems to be a fundamental fact of our consciousness, an irreducible minimum of social feeling. Now this feeling for country is essentially noncompetitive; we think of our own people merely as living on the earth’s surface along with other groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within rather than without, is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and our imaginations gradually stake out the world we live in, they need no greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than this sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less attuned, and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for country would be an uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State and Government which are associated with it. Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion. The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice. International politics is a power politics because it is a relation of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are, huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation to another country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting as a State. The history of America as a country is quite different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay for all. Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities. Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the

necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest levels of the herd, and to its remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become—the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, towards that peacefulness of being at war, of which L. P. Jacks has spoken so unforgettably. The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques must be learnt. Wearing home ties are broken and women who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as the universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in peacetimes had no living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding [in] severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. Loyalty, or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life. There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach physics or hold honorable place in a university—the republic of learning—if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything pertaining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such an act of selfsacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities or ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural. War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties. The minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation, instead of converting merely serves to

stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them. War—or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy—seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of democracy, it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort. For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the education of men and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and beauty in the nation’s communal living, are alien to our traditional ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant, throughout all history—war…. For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so out of a spiritual compulsion which pushes it on perhaps against all its interests, all its real desires, and all its real sense of values. It is States that make wars and not nations, and the very thought and almost necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of the State. Not for centuries have nations made war; in fact the only historical example of nations making war is the great barbarian invasions into Southern Europe, invasions of Russia from the East, and perhaps the sweep of Islam through Northern Africa into Europe after Mohammed’s death. And the motivations for such wars were either the restless expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of religious fanaticism. Perhaps these great movements could scarcely be called wars at all, for war implies an organized people drilled and led; in fact, it necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had any such organization, such huge conflicts between nations—nations, that is, as cultural groups—have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to assume that for centuries in Europe there would have been any possibility of a people en masse—with their own leaders, and not with the leaders of their duly constituted State—rising up and overflowing their borders in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the Revolutionary armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled freedom, and moreover, they were clearly directed not against other peoples, but against the autocratic governments that were combining to crush the Revolution. Three is no instance in history of genuinely national war. There

are instances of national defenses, among primitive civilizations such as the Balkan peoples, against intolerable invasion by neighboring despots or oppression. But war, as such, cannot occur except in a system of competing States, which have relations with each other through the channels of diplomacy. War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except in such a system. Nations organized for internal administration, nations organized as a federation of free communities, nations organized in any way except that of a political centralization of a dynasty or the reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly make war upon each other. They would not only have no motive for conflict, but they would be unable to muster the concentrated force to make war effective. There might be all sorts of amateur marauding, there might be guerrilla expeditions of group against group, but there could not be that terrible war en masse of the national state, that exploitation of the nation in the interests of the State, that abuse of the national life and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide which is modern war. It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naive spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and lifecrippling forces. If the State’s chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing process of the national life…. It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military achievement, military memory. It represents the country not in its intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the world. The flag is primarily the banner of war; it is allied with patriotic anthem and holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation’s patriotic history is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health and glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag, we are responding to the appeal of the State, to the symbol of the herd organized as an offensive and defensive body, conscious of its prowess and its mystical herd strength…. The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully shown by those laws which emphasize interference with the Army and Navy as the most culpable of seditious crimes. Pragmatically, a case of capitalistic sabotage, or a strike in war industry would seem to be far more dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than the isolated and ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent recruiting. But in the tradition of the State ideal, such industrial interference with national policy is not identified as a

crime against the State. It may be grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally as an impediment of the utmost gravity. But it is not felt in those obscure seats of the herd mind which dictate the identity of crime and fix their proportional punishments. Army and Navy, however, are the very arms of the State; in them flows its most precious lifeblood. To paralyze them is to touch the very State itself. And the majesty of the State is so sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a crime equal to a successful strike. The will is deemed sufficient. Even though the individual in his effort to impede recruiting should utterly and lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. Let the wrath of the State descend upon him for his impiety! Even if he does not try any overt action, but merely utters sentiments that may incidentally in the most indirect way cause someone to refrain from enlisting, he is guilty. The guardians of the State do not ask whether any pragmatic effect flowed out of this evil will or desire. It is enough that the will is present. Fifteen or twenty years in prison is not deemed too much for such sacrilege. Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human reason, are no accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by the war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful by all the classes which have the State ideal, and they express only an extreme of health and vigor in the reaction of the State to its non-friends. Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the State. For the State is a personal as well as a mystical symbol, and it can only be understood by tracing its historical origin. The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product and development of its original functions, and not because at any time men or classes in the full possession of their insight and intelligence have desired that it be so. It is very important that we should occasionally lift the incorrigible veil of that ex post facto idealism by which we throw a glamour of rationalization over what is, and pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit that we have personally invented and set up for the glory of God and man the hoary institutions which we see around us. Things are what they are, and come down to us with all their thick encrustations of error and malevolence. Political philosophy can delight us with fantasy and convince us who need illusion to live that the actual is a fair and approximate copy—full of failings, of course, but approximately sound and sincere—of that ideal society which we can imagine ourselves as creating. From this it is a step to the tacit assumption that we have somehow had a hand in its creation and are responsible for its maintenance and sanctity…. The modern democratic state … is therefore no bright and rational creation of a new day, the political form under which great peoples are to live healthfully and freely in a modern world, but the last decrepit scion of an ancient and hoary stock, which has become so exhausted that it scarcely recognizes its own ancestor, does, in fact, repudiate him while it clings tenaciously to the archaic and irrelevant spirit that made that ancestor powerful, and resists the new bottles for the new wine that its health as a modern society so desperately needs. So sweeping a conclusion might have been doubted concerning the American State had it not been for the war, which has provided a long and beautiful series of examples of the tenacity of the State ideal and its hold on the significant classes of the American nation. War is the health of the State and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution. If the American democracy during wartime has acted with an almost incredible trueness to form, if it has resurrected with an almost joyful fury the somnolent State, we can only conclude that the tradition from the past has been unbroken, and that the American republic is the direct descendant of the English State….

Source: Randolph Bourne. Untimely Papers. Edited by James Oppenheim. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919, p. 140.

The Conviction of Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare and North Dakota Politics (1918) Socialist editor, labor activist, and noted orator Katherine “Kate” Richards O’Hare (1876–1948) headed the national Socialist Party’s Committee on War and Militarism. On July 17, 1917, O’Hare delivered a rousing antiwar speech in Bowman, North Dakota—one of dozens of such occasions that year. O’Hare was arrested shortly thereafter and convicted of having violated the Espionage Act of 1917. A pamphlet published by the American Civil Liberties Union made clear that O’Hare’s celebrated arrest resulted from a combination of the repressive atmosphere of the war that restricted civil liberties, Progressive agrarian politics in the state, and the related agenda of local political officials in Bowman. MRS. KATE RICHARDS O’HARE, former International Secretary of the Socialist Party for the U.S., well known here and abroad as a writer and lecturer on labor and socialism, was sentenced to five years in prison by Federal District Judge M. J. Wade at Bismarck, North Dakota, on December 8, 1917, for violation of the Espionage Act. The conviction is pending on appeal to the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and is set for hearing May 27. This case involves issues of national significance,—both political and legal.

THE STORY OF KATE RICHARDS O’HARE’S ARREST AND CONVICTION The Political Background In Bowman County, N. D., a bitter feud has been waged between two factions of the Democratic Party —the so-called “stand-pat” faction and the Non-partisan League faction. The Non-partisan League is the radical progressive farmers’ organization which has overwhelmingly beaten the old political parties in recent elections throughout North Dakota. The standpatters have been under the leadership of James E. Phelan,—a wealthy banker and land owner, and the non-partisan leaguers under the leadership of County Judge Edward P. Totten. Mrs. Totten, wife of Judge Totten has been postmistress at Bowman, the office being the choicest political plum in the county, paying $1900 per year. A certain person named J. E. James —a protégé of Mr. Phelan’s,—has aspired to oust Mrs. Totten and secure the position. Mrs. O’Hare last summer was on a transcontinental lecture trip, and had delivered her lecture 76 times from Birmingham, Alabama, through the south and west before arriving in North Dakota. At each meeting representatives of the Department of Justice were present and the address was taken down in shorthand by them several times. The lecture dealt with the social and industrial effects of the war. Mrs. O’Hare spoke at Bowman, N. D., July 17, 1917. The lecture was attended largely by Nonpartisan Leaguers. The next day she was invited to Mrs. Totten’s house to discuss a college institution at Mrs. O’Hare’s Florida Home. This visit was observed by the Phelan clique, and a long telegram was at once sent to Senator McCumber at Washington who delivered on the floor of the Senate a vitriolic denunciation of Mrs. Totten, demanding that the Post-office Department remove her because she was a “traitor,” having applauded Mrs. O’Hare’s address. Mrs. O’Hare was charged with having likened the American mothers of drafted sons to “brood sows,” and having stated that the young men who were

drafted were “only fit for fertilizer”. The Associated Press transmitted the Senator’s speech to all parts of the country.

The Indictment Phelan and his candidate, James, appeared before the federal grand jury, and it is stated, attempted to secure an indictment against Mrs. Totten, but failed. But on their information the Grand Jury indicted Mrs. O’Hare. The indictment charged her with having willfully obstructed the enlistment service of the United States by stating in a public speech in Bowman that “any person who enlisted in the army of the U. S. for service in France would be used for fertilizer, and that is all he was good for, and that the women of the U. S. were nothing more nor less than brood-sows to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer.”

The Arrest and Trial She was arrested July 29th at Devil’s Lake, N. D., and arraigned before Federal Judge Amidon at Fargo, July 30th. Her bail was set at $1000.00. She was tried at Bismarck, N. D., on December 5th, before Judge M. J. Wade. Judge Amidon who was to have presided at the term of court had been replaced through a writ of prejudice secured in another case. The change was made so late that Mrs. O’Hare’s attorney could not have her case transferred from Judge Wade’s court. Of the five witnesses for the prosecution one was James, who aspires to Mrs. Totten’s job, one was Dr. Whittemore, whose drugstore is said to be mortgaged to Phelan, two were men in close business relation to Phelan, and one woman was the wife of a business associate of Phelan’s. Out of the audience of 135 persons only two, both political adherents of Phelan’s, could be found to swear that Mrs. O’Hare used the language ascribed to her. Judge Wade permitted three persons who were not at the meeting to testify for the prosecution. Mrs. O’Hare’s twelve witnesses were all present at the meeting. The court refused to permit four of her witnesses to testify at all.

The Verdict After a four day trial the jury brought in a verdict of guilty. In handing down the sentence of FIVE YEARS in the Missouri Penitentiary, Judge Wade quoted, among other documents, to justify his severity, a letter from the St. Louis office of the Department of Justice stating—“We have been unable to obtain anything specific on her that would be a violation…. Nothing would please this office more than to hear that she got LIFE.”

What Mrs. O’Hare Had Said Her speech which had been written, memorized and delivered scores of times, used this language— evidently the distorted basis of the indictment,— “When the governments of Europe and the clergy of Europe, demanded of the women of the warring countries that they give themselves, in marriage or out, in order that the men might ‘breed before they die’—that was not a crime of maddened passion—it was the crime of cold-blooded, brutal selfishness— and by that crime the women of Europe were reduced to the status of breeding animals on a stock farm”. And further,—

“Our enemies tell you that we Socialists are hindering enlistment. This is not true! Please understand me now, and do not misquote what I say, ‘If any young man feels that it is his duty to enlist, then with all my heart I say: Go! and God Bless you!’ His blood may enrich the soil of France, but that may be for the best.”

Mrs. O’Hare’s Address The addresses of both Mrs. O’Hare and the Judge are remarkable for the clearness with which the opposing views were brought out. The issues of the case are perhaps best revealed by the following quotations. Mrs. O’Hare said before sentence was passed on her:— “As your honor knows, I am a professional woman, following the profession of delivering lectures whereby I hope to induce my hearers to study the philosophy of socialism. In the regular course of my profession and work I delivered during this year lectures all over the United States, or practically all over. I delivered this lecture in North Carolina when the draft riots were at their height; I delivered it in Globe, Ariz., to 10,000 people, two or three days following the deportations from Bisbee, and on the day when the strike vote was taken when excitement ran high and when passions were having their sway; I delivered it in San Francisco during the Mooney case; and the same thing was true in Portland, Idaho, and in the northwestern lumber regions …; and at all of these lectures conditions were as tense as conditions could be.

The Secret Service Men at the Meetings “The men who were in the employ of the United States in the department of justice were present at my meetings. These men are trained, highly efficient and highly paid detectors of crime and criminals. In all these months when my lecture was under the scrutiny of this kind of men there was no suggestion at any time that there was anything in the lecture that was objectionable, that was treasonable, that was seditious. It was the custom at my meetings to send complimentary tickets to the district attorney and the marshal and deputy marshals of the district, in order that they might hear the lecture and attend the meeting. This plan was followed practically everywhere that I spoke.

The Speech at Bowman [“]And then, in the course of the trip, I landed at Bowman, a little, sordid, wind-blown, sun-blistered, frost-scarred town on the plains of western Dakota. There was nothing unusual in my visit to Bowman, except the fact that it was unusual to make a town of this size. The reason I did was because there was one man whose loyalty and faithfulness and unselfish service to the cause to which I had given my life, wanted me to come, and I felt he had a right to demand my services. I arrived in the town, delivered my lecture just as I had delivered it many, many times before. “But when I arrived at Bowman and had delivered my lecture, and spent the next day in resting before the continuation of the trip, I found that there were peculiar conditions existing in Bowman. They are common to the whole state of North Dakota. It is known to your honor and everyone who has [a] part in this trial, that in the State of North Dakota, in the last year and a half, the greatest and most revolutionary social phenomenon that has occurred since the foundation of this government has taken place.

The Farmers’ Revolution in North Dakota [“]The story is one that is so well known I need spend little time on it. Here to these wind-blown, frost-scarred plains came men hard of face and feature and muscle, who subdued this desert and made it bloom and produce the bread to feed the world; and these men toiling in the desperate struggle with adverse conditions and with nature, gradually had it forced on their minds that in some way they were not receiving a just return for the labor expended; that after their wheat was raised and garnered, in the processes of marketing, men who toiled not and suffered none of the hardships of production, were robbing them of the product of their labor; and these farmers, smarting under that chaotic condition, came to the town of Bismarck…. “They felt that the politicians, the men who held the offices in this state, the men they elected to office, were not serving them, but that they were using their offices and power to assist in the robbery and exploitation of the farmers of this state. So they appealed to the legislature, and then there came that marvelous thing that had such a wonderful effect in this state—an insult, a sneer from the lips of the politicians who believed themselves firm and secure in power, and that sneer, that insult, that told the farmers to go home and slop the hogs the while the politicians ran the state, had the effect of cementing the farmers in this state into a great revolutionary organization, and that organization went out and swept the whole state, and carried out of power the men who had been in power, and put in power the men chosen by the farmers of this state. “This had occurred in Bowman county, as it had all over the state of North Dakota. The old order had been deposed. The new order had been enforced, and naturally as always follows, the appointive offices that are called the spoils of political warfare, were taken from the adherents of the old order and given to the adherents of the new order.

The P. O. Job at Bowman [“]I think, so far as I can judge, the fattest, juiciest, most desirable plum in Bowman county was the post office. This was taken from the man that had held it and given to the wife of the leader of the new order. This naturally created bitterness, hatred and venom in such marked degree as I have seen in all my experience. “When I arrived in Bowman for my lecture it chanced that it was the adherents of the new order that attended, paid for the tickets, appreciated it, approved it, and applauded it, as they stated on the stand. And among the adherents of the new order that attended was the postmistress, and she did the things that the others did…. “And then the real thing in this case came out, and that was the contest over the post office. “There was a certain hungry office seeker in Bowman. He was the principal witness for the prosecution. He made the statement on the stand that he was a farmer, but he has never tilled the soil. He has always been a political hanger-on, a camp-follower of the old political order. Separated from any political job, he became lean and hungry, and looked with a hungry eye on the post office. “The deposed boss of the old order was perfectly willing that the hungry office seeker might have the post office if only the present incumbent could be eliminated; and when the postmistress attended the lecture, and the next day invited me to her home as her guest, there grew up in the minds of the deposed boss and the hungry office seeker the hope that I might be made the lever whereby the postmistress could be separated from her job, and the hungry office seeker find an opportunity to live without labor.

The Real Crime “I am not going to spend any of your valuable time rehearsing the trial, except to say that to my mind it is absolutely impossible that under any legal rule or thought a human being can be tried for a thing that he never did, and that there is no charge that he ever did, but only that he might have an intention of doing. “But, your Honor, all through this trial, all through the questions of the district attorney, all through his appeal to the jury, as the ever-recurring motive in this little drama of life, there ran the charge of a crime, a crime of which I was accused. And this crime is not a new one. It is as old as the human race. It is not peculiar to me. It is universal as life itself. “This crime that was charged by interference in the trial was the same charge that was brought against the first slave rebellion, against the first serf revolt. It was the charge that was brought against Moses and Spartacus, Watt Tyler and Cromwell, George Washington and Patrick Henry, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and it was the same crime that was charged against Jesus of Nazareth when he stood at the judgment bar of Pontius Pilate. “The crime is this: ‘She stirred up the people.’ And, your honor, if by inference I can be charged with that crime, and tried for it, then, your honor, at this point I plead guilty of that crime, if that is a crime. For twenty years I have done nothing but stir up the people….

The Real Issue “There is no doubt that in this hour of travail, and sorrow, and bloodshed and misery that marks the labor that is ushering in a new order, there is but one thing that should occupy our minds, and that is this: What, at this time, at this hour of our country’s peril and travail, will be the greatest good to the greatest number of people? And this, I believe, your honor, is the question that you are to decide. You are to decide whether at this hour it will be better for the people of the United States that I shall be convicted, not of a crime charged in the indictment, but convicted of having an intent in my heart that never found expression, and on conviction of having an intent in which I never gave action, I shall be sentenced to prison. Will this be a matter of the greatest good to the greatest number? … “Ah! They are willing to admit I am dangerous to some things in the United States, and I thank God that I am. I am dangerous to the invisible government of the United States; I am dangerous to the special privileges of the United States; I am dangerous to the white slaver and to the saloonkeeper, and I thank God that at this hour I am dangerous to the war profiteers of this country who rob the people on the one hand, and rob and debase the government on the other; and then with their pockets and wallets stuffed with the filthy, bloodstained profits of war, wrap the sacred folds of the Stars and Stripes about them and shout their blatant hypocrisy to the world. “You can convince the people that I am dangerous to these men; but no jury and no judge can convince them that I am a dangerous woman to the best interests of the United States. And at this hour will my conviction, will my incarceration behind the bars of a prison have the tendencyto cement and hold together the great mass of people in this nation, or will it have the tendency to create hatred and bitterness, and arouse suspicion, and make these people who know me, and who cannot be brought to doubt me, feel that this whole case is nothing but an attempt on the part of the war profiteers to eliminate and get out of the way a woman that is dangerous to them?

Her Attitude to the Court

[“]And understand this, your honor, if you, this afternoon, decide that I am to serve a prison term, I want you to know, and I want the district attorney to know, and I want these men who sat on the jury to know that I will go out of this court room to meet whatever you mete out to me with no bitterness in my heart, with no hate in my soul, but with nothing but the greatest feeling of comradeship and friendship and appreciation for what you men have done, because I believe that you have done the thing that you thought was your duty to do. [“]So, now, your honor, I am ready to accept judgment, knowing full well that no matter what becomes of me, no matter what becomes of you, or what your action may be, that this great world tragedy is achieving the thing to which I have given my life, and that is it is bringing in the great co-operative United States of the world built on cooperation instead of competition; a world where greed, and vice, and avarice have been replaced by brotherhood, and justice and humanity. And your honor, since all my life has been given to that ideal of bringing about that new order, and sharing in that time, if this war is to do that thing, then, your honor, I can feel at this time that I can retire, perhaps, and rest. So, your honor, if you decide at this hour that in the service of your country, in the service of the people of this country, I should be sent to prison, then I go, knowing that the onward march of progress will still keep on, and eventually my aim, my goal, and my ideal will be achieved. And knowing this, your honor, I can face the court. I can face prison, I can face any sentence that you can give, serene and calm and unafraid.”

Judge Wade’s Address Judge Wade’s address (before passing sentence) “the longest ever made from the bench in North Dakota,” went exhaustively into Mrs. O’Hare’s past record, her articles in “Social Revolution” (which had its second-class privileges withdrawn by the P. O. Dept.), her advocacy of the majority report at the St. Louis Convention of the Socialist Party where she acted as chairman of the Resolutions Committee, and her publication of an anti-war play in 1914. His general attitude toward the character of Mrs. O’Hare’s activities as he interpreted them is expressed as follows:

On Socialism “Well, I tell you, if that is the sort of stuff the socialist party stands for, if its gospel is the gospel of hate, and contempt of religion and charity, it has not any place on the American soil either in times of war or times of peace. The worst poison you can instill in the hearts of men is a conscientious feeling that they are being deprived of their just earnings, or their just deserts by some invisible power, and the whole theory of the socialist and that type of people at the present hour is that capitalism is the sole instrument that has brought this war, and, as in the statement of Debs in the paper of which she is part editor, the banker is pictured as exempt from war. [“]I would not go so fully into these things at this time if it were not for the remarkable presentation by the defendant of her cause. When I say that she believes these things I am speaking it earnestly. I do not think she is a hypocrite in regard to her belief as to this capitalistic domination. But the trouble about it is that there is no foundation for it. It is an aberration….

On Reformers

“This is a grave matter. I say we need reformers in this country. We need men to go out and preach the gospel of the glory and power of these United States, and the right of every man to his share in the glory and power and justice of the United States; and we need reformers to go out and point out to them where they can benefit themselves by having a law enacted here, and there, but we have no room for reformers that cannot go out and preach reform, based upon the constitution of the United States. We have no room for reformers who, in order to exploit their reforms must first drive out of the hearts of men and women every sentiment of pride and exaltation, and make them feel like abject slaves. We have not any room for that sort of reformers. It is time that men and women should be giving careful consideration to these things….

On Patriotism “These are times that try men’s souls—we must have patience and courage and loyalty and faith and confidence and patriotism. And what is patriotism? The highest form of patriotism is willing submission to lawful constituted authority. And where does lawful authority exist in this country? In the people of this nation. But as men differ as to policies, the majority must control; the minority must yield to the voice of the majority. This is the only way in which a republic may exist and endure. And how do the people express themselves in this country? Through their agents selected to speak for them, the members of congress and the members of the senate and the president of the United States….

On the War “The American people are not going to stand idly by and see these boys that are marching away to the front, shot in the back by cowards and traitors. This nation is willing to fight the enemy in front—she is willing to fight the assassins of the air, the pirates of the sea, the masters of the most brutal and diabolical savagery which the world ever saw—this nation is willing to fight all this, but she will not consent to be stabbed in the back, and would-be assassins might as well realize that they must sheath their knives or submit to extermination….

On Free Speech “This is a nation of free speech; but this is a time of sacrifice, when mothers are sacrificing their sons, when all men and women who are not at heart traitors are sacrificing their time and their hard earned money in defence of the flag. Is it too much to ask that for the time being men shall suppress any desire which they may have to utter words which may tend to weaken the spirit, or destroy the faith or confidence of the people….

A Warning to Others “Every person sentenced by a court must not only serve to expiate his own wrong, but he must serve as a warning to others. For these reasons the judgment of the court is that you, Kate Richards O’Hare, shall serve a period of five years in the federal prison at Jefferson City, Mo., and pay the costs of this suit.” Source: American Civil Liberties Union. The Conviction of Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare and Dakota Politics (New York: National Civil Liberties Bureau, 1918).

Speech of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts Opposing U.S. Membership in the League of Nations (August 12, 1919) Massachusetts U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924) led the Republican opposition to Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, the heart of which was the proposed League of Nations. Despite President Woodrow Wilson’s determined efforts to bring the United States into the new body, the treaty fell victim to both the horrific experience of the war itself and the xenophobic atmosphere of postwar America in which all things “foreign”—from Bolshevism to militant labor unions to “entangling alliances” that might surrender American sovereignty to other nations—were seen as threats to the nation. Lodge’s speech on the Senate floor reflects those fears, even as it affirms that the United States will continue to stand “in service to the world’s peace and to the welfare of mankind.” Mr. President: The independence of the United States is not only more precious to ourselves but to the world than any single possession. Look at the United States today. We have made mistakes in the past. We have had shortcomings. We shall make mistakes in the future and fall short of our own best hopes. But nonetheless is there any country today on the face of the earth which can compare with this in ordered liberty, in peace, and in the largest freedom? I feel that I can say this without being accused of undue boastfulness, for it is the simple fact, and in making this treaty and taking on these obligations all that we do is in a spirit of unselfishness and in a desire for the good of mankind. But it is well to remember that we are dealing with nations every one of which has a direct individual interest to serve, and there is grave danger in an unshared idealism. Contrast the United States with any country on the face of the earth today and ask yourself whether the situation of the United States is not the best to be found. I will go as far as anyone in world service, but the first step to world service is the maintenance of the United States. I have always loved one flag and I cannot share that devotion [with] a mongrel banner created for a League. You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life. I can never be anything else but an American, and I must think of the United States first, and when I think of the United States first in an arrangement like this I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States fails, the best hopes of mankind fail with it. I have never had but one allegiance—I cannot divide it now. I have loved but one flag and I cannot share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for a league. Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the men to whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me repulsive. National I must remain, and in that way I like all other Americans can render the amplest service to the world. The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come as in the years that have gone. Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin. We are told that we shall “break the heart of the world” if we do not take this league just as it stands. I fear that the hearts of the vast majority of mankind would beat on strongly and steadily and without any quickening if the league were to perish altogether. If it should be effectively and beneficently changed the people who would lie awake in sorrow for a single night could be easily gathered in one not very large room but those who would draw a long breath of relief would reach to millions.

We hear much of visions and I trust we shall continue to have visions and dream dreams of a fairer future for the race. But visions are one thing and visionaries are another, and the mechanical appliances of the rhetorician designed to give a picture of a present which does not exist and of a future which no man can predict are as unreal and short-lived as the steam or canvas clouds, the angels suspended on wires and the artificial lights of the stage. They pass with the moment of effect and are shabby and tawdry in the daylight. Let us at least be real. Washington’s entire honesty of mind and his fearless look into the face of all facts are qualities which can never go out of fashion and which we should all do well to imitate. Ideals have been thrust upon us as an argument for the league until the healthy mind which rejects cant revolts from them. Are ideals confined to this deformed experiment upon a noble purpose, tainted, as it is, with bargains and tied to a peace treaty which might have been disposed of long ago to the great benefit of the world if it had not been compelled to carry this rider on its back? “Post equitem sedet atra cura,” Horace tells us, but no blacker care ever sat behind any rider than we shall find in this covenant of doubtful and disputed interpretation as it now perches upon the treaty of peace. No doubt many excellent and patriotic people see a coming fulfillment of noble ideals in the words “league for peace.” We all respect and share these aspirations and desires, but some of us see no hope, but rather defeat, for them in this murky covenant. For we, too, have our ideals, even if we differ from those who have tried to establish a monopoly of idealism. Our first ideal is our country, and we see her in the future, as in the past, giving service to all her people and to the world. Our ideal of the future is that she should continue to render that service of her own free will. She has great problems of her own to solve, very grim and perilous problems, and a right solution, if we can attain to it, would largely benefit mankind. We would have our country strong to resist a peril from the West, as she has flung back the German menace from the East. We would not have our politics distracted and embittered by the dissensions of other lands. We would not have our country’s vigor exhausted or her moral force abated, by everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel, great and small, which afflicts the world. Our ideal is to make her ever stronger and better and finer, because in that way alone, as we believe, can she be of the greatest service to the world’s peace and to the welfare of mankind. Source: Lodge, Henry Cabot. “Treaty of Peace with Germany.” Speech, Senate of the United States, August 12, 1919.

George Creel’s How We Advertised America (1920) Advertising executive and loyal supporter of Woodrow Wilson, George Creel (1876–1953) headed the first official propaganda agency of the United States government, the Committee on Public Information (CPI). With the end of the war, Creel determined to write of his contributions to the U.S.Allied victory, of which he was very proud. Despite congressional efforts to suppress the publication, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe detailed the history of the CPI’s foreign and domestic operations. The book described proudly the “educational and informative” efforts of the CPI to deliver a virtual unanimity of American support at home for the war, and an unequivocally positive image of America’s idealistic purposes abroad. I. THE “SECOND LINES” 1 As Secretary Baker points out, the war was not fought in France alone. Back of the firing-line, back of armies and navies, back of the great supply-depots, another struggle waged with the same intensity and

with almost equal significance attaching to its victories and defeats. It was the fight for the minds of men, for the “conquest of their convictions,” and the battle-line ran through every home in every country. 2 It was in this recognition of Public Opinion as a major force that the Great War differed most essentially from all previous conflicts. The trial of strength was not only between massed bodies of armed men, but between opposed ideals, and moral verdicts took on all the value of military decisions. Other wars went no deeper than the physical aspects, but German Kultur raised issues that had to be fought out in the hearts and minds of people as well as on the actual firing-line. The approval of the world meant the steady flow of inspiration into the trenches; it meant the strengthened resolve and the renewed determination of the civilian population that is a nation’s second line. The condemnation of the world meant the [4] destruction of morale and the surrender of that conviction of justice which is the very heart of courage. 3 The Committee on Public Information was called into existence to make this fight for the “verdict of mankind,” the voice created to plead the justice of America’s cause before the jury of Public Opinion. The fantastic legend that associated gags and muzzles with its work may be likened only to those trees which are evolved out of the air by Hindu magicians and which rise, grow, and flourish in gay disregard of such usual necessities as roots, sap, and sustenance. In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression. Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive. At no point did it seek or exercise authorities under those war laws that limited the freedom of speech and press. In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising. 4 Under the pressure of tremendous necessities an organization grew that not only reached deep into every American community, but that carried to every corner of the civilized globe the full message of America’s idealism, unselfishness, and indomitable purpose. We fought prejudice, indifference, and disaffection at home and we fought ignorance and falsehood abroad. We strove for the maintenance of our own morale and the Allied morale by every process of stimulation; every possible expedient was employed to break through the barrage of lies that kept the people of the Central Powers in darkness and delusion; we sought the friendship and support of the neutral nations by continuous presentation of facts. We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other [5] argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts. 5 There was no part of the great war machinery that we did not touch, no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms. All that was fine and ardent in the civilian population came at our call until more than one hundred and fifty thousand men and women were devoting highly specialized abilities to the work of the Committee, as faithful and devoted in their service as though they wore the khaki. 6

While America’s summons was answered without question by the citizenship as a whole, it is to be remembered that during the three and a half years of our neutrality the land had been torn by a thousand divisive prejudices, stunned by the voices of anger and confusion, and muddled by the pull and haul of opposed interests. These were conditions that could not be permitted to endure. What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination. The war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice. What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business and every task a common task for a single purpose. 7 Starting with the initial conviction that the war was not the war of an administration, but the war of one hundred million people, and believing that public support [6] was a matter of public understanding, we opened up the activities of government to the inspection of the citizenship. A voluntary censorship agreement safeguarded military information of obvious value to the enemy, but in all else the rights of the press were recognized and furthered. Trained men, at the center of effort in every one of the war-making branches of government, reported on progress and achievement, and in no other belligerent nation was there such absolute frankness with respect to every detail of the national war endeavor. 8 As swiftly as might be, there were put into pamphlet form America’s reasons for entering the war, the meaning of America, the nature of our free institutions, our war aims, likewise analyses of the Prussian system, the purposes of the imperial German government, and full exposure of the enemy’s misrepresentations, aggressions, and barbarities. Written by the country’s foremost publicists, scholars, and historians, and distinguished for their conciseness, accuracy, and simplicity, these pamphlets blew as a great wind against the clouds of confusion and misrepresentation. Money could not have purchased the volunteer aid that was given freely, the various universities lending their best men and the National Board of Historical Service placing its three thousand members at the complete disposal of the Committee. Some thirty-odd booklets, covering every phase of America’s ideals, purposes, and aims, were printed in many languages other than English. Seventy-five millions reached the people of America, and other millions went to every corner of the world, carrying our defense and our attack…. 21 Turning away from the United States to the world beyond our borders, a triple task confronted us. First, there were the peoples of the Allied nations that had to be fired by the magnitude of the American effort and the certainty of speedy and effective aid, in order to relieve the war-weariness of the civilian population and also to fan the enthusiasm of the firing-line to new flame. Second, we had to carry the truth to the neutral nations, poisoned by German lies; and third, we had to get the ideals of America, the determination of America, and the invincibility of America into the Central Powers. Source: Creel, George. How We Advertised America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920, pp. 3–9. Paragraph numbers have been added.

Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

In August 1928, almost a full decade after the close of World War I, the United States, France, and 11 other nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, declaring that they would not use war as an instrument of national policy unless in self-defense. Although dozens of other nations eventually became signatories, the high-minded agreement held little meaning in the face of little international will or means of enforcement—as became clear in the decade ahead. BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. A PROCLAMATION. WHEREAS a Treaty between the President of the United States of America, the President of the German Reich, His Majesty the King of the Belgians, the President of the French Republic, His Majesty the King of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, His Majesty the King of Italy, His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, the President of the Republic of Poland, and the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, was concluded and signed by their respective Plenipot[e]ntiaries at Paris on the twentyseventh day of August, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight, the original of which Treaty, being in the English and the French languages, is word for word as follows: THE PRESIDENT OF THE GERMAN REICH, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS, THE PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF GREAT BRITAIN IRELAND AND THE BRITISH DOMINIONS BEYOND THE SEAS, EMPEROR OF INDIA, HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF ITALY, HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR OF JAPAN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF POLAND, THE PRESIDENT OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC, Deeply sensible of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind; Persuaded that the time has, come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated; Convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly process, and that any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty; Hopeful that, encouraged by their example, all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavor and by adhering to the present Treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting the civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy; Have decided to conclude a Treaty and for that purpose have appointed as their respective Plenipotentiaries: THE PRESIDENT OF THE GERMAN REICH: Dr Gustav STRESEMANN, Minister of Foreign Affairs; THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: The Honorable Frank B. KELLOGG, Secretary of State; HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS: Mr Paul HYMANS, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister of State;

THE PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: Mr. Aristide BRIAND, Minister for Foreign Affairs; HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF GREAT BRITAIN, IRELAND AND THE BRITISH DOMINIONS BEYOND THE SEAS, EMPEROR OF INDIA: For GREAT BRITAIN and NORTHERN IBELAND and all parts of the British Empire which are not separate Members of the League of Nations: The Right Honourable Lord CUSHENDUN, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Acting-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; For the DOMINION OF CANADA: The Right Honourable William Lyon MACKENZIE KING, Prime Minister and Minister for External Affairs; … who, having communicated to one another their full powers found in good and due form have agreed upon the following articles: ARTICLE I The High Contracting Parties solem[n]ly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. ARTICLE II The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means…. This Treaty shall, when it has come into effect as prescribed in the preceding paragraph, remain open as long as may be necessary for adherence by all the other Powers of the world. Every instrument evidencing the adherence of a Power shall be deposited at Washington and the Treaty shall immediately upon such deposit become effective as between the Power thus adhering and the other Powers parties hereto…. NOW THEREFORE, be it known that I, Herbert Hoover, President of the United States of America, have caused the said Treaty to be made public, to the end that the same and every article and clause thereof may be observed and fulfilled with good faith by the United States and the citizens thereof. IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. DONE at the city of Washington this twenty-fourth day of July in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and fifty-fourth. HERBERT HOOVER By the President: HENRY L STIMSON Secretary of State Source: United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 46, Part 2, p. 2343. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

4. World War II: The American Century Dawns

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW On August 9 and 10, 1941, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met aboard the USS Augusta in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. From their historic first meeting the two leaders issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of the Anglo-American principles that formed the basis of the system of global peace and collective security they envisioned would follow World War II. Coming in response to the darkening crisis of Nazi military victories sweeping across Europe, the Atlantic Conference strengthened the U.S.-British relationship at a critical moment even as it disappointed Churchill. The prime minister had hoped to secure a U.S. commitment to join a conflict nearly two years under way along with a stiffened U.S. resistance to the growing aggressiveness of Japanese actions in Southeast Asia—by then threatening British, French, and Dutch possessions in that region. Churchill received neither from the American president who still faced strong isolationist sentiment at home and was not yet willing to risk a complete severing of U.S.-Japanese relations. A visionary and inspiring statement of two imperial powers promising a more democratic postwar world, the Atlantic Charter is also a revealing document. Among its eight principles, the joint AngloAmerican statement pledged no territorial aggrandizement for themselves and the right of self-rule for all peoples—including, but not limited to those suffering under occupation by any of the major Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Although the charter offered hope for millions around the world, and despite its enduring significance as the basis for instruments of the postwar order such as the United Nations and multilateral trade and economic policies, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt intended in this nonbinding document to fully surrender their own respective colonies, possessions, or protectorates. Further, U.S. policy during World War II equivocated over whether other colonized areas of the world—French Indochina is one notable example—should be liberated at the end of the conflict. When four months later the Empire of Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, the United States became engulfed in a conflict against the Axis—the most fearsome and terrifying phalanx of totalitarian forces ever known. In some corners of the world hoping to break free of imperial occupation, World War II would be, at least temporarily, as bitterly disappointing as the conflict that preceded it. And yet this greatest conflict in human history also inaugurated not only what media magnate Henry Luce called for a few months before the Atlantic Conference—a transformational “American Century” of U.S. internationalism and global hegemonic dominance—but also an irrepressible wave of anti-imperialist, nationalist movements around the world that proved equally momentous in the decades ahead. The fervor for independence and self-determination unleashed by World War II and rooted at least rhetorically in the Anglo-American vision of 1941 would help fuel the next decades-long geopolitical conflict, even as it

ultimately threatened the very global order of American hegemony that Henry Luce had envisioned. As Luce and other internationalists and proponents of American exceptionalism urged in the time before Pearl Harbor, U.S. participation in World War II offered the nation a pivotal opportunity to realize its “destiny” and move toward a position of unmatched global economic, geopolitical, and cultural influence, backed by unprecedented levels of military power. Many Americans of the 21st century have a difficult time comprehending how their forebears of the 1930s could have witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe and Japanese militarism without confronting it with the sense of urgency that now seems so obvious. Such a perspective fails to appreciate the depth of the disillusionment felt by Americans in the two decades after the First World War. Cynicism about that war bolstered the political strength of so-called “isolationists”—an unwieldy but potent collection of Progressive peace activists, anti-Roosevelt conservatives, and business interests. Led by the America First Committee, isolationists effectively dominated the debate about international affairs leading up to the war. Indeed, the sequence of events that began in 1922 with the rise of Fascist Benito Mussolini in Italy and continued with the 1935 invasion by that country of Ethiopia, Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party in 1935 and its increasingly aggressive territorial aggrandizement (most alarmingly the seizure of Czechoslovakia in 1938), and the Spanish Civil War that ended in the Fascist dictatorship of Generalisimo Francisco Franco, served to reinforce the conviction of many Americans that World War I had been for naught and that the nation should avoid any further entanglements abroad. The Great Depression, too, fixed Americans’ attention on problems at home. President Roosevelt focused squarely on advancing New Deal legislation at home and professed in 1936 to “hate war” and adhere steadfastly to American neutrality if war were to break out in Europe. Nevertheless, FDR was throughout his presidency more engaged internationally than his predecessors and grew increasingly determined to confront the frightening turn of events abroad—calling in October 1937 for an international “quarantine of aggressor nations.” His resolve, however, was checked by a series of Neutrality Acts from 1935 to 1939 that restricted financial and other means of support for warring parties abroad. The “cash-and-carry” provision of the 1937 act that allowed warring parties to purchase nonmunitions materials reflected the gradual shift in public opinion away from strict isolationism to support for the Allies’ efforts. The trend culminated following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the fall of Paris in June 1940, and a series of German naval attacks on U.S. forces in the North Atlantic. That fall, Congress passed Lend-Lease legislation that liberalized arms sales, and in December Roosevelt declared that the United States would become the “Arsenal of Democracy” in producing the war matériel needed by Allied forces. The path to eventual U.S. involvement in World War II went not through Europe but through the waters of the Pacific. Tensions between the United States and the Empire of Japan long predated the latter’s 1931 incursion into Manchuria. Although the rise of Japan as an imperialist nation roughly coincides with that of the United States at the close of the 19th century, the relationship was far from one of equals. Many Japanese had long resented Japan’s “opening” by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, which they believed launched an exploitive trade relationship that tilted unfairly against Japanese economic interests. U.S. immigration policies toward the Japanese were perceived as racist, from the Theodore Roosevelt administration’s “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907 to the 1924 outright ban on all Japanese immigration. Nationalist Japanese politicians reflected the attitudes of many of their citizens who believed Western ethnocentric racism toward Japan hampered the ability of the society to prosper—this point driven home by the Allied powers’ refusal of a Japanese racial equality clause at Versailles following World War I.

When Japan’s leaders in 1915 attempted to economically control parts of China, the United States rejected this as a direct threat to its “Open Door” policy. The contentious relationship worsened with the growing internal strength of imperial militarists in the Japanese government who conspired and carried out the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, eliciting condemnation from U.S. president Herbert Hoover. Then in 1937, following a clash between Japanese and Chinese soldiers near Beijing, Japanese military officers determined to subdue the country once and for all and launched a full-scale invasion, seizing large swaths of China, killing thousands of civilians, and inaugurating World War II in the Pacific. A subsequent attack on the U.S. gunboat Panay prompted a rebuke from FDR. Given the isolationist climate in the United States and with major U.S. oil corporations profiting from the sale of oil to the Empire of Japan—nearly 60 percent of its oil coming from the United States—none of these events drew more than modest economic sanctions. As Chinese resistance stiffened, Japanese militarists blamed U.S., British, and other Western powers’ interference and moved—not to retreat from China, but toward escalation. Relations began to reach their nadir when in July 1940 the Japanese allied with Nazi Germany and took northern Indochina, then a colonial possession of France. Within a few months they held the entire country. Japanese planners hoped to cut China off from a level of external support they were grossly overestimating. Regardless, FDR was greatly alarmed by the Japanese incursion into Southeast Asia, a threat to an already endangered Great Britain—at the time very dependent on raw materials from nations throughout all of South Asia’s European-held colonies. Increasingly stiff U.S. sanctions followed, including an embargo on petroleum, iron, and technology. Cut off from these resources, the Japanese swept toward the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. By fall 1941 Japan, with its own population whipped into nationalistic fervor, had boxed itself in with a series of ill-conceived imperialistic advances, and now faced the worst one of all: certain conflict with the United States—a nation far stronger in nearly every respect and upon which it had grown increasingly dependent. Historians still debate legitimate questions surrounding the Roosevelt administration’s prior knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. From the standpoint of American expansionism, however, is this more fundamental issue: the long-term geostrategic, economic interests of the United States in the Pacific and East Asia, staked out decades before, put the nation on a collision course with Japan as it flexed its own imperial muscle in the 1930s. That the United States did not enter the war directly or intensify sanctions against Japan until its own interests were threatened speaks in part to the isolationist posture of Americans and the domestic political realities facing Roosevelt. But it is difficult to deny that U.S. reluctance to intervene in Asia as well as in Europe in the face of Hitler’s aggression and the unfolding horrors of Nazism owes at least something to the undertow of American corporate interests profiting from the Japanese war of aggression against China, and even more so the powering of the Third Reich’s military machine. Beyond Henry Ford’s notorious ideological affinity for Hitler and fascism, American corporations from DuPont and Dow Chemical to IBM and IT&T provided critical industrial support to the Nazi regime throughout the 1930s—most right up to Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war. Major New York banks and investment firms, like the German financial and corporate interests that helped bring Hitler to power, profited handsomely from the fascist policies of the Third Reich. It is tempting to see the appeal and influence of the American fascist movement that existed both in the streets and the halls of power as a spasm of extremist ideological attraction that stands alongside the Communist movement of the same period. The Nazi-affiliated German American Bund, though it drew 20,000 cheering supporters to Madison Square Garden in 1939, slowly lost favor among even the most die-hard extreme opponents of “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” the anti-Semitic sobriquet the organization hung on

the American president for his alleged “love of Jews.” However, the appeal of fascism in the highest circles of American corporate boardrooms reflected and intersected with the ascendant power of big business during World War II, the agenda of globalized foreign investment championed by close FDR advisers, and its influence inside the halls of a burgeoning military establishment. Throughout the war, corporate leaders as well as high-ranking officials in the Roosevelt administration envisioned a postwar world in which French and British influence would be on the wane, opening up opportunities for the United States to reshape the global business climate. The combination of American economic strength, the pivotal role played by the U.S. military establishment in winning the war, and the growing influence of big business interests and internationalist policymakers in Washington positioned the United States for unprecedented expansion at war’s end. An emerging transformation of control of Middle East oil before and during the war illustrates the point. Although the United States produced more than 60 percent of the world’s oil supply in the 1920s, industry officials increasingly viewed former territories of the Ottoman Empire as crucial to long-term supply. During and following World War I, the victorious Allied powers directed the partitioning of the old empire, placing French and British oil concerns in a favored position—one U.S. corporations were unable to disrupt. The first breakthrough came in 1932 with an oil strike in Bahrain by the Standard Oil Company of California (Socal) and the negotiation of a bold and exclusive 60-year concession in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The new enterprise, Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), enjoyed a series of lucrative strikes in the late 1930s, which secured Texaco as a new U.S. partner and brought an increased concession from Saudi king Ibn Saud—nearly one-half million acres. These events distressed British officials who for decades had been methodically supporting the rise to power of the House of Saud. As World War II broke out, the king faced German interruption of the royalties coming from his industry and turned to ARAMCO for financial assistance to stabilize the kingdom and defend the throne. ARAMCO initially acquiesced, but facing increased Saudi demands, in 1940 pressured the Roosevelt administration to send Lend-Lease aid to Saudi Arabia. This, U.S. officials could not do, given the stipulation that all such aid go to democratic nations. Instead FDR suggested the aid go through Britain, which it did for the next two years. However, by February 1943, with British officials wooing and pressuring the Saudi government for increased access, Roosevelt—understanding the importance of securing postwar U.S. interests in the region—acted decisively and extended Lend-Lease aid directly to Saudi Arabia, whose defense, he said, was “vital to the defense of the United States.” Although the United States and Great Britain would continue to jockey for influence, the flow of some $99 million in aid to Saudi Arabia during the war pronounced unequivocally that the United States had established a firm foothold in the region. The new U.S.-Saudi partnership was symbolized famously in February 1945 by FDR’s entertaining the king and his entourage aboard the USS Quincy on his return from the Yalta Conference. Even as the United States pledged support for Saudi security, inside the Roosevelt (by April, Truman) administration was an emerging commitment to support the Zionist determination for a permanent state for the Jewish people in the Middle East. The two policy goals— support for Arab authoritarian regimes to ensure stability and the steady flow of oil, and support for Israel —would inevitably conflict with each other and deepen the American footprint in the Middle East. As World War II drew to a close, other developments signaled the rise of global American leadership. In July 1944, representatives of 44 Allied nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Aid Conference to chart the postwar economic order. In some ways the culmination of several years of interwar talks among European powers after World War I and more recent bilateral negotiations between the United States and Britain, the Bretton Woods Conference established the institutional pillars for an American- and Anglo-European–directed global financial system for

promoting trade and expansion of the market economy, currency regulation and stability, and reconstruction of war-torn (and eventually “undeveloped”) nations. Leaders formally established or conceived the foundations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, which evolved into the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, in 1995 the World Trade Organization). With the haunting specter of the radical ideologies that arose from the economic nationalism of the 1920s and Great Depression, and with a nervous eye on the appeal of Communist and Socialist ideologies around the globe, the overriding goals of Western officials as they looked to the postwar era was to promote free-market economic growth and noncommunist global political stability. For the United States, the establishment of a fixed rate of currency exchange pegged to a gold-backed U.S. dollar solidified its position as a monetary hegemon. The ability to heavily capitalize reconstruction efforts in postwar Europe gave the United States proportionately strong influence at the World Bank and IMF, steering reconstruction, development, and monetary policies in its favor for the next quarter century. Similarly, Secretary of State Cordell Hull was instrumental in forging the architecture of a United Nations that ensured the dominance of the big four imperial powers of the era: the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. While many democratic principles—the right of nations to selfrule, human rights, prohibition against preemptive war, for example—were embedded in the UN Charter, it was also clear from the outset that U.S. officials viewed the body as another international instrument through which to advance not only American values but also U.S. material interests. Finally, signaling the massive wartime buildup of the U.S. military establishment was the deployment of more than 5 million Americans throughout England and all over the world—from Australia to northern Canada. Most were welcomed by host nations, often exuberantly. Many proved instrumental in the defeat of the Axis powers, particularly the tidal force of Americans who bloodied the English Channel and led the liberation of France in 1944. However, Americans abroad also induced clashes, variously triggered by U.S. racial attitudes, interactions with women, and extraterritorial legal immunity. This proved to be a harbinger of the “Coca-colonization” of the world that would accelerate after the war in the form of a globalizing American culture and a permanent U.S. military presence in most of these same countries. Soon after the world’s first atomic weapons were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, World War II came to an end. Although President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb remains contested, there is no question that the two atomic blasts not only brought an end to the most catastrophic conflict in history, but they also opened up a new chapter in global affairs. The bomb ended the war in the Pacific without the need for a joint U.S.-Soviet invasion to which the Russians had agreed at Yalta and affirmed at the Potsdam Conference, thereby solidifying the United States as sole occupying power in Japan after the war. The scientific and technological achievement of the Manhattan Project and the willingness to utilize the bomb further punctuated the new position of U.S. military dominance and its geostrategic aspirations far beyond Asia—a message heard unmistakably by leaders of the other empire that emerged from the war, the Soviet Union.

America First Committee Organized in September 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) quickly grew to become the largest and loudest voice of opponents to American intervention in World War II in Europe. It counted among its members a wide range of individuals, including politicians from the Left and the Right, business leaders, writers, past and future presidents, and religious leaders. Its most well-known member was Charles

Lindbergh, the famous aviator. By late 1941, however, the committee increasingly became viewed as proGermany and anti-Semitic, due in part to controversial speeches by Lindbergh. Four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into World War II, the committee disbanded. By the fall of 1940, France and all of Western Europe had fallen to the military might of Nazi Germany. Only Great Britain remained unconquered. While most Americans preferred to see England prevail, they were not anxious to join the fight, preferring a policy of neutrality. On September 4, 1940, two days after the “destroyers for bases” deal between the United States and Great Britain was announced, Yale Law School student R. Douglas Stuart Jr. and others formed the AFC to oppose American intervention in the war in Europe. At the time, the AFC was only the latest entity created to promote an antiwar position, but it quickly expanded by merging with the more left-leaning Keep America Out of War Committee. At its peak, the AFC had more than 850,000 members, with the core of its membership and support based in the Midwest. Shortly after its creation, the AFC formally organized at a meeting in Chicago, which became the home of its national headquarters. Retired general Robert E. Wood, the chair of Sears, Roebuck & Co., was selected as its chair, a position he held until the AFC disbanded. A wide array of leading citizens became members and supporters. Members of the AFC included past and future American presidents (Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy); politicians from both political parties (Hamilton S. Fish III, Robert LaFollette Jr., Robert A. Taft, Burton K. Wheeler); writers and journalists (William F. Buckley, e.e. cummings, John T. Flynn, Sinclair Lewis); business leaders (Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Robert McCormick); and other present and future leading citizens (Father Charles Coughlin, Lillian Gish, Charles Lindbergh, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Eddie Rickenbacker, Sargent Shriver, Potter Stewart). The AFC advocated strict isolationism. It distrusted President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his promise to maintain U.S. neutrality. It held to four core principles: (1) America must build an impregnable defense; (2) no foreign power can successfully attack a prepared America; (3) only by keeping out of the war in Europe could America preserve its democracy; and (4) “aid short of war” likely would involve America in the war and only weaken national defense. When President Roosevelt proposed the LendLease Act in December 1940, the AFC vigorously opposed the bill. It failed, however, to prevent passage of the act. Most AFC members simply wanted to keep America out of the war in Europe. The AFC endeavored to reduce the growing support for England by arguing that aid to Great Britain inevitably would lead to war, as in World War I. It minimized Nazi crimes in Europe and claimed that the United States could readily coexist with Nazi Germany. At the same time, some of its members were motivated more by opposition to President Roosevelt and his decision to run for an unprecedented third term in office. Others, however, were overtly pro-German, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. Soon after he assumed office in May 1940, British prime minister Winston Churchill recognized the AFC and similar groups as a significant impediment to his desire to gain the assistance, and eventually full participation of the United States in the war against Nazi Germany. He therefore assigned William Stephenson, head of the British Security Coordination (BSC), the task of undermining the isolationist and anti-interventionist organizations in the United States, including the AFC. Stephenson worked with William Donovan in the United States. By the spring of 1941, BSC operatives had infiltrated the AFC, closely watched and harassed AFC supporters, and engaged in activities designed to paint the AFC and its members as appeasers and pro-Nazi. BSC operatives acted to disrupt AFC rallies and meetings.

FIGHT FOR FREEDOM COMMITTEE’S “FUN TO BE FREE”

Organized shortly after France fell to the Nazis in April 1941, the Fight for Freedom Committee (FFC) was an organization of famous and ordinary Americans who argued stridently for American intervention in Europe to stop the onslaught of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Much less well known than its isolationist counterpart, the America First Committee, the FFC followed other groups like the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (1940) and the specifically pro-British Friends of Democracy (1937) in urging the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to take more aggressive action to defend the United States from the ominous threat of fascism then swallowing Europe. Sergeant Alvin C. York, the pacifist-turned-legendary World War I hero, was among its most famous and publicly outspoken members. York and other FFC members championed the cause of war against Nazi Germany as the best means of defending the security of the United States. This position was exceedingly unpopular even as late as the fall of 1941 when just 10 percent of Americans advocated war with Germany. Swimming against the tide of public opinion, the Fight for Freedom Committee organized a series of events aimed at pressing the Roosevelt administration toward intervention. Most famously, FFC staged an event called “Fun to be Free” on October 5, 1941, at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Orchestrated by composers Oscar Hammerstein and Irving Berlin among others, the event featured a “Mammoth Revue” of dramatic readings, skits mocking Hitler and Mussolini, and patriotic songs. From Major League Baseball came Brooklyn Dodgers owner Larry McPhail and the team’s manager Leo Durocher, who spoke at the event. Referring to the World Series then under way, Durocher declared, “We don’t want Hitlerism. We want Americanism. The Yankees are a great ball club. Even if we lose, we’ll be losing in a free country.”

As it became clearer that Hitler was bent on domination of all of Europe if not the world, public opinion became more favorable to England and supported its defiance of Nazi Germany. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Communist and Socialist members of the AFC left the group. For many in the AFC, however, the invasion of the Soviet Union furthered their view that the real conflict was between two dictatorships, and many hoped that Nazi Germany would succeed in conquering Russia as it had the rest of Europe. The AFC continued to agitate against intervention and support for Great Britain. One of the most celebrated Americans of his time, aviator Charles Lindbergh, became the leading advocate for the AFC and its positions. Lindbergh had spent nearly five years in Europe in the late 1930s and had visited Nazi Germany extensively. He was impressed with Germany’s efficiencies and military might. He minimized the criminal actions of Hitler and his followers, and argued that Britain was trying to get the United States into the war simply to preserve its colonial empire. But Lindbergh’s speeches were increasingly extremist. By the summer of 1941, Lindbergh was describing President Roosevelt as a greater threat to peace than Adolf Hitler. Lindbergh’s speech at an AFC rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, in which he identified the groups pushing the United States into the war as “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” was perhaps the high (or low) point of his inflammatory speeches. The speech was highly criticized for its anti-Semitic tone and caused some leaders of the AFC to withdraw. Many newspapers and politicians castigated Lindbergh for his statements and the sentiments revealed in his speech. Lindbergh’s rhetoric was viewed as pro-German and bigoted. His continued advocacy on behalf of the AFC damaged the public’s opinion of the organization, destroyed its unity and focus, and hastened its decline. In the few months remaining before Pearl Harbor, the AFC saw its efforts to keep America out of the war increasingly failing. The U.S. Navy began escorting convoys to England more than halfway across the Atlantic. President Roosevelt offered aid to the Soviet Union. Portions of the Neutrality Act were repealed. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, some members of the AFC still hoped the country could be kept out of the war in Europe. Hitler eliminated any such prospects when he declared war on America on December 11, 1941. On the same day, the AFC’s leaders voted to dissolve and issued a final press release contending that its principles were right and that if they had been adhered to, American involvement in the war could have been avoided. Alan M. Anderson

See also: Atlantic Charter; Isolationism; Neutrality Acts; Peace Movement (1930s); Primary Documents: Charles Lindbergh’s Address to the America First Committee in New York City (April 23, 1941)

Further Reading Cole, Wayne S. America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940–1941. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953. Doenecke, Justus D. In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-Interventionist Movement of 1940–1941 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990. Kaufman, Bill. America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995. Sarles, Ruth. The Story of America First: The Men and Women Who Opposed U.S. Intervention in World War II. Edited by Bill Kaufman. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.

American Armies of Occupation (World War II) During World War II, friendly troops and support personnel came in waves to Allied nations, chiefly to Britain but also to Australia and other nations. Canadian and other Commonwealth of Nations troops who came to help defend Britain were viewed by the British as polite colonials, coming to the defense of the mother country in its hour of greatest need. The Canadians sent several hundred thousand troops to Britain during the war; 330,000 passed through the Aldershot camp alone. Their presence was greatly appreciated by the British and did not prove particularly disruptive. The Americans who followed, after they joined the war in December 1941, were welcomed, but eventually proved less popular, popularly described as “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” American private soldiers were paid three times as much as the British, and their sexual appetites were legendary. These “friendly invasions,” particularly those involving the United States, became for many one of the defining and memorable characteristics of the Second World War. With remarkable speed, the United States from 1940 to 1942 mobilized its economy and armed forces in support of the global war. By early 1944 hundreds of thousands of American troops were dispatched to England to prepare for the Allied invasion of the continent. A large contingent was sent to Australia, another to New Zealand, and smaller groups to friendly island nations and colonies in the Pacific. The Americans sent soldiers to the Dominion of Newfoundland to assist with military preparations on the East Coast of North America, and more than 40,000 soldiers and a comparable number of civilians to build the Northwest Defense Projects in northern Canada. Smaller groups of construction workers and military personnel spread out across the globe, to the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and South Asia. Large airbases were constructed from Greenland to the South Pacific to assist with defensive and offensive activities. Construction crews by the tens of thousands, mostly with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, accompanied the troops, building large military encampments from southern England to Queensland in Australia. At its peak, the United States had 5 million military personnel in allied nations around the planet. The distribution ranged from more than 3 million in England in 1944 to tiny detachments at newly constructed bases in the Caribbean. The unprecedented expansion cost billions of dollars, spent with little regard for careful planning and connected to the obvious urgency of a war that shifted from a defensive operation in 1941 to preparations for a massive multifront offensive two years later. America was in important ways unlike its allies. Its troops brought their racial assumptions and practices with them, most notably in the segregated treatment of African American soldiers. New Zealanders were shocked by the differential arrangements for African Americans and began to reflect more extensively on their treatment of the Maoris. In Great Britain, to the horror of Americans, the local

women fraternized openly with African American troops. The Americans brought their material culture with their military hardware—what scholars refer to as “Coca-colonization”—nylon stockings, cigarettes, soda pop, candy, gum, movies, and other evidence that the United States was a much wealthier place than the prewar Allied countries. The American occupations were not free of local conflict. Australia, in particular, struggled with the scale and cultural brashness of the Americans. A major riot, the “Battle of Brisbane,” in November 1942 highlighted the often tense relationships between the outsiders and the locals. Australian culture has particularly striking social relations between the blokes (men) and the Sheilas (women). The Americans often attracted attention from the women and resentment from the men. The application of the rules of extraterritoriality, which shielded American military personnel under American law, angered many local people when conflicts broke out. Although America’s military contribution was greatly appreciated, social relations understandably cooled over the course of the war. The incoming Americans were overwhelmingly young and male. In Great Britain and Australia, already two and a half years into the war when the Americans arrived (a point many Allied nationals noted with some bitterness), large numbers of local men were away on military assignments. Thousands of marriages took place—along with an unknown number of pregnancies outside of wedlock. At the end of the war, 60,000 “war brides” left Britain for North America. It is difficult to assess how friendly armies of occupation shaped the United States. It certainly opened the eyes of many African American soldiers, who were surprised and delighted to see how much less racist Britain was than their own nation. American personnel gained extensive experience around the world and came home reassured of their material superiority and confident about a long-term role of global leadership. If nothing else, the experience of war reinforced a growing American self-confidence. In the end, the friendly invasions of World War II established the footprint of the American postwar empire. Unable to send supporting personnel to the Soviet Union, the American relationship with the Communist state deteriorated rapidly into the Cold War. Much the same happened in China, where the Communists waged a bitter war against the Japanese, but with minimal American involvement. Elsewhere, from England and Iceland to Australia and the Caribbean, many of the forward bases established during the war remained active thereafter, providing the logistical foundation for America’s expanding global military and setting out signposts to receptive audiences for U.S. products and popular culture. The friendly invasions of World War II were, given the sexual and other tensions involved, reasonably peaceful and constructive. The Allies appreciated the American assistance at a time of great need, but were happy when the bulk of the troops and personnel went home. The facilities constructed during wartime proved, in the main, to be of long-term benefit to the receiving countries, although many were dismantled after the fighting. World War II changed the dynamics of the global economic, social, and geopolitical system, in no small measure because of the presence and impact of the U.S. “armies of occupation.” They helped defeat the Axis powers while forging new socioeconomic alliances between the United States and its global allies. Bill Morrison and Ken Coates See also: U.S. Military Bases

Further Reading Costello, John. Love, Sex, and War: Changing Values. London: Collins, 1985.

Moore, John H. Over-Paid, Over-Sexed, and Over Here: Americans in Australia, 1941–1945. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1981. Stacey, C. P., and Barbara Wilson. The Canadians in Britain, 1939–1946. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

American Century/American Exceptionalism Ten months before the United States entered World War II, Life and Time publisher Henry Robinson Luce (1898–1967) articulated one of the most famous definitions of its 20th-century role in world affairs. The “fundamental trouble with America,” Luce declared in Life magazine in February 1941, was its newfound status as “the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world,” coupled with Americans’ inability “to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact.” Only by embracing their role as world leaders and making their age an “American Century,” he proclaimed, would the cycle of world wars cease, giving way to a stable, prosperous, and democratic world order. Americans must, Luce urged, “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit” (Luce). Along with other intellectuals, politicians, and citizens in the coming decades, Luce developed ideas and approaches that became known as “American exceptionalism”: the notion that the United States, a uniquely positioned and powerful nation, held a special mission to lead the world by spreading its influence, ideas, and institutions. Most broadly, the “American Century,” according to Luce and other like-minded thinkers, meant the end of America’s isolationism in world affairs. The United States’ fortunate position as an insulated, developing young nation in the Western Hemisphere, they argued, was obsolete in the face of the world’s growing interconnectedness and recent, rapid developments in global technology, communications, and culture. The Axis powers’ military threat to the United States was merely one menacing aspect of these larger realities. Unless Americans adjusted their worldview, they further warned, they would not only lose their chance at world leadership, but their own society would decline. To avert this fate, Luce called for an “American Century,” which defined global expansion in four areas: the international economy; technical and artistic aid to other societies; humanitarianism and war relief; and the globalization of U.S. political ideals and institutions. “Our only chance,” Luce summarized, was “a vital international economy” and “international moral order” based on “the imaginations of many men,” an internationalism “of the people, by the people and for the people” (Luce). As a call to action issued in the mass media, Luce’s “American Century” was purposefully general and popular in tone. It drew on long-standing notions of America’s global uniqueness, but adapted them to a prointerventionist stance in national debates over U.S. strategic policy leading into World War II. In early 1941, the U.S. government and its public were sharply debating the war’s meaning and threat to Americans; most particularly, the debate focused on U.S. military aid to Great Britain, the leading Western power fighting the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But as Luce explained at the beginning of his editorial, this specific issue, to believers in the “American Century,” was only a part of the sweeping, significant issue of the U.S. role in the world in many years to come. “The American Century” was Luce’s most influential single published work. It reached millions of readers through Life and reprints in the New York Times, Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, and other publications. Life received almost 5,000 letters to the editor, a record number of reader responses. The editorial revived popular feeling among veterans and citizens who strongly remembered former U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world “safe for democracy” in World War I. Luce received strongest support from other prointerventionist Americans in the media, government, education, business, and civic organizations. Many so-called “internationalists” undertook similar efforts to shape national

policies and public opinion, which still largely opposed U.S. entry in World War II. Luce worked closely with many “internationalists,” including national syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and 1940 Republican Party presidential nominee Wendell Willkie. Such Americans built a compelling portrait of America’s exceptional character and global responsibilities. Among themselves, they held disagreements. Some emphasized U.S.-British alliances, military strength, and other considerations of power, rather than Luce’s stress on American political ideals and global uplift. Many agreed with Luce’s basic message, but found its scope too ambitious and expansive. The Democratic Party’s liberal wing and Republican Party conservatives and some moderates were Luce’s greatest critics. Led by U.S. vice president Henry Wallace and U.S. senator Robert Taft, they accused Luce and his allies of warmongering, imperialism, chauvinism, greed, and utopianism. Undeterred, Luce continued his campaign for an “American Century” during World War II through his editorial leadership of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines and his political activities as a prominent Republican and citizen. Though memories of Luce’s “American Century” faded after America’s triumph in World War II, its vision of American exceptionalism dominated the postwar period. While American exceptionalism had a long history, dating from the American Revolution and Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on the early republic to Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “frontier thesis” about U.S. democracy, postwar Americans engaged such beliefs with unprecedented energy. In popular culture, academic research, and political discourse, Americans widely accepted the nation’s special global mission. As the United States played a leading role in the Cold War, Americans found exceptionalism a meaningful way of understanding the United States’ and other nations’ relationships and tensions. One particularly influential group, a 1950s “consensus” school of social scientists, posited America’s exceptionally stable, strong character as the result of a democratic social structure and culture that stood in stark contrast to those of Europe, Asia, and other societies. In various ways, postwar Americans, to a remarkable degree, supported the vision of global leadership that Luce and others had announced in World War II. In the 1960s, American exceptionalism’s dominant sway over U.S. society began to wane. As U.S. global power was increasingly challenged in the Vietnam War and elsewhere in the world, Americans and other peoples increasingly questioned America’s global leadership. Nonetheless, Luce’s “American Century” and other visions of American exceptionalism continue to hold widespread appeal to this day. Though amid growing polarization and disagreements, many political commentators, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens still profess its tenets. Though debate continues to surround the “American Century” and its future, its influence since World War II remains substantial. Kevin Y. Kim See also: Frontier; Turner, Frederick Jackson; Wilson, Woodrow; Primary Documents: Project for a New American Century, Letter to President Bill Clinton Regarding Iraq (January 26, 1998)

Further Reading Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994. Hogan, Michael J., et al. “The American Century: A Roundtable.” Parts 1 and 2. Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 157–370; no. 3 (Summer 1999): 391–537. Kammen, Michael. “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration.” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993): 1–43. Luce, Henry R. “The American Century.” Life, February 17, 1941, 61–65. Rodgers, Daniel T. “American Exceptionalism Revisited.” Raritan 24, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 21–47.

Arsenal of Democracy The “Arsenal of Democracy” refers to the term used by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in a radio broadcast of December 29, 1940, pledging that the United States would offer military assistance to Britain and the Allied powers in their fight against the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Notably, Roosevelt neither committed the United States to joining World War II nor affirmed that he would not do so in the future. Rather, Roosevelt argued that arming the Allies now would prevent Americans from having to fight later, and insisted that the United States must become the primary supplier of the Allied effort to ensure that outcome—and ultimately the survival of democracy in the world. The broadcast was given during a time of desperate Allied need, particularly for Britain. Although several programs for supporting Britain were already under way, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had informed Roosevelt about the urgent need for more substantial support. The “Arsenal of Democracy” speech helped build support in Congress to respond to the dire situation facing the British. In March 1941, over the objections of isolationist Republicans, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which eventually sent more than $50 billion of war matériel free of charge to the Allied powers (provided that they send back what was left in working condition after the war). Roosevelt’s call for U.S. industrial centers to supply the Allied war effort also came at a crucial time for the domestic economy. Following the stock market crash of 1929 and the worldwide depression that followed, U.S. trade plummeted as tariffs rose and demand and confidence vanished, at home and abroad. The United States experienced some recovery, but after a turn to spending cuts and tax increases by Congress and tighter money by the Federal Reserve, by 1937 profits, production, and wages had fallen to 1929 levels and between 1937 and 1938, unemployment rose from 14.3 percent to more than 19 percent. But as the skies darkened across Europe, rearmament pushed the U.S. government and American firms in a close relationship to supply European demand and reduce domestic unemployment. By 1941, employment and industrial output had increased significantly, a process accelerated dramatically after the U.S. entry into the war following the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Powered by a rapid rearmament program that converted civilian production of U.S. industry to the manufacture of military goods, the American “Arsenal of Democracy” produced over the course of the war a staggering volume of the munitions needed by U.S. and Allied forces to win the war, including 300,000 aircraft, 100,000 tanks and armored vehicles, 80,000 landing craft, 5,600 merchant ships and 1,500 navy ships, 20 million small arms, 41 billion rounds of ammunition, and 6 million tons of bombs. By 1944, U.S. unemployment was a mere 1.6 percent, but, as a consequence of being the “Arsenal of Democracy” for both Europe and itself, the United States and all of Europe would experience a dramatic contraction in credit, demand, and employment if U.S. firms could not continue to sell their surplus in foreign markets. After the war, many U.S. firms, strengthened and expanded by previous government contracts employing large swaths of the American public and subsidized by Marshall Plan aid and Truman Doctrine pledges, would continue to produce large quantities of industrial and military goods for both domestic and European markets. This permanent military economy—rooted in the “Arsenal of Democracy” production effort of World War II—helped to ensure economic prosperity in the postwar era but also became the heart of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would call the “military-industrial complex.” The “Arsenal of Democracy” broadcast was an important moment in Roosevelt’s efforts to convince Americans to see the conflict across the Atlantic as one threatening not just Europe, or even the values of Western civilization and liberal democracy. Rather, Roosevelt stressed that modern technology, when combined with Nazi ambitions, made the war’s eventual extension into the Western Hemisphere

inevitable. The speech may thus be grouped with Lend-Lease, the Atlantic Charter, and, most decisively, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as part of the profound decline of U.S. isolationism and strengthening of internationalism after the outbreak of the war—a commitment that would grow dramatically through the prosecution of the war, the terms of its settlement, and the management of the postwar American-Soviet confrontation. Michael Edward Franczak See also: Atlantic Charter; Isolationism; Lend-Lease; Military Industrial Complex; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Further Reading Hyde, Charles K. Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry During World War II. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1935. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Zelizer, Julian. Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security, from World War II to the War on Terrorism. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Atlantic Charter (1941) The Atlantic Charter was a document issued jointly by the United States and Britain on August 14, 1941, outlining eight principal points by which the two powers believed international relations should be administered following World War II. In the “Joint Declaration by the President and Prime Minister,” Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill intended to signal Anglo-American unity in the war and common ideals for its eventual settlement. The document was issued just five months before the passage by the U.S. Congress of Lend-Lease aid to Britain and the other Allied nations. The meetings that produced the unsigned and nonbinding document were held at Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland and were kept secret for their duration. However, the resulting declaration had farreaching propagandistic effects in America, Britain, Europe, and across the colonized world, strengthening support at home for the Allied cause, angering the Axis powers who interpreted it as a military alliance, and exposing the tension between liberal democracy and empire. The charter’s eight points concerned three areas: war, trade, and development. In the wake of aggressive territorial acquisitions by Germany and Japan, Points I, II, and III stressed territorial integrity (particularly in the wake of a major military conflict) and self-determination, while Point VIII demanded the disarmament of aggressor nations and a larger postwar disarmament. Following the commencement of Lend-Lease aid, through which Roosevelt’s State Department intended to open the economies of the British Empire to outside competition, Points IV and VII demanded equal access to the trade and raw materials of the world and freedom of the seas. And channeling the “Four Freedoms” Roosevelt introduced in his Inaugural Address seven months prior, Points V and VI called for international cooperation to promote economic and social progress and create a world free from fear and want— conditions the leaders believed would help to prevent another worldwide economic depression, which they believed contributed greatly to the outbreak of World War II.

U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill meet aboard the British battleship Prince of Wales on August 10, 1941. The meeting led to the Atlantic Charter, intended to signal Anglo-American unity in the war. (Library of Congress)

The Atlantic Charter reflected an important evolution in the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain and in American foreign policy. The failure of the League of Nations had contributed to a wave of isolationism in the interwar period, and in America and Europe economic and political nationalism encouraged rising tariffs and exclusive trading blocs. The deepening of the Great Depression in 1937 kept many Americans looking inward, and until the outbreak of war in 1939, the Anglo-American relationship remained cool due to Britain’s dislike of high American tariffs and the United States’ antipathy toward the British Empire’s preferential trading system. But Roosevelt was determined to send war matériel to Britain and the Allies; in fact, Lend-Lease aid had been announced to the British in December 1940, more than a year before it passed Congress, with the expectation that in time congressional and public approval would see its necessity. Economic considerations were essential to the Roosevelt administration’s renewed internationalism and deepening of the Anglo-American relationship, and Americans—especially the Roosevelt administration’s State Department—did not plan to give aid without something in return. Even in 1939, Britain did not contemplate opening up the preferential trading system it had established during the Depression to the neutral (and high-tariff) Americans. With the collapse of international trade accompanying the outbreak of war, this system of “imperial preference”—designed to encourage trade within the empire and shut out nonempire competition—was seen by British policymakers, citizens, and colonial elites as a necessary piece of the war effort and an important source of imperial pride and unity. For Roosevelt’s State Department, however, exclusionary trading blocs were a primary source of international conflict. Linking political independence with free trade—a persistent combination in American foreign policy rhetoric—was hoped to have the dual benefit of strengthening America’s international standing as a peace- and freedom-loving power and, through encouraging independence in Britain’s colonies, contribute to an opening of its trading system. Few Britons desired to give up imperial preference, but as France collapsed and the Nazis occupied Poland and much of Scandinavia throughout 1940, Churchill and others knew that some degree of acquiescence was necessary to gain quick and substantial American assistance. Yet, at this time Roosevelt and his State Department were of different minds. Both Roosevelt and Churchill were adamant that the Atlantic Charter remain a noncommittal but idealistic declaration rather than a dry trade agreement. Unlike in Lend-Lease (and later, the negotiations for the General Agreement

on Tariffs and Trade [GATT] and the 1946 Anglo-American Loan), in which the adamantly antiprotectionist State Department operated largely unsupervised, Roosevelt was much more involved in determining the final language. The charter was intended for a different purpose than other wartime Anglo-American agreements, and wielding it as an effective instrument of propaganda in America, Britain, Europe, and the colonial world required a directness and unity unsullied by the contentious issues of American tariffs and British trade practices. Although the declaration contains the State Department’s spirit of economic multilateralism and liberalism, it was Roosevelt (no fan of imperial preference) who resisted his State Department’s efforts to do to the charter what it planned for Article VII of Lend-Lease— that is, obtain a promise for the “elimination” of British preferences in exchange for a “reduction” in American tariffs. The Atlantic Charter is representative of a period of dramatic transformation in global leadership from the world’s largest empire-in-decline, Great Britain, to the world’s emerging commercial, financial, and military superpower, the United States. From Lend-Lease to the Marshall Plan, the GATT to Bretton Woods, the connection between open trade and global peace and prosperity contained in the charter dominated the language of American foreign economic policy, Anglo-American relations, and the world’s major multilateral institutions and agreements for trade, finance, and development. As is true with most important agreements and declarations, some of the architects of the charter felt disappointed in what had been accomplished at Placentia Bay. The British did not gain a promise from the Americans to enter the war, while Britain’s hostility to ending or seriously limiting imperial preference portended difficult later negotiations for free traders at the State Department. But the charter soon took on a life of its own, becoming an essential statement of Allied principles and an inspiration not only to those under Nazi occupation in Europe but also to those in and from Allied colonies fighting and sacrificing for freedoms denied to them by their metropoles. Michael Edward Franczak See also: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); Lend-Lease; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Primary Documents: The Atlantic Charter (August 14, 1941)

Further Reading Brinkley, Douglas, and David R. Facey-Crowther, eds. The Atlantic Charter. London: Palgrave, 1994. Wilson, Theodore A. The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941: Revised Edition. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Atomic Bomb The atomic bomb was one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary developments in military technology. It was invented by U.S. and British scientists, engineers, military figures, and government leaders during World War II. In response to reports that Nazi Germany was developing a new, powerful kind of weapon based on atomic fission, British and U.S. policymakers launched an enormous program of their own to develop such a weapon. Eventually becoming an exclusive weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the atomic bomb was used by the United States against Axis Japan in August 1945. Dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bomb contributed to the ending of World War II. It became one of the most significant objects of international competition in the postwar period, particularly with respect to the strategic Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The bomb was based on the work of physicists and other scientists in the international scientific community from the 1900s to the 1930s. Collaborating and competing through academic journals, conferences, and personal contacts, scientists were at first primarily interested in atomic energy as a spectacular innovation in civilian life. Spurred by the discovery of radioactivity in Paris in 1896, scientists in France, Germany, Italy, England, Hungary, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other nations sought to produce atomic energy by working with various natural elements, experimental designs, and engineering techniques. Key developments included U.S. physicist Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron, English physicist James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi’s creation of transuranic elements in 1934. Building on these developments, two German chemists discovered atomic fission in 1938. Further research suggesting the possibility of a fission-based chain reaction unleashing enormous energy led to the world’s first atomic bomb projects in Britain and Germany. World War II was the main catalyst. In 1939, amid growing war tensions in Europe, scientists in both nations alerted their governments to the military potential of atomic fission. Urged by two prominent scientists, including Albert Einstein, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt established a Committee on Uranium in late 1939. However, the bomb’s novelty, as well as numerous practical and political obstacles, discouraged any government from mounting a full-scale atomic bomb project. But after Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, two refugee scientists from Central Europe, sent a memo portraying the imminent feasibility of such a bomb to British leaders, they urgently mounted such an effort in late 1941. Influenced by similar reports, the Roosevelt administration began its own all-out effort in 1942.

Smoke rises more than 60,000 feet into the air over the Japanese port city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, a result of the dropping of the second atomic bomb three days after the United States dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima. Japan unconditionally surrendered five days later on August 14, 1945. (National Archives)

Out of distrust and rivalry, the United States and Britain initially pursued separate projects. After informal collaboration broke down and U.S. progress on the bomb surpassed that of Britain, they entered the Quebec Agreement in 1943. That accord, supplemented by later agreements, coordinated joint U.S.U.K. development, military strategy, and third-party information sharing regarding the bomb. Many British scientists working on the bomb moved to the United States to work on what became known as the “Manhattan Project.” Many scientific workers were refugees from Germany and other war-affected areas in Europe. Because of the project’s massive scale and sensitivity, the U.S. Army supervised its various operations throughout the United States, including the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico where the bombs were designed and manufactured. The Manhattan Project was the most expensive weapons development program in history. Costing $2 billion over three years, it employed about 120,000 people across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Personnel worked under the strictest secrecy. Except for a few senior congressmen confidentially informed by the Roosevelt administration, even the U.S. Congress was unaware of the project’s existence. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, U.S. scientists and officials tested the atomic bomb in the desert in southern New Mexico. Producing a higher-than-expected explosion equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, the test was a tremendous success. It was a testament to the growing technological, industrial, and political power of the United States at the peak of World War II. Fear of a German bomb had driven the Manhattan Project. But increasingly “the gadget,” as it was called by scientists at Los Alamos, took on a momentum of its own. Some British wartime intelligence indicated that the German effort was stalled. Unmoved by such estimates, American and British leaders and scientific advisers maintained a strong commitment to the project, given the expectations for a long war and the project’s quickening development by 1943. Though not completely known at the time, the German atomic bomb project, indeed, received less support and military priority from German leaders than those of the United States and United Kingdom. German scientists made little progress after 1942. After Germany’s defeat in May 1945 by the Allied powers, the atomic bomb’s primary target shifted to Japan. Before its use, the bomb’s military and political implications stirred remarkably little debate among the many political, military, and scientific figures who created it. Some governmental and scientific figures, such as Danish physicist Niels Bohr and many British and U.S. advisers, were distantly concerned about a possible nuclear arms race after the war. Few opposed or even deeply deliberated about its actual military use. The weapon’s spectacular but untested power, the war’s erosion of moral standards in the face of massive strategic bombing, the Allies’ goal of unconditional surrender in Japan, and other factors led to the bomb’s use in Japan. On August 6, 1945, the U.S. bomber Enola Gay delivered a uranium-235 bomb on Hiroshima, instantly killing at least 80,000 people. On August 9, the United States exploded a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki. Both cities were leveled. Estimates of total deaths ranged from 115,000 to 350,000. Shocked by the scale of the bomb’s destruction, the USSR attack on Japanese-held Manchuria, and growing domestic instability, the Japanese government surrendered on August 14, 1945. Despite the bomb’s potentially negative impact on international relations, the United States and United Kingdom did not reveal its existence to many allies, particularly their chief ally, the Soviet Union. Though President Roosevelt and other Allied leaders knew of Soviet espionage and knowledge of the bomb as early as 1944, American and British officials kept the bomb officially secret until Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, made an ambiguous, brief admission of its existence to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, after the bomb’s successful Trinity test, at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Much debate exists regarding the military necessity of the atomic bomb in Japan and U.S. motives behind its use. For decades, the retrospective views of U.S. policymakers, particularly President Harry Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, dominated scholarly and public perceptions. Such views stressed the need to save

hundreds of thousands of American lives in a prospective invasion of the Japanese mainland, as well as the intractability of the Japanese government and military. Recent scholarship utilizing a growing number of declassified materials in the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and other nations suggests a more fluid, diverse, uncertain picture: U.S. desires for unconditional surrender in Japan, failed Japanese efforts at U.S.-Japan-Soviet peace mediation, U.S. fears of Soviet expansion in northeast Asia, and various governments’ broader global and domestic concerns. Some historians question, however, how much the bomb itself raised these concerns given its uncertain efficacy in the context of an already tremendous Allied military effort in Japan. Regardless of policymakers’ actual intent, the bomb’s use and handling in World War II contributed greatly to the future of nuclear weapons and postwar world politics as a whole. In many ways, the bomb’s wartime use reflected and contributed to global tensions and trends. Thus, unsurprisingly, the atomic bombing of Japan has persisted, particularly during the late Cold War and post– Cold War eras, as one of the most contentious issues in world affairs. Kevin Y. Kim See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons (1946–1954); Potsdam Conference; Primary Documents: “Japan’s Struggle to End the War” from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report (June 30, 1946)

Further Reading Bernstein, Barton J., ed. The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Bernstein, Barton J. “The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered.” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1995): 135–152. DeGroot, Gerard J. The Bomb: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. Institute of Physics Publishing. Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hill Transcripts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Bretton Woods Conference/System As World War II drew to a close, policymakers in the United States set out to establish a monetary order that would allow it to finance postwar reconstruction and at the same time prevent a reversion to the interwar protectionism and economic crisis that had led to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s. These ideals were not altruistic: America’s abandonment of prewar isolationism was born of a concern to ensure future repayment of its loans to war-torn countries—loans that were to be extended not out of kindness, but to ensure export markets for U.S. manufactures, which in turn were deemed necessary to ensure domestic prosperity. A mechanism that would prevent other nations from manipulating their currencies to compete with U.S. exports was thus desirable. If this mechanism could simultaneously establish America’s own currency as the world’s primary reserve and secure the value of gold, which the United States held in unmatched quantities, all the better. All this was achieved and a good deal more within an institutional framework that guaranteed U.S. interests at the expense of other nations’ sovereignty when in July 1944, delegates from the Allied nations gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to build a new financial order. Agreements were reached to set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as a complex of permanent financial and debt management institutions empowered to recommend policies to member governments in the interest of world “financial stability” and “prosperity”—goals that also served U.S. interests well. John Maynard Keynes of the British delegation had wanted the IMF and World Bank to be independent of governmental agendas. His plea for them to be located in New York alongside the United

Nations was rejected. Both were housed in offices a short distance from the U.S. Treasury and State Department in Washington, D.C. American executive directors of the fund and bank were made responsible to the National Advisory Council (NAC)—a governmental agency formed to oversee their operations. The NAC included the secretaries of State and Commerce, the chair of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, and was headed by the Treasury secretary. The fund and bank were set up as private stock corporations, but the U.S. capital subscription of well over 20 percent and 40 percent, respectively, in each effectively gave it a veto on most rulings. Other governments were represented on the board of directors and enjoyed voting rights in proportion to their stock, but IMF quotas—the amounts each country was required to contribute to the fund (which in turn determined their borrowing rights)—were, in the words of a leading member of the French delegation, “established more or less arbitrarily by the United States in a series of deals.” Of the $7.3 billion in subscribed quotas at the close of 1945, the five largest IMF member nations controlled $5.5 billion, with America’s $2.75 billion quota more than double Britain’s ($1.3 billion). The very structure of the Bretton Woods institutions thus reflected and reproduced an imperial chain of command with America and its allies in the advanced industrial world at the helm (Hudson, 179–181, 280–281). The earliest IMF borrowings reflected the fact that loans were forthcoming but not without strings: World Bank membership was to serve as an incentive for countries to join the IMF. Any nation wishing to benefit from bank funding had to join the latter; signing up to either institution meant integration into the Bretton Woods order as a whole, which by 1947 included the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

Participants of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference meet in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Agreements were reached to establish what became the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as a complex of permanent financial and debt management institutions empowered to recommend policies to member governments in the interest of world financial stability and market-based prosperity. (Library of Congress)

America’s veto effectively gave it the power to cut off any nation from investment resources and trade partners outside the Communist bloc; signatories had little option but to accept the new order. The extent to which it was used to further U.S. interests directly is reflected in the fact that America experienced a $3.5 billion annual trade surplus in the five years following 1945, reaching its $10 billion gross export target at a canter while draining Europe and Latin America further of their gold reserves. And yet, from its inception in Washington in the early 1940s, the Bretton Woods system was carefully crafted to mask U.S. hegemonic interests. Its success depended upon the willingness of other nations to join the new institutions, which in practice they had little option but to do.

Of these, the most important was Britain, whose last vestiges of empire presented the largest remaining obstacle between the United States and global hegemony. The Anglo-American Loan of 1946 transformed the once leading colonial power into a dependent vassal through an early instance of what came to be known as “conditionality.” Drained of liquid reserves by the war, Britain accepted IMF membership on terms that effectively integrated the sterling-based system of imperial preference into a newly formed concentric dollar zone revolving around U.S. priorities. Rather than devalue its currency and build financial strength through exports to its vast markets in Argentina, India, and elsewhere, Britain kept sterling’s value artificially high by U.S. insistence on its adherence to fixed parities until 1949. Prevented from discriminating against dollar imports, its exports to Latin America fell 32 percent from their level a decade earlier. The much-vaunted Anglo-American “special relationship” was thus born of a curiously imbalanced exchange of British economic autonomy for U.S. loans, setting the tone for a new kind of economic imperialism based on regimes of monetary discipline and dependency imposed through lending via multilateral institutions. With Western Europe’s reconstruction and Latin America’s alignment confirmed, the new imperial settlement was presented to Asia and Africa as a fait accompli. They too would be subject to IMF oversight and World Bank loans that together helped quash such notions as redistributive land reform. Espousing liberal economic doctrines of free trade through comparative advantage, the Bretton Woods institutions pushed a technocratic view of growth upon developing societies during the 1950s and 1960s that directly served imperial interests. Loans financed the purchase of exports from the industrially advanced economies (particularly the United States) and the construction of infrastructure to develop extractive industries that produced raw materials and commodities to be imported cheaply and processed in the West. Manufacturing was encouraged primarily when it required the purchase of capital goods from rich countries; self-sufficiency in agriculture was discouraged so as to secure the future of U.S. agricultural exports. Indeed, as U.S. agricultural trade surpluses climbed behind the protections of a monetary system espousing “free trade,” formerly grain-exporting regions across the global South were hit by food deficits. Intensified commercial agriculture based on expensive techniques without social redistribution led to the entrenchment of landed oligarchies and squeezing out of small farmers and landless peasants who fled to cities fed by imported produce at inflated prices; rural sectors became oriented toward (and vulnerable to) fluctuations in demand on the world market; and global divisions of labor were cemented in a process Andre Gunder Frank called “the development of underdevelopment” (Frank, 17–31). Aided in their task by comprador elites in contexts as diverse as Pakistan and Nicaragua, Washington’s technocracy did much of its work through dictatorships, autocratic military-bureaucracies, and even right-wing death squads in a Cold War context that thwarted popular aspirations for real social change and investment in the countryside. The World Bank lent exclusively in foreign currency that had to be spent on projects that promised loan amortization within an acceptable span of time. During the 1960s its operations generated an average of $240 million per year to America’s balance of payments. Weighed against the interest payments it generated for U.S. citizens and other benefits, total U.S. investment in World Bank programs at the close of 1969 ($2,443 million) had yielded a return of well over 100 percent. A 1970 World Bank report confirmed that developing countries fared rather less well: the external debt of 80 less developed countries that same year ($59.3 billion) was more than $40 billion higher than America’s investment in these countries; debt-servicing ($5 billion) was well over the amount remitted on U.S. direct investments ($2.9 billion) and as a proportion of aggregate exports had roughly doubled within a decade to reach 20 percent. All of which made it virtually impossible for developing countries to address the acute social

and economic crises facing their societies, thanks to IMF and World Bank–style development, which laid the overall foundations of a growing North-South divide (Hudson, 179–206).

GLOBALIZATION AND THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS An acute balance of payments deficit that was compounded by soaring rates of military spending made America’s historic role as creditor impossible to continue by the early 1970s. Where Britain had been compelled in similar circumstances of real economic decline just a quarter of a century earlier to accept a position of dramatically reduced global influence, the United States retained its imperial position through continued control over the global financial system (backed, of course, by its status as the world’s leading military power). Rather than impose austerity on U.S. citizens, American policymakers simply restructured global monetary norms. In the early 1970s America unilaterally dismantled the very Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates based on the gold standard it had created in 1944 and replaced it with a new one in which its currency alone became the universal guarantor of monetary value. By blocking dollar convertibility into gold and warning against the purchase of U.S. national assets and companies, the United States has been able to borrow endlessly from foreign banks by running a payments deficit, achieving what Europe’s colonies could never have imagined: a superimperialism based on dollar hegemony through which America’s very indebtedness has become the source of its power and privilege. By locking foreign central banks into a circular system in which they have no choice but to recycle dollars back to the United States through the purchase of IOUs (government bonds), America has effectively passed the cost of its military and domestic deficit spending onto the rest of the world. This colossal “free lunch” has occurred parallel to a transformation of the Bretton Woods system as it was originally conceived. Debt-based imperialism at the world level is bound up with a shift in orientation within America’s domestic economy from export-based industry to stock market and real estate bubbles as generators of wealth. The IMF and World Bank continue to promote U.S. national interests in the name of free market capitalism, but the architecture through which they operate has been altered by a raft of deregulatory policies, bilateral treaties, and fund/bank pressure, the result of which from the 1980s forward has been unfettered movement of private capital across national borders—a process known today as neoliberal “globalization.” Like the previous phase of U.S. imperialism, globalization began with a deep erosion of Britain’s economic sovereignty, this time in the form of a £2.3 billion IMF rescue package conditional upon deep cuts in public expenditure and guarantees for private investment. London was to become the headquarters of a right-wing resurgence led by Margaret Thatcher, cementing Britain’s role as a sidekick in America’s bid for continued global dominance. A 1991 survey of staff in the World Bank showed 80 percent of staff were trained in a handful of British and U.S. institutions where the training tends to be “neoclassical” and uniform—an index of Britain’s ideological contribution to the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” (WC). The Third World debt crisis of the 1980s—a product of policies implemented under the original Bretton Woods system—provided the pretext for demolition of what little autarky had survived this period in the global South. Attached to loans from the World Bank in the form of conditions, free market globalization was extended to Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the name of “structural adjustment” policies—the dismantling of welfare systems, selling off of public utilities to private investors, and removal of barriers to international finance capital in the name of “efficiency” and wealth creation that were to benefit the poor. Currency devaluation was encouraged to boost primary commodity exports and

accelerate resource extraction in the name of free trade. Once again, America directly benefited, both privately and in terms of its broader agenda: U.S. industry could access cheap inputs, while American investors purchased privatized assets and played stock markets across the globe (Gowan). Absolute poverty increased during the period, as did income disparity—both within developing countries and between the global North and South. This did not trouble fund/bank technocrats, whose faith in neoliberal capitalism as envisaged by Milton Friedman was reinforced by the collapse of communism by the late 1980s. Postcommunist Eastern Europe was subjected to “Shock Therapy”—a brand of financial imperialism predicated upon the treatment of crisis situations to impose neoliberalism through IMF packages. By the late 1990s the World Bank was forced to acknowledge a number of these harsh, undeniable realities. By this time, the zealous deregulation and other “free market” policies of the previous two decades had wreaked havoc in many regions of the world and were held by political and civil society activists to be responsible for establishing a grossly imbalanced, volatile world economy in which untrammeled speculative capital was empowered to devastate real economies in rich and poor countries alike. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and academics in borrowing countries added to these criticisms with research and analysis that showed WC growth regimes increased poverty and caused environmental degradation, forcing a new approach to policymaking under the tenure of World Bank president James Wolfensohn (1995–2005), who launched the comprehensive development framework (CDF) and associated poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP) process in 1999. The “Post–Washington Consensus” (PWC), as it has come to be known, is supported intellectually by the new institutional economics (NIE), a body of theory that recognizes market failures and the “bounded” or limited rationality of actors, insisting on the need for programs to fit local conditions. The PWC’s stated priorities, reflected in the World Bank’s annual flagship reports, include environmental sustainability and the importance of “attacking poverty” (2001–2002). Its methods are more “participatory,” involving NGOs at all stages of project design and implementation (Cammack). Just how substantive a difference the PWC constitutes in overall direction is a matter of debate. For many critics, the PWC represents little other than a rhetorical shift that co-opts damning anti-imperialist critiques leveled against the IMF and World Bank without altering their essential role in economic development (and underdevelopment). Furthermore, belated recognition of the role of The State in a Changing World—as World Bank authors put it in their 1997 report—is hardly transformative given that the primary function of that changing world continues to be envisaged as creating the ideal conditions for a capitalism that accords with American investors’ need for access to markets across the globe (Gowan). The growing expectation that states must play a more active role in their commitment to private-sector profits and, increasingly, bear the brunt of the immense social cost that results from their accumulation is perhaps the dominant theme in World Bank lending in the second decade of the 21st century. Ali Nobil Ahmad See also: World Trade Organization (WTO)

Further Reading Cammack, Paul. “Attacking the Poor.” New Left Review 13 (2002): 125–134. Frank, Andre Gunder. “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review New York 18, no. 4 (1966): 17–31. Gowan, Peter. The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for Global Dominance. London: Verso, 1999. Hudson, Michael. Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance. London: Pluto Press, 2003. World Bank. World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

World Bank Policy Research Report. The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy. Washington, DC: World Bank, 1993.

China (World War II) To understand China’s role in World War II, it is necessary to look farther back than the official outbreak of war in 1939. In many ways, for China the war began two years prior, in 1937, when Japan launched its attack on the republic. This began with the Marco Polo Bridge incident, in which Japanese troops who were stationed along the railway lines linking Manchuria to Beijing undertook an unannounced military training maneuver. Thinking the Japanese were attacking, Chinese troops, also stationed along the railway, fired a few shots in retaliation. As a result, both the Japanese and Chinese moved more troops to the area of the bridge and a gunfire battle ensued. A temporary ceasefire did not last, and what might have been a minor skirmish became in the ensuing months full-scale war with the Battle of Beiping-Tianjin and the Battle of Shanghai. These battles led to a campaign on the part of Japan to invade the whole of China (which many commentators believe to have been Japan’s intention from the outset) and became known as the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). (The First Sino-Japanese War took place from 1894 to 1895.) At this stage the USSR signed a nonaggression pact with China and provided financial support, effectively severing China’s official cooperation with Nazi Germany. However, by 1940, the United States became China’s main supporter in diplomatic, financial, and military terms. After the outbreak of total war in 1939, the Second Sino-Japanese War became part of the Pacific War that was launched with the Japanese attack on Hawai‘i’s Pearl Harbor military base in 1941. The attack was intended to stop the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering in military actions Japan was planning in Southeast Asia: 353 Japanese planes attacked the base, sinking four of the fleet’s eight battleships and damaging the remaining four. With more than 2,400 Americans killed, the attack was a profound shock and resulted in the U.S. declaration of war on Japan and its entry into World War II. Meanwhile in China, the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, continued to receive support from the United States, but his less aggressive policies toward the Japanese were unpopular with the United States, which favored more direct military strategy. Chiang felt that there had already been too many Chinese casualties and wished to avoid more loss of life. He also felt that the Japanese would eventually fall under the pressure of U.S. economic and military power. However, this perceived weak response on the part of the Chinese caused the Western allies to lose confidence in China and concentrate their efforts on battling the Japanese directly. By 1943 U.S. strategy no longer depended upon China and financial support decreased substantially. Relationships between the United Kingdom and China were additionally strained as Chiang had openly declared his support for Indian independence. Despite all this, by the end of 1944 the Chinese had recaptured Hunan and Guangxi Provinces, which had been occupied by the Japanese. The Pacific War ended when Japan surrendered in August 1945, following the U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the end of World War II, the major victorious nations— United States, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, United Kingdom, and France—became permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. China itself emerged from the war economically weak and almost immediately returned to the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists that had engulfed it prior to 1939. By 1945, the Communists had military control of approximately one quarter of China, while the Nationalists controlled the rest. However, the war years had given the Communists the opportunity to help peasant farmers in the areas they controlled and gain the support of the wider population who were impressed that they could practice what they preached. Simultaneously the Soviets supplied weapons to the Chinese Communists

who emerged well trained and well armed. Not surprisingly, support for the Nationalists waned in the grim aftermath of war, and the Communists in turn enjoyed increased levels of support among a devastated population. By 1949 the Nationalists had retreated to Taiwan and Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, an event that would have seismic impacts on both U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic politics. The U.S. relationship with the newly Communist Asian power was profoundly affected by the larger geopolitical event of the Cold War. Americans generally, and many U.S. policymakers in particular, came to see the “fall of China” as a darkly ominous threat to U.S. interests and one that ultimately must have emanated from the Communist Soviet Union. This perception came despite the long-standing historical forces that had brought about the collapse of the Nationalist regime and the rise of Mao Zedong. In the decades that followed, the United States continued to support and recognize the exiled regime of Chiang Kai-shek in Formosa (later Taiwan) and not recognize the People’s Republic of China. Moreover, in the intensely fearful environment of the late 1940s, the administration of Harry Truman was blamed for China’s “loss” in a newly bifurcated geopolitical world defined by Soviet expansionism. Extending well into the 1960s, the Democratic Party continued to find itself on the defensive as having been “soft” on communism in Asia. Indeed, the “fall of China” cast its long shadow over decisions pertaining to U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, with succeeding presidents afraid of “losing” Vietnam as Truman had China. This domestic political impact had little to do with the geopolitical realities of China, where Mao Zedong’s Communists increasingly departed from the “false socialism” of the USSR and eventually by the late 1960s found themselves engaged in border conflicts with the great power—its competitor in the Communist world. Alison Hulme See also: China, Early Cold War; Korea; Southeast Asia; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Iriye, Akira. The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific. London: Longman, 1987. Marston, Daniel. The Pacific War Companion: From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. London: Osprey, 2011.

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola (Coke) is one of the commercial products most identified with the United States around the world. Founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1880s, the soft drink company originally marketed itself as a quasi-medicinal, nonalcoholic refreshment. As the United States began to transition to an industrialized, high-consumption society, the Coca-Cola Company continually blanketed the changing American landscape with massive advertising campaigns that included distinctive logos, slogans, and merchandise. By the 1930s the company had expanded well beyond the United States, operating in nearly 30 countries across Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. The company’s role in the Second World War further catalyzed its image as an American cultural symbol both at home and abroad. Acting as “technical observers” to the U.S. military, Coca-Cola officials followed American soldiers to the front lines and set up bottling plants close by so that as longtime company president Robert Woodruff noted, “every man in uniform could get a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents wherever he is.” By the end of the war more than 60 bottling plants had been established overseas, most at the expense of the U.S. government. Coca-Cola’s entry into the battlefield also endeared

the company to American servicemen, many coming to include enjoyment of the drink in their conceptions of the war’s larger purpose of protecting American values and freedoms. In the early postwar years the company looked to capitalize on these gains, particularly in the markets of Europe. To do so, however, meant becoming entrenched within early Cold War politics. The company was regularly met by backlashes, usually led by local Communist Party chapters. In France, for example, local Communists termed the influx of Coke products and advertising “Coca-colonization” and played on anxieties local French citizens already felt about the United States. European governments were also critical of the company’s expansion efforts, at times even attempting to block imports of necessary supplies from overseas. Company officials were eventually able to overcome such opposition by employing a combination of U.S. State Department pressure, anticommunist propaganda campaigns, and extensive American-style advertising drives. By the 1950s Coca-Cola products were regularly available throughout Western Europe, and the brand has continued to be a symbol of American culture ever since. In many ways the anti–Coca-Cola anxieties of Europeans anticipated the broader resistance faced by the globalization of other major U.S. corporations such as McDonald’s, Monsanto, and Wal-Mart in the decades ahead. The increased international presence of American retail and food giants came to be perceived as an economic force inextricably entwined with and often supported by an increasingly hegemonic U.S. footprint. Andrew Scott Barbero

Further Reading Kuisel, Richard F. “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: The French Face Americanization, 1948–1953.” French Historical Studies 17, no 1 (Spring 1991): 96–116. Pendergrast, Mark. For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Fascism, Support in the United States and Economic Ties to The relationship between the government of the National Socialist Party (Nazis) in Germany and America is multifaceted and fraught with complexity. From the shared ideological foundations of Nazi master race ideology as well as fascism, to the many economic links between American corporations and the German military machine, there is little dispute that while the two countries’ fundamental political and economic systems, as exemplified in their respective responses to the Great Depression, could not have been more different, it is also true that a number of key intellectual, social, and economic forces in the United States linked America to the regime it would go to war against in 1941. One might begin with the intellectual underpinnings of Hitler’s master race ideology. With the rise of the social sciences in the late 19th century, beliefs began to circulate in Europe and America that people are the products of their environment and that poverty is a social problem. Wealthy elites felt threatened by these beliefs and began to turn to eugenic theories that claimed race and bloodlines influenced these problems. Many leaned on beliefs associated with social Darwinism, which claimed a genetically designed hierarchy of humanity and that it was necessary for the most fit to rule the inferior at the bottom. For some, particularly in the eugenics movement, superior genetic makeup was found in blue-eyed Caucasians, while inferior genes were found among Asians, Africans, Indians, and other peoples of color; somewhere in the middle were the Eastern Europeans, Irish, and other immigrants. Genetically ill-suited humans also prevailed among the poor, the deaf, those with bad vision, criminals, and prostitutes. The pseudo-sciences supporting the eugenics movement had institutional backing in major universities,

including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. It was also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institute, and the Harriman Brothers’ railroad fortune. They spent millions of dollars to establish a pseudo-science institute on Long Island at Cold Springs Harbor. While in prison in 1925–1926, Adolf Hitler studied German translations of American books written on eugenics. He claimed in his book Mein Kampf that America was in fact leading the way to solving the racial problem. Hitler used a range of racist theories drawn from multiple sources to develop his master race ideology. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute spent millions of dollars to finance German doctors. Much of their work was done on twins because they thought they could learn from them how to create a mass multiplication of the master race and a mass subtraction of the inferior races. German doctor Otmar Verschuer received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. He sent Josef Mengele, a doctor who worked with him, to Auschwitz to do research on twins for the Rockefeller Foundation. In the Dearborn Independent, the newspaper published by Ford Motor Company founder and president Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler found many of the poisonous anti-Semitic ideas and conspiracy theories he would use to persecute Jews. As a leading spokesperson for anti-Semitism in 1920s America, Ford wrote several books claiming Jews were involved in a conspiracy to rule the world. Hitler is said to have bought thousands of copies of his book, The International Jew, and had a picture of Ford on the wall in his personal office. Another corporate titan, Irénée du Pont, was greatly impressed with Hitler, supported his position on eugenics, and funded organizations like the Liberty League. He provided them $500,000 in their first year so they could distribute more than 50 million copies of Nazi pamphlets. Later, du Pont helped finance the Black Legion, a terrorist organization that killed union leaders and African Americans and desired to destroy Jews and Communists. American aviator hero Charles Lindbergh was also a public supporter of Hitler, believing Hitler could help the United States fight communism. He visited Germany in 1935, attended the Olympics in Berlin in 1936, and became so impressed with Nazi society that he considered moving to Berlin. He was even awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle while in Germany. William Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, revealed how William Randolph Hearst had created a propaganda system for the Nazi cause. In 1934, Hearst had a meeting with Hitler and later made note of his friendly manner and his genius. Hearst later asked Dodd to broker a deal with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Hearst agreed to send Goebbels any information his reporters gathered on Europe before it ever went to press. Hearst also began to require all his reporters to write only articles that were favorable to Germany. So troubled was William Dodd by these developments that he wrote letters to Roosevelt claiming that elite members of American society were trying to replace the democratic government of the United States with the fascist governments of Germany and Italy. He stated that as ambassador to Germany he was aware of powerful American families who were working with the Nazis. He claimed that a group of U.S. industrialists were intent on supplanting America’s democratic republican government with a fascist state. Dodd alleged that an executive of one of America’s leading corporations stated that if Roosevelt did not stop his Progressive politics, he would bring fascism to America. In 1933, the American Liberty League, which included such corporate supporters as Heinz, Colgate, and General Motors, asked Major General Smedley Butler if he would be willing to lead 500,000 troops in a coup d’état to take control of the White House and set up a fascist government. Butler, who admitted his own role as a marine in helping to protect U.S. corporate interests in Latin America (“a racketeer for American capitalism” he called himself), refused and spoke out against the plot. The du Ponts were also implicated in this conspiracy to overthrow the American government. Although no one was imprisoned, it

was alleged that more than a million people were ready to join the plot and that Remington, a DuPont subsidiary, was planning to supply the ammunition. Many American companies had already begun investing in German subsidiaries in the 1920s. Prior to World War I, IBM had set up Dehomag, a German subsidiary. Adam Opel AG, the biggest producer of automobiles in Germany, was taken over by General Motors. Ford-Werke became a subsidiary of Ford. Standard Oil and I.G. Farben began working together on projects. Standard Oil actually worked with I.G. Farben to create synthetic rubber and fuels, and Standard Oil kept this information from the U.S. government during World War II. Other companies that had German connections during the 1920s include Westinghouse, General Electric, DuPont, Coca-Cola, IT&T, Singer, Eastman Kodak, and Goodrich. They began to supply the German military buildup both before and during World War II. They supported the Nazis even to the detriment of the United States. Undeniable evidence shows how these companies divided the world between themselves and the Nazi cartels. For instance, at one point in the war, Alcoa, the Mellon-Davis-Duke monopoly, sabotaged the aluminum program in the United States because of an agreement with the I.G. Farben cartel. As a result, America experienced occasional shortages of aluminum to make planes while Germany had an abundant supply. Harold Ickes, secretary of the Interior, claimed the Aluminum Corporation of America would be the reason if America lost the war. Irénée du Pont collaborated with the Nazis by using General Motors, in which he had a controlling interest, to provide $30 million to I.G. Farben to help build up Hitler’s war machinery. When General Motors acquired Opel as a subsidiary in Germany, they began supplying Germany with Opel “Blitz” trucks. For GM’s support to the German cause, Hitler awarded the chief executive for overseas operations, James Mooney, the Order of the German Eagle. The German blitzkrieg could never have been possible without American corporations. It required speed and coordination on land and sea. Ford and GM produced the wheels and wings for the planes. Ford-Werke built trucks and personnel carriers, as well as engines and small parts. GM’s Opel factory supplied trucks and Luftwaffe planes, like the Ju 86 bombers. GM and Ford together created more than half of all German tanks at one point during the war. IT&T provided all the communication systems needed to synchronize blitzkrieg attacks. Standard Oil and Texaco provided the fuel and oil. Standard Oil and I.G. Farben worked together to create a synthetic fuel called tetraethyl, which gave the planes the speed they needed in the synchronized attacks. IBM machines allowed planes to be built to the necessary size and proportions to obtain the greatest speed and fuel efficiency. Without these companies, blitzkrieg warfare could not have been achieved and Germany would not have gained domination of the European continent by 1940. As Germany began to conquer Eastern Europe, Coca-Cola and other American companies expanded their operations into the occupied countries. Most corporate leaders—like Thomas Watson, IBM’s president—felt that total control might continue for a longer time, and they might as well profit. As America in 1940–1941 began preparing for war, it turned to these same corporations to build up the country’s supply of war armaments, allowing profitability on both sides of the conflict, at least for a time. Brown Brothers and Harriman formed the Union Bank of New York to establish links with Thyssen’s bank in Holland to move funds back and forth between New York and Holland to be used for the Nazi regime. Fritz Thyssen supported Hitler’s rise to power as far back as 1925. He gave his support with the understanding that Hitler would put an end to unions. When Hitler came to power in 1932, he dissolved labor unions, threw Communists in jail, and built his first concentration camps. Fearing they would lose their jobs for striking or be sent to concentration camps, the German working class was powerless and suffered as a result.

The best quality equipment came out of the German subsidiaries. They created all-wheel-drive trucks to manage the mud on the eastern front and the desert sands in North Africa. They created the first jet fighter, the Me 262. They created the Maultier truck with wheels on the front and tracks on the back. They even developed the turbines for the V-2 rockets that devastated London. IT&T developed state-of-the-art communication systems that eventually allowed the Germans to break the American diplomatic code. If IT&T had not made everything from radar equipment and rocket bombs to advanced communication systems and 30,000 fuses per month, Germany would never have been able to fight the Allies. With the Hollerith punch card machine, IBM facilitated the efficiency of Nazi Germany’s murderous concentration camps. Without this machine and IBM’s support through its subsidiary, Dehomag, the Holocaust would have never been carried out in such an efficient manner. Using IBM machines to carry out a census before the war allowed the Nazis to locate Jews, send them to ghettoes, and transport them to the concentration camps. IBM’s subsidiary never broke its relations with the American branch, and IBM’s president, Thomas Watson, was well aware of its operations. The mood in Germany after the war was antifascist. Labor unions and left-wing political parties returned. There were denunciations of bankers and industrialists and a call for the socialization of some firms and industries. There were democratically elected works councils who sometimes elected Communists and wanted to have some participation in running the factories. American authorities in postwar West Germany condemned them and disrupted their attempts to institute social and economic reforms. Eventually, the authorities established a more conservative and authoritarian presence, even going so far as to give high positions to former Nazis. They called for democratic government, but even after World War II, American capitalism continued to collaborate with fascist governments, such as those in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Chile, supporting for decades fascistic dictators like Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet. James Varn See also: Butler, Smedley Darlington; Nazi Germany, U.S. Relationship to; Primary Documents: Senate Committee Report on the Support U.S. Corporations Provided for Fascism and Nazism Prior to World War II (1974)

Further Reading “American Supporters of the European Fascists.” rationalrevolution.net. November 11, 2012. http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/american_support_of_the_europ.htm. Accessed October 17, 2014. Baldwin, Neil. Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2001. Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004. Higham, Charles. Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–1949. New York: Delacorte Press, 1983. Pauwels, Jacques R. “Profits Über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler.” Centre for Research on Globalization. Globalresearch. January 27, 2007. http://www.globalresearch.ca/profits-ber-alles-american-corporations-and-hitler/4607. Accessed October 17, 2014. Price, R. G. “Fascism Part II: The Rise of American Fascism.” rationalrevolution.net. May 15, 2004. http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/rise_of_american_fascism.htm. Accessed October 17, 2014.

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was an arrangement created in 1947 that provided for a multilateral negotiating form to reduce barriers to trade, such as preferential and bilateral agreements and tariffs on foreign goods. Although planning for the postwar economic order was dominated by the United States and Great Britain, 23 nations were involved in the final negotiations in Geneva in October 1947. The GATT’s institutional counterpart, the International Trade Organization (ITO), was never approved by the U.S. Congress, and the GATT lacked a formal institutional affiliation until the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Since the signing of Lend-Lease, the U.S. State Department had sought to end Britain’s system of “imperial preference,” a set of agreements formalized in 1932 to promote trade within the British Empire and discourage the importation of nonimperial goods. The desire to eliminate imperial preference was heightened by the belief among American planners that without a dramatic expansion after the war of markets for American goods, the United States (and thus the rest of the world) would fall into severe recession. Thus, the preamble of the GATT calling for the elimination of preferences and reduction of tariffs mirrors the language of Lend-Lease’s Article VII. However, by 1947 the United States was unable to eliminate imperial preference (and many other restrictions on trade). Not only was Britain much weaker financially than had been predicted during the war, but Europe seemed on the brink of social and economic collapse and, therefore, vulnerable to the appeal of Communist and Socialist parties that maintained relative strength in much of Western Europe at war’s end. It is no coincidence that Secretary of State George Marshall announced what came to be known as the Marshall Plan in the middle of the GATT negotiations. With the rising threat of communism in Europe, the Truman White House was content to moderate earlier State Department demands and accept a less laissez-faire trading system in exchange for European unity, loyalty, and stability. Still, the final GATT negotiations provided two enduring principles for multilateral trade. First, rather than eliminating protectionist commercial policies, the GATT agreements more clearly defined their usages and limits and set boundaries on when and to what extent they could be introduced. Second, the GATT’s Article I applied (with some concessions) most-favored-nation status to all signatories, meaning that if one nation offered a trade concession to another, that concession would automatically apply to every other member as well. Reductions in tariffs were to be conducted under successive “rounds,” a practice that has continued after the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) absorption of the GATT. As of 2013 a total of nine rounds have been conducted, the current being the Doha Development Round, which began in 2001. The GATT has proven to be an important facilitator for the expansion of world trade on a multilateral basis and the prevention of nationalistic and antagonistic trade policies, but as the global balance of economic and political power changes, its future will depend on the adaptability of its framework and, most importantly, the expectations of its founders. According to its many critics, the GATT and the WTO stand alongside the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) as multilateral institutions that have since World War II enforced an American and Western European economic hegemony on the rest of the world. Michael Edward Franczak See also: Atlantic Charter; Bretton Woods Conference/System; Marshall Plan; World Trade Organization (WTO)

Further Reading

Gardner, Richard C. Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Irwin, Douglas A., Petros C. Mavroidis, and Alan O. Sykes. The Genesis of the GATT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Zeiler, Thomas W. Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of the GATT. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Hull, Cordell (1871–1955) Cordell Hull, an 11-term U.S. congressman, is best known as the longest serving secretary of state in American history, holding the position for 11 years (1933–1944). Hull was an outspoken supporter of free trade, was the largest influence behind the Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934, and was a major force in the creation of the United Nations; President Franklin D. Roosevelt called him the “father” of that body. Born in Pickett County, Tennessee, he earned a law degree in 1891, and in 1893 launched a 50-year political career (interrupted briefly by service in the Spanish-American War in 1898). Hull’s belief in free trade was rooted in his rural Tennessee upbringing where high tariffs were long seen as an infringement on common people. After World War I, Hull came to believe that free trade would benefit people worldwide—and conversely that high tariffs and what he called unfair taxation were leading causes of war. Twelve days into his first congressional term, won in 1906, Hull introduced a bill to level the tax burden between the wealthy and the poor—his first foray into what became a public service career focused on commercial and fiscal policies.

Cordell Hull served as U.S. secretary of state under President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944. Hull played a key role in implementing FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, and was at the center of U.S. efforts to force Japan’s withdrawal from China in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. His greatest accomplishment, however, was his role in establishing the United Nations, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945. (Library of Congress)

Hull and Franklin D. Roosevelt had a long-standing, mostly positive relationship; indeed, Hull was noted as a loyal friend in Roosevelt’s first campaign for governor of New York. Once Roosevelt was elected president in 1933, however, their relationship grew somewhat thorny as on the issue of tariffs FDR generally sided with Raymond Moley, a Columbia University professor who was an integral part of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust.” In the interest of American industry at home, Moley defended protective tariffs, arguing that tariffs were not related to the Depression, and that tariff reform was unnecessary. Cordell Hull expressed limited support of the New Deal program during Roosevelt’s first term. The New Deal focused the political energies of the nation internally on reconstructing the U.S. economy and generally relegated the issue of tariff policy to a place of lesser importance. Committed to strong international economic engagement, Hull only supported the New Deal as an emergency measure that could lead to full recovery and to the extent that it advanced free trade abroad. After recovery he believed that America needed to return to a more laissez-faire approach at home and needed to focus on developing free markets abroad. Hull left a mark on U.S. relations with both Mexico and Latin America, as well. His successful efforts to win compensation for Americans whose lands were expropriated during the late 1920s era of agrarian reform in Mexico led to enduring resentment in that country. His avid pursuit of FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy in Latin America led to reciprocal trade agreements with a number of nations and also helped to fend off Nazi subterfuge in the region. As the man responsible for U.S. foreign relations leading up to World War II, Hull sent the “Hull note” (formally, “Outline for Proposed Basis for Agreement between the United States and Japan”) to Japan, insisting on the withdrawal of all Japanese forces from China (where U.S. economic interests had been threatened by the Japanese bombing and occupation) and French Indochina. Taken effectively as an ultimatum by the Japanese imperial government, the Hull Note was followed within weeks by the attack at Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into World War II. Although he left his position just before World War II ended, Hull’s insistence on a vigorous international posture for the United States both economically and in terms of military power had a great impact on U.S. policy after the war. He was an uncompromising defender of the global projection of American economic interests—a point made very clear to the foreign ministers of New Zealand and Australia who received a demeaning dressing-down from Hull following their signing of the Canberra Pact in 1944. The Canberra Pact was a military alliance signed without input from the United States that outlined the two nations’ respective spheres of influence in the South Pacific, which Hull took as a threat to U.S. strategic interests in the region. Cordell Hull’s greatest accomplishment, however, was almost certainly his contribution to drafting the United Nations Charter. His experience in both world wars led him to believe that a strong international body was necessary to prevent future regional conflicts from erupting into worldwide conflagrations. Although he, like many Americans, had been an opponent of the League of Nations proposed as part of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles, the experience of America’s isolationism and World War II changed his views. Jessica Lynn O’Neill See also: Isolationism; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; United Nations (UN); Yalta Conference

Further Reading Butler, Michael A. Cautious Visionary: Cordell Hull and Trade Reform, 1933–1937. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998. “Cordell Hull—Bibliography.” Nobel Lectures, Peace 1926–1950. Edited by Frederick W. Haberman. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1972. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1945/hull-bio.html. Accessed October 17, 2014. Hull, Cordell. The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Vandenbosch, Amry. “Cordell Hull: Father of the United Nations.” World Affairs 136, no. 2 (Fall 1973), pp. 99–120.

Lend-Lease (1940–1941) Lend-Lease was a program proposed by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and enacted by Congress on March 11, 1941. During the course of World War II the program supplied the Allied nations with more than $50 billion of war matériel free of charge. The law stipulated that nations receiving LendLease aid could use the matériel until it was no longer needed (at which point it was to be returned to Washington) or until it was destroyed. Through Lend-Lease, the United States supplied more than $30 billion of aid to Britain, $11 billion to the Soviet Union, $3 billion to France, and more to other nations. Lend-Lease’s importance for the Allied war effort was critical. British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin praised Lend-Lease as critical to the victory of the Allies in World War II. The act effectively ended American neutrality and gave the Allied powers both the confidence and the supplies to continue to prosecute the war against fascism in Europe and Asia. Lend-Lease aid came at a particularly crucial time for Britain, which by late 1940 knew it could not continue to fend off the German Nazi assault without significant American assistance. Although the president’s inclination to intervene faced strong opposition from the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had a strong ally in Roosevelt, and he succeeded in getting the bill passed as the situation in Britain grew dire during the winter of 1940–1941. Along with the more idealistic Atlantic Charter, the language of the Lend-Lease agreement would form the basis of Anglo-American plans for the postwar order. But unlike the Atlantic Charter, the commercial provision of the Lend-Lease agreement was largely determined by the president’s long-serving secretary of state, Cordell Hull, whose reputation as an unrelenting advocate of free trade and opponent of Britain’s protectionist commercial policies was well known in London. Through Lend-Lease, Secretary Hull and his deputies sought to dismantle Britain’s system of “imperial preference,” established in Ottawa in 1932 to encourage trade within the empire and protect imperial markets from nonimperial goods. Thus, Article VII of Lend-Lease called for, “at an early convenient date … the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce, and … the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers” (Lend-Lease Act). Although Roosevelt promised Churchill that Lend-Lease was not intended to strike at the imperial preference system, the dispute simmered through the war and then proved the most controversial issue during postwar negotiations for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the International Trade Organization. Further, the Harry Truman administration’s abrupt cessation of Lend-Lease in the fall of 1945 was unexpected by the British and led to the negotiation of the 1946 Anglo-American Financial Agreement (or British Loan). The State Department never succeeded in eliminating Britain’s preferential trading system, though various limits were imposed. After the war the combination of a new president and deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union led the State Department to compromise on British and European commercial restrictions in the hope of fostering a European identity firmly opposed to Soviet communism and explicitly allied with the United States. Michael Edward Franczak See also: Arsenal of Democracy; Atlantic Charter; General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Further Reading Gardner, Richard C. Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Irwin, Douglas A., Petros C. Mavroidis, and Alan O. Sykes. The Genesis of the GATT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lend-Lease Act. Seventy-seventh Congress of the United States, H.R. 1776. “Our Documents.” http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php? flash=true&doc=71. Accessed October 17, 2014. Zeiler, Thomas W. Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of the GATT. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Micronesia “Micronesia” is a geographical and ethnic term for several thousand small islands lying in the western North Pacific Ocean, many of which—the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, Guam, and the atoll known as Wake Island—have been controlled at one time or another by the United States. It is believed that the islands of Micronesia were settled by peoples from Indonesia and East Asia beginning approximately 5,000 years ago. European explorers penetrated the region in the 16th century, beginning with the arrival at Guam by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Subsequently Miguel López de Legazpi visited Saipan in 1565 and claimed it, Guam, and the other islands of the Mariana archipelago for Spain. Within a few years the colonization of the Marianas had begun in earnest. The Spanish also claimed the Caroline Islands (south of the Marianas) and the Marshall Islands (lying east southeast), but the country’s efforts at colonization were perfunctory. Germany, which had recently developed imperial ambitions, made a claim to the former group in 1885. Asked to mediate the dispute, the pope ratified Spanish territorial claims while recognizing German trading claims as well. At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain chose to sell the Carolines as well as the Marshalls and the Marianas (with the exception of Guam, which was ceded to the United States) to Germany. Japan seized all three groups in October 1914 at the outbreak of World War I and subsequently ruled them as the South Pacific Mandate under the League of Nations. Shortly after the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian port of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese forces invaded Guam and the Philippines, the latter of which was an American commonwealth. They also seized Wake Island, which lies east northeast of the Marianas. The United States had annexed the remote atoll in 1899 for use as a telegraph cable station, and in 1935 Pan American Airways had built a small settlement on one of its islands. Then in January 1941 the U.S. Navy had established a military base on Wake and hired more than 1,000 civilian employees to work alongside the base’s garrison. American carriers and aircraft were able to make strikes on Wake in 1942 and 1943. But it was only in early 1944 that Allied forces were ready to mount a series of large-scale campaigns targeting the islands of the Japanese mandate as stepping-stones leading to the liberation of Guam and the Philippines and the capture of Japan itself. These operations included attacks on Mili, Kwajalein, and other atolls in the Marshall Islands in November 1943. In Operation Hailstone, carried out on February 16 and 17, 1944, Allied air and sea forces disabled a major Japanese airbase on Chuuk (Truk) Atoll in the Carolines. This attack ensured that the Japanese would be unable to send reinforcements to other islands, including Enewetak (Eniwetok) in the Marshalls, which fell to the Allies on February 23. The Marianas were among the next targets. Allied forces attacked Saipan on June 15, capturing it in a little more than three weeks. After heavy bombardment, the allies invaded Guam on July 21 and Tinian on July 24. Among the Caroline Islands, Angaur fell on September 22 and Palau (Peleliu) on November 27. After the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, the United States retained control of what had been the South Pacific Mandate, which was reorganized in 1947 as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. At first the territory was administered by the U.S. Navy from Guam, although that island itself was under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. In 1951, when Interior took over the administration of the Trust Territory as well, it moved the administrative headquarters to Saipan. The following year saw the enactment of a legal code dividing the territory into a number of administrative

districts. Under pressure from the United Nations, the United States allowed residents to elect a Congress of Micronesia with legislative powers in 1965. In 1975, voters in the Northern Marianas (an official designation that excludes Guam) chose to enter into a separate relationship with the United States as a commonwealth. Then in 1979 the Trust Territory districts of Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae (all in the Caroline Islands) established themselves as the Federated States of Micronesia. That same year, residents of the Marshall Islands voted to form their own republic, and in 1981 Palau, whose residents had voted against joining the Federated States, followed suit. More changes were on the way. In 1986 the United States entered into Compacts of Free Association with the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Under this arrangement, the two Pacific countries enjoy self-government while the United States remains responsible for their security and defense. The Republic of Palau entered into the same arrangement in 1994. With the conclusion of World War II and the surrender of the Japanese garrison, Wake had passed to the control of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, eventually becoming the site of a missile launching facility and a military airfield. The atoll is administered by the Office of Insular Affairs (a division of the Interior Department), but all military activities come under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. In early 2009 Wake was included as a unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, and shortly afterward the atoll, its islands, and the surrounding waters became a National Wildlife Refuge. Grove Koger See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; National Missile Defense

Further Reading Cressman, Robert. A Magnificent Fight: The Battle for Wake Island. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995. Farrell, Don A. History of the Northern Mariana Islands. Saipan: Public School System, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, 1991. Hanlon, David L. Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific Territory, 1944–1982. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998. Hezel, Francis X. Strangers in Their Own Land: A Century of Colonial Rule in the Caroline and Marshall Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.

Middle East As Britain’s imperial presence in the Middle East was ending in 1945, the U.S. role in the region was just beginning. Sparked during World War II because of the region’s vast oil reserves, it would intensify in the postwar era due to the development of the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union for dominance in the area. The entire Middle East felt the impact of Soviet Union–United States rivalry, but U.S. intervention in the region began with events in Turkey and Iran, which proved just the beginning of a long and continuing pattern of U.S. involvement in the modern Middle East. Whether influenced by Cold War policy, strategic concerns including access to the region’s oil, humanitarian considerations, or some combination of all these forces, the U.S. role in the Middle East has grown more complex, increasingly militarized, and ever more deeply entrenched. U.S. interest in the Middle East commenced as early as 1943. In the midst of World War II, and with the long-term strategic need for continued access to the world’s supply of petroleum now urgently clear to American policymakers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set in motion the beginnings of what became a

special relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. When Roosevelt and War Department officials began referring to the need to protect the Saudi kingdom, it stunned most Americans who had only vague conceptions of what seemed an exotic Arab world. Nevertheless, in 1944 American oil giant Chevron established the Arabian American Oil Company, which effectively served as a proxy U.S. government presence for the next several years. Early in 1945, FDR met Saudi king Abdulaziz aboard a U.S. cruiser in the Great Bitter Lake segment of the Suez Canal—ostensibly to discuss the fate of Palestine as American officials weighed the prospect of supporting the establishment of a Jewish state after the war. Many historians mark that meeting as the beginning of the “special” U.S.-Saudi relationship that has ever since earned protection for Saudi Arabia from regional threats and strategic stability and access to oil for the United States. On another level, U.S. support for the undemocratic rule of the Saudi sheiks epitomizes the larger U.S. role in the Middle East that has been fraught with complexity and competing interests ever since. Following World War II, the Soviet Union’s Middle Eastern neighbors, Turkey and Iran, experienced threats to their sovereignty when the “Red menace” claimed territory in both regions. The USSR made claims to territory from Turkey in Anatolia and made it clear that it wanted a greater role in running the Turkish Straits. Further, the Communist state supported the autonomy of Azerbaijan, an Iranian region in the Caucasus. Both events spurred U.S. action and helped shape its foreign policy. This postwar overture to growing geopolitical tensions in the region, coupled with alleged Soviet support of communism during the Greek civil war, led to the declaration in 1947 of the Truman Doctrine —a foreign policy that committed U.S. military and economic assistance to Turkey and Greece with the goal of maintaining a bulwark against communism in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Both Turkey and Greece soon became part of the U.S.-born North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military pact committing much of the “Western bloc” to aid one another against the threat of communism. U.S. support of Turkey and Greece marked the beginning of the American policy of containment of communism in the Middle East—and around the world—for decades to come. Designed to contain communism in the Middle East, the U.S. presence and intervention in the region created growing anti-American sentiment. Most notably, when the prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, nationalized oil in Iran in 1951, thereby taking control of the strategic resource from the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the United States intervened. The new powerhouse did so primarily due to the fear that Mosaddeq would turn to the Soviets for aid, and because of its own interests in securing long-term access to the uninterrupted flow of oil from Iran. The Central Intelligence Agency–sponsored coup d’etat against Mosaddeq in 1953 reestablished a royal dictatorship, fostered the creation of a brutal internal security organization (SAVAK), and dampened Iranian political freedoms. The global Cold War struggle continued to influence U.S. relationships with Middle Eastern countries throughout the era—always with an eye to constructing alliances against Communist expansion. After the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, the Soviet Union and the United States stood together in a rare moment of accord and condemned French and British military actions against Egypt due to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalize the canal. The stance marked only a temporary union and by 1957, both great powers were courting Egypt. The Soviet Union, however, built a solid relationship with Egypt through the sponsorship of the Aswan Dam project and the selling of Soviet weaponry, while the United States held closely to its renewed commitment to contain communism through the Eisenhower Doctrine, a military and economic policy designed to aid those states that actively resisted overtures from the Eastern bloc. However, Soviet aid to Nasser helped an Arab form of socialism to take hold in Egypt; U.S. aid through the Eisenhower Doctrine was simply a moot issue in this particular region.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union continued to solidify its relationships with the Arab Middle East at a clear loss to the United States. Arab perceptions of Israel as a continuation of Western imperialism and fears of Israeli desires for greater territorial aggrandizement at Arab expense whetted the appeal of Soviet weaponry and economic aid. Just as the United States had increasingly been shipping military weaponry to Israel and Egypt and providing an effective military protectorate for the Saudi kingdom, the Communist superpower funneled arms into the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq throughout the 1960s, a development alarming to Israel and the U.S.-Western alliance. After a devastating loss wrought by Israel on the Arab states in the 1967 “Six-Day War,” the United States helped negotiate a tenuous peace between the warring parties, and the Soviet Union took an even greater role in Egyptian affairs than before the war. Cold War rivalries waned in the 1970s due to concerns over access to oil, which was further complicated by the Arab-Israeli conflict. For instance, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war led costs of oil to skyrocket as Arab oil-producing states introduced a boycott of Western states. Western states, led by the United States, sought to ensure access to oil even at rising prices. Thus, the United States fostered friendly relationships with oil-producing states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Access to oil in the 1970s trumped concerns of containing communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s resulted in an opportunity for the growth of U.S. power in the Middle East. For instance, in the Gulf War of 1991, the United States formed a coalition that included Egypt and Syria, and drove Iraq out of Kuwait, thereby protecting the oil-rich producer from conquest. At the end of the war, U.S. troops remained in the Gulf as protectors of the oil-producing states, a development that helped stoke the genesis of Al Qaeda. The United States continues to help shape Middle Eastern affairs early in the 21st century, particularly in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks and subsequent launch of the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The growing militarized presence throughout the region, which now includes a steady spate of unmanned drone attacks from Yemen to Pakistan aiming to take out Al Qaeda leaders, has led to widespread condemnation among Arab states. In addition, the U.S. military invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 led to staggering numbers of Iraqi deaths, massive population displacement, and crippling societal changes for Iraqi men and women. The U.S. invasion—taken in the name of an alleged Iraqi military threat and humanitarian concerns for the people of Iraq living under the Saddam Hussein regime—is simply hard to justify given the consequences for the Iraqi population, and not surprisingly, many Arabs condemned the instability caused by U.S. intervention in the region. Kristin Collins-Breyfogle See also: Eisenhower Doctrine; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Oil Industry in the Middle East; September 11, 2001 (9/11); Six-Day (Arab-Israeli) War; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Yom Kippur War; Primary Documents: Two Letters Describing U.S. Interests in the Middle East (1944, 1948)

Further Reading Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Becker, Richard. Palestine: Israel and the U.S. Empire. San Francisco: PSL Publications, 2009. Cleveland, William L. The History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009. Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Nazi Germany, U.S. Relationship to

After the conclusion of the First World War, the United States did not want to punish Germany and its allies to the extent that France did. Even though France largely got its way through the Treaty of Versailles, which placed the blame for World War I almost completely on Germany, the United States helped the new government in Germany economically during the 1920s, even loaning it money to help pay reparations. A new Germany began to emerge in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, by President Paul von Hindenburg. Over the next 18 months Hitler consolidated his power and when Hindenburg died in the summer of 1934, Hitler combined the two offices, outlawed all other political parties, and proclaimed himself führer (supreme leader) of Germany. At the same time, in spite of some protests, the United States recognized Hitler’s government and appointed its first ambassador, William Dodd. In 1933, Germany owed the United States more than $100 million, but Hitler’s government made it clear that they did not intend to pay the money back. Secretary of State Cordell Hull demanded the money be paid back with interest, and while Germany refused, Dodd did not push the issue, and relations between the two nations remained strained but civil. In spite of the fact that Hitler’s aggression and anti-Semitism was apparent from the beginning of his time in office, most Americans did not take him or his government seriously. Many within the Franklin Roosevelt administration felt that the German people would rise up and overthrow Hitler before he controlled every aspect of society. Others believed the stories coming out of Germany were exaggerated or propaganda. Some Americans were sympathetic toward Hitler and wished the United States would mirror Nazi Germany. One such person was Fritz Kuhn. Kuhn was born in Germany and moved to the United States in 1928, becoming a citizen in 1934. He quickly became involved in the Friends of the New Germany, an organization founded in 1933 on the directive of the deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, with the aim of supporting Hitler’s regime in the United States. It was led initially by Heinz Spanknöbel and spread proNazi propaganda in the United States. The U.S. Congress began investigating the group, and in 1934 found that it was an American arm of the Nazi Party. By 1936 the group had dissolved, only to be replaced by the German-American Bund, which elected Kuhn as its leader. They were soon more powerful and boasted a much larger membership. The bund verbally attacked Jews, Communists, as well as political opponents such as President Roosevelt, even referring to his economic plan as the “Jew Deal.” The height of their power was a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939 in front of 20,000 people. The United States also had a homegrown Fascist movement called the Silver Legion of America or the Silver Shirts. Founded by William Dudley Pelley in 1933, it grew to more than 15,000 members by 1934. With funding directly from Hitler’s government, the group constructed a massive complex outside of Los Angeles to await the Fascist world takeover. Pelley ran for president in 1936 in an attempt to set himself up as the Fascist dictator of the United States, but received only 1,598 votes, and the movement slowly died out.

Thousands of Americans of German descent were wholly committed to Nazism and joined the German American Bund organization. This Bund parade in New York City on October 30, 1939, drew thousands of supporters, as well as protesters. After the U.S. entered World War II, the Bund dissolved and most Nazi sympathies in the United States ended. (Library of Congress)

As Germany began to violate the Treaty of Versailles, and rearm, and take over territory in Europe, the attitude of many Americans began to change, though there were still many isolationists, especially in Congress, who wanted to prevent American intervention in a future war at all costs. Many had even been sympathetic to Germany, feeling that the Treaty of Versailles had been unjust, and from 1933 to 1937 there was little demand to challenge Germany’s actions, even after it had reoccupied the Rhineland and sent troops to intervene on behalf of the Fascists in Spain’s Civil War. At the same time, Roosevelt pushed two neutrality acts through Congress, but also privately was wary of Germany’s aggression, and unlike Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who appeased Hitler with territory to try to stop his expansionism, Roosevelt increasingly believed the United States would have to adopt a stronger stance in the future. As Hitler continued to violate the Treaty of Versailles, he also forged a pact with Japan and Italy, which both started wars of aggression against China and Ethiopia, respectively. Even after Germany invaded Poland, and France and Britain declared war two days later, the United States remained neutral. Three weeks after the invasion of Poland, the United States changed its neutrality policy by implementing what Roosevelt initially called “Cash and Carry,” where Congress allowed the sale of matériel to nations at war, as long as they arranged for the transport using their own ships, paid immediately in cash, and assumed all risk in transportation. After the fall of France in 1940, Roosevelt proposed selling arms directly to Britain. Isolationists were strongly opposed, claiming it would anger Germany and lead to American involvement in a European war. Over time, opinion shifted as more Americans began to see the advantage of funding the British war against Germany, while staying out of the fight themselves. This led to the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, which allowed the United States to supply Britain, as well as other nations, with money, weapons, and aid. In all, the United States supplied more than $50 billion. The bill allowed the president to give aid to any nation whose defense would aid the United States. It was worded this way to make it seem that the United States was not intervening in the war against Germany and its allies. In spite of the wording, the message was clear, and four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States. Seth A. Weitz

See also: Fascism, Support in the United States and Economic Ties to; Spanish Civil War

Further Reading Adler, Selig. The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction. New York: Free Press, 1957. Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Neutrality Acts (1930s) The Neutrality Acts of 1935–1939 were the products of both evolving ideas surrounding American foreign policy and neutrality since the United States gained independence, as well as growing fears of U.S. direct involvement in a looming second world war. During his campaign for the presidency in 1912, Woodrow Wilson espoused America’s long tradition of remaining neutral in European conflicts. The United States’ policy of neutrality, however, was wrought with contradiction as it continued to profit economically from arms trade with feuding countries, and the nation was ultimately drawn into a conflict, the legacies of which were deeply ambiguous and contested as the 1920s and 1930s wore on. In addition, industrialized countries such as Germany and Great Britain found economic and political opportunities in imperialistic, territorial aggrandizement throughout much of the world. European imperialism further undermined American neutrality. And with its interests spanning much of the globe by the 1930s, American isolation and neutrality in the coming storm of World War II proved an impossibility. At the conclusion of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson’s enthusiasm for a League of Nations and calls for collective security were rejected by a U.S. Congress steadfastly committed not just to American neutrality in any future global conflict, but also to disengagement from all foreign geopolitical entangling commitments. How the United States would maintain neutrality while protecting its international economic interests remained an important topic and point of debate within the government until America’s entry into World War II. When Japan invaded Manchuria on September 19, 1931, the resolve of American neutrality was tested. The worsening Great Depression caused President Herbert Hoover to remain unresponsive toward Japan’s aggression in China. In a challenge to his own president, Secretary of State Henry Stimson regularly spoke out against Japanese aggression and encouraged the United States to initiate an arms embargo as a way to protect American neutrality. As a means of compromise, both Hoover and Stimson agreed that the United States would not recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. In 1933 the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought with it a noticeable shift in American foreign policy. Although he focused on domestic rather than foreign policy during his campaign, Roosevelt agreed with Stimson’s stance on nonrecognition of aggressor countries. On March 10, 1933, President Roosevelt adopted an arms embargo policy at the behest of his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. The passage of this proposal into law, however, created ongoing debates in Congress for the next two years. Congressional debate over America’s possible use of arms embargoes was not new in the 1930s, and one constant voice of opposition came from the munitions and aircraft industries, which had profited enormously from World War I—a development that fueled the pro-neutrality movement of the 1930s. Heads of munitions industries saw a potential for economic gain in the selling of war matériel to countries in conflict, which they argued would help bring the United States out of the Great Depression. Other congressmen worried that an arms embargo might provoke Japan, which viewed such a policy as a violation of neutrality. By 1935, congressional debate as to how the United States would handle the

growing global conflict was reaching fever pitch. Still trying to fix the severe economic crisis at home with the New Deal, the majority of Congress across the political spectrum stressed the need for American neutrality. Along with Roosevelt, several peace societies, such as the National Council for the Prevention of War (NCPW) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), grew disheartened by the lack of progress made at the Geneva General Disarmament Conference (1932–1935). As Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in Europe, France kept disarmament talks at a stalemate unless Great Britain agreed to intervene when or if Germany invaded. Similarly, Great Britain only agreed to help France if the United States maintained a congruent intervention policy. Ultimately, Roosevelt agreed to abandon traditional American neutrality to aid Great Britain and France, in exchange for a disarmament agreement at the conference. Still disappointed with the slow progress of the Geneva General Disarmament Conference, Dorothy Detzer, a national secretary in the WILPF, asked Senator George W. Norris in 1933 to form a congressional committee to investigate the munitions industry and its role in World War I. Norris and Detzer eventually approached Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota to lead an investigation that included witness testimony from shipbuilding, aircraft, ammunition, and chemical businesses. Eventually the Nye Committee concluded that the munitions industry had a close connection to the departments of War and Navy. The report, which received extensive newspaper coverage, also highlighted the dependence of American economic prosperity on the munitions industries. The Nye Committee’s report bolstered the position of the majority of Americans who favored neutrality—despite the increasingly grim events unfolding in Europe and Asia. After years of congressional debate over the use of arms embargoes against aggressor countries, the U.S. Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed into law, the Neutrality Act on August 31, 1935. This act, limited by a sixmonth expiration date, prohibited the transportation and trade of munitions and other instruments of war to belligerent nations and forbade the travel of American citizens on the ships of aggressor countries during war. Following Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia a few weeks later, Roosevelt invoked the law— revealing one of the chief criticisms of all the Neutrality Acts, that they made no distinction between aggressor and victim nations. The law was renewed by the Neutrality Act of 1936, which also covered financial credit and loans to belligerents. Conveniently for American companies such as Texaco and General Motors, the law did not apply to “civil wars”—most notably the horrific slaughter then going on in Spain at the hands of Franco’s Fascist forces, aided by the Nazi Luftwaffe. The 1937 Neutrality Act closed this civil war loophole and more tightly restricted the shipment on any U.S. vessel of any and all articles or passengers to belligerents. President Roosevelt gained a concession in the law—against the outcry of pro-neutrality advocates—that allowed the United States to sell arms to belligerents on a “cash-and-carry” basis, on the presumption that this would keep the United States from being drawn into the conflict and that only Great Britain and France would be in a position to take advantage of the provision. When Japan invaded China that year, Roosevelt did not invoke the Neutrality Act, knowing that Japan, not China, would be able to take advantage of “cash and carry.” And he further threaded the neutrality-entanglement needle by allowing British ships to transport U.S. arms to China. FDR’s speech in the fall of 1937 calling for the “quarantining” of belligerents seemed to move the United States one step closer to involvement in the eyes of isolationists. One more Neutrality Act in 1939 followed the invasion of Poland by Germany and the start of World War II. This law repealed the embargoes of 1935 and 1937 and allowed for the sale of war matériel to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis. In the end, it would be the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941 that ended the neutrality policy of the 1930s, that law allowing for the loan or sale of arms to belligerents Roosevelt had determined would best

defend America’s security and its interests. Largely discredited by then as having failed to attain their goal of U.S. neutrality in the conflict—and arguably, also naively enabling the Axis forces of aggression —the Neutrality Acts were repealed completely in November 1941. Allison L. Robinson See also: Fascism, Support in the United States and Economic Ties to; Isolationism; Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis

Further Reading Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945: With a New Afterword. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Divine, Robert A. The Illusion of Neutrality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Divine, Robert A. The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II. New York: Wiley, 1965. Young, Nancy Beck. Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013.

Northwest Defense Projects The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, greatly alarmed North Americans, especially those living on the west coast of Canada and the United States. Germany had done little to threaten the continent. The Japanese, however, actually invaded, seizing the Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu in June 1942. Alaska, connected only by sea and air to the south, seemed particularly vulnerable throughout the early years of World War II. In the weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack the American government rushed to defend Alaska by building a highway from the south. The U.S. government dismissed suggestions from the west coast for a road north from Washington state, opting instead for the “prairie route,” connecting northwest Alberta, Canada, with Fairbanks, Alaska. The route would follow a string of airfields that were being built across the region. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the project over the objections of the military, which called it unnecessary. Beyond its capacity to protect North America on its northern front, Roosevelt believed the project would boost wartime morale. What became known as the Alaska (originally the Alaska-Canada, ALCAN) Highway was just one of a series of initiatives known as the Northwest Defense Projects. Plans included the development of an oil field at Norman Wells in the Mackenzie River Valley (the CANOL project) and a pipeline from there to a refinery at Whitehorse in the Yukon, with lines following the Alaska Highway north and south to supply the road and the airfields and to the Alaskan tidewater at Skagway. The airfields were upgraded, a telephone system was introduced to a region still reliant on the telegraph, and access roads to the highway and pipeline corridor were either developed or improved. Work began in February 1942 under frigid sub-Arctic conditions. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, charged with construction of the highway and CANOL projects, began deploying thousands of soldiers, many of them African American, and huge quantities of construction supplies to key sites throughout the Far Northwest. Even as the Corps of Engineers, operating under the direction of Colonel William Hoge, started construction on an early-stage pioneer road, additional plans materialized for highway improvements to be carried out by civilian workers. Remarkably, the 1,500-mile pioneer road from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska, was completed in rough form by November 1942. Army crews built over hundreds of miles of permafrost that made construction difficult. They built temporary bridges over

hundreds of rivers and streams, and they finished the highway on ground that had not yet been properly mapped. The opening ceremonies, featuring one white and one black soldier, were widely covered in the North American media, demonstrating determined U.S. engineering prowess in defending not only the continent but democracy itself. Even as the preliminary road was being completed, the need for the Northwest Defense Projects quickly evaporated. In the summer of 1943, American and Canadian troops defeated the Japanese on the Aleutian Islands, lessening the threat from that quarter. The victory at Midway in June 1942 had already made a Japanese attack on North America unlikely. With the military threat removed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers downgraded the highway project as less of a priority. Highway improvement continued, but with fewer resources. The pipeline and refinery were finished but never worked effectively. The oil pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse was hampered by problems and operated only for a few months. However, the airfields, called the Northwest Staging Route, were upgraded and continued to operate throughout the war. The Northwest Defense Projects represented the largest ever “invasion” of Canada by American or other forces. More than 40,000 U.S. troops were deployed on the projects, most of them inside Canada. A comparable number of civilian workers, about three-quarters American, joined what some Americans lightheartedly called the “Army of Occupation” on Canadian territory. Construction passed with few crises, beyond the inevitable personal conflicts and breaches of the law associated with having large numbers of men in a lightly policed frontier region. Local residents resented the behavior of some of the new arrivals, particularly as American soldiers operated under extraterritoriality, meaning they were subject to American military law rather than the Canadian criminal code. The Americans, however, brought wealth into the area and both impressed and irritated the Canadians with their prosperity and generosity. Highway and pipeline communities, notably Whitehorse, grew rapidly, with the American forces both expanding the economy and contributing new facilities to towns and villages. Aboriginal people along the highway and pipeline routes bore the brunt of the invasion. Most seriously, soldiers and construction workers unwittingly introduced new diseases, particularly influenza, into the local population, killing many Aboriginal people who lacked immunity to them. The newcomers also overharvested fish and wildlife along the highway corridor, leading to the designation of a large portion of the southwest corner of the Yukon as a game preserve (later Kluane National Park). The war accelerated Alaska’s integration into the United States and launched the economic and demographic growth of the territory that led it toward statehood in 1959. With the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s the militarization of the northwest frontier that had begun with the Northwest Defense Projects served as the foundation for the Arctic standoff and air defense of North America that dominated much of U.S.-Canadian relations in the postwar era. The Northwest Defense Projects transformed the Far Northwest, but not in a manner that northern boosters envisaged. The Alaska Highway was in rough shape at the end of the war, and it was not opened to regular civilian traffic for several years. The once vital Northwest Staging Route was rendered obsolete by improvements in aeronautics that enabled military and civilian planes to fly farther and more safely. The major legacies from the wartime projects were an enhancement of Canadian-American relations (despite occasional flashes of an imperious American attitude demonstrated toward its northern neighbor during construction), the gradual opening of the interior of Alaska, a major shift in orientation in the Yukon from the old gold mining town of Dawson to the new southern capital of Whitehorse, the awakening of Canada to its northern responsibilities, and the severe disruption of Aboriginal life in the region. As examples of wartime engineering conducted under extreme conditions and pressure, however, the Northwest Defense Projects have few equals in the annals of the U.S. military.

Bill Morrison and Ken Coates See also: Midway Atoll; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

Further Reading Coates, K. S., and W. R. Morrison. The Alaska Highway in World War II: The U.S. Army of Occupation in Canada’s Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Dziuban, Stanley. Military Relations Between the United States and Canada, 1939–1945. Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1959.

Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis Following Labor Day in 1934, the Caucus Room of the U.S. Senate Office building was filled with an eager audience. The Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, otherwise known as the Nye Committee, was holding hearings with the purpose of investigating the reasons why the United States entered the First World War (1914–1918). The focus of the seven-member committee, chaired by the North Dakota senator Gerald Nye (1892– 1971), was ostensibly to examine the roles played by various groups that purportedly maneuvered the Woodrow Wilson administration into declaring war on Germany in April 1917. The committee had been established by Resolution 206 (the Nye-Vandenberg Resolution), which directed Vice President John N. Garner to form a seven-member council to investigate individuals, associations, and corporations involved in the manufacturing, distribution, sale, and import and export of munitions. As Nye termed it on October 3, 1934, war was “incorporated murder” and had taken the lives of 53,000 Americans. On other occasions, he deemed it “insane,” a cruel commercial racket. Support for such ideas was extensive. Antiwar publications such as those by Helmuth C. Engelbrecht and Frank C. Hanighen described the influence of the international armaments lobby as those of the “Merchants of Death.” Most political figures proved more reluctant to embrace the populist antiwar stance. Nye was far from deterred, promising that “when the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.” The economic system, in Nye’s mind, was vulnerable to corruption, marred by vested interests. It was typical of a style of agrarian Progressivism molded by pacifist sentiments. With that came an inherent suspicion of the workings of big business and business monopolies. Given the suspicions of big business caused by the Great Depression, Nye had a receptive audience. Some scholars have attempted to situate Nye in the broader legacy of Thomas Jefferson and William Jennings Bryan—the support of the farmer, the yeoman, against industrial interests. Nye’s views were further reinforced during his time as chair of the Committee on Public Lands and Survey, which found that the leasing of an oil field to the Mammoth Oil Company by President Warren G. Harding’s interior secretary, Albert B. Fall, valued at $100 million, took place without a transparent bidding process. It was not a difficult thing to claim that entry into global war was due to, as Nye put it, the actions and ambitions of “a few profit-bent men” (United States Senate). Nye could prove to be hostile in committee sessions and found various targets attractive. In 1936, he even asserted that President Wilson had concealed information he thought vital to the decision to enter the conflict. The response to Nye was one of indignation, best reflected by the response of Senator Carter

Glass of Virginia. Pounding his hand in the Senate in January 1936 till his fist bled, Glass spoke of Nye’s efforts to “[dirt daub] the sepulchre of Woodrow Wilson” (United States Senate). In terms of proposed legislation, the committee targeted shipping interests, manufacturers, and financiers while privileging the farming sector. Provisions for steep taxation on private and corporation incomes were drafted. A salient feature of the project was nationalizing the arms industry and removing the seemingly unpredictable nature of profiteering. For all the committee’s noise, these proposals were never adopted. However, the role played by the antiwar senator during the interwar years of isolationism was pivotal in keeping public opinion hostile to foreign entanglements. The committee’s exposure of various ties between munitions makers, bankers, and the military establishment affirmed that position, though it could never prove the premise that these groups were directly responsible for President Wilson’s decision to involve the United States in World War I. The domestic effects were, however, undeniable. Nor were they a mean feat. The League of Nations during the 1930s was fraying in its efforts to control acts of international aggression. Nazi Germany under Chancellor Adolf Hitler and Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini were making noises about territorial readjustments and gains. Imperialist Japan under Emperor Hirohito was expressing its belligerent intentions in China. Between 1935 and 1939, a series of Neutrality Acts were passed reflecting this antiwar sentiment. The Neutrality Act of 1936 allowed the president to embargo munitions to belligerents even after a state of war between them was proclaimed. As a general rule, arms sales and loans could not be lawfully made to any belligerent in a conflict. The sale of nonmilitary items to belligerents in a conflict was permitted, provided the goods were paid for in cash and carried on non-American vessels. These terms were colloquially described as “cash-and-carry” provisions. In 1940, as the Franklin Roosevelt administration got increasingly desperate in seeking a repeal of the Neutrality Acts, notably the “carry” part of the cash-and-carry provisions, Nye was appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also became a key spokesman for the America First Committee, gathering wide support against any impending U.S. involvement in the Second World War. Each attempt by the administration was seen as a measure of bringing U.S. military influence to bear. The Lend-Lease Bill of March 1941, and the Selective Training and Service Act, which instituted the country’s first peacetime draft, were considered ominous examples. The latter proved particular unpopular. Even as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nye was campaigning in Pittsburgh against involvement in the war, believing, in the spirit of the committee, that entering the conflict was self-defeating, wasteful, and needless. Nye’s defeat in his reelection bid in 1944 signaled the triumph of internationalism over agrarian-Progressive isolationism and the long-term involvement of the United States in international affairs. Binoy Kampmark See also: America First Committee; Isolationism; Lenin, Vladimir, Anti-Imperialist Critique of; Peace Movement, World War I; Primary Documents: The Nye Commission Report (1936)

Further Reading Cole, Wayne S. Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Engelbrecht, Helmuth C., and Frank C. Hanighen. Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934. Schlesinger, Arthur M., and Roger Bruns, eds. Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792–1974. New York: Chelsea House, 1975.

United States Senate. “September 4, 1934—Merchants of Death.” Senate http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/merchants_of_death.htm. Accessed June 7, 2014.

Stories,

1921–1940.

Peace Movement (1930s) The peace movement of the 1930s included a broad cross-section of American women, religious groups, and college students. Antiwar sentiment was indeed widespread among the general public throughout the interwar period. Helmuth Engelbrecht and Frank Hanighen’s Merchants of Death, along with articles in the press, made popular the notion that war profiteers played a leading role in getting America embroiled in World War I. In 1934, U.S. senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) opened investigations into the munitions industry, eventually finding that bankers, to protect their European loans, and arms manufacturers did in fact influence President Woodrow Wilson, fatally undermining his declared position of U.S. neutrality. Dorothy Detzer, the executive secretary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), took the lead in pressuring Senator George Norris (R-NE) to begin investigations into munitions producers and to select Nye to lead the investigation. Largely as a result of Nye’s investigation, the U.S. Congress passed several Neutrality Acts between 1935 and 1937. As isolationist sentiment increased, however, international aggression by Japan in 1931 and 1937 against Manchuria, Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and Nazi Germany’s rearmament and subsequent invasion of neighboring countries made it difficult for pacifists to carry on with their struggle. Peace activists in the early 1930s focused much of their attention on the issue of disarmament. In 1932 the League of Nations held a Conference on Reduction and Limitation of Arms in Geneva. The National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, founded by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1924, and the WILPF collected signatures for a petition that demanded complete disarmament by all nations. Beginning on June 21, 1931, the WILPF led a peace caravan across the United States from Hollywood, California, to Washington, D.C., where WILPF founder Jane Addams gave President Herbert Hoover the petition with more than half a million signatures in support of the outlawing of weapons. As Americans turned their attention to the newly elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Oxford University students presented the Oxford Pledge on February 9, 1933. The Oxford Union, a student debating society known more for being a breeding ground for future members of Parliament, approved the Oxford Pledge by a vote of 275 to 173. By accepting the Oxford Pledge, students refused to fight for Britain in any future wars. Despite pressure to drop the pledge, the Oxford Union reiterated its approval by voting 750 to 138 against withdrawing support for the pledge. Inspired by their British counterparts, American students expressed similar sentiments against war at approximately 90 colleges and universities. Brown University’s student newspaper polled 22,627 students from 65 colleges and universities and found that 39 percent of the students agreed with the Oxford Pledge and refused to fight in any war. The following year, on April 13, 1934, the National Student League, a Communist-oriented student group, and the Socialist-oriented Student League for Industrial Democracy organized a student strike against war. This first strike involved approximately 25,000 students, with 15,000 coming from the colleges and universities in New York City. By 1937, under the auspices of the United Student Peace Committee, which included representatives from, among others, the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and the Student YMCA and YWCA, the student strike against war succeeded in getting nearly 500,000 students to take part in the walkout. By this time, however, the student movement, like the peace movement as a whole, began to divide over the issue of whether strict neutrality or collective security represented the better strategy for achieving peace.

The rising threat of fascism and the increasingly apparent weaknesses of the League of Nations brought about a split in the peace movement. While the National Council for Prevention of War (NCPW) and the WILPF, along with other pacifist groups, sought strict neutrality, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the League of Nations Association (LNA) turned to collective security. Disagreements between pacifists and internationalists came to the surface during a meeting between 44 peace advocates on October 3, 1935, at Columbia University. Participants associated with the Carnegie Endowment and the LNA dominated the event and planned to use their numerical advantage to limit the influence of pacifists—whose goals seemed too utopian—in the National Peace Conference. Internationalists, however, ultimately failed in their efforts. Pacifists, on the other hand, succeeded in creating the Emergency Peace Campaign (EPC) in December 1935. The EPC had the support of the NCPW and the FOR and, with a budget of more than $130,000, organized conferences, lectures, and meetings in hundreds of locations across the United States. As its goals, the EPC supported working with the League of Nations to bring greater economic equality among nations, a strong military defense of the American continent, and membership in the World Court. Led by Kirby Page, the EPC conducted a NoForeign-War Crusade in 1937 that publicized the neutralist argument that European wars were the result of imperialism. By late 1937, though, the EPC dissolved. Following the debate in 1937 and 1938 over the Ludlow Amendment—a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have, with the exception of an attack upon America, required a national referendum before the nation could enter a war—pacifist-neutralists never regained their prominence in the peace movement. Clark Eichelberger, director of the LNA, organized weekly meetings in 1937 to prepare arguments against the Ludlow Amendment. From these meetings came a proposed amendment to the Neutrality Act that limited the restrictions included in the bill to aggressor nations only. Despite strong support from the NCPW since 1935, the January 10, 1938, House vote on the Ludlow Amendment resulted in a defeat for pacifists when Congress voted 209 to 188 against holding hearings on the bill. As pacifists and internationalists met in March 1938 for the Conference on World Economic Cooperation, the separation between the two groups became permanent. Internationalists argued that collective security based on political cooperation needed to precede economic cooperation, while pacifists believed that collective security based on politics led to a separation of the world into democratic and totalitarian countries, thus preventing economic cooperation. Brian S. Mueller See also: Addams, Jane; Isolationism; Neutrality Acts; Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis

Further Reading Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Chatfield, Charles. For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971. DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform in American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

Potsdam Conference (1945) The Potsdam Conference was held between July 17 and August 2, 1945, at the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin in occupied Germany, nine weeks after the surrender of Germany that ended World War II in Europe. The meeting was held between U.S. president

Harry Truman, British prime minister Winston Churchill (and later Clement Atlee following his electoral victory that summer), and Communist Party general secretary Joseph Stalin. Known as the Big Three, the leaders convened with the hope of establishing the broad outlines of the postwar order, the terms of peace among the warring parties, and how to deal with the devastating impacts of World War II. Most urgently, the Potsdam Conference looked to address the questions surrounding reparations from a defeated Germany—issues that had been faced a generation before following the First World War. The second of the two immediate issues was the means by which to compel the surrender of Japan that would end the war in the Pacific. The Big Three agreed on the temporary division of Germany into four occupation zones, one each controlled by France, Great Britain, and the United States in the western portion of the country, and a Soviet-controlled eastern zone. Reparations proved to be the most difficult and contentious issue to resolve at Potsdam. At the Yalta Conference in February, the Big Three had agreed that, as a basis for future discussion, Russia should receive approximately half of a total $20 billion in reparations from Germany to the Allied powers because of the tremendous cost borne by the Soviet Union in Hitler’s defeat. However, at Potsdam, the new U.S. president Truman and his secretary of state James Byrnes rejected completely the idea of a fixed dollar figure. Having agreed already to the division of Germany, Byrnes argued instead that each country should exact reparations from its own occupation zone. The Russians balked at this, particularly because the industrial heartland of the country lay inside the Western powers’ zones. They accepted the proposal only after a concession that a small share of capital equipment would be transferred to the Soviet Union—and after Byrnes announced that he and the president were leaving Potsdam imminently, settlement of the reparations issue notwithstanding. In the end, zonal reparations were instrumental in leading to what became a 45-year-long division of the country. Another European issue of contention lay in the U.S. refusal to recognize the Communist-controlled governments of Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The U.S. position that the three nations had to undergo democratic reorganization came despite the 1944 “Percentages Agreement” between Churchill and Stalin that had outlined Soviet general control (determined by specific percentages in each country) of those governments in exchange for Britain’s reestablishment of an authoritarian, neo-Fascist-led regime in Greece. Given that previous agreement (which U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt knew about), and in light of the recent U.S. argument in support of admitting an undemocratic government of Argentina into the United Nations, Stalin and Russian diplomats bitterly objected to surrendering control of Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Truman agreed to recognize the authority of the Allied Control Commissions (essentially provisional governments) in each country, but immediately after Potsdam the United States began working to subvert planned Bulgarian elections that Byrnes charged were not being organized democratically. Thus one sees at Potsdam the outlines of the fierce decades-long Cold War struggle over the fate of Eastern Europe. Truman left Potsdam determined to avoid such a conflict in Asia. More specifically, he would not allow the Russians any part in shaping the future of Japan, which in July was still resisting surrender. Although President Roosevelt had asked for and received a promise from Stalin that Soviet troops would enter the war in the Pacific once Germany was defeated, Truman resolved that U.S. interests would be better served by ending the war without Soviet intervention. Once the president received word of the successful Trinity test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico, he evinced a newfound demeanor of cocky self-assurance. Truman told Stalin that the United States was in possession of an unidentified “powerful new weapon” that would end the war. Stalin asked for no details, only urging that the United States “make good use of it against the Japanese.” The Potsdam Declaration—issued on July 26 separately from the Potsdam Agreement itself—outlined the terms of Japanese surrender that nation had to accept to avoid

“prompt and utter destruction.” That same day the USS Indianapolis brought the firing mechanism and a bullet of uranium-235 for the world’s first atomic bomb to Tinian Bay. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki refused the Potsdam Declaration’s call for surrender. His cabinet was divided between moderate forces hoping that the outstanding issue preventing a surrender—the postwar survival of the emperor—could be solved, and more hardline imperial advisers who wanted to continue fighting. Not knowing for certain that the Japanese would surrender if the United States acquiesced on the issue of the emperor (which ultimately happened), and faced with overwhelming pressures to use the atomic bomb—not the least of which was a desire to not give the Russians a legitimate stake in determining the future of Japan—President Truman gave the order for the bomb’s use, first at Hiroshima on August 6, and then Nagasaki on August 9. Chris J. Magoc and Nina Teresi See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Yalta Conference; Primary Documents: Excerpts from the Diary of President Harry S. Truman Regarding the Potsdam Conference (1945)

Further Reading Costigliola, Frank. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Miller, Donald L. The Story of World War II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Wittner, Lawrence S. Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882–1945) Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest serving U.S. president, its wartime leader in World War II, and in general terms can be described as an anti-imperialist. He did, however, advance policies of vigorous international engagement for the United States—most notably, leading the United States toward its inexorable entrance into World War II, and toward the war’s end, serving as an instrumental force in establishing the United Nations. Roosevelt was born on January 30, 1882, on the family estate, Springwood, at Hyde Park, New York, into a wealthy, patrician family. Known as FDR in his presidential years, he attended the Groton preparatory school before entering Harvard University. At Harvard FDR was active in sports, made friends, and served as editor of the Harvard Crimson. He graduated in 1903, but remained another year for more studies before entering Columbia University Law School. He passed the bar examination in 1907 and spent the next three years as a law clerk in a New York City law office. In 1910, the Democratic Party state leadership asked FDR to run for the New York Senate. He was a Democrat only because his father had been a Democrat instead of a Republican, as most of the wealthy were at the time. He won handily in part because he opposed the “big city bosses” and he called for clean government. In 1912, FDR supported Woodrow Wilson against his fifth cousin, former president Theodore Roosevelt, the leader of the Bull Moose Party. After his presidential victory Wilson appointed FDR to serve in his administration in the Navy Department as assistant secretary. His immediate superior was Josephus Daniels, secretary of the navy. Daniels became an important mentor to FDR, teaching him how to be successful in Washington politics. After World War I began in 1917 he considered entering military

service; however, Daniels persuaded him to continue serving in the Navy Department. His experiences at the time included working on many important wartime projects, experiences that would serve him as president. FDR was sent abroad in 1918 to tour European battlefields where correspondents reported his meetings with military leaders. In 1920 he was invited to join the Democratic Party presidential ticket as the vice presidential candidate running with presidential candidate James Middleton Cox (1870–1957), the reform-minded governor of Ohio. Cox was a supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist policies and supported the entry of the United States into the League of Nations. After the election FDR returned to private law practice until he was afflicted with polio in August 1921. By January 1922 he was hospitalized in poor condition; however, he began to fight the disease. He engaged in a program of physical exercises, including swimming, that strengthened his body. In 1924 he went to Warm Springs, Georgia, where polio patients went for treatment in the warm mineral waters. As FDR’s health improved he returned to politics. In 1928 he was elected governor of New York, where he oversaw a series of Progressive legislative accomplishments, including tax relief for farmers, a relief system for the unemployed, utility regulations, improvements to the state’s prison system, power projects on the Saint Lawrence River, reforestation, conservation, and more. In 1932 he was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for president. FDR used radio very effectively as a means of communications. Prior to the Democratic Party’s 1932 National Convention he gave a national radio talk in which he presented his ideas on how to handle the economic crisis causing the Great Depression. He called for a program that would help the “forgotten man” economically. Once in office his radio “fireside chats” made many people feel as if he were in the room speaking with them.

One of the greatest of U.S. presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt held office from March 1933 until his death in April 1945. Roosevelt guided the nation through World War II, advocated a “Good Neighbor Policy” to improve U.S.-Latin America relations, and oversaw

a complex relationship with the Soviet Union and its leader Joseph Stalin. (Library of Congress)

The 1932 campaign was an endurance test for FDR. He visited 38 states promising help to farmers and the unemployed, to end Prohibition, and to balance the budget. On March 4, 1933, FDR was inaugurated as the new president. He faced enormous challenges. Millions were unemployed, thousands were standing in bread lines to get food, and large numbers of businesses were failing as many were losing their homes because they could not make their mortgage payments. In addition, just prior to the inauguration there had been runs on many banks as people sought to get cash or to exchange it for gold. Two days after his inauguration FDR declared a “banking holiday” that closed all of the banks in the United States until they could be examined for financial soundness. He supported the Emergency Banking Relief Act that was adopted on March 9, 1933, on the grounds of a national financial emergency. FDR called his overall economic program of recovery and reform the “New Deal.” Most of FDR’s first and second terms were focused on the problems of the Great Depression, but from 1937 until his death in 1945 Roosevelt focused more and more on foreign affairs and the great conflict of World War II. In foreign affairs FDR sought “Good Neighbor” relations with Latin American countries. In 1934 the Platt Amendment of 1901 was repealed. The Platt Amendment had given the United States the right to intervene in Cuba’s internal affairs. He also settled disputes with Mexico over oil rights, removed American occupation forces from Caribbean countries, signed nonaggression treaties with Canada and some Latin American countries, and signed numerous reciprocal trade agreements with Latin American countries. Personal diplomacy was also part of FDR’s style, reflective of his belief that he could understand, manage, and work constructively with most people. He visited Cartegena, Colombia, in 1934, and the Inter-American Conference for Maintenance of Peace in 1936. He also renewed relations with the Soviet Union in 1933, a decision that gave legitimacy to the Soviet Revolution. In the 1930s Japan began a policy of militaristic expansion, occupying Manchuria and other parts of China. By 1937 Japan was at war with China. Its aggression resulted in the sinking of the USS Panay. To contain Japan FDR called for peaceful countries to unite in quarantining “war” (Japan) because he saw Japanese aggression as a threat to world peace. However, he was unable to abruptly change public opinion. The isolationists were too strong and supported a number of Neutrality American Conference Acts that were designed to keep the United States out of war and avoid what many believed was the mistake of intervention in World War I. In 1935 Congress passed a Neutrality Act that prohibited the United States from supplying countries at war. FDR was opposed to the Neutrality Acts because they did not distinguish between aggressors and their victims even if they were friendly nations. Even after World War II began in Europe on September 1, 1939, FDR could not gain public support over isolationist opposition. In 1939 Congress passed a new Neutrality Act that provided for the sale of American-made munitions and matériel on a “cash-and-carry” (on your own ships) policy. Reelected president in 1940 by breaking with the tradition of the two-term presidency, FDR moved the country closer to a wartime footing. In the summer of 1940 he signed an executive agreement that “loaned” the British 50 World War I destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on British possessions. In August 1941, FDR and Winston Churchill, British prime minister, met on a cruiser anchored off the coast of Newfoundland. They issued a joint declaration, the Atlantic Charter, which pledged the two parties not to seek territorial gains, to respect the right of nations to have their own form of government, freedom of individuals, and the right to carry on peaceful trade across the world. On January 6, 1941, FDR announced the “Four Freedoms” for all people around the world as a grand declaration of what the British- and U.S.-led Western democracies were fighting for in the conflict now

more than a year under way: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In March 1941 the Lend-Lease Act was passed. It allowed the president to provide aid to nations that the U.S. government held important to U.S. security. In September 1940, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 that established a peacetime draft. As a result a million men were prepared with military training when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. The next day FDR called it “a day that will live in infamy” in his request to Congress to declare war on the Empire of Japan. On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, which responded in kind. In a frustrated gesture, pacifists, isolationists, and others vilified FDR for tricking the Japanese into attacking the United States so that he could ultimately lure the United States into the conflict with Hitler’s Nazi Germany that he desired all along. Strategic naval victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway contained the Japanese advances across the Pacific. This allowed the “united nations”—as FDR called the alliance—to focus on defeating the Nazis first. In early 1943 FDR met with Churchill at Casablanca, Morocco. They announced that the terms of surrender for the Axis powers would be “unconditional surrender.” In November 1943 FDR met with Joseph Stalin and Churchill in Tehran, Iran, at the Tehran Conference. FDR made it plain to both Stalin and Churchill that there were to be no separate deals. FDR was reelected president in November 1944 and was inaugurated for the fourth time in January 1945. As the war progressed he dealt with postwar problems such as the Bretton Woods Conference that ended with a new international monetary system; the Dumbarton Oaks agreement that was the basis for the creation of the United Nations in 1945; and the granting of independence to the Philippines. Oddly enough, FDR pursued a number of anticolonial policies as a president who simultaneously was positioning the United States for its postwar role as the preeminent “leader of the free world.” He had confronted Churchill at Newfoundland about British imperialism, but was viewed by Latin Americans as imperialistic in his actions and attitudes toward them—the Good Neighbor policy notwithstanding. In February 1945, FDR met with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in the Crimea. They issued the Crimea Declaration, planned a meeting in San Francisco to establish the United Nations, and also made a secret deal with Stalin to enter the war against Japan three months after the surrender of Germany. It was obvious to all at the time that FDR was in frail health. On April 12, 1945, FDR was resting at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. His successor, Vice President Harry Truman, was sworn in and soon was informed of the Manhattan Project, a weapon of terrible imperial power that FDR had authorized prior to America’s entry into World War II. Andrew J. Waskey and Patit Paban Mishra See also: Atlantic Charter; Good Neighbor Policy; Isolationism; Neutrality Acts

Further Reading Cole, Wayne S. Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–45. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Davis, Kenneth S. FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 1882–1928: A History. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975. Farnham, Barbara Reardon. Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of Political Decision-Making. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Kimball, Warren F. Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Persico, Joseph E. Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage. New York: Random House, 2001. Schmitz, David F. The Triumph of Internationalism: Franklin D. Roosevelt and a World in Crisis, 1933–1941. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007.

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia in the early 21st century strives toward greater regional integration as an economic community of nations that now includes Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei. However, some difficulties in integration are linked to the incredible ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, and environmental diversity of the region. Recent studies in linguistics have found that a plural majority of the world’s endangered languages are from Southeast Asia, and while the scholars and political leaders have pushed for the autonomy of Southeast Asian peoples, the region has been deeply affected by a long history of imperialism. The name for the region itself derives from the ancient Hittite kingdom “Assuva” from which “Asia” emerged. The term “Southeast” meanwhile owes its own origins to French, Dutch, Spanish, and English colonial visions of the “Far East” and trading companies. The term “Southeast Asia” may have appeared first in a 1923 Viennese monograph, “Sudostasien,” by Robert Hiene-Geldern. Nevertheless, the making of Southeast Asia as an English language and American concept was ultimately rooted in World War II, when the National Geographic Society first published a map that recognized Southeast Asia as a distinct region. The importance of Southeast Asia preceding and during World War II gave the region recognition in European and American premier academic institutions, including London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, and Yale University, as well as the U.S. Department of State. The Southeast Asian Command (SEAC), which organized the region’s Allied forces during the war, did not include Sumatra, parts of the Malay Islands, nor the Philippines. In the postwar era defined by the Cold War, however, a new geopolitical framework—the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), established in Manila, Philippines, in 1954—was imposed upon the region. However, SEATO also had a curious area of coverage that included a more broadly defined Southeast Asia, the Southwest Pacific region, and Pakistan. SEATO was short lived. Just as the Cold War had served as the impetus for the organization, countries withdrew from SEATO as a result of Cold War fallout: Cambodia (1956), Laos (1962), Pakistan (1972), and South Vietnam (which ceased to exist as a result of reunification in 1975). In 1977 SEATO ceased to exist as well. A parallel organization called the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) formed in 1961, but only included Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaya. In 1967, these three states joined with what was now Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia to found the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Ultimately, the foundation of ASEAN was rooted in anticommunism as socialist Burma and the Communist states of Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) were not admitted to the organization initially, and regional identity was asserted through the Cold War experience of devastating conflict. On the whole, from the 1940s onward, academics and politicians alike engaged in the constant geopolitical definition and redefinition of Southeast Asia, a discourse often driven by external events and the strategic interests of nations beyond the region—including the United States. The assertion of ethno-linguistic and cultural semiuniformity, with recognized diversity for Southeast Asia, owes its own origins to colonial-era scholarship. Here, Indonesia or Indochine was a region that had been at a nexus of global exchange, particularly between Indic, Sinic, and Islamic influences, as both Indic and Sinic influences were traced back to the second century CE. While many scholars argued that Chinese influence was generally sociopolitical, Indian influence was characterized as cultural and religious. Sanskrit remained an elite language into the early modern period; revived by colonial-era scholars, it remains important today. Nevertheless, the colonial vision dictated that Indic culture had brought the worship of the trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva to the region through a wave of Indian colonization. Islamic influence entered the region in the 11th century. The 15th century saw the rise of many Southeast Asian polities: Malaka, Vijaya (Quy Nhon), Bo-Ni (Brunei), and others, which relied

upon the support of the Ming dynasty through long-distance tribute-trade. At the same time, Europeans began to make their own mark on the region, first with the voyage of Marco Polo, and later, the introduction of maritime empires. Europeans first appeared in Southeast Asia on mostly innocuous, small trading vessels. Europeans in Southeast Asia, from the early modern period onward, have often been described with an adaption of an Arabic term for foreigner, such as farang/parang or pareng. Although the Europeans were incredibly diverse as well, their impact remained minimal until the 1511 brutal conquest of the Sultanate of Melaka by the Portuguese—just one of a series of naval victories that led to the construction of a trading empire stretching from Europe across the Indian Ocean all the way to Japan. With the rise of the age of European imperialism, the Portuguese would not remain the only power in the region as the Spanish took Manila in the Philippines and the Dutch began their conquest of the Indonesian archipelago with the popular “spice islands” or the Moluccas. Global trade then became critical to the formation of imperial power in Southeast Asia—in particular, the Spanish-dominated Philippines becoming critical in the global silver trade. The age of colonial empire hardly spared any part of Southeast Asia. The Spanish, and later the Americans, took the Philippines; the Dutch took the Indonesian archipelago; France claimed Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos); Britain claimed Malaysia and Burma; and even Thailand has been argued to have been under the “crypto-colonial” influence of European powers. The colonial period resulted in near slave labor conditions on rubber plantations, in rice fields, on sugarcane plantations, and in mines across the region. The era saw as well the foundation of the region’s first largely international educational institutions, such as the Buddhist Institute in Cambodia and the École française d’ExtrêmeOrient (EFEO) in Vietnam. Indeed, the formation of international ties became the foundation for the end of the colonial period: at the turn of the 20th century, a large number of Southeast Asian nationalist leaders were educated in the United States or Europe, a development that helped to reinforce and further cultivate long-standing demands for independence and sovereignty. By the early 20th century the region of Southeast Asia had become a political battleground, and this feverish nationalism became even more prevalent with the Japanese occupation of the region in the late 1930s. After the occupation, however, the region also became a Cold War battleground. The Philippines were immersed in the Hukbalahap (Huk) Rebellion as Marxists battled Catholics who were backed by the United States. Marxist and Islamic nationalists battled in Malaysia and Indonesia as well. Most significantly, in that part of the region called Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos)—dominated since the 1850s by the French—Marxist nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh battled with Catholics, ethnic minorities, Buddhists, and others. Similar struggles unfolded in Thailand and Burma. In the post–World War II era, the popularity of Marxist-driven nationalism as an anticolonial force provided the central justification for American intervention in an attempt to maintain the “bamboo curtain” (the corollary to Europe’s more famous Iron Curtain) of pro-Western and anticommunist states in Southeast Asia. However, American intervention was hardly a new phenomenon in Southeast Asia. The United States had been acting as an active colonial and later semicolonial power in the Philippines since the collapse of the Spanish empire there at the end of the 19th century. Additionally, during World War II the American predecessor organization to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had worked with a young, relatively anonymous rebel in Vietnam to help ensure victory there over the Japanese. “Nguyen the Patriot” (Vietnamese: Nguyen Ai Quoc) would emerge in 1945 with a Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, based upon the American version of the same document. Ho Chi Minh, “Uncle Ho” (Vietnamese: Bac Ho), became one of the 20th century’s most important figures.

Despite warnings from seasoned OSS officers, American intervention in Southeast Asia was driven by the prevailing U.S. policy in the Cold War to contain communism and demonstrate American credibility in that global geopolitical conflict. Thus, the CIA successfully silenced the Huk rebellion, but also took on anticommunist measures in Indonesia, including a failed coup against Sukarno in 1958 and a long list of failed measures during the Vietnam War, not the least of which included William Colby’s oversight of the Phoenix program of targeted assassinations. As a result of American intervention conflict spread throughout the region in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly as the American “secret war” in Laos and the illegal bombings of Cambodia opened up new theaters of war in those two countries, and further measures produced devastating political instability in Indonesia and Thailand. By the official end of American intervention in Vietnam in 1973, American policies had resulted in a refugee crisis that had sent millions of Southeast Asians all over the globe. Regional political crisis deepened with the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, which began a four-year reign of terror that resulted in yet another refugee crisis. However, it was during this very time that regional identity for Southeast Asia began to be “reimagined” yet again with the foundation of ASEAN by the Bangkok Declaration in 1967. Although the foundation of ASEAN in 1967 was rooted in prodemocratic ideals, the American support of the dictatorial tendencies of a number of the initial member states of Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand made this precept problematic. In the context of the Cold War, Communist or Socialist states of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam were not admitted into ASEAN initially. Nevertheless, ASEAN did become a model of consideration for Southeast Asian regional identity that has existed up to the present as the organization strives to provide grounds for continued development and economic integration. However, the concept of ASEAN has also been challenged by the “reimagination” of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), which includes the mainland states of Southeast Asia and large parts of southern China. The GMS owes its own origins to research completed by the American military research firm, the RAND Corporation. In its current form the GMS was given new life by Asian Development Bank (ADB) affiliates that have favored neoliberal economic policies. Critiques of the GMS have noted that the only Southeast Asian country with representation on the ADB board is Indonesia. There is no doubt that further debates regarding the ADB, the GMS, and ASEAN are to come. Southeast Asia in the first decades of the 21st century remains one of the world’s most intensely diverse sociopolitical landscapes and—despite the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago—continues to be at the forefront of American interests. American military intervention in the region has been tragically unsuccessful at worst and tenuously influential at best. However, American economic and strategic interests in the region have not decreased. Training programs in cooperation with the Vietnamese navy, the U.S. role in the apparent transformation of Burma (now the Republic of Myanmar), and continued concerns in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand all suggest that Southeast Asia will remain a focus of American interests in years to come. William Noseworthy See also: Cambodia; French War in Indochina; Ho Chi Minh; Vietnam War

Further Reading Emmerson, Donald K. “Southeast Asia: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (1984): 1–21. Glassman, Jim. Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010. Grabowsky, Volker, ed. Southeast Asian Historiography: Unravelling the Myths: Essays in Honour of Barend Jan Terwiel. Bangkok, Thailand: River Books, 2011. Tarling, Nicholas. Ed. The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) Often described as the Second World War’s testing ground, the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) became a crucial moment in U.S. foreign policy and U.S. perceptions regarding international fascism. Beginning in July 1936, rebels led by General Francisco Franco sought to overthrow the republic, the country’s constitutional government. The resulting war divided not only Spain but also the world, as the Fascist governments of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy provided weapons and soldiers to Franco’s side while Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union assisted the Republicans. The implications resonated in the United States as the American public and U.S. officials debated the country’s international responsibilities. Immediately, the Spanish Civil War drew international attention. From 1936 to 1939, the conflict divided Spain into two coalitions. The so-called “Nationalist” rebels included Franco, monarchists, Fascists, archconservatives, and many supporters of the Catholic Church. Liberal Democrats, Socialists, and Communists who made up the “Republicans” or “Loyalists” took their names from their defense of the republic and the constitution. With Franco and the Fascists on one side and the Socialists and Communists on the other, the two sides obtained outside support. Hitler and Mussolini sent hundreds of aircraft and tanks and almost 100,000 troops to aid Franco, a Fascist ally. To combat this Fascist alliance, Stalin sent 3,000 advisers and a few hundred tanks. Burdened by the Great Depression and the memory of the First World War, the majority of Americans supported neutrality and nonintervention, preferring an isolationist policy over any greater role in the Spanish Civil War. When the conflict erupted, the British and French spearheaded calls for arms embargoes, and the British sought to continue their appeasement policy toward Fascist governments. Many Americans joined antiwar and peace organizations, fearing U.S. entanglements in places such as China, Ethiopia, and now Spain. U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and policymakers did not invoke the Neutrality Acts and saw few U.S. interests in Spain. Fearing international repercussions, FDR and Congress issued a moral embargo against any U.S. involvement and supported the British and French arms embargo. Violating international and U.S. embargoes, Hitler and Mussolini, as well as some U.S. companies such as Texaco Oil, continued providing weapons, oil, and more to Franco. In April 1937, Franco’s forces with German and Italian planes bombed the civilian town of Guernica, an event soon memorialized in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Such Fascist atrocities saw U.S. officials, even leading isolationist senator Gerald Nye, consider revoking or expanding the Neutrality Acts, for Franco benefited from Hitler’s and Mussolini’s assistance while embargoes primarily hurt Loyalists desperate for food, oil, and arms. However, Americans divided over the significance of the Spanish Civil War because of the participants’ ideologies and international alliances. Many liberals and leftists interpreted the war as one with Franco and fascism versus the Republicans and democracy, epitomized in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Writers, intellectuals, journalists, movie stars, and even labor unions supported the Republicans and opposed Franco and his Fascist allies. Between 2,000 and 3,000 Americans traveled to Spain to serve in the war, with around 450 Americans forming the famous Abraham Lincoln Brigade. On the other hand, many conservatives and Fascist sympathizers believed the sides were Franco, Christianity, and democracy versus communism. American Catholics believed that the Republican government had undermined the Catholic Church’s historic influence in Spain, so Catholic voters lobbied many politicians neither to oppose Franco nor support the Republicans. Growing far more concerned about the international threat of European fascism, FDR and important U.S. officials attempted to provide covert aid to the Republicans. U.S. secretary of the treasury Henry

Morgenthau purchased Republican silver, and FDR tried to ship planes through the Spanish-French border to Republicans. U.S. officials allowed passports for American medical personnel and tried to ignore Americans who joined brigades to help the Republicans. Despite such efforts and suggestions for international mediation, the Republicans found themselves exhausted. By 1939, Franco’s forces took Madrid and Barcelona and claimed victory. Twenty thousand Republicans were immediately executed, and the newly installed Fascist government created prisons, concentration camps, and work battalions as well as thousands of refugees who swarmed into Latin America and Europe, some of whom would be caught in Hitler’s concentration camps. By this time, in discussing U.S. officials’ long hesitance to support openly the Republicans against Franco, FDR admitted, “We have made a mistake” (Tierney, 1). The Spanish Civil War’s impact resonated into and beyond the Second World War. Veterans of the conflict had served with both the Axis and the Allies, and some worked with the Central IntelligenceAgency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). As some Central and South American nations supported Franco, U.S. officials feared Latin America would become a beachheadfor Fascist activities and Hitler’s operations in the Western Hemisphere. Such concerns influenced U.S. officials’ attempts to monitor, round up, and deport Germans and potential Nazi sympathizers in Latin America. Despite his Fascist proclivities, Franco remained distant from the Axis powers and sided with the United States. Only with the Cold War did U.S. officials’ tolerance of Franco’s authoritarian regime become open support for an anticommunist ally against the Soviet Union. By the late 1940s, U.S. officials no longer perceived Spanish Civil War exiles as refugees but as Communist agents subverting democracy in countries such as Guatemala. By the time Spanish Civil War veteran Alberto Bayo trained Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara in guerrilla warfare in the mid-1950s, some U.S. officials interpreted this as evidence of Castro’s Communist leanings. Aaron Coy Moulton

GUERNICA Guernica is an oil painting by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) depicting the aerial bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, by German and Italian Fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists of Fascist general Francisco Franco and the Spanish Republicans. Guernica helped rivet the eyes of the world upon that conflict—and more broadly to the horrors unfolding across Europe and Asia in the late 1930s. Using an entirely gray, black, and white palette on an immense mural canvas and employing heavy symbolism and his Cubist style, Picasso rendered the suffering of civilians and the chaos of modern war in a stark, graphic manner. Although Guernica earned mixed reviews at the Paris World’s Fair where it was first exhibited, a subsequent tour to various museums around the world enlarged the painting’s reputation. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Guernica was featured in a Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Guernica’s symbolic power grew over time. In the 1960s anti–Vietnam War protesters staged occasional vigils in front of the painting at MoMA. A tapestry copy hanging at the United Nations near the entrance to the Security Council drew attention in February 2003 during the George W. Bush administration’s run-up to the U.S. war in Iraq. With officials set to stage press conferences in front of the mural, at which they would make the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a curtain was draped over the mural. Although that decision was ostensibly made because the painting would be distracting for TV cameras, critics charged that the unpleasant sight of grotesquely disfigured bodies amid the chaos of war proved an inconveniently ironic backdrop for U.S. officials arguing for what many charged was an illegal and unnecessary war.

See also: Fascism, Support in the United States and Economic Ties to; Isolationism; Neutrality Acts; Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis

Further Reading

Little, Douglas. Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Schmitz, David F. Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Tierney, Dominica. FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle That Divided America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Stimson, Henry L. (1867–1950) Henry L. Stimson (1867–1950) was a leading American foreign policy statesman, attorney, and Republican Party leader whose career in several presidential administrations and advocacy for an interventionist U.S. role in the world made him an influential figure in America’s transition from overt imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, through the interwar era of isolationism, and culminating in the post–World War II period of American world dominance. Stimson served as secretary of war in the administration of William Howard Taft (1909–1913), as governor-general of the Philippines (1927– 1929) under President Calvin Coolidge, as secretary of state for President Herbert Hoover (1929–1933), and returned as secretary of war during the critical years of World War II under Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1940–1945). After graduating from Yale (1884–1888) and Harvard Law School (1888–1890), Stimson went into practice as a lawyer, establishing a partnership in 1899 with Bronson Winthrop. He moved up quickly in Republican Party circles, then ran a failed race for governor of New York in 1910. After serving briefly as secretary of war, he volunteered for military service during World War I, after which he became known as “Colonel Stimson.” In 1927 Coolidge appointed him presidential emissary to Nicaragua during the period when U.S. marines had landed to restore order. In what ultimately proved to be a futile effort, Stimson worked to negotiate a peace between Nicaragua’s warring factions. Stimson became secretary of state in 1929, a most inauspicious moment in world affairs. Though he labored in his four years to bring meaning to the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, events overwhelmed the agreement’s idealistic promise of conflict resolution and world peace. Perhaps most notably in his tenure, in 1931 Japan seized Manchuria in northern China. Appeals to Kellogg-Briand fell on deaf ears and his own president (Hoover), grappling with the onset of the Great Depression, would not agree to impose sanctions on Japan for this violation of territorial sovereignty. Stimson, therefore, issued notes to both Japan and China stipulating that the United States would not recognize any actions or agreement that violated U.S. rights in China and the territorial integrity of China. Stimson’s immediate concern was maintaining respect for the “Open Door” of access to U.S. trade in China, and more broadly safeguarding U.S. interests in the Far East against possible further aggression by imperial Japan. Indeed, he would comment at the end of his tenure on the events of 1929–1933 that had also included failed efforts at disarmament and culminated in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, “the situation in the world seemed to me like the unfolding of a great Greek tragedy, where we could see the march of events and know what ought to be done, but seemed to be powerless to prevent its marching to its grim conclusion” (State Department). The communiqué to Japan and China, known as the Stimson Doctrine, would be invoked by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 in the nonrecognition of the Soviet seizure of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Back in private life from 1933 to 1940, Stimson advocated for a strong military response to continuing Japanese—and by the end of the decade, Nazi—military aggression. Upon the outbreak of war in Europe, Stimson returned as secretary of war and in that capacity oversaw the extraordinary challenges of coordinating the war effort. He played a crucial role in three policies near the end of the war that had

far-reaching impacts: he opposed the Morgenthau Plan to de-industrialize and fracture Germany into several small states, which helped to set the stage for the East-West partitioning of Germany and the denial of Soviet reparations from the defeated country; as an attorney, Stimson argued successfully that Nazi officials be tried in the formal proceedings that became the Nuremberg Trials, a decision that had an enduring impact on international law; and he ultimately oversaw the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic bomb and advocated for its use against Japan in the summer of 1945. That final role may have brought Stimson his most lasting place in the history of U.S. foreign policy, tainting—perhaps unfairly—his legacy. Two years following that fateful decision to use the bomb and the end of the war, with questions emerging about the moral implications and the necessity of using the atomic bomb, Stimson wrote an article in Harper’s Magazine defending the decision to drop the bomb. Stimson’s claim that the United States would have suffered up to 1 million casualties in what would have been a necessary invasion of the Japanese mainland (had the bomb not been used) seemed to stand in contrast to some of the other evidence emerging from that period. In the era of the Vietnam War with the U.S. military establishment under harsh attack from many corners, the role of Stimson in the Hiroshima decision endured vigorous critique by historians and critics of nuclear weapons. Without question, however, Henry Stimson served a long and distinguished career as an American diplomat and military strategist, one whose impacts continue to be felt in the deliberation and execution of U.S. policy in the 21st century. Chris J. Magoc See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Kellogg-Briand Pact; Nicaragua (1893–1945); Open Door Policy

Further Reading Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950. New York: Knopf, 1990. Louria, Margot. Triumph and Downfall: America’s Pursuit of Peace and Prosperity, 1921–1933. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. Schmitz, David F. Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001.

Tehran Conference (1943) The Tehran Conference, lasting from November 28 to December 1, 1943, was the first of the Big Three great power conferences during and following World War II. Several significant agreements were made between the Allies at this conference. One of the most important issues, especially for the Soviet Union, was the issue of a second front in Europe. The United States and Britain pledged to open a second front by May 1944. The Soviet Union promised that at around the same time it would launch a major offensive on the Eastern Front. This would force the Germans to attempt to repel two major offensives at the same time. To facilitate this cooperation the Allied powers agreed to have their military staffs consult frequently to coordinate military operations. Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, was initiated on June 6, 1944. In late June the Soviets began Operation Bagration, which led to the collapse of German Army Group Center. The Soviets pushed the Germans out of Belarus and Ukraine, as well as invading Poland and eventually Germany. Another major agreement was to support the partisans in Yugoslavia. Occupying Yugoslavia tied down several German divisions. The partisan movement was dominated by the Communists led by Josef Tito. Tito would eventually liberate the country from Axis occupation. Communist Yugoslavia after the war was largely independent from the Soviet Union. The Allied powers also agreed that it was desirable

for Turkey to enter the war. The Soviets pledged to support Turkey in the event of an attack from Germany or its ally Bulgaria. Turkey ultimately declared war on Germany in February 1945. By that time German military forces had been pushed out of southeastern Europe. Iran, the location for the conference, was strategically important as it was the only secure line of supplies between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. The Allies pledged economic assistance to Iran after the war. Iran had been occupied by the Soviet Union and Britain in August 1941 because of its close relationship with Germany. The Allied powers agreed to Iranian independence and its territorial integrity after the war. One of the first flashpoints of the Cold War occurred in Iran in 1946. The Soviets supported autonomous movements in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in an effort to pressure Tehran into giving an oil concession. Iran was able to get the Soviets to withdraw after promising an oil concession, which was later rejected by the Iranian parliament. The United States had extended Iran economic and military assistance during the war and supported it during the 1946 crisis. This began a process in which the United States saw Iran as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East, as well as domestically facilitating the growth in power of an authoritarian monarchy that would advance U.S. and Western interests. Iran occupied a strategic position as it shared a long border with the then southern Soviet Union. The United States was able to establish CIA listening posts along the border to monitor Soviet communications and military movements in Central Asia. This was significant in the verification of any strategic arms deal with the Soviet Union as much of the Soviet strategic nuclear force was based in Central Asia. With the growth of Iran’s oil wealth, Tehran became the largest recipient of American arms by the late 1970s and an important ally in maintaining American interests in the region. That process might be said to have been launched at the Tehran Conference in 1943. John Miglietta See also: Potsdam Conference

Further Reading Avalon Project at Yale Law School. The Tehran Conference. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/tehran.htm. Accessed October 17, 2014. Eubank, Keith. Summit at Teheran. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Hamzavi, A. H. “Iran and the Tehran Conference.” International Affairs 20, no. 2 (April 1944): 192–203.

United Nations (UN) The United Nations (UN) was formally established in June 1945. The influence of the United States in the establishment and subsequent operation of the UN was readily apparent in the new organization’s charter. The groundwork for the organization was laid at a series of major meetings in 1944 held in the town of Dumbarton Oaks (near Washington, D.C.) between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, while China was also brought into the process. Then, in San Francisco in June 1945, 51 governments signed the charter. Following its establishment the UN became central to the ostensive end of formal imperialism and buttressed the rising global movement toward decolonization. As a growing number of former colonies became sovereign nation-states, UN membership rose to more than 120 by 1970, and then more than 150 by 1980. The end of the Cold War increased the number further to 185 by the turn of the century, and by 2012 there were 193 member states.

Edward Stettinius, chairman of the United States delegation to the United Nations Charter meeting in San Francisco, signs the Charter for the U.S. while President Harry Truman (second from left) and others look on, June 25, 1945. The U.S.-led establishment of the United Nations represented an immediate response to World War II. (Corbis)

The U.S.-led establishment of the UN represented an immediate response to the Second World War, but it was also a successor organization to the discredited League of Nations, ironically also an initiative that had enjoyed the support of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War. The latter organization, which the United States failed to join, had risen and fallen between 1919 and 1939 as the first clearly identifiable effort to establish a world body to mediate disputes between states. Most significantly, it was also set up to facilitate the establishment of sovereign nation-states in Eastern Europe and the Middle East out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and to a lesser extent the czarist empire. In retrospect the emergence and expansion of the United Nations represented a fundamental world-historical shift from a world of empires to a world of sovereign nation-states. Meanwhile, for the United States and its wartime allies, the UN still remained grounded (as much as, if not more than, the League of Nations) in the notion that the great powers had unique rights and

obligations (shorn of their explicit imperial baggage) in international relations and world affairs. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the fact that the major powers—the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (now Russia), Great Britain, France, and China (Taiwan held the Chinese seat until 1971)—who had led the Allies to victory were given permanent seats on the UN Security Council: these positions gave each member the right of veto on any initiative emanating from the Security Council. Despite being routinely undermined by the Cold War, the Security Council soon became and has remained the most important decision-making body of the UN. It has the power to call on the armed forces of member governments to provide peacekeeping forces and to intervene in conflicts and disputes around the world. The Security Council has five permanent members (with, as noted above, powers of absolute veto) and 10 rotating members. The United States increasingly viewed the UN generally and the Security Council more specifically as an important forum for the wider Cold War. More significantly perhaps, it became what was perceived by many critics—Communist powers, leaders of nonaligned nations, and anti-imperialist opponents in the United States—as an instrument to advance American and Western interests. The UN was also directly involved in the decolonization movement and the issue of racial discrimination, which was often directly or indirectly connected to the colonial question. For instance, on November 20, 1947, the UN called for the creation of Jewish and Arab states out of the British mandate in Palestine; Jerusalem was to be placed under international administration. Opposed to this plan, the Arab delegates at the UN walked out of the General Assembly. On May 14, 1948, the proclamation of the State of Israel initiated open warfare between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The UN then mediated a cease-fire that eventually led to Israel’s formal admission to the United Nations in May 1949. Another conflict brought before the UN in the late 1940s was that arising between the de facto government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Dutch colonial government in the Netherlands East Indies. Using its influence both within and outside the United Nations, the United States prevailed upon the Dutch government to quickly decolonize and recognize Indonesian independence in 1949. The United States was concerned that Moscow’s support for national liberation movements, such as that in Indonesia, would increase Soviet influence in the region at the same time that U.S. support for decolonization enhanced American influence. The Korean War (1950–1953) was a turning point for the UN, and for U.S. Cold War policy. When war erupted between the north and the south on June 25, 1950, the Security Council quickly organized a UN military force, under U.S. leadership, to intervene in Korea. Because Moscow had been boycotting the Security Council since early 1950, the Soviets did not veto this plan. The Soviet boycott was a protest of the fact that China’s permanent seat on the Security Council was still held by the Nationalist government, which had been limited to control of Taiwan since the Chinese Communist Party had won power on the mainland in late 1949. The Korean conflict quickly escalated into a major war. The General Assembly resolutions on Korean unification were soon being used to justify a full-scale military effort against North Korea. The initial aim of U.S./UN intervention to achieve the limited goal of ending North Korean “aggression” was rapidly transformed into a wider effort to reunify Korea under a pro-U.S./UN government. The Korean conflict eventually drew the People’s Republic of China into the war. The decline of U.S. influence at the UN in the 1950s was linked to the process of decolonization, which increasingly altered the balance of power in the General Assembly. A key event in this process and the development of the UN was the Suez Crisis of July 1956. The Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–1970) precipitated the crisis by seizing the Suez Canal on July 26. Because the canal was of great commercial and strategic importance to Great Britain and France, those countries, despite the objections of the Security Council, attacked Egypt with the support of Israel. With U.S. and Soviet

support, the UN responded by creating and dispatching a 6,000-man United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to manage a cease-fire and oversee the withdrawal of Anglo-French forces from the Canal Zone. The UNEF, which continued to operate as a buffer between Egypt and Israel until 1967, was important for future peacekeeping efforts. It arose from a resolution of the General Assembly and clearly set the precedent (not always followed) that UN peacekeeping forces should work to prevent conflicts rather than engage in them. The growing significance of decolonization for the United Nations was made clear when, following Congo’s achievement of independence from Belgium in 1960, a UN force (Operation des Nations Unies au Congo—ONUC) was asked to intervene. The operation in Congo, which lasted from July 1960 to June 1964, was the largest UN action since the Korean War. Although more than 20,000 UN-sponsored troops entered Congo, no cease-fire was agreed to and Katanga was not brought back into Congo until 1964. The ONUC was recalled in 1964 partly because the UN was on the brink of bankruptcy (a result of French and Soviet refusals to contribute to the costs of force). Not until the UN operation in Somalia in 1992 did the United Nations again intervene militarily on the scale of its operation in Congo. Nevertheless, by the 1970s, the recent emergence of new nation-states in Africa and Asia had clearly altered the balance in the UN in favor of the so-called “Third World.” This shift was manifested in the formal Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which passed the General Assembly on May 1, 1974. However, by the 1980s, calls at the UN and elsewhere to address the North-South question faded, especially after the start of the debt crisis and the subsequent spread of neoliberal economic policies and practices. The end of the Cold War strengthened this trend, and by the 1990s almost all branches of the United Nations had become instruments for promoting economic liberalism (neoliberalism) and what is now known as globalization. The end of the Cold War provided the UN with opportunities to again undertake major peacekeeping and security activities. For instance, while the UN dispatched a total of 10,000 peacekeepers to five operations in 1987, the total number of troops acting as peacekeepers under UN auspices by 1995 was 72,000 in 18 different countries. Early post–Cold War initiatives augured well for the UN’s new role. The major civil war in El Salvador, which had been fueled by the Cold War, came to a negotiated end in 1992 under the auspices of the United Nations. Other countries in which the UN has provided peacekeepers and election monitors include Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia, East Timor, Macedonia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Somalia, and Western Sahara. While Cambodia and East Timor are seen as UN success stories, the failure of the United Nations in Angola and Somalia highlights the constraints on the UN’s role in the post–Cold War era. The UN’s new post–Cold War initiative in relation to peacekeeping was linked to the appointment of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general at the beginning of 1992. Shortly after taking up the new post, Boutros-Ghali presented the Security Council with his “Agenda for Peace,” asking member states to provide permanently designated military units that could be deployed quickly in a time of crisis. The UN military advisory staff was expanded with a focus on intelligence activities and long-range planning, and efforts were made to enhance communications between officers on the ground and UN headquarters. These initiatives made little progress, however, in the context of an organization comprised of sovereign nation-states that were wary of providing soldiers and equipment in ways that might diminish their own sovereignty. As a result of concerted U.S. opposition, Boutros-Ghali was not reappointed as secretary-general for a second term, further dampening the momentum toward a more assertive United Nations in the post–Cold War era. For example, repeated calls for changing the structure of the Security Council have been deflected or defused by those powers (including the United States) that want to preserve the status quo.

Boutros-Ghali’s replacement, Kofi Annan, emerged as a much more cautious and conciliatory secretarygeneral, as has his successor Ban Ki-moon, who took over on January 1, 2007, and was reelected in 2011 to serve until December 31, 2016. Marcos (Mark T.) Berger See also: China, Early Cold War; Congo Crisis; Eisenhower Doctrine; Israel (1946–1954); Korea

Further Reading Hanhimäki, Jussi M. The United Nations: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hilderbrand, Robert C. Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Mazower, Mark. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Meisler, Stanley. United Nations: The First Fifty Years. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Why We Fight (Frank Capra) (1942–1945) Shortly after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in early December 1941, U.S. Army chief of staff George C. Marshall, the army’s senior officer, approached acclaimed Hollywood director Frank Capra with a request to create a series of films that would inspire and motivate the soldiers who were about to be shipped off to fight in Europe and the Pacific. Marshall made it clear to Capra that the films would make a tremendous contribution to what would soon become an all-consuming total war effort to defeat the Axis powers. Marshall knew that the Signal Corps, the traditional vehicle for communications efforts in the U.S. Army, would not be adequate for the momentous nature of this task. The urgency and importance of putting the project in the right hands was further reinforced by the recent production of Triumph of the Will—the powerfully chilling German propaganda film produced by Leni Riefenstahl that promulgated the horrific totalitarian master race designs of the Nazis. In the hands of newly enlisted major Frank Capra, the result was Why We Fight, a series of seven propaganda films that were shown to American soldiers, and—in part at the insistence of President Franklin D. Roosevelt—general audiences across the country to help inspire the home front effort. The latter goal was especially important, given the prevailing noninterventionist position of most Americans prior to Pearl Harbor. Produced from 1942 to 1945, the films were narrated by the Academy Award–winning actor Walter Huston. Each film ended with this quote from Marshall: “The Victory of the Democracies can only be complete with the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan.” The films brilliantly featured extensive footage of German, Italian, and Japanese militarism dating to the 1930s, as well as numerous clips of those nations’ own propaganda efforts—including Triumph of the Will. Imagined immediately after given the assignment, Capra’s stroke of genius here was to simply lay bare the darkly despotic aims and actions of America’s enemies; they, Capra was convinced, would provide all the motivation soldiers would need. In addition, the films also lauded U.S. democratic ideals, America’s origins and heroic past struggles, as well as the brave and courageous efforts of U.S. allies Great Britain, France, and Russia in trying to halt Axis aggression. The first of the seven films, Prelude to War, was produced in 1942 and exhibited the clear differences between democracy and fascism. It also examined the horrors of the Japanese conquest of Manchuria as well as the Italian Fascists’ rout of Ethiopia. In this first film, Capra hoped to depict a comparison of the righteous, democratic United States against the barbarous Axis powers plaguing Western and Asian lands. As Capra put it, the film “presented a general picture of two worlds; the slave and the free, and the rise of

totalitarian militarism” (Capra, 328). Prelude to War won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1942. The next five films detailed various other aspects of Axis power militarism and totalitarianism, interspersed with the intrepid efforts of America’s allies to resist an Axis victory. The final installment was perhaps the most important in the series. Titled War Comes to America and produced in 1945, the film depicted how Axis aggression had compelled the United States to move from its long noninterventionist isolation toward taking the bold and decisive steps that were inexorably leading to victory in World War II. In this film Capra was essentially declaring the righteousness of the American people and the American system to be the distinguishing factors that were inevitably leading to the defeat of the Axis powers. As he completed production of Why We Fight and the war in Europe drew to a close, Capra turned his attention to bolstering the war effort in the Pacific with Know Your Enemy—Japan. Similar to Why We Fight, Know Your Enemy—Japan centered on the barbarous horrors of the Japanese against not only the indigenous peoples they conquered but also the American soldiers fighting in the region. And as before, Capra contrasted good versus evil, American civilization against Japanese barbarism, the United States’ democratic liberties against Japanese totalitarianism. Interestingly, more than a half-century later, the title Why We Fight was revived by filmmaker Eugene Jarecki in a scathing documentary he made in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Jarecki’s film leaned heavily on the 1961 farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower in which he warned of a “military-industrial complex” that he suggested was increasingly driving the nation’s foreign policy and its political and economic institutions. Keen observers noted that although the films bore the same title, the global military hegemonic power the United States had become by the time Jarecki made the film in 2005 bore little resemblance to the America of Frank Capra. Chris J. Magoc and Nina Teresi See also: Military-Industrial Complex; Primary Documents: “This Man Is Your Friend” Propaganda Poster Series

Further Reading Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Yalta Conference (1945) The Yalta Conference was the last great power conference held before World War II ended in Europe. It took place from February 4 to 11, 1945, in the Crimean resort of Yalta, then part of the Soviet Union and currently part of Ukraine. The major participants were Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union; Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain; and Franklin Roosevelt, president of the United States. This was the follow-up to the Tehran Conference of 1943. The major issues discussed at the Yalta Conference were the occupation of Germany; the entry of the Soviet Union in the war against Japan; the disposition of influence among the major powers in Eastern and Central Europe; and the structure of the United Nations. A major point of agreement at the conference was the unconditional surrender of Germany. It was decided at the conclusion of hostilities that Germany would be split into four zones of occupation with a four-part occupation of the German capital of Berlin. The great powers agreed to accept France as an

occupying power with a zone carved out of the British and American sectors. Germany would be demilitarized and Nazi influence eliminated. There would also be the formation of the reparations council headquartered in Moscow. The United States and Britain wanted the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The Soviet Union and Japan had a nonaggression pact. The atomic bomb was in the final stages of production but there was no guarantee of its success. In addition, the Japanese still had substantial military forces in China and other parts of East Asia, including Korea. The Soviet Union was very anxious to acquire territories it lost to Japan as a result of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905. Stalin agreed to engage in hostilities against Japan within 90 days after the war in Europe ended. He was able to gain the promise of territorial concessions at the expense of Japan that included the southern part of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands. In addition, the Soviets desired increased influence in Manchuria as well as Korea. The Soviets did engage in the war against Japan on August 8, 1945, overrunning the Japanese army in Manchuria within a few days, but a full-scale invasion of Japan with Soviet participation was rendered unnecessary with the U.S. decision to drop two atomic bombs on August 6 and 9.

The Yalta Conference, February 4-11, 1945, was the last great power conference held before World War II ended in Europe (left to right: British prime minister Winston Churchill, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin). The major issues discussed at Yalta included the occupation and immediate future of Germany. (National Archives)

Another major issue discussed at the Yalta Conference was the question of the postwar fate of Eastern and Central European nations, especially Poland. The Soviets desired to have a buffer zone in Eastern Europe composed of friendly, pliant states to guard against any further invasions of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had swept the Nazis out of Belarus, Ukraine, as well as Poland. It had overrun Romania and Bulgaria, which were allied with the Germans. In addition, it had invaded Hungary where the Germans were desperately attempting to hold on to Budapest. Soviet armies were penetrating deep into eastern Germany. The issue of political control over these territories was in many ways already accomplished as a result of Soviet battlefield victories. The most complicated issue was Poland. In 1939, the Western Allies’ pledge to defend Poland had figured into the onset of World War II, although Poland was nevertheless quickly overrun by the Nazis. The Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact led the Germans and the Soviets to partition Poland, as well as ceded control of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to the Soviet Union. These

territories had once been part of the Russian Empire but had gained their independence after World War I. (They were also the first of the Soviet republics to declare their independence in 1991.) There was a Polish government in exile based in London, and many Polish volunteers fought with the Western Allies against Nazi Germany. The Soviets backed a Communist group of Poles and set them up in the Polish city of Lublin when they entered Poland in late 1944. The Soviets insisted that they be given territorial concessions in Poland as they argued that as a result of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, Poland took territory at the expense of Soviet Ukraine. All parties agreed that Poland would be compensated with former German territory in East Prussia. The Baltic countries were incorporated into the Soviet Union. Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany saw the Soviets install Communist-led governments. Together with the Soviet Union, these states formed the Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1955 as a counterweight to NATO, which had formed in 1949, and to the rearming of West Germany. The final major agreement was over the structure of the emerging United Nations international security organization. The Soviets agreed to join the UN and participate in the Security Council. There were agreements detailing that the five major victors of World War II—the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China—would be permanent members of the Security Council and would each have veto power over Security Council actions. Critics have long argued that the Western Allies gave away too much at Yalta, emphasizing international stability over the freedom of Eastern and Central Europe. The Soviets got most of the territorial and political influence they wanted in Eastern and Central Europe. In addition, they regained territory in East Asia and were accepted as major powers in shaping the postwar world. However, the Western Allies got a pledge of Soviet support against Japan, as well as some degree of Soviet cooperation in the postwar era. It was the military realities of the conflict that left the Soviets in direct control of most of Eastern and Central Europe. Participation in the occupation of Germany solidified the U.S. position in shaping the future of postwar Europe. This helped to create the climate for the beginning of the Cold War, lasting from the end of World War II to the breakup of the Soviet Union. John Miglietta See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Potsdam Conference; Tehran Conference

Further Reading Avalon Project at Yale Law School. The Yalta Conference. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp. Accessed October 17, 2014. Bundy, McGeorge. “The Test of Yalta.” Foreign Affairs 27, no. 4 (July 1949): 618–629. Latin Library. The Yalta Conference. www.Thelatinlibrary.com//imperialism//notes/yalta.html. Accessed October 17, 2014. Plokhy, S. M. Yalta: The Price of Peace. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

Zionism Developed in response to centuries of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and a lack of assimilation of Jewish populations into the European diasporas of the 19th and 20th centuries, Zionism was the movement that aimed to transform a growing Jewish nationalism and a vision of Jewish redemption through a return to the Holy Land into international support for a permanent Jewish state in Palestine. The success of the Zionist agenda to create a Jewish state in Palestine is closely linked to its support by Western empires, particularly Great Britain and the United States.

The Zionist agenda turned political in the wake of violent anti-Semitism in late 19th-century Russia and Eastern Europe. Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), a Viennese Jew, presented his compatriots an alternative to the persecution they encountered in Europe by suggesting that Jews needed a national state of their own in which to freely express their culture and religion. From his endeavors, the World Zionist Organization was born to advance the creation of a Jewish state. Britain promised its support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, an area it was then conquering, when it affirmed the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917). American politicians showed their support of pro-Zionist agendas, in part due to Christian religious sentiment and imperialist desires that identified the “outnumbered” Jewish settlers in Palestine as brave adventurers fighting a supposedly culturally, religiously inferior (and darker skinned, as portrayed in popular culture), primitive Arab opposition. Following these views, Woodrow Wilson became the first American president to support the Balfour Declaration, thereby pledging eventual American support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Post–World War II Americans, Jewish or not, often supported Zionist goals in Palestine due to guilt caused by a lack of American intervention in the Holocaust. President Harry Truman recognized the birth of Israel soon after the new state declared its independence in May 1948. His political agenda, to ensure the support of Jewish Americans in the upcoming election, may well have played a part in Truman’s decision to support Israel, but so too did his fear that the Soviet Union might take the opportunity to gain a Communist foothold in the Middle East by supporting Israel’s independence. Support for the new state continued to develop throughout the Cold War era due to concerns over the rise of Communist states. Even when American presidents disagreed with Israeli actions, they often showed a willingness to continue to support Israel due to the Jewish state’s strong anti-Soviet posture in the Cold War, a position that aligned nicely with the United States’ own strategic interests in the Middle East. Zionists have continued to enjoy the support of the United States, but in recent years that support has become more complicated. Historically, the United States sponsored the Zionist agenda due to conditions created by the Cold War and out of domestic political interests. The United States has found in the Zionists both diplomatic allies and liabilities and will likely continue to do so. The post-9/11 military response of the United States to launch a “War on Terror” that included preemptive war and violation of Geneva conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners won the ardent backing of hardline Zionists who have been fighting their own brand of domestic terror for decades. At the same time, U.S. support for a Palestinian state and an end to settlements on the West Bank have run afoul of Zionists who espouse what critics find to be an absolutist position on Israeli territorial aggrandizement and what U.S. diplomats have found to be obstructive toward attainment of a resolution of an Israeli-Palestinian solution. Kristin Collins-Breyfogle

Further Reading Becker, Richard. Palestine: Israel and the U.S. Empire. San Francisco: PSL Publications, 2009. Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009. Gelvin, James. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kiracofe, Clifford A., Jr. Dark Crusade: Christian Zionism and US Foreign Policy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS The Nye Commission Report (1936)

Established April 12, 1934, the Nye Committee—formally the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry—was formed in the U.S. Senate for the purpose of investigating the role the munitions and banking industries played in U.S. intervention in World War I. Chaired by North Dakota Republican senator Gerald Nye (1892–1971), the seven-member Nye Committee held nearly 100 hearings and received testimony from 200 witnesses. Its final report, excerpted here, concluded that the extraordinary imbalance of American loans to Great Britain versus those received by Germany and the Central Powers from 1914 to 1917 became a central cause of U.S. intervention in the war, and that industrial producers of military armaments cynically profited from industrial production for the Allied cause. The Nye Committee findings reinforced the mid-1930s climate of isolationism, even as the genuine national security threat of World War II loomed ever closer. FINDINGS I. NATURE OF THE MUNITIONS COMPANIES The committee finds, under the head of “the nature of the industrial and commercial organizations engaged in the manufacture of or traffic in arms, ammunitions, or other implements of war” that almost none of the munitions companies in this country confine themselves exclusively to the manufacture of military materials. Great numbers of the largest suppliers to the Army and Navy (Westinghouse, General Electric, du Pont, General Motors, Babcock & Wilcox, etc.) are predominantly manufacturers of materials for civilian life. Others, such as the aviation companies and Colt’s Patent Firearms Co., supply the greatest portion of their output to the military services. In addition to the manufacturers there are several sales companies which act as agents for various manufacturers. There are also brokers dealing largely in old and second-hand supplies. In case of war, other companies, not at present producing any munitions, would be called upon to furnish them. The Army manufactures its own rifles, cartridges, and field artillery. The Navy manufactures most of its own propellant powder, its own guns, and half of the battleships. II. THE SALES METHODS OF THE MUNITIONS COMPANIES The Committee finds, under the head of sales methods of the munitions companies, that almost without exception, the American munitions companies investigated have at times resorted to such unusual approaches, questionable favors and commissions, and methods of “doing the needful” as to constitute, in effect, a form of bribery of foreign governmental officials or of their close friends in order to secure business. The committee realizes that these were field practices by the agents of the companies, and were apparently in many cases part of a level of competition set by foreign companies, and that the heads of the American companies were, in cases, apparently unaware of their continued existence and shared the committee’s distaste and disapprobation of such practices. The committee accepts the evidence that the same practices are resorted to by European munitions companies, and that the whole process of selling arms abroad thus, in the words of a Colt agent, has “brought into play the most despicable side of human nature; lies, deceit, hypocrisy, greed, and graft occupying a most prominent part in the transactions.” The committee finds such practices on the part of any munitions company, domestic or foreign, to be highly unethical, a discredit to American business, and an unavoidable reflection upon those American governmental agencies which have unwittingly aided in the transactions so contaminated. The committee finds, further, that not only are such transactions highly unethical, but that they carry within themselves the seeds of disturbance to the peace and stability of those nations in which they take

place. In some nations, violent changes of administration might take place immediately upon the revelation of all details of such transactions. Mr. Lammot du Pont stated that the publication of certain du Pont telegrams (not entered in the record) might cause a political repercussion in a certain South American country. At its February 1936 hearings, the committee also suppressed a number of names of agents and the country in which they were operating, in order to avoid such repercussions. The committee finds, further, that the intense competition among European and American munitions companies with the attendant bribery of governmental officials tends to create a corrupt officialdom, and thereby weaken the remaining democracies of the world at their head. The committee finds, further, that the constant availability of munitions companies with competitive bribes ready in outstretched hands does not create a situation where the officials involved can, in the nature of things, be as much interested in peace and measures to secure peace as they are in increased armaments. The committee finds also that there is a very considerable threat to the peace and civic progress of other nations in the success of the munitions makers and of their agents in corrupting the officials of any one nation and thereby selling to that one nation an armament out of proportion to its previous armaments. Whether such extraordinary sales are procured through bribery or through other forms of salesmanship, the effect of such sales is to produce fear, hostility, and greater munitions orders on the part of neighboring countries, culminating in economic strain and collapse or war. The committee elsewhere takes note of the contempt of some of the munitions companies for those governmental departments and officials interested in securing peace, and finds here that continual or even occasional corruption of other governments naturally leads to a belief that all governments, including our own, must be controlled by economic forces entirely. III. THEIR ACTIVITIES CONCERNING PEACE EFFORTS The committee finds, under this head, that there is no record of any munitions company aiding any proposals for limitation of armaments, but that, on the contrary, there is a record of their active opposition by some to almost all such proposals, of resentment toward them, of contempt for those responsible for them, and of violation of such controls whenever established, and of rich profiting whenever such proposals failed…. The first great peace effort after the war was incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles and in the treaty of peace between the United States and Germany in the form of a prohibition on the manufacture, import, and export of arms by Germany. The manufacture and export of military powder by German companies, in violation of these treaty provisions first took place in 1924 and was known to the Nobel Co. (predecessors of Imperial Chemical Industries) of England and to the du Pont Co., but was not brought to the attention of the Department of State. The du Pont officials explained that the violation was allowed because of the close commercial relations between the British and German chemical companies. Later, United Aircraft licensed a German company for the manufacture of its airplane engines. Sperry Gyroscope also licensed a German company for the manufacture of its equipment. Both the engines and the equipment were of military availability. (See part V, B, secs. II and III.) The second peace effort was made in 1922, when the Washington Disarmament Conference took place, not long after the American shipbuilding companies had received post-war awards of destroyers at a cost of $149,000,000, and while battleships whose construction was left pending in 1917 were being completed. The naval part of that conference succeeded in stopping a naval race. There was however, no effective action taken in regard to checking the use of poison gas, which was the other main subject for consideration. The committee’s record is incomplete on the activities of the munitions companies in this

connection, but does show their opposition to proposals for control of the chemical industry and their interest in the choice of chemical advisers to the American delegation. The conference had been preceded by the sale of all the German chemical patents to the American companies for a small sum, extensive propaganda and expenditures for high-tariff protection on grounds of national defense, and the instigation and writing of news stories from London and Paris designed to give the American public the impression that France and England were engaged in the construction of great poison-gas factories of their own to offset the German ones. Some of these were written by a du Pont agent under an assumed name. The Washington Conference operated in this atmosphere, and contented itself with repeating the declarations of The Hague conventions respecting the use of poisonous gases in warfare which had been violated during the war. Several delegations pointed out that this was no progress at all, but simply a reaffirmation of supposedly existing international law. The embargo placed at the request of the Central (Nanking) Chinese Government on exports of arms to China was, according to the evidence, violated by American and European munitions companies. Shipments via Europe and Panama were frequently considered as a means of evading the embargo. The Geneva Arms Control Conference of 1925 was watched carefully by the American and European munitions makers. They knew the American military delegates to the conference several weeks before the public was informed of their names, and one of them told the munitions makers that he believed a licensing system (the sine qua non of any control) to be undesirable. Du Pont representatives made known their objections to publicity. At a conference at the Department of Commerce (prior to the convening of the Geneva Conference) the objections of the munitions manufacturers were considered carefully and reservations to the draft convention to be discussed at Geneva were made. State Department documents not entered into the record, give credit to the American delegation to the Geneva Conference for weakening the proposed draft convention in two important respects. The du Pont representatives (who attended the meeting at the Department of Commerce) later remarked of the final draft of the convention regarding the arms traffic signed at Geneva in 1925: There will be some few inconveniences to the manufacture of munitions in their export trade, but in the main they will not he hampered materially. The draft convention was widely advertised as a large step forward in the direction of control of the traffic in arms. It has, in 1936, not yet been ratified by sufficient States to put it into effect. The influence of American naval shipbuilding companies on the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1927 has been described in the committee’s report on Naval Shipbuilding (74th Cong., Rept. 944). Their agent at Geneva claimed credit for the failure of that conference, which came at a time when the Big Three shipyards had been given orders by the Navy for $53,744,000 in cruisers, which would have been cut materially in case the conference had been a success. He was paid by the shipbuilders into 1929. The Navy has not denied to the committee that this agent of the shipbuilders was in possession of confidential Navy Department documents during the time of his activity at Geneva. Following the Geneva conference an arms embargo resolution was introduced in 1928 by the chairman of the American delegation to that conference, Representative Burton of Ohio. The munitions manufacturers, cocky with their success at Geneva, consulted with such allied interests as the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute, and found it unnecessary to appear in the front ranks of opposition to this resolution. In 1932 Representative Fish introduced a resolution for a multilateral agreement renouncing the sale and export of arms. Du Pont representatives were active in lining up War and Navy opposition to it. In 1932-33 President Hoover supported an arms embargo which drew the comment from a du Pont representative:

Regarding the attempts of Mr. Hoover and the “cooky pushers” in the State Department to effect embargoes on munitions sent out of the country, I do not believe there is the least occasion for alarm at present. The munitions people were active in opposition to the arms embargo proposal which was adopted in the Senate without opposition. Senator Bingham of Connecticut succeeded in killing the bill on reconsideration and received the thanks of the munitions people and of their organization, the Army Ordnance Association. The War Department also opposed the embargo. In 1932, another disarmament conference was held at Geneva. By this time the failure to prevent the rearmament of Germany, described above, had resulted in great profits to the French steel industry which had received large orders for the building of the continuous line of fortifications across the north of France, to the French munitions companies, and profits were beginning to flow into the American and English pockets from German orders for aviation matériel. This in turn resulted in a French and English aviation race, and with Germany openly rearming the much-heralded disarmament conference which convened in 1932 has failed completely…. In 1934, Congress adopted a joint resolution prohibiting, in effect, sales of munitions to Bolivia and Paraguay, then engaged in the Chaco War, for a period of almost 6 years. During these 6 years, the munitions companies had profited largely from the defeat of the Burton embargo proposal, offered in 1928. The Chaco embargo, according to indictments issued by a Federal grand jury, was violated by the Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation and the Curtiss Aeroplane Motor Co. The lower court has held the embargo unconstitutional on the ground of delegation of power to the President. Mayrink-Veiga, agents for many munitions companies in Brazil suggested that the embargo could be evaded by the shipment of planes to Europe first, stating that to be the Curtiss and Bellanca procedure. In 1935, after a year of hearings by the special committee, a neutrality bill was passed including an embargo on arms, ammunition, and implements of war in the event of a state of war between two or more foreign states, and including a munitions-control board with power to issue export licenses. The Secretary of State has announced that not all the companies supposed to register under this law have done so. In 1936 an attempt was made to amend the neutrality law by holding the exports of necessary war materials (oil, copper, steel, etc.) to belligerents to normal quotas. This was defeated. Considerable quantities of those materials were already being exported to Italy, one of the belligerents in the Italo-Ethiopian War, and some of the exporting companies had connections and investments in Italy. IV. THE EFFECT OF ARMAMENTS ON PEACE The committee finds, under the head of the effect of armament, on peace, that some of the munitions companies have occasionally had opportunities to intensify the fears of people for their neighbors and have used them to their own profit. The committee finds, further, that the very quality which in civilian life tends to lead toward progressive civilization, namely the improvements of machinery, has been used by the munitions makers to scare nations into a continued frantic expenditure for the latest improvements in devices of warfare. The constant message of the traveling salesman of the munitions companies to the rest of the world has been that they now had available for sale something new, more dangerous and more deadly than ever before and that the potential enemy was or would be buying it. While the evidence before this committee does not show that wars have been started solely because of the activities of munitions makers and their agents, it is also true that wars rarely have one single cause,

and the committee finds it to be against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity. The committee finds, further, that munitions companies engaged in bribery find themselves involved in the civil and military politics of other nations, and that this is an unwarranted form of intrusion into the affairs of other nations and undesirable representation of the character and methods of the people of the United States. The export field of our munitions companies has been South America and China, with occasional excursions into Poland, Turkey, Siam, Italy, Japan, and other nations. There was less important dynamite loose in either South America or China than in western Europe. The activities of the munitions makers in Europe were of greater importance to the peace of the western world than their activities in either South America or China. It will remain for commissions with full powers in the large European nations to report on the provocative activities of their companies, particularly to investigate the statements made in the French Chamber of Deputies, that Skoda in Czechoslovakia, a subsidiary of Schneider-Creusot, financed the Hitler movement to power, which, more than any one other event, can be credited with causing the present huge rearmament race in Europe, so profitable to the European steel, airplane, and munitions companies. In South America there have, in the post-war years, been moments of severe tension, occasionally breaking out into war. One of these moments apparently came directly after the World War, when Chile bought from Vickers a considerable battle fleet. This caused agitation in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, with Vickers taking the lead in Chile and Argentina, and Electric Boat Co. in Peru and Brazil. The situation was apparently so delicate that an administration countermanded an offer from the United States Navy to sell destroyers to Peru inasmuch as the sale might encourage an outbreak of war between Chile and Peru (exhibits 54, 57). Later tension developed between Peru and Chile over the Tacna-Arica matter and Aubry, the Electric Boat Co. agent, felt that if he brought the contracts for submarines for Peru—it would be a great blunder going to Argentina, for instance, via Chile (In this business we have to be tactful and a little diplomatist) and so in regard to Brazil as well as to the Argentine now that affairs are going to take place at the same time (exhibit 69). Mr. Carse, president of Electric Boat, recognized the danger of armament when he pointed out in regard to financing Peruvian purchases “the armament which this money could purchase would not insure victory, as the other nation has much stronger armament and would tend more to bring conflict to a point than if they did not purchase the armament” (exhibit 61). It was sold, nevertheless…. The naval armament had its military side. Evidence read into the record during the Colt Co. hearing in 1936 indicated an arms race with intense activity on the part of all machine-gun manufacturers. The country which was credited with starting military armament “out of all proportion with that of other countries in South America” was identified as a country whose officials were the most susceptible to bribes. The Department of Commerce obligingly furnished Colts the information that the arms race was bringing about a cabinet crisis in one of the countries reluctant to participate in it. The statement of a Federal Laboratories salesman that “the unsettled condition in South America has been a great thing for me” is the key, and also, “We are certainly in one hell of a business where a fellow has to wish for trouble to make a living.” Colombia and Peru, at the time of the Leticia incident, were each kept well informed by the munitions companies of the proposed purchases of the other nation. The evidence of the Colt agent in Peru was that the Vickers agent, after unloading a huge armament order on Peru, had boasted to the Peruvians that he

would sell “double the amount, and more modern, to the Chilean Government.” When a limited amount of mat[é]riel, such as machine guns, was available, Bolivia could be forced into ordering them on the threat that unless she acted quickly, Paraguay would get them. Killing the back-country Indians of South America with airplanes, bombs, and machine guns boiled down to an order to get busy because “these opera bouffe revolutions are usually short-lived, and we must make the most of the opportunity.” In China the munitions companies report that there was a certain amount of feeling between the Central (Nanking) Government and the Canton Government. The Boeing agent was able to sell 10 planes to the Canton Government. Referring to the Nanking (recognized) Government he wrote: Their anger at us in selling airplanes to the Cantonese is more than offset by the fact that the Cantonese have gotten ahead of them and will have better equipment than they will have. In other words, the Canton sale is quite a stimulant to the sale up here. The company, interested in making sales also to the recognized Nanking Government, replied: If the present deal with the Cantonese can be put through, without unreasonable demands being made upon us, it is to our advantage to successfully conclude the business if for no other reason but for the effect it would have on the Nanking Government. All this may be little more to the munitions people than a highly profitable game of bridge with special attention on all sides to the technique of the “squeeze” play, but to a considerable part of the world’s inhabitants there is still something frightful in death by machinery, and the knowledge that neighboring governments have acquired the latest and fastest engines of destruction leads to suspicion that those engines are meant to be used, and are not simply for play and show. At the time a naval bill for $617,000,000 was before Congress, the president of the Bath Iron Works in Maine asked the publisher of a string of newspapers to reprint a Japanese war-scare story, although the Chinese source of that story had been thoroughly discredited editorially by the newspaper originally publishing it, the New York Herald Tribune. He thanked the publisher for playing up the scare story (Report on Naval Shipbuilding). Attempts to sell munitions frequently involve bribery, which, to be effective, must go to those high in authority. This is apt to involve the companies in the politics of foreign nations. Federal Laboratories, by putting itself at the disposal of the administration of Cuba and two opposing factions, all at the same time, is a case in point. The Colt agent in Peru reported on his helping overthrow the general in charge of ordnance orders. American airplane companies reported on the political influence of French and English airplane companies, in a certain European country. Sperry Gyroscope’s representative reported on Vickers’ (English) political influence in Spain, as did also Electric Boat Co. officials. The political power of the companies is best indicated, however, by a letter from Mr. John Ball, director of the Soley Armament Co Ltd., of England, in which he pointed out that “the stocks we control are of such magnitude that the sale of a big block of them could alter the political balance of power of the smaller States.” V. THEIR RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT The committee first, under this head, repeats its report on naval shipbuilding, in which “the committee finds, under the head of influence and lobbying of shipbuilders, that the Navy contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers constitute a very large and influential financial group”, and “the committee finds that the matter of national defense should be above and separated from lobbying and the use of political influence by self-interested groups and that it has not been above or separated from either of them.” The committee finds, further, that the munitions companies have secured the active support of the War, Navy, Commerce, and even State Departments in their sales abroad, even when the material was to be

produced in England or Italy. The committee finds that by their aid and assistance to munitions companies the War, Navy, and Commerce Departments condone, in effect, in the eyes of those foreign officials cognizant of the details of the transactions the unethical practices of the companies which characterize their foreign sales efforts. The committee finds that the munitions companies have constantly exerted pressure on the War Department to allow the exportation of the most recent American improvements in warfare, and have usually been successful in securing it, and have also furnished plans of important new machines of war to their foreign agents in advance of any release by the War Department. The committee finds that the War Department encourages the sale of modern equipment abroad in order that the munitions companies may stay in business and be available in the event of another war, and that this consideration outranks the protection of secrets. (General Ruggles was quoted: “It was vastly more important to encourage the du Pont Co. to continue in the manufacture of propellants for military use, than to endeavor to protect secrets relating to the manufacture.”) The committee finds that as improvements are developed here, often with the cooperation of the military services, and these improvements presumably give the United States a military advantage, we are in the anomalous position of being forced to let the other nations have the advantages which we have obtained for ourselves, in order to keep the munitions manufacturers going, so that the United States can take advantage of the same improvements which its companies have sold abroad. The committee finds, from official documents it has not entered into the record, that the United States naval missions to Brazil and Peru have been given considerable help to American munitions makers, and that their participation and leadership in war games directed at “a potential enemy” have not advanced the cause of peace in South America, and that their activity can be misinterpreted by neighboring countries as support of any military plans of the nations to which they are attached. The committee finds, from official documents which it has not entered into the record, that the sales of munitions to certain South American nations in excess of their normal capacity to pay, was one of the causes for the defaults on certain South American bonds; and that the sales of the munitions was, in effect, financed by the American bond purchasers, and the loss on the bonds was borne by the same people. The committee finds that the Army Ordnance Association, consisting of personnel from the munitions companies, constitutes a self-interested organization and has been active in War Department politics and promotions. The committee finds that the Navy League of the United States has solicited and accepted contributions from steamship companies, the recipients of subsidy benefits, and that it has solicited contributions from companies with large foreign investments on the ground that these would profit from a large navy and that its contributors have at times been persons connected with Navy supplies. The committee also finds that the Navy League together with various Navy officials have engaged in political activity looking toward the defeat of Congressmen unfavorable to Navy League and Navy views. The committee finds, further, that any close associations between munitions and supply companies on the one hand and the service departments on the other hand, of the kind which existed in Germany before the World War, constitutes an unhealthy alliance in that it brings into being a self-interested political power which operates in the name of patriotism and satisfies interests which are, in large part, purely selfish, and that such associations are an inevitable part of militarism, and are to be avoided in peacetime at all costs. The committee finds, finally, that the neutrality bill of 1936, to which all its members gave their support and which provides for an embargo on the export of arms, ammunitions, and implements of war to belligerents, was a much needed forward step, and that the establishment of a Munitions Control Board,

under the Department of State, should satisfactorily prevent the shipment of arms to other than recognized governments. VI. INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS OF MUNITIONS COMPANIES The committee finds, under this head, that, among the companies investigated, the following have the most extensive foreign arrangements: F. I. du Pont do [sic] Nemours Co., Colt’s Patent Firearms Co., Electric Boat Co., Sperry Gyroscope Co., Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Co. The committee finds that the usual form of arrangement is a license to a foreign ally involving rights to manufacture and sell in certain parts of the world, together with more or less definite price-fixing agreements and occasionally profit-sharing arrangements, and that in effect the world is partitioned by parties at interest. The committee finds that the granting of licenses to manufacture and sell to nations against which there were embargoes, such as Germany, was in practice a violation of the interest of such embargoes and nullified them. The committee finds that the international commercial interests of such large organizations as du Pont and Imperial Chemical Industries may precede in the minds of those companies the importance of national policy as described publicly by the foreign office or State Department, and that such considerations of commercial interest were apparently foremost in the rearming of Germany beginning in 1924 and in the sale of a process which could he used to manufacture cheaper munitions in Japan in 1932, shortly after Secretary of State Stimson had taken steps to express the disapproval of this Nation for Japan’s military activities in Manchuokuo. Several aviation companies also licensed Japan for the use of their material in Manchuokuo at a time when the United States Government refused recognition to it. Recognition by munitions companies may be far more important than diplomatic recognition. The committee finds that the licensing of American inventions to allied companies in foreign nations is bound to involve in some form the recurrence of experiences similar to those in the last war in which Electric Boat Co. patents were used in German submarines and aided them in the destruction of American lives, and ships, and that in peacetime the licensing involves the manufacture abroad, at lower costs, of American material. VII. THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY AND MUNITIONS The committee finds a general acknowledgment of the importance of the commercial chemical industry to the manufacture of such instruments of warfare as high explosives and gasses, that most of the large industrial nations have granted their chemical companies considerable measures of protection in the interests of national defense, and that no effective control has to date been established over these large military resources. These findings were concurred in by all members of the committee. Source: Report of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry (The Nye Report), U.S. Congress, Senate, 74th Congress, 2nd sess., February 24, 1936, pp. 3–13.

Charles Lindbergh’s Address to the America First Committee in New York City (April 23, 1941) Organized in September 1940 and headlined by well-known figures such as aviator hero Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) and U.S. senator Gerald Nye, the America First Committee (AFC) became almost immediately the most influential voice of opposition to American intervention in World War II.

By the spring of 1941, the war drew ever closer and condemnation of Nazi aggression grew louder, increasingly weakening the position of the AFC. Many increasingly criticized the organization as proGerman and anti-Semitic, due in part to controversial speeches by Lindbergh. Reflecting the persistent isolationist sentiment of the interwar era, Lindbergh continued to call for a negotiated peace and nonintervention by the United States in a war he charged had no clear aggressor. There are many viewpoints from which the issues of this war can be argued. Some are primarily idealistic. Some are primarily practical. One should, I believe, strive for a balance of both. But, since the subjects that can be covered in a single address are limited, tonight I shall discuss the war from a viewpoint which is primarily practical. It is not that I believe ideals are unimportant, even among the realities of war; but if a nation is to survive in a hostile world, its ideals must be backed by the hard logic of military practicability. If the outcome of war depended upon ideals alone, this would be a different world than it is today. I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning. That, they will claim, is far too materialistic a viewpoint. They will advance again the same arguments that were used to persuade France to declare war against Germany in 1939. But I do not believe that our American ideals, and our way of life, will gain through an unsuccessful war. And I know that the United States is not prepared to wage war in Europe successfully at this time. We are no better prepared today than France was when the interventionists in Europe persuaded her to attack the Siegfried Line. I have said before, and I will say again, that I believe it will be a tragedy to the entire world if the British Empire collapses. That is one of the main reasons why I opposed this war before it was declared, and why I have constantly advocated a negotiated peace. I did not feel that England and France had a reasonable chance of winning. France has now been defeated; and, despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months, it is now obvious that England is losing the war. I believe this is realized even by the British government. But they have one last desperate plan remaining. They hope that they may be able to persuade us to send another American Expeditionary Force to Europe, and to share with England militarily, as well as financially, the fiasco of this war. I do not blame England for this hope, or for asking for our assistance. But we now know that she declared a war under circumstances [that] led to the defeat of every nation that sided with her from Poland to Greece. We know that in the desperation of war England promised to all these nations armed assistance that she could not send. We know that she misinformed them, as she has misinformed us, concerning her state of preparation, her military strength, and the progress of the war. In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda. I do not believe we should be too quick to criticize the actions of a belligerent nation. There is always the question whether we, ourselves, would do better under similar circumstances. But we in this country have a right to think of the welfare of America first, just as the people in England thought first of their own country when they encouraged the smaller nations of Europe to fight against hopeless odds. When England asks us to enter this war, she is considering her own future, and that of her Empire. In making our reply, I believe we should consider the future of the United States and that of the Western Hemisphere. It is not only our right, but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively, and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.

I ask you to look at the map of Europe today and see if you can suggest any way in which we could win this war if we entered it. Suppose we had a large army in America, trained and equipped. Where would we send it to fight? The campaigns of the war show only too clearly how difficult it is to force a landing, or to maintain an army, on a hostile coast. Suppose we took our navy from the Pacific, and used it to convoy British shipping. That would not win the war for England. It would, at best, permit her to exist under the constant bombing of the German air fleet. Suppose we had an air force that we could send to Europe. Where could it operate? Some of our squadrons might be based in the British Isles; but it is physically impossible to base enough aircraft in the British Isles alone to equal in strength the aircraft that can be based on the continent of Europe. I have asked these questions on the supposition that we had in existence an army and an air force large enough and well enough equipped to send to Europe; and that we would dare to remove our navy from the Pacific. Even on this basis, I do not see how we could invade the continent of Europe successfully as long as all of that continent and most of Asia is under Axis domination. But the fact is that none of these suppositions are correct. We have only a one-ocean navy. Our army is still untrained and inadequately equipped for foreign war. Our air force is deplorably lacking in modern fighting planes. When these facts are cited, the interventionists shout that we are defeatists, that we are undermining the principles of Democracy, and that we are giving comfort to Germany by talking about our military weakness. But everything I mention here has been published in our newspapers, and in the reports of congressional hearings in Washington. Our military position is well known to the governments of Europe and Asia. Why, then, should it not be brought to the attention of our own people? I say it is the interventionist in America, as it was in England and in France, who gives comfort to the enemy. I say it is they who are undermining the principles of Democracy when they demand that we take a course to which more than eighty percent of our citizens are opposed. I charge them with being the real defeatists, for their policy has led to the defeat of every country that followed their advice since this war began. There is no better way to give comfort to an enemy than to divide the people of a nation over the issue of foreign war. There is no shorter road to defeat than by entering a war with inadequate preparation. Every nation that has adopted the interventionist policy of depending on some one else for its own defense has met with nothing but defeat and failure. When history is written, the responsibility for the downfall of the democracies of Europe will rest squarely upon the shoulders of the interventionists who led their nations into war uninformed and unprepared. With their shouts of defeatism, and their disdain of reality, they have already sent countless thousands of young men to death in Europe. From the campaign of Poland to that of Greece, their prophecies have been false and their policies have failed. Yet these are the people who are calling us defeatists in America today. And they have led this country, too, to the verge of war. There are many such interventionists in America, but there are more people among us of a different type. That is why you and I are assembled here tonight. There is a policy open to this nation that will lead to success—a policy that leaves us free to follow our own way of life, and to develop our own civilization. It is not a new and untried idea. It was advocated by Washington. It was incorporated in the Monroe Doctrine. Under its guidance, the United States became the greatest nation in the world. It is based upon the belief that the security of a nation lies in the strength and character of its own people. It recommends the maintenance of armed forces sufficient to defend this hemisphere from attack by any combination of foreign powers. It demands faith in an independent American destiny. This is the policy of the America First Committee today. It is a policy not of isolation, but of independence; not of defeat, but of courage. It is a policy that led this nation to success during the most trying years of our history, and it is a policy that will lead us to success again.

We have weakened ourselves for many months, and still worse, we have divided our own people by this dabbling in Europe’s wars. While we should have been concentrating on American defense, we have been forced to argue over foreign quarrels. We must turn our eyes and our faith back to our own country before it is too late. And when we do this, a different vista opens before us. Practically every difficulty we would face in invading Europe becomes an asset to us in defending America. Our enemy, and not we, would then have the problem of transporting millions of troops across the ocean and landing them on a hostile shore. They, and not we, would have to furnish the convoys to transport guns and trucks and munitions and fuel across three thousand miles of water. Our battleships and submarines would then be fighting close to their home bases. We would then do the bombing from the air, and the torpedoing at sea. And if any part of an enemy convoy should ever pass our navy and our air force, they would still be faced with the guns of our coast artillery, and behind them, the divisions of our army. The United States is better situated from a military standpoint than any other nation in the world. Even in our present condition of unpreparedness, no foreign power is in a position to invade us today. If we concentrate on our own and build the strength that this nation should maintain, no foreign army will ever attempt to land on American shores. War is not inevitable for this country. Such a claim is defeatism in the true sense. No one can make us fight abroad unless we ourselves are willing to do so. No one will attempt to fight us here if we arm ourselves as a great nation should be armed. Over a hundred million people in this nation are opposed to entering the war. If the principles of Democracy mean anything at all, that is reason enough for us to stay out. If we are forced into a war against the wishes of an overwhelming majority of our people, we will have proved Democracy such a failure at home that there will be little use fighting for it abroad. The time has come when those of us who believe in an independent American destiny must band together, and organize for strength. We have been led toward war by a minority of our people. This minority has power. It has influence. It has a loud voice. But it does not represent the American people. During the last several years, I have travelled over this country, from one end to the other. I have talked to many hundreds of men and women, and I have had letters from tens of thousands more, who feel the same way as you and I. Most of these people have no influence or power. Most of them have no means of expressing their convictions, except by their vote which has always been against this war. They are the citizens who have had to work too hard at their daily jobs to organize political meetings. Hitherto, they have relied upon their vote to express their feelings; but now they find that it is hardly remembered except in the oratory of a political campaign. These people—the majority of hard-working American citizens are with us. They are the true strength of our country. And they are beginning to realize, as you and I, that there are times when we must sacrifice our normal interests in life in order to insure the safety and the welfare of our nation. Such a time has come. Such a crisis is here. That is why the America First Committee has been formed—to give voice to the people who have no newspaper, or news reel, or radio station at their command; to the people who must do the paying, and the fighting, and the dying, if this country enters the war. Whether or not we do enter the war, rests upon the shoulders of you in this audience, upon us here on this platform, upon meetings of this kind that are being held by Americans in every section of the United States today. It depends upon the action we take, and the courage we show at this time. If you believe in an independent destiny for America, if you believe that this country should not enter the war in Europe, we ask you to join the America First Committee in its stand. We ask you to share our faith in the ability of this nation to defend itself, to develop its own civilization, and to contribute to the progress of mankind in

a more constructive and intelligent way than has yet been found by the warring nations of Europe. We need your support, and we need it now. The time to act is here. Source: PBS Website. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lindbergh/filmmore/reference/primary/firstcommittee.html.

The Atlantic Charter (August 14, 1941) On August 14, 1941, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of the Anglo-American principles that formed the basis of the system of global peace and collective security they envisioned would follow World War II. Coming in response to the darkening crisis of Nazi military victories sweeping across Europe, the Atlantic Conference strengthened the U.S.-British relationship at a critical moment. The Atlantic Charter pledged no territorial aggrandizement for themselves and the right of self-rule for all peoples —including, but not limited to those suffering under occupation by any of the major Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Although the charter offered hope for millions around the world, and despite its enduring significance as the basis for the Anglo-American postwar order, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt intended in this nonbinding document to fully surrender their own respective colonies, possessions, or protectorates. The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world. First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them; Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity; Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security; Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want; Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance; Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments. Franklin D. Roosevelt

Winston S. Churchill Source: U.S. Department of State. A Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941–1949. Washington, DC: GPO, 1950, p. 2.

Map of U.S. Defense Projects in Alaska (1941–1945) The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, greatly alarmed North American residents of the west coast of Canada and the United States, particularly after the Japanese seizure of the Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu in June 1942. What became known as the Alaska (originally the Alaska-Canada, ALCAN) Highway was just one of a series of defense-related undertakings in the far northwest during World War II.

Source: World War II in Alaska: A Resource Guide for Teachers and Students. Anchorage, AK: U.S. Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2000, p. 4.

“This Man Is Your Friend” Propaganda Poster Series On June 13, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt established by executive order the Office of War Information (OWI), consolidating several preexisting federal agencies around a mission of producing and distributing war-related information. Although many Americans had criticized the propaganda effort of the First World War’s Committee on Public Information, that experience was overshadowed by the Roosevelt administration’s determination to coordinate the dissemination of information that could help ensure victory. Among the millions of posters distributed by the OWI early in the war, the “This Man Is Your Friend” series—featuring not only English soldiers but Chinese, Australian, Russian, and others—helped to educate little-traveled Americans about the geographically and politically diverse nature of the national forces with whom Americans were allied against the Axis powers. Ironically, within just a few years a number of these nations would either be enemies of the United States in the Cold War, or be hosting U.S. military bases.

Source: Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. Bureau of Special Services. (National Archives, Record Group 44: Records of the Office of Government Reports, 1932–1947).

Two Letters Describing U.S. Interests in the Middle East (1944, 1948) As the following two documents make clear, the oil-rich Middle East had since the end of World War I taken on increasing importance for the United States. Understanding the heightened significance of the region both for the war effort and the long-term strategic interests of the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 extended Lend-Lease aid directly to Saudi Arabia, whose defense, he said, was “vital to the defense of the United States.” The wartime communiqué to James M. Landis suggests that the United States sought only a kind of Middle East version of an economic “open door.” Still, the voluminous flow of wartime aid was a clear indication that the United States was establishing a firm presence in the region, presaging the unseating of Great Britain as the dominant outside Western power. The letter from Philip Jessup, U.S. official at the new United Nations, to Secretary of State George C. Marshall also reinforces the economic importance of the oil resource to the postwar recovery of both Europe and the United States. Letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to James M. Landis, American Director of Economic Operations in the Middle East, Concerning the Vital Interest of the United States in the Middle East (1944) [WASHINGTON, March 6, 1944.] MY DEAR MR. LANDIS: The Middle East is an area in which the United States has a vital interest. The maintenance of peace in that area, which has so frequently seen disturbances in the past, is of significance to the world as a whole. A means of insurance against unrest of that character is to encourage the

governments of the territories that comprise the Middle East to push ahead with the vigor that they may possess to stabilize and improve their economic systems in terms of the production and distribution of wealth. Though the United States, following traditional policy, should not seek to interfere in the internal affairs of these territories, it is interested in seeing that itself and other nations should not be discriminated against in dealing openly and fairly with these territories in the exchange of goods and resources. In the Middle East, as elsewhere, the objective of the United States is to make certain that all nations are accorded equality of opportunity. Special privileges, in so far as they do not rest upon acknowledged possession or trusteeship, should not be afforded to any country or its nationals for such privileges have little place in the type of world for which this war is being fought. The American point of view, naturally, has regard to the desires of the territories of the Middle East to seek, in the manner deemed best by their own governments, objectives consistent with the faiths for which this war is being waged. The realization of such aims will, naturally, further the broad interests of the United States in that it will assure equality of treatment being afforded to this country. As American Director of Economic Operations in the Middle East, the daily pattern of your work in wartime economic affairs will have reference to, and your activities should be carried out in a manner consistent with, policies such as these. Your work, under the directives you have received from the Department of State and the Foreign Economic Administration, is primarily concerned with the conduct of economic activities relating to the war. In that work you will, of course, put first the strengthening in every way of the warm and cooperative relations with our Allies, upon which our success in the war, and thereafter, so largely depend. On occasion you may require the assistance of other branches of the United States Government, now active in the Middle East, to make your endeavors in the economic field effective. Within this area of operations you are authorized to show this letter to such officials of the United States in order that the aid that they may reasonably give you may be forthcoming within the limits of their staffs and in so far as is consistent with political and military policies. Very sincerely yours, [FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT] Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1944. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, the Far East. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1944.

Philip Jessup, the Acting U.S. Representative at the United Nations to Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Outlining U.S. Interests in the Middle East (July 1, 1948) From the strategic viewpoint we assume that Palestine, together with the neighboring countries, is a major factor presumably in any future major conflict [in] this region, [and] would be of vital importance to [the] U.S. as a potential base area and with respect to our lines of communication. Presumably also the oil resources of the area are considered vital. It is our feeling that this last point may not perhaps have been dealt [with] adequately and frankly enough in official and public discussion of the Palestine question. From the economic viewpoint it is probable that with the exception of oil, our trade and other economic relations with Palestine and the other Near East countries are not directly of any substantial importance. Indirectly, however, the economic stability and developing prosperity of Palestine and the Middle East area under peaceful conditions could make a very substantial contribution to the economic recovery of the world generally and thus contribute to the economic welfare of the U.S. With respect to

oil, we recognize that the oil supply from the area is of great importance in the European recovery program. Were it not for this factor, however, and the strategic importance of oil, we should probably not allow the economic importance of this commodity to condition our judgment substantially with regard to Palestine. Source: The Acting United States Representative at the United Nations (Jessup) to the Secretary of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) 1948, July 1, 1948, Vol. V, part 2, p. 1184.

Excerpts from the Diary of President Harry S. Truman Regarding the Potsdam Conference (1945) The Potsdam Conference was held between July 17 and August 2, 1945, at the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin in occupied Germany, nine weeks after the surrender of Germany that ended World War II in Europe. The meeting was held between U.S. president Harry Truman, British prime minister Winston Churchill (and later Clement Atlee), and Communist Party general secretary Joseph Stalin. In these excerpts from President Truman’s diary, the reader gains insight into the new American president’s grim perceptions of the horrors of World War II, his first reading of Soviet leader Stalin, and his belief that the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb over Japan would end the war in the Pacific without the need for Russian intervention. July 16, 1945 At 3:30 p.m. Mr. Secretary Byrnes, Admiral (5-star) Leahy and I left in an open car for Berlin, followed by my two aides and various and sundry secret service and military guards, and preceded by a two-star general in a closed car with a couple of plain-clothes men to fool ‘em if they wanted to do any target practice of consequence on the president. They didn’t. We reviewed the Second Armored Division and tied a citation on the guidon of Company E, 17th Armored Engineer Battalion. General Collier, who seemed to know his stuff, put us in a reconnaissance car built with side seats and no top, just like a hoodlum wagon minus the top on a fire truck, with seats and no hose, and we drove slowly down a mile and a half of good soldiers and some millions of dollars’ worth of equipment—which had amply paid its way to Berlin. Then we went on to Berlin and saw absolute ruin. Hitler’s folly. He overreached himself by trying to take in too much territory. He had no morals and his people backed him up. Never did I see a more sorrowful sight, nor witness retribution to the nth degree. The most sorrowful part of the situation is the deluded Hitlerian populace. Of course Russians have kidnapped the able-bodied and I suppose have made involuntary workmen of them. They have also looted every house left standing and have sent the loot to Russia. But Hitler did the same thing to them. It is the Golden Rule in reverse—and it is not an uplifting sight. What a pity that the human animal is not able to put his moral thinking into practice. We saw old men, old women, young women, children from tots to teens carrying packs, pushing carts, pulling carts, evidently ejected by the conquerors and carrying what they could of their belongings to nowhere in particular. I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis, Peking, Babylon, Nineveh, Scipio, Ramses II, Titus, Herman, Sherman, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Darius the Great—but Hitler only destroyed Stalingrad—and Berlin. I hope for some sort of peace, but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it. I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll be a reckoning. Who knows?

July 17, 1945 Just spent a couple of hours with Stalin. Joe Davies called on Maisky and made the date last night for noon today. Promptly at a few minutes before twelve I looked up from my desk and there stood Stalin in the doorway. I got to my feet and advanced to meet him. He put out his hand and smiled. I did the same, we shook, I greeted Molotov and the interpreter and we sat down. After the usual polite remarks we got down to business. I told Stalin that I am no diplomat but usually said yes and no to questions after hearing all the arguments. It pleased him. I asked him if he had the agenda for the meeting. He said he had and that he had some more questions to present. I told him to fire away. He did and it is dynamite—but I have some dynamite too, which I am not exploding now. He wants to fire Franco, to which I wouldn’t object and divide up the Italian colonies and other mandates, some no doubt that the British have. Then he got on the Chinese situation told us what agreements had been reached and what was in abeyance. Most of the big points are settled. He’ll be in the Jap war on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about. We had lunch, talked socially, put on a real show, drinking toasts to everyone. Then had pictures made in the backyard. I can deal with Stalin. He is honest, but smart as hell. July 18, 1945 Ate breakfast with nephew Harry, a sergeant in the field artillery. He is a good soldier and a nice boy. They took him off Queen Elizabeth at Glasgow and flew him here. Sending him home Friday. Went to lunch with P.M. at 1:30, walked around to British headquarters. Met at the gate by Mr. Churchill. Guards of honor drawn up. Fine body of men—Scottish Guards. Band played “Star-Spangled Banner.” Inspected guard and went in for lunch. P.M. and I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time. Stalin’s luncheon was a most satisfactory meeting. I invited him to come to the U.S. Told him I’d send the battleship Missouri for him if he’d come. He said he wanted to cooperate with the U.S. in peace as we had cooperated in war, but it would be harder. Said he was grossly misunderstood in the U.S. and I was misunderstood in Russia. I told him that we each could help to remedy that situation in our home countries and that I intended to do my part at home. He gave me a most cordial smile and said he would do as much in Russia. We then went to the conference and it was my job to present the ministers’ proposed agenda. There were three proposals, and I banged them through in short order, much to the surprise of Mr. Churchill. Stalin was very much pleased. Churchill was too, after he had recovered. I’m not going to stay around this terrible place all summer just to listen to speeches. I’ll go home to the Senate for that. July 25, 1945 We met at 11:00 a.m. today. That is, Stalin, Churchill and the U.S. president. But I had a most important session with Lord Mountbatten and General Marshall before that. We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark. Anyway, we think we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling—to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused a crater six hundred feet deep and twelve hundred feet in diameter, knocked over a steel

tower a half mile away, and knocked men down ten thousand yards away. The explosion was visible for more than two hundred miles and audible for forty miles and more. This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful. Source: Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman. Diary, July 17, box 333, president’s secretary’s files; diary, July 16, “Ross, Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. (handwritten)” box 322, president’s secretary’s files.

“Japan’s Struggle to End the War” from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report (June 30, 1946) In the 1960s, revisionist historians led by Gar Alperovitz (b. 1936) began to challenge the long-held view that the dropping of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essential to ending the war, thereby obviating the need for a U.S.-led invasion of the mainland of Japan that would have resulted in catastrophic casualties. Alperovitz and others examined a range of evidence to support their position, including the assessments of high-ranking U.S. military officials. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report of 1946 was the most comprehensive document that indicated that the bomb had not been necessary to end the war, that “even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.” This bolstered the argument of historians and other critics that the bomb was aimed as much at the Soviet Union and asserting postwar U.S. global ambitions as at ending the war. Japan’s Struggle to End the War Japan’s governmental structure was such that in practice the Emperor merely approved the decisions of his advisers. A consensus among the oligarchy of ruling factions at the top was required before any major question of national policy could be decided. These factions, each of which had a different point of view, included the group around the Emperor of whom Marquis Kido, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, was the most important, the ex-premiers constituting the Jushin or body of senior statesmen, and the cabinet. The Army and navy named their own cabinet ministers, who, together with the two chiefs of staff, had direct access to the Emperor. The cabinet could perpetuate itself only so long as it was able to absorb or modify the views of the Army and navy ministers, who, until the end, were strongly influenced by the fanaticism of the Army officers and many of the younger navy officers. The ruling oligarchy considered the opinions of the Japanese people as only one among the many factors to be taken into consideration in determining national policy and in no sense as controlling. The first definitive break in the political coalition which began the war occurred following our success at Saipan. Ten day[s] thereafter, on 16 July 1944, the cabinet headed by General Tojo fell. This significant turn in the course of Japan’s wartime politics was not merely the result of an immediate crisis. Even at that date, elements opposing continuation of the war had found means of applying pressure against the fantastic exponents of Japan’s militaristic clique. The original factions who had either opposed war before Pearl harbor, or gone along, or “retired” in the first phase of the conflict recognized as early as the

spring of 1944 that Japan was facing ultimate defeat. By that time, United States determination to fight and her ability to mount over-powering offensive in the Pacific, even before the opening of the European Second Front, had already been demonstrated to many of those who had access to all the facts. The political problems of those who saw the situation was to circulate among other leaders in retirement or outside the government a true picture of the war and then unseat the Tojo government in favor of one which would bring the war to an end. Rear Admiral Takagi of the Navy General Staff made a study between 20 September 1943 and February 1944, of the war’s battle lessons up to that time. Based on analysis of air, fleet and merchant ship losses, Japan’s inability to import essential materials for production, and the potentiality of air attacks on the home islands, Takagi concluded that Japan could not win and should seek a compromise peace. His study and a similar one made by Sakomizu of the Cabinet Planning board documented the fears of the Jushin, and through them of Marquis Kido, that all was not well with Tojo’s prosecution of the war. With the loss of Saipan, it was possible to build up sufficient pressure to force Tojo’s retirement. The government of General Koiso, who was chosen by the ever-cautious Kido to head the succeeding cabinet, did not have the strength to stand up to the military and was a disappointment to the more enthusiastic peace makers. In spite of the original instructions to give “fundamental reconsideration” to the problems for continuing the war, his only accomplishment in that direction was the creation of a Supreme War Direction Council, an inner cabinet which supplied the mechanism through which the problem of surrender was eventually resolved. The conviction and strength of the peace party was increased by the continuing Japanese military defeats, and by Japan’s helplessness in defending itself against the ever-growing weight of air attack on the home islands. On 7 April 1945, less than a week after United States landings on Okinawa, Koiso was removed and Marquis Kido installed Admiral Suzuki as premier. Kido testified to the survey that, in his opinion, Suzuki alone had the deep conviction and personal courage to stand up to the military and bring the war to an end. Early in May 1945, the Supreme War Direction Council be[g]an active discussion of ways and means to end the war, and talks were initiated with Soviet Russia seeking her intercession as mediator. The talks by the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and with the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo did not make progress. On 20 June the Emperor, on his own initiative, called the six members of the Supreme War Direction Council to a conference and said it was necessary to have a plan to close the war at once, as well as a plan to defend the home islands. The timing of the Potsdam Conference interfered with a plan to send Prince Konoye to Moscow as a special emissary with instructions from the cabinet to negotiate for peace on terms less than unconditional surrender, but with private instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price. Although the Supreme War Direction Council, in its deliberations on the Potsdam Declaration, was agreed on the advisability of ending the war, three of its members, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the Navy Minister, were prepared to accept unconditional surrender, while the other three, the Army Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff of both services, favored continued resistance unless certain mitigating conditions were obtained. On 8 August the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and on 9 August Russia entered the war. In the succeeding meeting of the Supreme War Direction Council, the differences of opinion previously existing as to the Potsdam terms persisted exactly as before. By using the urgency brought about through fear of further atomic bombing attacks, the Prime Minister found it possible to bring the Emperor directly into the discussions of the Potsdam terms. Hirohito, acting as arbiter, resolved the conflict in favor of unconditional surrender. The public admission of defeat by the responsible Japanese leaders, which constituted the political objective of the United States offensive begun in 1943, was thus secured prior to invasion and while

Japan was still possessed of some 2,000,000 troops and over 9,000 planes in the home islands. Military defeats in the air, at sea and on the land, destruction of shipping by submarines and by air, and direct air attack with conventional as well as atomic bombs, all contributed to this accomplishment. There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan’s unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan’s disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. Source: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War), July 1, 1946. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946. Available online at http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm.

Senate Committee Report on the Support U.S. Corporations Provided for Fascism and Nazism Prior to World War II (1974) In the period following the Vietnam War, the United States government began to acknowledge many of the darker previously classified secrets of its foreign policy. Most of the revelations had to do with the Cold War era. This document, from a 1974 U.S. Senate Committee investigation, went further, to the period of World War II and the deep and disturbing connections of major U.S. corporations to the building of the Nazi military machine. The activities of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler prior to and during World War II … are instructive. At that time, these three firms dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. Due to its mass production capabilities, automobile manufacturing is one of the most crucial industries with respect to national defense. As a result, these firms retained the economic and political power to affect the shape of governmental relations both within and between these nations in a manner which maximized corporate global profits. In short, they were private governments unaccountable to the citizens of any country yet possessing tremendous influence over the course of war and peace in the world. The substantial contribution of these firms to the American war effort in terms of tanks, aircraft components, and other military equipment is widely acknowledged. Less well known are the simultaneous contributions of their foreign subsidiaries to the Axis Powers. In sum, they maximized profits by supplying both sides with the mat[é]riel needed to conduct the war. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, the Big Three automakers undertook an extensive program of multinational expansion…. By the mid-1930’s, these three American companies owned automotive subsidiaries throughout Europe and the Far East; many of their largest facilities were located in the politically sensitive nations of Germany, Poland, Rumania, Austria, Hungary, Latvia, and Japan…. Due to their concentrated economic power over motor vehicle production in both Allied and Axis territories, the Big Three inevitably became major factors in the preparations and progress of the war. In Germany, for example, General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM’s plants in

Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps…. Ford was also active in Nazi Germany’s prewar preparations. In 1938, for instance, it opened a truck assembly plant in Berlin whose “real purpose,” according to U.S. Army Intelligence, was producing “troop transport-type” vehicles for the Wehrmacht. That year Ford’s chief executive received the Nazi German Eagle (first class)…. The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion by GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks…. On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored “mule” 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as “the backbone of the German Army transportation system.” … After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by their Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing…. Ford received a little less than $1 million, primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne…. Due to their multinational dominance of motor vehicle production, GM and Ford became principal suppliers for the forces of fascism as well as for the forces of democracy. It may, of course, be argued that participating in both sides of an international conflict, like the common corporate practice of investing in both political parties before an election, is an appropriate corporate activity. Had the Nazis won, General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi; as Hitler lost, these companies were able to reemerge impeccably American. In either case, the viability of these corporations and the interests of their respective stockholders would have been preserved. Source: Committee of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. United States Senate, 16–24 (1974), in Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Industrial Reorganization Act, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session (1974), part 4A, p. A-22.

Glossary

Anglo or Anglo-American: generally refers to a Caucasian (white) American of non-Hispanic descent. Anti-Semitic: espousing views, attitudes, or governmental policies that are hostile or prejudicial toward Jews as an ethnic, racial, or religious group. Appeasement: in the context of international relations, refers to making concessions and doing everything possible to avoid conflict with a threatening power. Stems from the 1938 Munich Conference in which Adolf Hitler was appeased by Western Allied powers. Archipelago: a chain or group of islands, often constituting one nation as in the case of the Philippines. Associated State: a political entity that enjoys a relative degree of sovereignty in the economic arena and on domestic matters, but generally defers to a senior larger partner on matters of security and defense. The Philippines (1935–1946) was the first associated state in U.S. history. Atoll: a coral reef in the shape of a ring encircling a lagoon. Many of the world’s atolls are found in the Pacific Ocean region of Micronesia within which lie the Marshall Islands, scene of many U.S. atomic bomb tests. Authoritarian(ism): refers to a leader or a system of governing that exercises concentrated power and is not responsible constitutionally to the will of its citizens. Beaux Arts: a form of architecture emphasizing the monumental, rich ornamental detailing, and historic references to antiquity; closely associated with the age of imperial power. Biological determinism: an understanding of humans and human behavior grounded in the biological (or genetic) makeup of a person. Bolsheviks: by translation, the “largest” faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party that swept to power during the October phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917; often used pejoratively in the United States to disparage or discredit “Left” or liberal thinking and political activism. Colonial Indemnity: monetary payment offered to an occupying colonial power upon the liberation or “loss” of a colony by the newly liberated nation. Colonialism: the historic practice of (generally more powerful) nations invading and occupying lands or nations and exploiting their labor and natural resources.

Commonwealth: in the context of imperialism, refers to a political entity similar to a U.S. state but which has only a nonvoting representative in Congress and whose citizens pay no federal income taxes. Contraband: illegally exported or imported goods, either brought into or taken out of a country without payment of duties (fees) or in violation of an outright ban. Determinism: belief that events in the world are explained by some core phenomenon: past events (historical determinism), economic forces (economic determinism), biological, and so on. Ethnocentrism: generally negative ideas or attitudes about another culture based on a predisposition toward the superiority of one’s own. Eugenics: emerging in the late 19th century, the belief in or practice of perfecting the human population by discouraging reproduction of “undesirable” members of the population, or by contrast encouraging reproduction among allegedly superior members of the population. Practiced in its most violent form by the Nazis. Evolutionary: generally refers to the principles or theories of the biological evolution of the species put forward by Charles Darwin, or varyingly to social Darwinism. Expeditionary Force (Marine): refers to a military force of an imperial power sent to fight in a foreign country (often U.S. Marines in the case of the United States). Extraterritoriality: refers to either the exercise of a sovereign nation’s own laws outside of its own nation or the immunity of a nation or its citizens or military from the laws of a nation where it is operating. Fait Accompli: when events have already transpired or decisions have already been made, leaving to those affected little choice but to accept them. Fascism: a political system characterized by all power being vested in one dictatorial ruler and the people have few or no political rights, where state power is fused to the interests of big business or corporations, where society is severely ordered, and where state power is heavily fortified with a strong military. Often associated with territorial aggrandizement, as in Nazi Germany. Frontier Mythology: embraces a set of enduring beliefs, values, and attitudes associated with the American westward experience (e.g., righteous violence against an inferior people). Garrison: a military encampment or base of operations, temporary or permanent. Globalization: the ongoing development of an internationally integrated economy that is driven by industrialized nations’ and transnational corporations’ desire for access to natural resources, cheap labor, and foreign markets. Gunboat Diplomacy: relations between and among nations involving the deployment or threat of military force by one nation against another. Historiographic: refers to either a body of historical literature (often on one topic), or to the ongoing process of producing critically sound, authentically sourced, scholarly reviewed historical interpretations of a topic.

Incendiary: a bomb or flammable military device used to cause fiery combustion. Insular: in the context of U.S. imperialism, refers to the affairs of U.S. island possessions acquired after the turn of the 20th century. Insurgent: a rebel or revolutionary engaged in armed conflict against a government in power. Intelligentsia: relatively small number of political, intellectual, and economic elites in a country that direct or greatly influence a nation’s affairs. Internationalism/ist: refers either to the advancement of policies and principles that benefit all nations and peoples, or to the willful projection of strategic interests globally and military power to defend them. Islets: small islands. Jingoism: bellicose expression of national chauvinism or patriotism associated with times of war or the run-up to war, often by imperial powers. Liberal Democracy: sometimes called a constitutional democracy, this is a system of government that features free and fair elections and a publicly accountable system of checks and balances. Macroeconomic: referring to the behavior or performance of economic systems of nations or the global economy as a whole. Malthusian or Neo-Malthusian: alludes to those espousing new incarnations of ideas once put forward by Thomas Malthus (1776–1834), generally centered on population control and the exhaustibility of natural resources in the face of unchecked population growth. Mercantilism: economic theory or system holding that trade generates wealth for nations and individuals and that nations should protect their domestic economic concerns to ensure a profitable balance sheet. Metropole: the senior state in a colonial relationship of nations. Militarism: the state of unabashed enthusiasm among a people or in a nation for the use of military power to defend or advance its interests. Militarization: variously refers to equipping or training a people for war, converting industry for munitions making, and infusing a people with the spirit of militarism. Multilateral/ism: involving two or more nations, as in an economic trade relationship or security treaty. Multinational/Transnational Corporation: a large publicly traded business that has assets, holdings, or operations in more than one nation. Some U.S.-based multinational corporations have assets larger than some countries and are a central force in the globalization of the economy. Munitions: 19th- and early 20th-century term used to describe war matériel from small arms to artillery and explosives. Nationalism: refers to either a desire for political independence and sovereignty of a nation under colonial occupation, or broadly felt and impassioned expressions of chauvinistic patriotism.

Nationalization: the process of a nation taking government control of its resources and important sectors of its economy; its opposite is privatization and the opening of an economy to private, usually corporate investment. Noncombatant Vessels (or Aircraft): ships, freighters, and other seagoing vessels/aircraft that claim to not hold any war-related materials and to be nonparticipants during a wartime situation. Pacifist: a person asserting opposition to war, militarism, and organized violence, no matter the political or historical circumstances. Progressive: generally refers to ideas representing liberal, humanitarian reform of economic or social conditions deleterious to the human condition. In the United States, the Progressive Era denotes roughly the 1890s through the onset of World War I. Propaganda: in the context of imperialism, refers to information of a deliberately biased, exaggerated, or misleading nature aimed at galvanizing popular support for an overseas war or militarism generally. Protectionist: a person, usually a political or economic leader, who espouses policies aimed at shielding a domestic industry or economic concern through such measures as high import duties or tariffs. Protectorate: a country defended but also generally controlled by another country exercising authority over it in various ways. Reparations: compensation of one form or another (e.g., monetary, industrial capacity) paid or owed to one country from damage suffered in war. Republic: a nation-state in which power is vested in the citizens and their representatives and its central leader is elected by the people. Sea Power: formidable naval strength of a nation, or a nation itself possessing such armed naval power. Sedition: speech or conduct aimed at inciting people to revolt against the established power of the state. Self-Government: in contrast to rule by an occupying imperial power, this refers to government by the people of a country in whatever form. Socialist: normally refers to an advocate of socialism, meaning that the people of a state should control the means of production, distribution, and exchange of materials in an economy for the theoretical benefit of the majority, not the few of a society. Sovereignty: autonomous self-rule of an independent state. Spoils System: the 19th-century political practice of U.S. presidents rewarding members of their own party with positions in government. Superpatriotism: the condition of fervent, chauvinistic love of country normally expressed most acutely during times of war. Tariff: a duty or tax paid on a type or group of products or services imported to a country, making them more expensive.

Terroristic: actions or stated intention of violence directed against a person or persons, property, or a state aimed at achieving some political end otherwise not achievable through peaceful means. Torture: the act of inflicting severe physical pain or punishment on another person as a means of compelling the person to surrender information or do something. Trading Bloc: an intergovernmental agreement among nations, usually in a common geographic region, aimed at eliminating tariffs and other trade barriers, fostering competition and lower prices, and stimulating market growth and economic efficiency. Unincorporated American Territory: a legal term designating the 13 territories of the United States that were acquired beginning at the end of the 19th century. Fundamental rights apply in unincorporated territories, but full U.S. citizenship rights are not extended. A series of Supreme Court decisions at the turn of the 20th century provided the creative extraconstitutional framework defining rights within the new territories and helped justify America’s overseas expansion. Uranium-235: the radioactive uranium isotope with a mass number of 235, which when bombarded with neutrons undergoes fission, unleashing the force of nuclear energy. White Man’s Burden: derived from the 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling, this refers to the ethnocentrically or racially presumed responsibility of supposedly superior white Europeans to “civilize” and Christianize the allegedly inferior peoples of Africa, Asia, and other parts of the so-called undeveloped world (or “Third World,” the term used during the Cold War), often used to justify imperialist conquest. Xenophobic: fear and loathing of peoples and cultures from other countries.

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Kammen, Michael. “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration.” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1993): 1–43. Karnow, Stanley. In Our Image: America’s Image in the Philippines. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990. Kennedy, Ross A. The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009. Keys, Barbara. “Spreading Peace, Democracy, and Coca-Cola®: Sport and American Cultural Expansion in the 1930s.” Diplomatic History 28, no. 2 (2004): 165–196. Kingsbury, Celia M. For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Homefront. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Kramer, Paul A. “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910.” Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315–1353. Kramer, Paul A. “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War.” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (2006): 169–210. Lebow, Richard Ned. “Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration.” Journal of Modern History 40 (December 1968): 501–523. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?”and Other Writings. New York: Dover, 1987. Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Luard, Evan. A History of the United Nations: The Years of Western Domination, 1945–1955. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Malavet, Pedro A. America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Malloy, Sean Langdon. Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mazower, Mark. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. McAllister Linn, Brian. The Philippine War, 1899–1902. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. McPherson, Alan, ed. Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Berghahn, 2006. Merritt, Richard L. Democracy Imposed: US Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945–1949. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Miller, Stuart Creighton. Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Morrow, John H. The Great War: An Imperial History. New York: Routledge Press, 2005. Murphy, Erin L. “Women’s Anti-Imperialism, ‘the White Man’s Burden,’ and the Philippine American-War: Theorizing Masculinist Ambivalence in Protest.” Gender and Society 23, no. 2 (2009): 244–270. O’Sullivan, Christopher. FDR and the End of Empire: The Origins of American Power in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. O’Sullivan, Christopher. Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937–1943. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Paris, Michael. The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Parmar, Inderjeet. Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Parmar, Inderjeet. Special Interests, the State and the Anglo-American Alliance, 1939–1945. New York: Routledge, 2013. Parrini, Carl P. Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969. Pool, James. Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power. New York: Simon and Schuster / Gallery Books, 1997. Preston, Diana. The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China’s War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. Prins, Nomi. All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power. New York: Nation Books, 2014. Randall, Stephen J. United States Foreign Oil Policy Since World War I, for Profits and Security. Montreal, Canada: McGill Queens University Press, 2005. Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Reynolds, David. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Rollins, Peter C. “Frank Capra’s Why We Fight Film Series and Our American Dream.” Journal of American Culture 19, no. 4 (1996): 81– 86. Roorda, Eric. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Emily. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. New York: Macmillan, 2011.

Ross, Stewart Halsey. Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914–1918. San Diego, CA: Progressive Press, 2009. Rowe, John C. Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Sadlier, Darlene J. Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Sarles, Ruth. A Story of America First: The Men and Women Who Opposed US Intervention in World War II. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Schoonover, Thomas D. Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Schraeder, Peter J. United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and Change. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Seymour, Richard. American Insurgents: A Brief History of American Anti-Imperialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Silbey, David J. The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013. Silbey, David J. A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902. New York: Macmillan, 2008. Spencer, David R. The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America’s Emergence as a World Power. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Striffler, Steve. Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Sutton, Antony C. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. New York: GSG and Associates, 1976. Thomas, Evan. The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898. New York: Back Bay Books, 2011. Tooze, Adam. The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the World Order, 1916–1931. New York: Viking, 2014. Tota, Antonio Pedro. The Seduction of Brazil: The Americanization of Brazil During World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Trask, David F. The War with Spain in 1898. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Traxel, David. Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War, 1898–1920. New York: Vintage Press, 2007. Tucker, Robert W. Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Walter, Knut. Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Wimmel, Kenneth. Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet: American Sea Power Comes of Age. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2000. Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Wolff, Leon. Little Brown Brother: America’s Forgotten Bid for Empire Which Cost 250,000 Lives. New York: Kraus, 1970.

Chronology: 1945–2015

1945–1952 1945 1945 1945

1945

1945 1945 1945 1945 1945

1945

1946 1946 1946

1946

American occupation of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur. Yalta Conference: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin discuss the reorganization of postwar Europe. United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco. Potsdam Conference: Harry Truman, Churchill, and Stalin determine the partitioning and occupation of defeated Nazi Germany and other postwar issues, including their vision for Indochina. United States tests the first atomic weapon in world history in the New Mexico desert. The Trinity Test is the first of 1,054 documented U.S. nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992, surpassing the 727 conducted by the Soviet Union. United States drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Soviet Union declares war on Japan, prepares to enter war in the Pacific. United States drops second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki, forcing Japanese surrender. Lend-Lease Aid program is terminated by President Truman. Invoking the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh issues Declaration of Independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Japan transfers governmental authority to Ho’s Viet Minh. British forces in the South transfer authority to the French, who begin establishing puppet government under Bao Dai. From fall 1945 to spring 1946 Ho Chi Minh writes a series of letters to President Truman appealing for support of Vietnamese nationalist independence. Truman ignores the letters, moves toward U.S. support for French reoccupation of Vietnam. First meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Iran-Azerbaijan Crisis, triggered by Soviet refusal to withdraw troops from northern Iran. State Department Russian authority George Kennan writes his influential “Long Telegram” calling for tough measures to contain Soviet expansionism. That is followed a few months later by the Novikov Telegram in which Nikolai Vasilevich Novikov condemns U.S. actions that are aiming for “world supremacy.” Statesman and financier Bernard Baruch delivers the Baruch Plan for international control of nuclear weapons, rejected by the Soviet Union.

1946 1946 1946

1946 1946

1946

1946 1946 1947

1947

1947

1947 1947 1947

1947

1947 1948–1956 1948

After months of failed negotiations to reach an accord, Viet Minh attack French nationals at Haiphong. United States formally grants the Philippines independence. Washington Treaty on British and American cooperation over economic issues in occupied Germany. Simultaneously, negotiations over Allied reparations from Germany collapse. Winston Churchill warns of an “Iron Curtain” falling across Eastern Europe. U.S. “Operation Crossroads”: series of atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific at Bikini Atoll—first such tests since Trinity in July 1945. Atomic Energy Commission established. U.S. secretary of state James F. Byrnes delivers “Restatement of Policy on Germany” speech, indicating U.S. intention to maintain military presence in Europe indefinitely. He underscores U.S. determination to keep German people from moving toward socialism. Greek Civil War begins. The U.S. School of the Americas is established in Panama. United States and Great Britain combine their zones of occupation in Germany, creating the Bizone—the genesis of West Germany and the first step in creating the bipolar world of the Cold War. With the Greek Civil War going badly, Great Britain turns to President Truman for assistance to prevent a victory by Greek Communists. Truman responds with the Truman Doctrine: a request to send $400 million in mostly military aid to both Greece and Turkey. He also pledges open-ended U.S. support for “free peoples” everywhere. President Truman signs the National Security Act, a major reorganization and expansion of the U.S. military establishment. Authorizes the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council. Bernard Baruch coins the term “Cold War” to describe U.S.-Soviet relations. United States begins providing training to Iran’s military. U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall announces European Recovery Plan to aid Allied nations whose economies were ravaged by World War II. By 1951, nearly $13 billion would be appropriated by Congress as part of what became known as the Marshall Plan. Soviet leader condemns the plan as part of a U.S. effort to “infiltrate” Western European economies. UN calls for a commission to advance reunification of Korea, along with free elections and immediate withdrawal of foreign soldiers from both halves of the country. United Nations transfers Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in Micronesia to the United States. CIA’s Operation Splinter Factor infiltrates Communist parties across Europe. The CIA creates the Office of Policy Coordination to devise and carry out a range of covert actions including propaganda, sabotage, economic warfare, demolition,

and “subversion against hostile states.” 1948 1948 1948 1948

1948

1948 1948 1949–1954 1949 1949 1949 1949 1949

1950s 1950

1950

1950

Covert CIA subversion of elections in Italy ensures defeat of the Communist Party. CIA establishes Operation Mockingbird to begin recruiting journalists and news organizations to support domestic spying and propaganda dissemination. United States recognizes the newly created state of Israel. London Conferences and London Program charting path for separate West German republic and related common currency and reforms to revive the West German economy. In immediate response to common West German currency for (U.S.-British-French) Tripartite Zone, Soviet Union announces a blockade of all transportation routes between Allied-occupied West Berlin and West Germany. President Truman responds with the Berlin Airlift: U.S.-British round-the-clock coordinated flights of food, fuel, and other supplies into West Berlin, lasting until the blockade is lifted in September 1949. Organization of American States (OAS) is founded. Parliamentary vote confirms Syngman Rhee as president of South Korea, even as instability and repression in the country grow. The Second Red Scare (“McCarthyism”) peaks in the United States with fears of Communists and subversives reaching fever pitch. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is established in the wake of the Berlin Crisis. Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) is established, followed by the Soviet creation of the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany). Radio Free Europe established. Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb. After the success of the Chinese Communist revolution, Mao Zedong declares the People’s Republic of China. The United States refuses recognition and ensures China is not admitted to the UN. During the depths of the Cold War, the production of Hollywood Westerns dominates the motion picture industry. Paul Nitze is the lead author of NSC-68. Presented to President Truman, the document calls for more aggressive measures to defeat an expansionist Soviet Union. In June, North Korea invades the South. President Truman positions U.S. military force in the region and coordinates a UN-sponsored, U.S.-led coalition “police action” to reverse the invasion. General Douglas MacArthur lands forces at Inchon and within weeks Pyongyang is taken by UN forces. Now threatening the Chinese border, UN forces are overwhelmed by nearly 500,000 troops storming into Korea. U.S. politicians and General MacArthur argue for use of atomic weapons. United States increases support to the French for their war against the Communists in Vietnam.

1951 1951

1951

1951 1952

1952 1952

1952 1953 1953 1953 1953 1953

1953 1954–1955

1954 1954

1954

Chinese–North Korean forces drive U.S.-UN forces back across the 38th parallel. General MacArthur is fired by President Truman for failing to respect the constitutional authority of the civilian commander in chief in making wartime policy. President Truman signs the Mutual Security Act, succeeding the Mutual Defense Assistance Act that had administered Marshall Plan aid. The new law authorizes a shifting combination of military and economic aid to foreign countries around the world to promote the defense of U.S. strategic interests. The United States executes the Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty. United States European Command established at Frankfurt, Germany. Stalin proposes the neutral unification of Germany, which is immediately rejected by the United States and its allies. The United States tests its first thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. U.S. Strategic Air Command deploys long-range nuclear bombers at bases in strategic areas of the world, within striking range of the Soviet Union without refueling. Allen Dulles becomes the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Upon the inauguration of President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles becomes secretary of state. José Figueres begins his second term as president of Costa Rica. The United States boasts more than 800 foreign military bases around the world. The number increases to more than 1,000 by 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War. Armistice agreement ends the fighting in Korea. In Operation Ajax, the Central Intelligence Agency leads a coup d’etat in Iran, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had been advancing a program to nationalize the oil industry. CIA creates Operation MK-Ultra, a mind control program. With hostilities heating up between exiled Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan (Formosa) and mainland Communist China, President Eisenhower threatens military intervention, including nuclear weapons. Congress passes the Formosa Resolution granting presidential authority to use force in the event of a Communist invasion. United States launches the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. United States tests massive hydrogen weapons during Castle Bravo series in the Pacific, contaminating Japanese fishermen and exposing U.S. servicemen to radioactive fallout. After a several-week siege, the French are defeated by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, ending the French Indochina War.

1954

1954

1954 1955

1955 1955 1955 1956

1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1958 1959

In defense of U.S. support for anticommunist forces in Vietnam, President Eisenhower cites the possibility of “falling dominoes” should Vietnam fall to the Communists. France withdraws from Indochina and four states—Laos, Cambodia, and North and South Vietnam—are created. The Geneva Accords call for free and democratic elections by 1956 to unite North and South Vietnam. The United States does not sign, fearing a victory by the nationalist-Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. The Americans move instead to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam and create a mutual regional defense alliance, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), helping to set the stage for U.S. intervention. CIA under Edward Lansdale begins a failed campaign to bring down the North Vietnamese government of Ho Chi Minh. The CIA plays a central role in the coup d’etat in Guatemala, overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and installing an authoritarian military junta. Modeled after NATO and SEATO, the Central Treaty Organization (previously known as the Middle East Treaty Organization or the Baghdad Pact) is organized by the United States to resist Communist aggression in the Middle East. At Bandung, Indonesia, the first conference is held leading to the founding in 1961 of the Non-Aligned Movement. West Germany joins NATO and begins rearming. U.S.-backed Diem wins rigged election, declared president of the Republic of Vietnam. While asserting “positive neutrality” toward both Cold War powers, Arab nationalist president of Egypt Gamal Nasser adopts policies perceived as aligned with the Communist Soviet Union. The United States responds by withdrawing previously pledged funding for the Aswan Dam. Nasser then nationalizes the Suez Canal, prompting a coordinated military attack by Britain, Israel, and France on Egypt. Eisenhower condemns the assault. Inspired in part by Radio Free Europe broadcasts, Hungarian people rise up against Communist repression. A bloody Soviet invasion follows. Policy known as the “Eisenhower Doctrine” is declared, the effect of which is the United States becoming the dominant Western power in the Middle East. Soviets launch Sputnik, fueling charges of Soviet superiority in space research and other areas of weapons development. The Gaither Report is produced, further reinforcing allegations that the Soviets have opened a “missile gap” over the United States. President Eisenhower deploys U.S. Marines to Lebanon for a four-month occupation aimed at restoring political stability. The Ugly American is published. In Cuba, U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista falls to revolution led by nationalist-Communist leader Fidel Castro and anti-imperialist revolutionary Che Guevara.

1959

Che Guevara visits Sukarno in Indonesia; they discuss their shared ideology of antiimperialism.

1959

The “Kitchen Debate” between U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev takes place at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. United States helps the dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier to power in Haiti. U-2 spy plane shot down over Soviet airspace. Pilot Francis Gary Powers is tried and sentenced by Soviet authorities; his release comes in 1962 in a spy exchange. With Ngo Dinh Diem growing more repressive and resisting U.S. calls for reform, the National Liberation Front is formed in South Vietnam aimed at helping Ho Chi Minh to unite the country under his Communist leadership. Eisenhower authorizes CIA to begin planning for the overthrow of Castro’s Communist government in Cuba. U.S. CIA and military intervene in the Dominican Republic, culminating in the landing of 22,000 marines in 1965 to crush a popular uprising. President Eisenhower delivers his Farewell Address in which he warns of a “military-industrial complex.” Patrice Emery Lumumba, first democratically elected president of the Republic of Congo, is assassinated with CIA involvement. CIA participates in planning the assassination of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo. CIA helps engineer the resignation of Ecuadoran president José Velasco. Newly elected U.S. president John F. Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps. President Kennedy initiates the Alliance for Progress to foster noncommunist development in, and improved relations with Latin America. CIA launches failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba. JFK accepts responsibility for authorizing action, then orders CIA shake-up and moves to restrict CIA covert action. President Kennedy announces Apollo space program. Soviet building of the Berlin Wall is met with calls from some in the Pentagon for military action. President Kennedy prepares the nation for the possibility of war over the freedom of West Berlin. Vice President Johnson tours South Vietnam, calls Diem the “Churchill of Asia.” After years of civil war, failed CIA activity aimed at destroying the Communist Pathet Lao, and warnings from his predecessor of the need for U.S. military action, President Kennedy’s State Department successfully negotiates a coalition government and the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos. Cuban Missile Crisis takes place. Bob Dylan writes “Masters of War” and “It’s All Right, Ma.” President Kennedy delivers the American University Commencement Address declaring the need for a new relationship with the Soviet Union and support for a

1959 1960 1960

1960 1961–1965 1961 1961 1961 1961 1961 1961 1961

1961 1961

1961 1962

1962 1962 1963

1963 1963 1963 1963 1964 1964

1964 1964

1964 1965–1968

1965 1965 1966–1967 1966–2014

1966 1966 1966 1966 1967 1967 1967

treaty to ban atmospheric and underwater nuclear weapons testing. President Kennedy delivers “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in West Berlin, expressing solidarity with West Berlin’s aspirations for freedom. Limited Test Ban Treaty is signed. Policy change on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, coupled with CIA-backed overthrow of Diem. President Kennedy is assassinated. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is released in U.S. theatres. Triggered by the right of Panamanians to fly their national flag alongside the U.S. flag, riots ensue over the sovereignty of the Panama Canal Zone. Twenty Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers are killed in an event that proved pivotal in U.S. willingness to transfer control of the Canal Zone. Military action figure G.I. Joe is introduced by Hasbro. Backed by the CIA, a military coup in Brazil overthrows the democratically elected but Socialist-leaning Joao Goulart, opening a period of repressive assault against suspected Communists led by General Castelo Branco, whose death squads are trained by the CIA. Gulf of Tonkin events in August provoke U.S. escalation in Vietnam. With modest beginnings in a series of “Teach-Ins,” antiwar movement increases in numbers. Its growing militancy reflects a nation deeply divided over a war in Southeast Asia that antiwar radicals decry as “imperialist.” U.S. bombing of North Vietnam begins; the first U.S. ground troops arrive in South Vietnam. The CIA stages the overthrow of the democratically elected Sukarno in Indonesia, leading to a period of bloody repression under General Suharto. Green Berets intervene in Guatemala against rebels. The United States vetoes more UN Security Council resolutions than any other nation; more than half of these pertain to condemnation of Israeli actions against its Arab neighbors or Palestinians in the post-1967 occupied territories. More than 400,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” is released, reaching number one on the pop music charts. Vietnam Veterans Against the War organize. Black Panthers condemn U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam and the Third World as imperialist. Six-Day War takes place in the Middle East. Indicting his own nation as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declares his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Operation Phoenix intensifies its persecution of suspected Viet Cong officials and sympathizers.

1967 1968

1968 1968 1968 1968 1969–1975 1969 1969 1969 1970 1970 1970 1971 1971 1972 1972 1972 1973 1973 1973

1973

1973 1973 1974 1975

Revolutionary insurgent and global anti-imperialist Che Guevara is killed in Bolivia by members of the Bolivian military and CIA operatives. Tet Offensive takes place in Vietnam, proves to be the key turning point in the war. Although U.S. and South Vietnamese forces reclaim lost ground and proclaim victory in the offensive, President Johnson rejects request of General Westmoreland for another 200,000 U.S. troops. Paris peace talks begin, aimed at bringing an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. My Lai Massacre takes place; comes to light in 1969 and highlights the larger issue of atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam. Antiwar forces demoralized by the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The Green Berets is released in U.S. theaters. U.S. corporate investment in Angola more than doubles. President Richard Nixon begins secret bombing of Cambodia. Henry Kissinger is named national security advisor by President Nixon. Vietnam Moratorium takes place, largest antiwar demonstration of the war. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia is deposed in a CIA-supported coup. Lon Nol takes power. President Nixon announces the U.S.–South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. It is followed days later by the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State. Salvador Allende elected president of Chile. Nixon and Kissinger aim to disrupt and bring down his government. Pentagon Papers are published. CIA backs a coup in Bolivia that ousts leftist president Juan Torres. President Nixon makes historic visit to China. Nixon orders the so-called “Christmas Bombing” over North Vietnam. Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law in the Philippines. Paris Peace Accords are signed, bringing an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. U.S. Senate opens hearings on the secret bombing of Cambodia. Egyptian forces lead other Arab states in attacking Israel in the Yom Kippur War. With Israel under siege and the Soviet Union backing Arab states, President Nixon delivers the largest massive military weapons airlift in history to Israel and considers U.S. military intervention. General Augusto Pinochet comes to power in Chile after a CIA-sponsored coup that overthrows Salvador Allende. Pinochet’s military junta (1974–1990) will imprison 80,000, torture more than 20,000, and murder close to 3,000. Armed siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, with leaders of the American Indian Movement. War Powers Resolution is passed into law. The Watergate scandal forces the resignation of Richard Nixon. Last Americans evacuate South Vietnam as Saigon falls to North Vietnamese Communist forces and is renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

1975 1975 1975 1975 1975 Mid-1970s

1977 1978 1979 1979 1979 1979

1979 1979 1980s

1980 1980 1980

1981–1985 1981

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge take power in Cambodia, commence massive genocide. Communist Vietnam will invade by 1979 and bring an end to the regime. CIA helps engineer a change in government in Australia, removing the left-leaning prime minister Edward Whitlam. Mayaguez incident between the Khmer Rouge and the United States marks the last official military engagement of the Vietnam War. CIA launches a nine-year intervention into Angola. U.S. senator Frank Church holds hearings into clandestine CIA activities. An influential cadre of defense hawks criticizes defense cuts in the post-Vietnam era and any Middle East peace efforts that could undercut Israel. They eventually call themselves “neoconservatives.” Newly elected President Jimmy Carter promises to curtail U.S. militarism in the post-Vietnam era and pursue a foreign policy focused on universal human rights. Camp David Accords signed, bringing peace between Egypt and Israel. Shah Reza Pahlavi falls to an Islamic revolution in Iran, leaving the United States without a stalwart, strategically important ally in the Middle East. In Nicaragua, Sandinistas lead successful Socialist revolution ousting U.S.-backed dictator Somoza. Iranian student revolutionaries seize U.S. embassy in Tehran and take Americans hostage. The “Hostage Crisis” lasts 444 days. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is anticipated by President Carter’s support months before of a mujahideen of Islamic “holy warriors” intent on fighting a Soviet-backed regime in the country. Civil war commences in El Salvador. A military junta charged with widespread human rights crimes continues to receive U.S. support into the early 1980s. Calling nuclear weapons technology “evil,” the new Islamic state of Iran suspends the U.S.-supported nuclear weapons program launched under the shah. Anti-apartheid movement gains widespread support in the United States. Despite opposition from the Reagan administration, support for economic sanctions on South Africa helps to topple apartheid by the end of the decade. The hit song “In America” by the Charlie Daniels Band typifies the rise of patriotic, conservative-themed country music. Iraq invades Iran. President Jimmy Carter declares the Carter Doctrine, affirming U.S. willingness to use military force to defend U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf. United States begins massive military buildup in the region. President Ronald Reagan pursues largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history. Newly elected U.S. President Ronald Reagan authorizes support for the Contras aimed at overthrowing the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Among the means is a CIA manual training the Contras in ways to “neutralize” the Sandinista government, including economic sabotage, torture, and assassination.

1981

Peace movement organizes, aimed at halting the Reagan administration’s increasingly bellicose policies in Central America.

1981

Pakistan intelligence agency, the ISI, begins recruiting fighters from across the Arab world to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Much U.S. aid intended for the Afghan resistance is siphoned to the ISI. In the midst of civil war and an Israeli invasion of Lebanon, President Reagan sends U.S. Marines to the country as part of an international peacekeeping force. The first Rambo film, First Blood, premieres in U.S. theaters. The Reagan administration removes Iraq from its list of terror-sponsoring states, despite objections from the State Department. Nearly one million people turn out for a concert and protest in New York City’s Central Park in support of the Nuclear Freeze. Through a variety of channels, United States provides Saddam Hussein with tactical planning support and voluminous materials for Iraq’s missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. U.S. forces and civilian personnel in Lebanon are victimized by a series of suicide bombings, one resulting in the deaths of 241 marines in Beirut. The United States invades the Caribbean island nation of Grenada in what is described by President Reagan as a rescue operation. President Reagan denounces the Nuclear Freeze and proposes instead the Strategic Defense Initiative to protect Americans from nuclear attack. U.S. secretary of state provided intelligence documenting Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran. One month later, U.S. special envoy to Iraq Donald Rumsfeld assures Iraq of continued U.S. support. Opposition leader Benigno Aquino returns to the Philippines from exile but is shot dead upon exiting the airplane. Marcos’s military is blamed for the murder. Extremist Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar emerges as the most powerful of Pakistan’s ISI’s mujahideen clients. A known drug trafficker who will develop close ties to Osama bin Laden, Hekmatyar receives about one-half of all CIA covert weapons aid intended for Afghanistan. Pakistan ISI and CIA train Afghan mujahideen to fight Soviets inside the Soviet Union, an idea encouraged by CIA director William Casey. Operating through USAID, the CIA secretly funds Afghan school textbooks filled with militant, violent messages intended to inspire young Afghans to fight against the Soviet Union. CIA mines Managua Harbor in violation of Nicaraguan sovereignty. U.S. support for Iraq in Iran-Iraq War declared. U.S. exports dual-use materials to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq government for possible use in developing a nuclear weapons program. Boland Amendment cuts off all funding for the Contras in their war against the government of Nicaragua.

1982 1982 1982 1982 1983–1988

1983 1983 1983 1983

1983 1983

1984–1985 1984–1994

1984 1984

1984

1984

Nicaragua Sandinista revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega wins the presidency overwhelmingly in an election certified as fair by all international observers except the United States.

1985

Reagan administration begins selling weapons to Iran in violation of U.S. and international law both to support the Contras in Nicaragua and to advance policy objectives in the Middle East—most critically the freeing of Americans held captive by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The CIA, Pakistani ISI, and British intelligence plan guerrilla attacks from Afghanistan into the Soviet states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Invasion USA released in U.S. theaters. The United States launches airstrikes against Libya for Muammar Qaddafi’s support of terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens and interests. U.S. sale of weapons to Iran is revealed in a Lebanese newspaper. Nicaraguan government shoots down a C-123 transport plane carrying Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA employee ferrying supplies to the Contras. The incident helps expose the Iran-Contra scandal. Elections held in the Philippines between Marcos and Corazon Aquino, widow of slain opposition leader. Widespread fraud is suspected as Marcos declares himself the winner. Following widespread protest, United States abandons support and Marcos flees to Clark U.S. Air Base. United States found guilty in the International Court of Justice of violating the sovereignty of Nicaragua; court orders United States to pay reparations and cease its actions in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration ignores the verdict. United States and Britain block UN Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran. Continued instability in Haiti. The United States helps dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier flee to exile but then helps bring another authoritarian leader to power to keep a lid on rising protest. In defiance of Congress, Reagan administration encourages the acquisition by Pakistan of nuclear weapons technology. A series of investigations link the Bank of Credit and Commercial International (BCCI) with the execution of American foreign policy. BCCI is linked to the CIA, shadowy weapons and drug dealers, and several corrupt dictatorships. President Reagan accepts the findings of the investigative Tower Commission that his administration had acted illegally in trading arms to Iran for hostages and sending the proceeds to the Contras in Nicaragua. Congress approves massive military and economic aid package for Pakistan, despite knowledge of nuclear weapons program, and widespread suspicions that it has been partially funded by U.S. aid intended for Afghan mujahideen. Despite documented use of chemical weapons by Iraq, U.S. assistant secretary of state affirms the importance of U.S.-Iraqi relationship to U.S. strategic objectives.

1985 1985 1986 1986 1986

1986

1986

1986 Late 1980s

Late 1980s Late 1980s

1987

1987

1988 1988

1989 1989

1989 1989

1990 1990 1990 1990

1991–1996 1991

1992–2014

1992 1992 1992 1992 1993

1993

1993

Osama bin Laden forms Al Qaeda (“the base”) from former mujahideen and other new recruits. U.S. invasion of Panama to overthrow Manual Noriega, a dictator who had long received U.S. backing. Soviet Union completes its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Bin Laden returns to Saudi Arabia where he foments opposition to the monarchy. United States reduces aid to Afghanistan. Berlin Wall comes down, signaling the imminent end of the Cold War. George H. W. Bush administration tells Israel that they will need to withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip and West Bank in exchange for peace and security. Israeli officials balk. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, triggering the U.S.-led, UN-sanctioned, and quickly successful Operation Desert Storm that reverses the invasion. Sanctions are imposed on Iraq and not lifted until after the U.S. invasion of 2003. U.S. construction of military base in Saudi Arabia near Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina outrages bin Laden. In elections in Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, outspoken critic of America’s close ties with the Duvalier regime, becomes president, promising significant reforms. A bloody coup follows seven months later, overthrowing Aristide. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, private investment by major U.S. oil corporations flows into former Soviet states in Central Asia. Bin Laden expelled from Saudi Arabia, takes up headquarters in the newly declared Islamic state of Sudan where he builds Al Qaeda into a terror network and begins plotting attacks against Americans and U.S. interests. Despite a pledge by President George H. W. Bush not to do so, U.S. and Western European NATO allies press for the expansion of NATO membership among former Soviet states and nations within the Soviet bloc. Subic Military Base in the Philippines is abandoned following a vote in the Philippines Senate. U.S. forces land in Somalia on a UN-sponsored humanitarian mission. Increased ethnic tensions emerge in the Balkan states following the collapse of the Communist government of Yugoslavia. “Defense Planning Guidance” promotes United States as world’s lone superpower. President Bill Clinton helps broker Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. It is condemned by U.S. neoconservatives, hardline Israelis, and conservative Christian evangelicals. Explosion at New York City’s World Trade Center (WTC), killing six and wounding hundreds. Six radical extremists with ties to bin Laden are convicted for the crime and bin Laden is named an unindicted co-conspirator. Eighteen U.S. soldiers are killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, following a failed attempt to capture several associates of a local warlord. In 1998, the United States will indict bin Laden on charges of having trained the attackers.

1993 1993 1993

1994

1994

1994

1995

1995 Late 1990s 1996 1996

1996 1996

1997 1997 1997

Angry with U.S. policy in the Middle East, Pakistani militant Mir Aimal Kasi kills two CIA employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The Hollywood blockbuster film True Lies is released in theaters. The new U.S. administration of Bill Clinton prepares for military intervention in an attempt to restore exiled Haitian president Aristide to power. Diplomatic efforts by former president Carter facilitate his peaceful return. Sarajevo marketplace bombing kills 68. Blame falls on the Serbs, and U.S.-NATO cruise missile attacks on Serb positions follow. Serb resistance collapses, and Dayton Agreement 18 months later effectively partitions Bosnia-Herzegovina. The United States begins several years of support of the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan, believing its leaders to be anti-Iranian and pro-Western in orientation and a stabilizing force in the region. U.S. energy giant Enron builds the world’s largest gas-fired power plant in Dabhol, India, a project that depends on the construction of a Unocal natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. Heavy lobbying of both Indian and Afghan officials will continue through the Clinton administration. Later reports indicate that Enron spent millions trying to bribe the Taliban over the pipeline project. Attack on a U.S.-operated Saudi training center in Riyadh kills five Americans and two Indians. Bin Laden denies responsibility but praises the attack. He applies public pressure on the Saudi monarchy to drive U.S. forces from the country. Reports of massacre by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica bring rising call for U.S. intervention. Numerous U.S. reports warn of an airborne terrorist attack linked to Al Qaeda hitting the United States and killing Americans. President Clinton signs letter authorizing the CIA to use any and all means to destroy bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Supported by American neoconservatives, newly elected Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells the U.S. Congress they should join Israel in “democratizing” the Middle East. A truck bomb destroys Khobar Towers, a U.S. military residence in Dhahran, killing 19 U.S. servicemen. U.S. military links bin Laden to the attack. Bin Laden issues declaration of jihad with the following goals: driving U.S. forces from the Arabian peninsula; overthrow of the Saudi monarchy; liberation of all Muslim holy sites; and assistance to like-minded Islamic groups around the world. CIA creates secret task force to investigate Central Asian oil reserves and examine regional political situation that may impact U.S. access to the region. A consortium comprised of Unocal and Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia is formed to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. Unocal pays University of Nebraska nearly one million dollars to set up a training facility near bin Laden’s compound in Kandahar to train Afghans for pipeline construction.

1998 1998

U.S. grand jury indicts bin Laden for plotting attacks against the United States. Bin Laden promises to bring jihad to the United States.

1998

Project for the New American Century appeals to President Clinton to stage an invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. United States launches cruise missile attacks against suspected terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Al Shifa in Khartoum. U.S. UN ambassador Bill Richardson meets Taliban officials in Kabul, promoting Unocal pipeline project and hoping to induce them to turn over Osama bin Laden in exchange for diplomatic recognition of the Afghanistan government. Because President Clinton will not extend diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government, Unocal cancels its Afghanistan pipeline project. Anti-imperialist U.S. critic and Socialist Hugo Chavez is elected president of Venezuela. Strategic Assessment 1999, a high-level report prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, envisions the United States preparing to fight a war to ensure access to oil and natural gas in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions. A number of reports estimate that between 200,000 and 500,000 children in Iraq have died since the imposition of sanctions in 1990. U.S.-led NATO bombing for 78 days of Serbian targets in Kosovo. In the wake of the assault, the new state of Kosovo is created, which will be administered by the UN until 2008. United States establishes Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo, the largest U.S. military base built since the Vietnam era. USS Cole is bombed in Yemen, killing 17 crew members and wounding 30. U.S. officials quietly seek an overthrow of Taliban in Afghanistan, discuss joint operation with Russia. Outgoing U.S. president Clinton warns president-elect George W. Bush that Al Qaeda is top U.S. security threat; Bush asserts it is instead Saddam Hussein in Iraq. “Plan Colombia” is launched with the government of Colombia, a U.S. effort to go after “narco-terrorists.” George W. Bush becomes U.S. president. His administration has deep ties to major transnational oil corporations and to the Project for the New American Century. Declaring a unilateralist foreign policy, the Bush administration withdraws from a number of international treaties and conventions. United States abrogates 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and determines to develop the National Missile Defense system. President George W. Bush declares that the United States will not abide the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of states hostile to U.S. interests. On September 11, three hijacked U.S. civilian airliners crash into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth aircraft is redirected by terrorists toward Washington, but is deliberately crashed

1998 1998

1998 1998 1999

1999 1999

2000 2000 2000 2000 2001 2001

2001

2001

2001

2001

2002

2002 2002 2002

2002

2002

2003 2003

2003

2003

by passengers over an isolated field in southwestern Pennsylvania. With nearly 3,000 deaths, the United States suffers the worst terrorist attack ever on its own soil. Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terror network claims credit for the attacks, which provoke the U.S. administration of George W. Bush to declare a global “War on Terror.” With NATO support, President Bush launches a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in an attempt to destroy Al Qaeda’s terrorist training camps. Simultaneously, planning within the administration intensifies for an invasion of Iraq despite the lack of evidence of any connection to the 9/11 attacks. The United States begins holding a new class of war-related prisoners it captures in the “War on Terror” and describes as “enemy combatants” at its military base in Guantánamo Bay. The prisoners’ minimal access to due process receives international condemnation. President Bush declares that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constitute an “Axis of Evil” in the world. He singles out Iraq as a regime whose alleged “weapons of mass destruction” pose an immediate threat to the United States and its interests. Attempted coup fails to dislodge Hugo Chavez from power in Venezuela. Evidence suggests U.S. role, though the Bush administration denies it. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States steps up use of unmanned military drone flights to go after suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the largest reorganization of the U.S. national security establishment since 1947, Congress establishes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The new agency, National Security Agency, CIA, and other intelligence-gathering agencies receive a massive infusion of expanded funding and authority. Bush administration officials produce “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.” The document articulates an aggressive U.S. national security strategy, declaring among its tenets the right to launch preemptive attacks on nations or nonstate actors deemed a threat to the United States or its Western allies. Bush administration officials wage public relations offensive to build support for an invasion of Iraq, arguing that Saddam Hussein is harboring weapons of mass destruction and suggesting that Saddam has ties to Al Qaeda. International protests against the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq draw millions into the streets. Bush administration launches the invasion of Iraq (“Operation Iraqi Freedom”) with a powerful barrage of air strikes and overwhelming force described by administration officials and military experts as “shock and awe” certain to defeat Saddam Hussein. Baghdad falls quickly as the search for alleged “weapons of mass destruction”—the declared casus belli—begins. UN resolution declares the United States and Britain the “occupying powers” in Iraq. President Bush appoints L. Paul Bremer chief administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which now directs the affairs of Iraq. Even as President Bush declares major combat operations over, Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led invasion begins to gather force.

2003

Saddam Hussein is captured. Despite an exhaustive search, no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq.

2003

United States supports Georgia’s request for NATO membership. Its bid is bolstered by the country’s participation in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan. The insurgency in Iraq intensifies and U.S. casualties begin to mount. U.S. transnational energy services giant Halliburton awarded billion-dollar no-bid contract to rebuild war-ravaged oil industry in southern Iraq. President Bush declares in his second inaugural address that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” President Bush grants recess appointment as UN ambassador to John Bolton, longtime critic of the UN who espouses a unilateralist foreign policy for the United States. The United States follows Israel’s lead in refusing to engage a newly elected Palestinian government comprised of both Fatah moderates and Hamas, which has been branded a terrorist organization. Blackwater Security Consulting security guards fire on a crowd in Nisour Square, Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqi civilians. The incident highlights problems stemming from the growing use of U.S. private military contractors and security firms in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barack Obama is elected U.S. president, partly on a promise to end the war in Iraq. He pledges to restore America’s damaged international reputation by closing the military detention center in Guantánamo and pursuing diplomacy over unilateral military action. After six years of fighting in Iraq, 154 criminal investigations are now probing allegations of widespread bribery, conflicts of interest, defective products, bid rigging, and theft in the delivery of goods and services by U.S. contractors related to the war. The Obama administration intensifies use of unmanned drones in the fight against suspected terrorists in a number of countries. In the face of domestic criticism from conservatives, President Obama pledges new U.S. relationship with the Arab and Muslim world while affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself.” President Obama announces troop surge of 30,000 more U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. U.S. sanctions against Iran deepen over the nation’s nuclear program. The nonviolent protests of the “Arab Spring” overthrow U.S.-backed authoritarian Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. After more than three decades of a relationship in which Egypt served as a bulwark of peace and “stability” in the region in return for large volumes of U.S. aid, U.S.-Egyptian relations are suddenly destabilized. Additional U.S. sanctions on Iran are imposed over its nuclear program.

2004 2004 2005

2005

2005

2007

2008

2009

2009 2009

2009 2010 2011

2012

2013

In an address to the General Assembly of the UN, President Obama declares, “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure our core interests in the region…. We will ensure the free flow of energy from the region to the world.” He further asserts: “The notion of American empire may be useful propaganda, but it isn’t borne out by America’s current policy or public opinion.”

2014

United States withdraws its last combat troops from Afghanistan. Lasting from 2001 to 2014 and ending without a clear determination of victory, the war is the longest military conflict in U.S. history. President Obama, abandoning his plan to remove all troops from Afghanistan by the end of his term in January 2017, announces that 9,800 American troops will remain in the country through most of 2016 and about 5,500 of those would remain into 2017.

2015

1. The Early Cold War Era and Global U.S. Interests, 1946–1954

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In the aftermath of the Allied victory of World War II, the United States of America enjoyed by any measure the most enviable position of all the major warring powers. Across the Soviet Union, Europe, and Japan, countless towns, cities, factories, and military facilities lay in ruins. By contrast, with the exception of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States emerged from the conflict without suffering any material damage to its territory, infrastructure, or economy. Indeed, the greatest conflict in history had ended the Great Depression and brought booming factories, stunning levels of industrial production, and rising incomes. And although more than 400,000 American soldiers lost their lives, that figure paled in comparison to the more than 9 million Soviet military personnel and 16 million citizens who perished in the war, and the staggering global figure of more than 65 million dead. Further, at Bretton Woods in 1944, the United States was the lead architect of the new postwar global economic order. The U.S. military also reigned supreme in the fall of 1945, possessing the world’s largest navy, a monopoly on the atomic bomb, and an occupying military force deployed in nations around the world. From the North Atlantic to countries across Western Europe, eastward to China, and on to South Asia, Australia, and the island territories of the Pacific, American GIs could be found in every corner of the globe. Most of these armies of liberation, often stationed alongside other Allied forces, began returning home over the next few years. However, in dozens of countries the United States moved in the late 1940s to establish permanent bases for the army, air force, and navy—more than 200 in total by 1954. In postwar Japan, the occupation of the defeated empire, presided over by General Douglas MacArthur, formally ended in 1951 with the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco that restored Japanese sovereignty. Subsequent security and “status of forces” agreements authorized a permanent U.S. military force to remain in Japan, one that has continued for more than 60 years to provide both for the defense of the country and for protection of U.S. interests in greater East Asia. Coincident with the U.S. deployment of a permanent global military presence, the Soviet Union moved in the postwar era to secure regional dominance in Eastern Europe. The Russian people having suffered far more than any other Allied power in World War II, invaded by Germany through Poland twice in a generation, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made clear at the Yalta conference his nation’s need for Eastern European border security—in Poland, particularly. At Yalta in February 1945, at least for the moment, President Roosevelt tacitly agreed, in exchange for a vaguely elastic agreement on democratic elections in Poland. The details of how to reconcile those two fundamentally contradictory goals, along with the details of reparations due the Soviet Union, would be worked out following the war.

It turned out that another president would face those challenges. President Harry S. Truman was generally more inclined than FDR to draw a harder line in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Surrounded by tough and single-mindedly anticommunist foreign policy advisers, Truman himself also understood the emerging Cold War tensions over such key areas as Poland, Germany, and China in rather stark terms. The Truman national security team tended to look with suspicion on every Russian action, often discounting other important considerations. More than anything, they gave primacy to a new and unprecedented global U.S. agenda. The combination of the defiant posture of Stalin in such confrontational episodes as the blockade of Berlin in 1948, coupled with Truman’s determination to project a muscular U.S. response to any possible threat to U.S. interests—no matter how threadbare the connection to the Soviet Union or what U.S. officials now called “international communism” might be—brought heightening tensions that hardened into the Cold War. Led by influential Republican critics of FDR and Truman, war-weary Americans increasingly viewed Soviet actions in the late 1940s in Eastern Europe through both the prism of their longstanding revulsion at communism and the dark shadow of Hitler’s aggression that brought World War II. With Poland and Eastern Europe falling under Communist domination by 1947 and Stalin stiffening his demands over Berlin, critics charged the Democrats with having committed Munich 1938–style “appeasement” at Yalta and began to point fingers at alleged Communist sympathizers in the State Department who they said had invited Stalin’s aggression. Democrats and liberals generally found themselves on the defensive or charged outright with subversion when they tried to argue for a more measured, nuanced policy toward the Soviet Union and Communist-led nationalist rebellions around the world. The black-and-white view of the world held by many Americans, exploited by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his meteoric rise to political stardom, was in part a creation of the Democratic president. Most revealing—and of profound significance for long-term U.S. foreign policy—was President Truman’s response to the crisis in Greece. The Greek Civil War had been underway since the liberation of that country in 1944. The conflict was a product of internal forces having far more to do with the repressive policies of the British-supported authoritarian monarchy than of any external modest support the Greek Communist resistance forces received from Communist but independent Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, President Truman, influenced by State Department Russian expert George Kennan’s counsel that the Soviet Union would respond best to military force aimed at containing its expansionist ambitions, and nervous about a possible Communist incursion into the Mediterranean and the oil-rich Middle East beyond, resolved to act. Advised by Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg to “scare hell out of the American people” in order to win their support, Truman made the case for $400 million of American aid to the anticommunist regime in Athens—one that was in fact neo-Fascist in its orientation. In an address laying out what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president made the argument with plain language and in blunt terms—as Dean Acheson later said, “[making] things clearer than truth” (Bernhard, 561–563). Truman declared boldly the need to defend what he very generously characterized as the “free peoples” of Greece and Turkey—and free people everywhere. Although he never explicitly charged the Soviet Union with inspiring or supporting the Greek Communists, he did not have to; the implicit conflation of Greek communism with references to Soviet actions unfolding elsewhere in Eastern Europe effectively delivered the message. In a single stroke, the president set his nation on a course of global policing of not just communism coming from the Kremlin but any nationalist revolt anywhere that might pose a threat to any nation allied with the strategic interests of the United States. Truman called his Doctrine of Containment the “other half of the walnut,” the first half being the Marshall Plan of economic assistance to war-ravaged European nations. Formally known as the European

Economic Recovery Program, the $17 billion aid package was strategically aimed at ensuring Western Europe would remain reliably anticommunist. The 16 national economies participating in the program’s Organization for European Economic Cooperation began to experience rapid recovery, which further cemented the transatlantic relationship while serving well both the U.S. postwar economy and foreign policy agenda. Containment and the Marshall Plan were followed quickly by the passage of the National Security Act. That law, constituting the largest ever peacetime reorganization and expansion of the U.S. military establishment, established the Defense Department (the new title underscoring presumed U.S. intentions in the world), the National Security Council, and—perhaps most important—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Beyond intervention in the Greek Civil War and all that it entailed, 1947 proved to be the turning point of the Cold War. Although historical interpretations of U.S. and Soviet actions during this period remain a matter of some debate, most scholars have now generally reached a consensus on several key points. First, the Marshall Plan was both an attempt by the United States to stabilize the economic and political situation in Western Europe and solidify the region as an anticommunist bulwark, and an effort to undermine Communist control of Eastern European states over which Stalin had by this point established control. The release of historical documents since the end of the Cold War has made it clear that the Soviet Union saw the U.S.-imposed conditions on receiving Marshall Plan aid as a form of economic imperialism, a clear threat to its very fragile hold on the entire Eastern European security bloc of satellite states, and ultimately aimed at advancing a capitalist order on the entire continent. The combination of a ravaged Soviet state, U.S. and British resistance to the $20 billion Russian demand for reparations from Germany, and now what seemed from Stalin’s point of view to be tactical economic aggrandizement, helped lead him toward a series of crudely aggressive actions. Most extreme among these was the 1948 military coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia. Taken together, the imposition of Soviet-style Communist regimes across what Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain” of Eastern Europe was viewed by the Truman administration as nearly tantamount to a declaration of war against the West. By early 1947, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) moving toward imposing Sovietstyle Socialist rule over countries under its occupation, the United States and Great Britain were moving toward a much tougher anti-Soviet posture. Beyond the increasingly hardline rhetoric of U.S. officials were economic policies imposed in the western sectors of Germany occupied by American and British troops. First came the unified American-British Bizone. Marshall Plan aid began flowing into western Berlin and throughout the Bizone, launching what became known as the “German economic miracle,” while the eastern Soviet-occupied sector remained impoverished. The decades-long flow of economic refugees into what soon became West Germany had begun. Within a year, British and American officials created a unified currency and national bank. The cumulative impact of these economic developments triggered the Soviet military blockade of West Berlin, the historic U.S.-British airlift, and the creation of the divided states of, first, the Federal Republic of (West) Germany, and in response, the (East) German Democratic Republic. The economic revival of Germany was more complex than many Americans appreciated at the time. Many of the largest contracts for Germany’s recovery were awarded to U.S. and German corporations that had collaborated with the Nazis. Indeed, American policy by 1947 had become much less interested in the goal of “denazifying” Germany—in 1945 that had been front and center among U.S. goals for postwar Germany—and much more focused on rebuilding Germany as an economic and political fortress against Soviet expansionism. Thousands of Nazi industrialists and political leaders were “rehabilitated” in postwar Germany. As one scholar has demonstrated recently, thousands more were permitted to quietly

emigrate to the United States and assimilate into American society—often with the direct assistance of American intelligence officials who saw them as potentially effective operatives against the Soviet Union. In the wake of the Berlin crisis, the United States and Britain forged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a multilateral defense alliance that stood for the common protection of all member nations. NATO bound the United States and Europe tightly in a strategy to contain Soviet expansion through conventional and nuclear deterrence, including the stationing of U.S. military forces and bombers at U.S. bases in Europe. Two further events in 1949—the successful Communist revolution of Mao Zedong in China and the Soviet test of its first atomic bomb—shook the U.S. national security establishment. With the containment strategy now under increasing challenge, Truman’s National Security Council, led by the State Department’s Paul Nitze, produced the report NSC-68, calling for a much more vigorous, offensive, and expensive strategy to halt the spread of communism. The document warned of grim, apocalyptic consequences if the United States failed to take the fight to the Communists, but also made clear that U.S. policy was driven by a positive determination “to develop a healthy international community,” a strategic goal the authors indicated the United States would “probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat.” The 1947 National Security Act authorized the CIA to gather intelligence abroad from America’s enemies, and to carry out through its “Special Activities Division” highly clandestine operations to advance America’s security. Such activities included covertly orchestrating propaganda campaigns against political leaders, sabotaging the economies and elections of various countries, and most dramatically, staging coups d’état—often in collaboration with internal opportunistic military forces. Such was the case in Iran in 1953. In the early 1950s, Great Britain’s lucrative colonial control of the oil resource, stemming from the World War I–era partitioning of the region, stood threatened by the nationalization policies of elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. In 1952, President Truman rebuffed appeals to collaborate with the British Secret Intelligence Service in an overthrow of the Mosaddeq government. President Eisenhower, however, brought to the national security establishment the Dulles brothers—John Foster as secretary of state, and Allen, who headed the CIA. Both men were fervently committed anticommunists and U.S. internationalists, who harbored no compunction about the strongest possible exercise of all instruments of American power to advance the nation’s interests. Allen Dulles authorized the plan to overthrow Mosaddeq and install a government ruled by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Stalwart U.S. ally for most of his 25-year rule, the autocratic shah often resorted to violent political repression against opponents. Firmly embedded in the historical memory of the Middle East, the Iranian coup stands for many people throughout the region as symbolic of the imperial policies of the United States. The CIA followed its success in Iran with an overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. Widespread popular revolt in 1944 brought an end to more than a decade of the U.S.-supported dictatorial regime of General Jorge Ubico. Juan José Arévalo won democratic elections and instituted a series of moderate social reforms that were deeply resented by the strongest economic power in the country—the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (UFCO), which had benefited enormously from Ubico’s rule. Numerous coup attempts had failed to bring down Arévalo. In 1950, newly elected Arbenz Guzmán added a land reform program that promised small parcels of land to peasants who had fallen into debt-slavery under Ubico. When Arbenz Guzmán demanded that UFCO return some of the lands it had expropriated, the Dulles-led CIA began moving against him. In June 1954, a coup deposed Arbenz Guzmán and installed General Carlos Castillo Armas—ultimately triggering the Guatemalan Civil War that resulted in the deaths of some 200,000 Guatemalans.

Tensions elsewhere drew the nation more and more deeply into a series of vexing geopolitical challenges. In Korea, Truman’s bold resolve to confront through a UN “police action” Communist North Korea’s invasion of the South further solidified U.S. support of the violently repressive regime of Syngman Rhee in Seoul. Similarly, South Africa, though it adopted the racist national policy of apartheid in 1948, was the most important anticommunist U.S. ally on the African continent. Also home to profitable investments by American mining companies, South Africa received significant volumes of U.S. military weaponry and economic assistance. By far the largest beneficiary of U.S. military and economic aid of any nation in the world since World War II, the newly created state of Israel posed perhaps the most troublesome test for U.S. policymakers. Israel was a parliamentary democracy amid a sea of autocratic monarchies. From the moment President Truman offered the state diplomatic recognition in 1948, the United States found itself in the geopolitically untenable position of supporting Israel’s security in the face of armed opposition from oil-rich neighboring Arab states. In the same region, the United States offered support in the late 1940s to the autocratic monarchy of the one-time Nazi-supporting King Farouk in Egypt, outwardly supporting that country’s independence from Britain but more determinedly cultivating it as another anti-Soviet ally. By 1950–1951, however, the CIA was helping to plot the overthrow of the increasingly unpopular and corrupt Farouk, who appeared by then an unreliable strategic partner in an increasingly politically volatile nation marked by rising pan-Arab nationalism. Committed now to a global struggle against communism and the protection of its own strategic interests, the United States overall found itself increasingly enmeshed in local and regional conflicts that had little if anything to do with the advancement of what politicians of both parties frequently described as “international communism.” Such was the case in Indochina, where nationalist-Communist Viet Minh forces, once allied with the United States in World War II against the Japanese, battled the French for their independence from decades of repressive colonial rule. Concerned less with the aspirations of Vietnamese to be free of outside domination and far more with holding the support of the French—key to the anti-Soviet bulwark U.S. policymakers were building in Europe—the Truman administration provided crucial political and financial support for an ultimately failed French war in Indochina. The Cold War was fought on all fronts—geopolitical, financial, covert operations, proxy military battles, and nuclear weapons development—the latter with grim ramifications for the people of the Marshall Islands as well as American citizens caught in the path of radioactive fallout. There was also a cultural dimension. The State Department and CIA (covertly) deployed cultural ambassadors such as jazz musicians, visual artists, ballet dancers, and orchestra performances worldwide to demonstrate the supposed superiority (and racially pluralistic nature) of American democratic culture versus that of the Soviet Union. These first postwar years demonstrated that this would be a war for the allegiance of peoples around the world. As the authors of NSC-68 implicitly acknowledged, the Cold War conflict to defend the “free” from a future of “enslavement” was inseparably intertwined with the strategic goal of the United States to create a “world environment” where “the American system … can survive and flourish.” Neither the outcome, nor the costs and consequences of that crusade could be seen at the time.

Further Reading Bernhard, Nancy E. “Clearer Than Truth: Public Affairs Television and the State Department’s Domestic Information Campaigns, 1947– 1952.” Diplomatic History 21, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 562–563. United States National Security Council. NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. Washington, D.C.: National Security Council, April 14, 1950.

Acheson, Dean (1893–1971) Dean Acheson was a Democratic statesman who served as President Harry Truman’s secretary of state (1949–1953) and played a pivotal role in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the early Cold War era. A pragmatic man who distrusted ideologues and extremists, he became Truman’s closest adviser and an architect of the policy of using presidential power without congressional authority—a key development that had long-term momentous impacts on the exercise of U.S. foreign policy. Born and raised in Connecticut, Acheson was educated at Yale University and Harvard Law School. As an aide to Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, he came to know leading figures in Washington, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1941 named him assistant secretary of state for economic affairs. He played a key role in the development of the Lend-Lease Act (1941) and the Bretton Woods Agreement (1945). In 1945 he became undersecretary of state for Secretary of State James Byrnes, who was abroad most of the time, giving Acheson a great deal of responsibility. Their relationship was strained, however, and Acheson submitted his resignation in 1945, but President Truman refused to accept it. Acheson remained in the position until 1949, serving under Byrnes for two more years and his successor, General George C. Marshall. After the war, Acheson at first took a moderate stance toward the Soviet Union in part because it had been a bulwark against the Axis. Like Truman, he tried to find common ground with the Communists. The Acheson-Lilienthal Plan (1946) proposed sharing nuclear technology with the Soviet Union and Western Allies as a means of preventing an arms race, but would have effectively maintained an interim U.S. atomic monopoly and was rejected by the Soviet Union. After Stalin reneged on free elections in Poland and toughened his stance toward the United States and Western Europe from 1945 to 1949, Acheson and Truman took a harder line toward the Soviets and rejected calls for further demobilization of U.S. conventional forces. After becoming secretary of state in 1949, Acheson made strengthening Europe’s ability to stand up to the Soviets one of his biggest priorities. Three pillars of this policy were the National Security Council report NSC-68, which called for a much more aggressive posture toward the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951). Although all major Western European nations joined NATO, Acheson was unable to persuade France that rearming the new West German republic was necessary to the defense of Europe. With postwar communist advances in Eastern Europe, conservative Republicans bitterly attacked Acheson’s record. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) alleged that the State Department was infiltrated by Communist subversives and sympathizers. Acheson proved an easy target for such attacks. His admission that he was less interested in Asian affairs, coupled with a declaration that Korea lay outside the region the United States was willing to defend, seemed dangerous after the 1949 Communist victory in China and then Communist North Korea’s invasion of the South in June 1950. McCarthy and other conservative Republicans blamed Acheson for “losing” China and endangering American security in Korea. In 1950, Acheson persuaded Truman to send assistance to anticommunist French forces in Vietnam, which laid the groundwork for greater U.S. involvement in the region. After the Democrats lost the White House in 1952, he never held another official government post but remained a key foreign policy adviser in the Democratic Party. He advised President Kennedy on Berlin and Cuba and supported President Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam. Acheson reversed his Vietnam position in the late 1960s, helping to persuade Johnson to move toward peace talks. By helping steer the nation from isolationism to

internationalism, Acheson played a major role in the United States becoming the preeminent world power in the second half of the 20th century. Matthew McMurray See also: Berlin Blockade/Airlift; Korea; McCarthyism; National Security Council Paper NSC-68; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Vietnam War; Primary Documents: Excerpts from Dean Acheson’s Speech on the Far East (January 12, 1950); NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950)

Further Reading Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Brinkley, Douglas. Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–71. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. McLellan, David S. Dean Acheson: The State Department Years. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1976.

Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons (1946–1954) The creation and use of nuclear weapons during World War II contributed significantly to the postwar global tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that became the Cold War. Uniquely powerful weapons, nuclear weapons quickly became major objects of international cooperation, rivalry, and military strategy. Though their precise role evolved with changing technological innovations and broader geopolitical developments, nuclear weapons posed basic, enduring issues and conflicts in international security that have lasted to the present day. From their inception, nuclear weapons’ long-term implications were widely understood. During the atomic bomb’s wartime development by American and British scientists, occasionally even these two close allies sharply disagreed over nuclear facility construction, information sharing, and other technical issues that held broad implications for atomic energy’s industrial, commercial, and military future. Foreseeing these enormous benefits, most political and scientific U.S. leaders sought to preserve the United States’ broad international control over atomic power, particularly given their leading role in its development. At the same time, American and British leaders generally agreed on the international military and political future of atomic energy, particularly the possibility that nuclear weapons might help secure a postwar peace. The future of atomic energy turned principally on U.S. and British relations with the Soviet Union. Even U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, who crafted a general policy of cooperation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), withheld knowledge of the Manhattan Project from Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, despite their wartime alliance. Like many policymakers, Roosevelt hoped that U.S.-British nuclear technology could be shared with the USSR and the larger international community as part of future peace talks. When Roosevelt died in April 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, continued to rely on the atomic monopoly to carry out Roosevelt’s legacies and advance U.S. interests. In the early postwar years, nuclear issues reflected and reinforced broader global developments. On the one hand, the atomic bombing of Japan launched a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. The awesome display of the bomb’s power at Hiroshima and Nagasaki compelled Soviet leaders to accelerate their nuclear weapons program. Despite knowledge of the Manhattan Project through Soviet espionage, nuclear weapons had been a marginal element of their military program. On the other hand, a growing number of policymakers and scientists—including leading Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, former secretary of war Henry Stimson, and others—advocated international

nuclear cooperation. Influenced by such views, the U.S. government pushed increasingly for international nuclear cooperation after the war. In late 1945, Secretary of State James Byrnes secured Soviet support for a United Nations commission on atomic energy. In late 1946, many influential Americans reversed earlier, less cooperative attitudes on behalf of a sustained effort for the international control of nuclear weapons. These efforts culminated in the Acheson-Lilienthal report to the UN and the Baruch Plan in 1946. In sum, these U.S. proposals envisioned an international inspections system, progressing by stages, in which all nations subjected their territories to UN scrutiny and enforcement. As American officials intended, the plan preserved the U.S. atomic monopoly until every nation’s nuclear facilities and resources came under UN supervision. The U.S. plan was rejected by the Soviet Union and other powers. Soviet leaders countered with their own proposal, which called for immediate U.S. nuclear disarmament and a less intrusive inspections regime. Both sides made limited concessions in ensuing talks. In 1947, a worsening Cold War atmosphere stymied further progress. Soviet determination to break the U.S. monopoly and growing U.S. reliance on its modest but growing nuclear arsenal greatly restricted the scope of atomic energy talks through the mid1950s. Frustrated with Soviet global attitudes and expansion in Europe and the Middle East, U.S. policymakers emphasized the atomic monopoly as a counterweight to the Soviet Union’s considerable conventional military power. During implementation of the Marshall Plan aimed at advancing economic recovery in Western Europe in the late 1940s, atomic bombs reinforced the United States’ and its allies’ efforts in the face of growing hostility from Soviet bloc nations. During the 1948–1949 Soviet blockade of U.S.-British-French–occupied West Berlin, the U.S. transfer of nuclear-capable B-29 bombers to England and President Truman’s stated willingness to use atomic weapons strongly supported the massive U.S. airlift that resolved the crisis in the West’s favor—as well as the Soviet Union’s resolve to develop its own atomic weapons. Despite such experiences, with only a few dozen bombs in the U.S. arsenal, atomic weapons were not a dominant, efficiently organized component of U.S. strategic planning before Soviet attainment of the bomb in 1949. Only as an element of conventional airpower did nuclear weapons affect public and governmental debates over national security. Until the Soviet bomb, moral and political reservations regarding the bomb, widespread pressures to cut military spending, and continuing hopes for international control and improving U.S.-USSR relations greatly restricted the role of nuclear weapons in early Cold War conflicts. One major additional reason for the United States’ limited development of nuclear weapons was its estimate that the Soviet Union could not build the bomb for many years. The Soviet detonation of an atomic device in August 1949 shocked U.S. leaders. In response, they escalated nuclear weapons–related production and planning. Most notably, the Truman administration authorized development of thermonuclear weapons (the hydrogen bomb, also called the “H-Bomb” or “the Super”), which promised exponentially greater explosive yields—up to 1,000 times—than those of the atomic bomb. The Korean War, particularly the intervention of the People’s Republic of China, caused a drastic, steady buildup of U.S. nuclear capabilities and overall military strength that escalated the Cold War. Rising in quantity, technological quality, and methods and range of delivery, nuclear weapons became increasingly central aspects of Cold War strategy and superpower competition in the 1950s and 1960s. Though many scientists and citizens grew concerned about these developments, the American public largely accepted its government’s official policies and explanations. At the dawn of the nuclear arms race, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union saw nuclear weapons as militarily decisive in an actual world war, or feared them as an imminent threat. Rather, the

arms race, at first, was driven by nuclear superiority’s importance as a symbol of global power and a potent military factor that might empower or provoke either side into initiating lesser conflicts that could escalate to world war. As an implicit and sometimes explicit threat, nuclear weapons played a crucial role in the growth of NATO and other broader Cold War developments, as well as local Cold War conflicts, particularly in Korea, Southeast Asia, and China through the mid-1950s. Kevin Y. Kim See also: Castle Bravo Nuclear Test; Eisenhower, Dwight D., “New Look” Policy of; French War in Indochina; Korea

Further Reading Bird, Kai, and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Cantelon, Philip L., Richard G. Hewlett, and Robert C. Williams, eds. The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Rosenberg, David Alan. “American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision.” Journal of American History 66 no. 1 (June 1979): 62–87. Rotter, Andrew J. Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Berlin Blockade/Airlift (1948–1949) The Berlin Blockade and Airlift was the first crisis of the Cold War directly involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective European allies. The crisis resulted in the United States demonstrating its commitment to the defense of Western Europe and accelerating the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—America’s first entangling alliance—and the state of West Germany. After World War II, the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and France agreed to divide Germany into four occupation zones with each power administering one zone within a larger governing body, the Allied Control Council, responsible for all of Germany. Berlin, located within the Soviet Union’s zone, was also divided into four sectors. On June 24, 1948, the Soviet Union closed all rail, road, and barge traffic between Berlin and the Western zones of occupied Germany, denying the city food and vital resources. In response, the United States, Britain, and to a lesser degree France, airlifted foodstuffs, fuels, manufactured goods, and other resources to Berlin’s 2.4 million people rather than granting the Soviet Union control of the city. Between June 1948 and October 1949, the Western Allies lifted more than 2.3 million tons of cargo to Berlin in more than 270,000 flights. This cargo consisted of approximately 537,000 tons of food, 1.6 million tons of coal, and 228,000 passengers in and out of the city. Thirty-one Americans and 40 Britons died during the operation as a result of accidents. On May 12, 1949, Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, conceded defeat and ended the blockade of Berlin, but the Western Allies continued the airlift until October, stockpiling resources in case of another blockade.

Berliners watch a U.S. Douglas C-54 transport land at Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift, a massive transfer of essential supplies into Berlin by the Western Allies during the Soviet-imposed Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949. The Berlin crisis proved transformational in U.S. foreign policy, helping to lead the United States into other long-term regional alliances, while also building domestic support for a large and permanent military establishment. (Library of Congress)

The causes of the Berlin crisis rest in the aftermath of World War II and the victorious Allies’ plans for Germany. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, U.S. president Harry S. Truman, British prime minister Clement Attlee, and Stalin agreed to divide Germany until it was demilitarized and democratized, at which point the Allies would carry out Germany’s reunification. During the occupation, however, relations between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union fractured over the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Communist political movements in France and Italy, and Stalin’s demands for greater reparations from Germany. These disputes as well as Soviet pressure on Turkey and a Communist insurgency in Greece led the United States to proclaim the Truman Doctrine and adopt the policy of Soviet containment in early 1947. Motivated by its unprecedented economic power and monopoly on atomic weaponry, the United States now moved to counter Communist political movements in Western Europe with the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan). At the same time, Stalin worked to strengthen Communist power in Eastern Europe, most notably by aiding a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in early 1948, and supporting efforts to undermine the adoption and implementation of the Marshall Plan. In essence, the United States and Soviet Union were both attempting to shape the European balance of power to their own interests and benefit.

With the U.S.-Soviet Union rivalry or Cold War underway, negotiations over German economic power and reunification took on more importance. Germany was a key asset in the European balance of power. German industrial power had enabled the Nazis to lay waste to Europe in World War II, and now U.S. and British policymakers feared that Stalin could do the same if a reunified Germany fell to communism. Instead, the United States and Britain wanted to combine the three Western zones of occupied Germany and permit western Germany to participate in the Marshall Plan. German participation would speed up European recovery and stabilize Western Europe, thereby preventing Soviet expansion. Stalin, though, was horrified by the possibility of West German self-government and the creation of a Western capitalist economic bloc. He feared that such a bloc would undermine Soviet control in Eastern Europe and potentially lead to a revival of German power and reunification on the West’s terms rather than his own. A revived Germany might also compete with the Soviet Union for influence in Eastern Europe. Unlike the West, Stalin wanted a weak, prostrate Germany that the Soviet Union could co-opt for its own economic, political, and strategic interests. Stalin ordered the blockade of Berlin in an attempt to undermine talks of unifying the western occupation zones and revive Four Power talks over Germany in the Allied Control Council. The French were hesitant to accept U.S. and British plans for western unification, and Stalin hoped the blockade would convince them to back out. On the contrary, Soviet actions shook the Western governments’ confidence in any future Four Power talks, and U.S. policymakers saw the Berlin crisis as a question of U.S. prestige and a test of America’s commitment to aid its allies in Western Europe. As U.S. political adviser Robert Murphy told Secretary of State George Marshall, the “presence in Berlin of Western occupants became a symbol of resistance to eastern expansionism…. Withdrawal would raise justifiable doubts in the minds of Europeans as to the firmness of our European policy and of our ability to resist the spread of Communism, particularly in central Europe” (Murphy). As a result the Truman administration and the U.S. military organized the airlift and risked a further escalation of the crisis to demonstrate America’s commitment to European defense. At the same time, U.S. policymakers reversed plans to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe once the Western nations were rebuilt and participated in the organization of a West German state and the

creation of an Atlantic security alliance (NATO) under American leadership to deter Soviet aggression. The Berlin crisis and its consequences helped lead the United States to dramatically change its foreign and military policies. For the first time, the United States entered into a long-term security alliance, increased the size of its military and military aid to its allies, and concerned itself with the long-term balance of power in Europe (Leffler). Tyler P. Esno See also: Marshall Plan; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Potsdam Conference

Further Reading Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 182–219. Miller, Roger G. To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. Murphy, Robert, to George Marshall. Telegram, June 26, 1948. U.S. Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948: Germany and Austria, Vol. II. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948. 919–921. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1948v02.

Byrnes, James F. (1882–1972) James Francis Byrnes was a lawyer, politician, Supreme Court justice, diplomat, and governor. Born May 2, 1882, in Charleston, Byrnes went on to become one of the most prominent and influential South Carolinians of the 20th century. Though he did not attend college or law school, Byrnes apprenticed at a law firm and in 1903 was admitted to the South Carolina Bar Association. He soon became noted for his excellent public speaking skills and ability to win an argument in the courtroom. This led him to enter politics and in 1911 he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1930 South Carolinians elected him to the U.S. Senate and he served until his resignation in 1941, when President Franklin Roosevelt chose Byrnes to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. Byrnes’s time on the Court was short; in 1942 he resigned to play a larger role in the United States’ effort in World War II. He was appointed to head the wartime Office of Economic Stabilization and also became the director of the Office of War Mobilization. In 1945, he was chosen as President Harry Truman’s secretary of state. Byrnes became an influential foreign policy adviser, particularly during the early years of the Cold War. He urged President Truman to deploy the atomic bombs against Japan and argued that only an unconditional surrender was acceptable. Byrnes next focused his attention on the rising tensions between the United States and Soviet Union. Though both Truman and Byrnes desired to be firm with the Soviets, the president came to view his secretary of state as too willing to accommodate the Soviets. Following the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers in December 1945, President Truman criticized Byrnes for agreeing to a final communiqué that seemingly acquiesced to Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. Byrnes asserted that he was simply adhering to already agreed upon accords. In January 1946, Truman wrote to his secretary of state advising him that the president needed to be kept up-to-date regarding any U.S.-Soviet negotiations and that he would no longer yield to Soviet demands. From that point on, Byrnes’s influence waned as Truman and other more hardline anticommunists in his administration took control of American foreign policy. Early in 1947 Byrnes resigned as secretary of state.

The end of Byrnes’s public service career came as governor of South Carolina from 1951 to 1955. He died on April 9, 1972. From the small courtrooms of South Carolina to the halls of foreign minister meetings in Europe to the Oval Office in Washington, James F. Byrnes left a lasting legacy as an influential statesman. Matthew D. Jacobs See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Potsdam Conference; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Yalta Conference

Further Reading Clements, Kendrick, ed. James F. Byrnes and the Origins of the Cold War. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1982. Messer, Robert. James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Castle Bravo Nuclear Test (1954) Bravo was the first and largest of the Castle series nuclear weapons tests detonated in the Marshall Islands’ Bikini Atoll. Bravo resulted in a 15-megaton explosion, creating a fireball more than four miles wide and vaporizing parts of three islands. The fallout contaminated more than 7,000 square miles in the Pacific. Bravo was the largest U.S.-sponsored nuclear test ever conducted, one of 23 tests the United States performed there from 1946 to 1958. Part of Cold War nuclear deterrence, the Castle series exemplified the significance of Pacific islands for U.S. national security. Now independent, these areas still bear the scars of nuclear testing, including environmental damage and permanently displaced populations. The United States liberated the Marshall Islands from Japan in 1943 to establish a string of military bases across the Pacific. This territorial expansion was vital to winning World War II, and later to monitor U.S. security concerns in the Asia-Pacific region. The United States viewed the Marshall Islands as an isolated strategic space that could be utilized to safeguard its interests. The Bravo shot occurred March 1, 1954. The explosion was three times greater than expected. Weather reports indicated initially that winds would push the radiation away from the islands. Reports closer to launch noted a change in wind direction that would directly affect the islands. The test went forward despite the possible effect on the islands. Almost immediately, servicemen, natives, and crewmen of the Japanese vessel Daigo Fukuryu Marū suffered effects of radiation. The United States would pay a $2 million settlement to the Japanese government as compensation for the incident. U.S. nuclear activities in the Pacific had long-term negative social, cultural, economic, and environmental ramifications. For the islanders, the Castle series continues its nuclear legacy more than 60 years after detonation. In 1963, more than a decade after having shifted much of its nuclear weapons testing program to the Nevada Proving Grounds, the United States halted nuclear operations in the region. In 1972, it implemented a cleanup operation to repatriate displaced persons. However, radiation levels remained too high for human habitation. In 1986, the United States pledged $75 million in reparations and established funds for additional financial support. During the 1990s, the United States presented thousands of declassified documents to the Marshallese government during an openness initiative. In response, the Marshallese filed a lawsuit against the United States for medical experiments carried out on islanders. In

2001, the Marshallese received a winning verdict and petitioned the U.S. Congress to compensate the country for the scientific knowledge harvested from its lands and people. They continue to await a response. In 2010, the United Nations designated the Bikini Atoll a World Heritage Center to commemorate the islands’ sacrifices during the nuclear age. Laura Steckman See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; U.S. Military Bases

Further Reading Barker, Holly M. Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World. 2nd ed. Case Studies on Contemporary Social Issues. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013. Hewlett, Richard G., and Jack M. Holl. Atoms for Peace and War 1953–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Kuletz, Valerie. “Environmental Justice and Grassroots Globalization in the Nuclear Pacific.” In Gary M. Kroll and Richard H. Robbins, eds. World in Motion: The Globalization and the Environment Reader. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009, pp. 209–224. Smith, Anita. “Colonialism and the Bomb in the Pacific.” In John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft, eds. A Fearsome Heritage: Diverse Legacies of the Cold War. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007, pp. 51–71.

Central Intelligence Agency (1947–1954) Since the Revolutionary War in 1775, successive U.S. administrations made little attempt to create an independent unit to coordinate intelligence activities. The idea of having a powerful and organized central agency for collecting information, analyzing intelligence, and disseminating finished intelligence reports to policymakers to help them improve policies and take important decisions stems from three critical junctures in America’s modern history: first, the devastation wrought by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; second, the entry of the United States into the Second World War against the Axis powers to end the reign of Nazi Germany and Japan’s imperial overstretch in the Far East; third, the rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower in the aftermath of the Second World War and the fear of the spread of communism across the globe, which threatened the new world order that the United States wanted to create and sustain. At the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman decided to create for the first time in the nation’s history a peacetime intelligence unit outside of the confines of the military. Truman was keen on creating such an agency largely due to his firm desire to avoid another catastrophe similar to the Pearl Harbor attacks. The first incarnation of a peacetime intelligence organization was created in January 1946 and was known at the time as the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), headed by a director of central intelligence (DCI). The CIG received its funding and staff from the Departments of State, War, and Navy. Prior to the establishment of the CIG, all intelligence units in the United States had ties to the military. Even the wartime predecessor of the CIG, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—a civilian-run office —was under the jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time, Congress was not in favor of appropriating funds for the creation of independent intelligence organizations apart from those already in place for the military. In the weeks following the creation of the CIG, several bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to emphasize the importance of granting this new intelligence agency a degree of authority and autonomy as well as its own budget. The first DCIs of the CIG, Sidney Souers and Hoyt Vanderberg, came to the conclusion that the new intelligence agency required its own budget and personnel to be able to function properly and impartially. While DCI Vanderberg failed to get everything that he wanted in different bills that were being introduced, after several months of hearings and debates, the National

Security Act of 1947 passed Congress on July 25. The statute combined the Department of the Navy and the Department of War into a single military establishment, which was renamed the Department of Defense. Section 202 of the National Security Act explicitly called for the establishment of an independent and seemingly autonomous organization known as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The duties of the CIA as provided by the National Security Act of 1947 are to collect information, analyze intelligence, and share finished reports across different sectors of the American government. While the functions and duties of the CIA were no different than those of its wartime and peacetime predecessors, for the first time in the nation’s history, an established intelligence agency was created with a relative degree of autonomy as well as its own budget. As tensions grew in the early Cold War years, the National Security Council (NSC) directed the CIA to begin covert and psychological operations to counter similar Soviet activities that policymakers argued constituted a threat to American interests in different regions of the world. In December 1947, one year after the CIA was established, its functions grew beyond collecting, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence to policymakers and began to include covert operations. In 1948, the CIA failed to predict the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the Communist coup as well as the death of diplomat Jan Masaryk in Czechoslovakia. These failures persuaded Truman of the need for a reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community, specifically the need to strengthen the CIA’s analytical capabilities. More importantly, Truman was convinced that the only method of strengthening the CIA’s capabilities was to grant it authority over competing intelligence units. The Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee submitted its report on January 1, 1949, reflecting Truman’s concerns and specifying that efficiency was lacking in the American intelligence community that had to be rectified to meet national security demands. The covert and confidential nature of intelligence work did not allow the CIA to publicize its many successes. However, failures were trumpeted and utterly exposed. For example, the CIA failed to clearly assess and predict the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. In response to this failure and similar to previous instances, the second director of the agency, General Walter Smith, was persuaded that critical reorganization of the CIA and its approach to intelligence analysis and prediction was required to guard against looming threats on the horizon. Following this intelligence failure in 1950, the CIA’s attention expanded to a more global effort to contain the spread of communism. Rather than focusing on predicting looming threats to U.S. national security, its new mission centered on a broader effort to halt the growth of communism not only in Europe and China but also throughout the entire world. For instance, the CIA sanctioned covert missions in the Philippines, several states in Latin America, as well as the Middle East to combat Communist infiltration. In addition, the agency’s expanded authority led it to support or help install U.S.- and Western-leaning governments that would advance U.S. strategic and economic interests —an imperious direction that has been met with criticism from the Truman era to the present day. As was the case with many newly established institutions, the early years of the CIA were difficult as the agency established itself within the government. More importantly, the CIA was caught in the growing concern about Communist expansionist gains in Eastern Europe and the rising power of the Soviet Union. At the time, the president and Congress largely supported the creation of a powerful and seemingly autonomous intelligence agency for the purpose of developing intelligence estimates and assessments of the Soviet threat. The very first intelligence estimates produced by the CIA focused on Moscow’s intentions and Soviet military and foreign policy. The president and Congress had high expectations of the CIA as the Cold War between Washington and Moscow intensified. The growing bipolar rivalry between both superpowers began to intensify across different theaters and regions less than a year after the CIA came into existence and continued throughout the Cold War. Jeffrey G. Karam

See also: Dulles, Allen; Guatemala (1946–1954); Iran, Coup d’etat; Korea; Operation Splinter Factor

Further Reading Monje, Scott C. The Central Intelligence Agency: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. Wagner, Heather Lehr. The Central Intelligence Agency. The US Government: How It Works. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007.

China, Early Cold War (1946–1954) The Cold War can best be described as the state of geopolitical tension that existed between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the United States following World War II. Despite being on the same side during the war, the economic and political systems of the two countries were almost entirely opposed to each other—the United States heading the nations of free market democratic capitalism, and the USSR heading the Communist world of state-directed countries. In addition they were the largest two military powers, both (after 1949) possessing nuclear weapons. Their interests diametrically opposed, they threatened each other (and the world) with mutual destruction and remained in a perpetual state of geopolitical conflict until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Having become a Communist state in 1949, China’s place in the Cold War may appear straightforward, but it was born of unusual circumstances. China too had been on the side of the Western Allies during World War II and had received support from both the USSR and the United States during the war. Following World War II, American policy supported the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek (which it saw as relatively aligned to its way of thinking) and hoped that it could continue to govern China. However, when the Mao Zedong–led Communists established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the United States sharply withdrew support, backing instead the Nationalist leaders who had fled to Taiwan (formerly Formosa). From the vantage point of American policymakers, these developments placed China on the same side as the USSR in the darkening specter of global Cold War. Though Mao’s program was quite different from that of the Soviet Union (especially as time moved on) and though China’s relations with the USSR were often quite contentious, the fact remained that China had become a socialist country and like the Soviets, had adopted a controlled economy that seemed to threaten the interests of the United States and the Western democratic world.

On October 1, 1949, following the surrender of Chiang Kai-shek and the retreat of the Nationalists to Taiwan, Chairman Mao Zedong proclaims the founding of the People's Republic of China, ushering in a new era of Communist rule. (AP Photo)

In addition, in 1946, the Indochina War broke out in Vietnam as Ho Chi Minh’s forces battled for independence from the French. This conflict between Ho’s Viet Minh and Vietnam’s decades-long French colonial rulers was driven by a growing desire among the Vietnamese to break free of the autocratic Western-oriented rule of the French and to reorient their economy toward communism. In the preceding decades Ho Chi Minh had been educated in the ideas and practices of communism in a number of countries, including China. With Mao Zedong’s forces on the move in China, and Korea divided between a Communist north and a U.S.-supported regime in the south, American policymakers in the late 1940s were concerned that all of South Asia would become Communist, threatening U.S. interests in the broader region. After 1949, the People’s Republic of China supported Vietnam in Ho’s struggle for independence, thus strengthening its position as being on the Communist side of the Cold War. The war was, in many ways, a playing out of Cold War tensions, as the French were supplied with weapons by the United States, while both China and the USSR aided the Viet Minh militarily and throughout the 1950s jockeyed for political influence in Ho’s emerging government in the north. In 1950, in the midst of the Indochina War and on the heels of the success of Mao’s revolution in 1949, the Korean War began. This event would have grave implications for the U.S. view of China and its relationship with the new Communist power. Korea had been ruled by Japan until the Japanese surrender just before the end of World War II. Following the Allied victory, the Japanese relinquished Korea and it was split near the 38th parallel between the USSR and the United States (in much the same way Germany was). Therefore, like Vietnam, Korea was divided into a Communist North supported by the USSR, and a democratic South supported by the United States. When Communist leader Kim Il Sung invaded the South in June 1950, the Truman administration’s “police action” aimed to reverse the invasion. Months later,

that successful counteroffensive appeared to threaten China and its sovereignty, and Mao Zedong then followed through on his threat to enter the war. More than 350,000 Chinese troops stormed over the border in the winter of 1950–1951 as the United States found itself fighting not only North Koreans but also Chinese in an attempt to contain the spread of communism in Asia. Despite China’s intervention in Korea and its support for Ho Chi Minh’s struggle in Vietnam, China’s position in the Cold War was complex. From the mid-1950s Mao began to feel that adopting the Soviet road to socialism, which emphasized urban development, was not a path that best suited China’s situation. He felt that rural development was important for China—especially as, unlike the USSR, it did not already have urban infrastructure when it set out on its path to socialism. By the end of the decade, Mao began to express dissatisfaction with the relationship between Beijing and Moscow, and when Nikita Khrushchev assumed power in the mid-1950s following the death of Joseph Stalin and announced policies of a much more liberal nature, Mao took the opportunity to break the relationship and declare that China was creating its own socialist path. The relationship between China and the United States gradually warmed following the fracture of the Sino-Soviet alliance, paving the way ultimately for the landmark 1972 visit to China by President Richard M. Nixon and his administration’s geopolitical strategy to use that divide to advance U.S. interests. Alison Hulme See also: China (World War II); French War in Indochina; Korea

Further Reading Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Sewell, Mike. The Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Cold War Cultural Imperialism “Cold War cultural imperialism” refers to the ways nations and other political groups used culture to dominate and also to control one another as well as their own citizens, members, allies, and enemies during the Cold War that lasted from the mid to the late 20th century (Tomlinson, 2). The concept intersects imperialism, the Cold War, and culture. Also, it underscores the participation of culture in developments we consider primarily political and economic. Imperialism has its roots in 18th- and 19th-century European nations expanding their territorial holdings in competition with one another. This territorial aggrandizement provided nations with diplomatic advantages, locations for military bases, and labor, raw materials, and markets for commercial expansion. Many imperial nations used military force to achieve and to maintain control over colonial subjects they considered less developed racially, intellectually, and spiritually. Although the ancient world also had empires, this type of modern imperialism peaked around the time of World War I. In addition, scholars characterize as imperialistic the behavior of rulers and governments that did not necessarily acquire colonies, but instead controlled weaker nations by using some combination of military, political, or economic domination, sometimes buttressed with cultural assumptions about racial superiority. The years following World War II witnessed a rising postimperialism and reduction of territorial colonialism that was fueled by fierce nationalism. However, this occurred in the context of the bipolar division of the globe via the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet

Social Republics, or USSR). The Cold War came with an American perception of the world as divided between democracy and free enterprise, and communism that diminished individual agency and freedom in every facet of life. Consequently, the United States developed policies intended to contain communism. Conversely, the USSR accused the United States of acting as a tacit imperial state, in part by offering economic aid to underdeveloped nations where it would locate its military presence. In fact, both the United States and the USSR established respective networks of allies sharing ideological, military, and economic ties. Yet, rather than pursue direct confrontation, notwithstanding a series of proxy wars, the conflict between the United States and the USSR was mainly expressed through psychological, economic, and cultural competition. Culture related to Cold War imperialism in two ways. In the first, the United States and USSR created and distributed culture at home and abroad to convey the benefits of their respective politics and ways of life. Examples ranged from works of literature and fine and performing art, to popular culture and mass print and electronic media such as films, radio programs, photographs, books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, posters, and consumer goods. There were also international cultural competitions and programs, too. The U.S. government created the United States Information Agency and the Fulbright exchange programs to export American culture, including literature, music, and art, abroad (GienowHecht, 467). Also, both the United States and the USSR promoted culture that embodied their respective ideals. Thus, by supporting contemporary abstract and modern art in traveling overseas cultural programs, the governments of the United States and its Western allies broadcast the creativity, intellectual freedom, and cultural progress they associated with free, democratic societies. Equally, culture could convey critical messages about the shortcomings, dangers, and consequences of life in the enemy state, as when American cultural writers critiqued Soviet realism for limiting individuals’ creative horizons in style and subject matter. Furthermore, the United States held that the USSR and other communist superpowers, like the Republic of China, negatively impacted their human subjects by changing the culture of their weaker satellite states. They modified it or censored, suppressed, or even destroyed it to privilege what the central governments determined was the official culture. At the same time, world and regional fairs as well as trade expositions served as arenas where the United States and the USSR expressed their ambitions for economic power, too. During the renowned “Kitchen Debate” held at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. vice president Richard Nixon debated the merits of American-made consumer goods in a simulated American house featuring a kitchen filled with the most up-to-date appliances. Meanwhile, critiques of American capitalism coming from liberal American intellectuals, Western Europeans, and governments in Communist countries accused the United States of pushing its goods and culture abroad to the extent that interest in local goods and culture diminished. A second way that culture intersected with Cold War imperialism involved culture facilitating it. Culture put forth ideas beneficial to the imperialist state. By using or consuming it, citizens, allies, and enemies reproduced ways of thinking and being that aided distinctions about who did and did not deserve the state’s military, political, economic, and/or social power, rights, or recognition. These latter issues of inclusion and exclusion could maintain social hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, or gender. In these ways, culture helped Cold War imperialism by binding people to its ideologies, including the belief that they needed and benefited from them. During the late 1950s the United States feared that Southeast Asia would fall to the communism of the People’s Republic of China or the Soviet Union, thus squelching free enterprise and democracy worldwide. Christina Klein has studied how American films and novels represented Asia in ways that “reinforced the ‘Cold War consensus’ that supported US expansion of power across the world through the 1950s. Through these representations, ‘structures of feeling’ were

created, which worked to channel ideological configurations into the field of the motions, experience, and consciousness of ordinary people.” The result “did not merely seek to contain communism; it sought to integrate Americans sentimentally with Asians who had not yet been made communist, both within the US and internationally” (Duara, 468). Subsequently, though, during the Vietnam War, American visual artists developed new forms of performance activism to expose what they considered an increasingly militaristic American foreign policy, the core argument being that U.S. militarism and multinational capitalism were spreading domination and oppression at home and abroad. Today, Cold War scholars study dissent within imperialist states’ cultures. Additionally, they treat the Cold War as a global event involving American efforts to contain communism in and in relation to political developments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Jennifer Way See also: Jazz; Kitchen Debate; Point IV Program (U.S. Home Economics Education in Iran)

Further Reading Duara, Prasenjit. “The Cold War as a Historical Period: An Interpretive Essay.” Journal of Global History 6 (2011): 457–480. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. “Shame on US? Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War—A Critical Review.” Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 465–494. Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asian in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Oliver, Robert Tarbell. Culture and Communication: The Problem of Penetrating National and Cultural Boundaries. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1962. Radojkovica, Miroljub. “How Cultural Imperialism Works.” Journal of East and West Studies 24, no. 1 (1995): 79–87. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Dulles, Allen (1893–1969) Allen Welsh Dulles was a banker, lawyer, diplomat, and public official who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency during the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential administration. Born to Allen Macy and Edith (née Foster) Dulles on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York, Dulles was raised in an affluent and influential family that was committed to public service. Dulles was the younger brother of John Foster Dulles, who would be secretary of state under President Eisenhower, and was the older brother of Eleanor Lansing Dulles, who spent 26 years in the State Department and other government agencies. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, and his uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing, had served as secretary of state under presidents Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson, respectively. After graduating from Princeton University Dulles joined the State Department in 1916 and was assigned to several European postings. In 1920 Dulles married Martha Clover Todd, whom he had met the year before in Paris while he served on President Woodrow Wilson’s mission to Paris and she worked for a YMCA canteen for American servicemen. The couple had one child. In 1926 he received a law degree from George Washington University and joined John Foster Dulles as a partner in the influential Sullivan & Cromwell law firm. During World War II Dulles returned to public service as an operative for the Office of Strategic Services’ Switzerland station. Becoming active in postwar Republican national politics, Dulles became the first civilian director of the CIA in 1953. After being asked to leave the position by President John F. Kennedy following the debacle of the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. Dulles returned to private life upon the conclusion of the investigation and died January 29, 1969.

Dulles served as director of the CIA during a particularly activist and influential period in the agency’s history. As part of President Eisenhower’s emphasis on anticommunist containment in the developing world—by cost-effective means short of conventional military intervention—Dulles and the CIA were responsible for all manner of covert activities and psychological warfare. Dulles possessed a long record as an enthusiastic spy and intriguer. During World War I Dulles had speculated on the use of propaganda to exacerbate domestic tensions within Germany. During the Second World War he maintained contacts with the German army plotters who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944; he also guided the Operation Sunrise negotiations that culminated in the Nazi surrender in Italy. After 1953 Dulles directed U.S. efforts to destabilize the Soviet bloc through means such as Operation Splinter Factor, Radio Free Europe propaganda broadcasts, and the acquisition of a text of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” which the CIA subsequently doctored for secret distribution in hopes of discrediting Khrushchev in the eyes of the Soviet Union’s Chinese and Indian allies. Dulles was also an enthusiastic supporter of the U-2 spy plane program.

Allen Welsh Dulles played a major role in the creation and organization of the Central Intelligence Agency and served as the first civilian director from 1953 to 1961. The most ardent of cold warriors, Dulles played a central role in planning the overthrow of governments in numerous countries, and undermining nationalist movements deemed to be either communist or otherwise a threat to U.S. interests. (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library)

In addition to these intelligence activities, Dulles oversaw the development and execution of several notable covert operations in the developing world. In 1953 the CIA chief helped plan Operation Ajax in Iran, in which U.S. operatives toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and propped up the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in an effort to reduce perceived Soviet influence in the country and prevent the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1954 Dulles and the Eisenhower administration directed Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala, where CIA-supported rebels overthrew President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, whom the White House suspected of being a Communist sympathizer. It

is also true that Arbenz Guzmán was advancing a program of land reform that threatened the stranglehold of Guatemala’s economy held by the United Fruit Company—a corporation represented by the law firm of John Foster Dulles, the CIA director’s brother and secretary of state and on whose board Allen Dulles held a seat. Beginning in 1958 Dulles and the Eisenhower White House focused their efforts on undermining or eliminating the Fidel Castro government in Cuba. After considering a possible assassination attempt against Castro, Dulles opted for planning an invasion of Cuba that would simply topple the Castro regime. Such planning culminated with the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. In the summer and autumn of 1960 Dulles directed contingency planning for the assassination of pro-Soviet leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, an operation made unnecessary by Lumumba’s death at the end of the year. As Dulles and the Eisenhower administration saw it, such interventions were necessary to save Third World peoples from themselves, given that their inexperience in self-government might lead them to unwittingly hand over their countries to the monolithic forces of world communism. As part of his efforts to strengthen and institutionalize the CIA, Dulles secured funding to construct a new agency headquarters in 1958. As public outcry over the Bay of Pigs debacle increased in the summer of 1961, however, President Kennedy made it clear that Dulles would have to vacate his position. Dulles resigned his directorship in November 1961 and entered a state of semiretirement, maintaining an office at the old CIA headquarters but increasingly persona non grata in policymaking circles and at the White House. He worked part-time for his old law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, served on the Council on Foreign Relations, and engaged himself on the speaking and writing circuit in Washington and around the country. These latter efforts culminated in two successful books, The Craft of Intelligence and The Secret Surrender. With his service on the Warren Commission, and also as special presidential representative in the investigation of racial violence in Mississippi in 1964, Dulles made something of a return to public life. In the context of the political controversies of the 1960s, however, Dulles found himself increasingly on the defensive against public criticism of alleged CIA misdeeds and dirty tricks throughout the developing world. Loyalists from the Kennedy administration went so far as to suggest that Dulles and the CIA had betrayed the president during the Bay of Pigs saga. Dulles gradually cut back his speaking engagements during 1966 and 1967, and by 1968 had focused almost exclusively on advising the CIA on ways to counter the flow of publications criticizing the behavior of the agency. Aragorn Storm Miller See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Central Intelligence Agency; Congo Crisis; Dulles, John Foster; Guatemala (1946–1954); Iran, Coup d’etat; Operation Splinter Factor

Further Reading Brands, H. W., Jr. Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Hersh, Burton. The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992. Srodes, James. Allen Dulles: Master of Spies. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999.

Dulles, John Foster (1888–1959) John Foster Dulles was born February 25, 1888, in Washington, D.C., the eldest son of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy and Edith Foster Dulles. His grandfather, John Welsh Dulles, had served as a Presbyterian missionary in India. Dulles attended Princeton University in 1908 as well as George Washington University Law School. Alongside pursuing politics, Dulles worked as a lawyer for the New

York City law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, focusing on international law. During this time, Dulles married Janet Avery on June 26, 1912. The couple had two sons as well as a daughter. He is best remembered as the U.S. secretary of state during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson asked the young John Foster Dulles to act as a part of the legal counsel to the delegation of the United States at the Peace Conference at Versailles, effectively serving under his uncle Robert Lansing, the secretary of state at the time. After the conference, Wilson then invited Dulles to serve on the War Reparations Committee. Continuing his early political and diplomatic career, Dulles was also a part of the League of Free Nations Association in 1918 (later the Foreign Policy Association). In the interwar period, Dulles continued his participation by assisting in the formation of the Dawes Plan that brought reductions to German World War I reparations payments following the Treaty of Versailles. These efforts were aimed in part at securing the financial interests of American firms who loaned money to Germany so it could pay its reparations to Britain and France, which in turn were repaying the United States for wartime debts. A lifelong Republican, Dulles served briefly as a U.S. senator from New York from July 1949 to November that year. Governor Thomas E. Dewey appointed Dulles to fill a vacancy, but he was then defeated in an election that fall by Herbert Lehman. That proved fortuitous, as just four years later, following the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the new president appointed John Foster Dulles the 52nd U.S. secretary of state. He served from January 1953 through April 1959. As secretary of state, Dulles firmly upheld the policy of containing communism throughout the world, with a special focus on Asia. President Eisenhower heavily relied on Dulles for his expertise developed from his experience both as a lawyer in international law as well as his early diplomatic career. In addition, to secure America’s interests in the Cold War, Eisenhower and Dulles developed a policy of “massive retaliation” to deter perceived Soviet or Chinese aggression. Massive retaliation, which became the cornerstone of what was called Eisenhower’s overall “New Look” foreign policy, leaned heavily on the rapid buildup of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems (e.g., bombers, overseas military bases, and eventually submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles) to prevent a possible military offensive from the Communist world. Massive retaliation allowed Eisenhower and Dulles to advance America’s national security interests—and do so more rapidly in the event of sudden attack—while also trimming the size of more expensive conventional forces, a policy that was politically popular with the American people. Among his many duties as secretary of state, Dulles was in charge of building the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance of countries established in 1949 to provide mutual defense in response to an attack upon any member nation of NATO from an aggressive foreign power—specifically the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or one of the Soviet-bloc states. Dulles also created other alliances that were designed to fortify U.S. interests and combat existing and potential threats from the Communists. Most notably, in French Indochina, in 1954 Dulles—after orchestrating a U.S. refusal to sign the Geneva Accords calling for free elections to unify Vietnam (a development that undoubtedly would have led to an electoral victory by the Communist Ho Chi Minh)—created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), an alliance that included the United States, Great Britain, and France, along with the Cold War–allied states of Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand. The signatories agreed that if the countries of Laos, Cambodia (defined as neutral in the Geneva Accords), and the newly established U.S.-created state of South Vietnam were threatened—presumably by Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime in North Vietnam—then SEATO would be obligated to respond to preserve the “peace and security” of all the signatories. The treaty only required that the signatories consult one another instead of demanding their military action, but it failed to seek the support of India,

Burma, and Indonesia, countries important to the Cold War in Asia for their strategic locations as well as their young political states allowing them to be vulnerable to Communist influence. In the long run, Dulles’s creation of SEATO would help provide international legal cover for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In 1958, surprisingly moving from his earlier support of increased spending on nuclear weapons, Dulles called for reductions of military spending as well as a call for both the United States and the Soviet Union to ban nuclear testing. This was one of the first efforts to collaborate with the Soviet Union. Both sides agreed to halt nuclear testing for three years. However, in 1960 relations between the two countries took a turn for the worse following the disclosure of U-2 surveillance flights that had been penetrating Soviet air space for several years. As a result, the United States and the Soviet Union abandoned efforts in the late 1950s to curb nuclear testing.

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS Emerging out of World War I, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is a nongovernmental membership organization of political and economic elites and distinguished scholars based in New York City that, since its founding in 1921, has been highly influential in shaping U.S. foreign policy. On the eve of World War II, the organization began receiving major funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and its leadership gained unprecedented access to the centers of political power, particularly in the State Department. The CFR’s highly secretive War and Peace Studies project aimed to guide the integration of U.S. economic interests with foreign and military policy during and following the war. CFR study groups helped direct the establishment and structure of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. In the postwar era council members constituted roughly half of the appointed positions in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. It was in the council’s influential journal, Foreign Affairs, that George Kennan wrote his “X” article (“The Sources of Soviet Conduct”), which proved instrumental in shaping the U.S. containment strategy in the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, the CFR has continued to serve as one of the nation’s leading think tanks, promoting neoliberal policies of globalization and free markets. Deeply connected to the interlocking complex of American corporate and financial power, the CFR has been attacked by both libertarian conservatives who have feared since the 1950s that the council is aiming for “one-world government” that would undermine U.S. sovereignty, and by far-left progressives who see the organization as a major force in promoting an agenda of U.S. imperialism that serves the interests of multinational corporations and the military-industrial complex.

Dulles’s health began to deteriorate in the late 1950s. In 1956, he underwent difficult surgery for colon cancer. That was followed in 1958 by hospitalization for diverticulitis and protracted abdominal pain, further surgery, and radiation therapy for the cancer that had by then metastasized. He resigned his office in April 1959 and died one month later at the age of 71. Buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Dulles was awarded the Medal of Freedom and the Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1959 for his long and influential career in promoting America’s national security and global interests. Nina Teresi and Chris J. Magoc See also: Eisenhower, Dwight D., “New Look” Policy of; Geneva Accords; Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)

Further Reading Immerman, Richard H., ed. John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kinzer, Stephen. The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War. New York: Times Books, 2013.

Eisenhower Doctrine (1957)

The Eisenhower Doctrine, proposed in a joint session of Congress on January 5, 1957, addressed what President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw as a new set of conditions developing in the post–World War II Middle East. Eisenhower characterized the region as having “abruptly reached a new and critical stage” in its history where the emerging independence of Arab nations was met with instability. That instability was generated, he said, by “distrust and fear” among nations of the region, hostile influence by Western European nations, inflamed anti-Zionism triggered by Israeli attacks on Arab states, and through manipulation of those tensions by the forces of “International Communism” (Eisenhower Doctrine). This final source of instability was central to Eisenhower’s proposed legislation as he leveraged the Cold War standoff between democratic ideals of freedom and American fears of Communist enslavement to call for containment of “International Communism,” at the time always ominously capitalized (Seale). The doctrine also signaled the United States’ desire to contain the rising specter of Arab nationalism, generating fear in the Arab world of a transition from British colonialism to American imperialism. The period immediately following World War II was defined by the Truman Doctrine of Soviet containment. In the Middle East this was achieved by marrying U.S. economic support to the regional influence of Great Britain to advance military security. The Eisenhower Doctrine, like the Truman Doctrine before it, was focused not only on rolling back Soviet-Communist aggression and influence, but also on elevating the U.S. position as the premier power and leader of the “free world.” Unlike the Truman Doctrine, the approach to the Middle East under President Eisenhower took a more aggressive stance. The roots of the Eisenhower Doctrine can be traced to the pivotal moment in July 1956 when congressional resistance to financial aid for the Aswan Dam development project left Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser feeling betrayed. A series of diplomatic, economic, and military crises evolved. Just days after being informed that the United States had reneged, Nasser moved to assert Egyptian sovereignty by nationalizing the Suez Canal Zone. After three months of problematic Anglo-American diplomatic efforts, British, French, and Israeli forces responded militarily, against U.S. wishes, to reestablish Western control over the occupied Canal Zone. In a decision that established the conditions for future U.S. responsibility in the Middle East for decades to come, Eisenhower stood firm against his allies, declaring this action to be a violation of the sovereignty of an Arab nation. British, French, and Israeli forces ultimately withdrew and that departure of British influence created a power vacuum that U.S. officials feared would encourage SovietCommunist influence in newly independent Arab states. These concerns were exacerbated when Nasser accepted financial and military assistance from the Soviet Union. Following the Suez Crisis and the British departure from the region, it became clear that a new U.S. strategy would require a twofold approach, combining military force to check aggression and an investment of $200 million to assist with development in Middle Eastern nations. To galvanize support, Eisenhower invoked the Tripartite Declaration of 1950—a U.S.-British-French pact that pledged to work for regional Arab-Israeli peace and stability that could help ensure the flow of Middle Eastern oil to the West and encourage a regional bulwark among Arab states against possible Communist incursion. Eisenhower therefore informed Congress that the precedent had been set for an executive declaration opposing aggression in the region. The economic importance of maintaining the free flow of two-thirds of the world’s oil was critical to an increasingly oil-dependent world economy. Eisenhower attempted to convince Congress that any actions that placed control of the region in hands hostile to Western interests created a threat to U.S. national security and economic interests. The evolving influence of the Soviet Union led Eisenhower to suggest that a more aggressive posture was necessary and that a joint resolve by Congress and the president “should be so couched as to make it apparent that if

need be our words will be backed by action” (Eisenhower Doctrine). The doctrine as proposed had three main components, which would authorize U.S. assistance to any nation or group of nations in the Middle East: 1. to develop economic strength dedicated to maintenance of national independence, 2. to undertake programs of military assistance and cooperation, and 3. to employ the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect territorial integrity and political independence against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by “International Communism.” Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made it clear to Congress that the United States must redouble efforts at demonstrating a willingness to support the independence of “freedom-loving” (Eisenhower Doctrine) nations of the area. This rhetoric did not wholly square with U.S. foreign policy that supported authoritarian regimes in the region, but played to the emotions of the ideological struggle against communism in the decade following World War II. After two months of polemic debate, the provisions of the Eisenhower Doctrine were passed by joint resolution on March 9, 1957. Though approved on the domestic front, a warning by Dulles to Eisenhower on January 3, 1957, just 48 hours prior to his speech to Congress, foretold the difficulty of seeing the doctrine to successful implementation with partners throughout the Middle East. In a final consultation between the president and the secretary of state, Dulles warned that initial interpretations had begun to form in the Arab world that the doctrine represented “imperialism and colonialism” (Dulles). There was good reason for Dulles’s caution—while many nations clearly allied with either Western democracy or Eastern-bloc Communism, others joined together to declare nonalignment, or neutralism, as their response to the Cold War battle between superpowers. Indeed, one of the early “founding fathers” of the nonalignment movement was Egyptian president Nasser. Though Eisenhower’s address to Congress focused on denying Soviet expansion, an equally important facet was containment of what was perceived as the radical Arab nationalism of Nasser and pan-Arab nonalignment. However, U.S. policymakers’ inability to see the power of state and regional agendas as a counterforce to the United States’ global Cold War policies reduced the appeal and effectiveness of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Ultimately, the Eisenhower administration overestimated U.S. influence in the Middle East, overexaggerated fears of communism in the region, and greatly underestimated the political appeal of Nasserism. Though the Eisenhower Doctrine was never directly invoked, a series of overt military actions and covert actions by the CIA in 1957 and 1958 were met stubbornly by anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist sentiment that viewed the Eisenhower Doctrine with suspicion and hostility. In attempting to replace the colonialism of Great Britain with a policy of unilateral U.S. military intervention to block Soviet gains, the United States inadvertently “tarred itself with the brush of imperialism” (Little, 154). Kevin Brown See also: Central Intelligence Agency (1947–1954); Dulles, John Foster; Non-Aligned Movement; Oil Industry in the Middle East; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Zionism

Further Reading

Dulles, John Foster. Personal Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas, Telephone calls series, Box 11, Memo of Telephone Conversation, White House, January 1957 to February 28, 1957. Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Eisenhower Doctrine,” speech delivered January 5, 1957, to Congress. Eisenhower Library, Online Speeches. http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/education/bsa/citizenship_merit_badge/speeches_national_historical_importance/eisenhower_doctrine.p

Accessed October 17, 2014. Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Seale, Patrick. The Struggle for Syria. A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945–1958. London: Tauris, 1986, pp. 284–293.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), “New Look” Policy of In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a leading World War II commander and an internationally respected military figure, became president of the United States. The first Republican president in 20 years, Eisenhower and his foreign policy advisers created a national security policy for the Cold War that became known as the “New Look.” Based on great reliance on nuclear weapons, covert operations, psychological warfare, and a reformed defense bureaucracy, the “New Look” served as the blueprint for U.S. foreign policy and military strategy in the 1950s. It significantly shaped U.S.-USSR relations, U.S. and other nations’ military and economic development, and numerous crises in Europe and postcolonial countries, which were a central arena of global conflict in the 1950s and 1960s. Eisenhower’s election was greatly fueled by the war hero’s campaign promise to overhaul the nation’s Cold War policies in light of the Korean War. Riding a wave of public frustration with the Korean War, which remained locked in a stalemate between U.S.-led UN forces and Communist forces after mid-1951, Eisenhower’s election reflected widely held sentiment that the United States and its allies could not afford to fight limited, conventional wars in peripheral areas like Korea. In a series of influential articles in Life magazine, Eisenhower’s future secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, augured the administration’s new strategy with his bold claim that the United States could only regain its initiative in the Cold War amid Communist-fomented aggressions across the globe by emphasizing massive nuclear and air strikes. The United States and its allies “cannot build a 20,000-mile Maginot Line or match the Red armies,” Dulles wrote in May 1952, which only meant “real strength nowhere and bankruptcy everywhere.” Instead, he famously declared, the free world had to develop the will and means “to retaliate instantly” anywhere in the world “by means of our choosing” (Dulles, 148, 151). The doctrine of “massive retaliation” became the central, most controversial aspect of New Look strategy. Conservative and Republican critics attacked it as mostly rhetorical, grossly expensive, and barely different from Truman administration “containment.” Democrats and liberals, particularly former Truman administration officials and supporters, criticized the New Look’s overreliance on nuclear war, its destabilizing brinkmanship, and its weakening of economic aid, U.S. ground forces, and a wellrounded global strategy suited to handling various world conflicts—particularly civil wars in developing nations where Communist and noncommunist forces clashed short of war. Such growing dissatisfaction, reflected by influential books like U.S. general Maxwell Taylor’s Uncertain Trumpet and Henry Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, contributed to Democrats’ recapture of the White House in 1960 and the rise of “flexible response”—so named for a diverse spectrum of responses to Communist action—as official U.S. national security strategy.

Having served as supreme commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II and subsequently as the first commander of North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States in 1952. He proved to be a popular two-term president, presiding over the end of the Korean War and years of economic expansion. (Library of Congress)

In fact, the New Look shared much ground with “containment” and “flexible response.” Truman administration policymakers regarded U.S. airpower and nuclear weapons as the noncommunist world’s principal deterrent—and weapon of last resort—against the USSR. In the Korean War, the Truman administration initiated a significant program of U.S. nuclear weapons production (including the thermonuclear bomb and tactical nuclear weapons) that laid much of the basis for New Look military programs. Though the Eisenhower administration’s attitude toward foreign economic aid was more ambivalent and constrained, it used aid and other tools used by other administrations to promote trade and development as preventive measures against the spread of international communism. Above all, the New Look shared its rivals’ post–Korean War pursuit of a more stable, sustainable strategic policy, based on a large military buildup, rather than the frequent crises that marked the Cold War’s first years. Central to the New Look was Eisenhower’s firm belief that war between the United States and the USSR would involve an unacceptable amount of global destruction. Such beliefs compelled the administration’s rejection of preventive war, liberation of Communist “captive” peoples, and other aggressive ideas championed by Republicans during the election campaign. Though such proposals drew some support in the administration and the public, New Look strategy relied mostly on covert operations (particularly in Latin America and the Middle East), propaganda warfare (particularly in Eastern Europe), economic pressures (particularly against the People’s Republic of China, or PRC), and, above all, nuclear deterrence (especially in Western Europe and many military crises in Asia). Under Eisenhower’s firm, though increasingly challenged leadership, U.S. officials reorganized national security agencies, reduced national military spending from peak levels in the Korean War, and made constructive,

if limited, strides toward international economic recovery and improved U.S.-USSR relations after Stalin’s death in March 1953. Strategic ambiguity was central to the New Look. Its principal spokesmen, Secretary of State Dulles and President Eisenhower, deliberately stressed their own uncertainty over the use of U.S. air and nuclear power in actual crises. The administration used public and diplomatic hints of its willingness to use massive airpower in its approach to the Korean War, the French Indochina War, and the Taiwan Straits crises between the PRC and Republic of China (ROC). Growing international and domestic challenges eroded the New Look’s influence in the late 1950s. Rising Third World nationalism fueled major crises, which stoked growing criticism of the New Look. These included a 1958 Taiwan Straits crisis widely viewed as initiated not by the PRC but the U.S.-allied ROC, the Suez Crisis in Egypt, and the 1956 democratic uprising in Hungary encouraged by U.S. radio propaganda yet unaided by the United States during the subsequent brutal Communist crackdown. In Europe, the United States and European governments struggled to create a NATO army to mitigate reliance on “massive retaliation.” The Soviet Union and the PRC’s own bold campaigns to engage Third World nations, as well as a nonalignment neutrality movement led by India, further strained New Look programs and assumptions. Amid these challenges, some administration leaders began calling for larger U.S. and allied ground forces, anticipating the rise of “flexible response” in the 1960s. Despite public uproar after the USSR launched the world’s first space satellite and the popular belief that a life-threatening “gap” in U.S. and USSR missile technology existed, President Eisenhower resisted increasingly powerful calls in his government and U.S. society for a colossal military buildup beyond a tripling of the nuclear stockpile, a pilot Polaris nuclear submarine program, and similar measures that his late administration approved. The United States, the president warned in his farewell address to the American people after Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election after attacking the New Look’s “missile gap,” was endangered not only by the global Cold War but by a “military-industrial complex” of U.S. interests overly influencing the nation’s security policies. Besides marking the New Look’s last breaths, Eisenhower’s warning augured struggles at home and abroad that affected Americans for many decades to come. Kevin Y. Kim See also: Dulles, John Foster; Military-Industrial Complex

Further Reading Bowie, Robert R., and Richard H. Immerman. Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dulles, John Foster. “A Policy of Boldness.” Life, May 19, 1952. Kissinger, Henry A. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957. Taylor, Maxwell D. The Uncertain Trumpet. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.

Figueres Ferrer, José (1906–1990) José Figueres Ferrer, or “Don Pepe,” was a Costa Rican Social Democrat and Central American political leader who opposed U.S. imperialism. He repeatedly castigated the U.S. government and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for supporting Latin American dictators. However, his anticommunist views earned him many admirers in the United States with whom he collaborated during the Cold War. Figueres epitomized the Latin American leader who maneuvered among U.S. policies to pursue his own goals.

After studying in the United States, Figueres formed the Costa Rican Social Democratic Party (PSD) in the mid-1940s. During the 1948 presidential election, Figueres lambasted Presidents Teodoro Picado and Rafael Angel Calderón Guardia for allying with Vanguardia, a Communist organization. In the context of the Cold War, U.S. officials also questioned this alliance. When an electoral tribunal declared Figueres’s party victorious, Calderón Guardia’s allies annulled the election. As civil war began, Figueres received aid from Guatemala as Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza joined Calderón Guardia. However, U.S. officials maintained an arms embargo against Calderón Guardia and discouraged Somoza’s aid while refusing to impede Guatemala. Such measures weakened Calderón Guardia and the Communists and bolstered Figueres. As president of Costa Rica, Figueres raised taxes, demanded income from the United Fruit Company, and nationalized banks. These actions, like those of other Latin American nations at various times throughout the Cold War, would be labeled by U.S. officials as Communist. However, Figueres asserted his independence by, among other things, stressing his role in ousting Calderón Guardia’s pro-Communist government. Additionally, in part to secure U.S. loans, he worked with Americans for Democratic Action and U.S. officials such as Adolf Berle and Senator J. William Fulbright to present his government as proAmerican. On the other hand, Figueres also emerged as a vocal critic of U.S. support for Latin American dictatorships and aided in antidictatorial movements, irritating U.S. officials. As he explained, “If I were to blame the United States for something in the twentieth century in Latin America, it would be for connivance with corrupt dictatorships” (Figueres Ferrer, 32). Nevertheless, he refrained from vocally criticizing the U.S. intervention in Guatemala. With the onset of the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s, the CIA found Figueres a reliable anticommunist ally. Although he originally aided Fidel Castro, relations deteriorated. During a 1959 speech in Cuba, Figueres warned against communism and anti-Americanism as a Cuban official took away Figueres’s microphone. When the CIA sought to blunt Castro’s popularity by supporting liberal noncommunists, Figueres joined CIA operative Sacha Volman to build the Institute of Political Education in Costa Rica and publish the magazine Combate. Still, Figueres criticized U.S. policies during the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican crisis in 1965, and Contra operations in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Guatemala (1946–1954)

Further Reading Ameringer, Charles. Don Pepe: A Political Biography of José Figueres of Costa Rica. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Figueres Ferrer, José. Oral History Interview with Donald R. McCoy and Richard D. McKinzie. July 8, 1970. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/ferrerjf.htm. Accessed January 13, 2014. Longley, Kyle. The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States during the Rise of José Figueres. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997.

French War in Indochina (1946–1954) The French War in Indochina, also known as the First Indochina War, lasted from 1946 to 1954. Though the conflict had deeper roots, it broke out as a result of France’s lack of willingness to recognize the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945. At the time France had incurred serious debts as a result of World War II and Indochina had been for decades a great source of economic revenue and

manpower for the country. Thus France was determined to hold onto this important region of its colonial empire. However, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh army already controlled the majority of Indochinese territory in 1945. France fought this conflict to regain its former colony of Cochin China and protectorates of Annam (covering two-thirds of present-day Vietnam), Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos. The initial French advance was successful and the organization of the Viet Minh appeared to collapse. However, the Viet Minh then surprised the French command by drawing them into a protracted guerrilla war—a pattern that would later be repeated against the forces of the United States and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in the American war. The French War in Indochina was not simply the ill-fated death rattle of the French empire. Rather, a long series of complicated decisions, combined with tactical mistakes, drew the French deeper and deeper into a conflict that by the early 1950s they seemed destined to lose. The first mistake was France’s close association with and support of Bao Dai. Known since his reign began in 1926 as the “Protector of Greatness,” Bao Dai was the last emperor of the house of Nguyen, Vietnam’s last dynasty. In the postwar climate of rising demands for self-governance among colonized peoples around the world, France tried to redefine Bao Dai as a Vietnamese nationalist. This proved a tough sell, however, as Bao Dai was an unpopular and corrupt ruler. The other problem was Ho Chi Minh, who in the late 1940s was already a popular nationalist leader. American officials noted that Bao Dai could never hope to stand up against Ho Chi Minh. The French tried to underscore a dubious Soviet connection to Ho Chi Minh to heighten American interest in a deteriorating situation. A change in the political winds in the arena of the French War in Indochina began in 1946 as Ho Chi Minh began to deradicalize the Communist base of the Viet Minh by opening the Viet Minh to participation from other political groups. This move responded to the incredibly diverse political climate of Hanoi at the time and carried the additional benefit of heightening the international appeal of the Viet Minh as nationalists, rather than Communists. The Ho Chi Minh shift to deemphasize the Communist ideology was supported by a diverse group of Vietnamese diplomats. From 1946 to 1948 their arguments centered on the widely accepted accusation that Bao Dai was a French puppet. They called for material support for the Viet Minh—from the Kuomintang in China, from Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, and India— for the sake of pan-Asian anti-imperialism. Support for the Viet Minh was given verbally by such figures as Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, the Thai Pridi government, and the Burmese. However, initial material support was minimal, though evidence does suggest that a substantial flow of arms came to the Viet Minh from Bangkok, Manila, and the Kuomintang in China. The Viet Minh and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, Ho Chi Minh’s government in the north) persisted, forcing the French into a decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Leading up to Dien Bien Phu, the war was going quite poorly for the French in 1953. The Navarre Plan was a proposed solution. It aimed to outgun the Viet Minh and DRV forces and cut off their roots in the northern highlands and supply route through Laos. However, the French forces were drawn away from Dien Bien Phu by Viet Minh attacks in Laos and points south throughout March 1954. Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap then used the distraction to thrust at Dien Bien Phu, defeating the French after 55 days of solid fighting on May 7, 1954. Accounts of what actually happened at Dien Bien Phu differ. The official account by Vo Nguyen Giap emphasized the inevitable victory of Vietnamese forces based on their moral high ground. It is important to understand that in the later context of the Vietnam War, Vo Nguyen Giap’s account of Dien Bien Phu became one of the most compelling and often-told stories among Americans, French, and Vietnamese alike. Without question, the resolve of Vietnamese volunteers played a major role in the victory as they fought day and night without rest, repositioning artillery by dragging it with ropes across the steep

inclines of the northern highlands. In the midst of an increasingly likely French defeat, the Eisenhower White House debated the risks of intervening militarily on the side of the French. Despite the fact that the United States had been increasingly funding the French war (nearly 80 percent of the cost by 1951), President Eisenhower ultimately determined that the greater dangers lay in intervention. The United States would instead focus its energies on trying to forestall the advance of communism in Indochina following the conflict.

French parachutists watch comrades being dropped over Dien Bien Phu, an enemy stronghold in Vietnam. Although the French held the area for a period, they eventually were besieged and defeated by the Viet Minh. The United States, which had been sending great volumes of weaponry to French forces for years, increased that aid throughout the siege at Dien Bien Phu, but avoided direct intervention in Vietnam. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Ultimately, under the weight of heavy artillery fire, the French position was broken and the remaining troops were forced to march to Hanoi after their surrender. According to Giap’s intelligence estimates a total of 112,000 French troops were “incapacitated” during the French War in Indochina, with 16,200 of that number coming at Dien Bien Phu alone. More importantly, Giap’s forces had turned the course of history. For the first time a major European power was defeated by a non-European colonial independence movement on the battlefield. At the end of the conflict, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu forced them to the negotiating table at Geneva where the Geneva Accords would be adopted, an agreement that was intended to chart through democratic elections a peaceful future for a unified Vietnam —but one that was not signed by the United States. William Noseworthy See also: Geneva Accords; Ho Chi Minh; Vietnam War

Further Reading Bradley, Mark P. Imagining Vietnam & America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Lawrence, Mark Atwood. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to the War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Schaller, Michael. “Securing the Great Crescent: Occupied Japan and the Origins of Containment in Southeast Asia.” Journal of American History 69, no. 2 (September 1982): 392–414. Vo Nguyen Giap. “Vietnamese Victory: Dien Bien Phu, 1954.” In Marvin E. Gettlemen et al., eds. Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War. New York: Grove Press, 2005.

Geneva Accords (1954) The Geneva Accords of 1954 resulted from a conference held in Geneva, Switzerland, from April 26 to July 20 of that year to discuss outstanding issues related to Korea following the recent conclusion of war on the peninsula, as well as the unification of Indochina—then in the last phase of a conflict between the French and Viet Minh. Present throughout the entire conference were officials from France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the United States; representatives of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Korea joined the proceedings at those points of the conference when their issues were being deliberated. Although never implemented, the most significant of the Geneva Accords’ 10 resultant documents was the “Conference Declaration”—issued as a consensus by the conference’s British chair but not supported by the United States and South Vietnam—that called for, most significantly, elections by 1956 to unify and bring peace to Vietnam. After eight long years of fighting between Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh and French forces, the collapse of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, ended French colonial rule in Indochina. The next day, the Indochinese session of the Geneva Conference began. As it had been since the outbreak of the Cold War, the policy of the United States throughout the conference was that communism had to be contained to the northern regions of Vietnam controlled by Ho Chi Minh. That position had compelled the United States to support the French reconquest of Indochina in 1945–1946 that produced the eight-year war, heavily backed by the United States with military aid to the French. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 had heightened the determination of U.S. policymakers to hold the line on the spread of communism in Asia. For its part, China recognized Ho Chi Minh’s government in the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam and supplied military and material aid. Thus on April 7 amid the siege of Dien Bien Phu, American president Dwight D. Eisenhower—asked in a press conference about the rationale for U.S. support for the French at a time when the United States was still considering direct intervention—coined one of the famous phrases of the Cold War by declaring that if Indochina were to fall to Communist forces, other noncommunist countries in the South Asia–Pacific region would fall like “dominos.” The “domino theory” guided U.S. policy toward Indochina for more than two decades. U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles and Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith headed the American delegation during different periods of the Geneva Conference. Deliberations at the conference were generally acrimonious, signified by the refusal of Secretary of State Dulles to shake hands with the Chinese foreign minister. Thus it was not a harbinger of the proceedings to come when near the outset of the conference a declaration was agreed upon calling for an end to hostilities; territorial sovereignty for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; and the removal of foreign forces from all of Indochina. The more difficult work lay ahead. Although the conference produced nothing of substance on the issues related to Korea, the Geneva Accords on Indochina emerged from the conference on July 21 with the following key provisions: Vietnam was to be divided temporarily along the 17th parallel into two states, North and South Vietnam. Elections were to be held within two years, unifying the country under one government. The agreements were clear in specifying that the division of the country was temporary and not to be interpreted as a permanent political boundary. With a deadline of 300 days, the French forces stationed in North Vietnam and Communist Viet Minh forces in South Vietnam were to be withdrawn from those respective areas of the country. Neither North nor South Vietnam was to join any military alliances or allow foreign military bases during this period. The newly sovereign state of Cambodia was to form a government under Norodom Sihanouk. The Communist faction of Laos, the Pathet Lao, was recognized as a political party with control over Phong Saly and Sam Neua provinces. Cambodia and Laos were to remain

demilitarized, neutral, and nonaligned states. An International Supervisory Commission was set up to oversee the cessation of hostilities in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Because the United States and South Vietnam only acknowledged the Geneva Accords but would not sign them, they were doomed to fail. Bent on preventing unification of Vietnam under a Communist government, the United States knew very well that Ho Chi Minh—presumed to run as the Communist candidate in the 1956 election—would defeat handily the corrupt and discredited emperor Bao Dai (generally perceived as the puppet leader of the French). Instead the United States moved quickly to back Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese Catholic nationalist, as the president of the newly declared Republic of (South) Vietnam. Refusing to support the Geneva-mandated unifying elections, Diem was instead “elected” president of South Vietnam in a 1955 plebiscite rigged by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in which Diem received 133 percent of the vote in the area of Saigon. Nevertheless, Diem would be provided with massive military and economic assistance from Washington. Two days after the Geneva Accords Dulles bemoaned Communist “inroads” in Asia, specifically the loss of North Vietnam. He called for a collective security system in Southeast Asia and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was formed in Manila on September 8, 1954, encompassing the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. A special protocol added Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam as states to be protected by SEATO, thereby providing later international legal justification for U.S. involvement in the defense of South Vietnam. China, North Vietnam, and the Soviet Union condemned the establishment of SEATO, pointing out that the inclusion of Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam violated the spirit of the Geneva Accords. Although the Geneva Accords of 1954, combined with the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, put an end to the First Indochina War, it set the stage for American involvement for another 20 years. After the Geneva Accords the United States effectively replaced France as the Western imperial power in Indochina. Patit Paban Mishra and Andrew J. Waskey See also: French War in Indochina; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Vietnam War

Further Reading Addington, Larry H. America’s War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Cable, James. The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina. London: Macmillan Press, 2000. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Mandate for Change, 1953–1956. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963. Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. New York: Wiley, 1979. Herring, George C. The Pentagon Papers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Hughes, Matthew, and Matthew S. Seligmann. Losing the Peace: Failed Settlements and the Road to War. Stroud, UK: History Press, 2009. Irving, R. E. M. The First Indochina War: French and American Policy, 1945–54. London: C. Helm, 1975. Lawrence, Mark A., and Fredrik Logevall. The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Mishra, Patit Paban. “Geneva to Geneva: A Discourse on Geo-Political Dimension of Conflict in Laos: 1954–1962.” Journal of International Studies (Kuala Lumpur) 7 (2011). Mishra, Patit Paban. “Indochina War/First and Second.” Encyclopedia of World History. Vol. V. New York: Facts on File, 2008. Phillips, Charles, and Alan Axelrod. Encyclopedia of Historical Treaties and Alliances. New York: Facts on File, 2001. Randle, Robert F. Geneva 1954: The Settlement of the Indochinese War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Waite, James. The End of the First Indochina War: A Global History. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2012. Windrow, Martin. French Indochina War 1946–54. Oxford: Osprey, 1998.

Greek Civil War (1946–1949) American policymakers did not take much interest in Greece before the Second World War. In the 1930s the country was under the control of General Ioannis Metaxas, a right-wing strongman sympathetic to the British. In October 1940 Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, demanded that Greece allow Italian troops to occupy strategic locations. Metaxas refused and a short time later Italy invaded. The Greeks pushed them back, which prompted the Germans to invade in April 1941. The Nazis quickly crushed the Greeks and the small British force there and occupied the country for the next three years. The Kommounistiko Komma Elladas (KKE, Greek Communist Party) had existed on the margins of Greek society until the outbreak of the war, but it was better organized and more accustomed to operating underground than other political parties in Greece, and the social and economic disruptions the war brought offered it the chance to attract followers. During the war, it enjoyed the support of approximately 500,000 of the country’s 7.5 million citizens and boasted 60,000 fighters with a sizable number of reservists. The two major resistance groups seeking to expel the Nazis were the Ellinikos Laikos Apelftherotikos Stratos (ELAS, or Greek People’s Liberation Army), the KKE’s military arm, and its noncommunist rival, Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos (EDES, or National Republican Greek League). The two had been bitter rivals for years and there was much distrust and mutual suspicion between them. Essentially directed by the KKE, the National Liberation Front (EAM) served as the political arm of the ELAS and enjoyed considerable support throughout the country. The British viewed the peninsula as a linchpin of the security of their interests in the eastern Mediterranean, as a bulwark to the spread of communism in the region, and as a vital link in defending their empire east of Suez. At his meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Prime Minister Winston Churchill went to great lengths to ensure postwar British influence in the country: in the so-called “Percentages Agreement,” he secured British influence in Greece at 90 percent while ceding to the Communists 80 percent control of Bulgaria and Hungary and 90 percent control of Romania. In doing so Churchill effectively surrendered British influence in the Balkans for the chance to maintain Britain’s dominance in Greece. The project of doing so, however, was greatly complicated not only by Britain’s weakened state at the end of World War II but also by the political support the Communist ELAS-EAM forces had been gaining throughout the war—more than any other resistance group or political faction in the country—and the fact that the Greek government was in exile during the Nazi occupation. In late 1942 sporadic fighting erupted between ELAS-EAM forces and EDES and other resistance groups in what became the overture to civil war. After the liberation of Greece a new chapter began in the country’s history. Despite the fact that as the Nazis withdrew from Greece in 1944, ELAS-EAM Communists were in effective control of the country except for the major cities, the shortage of housing, disruptions to the transit system, the murders of hostages by both sides, and hyperinflation combined to deepen the crisis of a country that was about to descend into full-scale civil war. The British contributed to the tensions with their insistence that King George II be restored to his throne without a plebiscite on the issue as most citizens wanted. Further inflaming the situation was an assault in Athens in December 1944 by Greek government police on a large crowd of unarmed pro-EAM supporters, killing 28 and wounding dozens more. A 33-day battle ensued pitting EAM-ELAS against government forces, which received heavy reinforcements from the British and achieved a victory. The “White Terror” of 1945–1946 followed: an intensive, violent persecution campaign led by the British-supported government against anyone identified with EAM-ELAS. That proved a turning point, inciting a more militant extremism among the EAM-ELAS forces, a purge of

noncommunist factions within the EAM, the consolidation of the Communist Party KKE as the sole resistance force, and provoking a KKE boycott of the 1946 elections, which were predictably won by the United Alignment of Nationalists, an amalgamation of right-wing political factions supported by the British. By orchestrating these events the British made Greece the first of the nations liberated from Nazi control to submit to the coercive will of an outside occupying power—Britain, soon to be supplanted by the United States. Still enjoying broad support in the country, the KKE formed a provisional Communist government and its Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) prepared for war with the British-supported monarchists. Neighboring Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria provided support to the provisional government, while Stalin abided by the terms of the agreement with Churchill and maintained a noninterventionist position. The DSE achieved some early success in the conflict, which required additional British military intervention to support the monarchists. By February 1947, Clement Attlee, who had succeeded Churchill as prime minister, informed Washington that Britain could no longer afford to police Greece (nor Turkey, which had assumed growing importance as well, given its strategically important location) and would have to withdraw by March 31. U.S. diplomats in Greece conveyed the message that British withdrawal meant the loss of Greece and potentially Turkey to the Communists. Convinced that the United States was the only nation capable of preventing the triumph of communism in the eastern Mediterranean, Truman and his advisers formulated a new foreign policy model to fit the changing circumstances. Secretary of State George C. Marshall warned congressional leaders of the prospects of Communist domination in the eastern Mediterranean while Truman convened with key advisers, including Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), as to how best to secure the support of the American people for what constituted an existential shift in orientation of U.S. foreign policy. The president would need to request significant military aid to a nation halfway around the world that was hardly democratic, one engulfed in a complex civil war, and he was doing so while the United States itself was at peace. And this was occurring just two years following the tremendous sacrifices made by Americans during World War II. Vandenberg advised the president that he would need to give an address to the American people and “scare the hell” out of them to persuade them of the gravity of the threat of a Communist victory in Greece. In addition, the request to intervene had to come from Greece itself: the State Department directed the Greek government’s chargé d’affaires in Washington to sign a letter (written by the State Department) seeking U.S. support. Adviser and future secretary of state Dean Acheson later characterized Truman’s mission—in this instance and more broadly in galvanizing Americans’ support behind the emerging Cold War—as having to make things “clearer than truth” (Mihalkanin, 10). And so, on March 12, 1947, President Truman outlined before Congress what became known as the Truman Doctrine. In appealing for popular and congressional support for the $400 million (largely military) aid package to Greece and Turkey, he boldly declared that the government of Greece was in dire need of the support of the only nation that could provide it. Downplaying the fact that the Greek government was an authoritarian regime, Truman instead spoke in sweeping, universal terms and depicted the prospect of a takeover by the Communists in Greece as a grave threat to American freedom and security. Moreover, Truman declared that the effort in Greece was only the beginning of a global effort to support “free peoples” everywhere. Astute contemporary observers recognized that the Truman Doctrine and the new bipartisan policy of “containment” marked a sea change in U.S. foreign policy. Critics warned the policy would be costly and make the United States the world’s imperial policeman. The speech did achieve the moral clarity that Truman and the internationalists on his national security team had hoped for, and it proved critical in gaining the support of the Congress and the American people for what was now a global fight to contain communism in all its forms, in whatever context.

U.S. military aid to Greece came in the form of planes, tanks, napalm, small arms, and extensive training and supervision of Greek government military forces. Because American military intervention made the key difference in compelling leftist forces to surrender in 1949, it reinforced the belief among military planners and policy strategists that the lessons of the Greek Civil War could be applied to other hot spots of U.S. intervention to follow, including Vietnam. Well into the 1950s, the conservative rightwing Greek government deferred to U.S. officials on virtually every important policy question as the country became essentially a U.S. client state in an important region of the world. Moreover, its internal conflict had inadvertently set the United States on a course of global intervention. Matthew McMurray See also: Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Clogg, Richard. Greece 1940–1949: Occupation, Resistance, Civil War: A Documentary History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Close, David H. The Greek Civil War, 1943–1950: Studies of Polarization. New York: Routledge, 1993. Mihalkanin, Edward S., ed. American Statesman: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.

Green Revolution The Green Revolution refers to a series of scientific and technological innovations aimed at dramatically increasing agricultural production in parts of the so-called Third World during the heart of the Cold War. Although the Green Revolution has its roots in earlier advances in agrarian genetics in the 1920s, it was not until the 1940s when postwar geopolitical conditions, circumstances of famine, development of technology transfers, and necessary funding and institutional support from the United States coalesced, allowing for this revolutionary transformation of agriculture. The Green Revolution in agriculture aimed primarily at producing high-yielding strains of wheat and maize that responded well to irrigation, modern management strategies, artificial fertilizers, and to some degree, pesticides. In 1968, after two decades of wondrous agricultural improvements in India and elsewhere, William Gaud, the former head of the United States Agency for International Development, collectively described the developments as the “Green Revolution.” Gaud’s use of the term aimed quite consciously to distinguish it from the Soviet Union– inspired “Red Revolution.” For officials at the U.S. State Department and the Ford Foundation—two of the key funders and strategic supporters of the program—the Green Revolution offered a development alternative to socialist initiatives in agrarian reform. The problem of food insecurity during and immediately after World War II provided the first necessary condition for the Green Revolution. Inspired in part by interruptions in food shipments during the First World War, the very influential Rockefeller Foundation had run an agricultural research station in China since the 1920s, but the Japanese invasion of the mainland forced their withdrawal by the late 1930s. With the outbreak of World War II, Rockefeller officials looked to Mexico as a new location for a research station to experiment with new plant varieties to guard against food shortages, a goal that served well the desire of the Roosevelt administration for improved relations with Mexico. The result was the Mexican Agricultural Program, led by biologist and plant pathology expert Jacob George Harrar (1906– 1982). The program focused on developing high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of maize and wheat— the latter effort headed by visionary biologist and humanitarian Norman Borlaug (1914–2009).

Halfway around the world, British imperial control of India during World War II had exhausted and destroyed much of traditional agriculture. An estimated 3 million people had perished in the 1943 Bengal famine. Following the war, division of the precariously held British India left most wheat supplies inside a newly independent Pakistan. Simultaneously the outbreak of the Cold War by 1947 provided the other crucial geopolitical context for the development of the Green Revolution. Fears of nationalist upheaval throughout Asia and Latin America led officials in the Truman administration to embrace any and all means of supporting food security in nations such as the Philippines and India that seemed particularly vulnerable to Communist-driven revolt. Toward that goal, targeted agricultural assistance was at the center of President Truman’s Point IV international aid program. Launched in 1949, Point IV focused on ensuring that strategically important countries like Iran and Pakistan did not fall prey to communism. Meanwhile, inspired by the success of the Mexican Agricultural Program, in the Philippines the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations collaborated with the government to establish the International Rice Research Institute and the Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat. Both programs focused on developing and intensively breeding varieties of seed that would respond well to artificial fertilizers and produce high crop yields. The success of both programs in turn prompted the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, with strong support from the U.S. State Department, to work with the government of Mexico to launch the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement near Mexico City with a parallel mission. By the mid-1960s, Borlaug’s efforts were producing dramatic increases in production, both in Mexico and after 1964, in India as well where a semidwarf variety of rice called IR8 was introduced and met what seemed like miraculous success. Having been on the edge of a severe famine crisis in 1960, by the late 1980s India had dramatically increased its rice production and become a major rice exporter. By then the Green Revolution had been credited with saving the lives of more than one billion people and Borlaug had earned the 1970 Nobel Prize. Critics of the Green Revolution, who began to emerge in the 1970s, have maintained that its tremendous increases in production produced a wave of environmental and social ills. They argue that the Green Revolution depended heavily on massive irrigation projects and drawdowns of local groundwater that displaced vast numbers of people and led to falling water tables, as well as increased salinization in many areas. Second, heavy applications of nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides have often produced contaminated waterways. In addition, the Green Revolution tended to advance monoculture of plant strains and to diminish biological diversity, as high-yield varieties of wheat and corn came to dominate and farmers in the developing world came to depend on a select few grains promoted by their governments and Western corporations to survive economically. The Green Revolution’s promotion of mechanized agriculture has also tended to displace farmers and drive people into cities to seek work in factories at very low wage rates and in poor conditions. In the end, opponents maintain that the entire project is simply unsustainable. They argue that although dramatic population increases in nations like India may have been met by the miracles of science and technology, the Green Revolution—which begat other developments like seed patenting and new advances in bioengineering—at bottom intensively utilizes a supply of increasingly diminishing and degraded resources: water, topsoil, and energy. Moreover, although scientists from India, Mexico, and other nations have been involved in the Green Revolution almost since its inception, it is fundamentally a U.S.-led, Western project that represents the worst aspects of globalization. As officials had hoped in the 1940s, locally based movements for collective agrarian reform—often associated with socialism—were discredited by the Green Revolution, along with traditional agriculture. Today’s anti–Green Revolution activists like Vandana Shiva (b. 1952) say that the phenomenon is at its core driven by Western money and geopolitical interests, and that despite

the human lives saved and real and undeniable material improvements, it is fundamentally beholden to the same U.S. and Western forces that first drove it nearly a century ago. Chris J. Magoc See also: Point IV Program (U.S. Home Economics Education in Iran); Sustainable Development

Further Reading Griffin, Keith B. “The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution.” In J. K. Boyce and Keith B. Griffin, eds. Human Development in the Era of Globalization. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2006. Jain, H. K. Green Revolution: History, Impact and Future. Houston: Studium Press, 2010. Perkins, John H. Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Shiva, Vandana. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. London: Zed Books, 1991.

Guatemala (1946–1954) Guatemala entered the Cold War era with democratic and nationalistic aspirations stemming from its 1944 October Revolution that shaped its rise and subsequent fall in 1954. Refugees from Central American and Caribbean dictatorships received sanctuary and assistance from President Juan José Arévalo. The revolutionary government established labor codes and agrarian projects to uplift its economy and population, and Guatemalan officials respected the rights of assembly and free speech, including those of Communists. These projects became targets of Latin American dictatorships, U.S. transnational companies, and ultimately the U.S. government, leading to the U.S.-directed Operation PBSUCCESS. In 1954, U.S. Cold War policy toward Guatemala was carried out in the overthrow of elected president Jacobo Arbenz, which destroyed the nation’s democratic experiment and assisted repressive regimes throughout the region. The legacies of U.S. policy in Guatemala during this period endure more than a half-century later. This dark history is rooted in the 1940s. Profiting from his graft, control over various enterprises, and intimate relationships with U.S. corporations such as the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and International Railways of Central America (IRCA), dictator Jorge Ubico protected conservative landowning elites’ privileges and mandated the indigenous population’s subservience on plantations through military repression, daily violence, and legally sanctioned murder. Dependent on coffee and other agricultural exports, Guatemala had one of the lowest per capita annual incomes at less than $200, the highest rate of illiteracy at 70 percent, and the most inequitable system of landownership with 72 percent of the land owned by only 2 percent of the population. In the early 1940s, Ubico’s officials began to complain that U.S.-inspired ideals from World War II encouraged Guatemalans to criticize the dictatorship. In 1944, Guatemalan students, labor activists, teachers, and middle-class leaders cited the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter as they overthrew Ubico and initiated the October Revolution. A new sense of democracy and nationalism flourished, epitomized in the election of Juan José Arévalo. Exiles from various Central American and Caribbean dictatorships flocked to Guatemala’s emerging democracy. In 1947, Arévalo referenced World War II as he broke diplomatic relations with Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and Nicaraguan and Honduran exiles protested and wrote newspaper articles against the respective dictators Anastasio Somoza and Tiburcio Carías. For these dictatorships, Guatemala’s democratic revolution threatened their regimes by welcoming exiles and protecting the rights to assemble, speak freely, and have a free press. The dictators began providing money and weapons to former Ubico officials and Arévalo’s enemies to overthrow the Guatemalan democracy.

Arévalo then helped exiles try to overthrow the region’s dictatorships and install democratic governments. During a 1947 expedition of Dominican exiles out of Cuba to overthrow Trujillo, Arévalo delivered Argentine weapons. In December, the Guatemalan president mediated an agreement among exiles to overthrow regimes in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica and aided exile groups that installed José Figueres during the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War. When Trujillo and Somoza lobbied the Truman administration to intervene, U.S. officials refused, for Arévalo and the exiles were removing a Costa Rican government that allied with Communists. When Dominican exiles prepared a 1949 expedition from Guatemala to overthrow Trujillo, Arévalo offered his nation’s military bases, provided weapons, and even deployed a Guatemalan military plane. With the expedition’s disastrous failure, Trujillo and Somoza again lobbied the Truman administration against Arévalo. U.S. officials now listened. With the dawn of the bipolar Cold War against the Soviet Union and international communism, the Truman administration demanded stable governments in Latin America. Although originally unfazed, U.S. officials in 1949 described such expeditions and Arévalo’s role as beneficial to Communist plans to weaken the U.S.-led inter-American system. Arévalo’s policies toward UFCO also received U.S. attention. Due to its relationship with Ubico, UFCO avoided significant taxes, dismissed workers at the first sign of opposition or organization, and operated freely as Ubico outlawed any criticism of U.S. companies. These companies did not just control the ports and railroads. As UFCO owned IRCA stock, IRCA lowered shipping prices for UFCO exports, giving UFCO an unfair advantage over Guatemalan competitors. Furthermore, UFCO devalued its estates to avoid paying already minimal taxes. In the United States, public relations firms guarded UFCO’s image. Former UFCO president Thomas Cabot was the brother of the Eisenhower administration’s assistant secretary of state for Latin America, John Moors Cabot, and the Eisenhower administration’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, helped negotiate UFCO contracts in the 1930s, demonstrating the corporation’s reach. UFCO’s relationship with Ubico, defrauding fiscal responsibilities, and denying laborers’ rights insulted Guatemalans’ sense of nationalism as the corporation represented the country’s underdevelopment, poor infrastructure, and lack of industry. During the 1944 revolution, UFCO workers networked with labor movements. When workers at UFCO’s Bananera plantation led an October 1946 strike, the corporation simply refused to negotiate. Working with labor activists, Arévalo passed the May 1947 Labor Code, allowing Guatemalan workers to protest and organize as in the United States. When workers organized and demanded the Labor Code’s enactment, UFCO officials claimed the code was unfair for giving greater protection to workers on large plantations such as those of UFCO. The corporation lobbied the U.S. State Department to send an official to solve the issue and alleged that communism influenced labor leaders and Arévalo, making UFCO the first U.S. actor to describe the Guatemalan government as Communist. With the Cold War and anticommunism dominating U.S. foreign policy, the Truman administration responded favorably to UFCO’s denunciations of communism in Guatemala. U.S. officials also socialized with and obtained information from elite Guatemalans and U.S. business leaders opposed to the Labor Code and Arévalo. By 1948, U.S. analyses of Guatemala reflected the same anticommunist denunciations of UFCO and Arévalo’s opponents. U.S. officials, most notably Ambassador Richard Patterson, castigated the Arévalo government and warned against communism’s dangers. In March 1951, Jacobo Arbenz took office after a democratic election. U.S. officials originally described him as “opportunistic” in using leftists and Communists for votes without sharing their actual vision. Influenced by his Salvadoran wife, María Vilanova de Arbenz, Arbenz read about Guatemala’s agrarian problems and economic difficulties. Rather than offering solutions to Arbenz, most political

organizations merely bickered over government positions and political spoils. However, a group of Communist leaders began working in the countryside and addressing those agrarian and economic issues. Gradually, Arbenz developed close relationships with Alfredo Guerra Borges, Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, and Mario Silva Jonama, founding members of Guatemala’s Communist Party, the Guatemalan Party of Work (PGT). Arbenz discussed agrarian programs, debated social issues, and read Communist literature with José Manuel Fortuny, a prominent Communist. During his presidency, Communists had little power in the legislature but became Arbenz’s intimate advisers. On June 17, 1952, Arbenz signed into law Decree 900, an expansive agrarian reform project designed with the advice of PGT leaders. Idle lands on estates of 224 to 672 acres would be expropriated if less than two-thirds of the total estate was cultivated, and uncultivated lands on estates larger than 672 acres would be expropriated. These lands, as well as lands owned by the government, would be parceled out to peasants to establish independent farms, similar to programs implemented in the United States after the Civil War and endorsed in U.S. foreign policy toward economically underdeveloped countries. The Guatemalan government would compensate owners with 3 percent bonds that matured after 25 years, equivalent to the expropriated lands’ declared value on the latest tax returns. Decree 900 expropriated 234,000 acres from UFCO’s 295,000-acre Tiquisate plantation and 173,000 acres from its 253,000-acre Bananera plantation. UFCO’s tax returns placed the lands’ value at $3 an acre for a total of $1,185,000, but UFCO and the State Department both acknowledged that the company had fraudulently devalued the land to avoid paying taxes. Consequently, these groups demanded compensation at $75 an acre for a total of $19,355,000. Although UFCO especially denounced Decree 900, U.S. officials feared more than the agrarian reform’s seizure of land. For U.S. officials, Decree 900’s success served as “an excellent opportunity to extend [Communist] influence over the rural population” (Gleijeses, 152). The agrarian reform required local committees to administer the program, and PGT members and Communists were the most capable and efficient organizers in the countryside. Such a program would supposedly provide legitimacy to the presence of Communists throughout Guatemala, though the PGT numbered less than 500 members. When Guatemala’s Supreme Court declared Decree 900 unconstitutional, Arbenz encouraged the Guatemalan legislature to impeach the judges and install new judges, further inflaming U.S. fears of “totalitarian” influences.

ROCKEFELLER, FORD, AND CARNEGIE FOUNDATIONS Founded early in the 20th century, the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations are wealthy, nonprofit philanthropic organizations with interlocking directorates that are dedicated to the advancement of social progress and moderate reform in the United States and internationally. Their interests have also been systematically and closely allied with the projection of U.S. global hegemonic power. For example, prior to the advent of U.S. foreign aid programs, the Rockefeller Foundation established public health and agricultural initiatives in Asia and Latin America. In those countries where U.S. business concerns were invested, such programs carried the added benefit of strategically advancing political stability and suppressing rebellion. Similarly, in the postwar era the educational programs of the Rockefeller Foundation worked to promote American ideals of democratic free enterprise capitalism in “Third World” nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. During the 1950s and 1960s, many of these underdeveloped countries were undergoing profound transformation. Nationalist independence movements often appeared to be either leaning toward communism or defiantly attempting to remain nonaligned. In either case, a central project of the Rockefeller-led corporate foundations was to ensure the Americanizing education of a generation of political and economic leaders in strategically important Third World countries. Educational exchange programs in particular would instill the virtues of liberal democracy and global capitalism. Similarly, the foundations played an important role in the cultural Cold War. For example, the Ford Foundation and the Central Intelligence Agency secretly funded the international U.S. advocacy group Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Operating in 35 countries, the CCF published magazines and held conferences and other events designed to promote American cultural and political values, particularly in literature. The Ford Foundation’s Foreign Student Leadership Program

also worked closely with the CIA-backed National Student Association in promoting an anticommunist, “pro-American” agenda at home and abroad.

To hold off U.S. opposition, Arévalo repeatedly affirmed his pro-American position in international affairs, for his government allowed U.S. military missions and supported the Korean War. Still, Arévalo’s receiving international Communists such as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, providing asylum to exiles denigrated by dictatorships as Communists, offering sanctuary to Spanish leftist and Communist refugees, and challenging UFCO’s economic dominance offended U.S. officials. Arévalo defended such actions as democratic, respecting the right to assemble and hold one’s own political beliefs. Under Arbenz, Guatemalan officials vocally disputed U.S. demands to persecute leftists and Communists, especially since the Soviet Union had no relationship with Guatemala. Blinded by “McCarthyist” persecutions of leftists, U.S. officials refused to acknowledge that Guatemala maintained such democratic principles. When insulted by Guatemalan officials’ sense of nationalism and independence, some U.S. officials utilized racist ideas to denigrate Guatemalans as “backwards” or “ignorant.” Enveloped in an anticommunist foreign policy and lobbied by dictatorships and UFCO, President Harry Truman authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in July 1952 to organize Operation PBFORTUNE to overthrow Guatemala’s government. With Somoza and Trujillo, CIA officials began coordinating with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan military officer who already had tried to overthrow the Guatemalan government. The CIA station in Guatemala organized a psychological warfare campaign with anti-Arbenz propaganda, and intelligence agents established sabotage and assassination plans. Although the State Department halted Operation PBFORTUNE, newly elected president Dwight D. Eisenhower approved its successor, Operation PBSUCCESS, on August 12, 1953. Building upon the previous operation, CIA agents funded student groups, labor unions, and churches to denounce the government and distribute anti-Arbenz propaganda, from comic books to priests’ warnings of atheistic communism. On June 18, 1954, Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala with less than 500 soldiers, but the Guatemalan army halted this attack. Furthermore, the Guatemalan government in January, May, and June had arrested CIA allies and Arbenz’s enemies, eroding the CIA’s capabilities. However, CIA director Allen Dulles had earlier approved the assignment of Ambassador John Peurifoy. In Guatemala, Peurifoy had encouraged the CIA to contact Guatemalan military officers to help overthrow Arbenz, and U.S. military attachés repeatedly warned Guatemalan officers about U.S. hostility to Arbenz’s government. Over the previous months, the Eisenhower administration had halted arm shipments to the army, leading Arbenz to purchase weapons from Czechoslovakia and aggravate U.S. and Guatemalan officers’ concerns. During Castillo Armas’s invasion, U.S. pilots dropped anti-Arbenz publications and bombed Guatemala City, and CIA officials bribed Guatemalan officers. Despite the failure of Castillo Armas’s invasion, the CIA’s psychological warfare against the Guatemalan military pushed military officers to overthrow Arbenz on June 27, 1954. Some Guatemalan officers participated in the coup to prevent further bloodshed and Castillo Armas’s ascension, but Peurifoy rebuked this demand. Under Castillo Armas, a military regime emerged whose anticommunist laws condoned murdering labor organizers, peasant leaders, and moderate reformers. Over the next decades, such repression and violence unraveled the democratic and nationalistic aspirations unleashed in the 1944 revolution. Additionally, Operation PBSUCCESS became a blueprint for similar U.S. operations, most notably the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation against Fidel Castro, and from Mexico to Chile, various Latin American organizations protested U.S. policy toward Guatemala. Today, the overthrow of Guatemala remains a key point of contention and a defining moment in U.S. anticommunist policy toward Latin America during the Cold War.

Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Atlantic Charter; Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Figueres Ferrer, José; Guatemala (1954– 1975); McCarthyism; United Fruit Company; Primary Documents: CIA Document on the Arbenz Government in Guatemala (1952); Philip C. Roettinger Recalls the 1954 CIA Coup in Guatemala (1986)

Further Reading Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rabe, Stephen. Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Iran, Coup d’etat (1953) The United States entered the fray of Western powers involved in Iranian affairs during the 1940s when the turmoil of World War II shaped much of the world and the British and Soviet Union, both having previous relationships with Iran, occupied the sovereign country in an effort to ensure access to the Middle Eastern state’s precious resource—oil. Each player sought to influence different factions within Iranian society: Britain backed the Pahlavi monarchy it helped to prop up, the Soviet Union backed the Tudeh Party (party of the masses), the pro-Socialist/Communist party begun in 1941 by Iraj Iskandari (a central figure in the working-class movement), and the United States backed any faction opposed to the USSR. From 1946 to 1954, foreign interference continued to play an undermining role in Iranian affairs and came to shape a tenuous future for both Iran and its relationship with the West. The 1941 occupation of Iran by Anglo-Soviet forces greatly influenced the next 13 years of Iranian affairs as dominated by Western powers. After Reza Shah’s abdication in 1941 at the insistence of Britain and the Soviet Union, Muhammad Reza succeeded his father. The British took control of the south of the country, and the Soviets dominated the north. The United States stepped in and guaranteed that its allies’ forces would withdraw at the conclusion of World War II. The young shah continued to control his central administration and his military, but his rule was directly affected by the Western powers occupying his country. For instance, in order to maintain his armed forces the new shah agreed to cooperate fully with his occupiers, which included implementing extensive reforms, improving his family image, handing over his father’s ill-gotten estates, and even taking well-publicized pilgrimages. Muhammad’s reign would continue to suffer from criticism of, and indeed, influence of foreign domination throughout his tenure as ruler. In the postwar era the United States sought to contain communism and to ensure the stability of Iran as one of the most significant oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Both issues were strongly connected. U.S. critics worried about the inability of the young shah to modernize Iran’s economy, its landowning system, and its society at a quick enough pace to avoid a coup. As Washington policymakers saw it, Iran’s ruling landowning elite benefited from its country’s land wealth, while as many as 20 million peasants, the majority of Iran’s population, remained impoverished. “Frustration and hopelessness among the mass of the people” (Little, 216) continued as a main concern among U.S. officials who worried that the lack of stability in the oil-rich Middle Eastern country might lead its masses to turn to Moscow.

The leader of the Western bloc struggled against the Moscow-minded Tudeh Party throughout the entire 1940s, which was run under the chairmanship of Iraj Iskandari’s uncle Sulayman Iskandari, a longtime Iranian politician. The United States had reason to fear the broad program proposed by the party of the masses. Chairman Iskandari’s party appealed broadly to Socialists, patriots, democrats, and constitutionalists. Of significance in a largely Muslim country with religious elites, he sought to avoid the pitfalls of many Socialist/Communist parties that antagonized religious leaders and adherents in their countries. Not surprisingly, this type of wide-ranging appeal led to success and continued issues for U.S./British policymakers and businesses alike. By the mid-1940s the success of the Tudeh Party compelled both U.S. and British policymakers to acknowledge its achievements. By 1945, the party of the masses possessed six parliamentary seats, a newspaper (Rahbar, “Leader”), and more than 150,000 members. Sulayman Iskandari’s party gave urban wage earners and middle-class Iranians a voice within their society. U.S. policymakers saw the Tudeh Party as one of the strongest, most organized political organizations in Iran. British politicians and businessmen noticed the “struggle between the have and have-nots” even more intimately than their U.S. counterparts due to the role of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in Iranian affairs, which the Tudeh Party forced to provide its workers with an “eight-hour day, Friday pay, overtime scales, higher wages,” and improved housing (Abrahamian, 110). Soon after, the party of the masses insisted that its government create one of the first labor laws in the Middle East, which included a package similar to the one that the AIOC already implemented in addition to paid holidays, insurance and unemployment pay, and minimum wages. Indeed, the United States and its British counterparts had reason to fear the success of this young generation of Socialist/Communist–minded supporters. Soviet actions, however, led to serious setbacks for the Tudeh Party in 1945–1946, when the leader of the Eastern bloc demanded an oil concession in northern Iran. The Tudeh Party could not accept this demand since it criticized its own parliament for offering oil concessions to American and British companies and had been calling for the nationalization of the AIOC. Leaders of the party of the masses argued half-heartedly that at least the Soviet Union offered to share profits equally, as compared to the 20 percent offered by the British. But in all fairness the party of the masses could not legitimize Moscow’s actions. This incident, in addition to Soviet support of Kurdish and Azerbaijani national movements in Iran, left many members of the Tudeh Party bewildered, resulted in a loss of party membership, and created an insurmountable divide between the leftists and the Nationalists. The Tudeh Party began a slow decline due to its continued support of the Moscow party line even when the “line” did not fit the party of the masses’ agenda. Instability continued as a main issue in U.S.-Iranian relations, a situation that worsened when the Tudeh Party’s decline led to increased opportunity for and appeal of the Iranian Nationalist Party, which openly and loudly supported the nationalization of oil in Iran. When Muhammad Reza Shah visited the United States in 1949 hoping for monetary aid, Secretary of State Dean Acheson strongly suggested that the young shah work on economic and social reform lest he lose control of his country as suggested by his inability to control or guide the Socialist and Nationalist elements in Iranian society. Acheson was not wrong. Led by Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iranian prime minister from 1951 to 1953 and a prominent member of Iranian politics since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the Nationalist Party encouraged constitutionalism and independence from foreign, especially Western, domination. In fact, Mosaddeq campaigned directly against the British and his shah and created the National Front. He enjoyed the support of some of the most popular clerics of the day, like Ayatollah Sayyed Abul-Qassem Kashani, in

addition to much of the middle class. Both hoped to benefit from the National Front’s call to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. Muhammad Reza Shah lost political control of affairs in Iran soon after May 1951, when Mohammad Mosaddeq’s nationalization bill passed. Mosaddeq created the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and demanded negotiations with the AIOC. The British-owned oil company, however, steadfastly refused to revise its concessions with the Iranian government, closed its pipelines, recalled its personnel, blocked the export of oil from Iran, and complained to the United Nations. Prime Minister Mosaddeq subsequently expropriated and nationalized the AIOC, broke diplomatic relations with Britain, and heightened expectations of economic and social reform among Iranian society. The young shah desired a more peaceful, less apocryphal relationship with Britain and the West, from whom he often received both advice and aid, but Mosaddeq’s actions placed Iran on a revolutionary path out of the shah’s hands. The United States and Britain saw that revolutionary path as stretching toward Moscow and threatening a precious strategic resource—oil. U.S. policymakers warned Washington, “A Communist takeover is becoming more and more likely” (Little, 216). Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1953, feared that a loss of Iranian oil to the Communists would mean a potential loss of up to 60 percent of Middle Eastern oil reserves to the Eastern bloc. In response, the United States organized an embargo of Iranian oil, and U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his officials acknowledged the need for intercession on behalf of Muhammad Reza Shah. Both Britain and the United States acted together to ensure that the shah remained in control of his crown with the goal of keeping oil-rich Iran well within the fold of the Western bloc. By July 1952, the British and the Americans agreed that “only a coup d’etat could save the situation” (Abrahamian, 120–121). The CIA and its British counterpart MI6 brought much needed resources to the table. MI6 possessed extensive intelligence and contacts with Iranian politicians, religious elites, chiefs, business leaders, and military officers, whereas the CIA had access to the large American embassy, advisers in the Iranian military, and the assistance of Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt), who proved instrumental in gaining Muhammad Reza Shah’s support for the coup. According to Eisenhower, on the day of the planned coup, August 19, 1953, the Iranian people “saved the day,” stood up against communism, and proclaimed their love for their ruler. In reality, 32 Sherman tanks entered Tehran, the capital, took central positions, surrounded Mohammad Mosaddeq’s home, and proclaimed General Fazlollah Zahedi the shah’s new prime minister. Few Iranians took part in the affair. According to the New York Times, up to 300 people were left dead in the wake of the coup to undo Mosaddeq’s National Front. The deposed prime minister found himself and his supporters (especially any followers from the Tudeh Party) jailed. U.S. and British intervention in Iranian affairs handed back control of the oil-rich country to Muhammad Reza Shah, who praised the coup for being bloodless and in deference to Iran’s rightful heir. The shah and his elite came to profit greatly from Iran’s relationship to the West. However, much of Iran remained impoverished and lacking in political and human rights. The Tudeh and Nationalist parties were destroyed; leaders were arrested and even executed, pushing the Iranian political arena clearly away from nationalism, socialism, and liberalism. Muhammad Reza Shah and his rule became even more closely aligned with the United States and Britain—and with imperialism, capitalism, despotism, and fear. The 1953 coup served as only the beginning of intimate relations between the United States and Iran, bringing an enduring, ongoing legacy with complicated ramifications for both the future of U.S. policy in the Middle East and Iranian relations with the West.

A Communist newspaper kiosk is burned by pro-Shah demonstrators during the second coup attempt against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, Tehran, Iran, August 19, 1953. The coup, engineered by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and backed by Great Britain in support of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, re-established the Shah of Iran’s throne and ousted Mosaddeq in favor of General Fazlollah Zahedi. (AP Photo)

By 1954, Muhammad Reza Shah’s Iran had been transformed into a very different country from only a year before. Iran became one of the world’s largest oil producers and finally profited from its oil exports thanks to the 1954 consortium agreement, which granted it 50 percent of the profits. The shah began state building programs and bought helicopters, hovercraft, artillery, and arms from the West. To maintain his realm and protect it from attack from within, Muhammad Reza Shah with the help of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created an intelligence agency called the SAVAK in 1957, which closely inspected the activities of Iranians including officials, militia, and political dissidents. SAVAK operatives dealt with perceived threats through torture, jail time, and summary executions. These changes and repressive actions would have lasting effects for future Iranian society and politics, and for the nation’s relations with the West. By the time the United States recognized what type of closed-off, unequal society it had helped create, it was already too late for the shah to provide Iranians with enough voice to thwart subsequent upheaval. Kristin Collins-Breyfogle See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Dulles, Allen; Primary Documents: United States Embassy, Iran Cable from C. Edward Wells, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, to the Department of State Regarding the Pro-Soviet Film North Star (December 28, 1950); CIA Propaganda Document Smearing Prime Minister Mosaddeq of Iran as a “Dictator” (Summer 1953) and CIA Summary Entitled “Campaign to Install a Pro-Western Government in Iran,” a Redacted Draft of the Internal History of the Coup That Overthrew Prime Minister Mosaddeq (1953)

Further Reading Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cleveland, William L. The History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009. Khalidi, Rashid. Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Israel (1946–1954) In the aftermath of World War II, many in the West and in the United States came to believe that one way to atone for the unspeakably horrendous actions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis was to permit a Jewish settlement in Palestine. American and Palestinian Zionists sought to encourage President Harry Truman and his administration to support such a settlement. U.S. support of Zionist aims began immediately after World War I. However, the explicit support of American Zionists for the May 1942 Biltmore program, which adopted a series of resolutions calling for the establishment of a Jewish state, marks the real beginning of U.S. involvement and support of Jewish immigration into Palestine. From 1945 to 1948, Truman demonstrated his commitment to the humanitarian concerns of the Zionists and the growing Zionist lobby within the Democratic Party. Neither issue appears to have weighed more heavily than the other. Truman’s secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, claimed that Truman wanted only to do “what was right” for the Jewish community. For instance, when he learned through his advisers that Jewish Holocaust survivors continued to live in Nazi facilities after World War II, the president became more determined than ever to assist Jewish refugees in finding a home in the Holy Land. Since war-torn Britain was backing out of Palestine and rethinking its support of a Jewish state after the war, support from the United States for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth proved instrumental. More important, U.S. support meant monetary and military aid for Jewish aims. The Yishuv (the name of the Jewish community before independence) and Truman’s policies regarding Jewish refugees’ entrance into Palestine were in accord. The Jewish community looked toward the United States as it sought to throw off the British yoke that inhibited its agenda by turning away Jewish refugees and sending them to detention camps. To this end, the Yishuv began attacks against the British that lasted from 1945 to 1947. In 1946 extremist groups entered the fray and bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, British military headquarters, prompting Nahum Goldman, director of the Jewish Agency, to strongly suggest that Truman publicly endorse an independent Jewish state—a suggestion the president accepted. The British, on the other hand, sought a way out of the Palestine conflict through the assistance of the United Nations. The United Nations called for the partition of Palestine between the Arab and Jewish communities, economic unity, and the internationalization of Jerusalem. The partition would grant 55 percent of Palestine to what would soon become Israel and 44 percent of the contested area to the Palestinian Arabs, leaving the Arabs particularly disgruntled. The United States and the Soviet Union both supported the partition, while Britain abstained, believing that a vote for the resolution would undermine its relationship with the Arab states. The United Nations passed the partition vote, but the British, the only foreign entity overseeing the Palestine conflict on the ground, left the territory in May 1948. Their absence was all too obvious to both Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine, who noted the lack of outsiders and sought to take the opportunity to “right the wrongs” of the partition and take more territory than allotted through the agreement. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Palestinian Zionist Executive and the World Zionist Organization, announced the independence of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948. Both the United States and the Soviet Union recognized the new state without delay. Despite some of his administration’s internal objections, Truman supported the proclamation. The U.S. president believed that recognizing Israel would end the fighting between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews, and he hoped that Israel would help hinder the spread of communism in the Middle East. The consequences of the proclamation of Israel’s independence became immediately apparent. War began in earnest and the United States and the new state of Israel began a complicated yet close relationship that continues to this day.

On May 15, 1948, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Iraq sent military units against Israel. The Arab states soon learned that the new state of Israel possessed the will, the military expertise, and the arms to succeed against them. By December, Israel had defeated the Arab states, enlarged its territory, and carved out a space for itself among the international community. The United States, for its part, desirous of peace in the region, attempted to dissuade Ben-Gurion, the new Israeli prime minister, from keeping so much of the territory Israel captured in its victory against the Arabs. Truman’s State Department even asked the United Nations to create new boundaries that were more palatable to the Arabs. Not only did the Israelis reject the proposal, but they orchestrated the assassination of the Swedish count sent to “pitch” the idea. Appalled, Truman outwardly supported Israel after this incident, but privately reeled against any notion of the new state taking more territory in the region. By the time he left office, relations between the United States and Israel had cooled. The new administration that took office in January 1953 possessed a more objective agenda that noted the necessity to support Israel, but also acknowledged the need to address Arab concerns. President Dwight D. Eisenhower proved more attentive to Arab complaints than to cultivating a relationship with Israel. To that end, Eisenhower sent Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on a “fact-finding” mission to Israel. Dulles reported glowingly about the Israelis’ “spunk” and their anticommunist stance, noting, however, that they refused to work with the Arabs at all. The refusal of Israel to address Arab concerns remained unacceptable to both President Eisenhower and his advisers, who in a televised report given by

Dulles claimed that America must “win not only the respect and regard of the Israeli but also of the Arab peoples” (Little, 89). The United States did not back down from its agenda. Late in 1953, the United States halted a $40 million payment in aid allotted for Israel when the Israelis refused to stop work on an irrigation project in the contested land separating Israel and Syria. Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee and the American Zionist Council sought the help of John Foster Dulles, who suggested that they might try working with the Israeli government to change its policies. Eisenhower did release a $26 million package in aid to Israel at the end of 1953, but the relationship between the United States and Israel was marred by Israel’s refusal to even attempt to find peace with the Arab peoples around them. Kristin Collins-Breyfogle See also: Dulles, John Foster

Further Reading Cleveland, William L. A History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009. Gelvin, James. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kiracofe, Clifford A., Jr. Dark Crusade: Christian Zionism and US Foreign Policy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Italy Italy emerged from World War II physically and economically damaged and politically shaken. As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began, Italy’s unstable political and economic position left the country vulnerable to Communist aggression, from the point of view of the United States. This potential turn to communism would have been a huge blow to the interests of Western Europe and the United States. As the postwar period began, therefore, American actions in Italy helped to secure the country’s transition from devastation and political turmoil to being a functioning member of the European economic zone with a stable democratic government. In December 1945, newly elected prime minister Alcide De Gasperi of the Christian Democratic Party formed his first cabinet, apparently securing Italy from Communist and Socialist parties that remained strong in the country. Gasperi’s government initially was more concerned with rebuilding a shattered Italy than with the alleged threat of Communist infiltration. Italy turned to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), funded by the United States, and received more than $1.6 billion worth of aid even before the Marshall Plan was initiated. For the Americans, immediate restoration of the Italian economy was critical to maintaining the long-term free market status of the strategically important Mediterranean nation. The Marshall Plan, put forth by U.S. secretary of state George Marshall in 1947, played a critical role in the American plan to restore Italian economic strength under conditions of liberal capitalism. Indeed, between 1946 and 1948 the dominant Christian Democratic Party was compelled by conditions imposed under the Marshall Plan to force both Communists and Socialists from its government. For De Gasperi, who saw his Catholic coalition as the adversary of communism, this was acceptable. Marshall Plan economic aid (approximately $1.2 billion) helped to secure a more stable political atmosphere in Italy and served to marginalize the Communists. Throughout the period, the United States played a key role in

overtly orchestrating political pressure from the outside to force all Communists and Socialists from the centrist government of the country. Governmental stability and returning productivity in Italy, however, did not instantly bring the Italians into the full American sphere of influence. Italy’s international role was a major concern of both De Gasperi and Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza, so when pressed by the United States to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, the Italians delayed. This impasse was resolved when both De Gasperi and Sforza realized their rejection of NATO would strain Italian relations with other Western states; their neutrality was not worth exclusion. Italy’s importance to the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s was reinforced by events just across its borders. Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania had fallen to the Communists. Civil war in Greece brought the threat of another Communist-led nation in the region—and ultimately American intervention in 1947. To the north, Austrian Communists were clashing with conservatives and Soviet intervention in 1948 brought Czechoslovakia under Communist control. With the internal strength of Communist and Socialist parties during and just after World War II, Italy very easily could have chosen the Communist path—a situation the United States would not allow. Marc Sanko See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Greek Civil War; Marshall Plan

Further Reading Duggan, Christopher, and Christopher Wagstaff, eds. Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society 1948–1958. Oxford: Berg, 1995. Harper, John Lamberton. America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Willis, Roy F. Italy Chooses Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Japan, Postwar Occupation of At the end of World War II, the United States took the lead in occupying and governing the defeated Japan. By the time that occupation ended in 1952, the United States had accomplished a highly successful effort at nation building. Led by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP), the occupation authority first presided over Japan’s demilitarization and recovery from wartime devastation. Later, as Cold War tensions expanded with the victory of the Communists under Mao Zedong in China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, its goals shifted to ensuring that Japan would be a reliable ally in the Pacific. Many of MacArthur’s early initiatives set the tone for the occupation. Prominent military, political, and business leaders were purged from government. War crimes tribunals meted out punishment for those accused of wartime atrocities. But, in a critical decision intended to ensure unity and stability, MacArthur rejected calls to depose Emperor Hirohito and charge him with war crimes. He instead opted to preserve the institution of the emperor, albeit only as a figurehead without divine trappings. This changed status for the emperor was a key component of a new Japanese constitution promulgated in 1947. Modeled after the U.S. constitution, it replaced the old imperial structure with a government based on popular sovereignty. It vested political power in a freely elected parliament and provided essential human rights for all citizens. Women were guaranteed equal rights, including the right to vote. Finally, Article 9 explicitly renounced war and prohibited the Japanese state from supporting armed forces for the prosecution of war.

Parallel with these fundamental political changes, the occupation authority took steps to break up the concentration of economic power and provide greater opportunity in Japanese society. Land reforms divided the traditional large estates of the past into smaller plots that were distributed to former tenants who had worked those lands for generations. Steps were also taken to dismantle the zaibatsu, influential family-owned industrial monopolies that had long dominated Japan’s economy, to encourage healthy economic competition. Labor reforms gave workers the right to strike and encouraged the creation of labor unions. Also, education reforms were put in place to ensure equal opportunities for all classes. While these initiatives were transforming the Japanese nation, escalating Cold War tensions led to a shift in occupation policy away from reform to an emphasis on making Japan a reliable ally in the Pacific. Japan’s strategic importance became even more critical to American global interests with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. In 1951, the Truman administration, intent on bringing an end to the postwar occupation, appointed John Foster Dulles as his special representative to negotiate a final peace treaty. Signed by 48 nations in San Francisco in September 1951, this agreement ended the occupation, restored Japanese sovereignty, and resolved issues involving American military bases and wartime reparations. A separate security treaty made provisions for U.S. forces to remain to protect Far Eastern security. T. Michael Ruddy See also: MacArthur, Douglas; Primary Documents: Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan (1951)

Further Reading Giffard, Sydney. Japan Among the Powers, 1890–1990. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Iriye, Akira, and Warren I. Cohen, eds. The United States and Japan in the Postwar World. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Schaller, Michael. The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Kennan, George (1904–2005) George F. Kennan, statesman, Soviet expert, and acclaimed historian, conceived, articulated, and helped implement the containment doctrine established by President Harry S. Truman at the outset of the Cold War in the late 1940s. He directed the Department of State’s first Policy Planning Staff, advising Secretary of State George Marshall, and authoring several papers the Truman administration approved as policy. He also inaugurated what he called “organized political warfare,” or covert operations. Kennan’s voice remained a powerful one in postwar American foreign relations, perhaps more influential than any other during the early Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Kennan graduated from Princeton in 1925 and determined to enter the Foreign Service, passing the entrance examinations and joining the U.S. Department of State in September 1926. He served in Central and Eastern Europe. The department selected Kennan for special studies in Russian politics, history, and languages as he was completing his first year in the Foreign Service. The Wilson administration had broken official contact with the newly established Soviet Union in 1918. The United States maintained only unofficial relations with the USSR thereafter. Some in the department anticipated change in U.S.-Soviet relations, however, and began cultivating Soviet specialists by the late 1920s. Kennan embraced this training, soon attaining fluency in Russian and a lifelong love for its literature.

Among the most influential foreign policy intellectuals of the post–World War II era, U.S. diplomat and historian George F. Kennan inspired the policy to aggressively “contain” Soviet-inspired communism everywhere. By the late-1940s, Kennan came to believe that his essential argument was being misinterpreted and applied far too broadly. He later sharply condemned the U.S. war in Vietnam. (Library of Congress)

The Roosevelt administration recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 and dispatched an ambassador and diplomatic mission there. The department assigned Kennan to this mission, and he helped establish the American embassy in Moscow. He served in Czechoslovakia and then Germany as the Second World War began in 1939. Kennan returned to the American embassy in Moscow, serving as counselor to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman in 1944, remaining there through 1946. Kennan interpreted and explained postwar Soviet politics to the Department of State, the National War College, and the Council on Foreign Relations in the Cold War’s earliest moments. He authored two widely read documents: the so-called “Long Telegram” and his article “Sources of Soviet Conduct.” According to Kennan, American leaders could not profitably exchange views or enjoy constructive relations with their Soviet counterparts and this would remain so into the foreseeable future for two reasons. First, the men in the Kremlin remained fanatically devoted to Marxist-Leninist ideology, which postulated irreconcilable differences and innate antagonism between socialism and capitalism, predicting socialism’s inevitable triumph over a decaying and doomed capitalist order. These men could not see beyond this worldview and its talking points. They were right; time was on their side; and, in Kennan’s opinion, American leaders, whom the men in the Kremlin dismissed as, at best, bourgeois thinkers who lacked true consciousness, would never penetrate this. Second, Kennan argued that the men in the Kremlin merely represented the latest in a long line of brutal and insecure Russian rulers. They had gained and consolidated power only by seizing it from rivals. These men constructed a one-party dictatorship and police state that relied on an increasingly powerful military establishment to crush their rivals and impose their will, first within Russia, and then abroad. This fig leaf of moral and intellectual legitimacy, Kennan continued, resonated not only among Marxist-Leninist elites, but throughout the Soviet Union. Russia had long experienced traumatic foreign aggression, from the Mongols to the Germans, and the Russian people had internalized this confrontational, state-of siege mentality. The men in the Kremlin could not relax this posture and expect to

retain power. And American leaders could not coexist with them in a peaceful world so long as they retained an attitude that necessitated their constantly seeking to increase their own security at the expense of all others’ security in world affairs until all submitted to them. Kennan recommended the United States “contain” Soviet ambitions and attempt to modify the behavior of the Kremlin. Kennan believed such change inevitable because the nation’s Communist leaders had sown the seeds of their own destruction. The Kremlin had overextended itself in Eastern Europe where it had garrisoned its armed forces in large numbers. Its continued presence there would only create and exacerbate nationalist resentment, even among local Communists. The Kremlin had constructed powerful political, military, and surveillance institutions at the expense of developing social and economic life in the USSR. The Russian people not only lacked sufficient housing, transportation, and consumer goods; they also lacked basic freedoms and human rights. Kennan reported that the Kremlin could only inspire others abroad now, the Russian people having long since become psychologically demoralized and physically exhausted. Kennan thus supported the Truman administration’s initiatives to reconstruct and reenergize Western European and Japanese economies and trade, especially the Marshall Plan. He also helped construct and institutionalize the United States’ covert operations capabilities, personally approving early political operations, intervening in national elections, and influencing organized labor in France and Italy. He also advised recruiting informants from émigré communities. But by 1950 Kennan complained that he was losing control to less nuanced and more militant voices. He disagreed with the administration’s decisions to create the NATO alliance, to permanently divide Germany, and to develop thermonuclear weapons, for example. He argued that these decisions, as well as the general and sustained rearmament following the administration’s approving the NSC-68 report, would needlessly prolong the Cold War and engender a dangerous arms race. Kennan accepted a faculty position at Princeton’s prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in 1950, remaining there for the rest of his life, although he did briefly return to government service as ambassador to Moscow and then Yugoslavia in the Truman and Kennedy administrations. He opposed the Johnson administration’s escalation in Vietnam, disavowed the CIA’s increasingly ambitious paramilitary operations in the developing world, and criticized the Reagan administration’s rhetoric and policies through 1984. He embraced General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and initiatives in foreign relations, and applauded the Reagan administration’s response to them after 1985. Meanwhile, Kennan continued publishing award-winning memoirs and histories. He died peacefully on March 17, 2005, having lived 101 years. James Lockhart See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Marshall Plan; National Security Council Paper NSC-68; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Gaddis, John Lewis. George F. Kennan: An American Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Kennan, George. Memoirs: 1925–1950. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.

Korea (1945–1953) Korea, divided into a Communist North and an American-backed South as a result of an American-Soviet agreement at the end of World War II, was the site of the first military confrontation between the United States and Communist forces in the Cold War. In the wake of the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists in the Chinese Civil War and the detonation of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb in 1949, about 75,000 North Korean troops invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, prompting an American military intervention in the peninsula to prevent Korea from being united under a Communist regime. The war lasted until July 27, 1953, when the United States, North Korea, and China—which had entered the war in November 1950 to prevent an American victory over its North Korean ally—signed an armistice confirming the division of Korea along the 38th parallel. The Korean War—a test case of the policy of containment—led to the further militarization of the Cold War and increasing American commitments in Southeast Asia. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea—which Japan had annexed in 1910—was divided along the 38th parallel. The partition of Korea was an indirect result of the Yalta Conference of February 1945, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt had accepted Soviet preeminence in postwar Manchuria in return for Joseph Stalin’s promise to enter the war against Japan within three months after the war in Europe had ended. In consequence, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan and invaded Manchuria, which was held by Japan, on August 9, 1945, and on August 12, the northern part of the Korean peninsula. In the face of Stalin’s fait accompli, the new U.S. president, Harry S. Truman, proposed dividing Korea into Soviet and American zones of military occupation. As Stalin accepted, the Red Army, on August 26, stopped at the 38th parallel to await the arrival of U.S. forces in the south. Efforts to reunify Korea in the following years failed, as Americans and Soviets could not agree on which Korean representatives should be allowed to form a provisional government and as the Soviet Union refused to allow the United Nations to monitor free elections in its occupation zone. In May 1948, elections took place only in the southern part, leading to the formation of the Republic of Korea in August 1948. One month later, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was formed in the North. While Kim Il Sung created a Soviet-style Socialist regime in the North, President Syngman Rhee established a repressive, authoritarian, anticommunist regime in the South. After helping to create these independent states, the Soviet Union and the United States withdrew their troops by 1949. Both governments on the Korean peninsula claimed to represent the entire Korean population, and attempts by each regime to destabilize the other led to frequent clashes along the border. It was in the middle of what one could call a civil war when North Korean forces attacked South Korea on June 25, 1950. Since the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN at the time, protesting that the Republic of China (Taiwan) held China’s permanent seat in the Security Council instead of the Communist People’s Republic of China, the Security Council could unanimously demand an immediate cease-fire. On June 27, the Security Council called on UN member states to provide military assistance to South Korea. Three days later, Truman, without congressional authorization or a declaration of war, ordered American forces to Korea, as General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of U.S. armed forces stationed in Japan, convinced him that without U.S. troops South Korea would be conquered. On July 10, the president appointed MacArthur to head the United Nations Command (UNC) to which 17 nations contributed; the bulk of troops, however, came from South Korea and the United States. What were the causes of this conflict? In the first two decades after the outbreak of the Korean War, U.S. historiography was dominated by the official view of the American government that the Democratic

People’s Republic of Korea had acted on the orders of Stalin, who allegedly used Communist puppet regimes around the world to expand his influence. In the early 1970s, the revisionist interpretation by the New Left, by contrast, held the United States responsible for the Cold War and consequently blamed the U.S.-backed and authoritarian South Korean regime for the commencement of hostilities. In the 1980s, Cold War historians broadened their approach to include actors on the periphery in their explanations of this conflict. This scholarship demonstrated that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States had an interest in a war in Korea but that the origins of the conflict had to be sought in Korea. Bruce Cumings argued that Rhee provoked the conflict, hoping that a Communist invasion of South Korea would force the United States to intervene and unite Korea under his government. Soviet documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, by contrast, shed new light on the role of Kim Il Sung and demonstrated that Stalin was opposed to a Communist invasion of South Korea in 1949, since he feared a general war with the United States. After Communist forces triumphed in China, however, Kim played the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China against each other and convinced Stalin that an invasion of South Korea would result in a quick victory and that the United States—given that it had not interfered in the Chinese Civil War and that it had withdrawn its troops from South Korea—would not intervene. The American government also wished to avoid conflict and in 1949 and 1950 criticized clashes along the inner Korean border. By publicly excluding South Korea from the U.S. strategic Asian defensive perimeter, however, the American government might have encouraged Kim to believe that the United States would not enter the conflict. The scholarship of the 1990s stressed that the Korean War would not have broken out had Stalin and Mao not wished it and that it was closely linked to events in Europe and the Third World.

A U.S. gunner fires his rifle near Oetlook-tong, Korea, in support of infantry units directly across the valley, June 9, 1951. By this point in the war, American-led UN and Republic of Korea forces had been driven south of the 38th parallel by the second offensive of the Chinese. By late June they had rallied to push the fighting back just north of the 38th parallel, where the war would grind on for another two years, ending in a stalemate. (Department of Defense)

Despite Korea’s lack of strategic importance to the United States, the Truman administration immediately decided to intervene. In the Truman Doctrine, the American president had announced on March 12, 1947, that the United States would come to the aid of all countries threatened by Communist internal subversion or outright external attack. North Korea’s invasion of South Korea now became the test case of his containment policy. Further, National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68), issued just

two months prior to the outbreak of the war in Korea, had called for a more aggressive posture, effectively calling for U.S. victories against perceived international Communist aggression. The consensus in Washington was that if the United States did not prevent a Communist takeover of the Republic of Korea, its prestige and credibility would suffer worldwide. American policymakers feared that failure to protect South Korea would cast doubt on America’s security guarantees and make America’s allies in Europe and Asia seek agreements with the Soviet Union. Drawing an analogy to the Munich conference of 1938, moreover, Truman held that not responding to Communist aggression in Korea would encourage Stalin, as the appeasement policy had encouraged Hitler in the 1930s, to seek to spread communism by arms elsewhere, possibly in Europe. Truman also had domestic political reasons for choosing to intervene in Korea. The Soviet Union’s successful first detonation of an atomic bomb and the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 shifted the global balance of power and caused widespread criticism of his foreign policy at home. Republicans blamed him for the “loss of China” and charged him with being “soft on communism.” Within days, North Korean troops—driving off the poorly equipped and outmanned South Korean army—captured Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Pressing forward, they pushed South Korean and the newly arrived American and allied forces almost off the peninsula. Only when, on September 15, UNC forces landed by sea behind enemy lines at Inchon, northwest of Seoul, did the tide change. Surprising the enemy and cutting off the North Korean army’s supply line to the south, they recaptured Seoul on September 24 and forced the North Korean army to retreat. With its original war aim of defending South Korea achieved, the Truman administration changed its objectives, seeking the unification of Korea under American tutelage. In early October, UNC forces thus crossed the 38th parallel and took Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, on October 19. As American forces pushed northward toward the Yalu River, which marked the border between China and North Korea, China entered the war. About 200,000 Chinese troops, under cover of Soviet warplanes, crossed the river on November 26 to push UNC forces back to South Korea. Historians mostly agree that Truman’s decision to invade North Korea was a mistake, since it provoked a Chinese entry into the war, thus risking an uncontrollable escalation of the conflict. The fact that congressional elections would take place in November might have contributed to Truman’s gambit, since he feared that stopping at the 38th parallel after a swift and successful military campaign might expose Democrats to the criticism of being too soft on communism. Far outnumbering UNC troops, Chinese and North Korean forces quickly pushed them south. In March 1951, the allied forces were able to halt the Chinese offensive and the armies faced each other along the 38th parallel, where the war had started. MacArthur wished to once again press northward and, if need be, use atomic weapons against Chinese forces. Truman and his advisers, however, decided to stick to their original limited war aims—reestablishing the prewar status, which would effectively result in the successful containment of the Communists above the 38th parallel, and, equally important, avoid the outbreak of a global conflict with the Soviet Union. He also chose—despite widespread domestic support for nuclear war in Korea—not to authorize the employment of atomic weapons, since he feared Soviet reprisals and worldwide condemnation of America, particularly in Asia, since the United States had already used nuclear bombs against Asian people in World War II. When MacArthur subsequently defied the president and publicly criticized his policy, Truman relieved him of his command. Despite Truman’s decision to engage in peace talks beginning in July 1951, the war continued, with negotiations deadlocking in part over the status of prisoners of war (POWs). The United States was unwilling to repatriate POWs against their will, since North Korea had forced many South Koreans into their army and many Chinese POWs preferred going to Taiwan rather than to the People’s Republic of

China. In due course, the war became unpopular in the United States, and Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952 partly due to his promise to end the Korean War. After he assumed office, he exerted pressure on China by threatening to escalate the war and to possibly use nuclear weapons. Stalin, moreover, passed away in March 1953, his death raising doubts about continued Soviet support for China. With this complex of forces at work, Chinese, American, and North Korean representatives signed an armistice on July 27, 1953, which confirmed the border between North and South Korea along the 38th parallel, created a demilitarized zone between both countries, and established a committee consisting of members from neutral states, which would deal with the issue of POWs. Thus ended the Korean War, in which more than 1 million people died in battle. Since this does not include civilian deaths, the total number of war-related deaths might well be more than twice as high. With its far-reaching consequences, the Korean War was one of the most significant conflicts after World War II. It led to a further militarization of the Cold War and America’s containment policy. As a result of the conflict in Korea, the Truman administration officially endorsed NSC-68, which called for a massive military buildup, including the development of the H-bomb. U.S. defense spending almost quadrupled from $13 billion in 1950 to $50 billion in 1953. While in the late 1940s it was hoped that containment would be achieved mainly by economic means, as through the Marshall Plan in Europe, the emphasis of foreign aid shifted to allied rearmament programs after 1950. Drawing parallels between Korea and the divided Germany in Europe, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, convinced the American government that the rearmament of the Federal Republic was needed to prepare for a Soviet or East German invasion. Consequently, just 10 years after the end of the Second World War, West Germany joined NATO in 1955. The Korean War also accelerated U.S. efforts to create an American alliance system in Asia. In 1951, mutual defense treaties were concluded with the Philippines, Japan, and—in the form of the ANZUS Tripartite Security Treaty—with Australia and New Zealand. After the armistice in Korea, the United States also created bilateral security alliances with the Republic of China and South Korea. In 1954, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was formed. When Truman decided to send U.S. troops to Korea without the approval of Congress, he set an important—and as many constitutional scholars and other critics later argued, dangerous—precedent for future presidents. Truman justified his assumption of executive war-making power by pointing to the UN Security Council’s call for military assistance to South Korea. Congress would subsequently appropriate the funds necessary to conduct the war in Korea. The projection of American military force by way of a largely unilateral executive decision was, in hindsight, a significant step in the development of a global American imperial presence. The most immediate result of the war was the continued division of Korea along one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. Moreover, because South Korea refused to sign the armistice, since it did not put the blame for the outbreak of war on North Korea, both Koreas never officially ended hostilities. Jasper M. Trautsch See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; China, Early Cold War; MacArthur, Douglas; National Security Council Paper NSC-68; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Primary Documents: President Harry S. Truman’s Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea (July 19, 1950) (Including the Text of a Message from General Douglas MacArthur Describing the Situation in Korea)

Further Reading

Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990. Goncharov, Sergei N., John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Halberstam, David. The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. New York: Hyperion, 2007. Lee, Steven Hugh. Outposts of Empire: Korea, Vietnam, and the Origins of the Cold War in Asia, 1948–1954. Buffalo, NY: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 1995. Pierpaoli, Paul G., Jr. Truman and Korea: The Political Culture of the Early Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Stueck, William W. The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964) Douglas MacArthur was one of 20th-century America’s most celebrated and controversial military leaders. He was born in 1880 in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Arthur MacArthur Jr. and Mary Hardy MacArthur. His father, from a Wisconsin family with strong Republican Party ties, was an eminent U.S. military officer who served as military governor in the Philippines. His mother—an intelligent, ambitious Southern belle from Norfolk, Virginia—also had a strong influence on her son’s personality and career. With his family or military units, MacArthur lived and traveled, in various military and civilian capacities, across the world. Before his death, he played a prominent role in some of the 20th century’s most pivotal events, particularly World War II and the Korean War. As a youth, MacArthur displayed many traits that characterized his adult career. As a teenager, he identified strongly with tales and images of the pioneering U.S. West. His father’s military duties frequently moved the young MacArthur across the country and the Pacific Ocean, accustoming MacArthur to an itinerant lifestyle—and detached, global perspective—that he continued on his own military assignments through the 1950s. The future five-star general’s intellect and ambitions were apparent at a young age. To enter the prestigious United States Military Academy at West Point, MacArthur scored a 93.3 percent mark on a qualifying exam, far above the next highest score. He graduated first in his West Point class in 1903. As an army officer, MacArthur became well known, not only for leadership and dramatic flair, but for a strong ego, frequent clashes with authority, and bravura. In one emblematic episode in early 1914, 34year-old MacArthur led a hazardous reconnaissance mission to Veracruz accompanied only by three Mexican guides. For his bravery, he was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but denied it for excessive risk-taking amid a tense standoff between the United States and Mexico over the latter’s arrest of several U.S. sailors. The combination of daring, tactical brilliance, and questionable judgment would recur throughout MacArthur’s career. As it did for many Army officers, World War I launched MacArthur’s military career. After seeing action in eight major engagements and mounting successful field and administrative commands in Europe’s battlefields, MacArthur achieved the rank of brigadier general in 1918. He was awarded seven Silver Stars, two Distinguished Service Crosses, two Purple Hearts, one Distinguished Service Medal, and several French government honors. MacArthur held a deep, lifelong interest in Asia. His father, who led U.S. forces in the PhilippineAmerican War and the subsequent U.S. occupation, impressed on his son the importance of a strong U.S. presence in the Pacific, as well as paternalistic views of Asian society. In his memoirs, MacArthur credited a 20,000-mile journey with his parents through much of Asia from 1905 to 1906 for opening his eyes to Asia and helping him understand its long-term importance to U.S. interests. A strong believer in Asia’s democratic development, MacArthur’s convictions grew as commander of the U.S. Philippines Department, a leading commander in the Pacific theater of World War II, head of Japan’s postwar Allied

military occupation, and military adviser to various governments, political organizations, and prominent individuals. From 1930 to 1935, MacArthur served as army chief of staff in Washington, D.C. Amid the Great Depression and popular pacifist sentiment, his plans for reforming and modernizing U.S. military forces met limited success. Under strong pressure from Congress and the public to cut the nation’s military budget, MacArthur and other War Department officials worked to maintain U.S. military strength, balanced composition of ground-sea-air forces, and a well-trained officer corps. MacArthur first emerged as a major public figure in what became known as the “Bonus Army incident.” In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the worst year of the Great Depression, nearly 22,000 World War I veterans and their families encamped in Washington, D.C. to demand payment of an authorized but deferred compensation for their service totaling $2.4 billion. Enthusiastically interpreting his orders from President Herbert Hoover, MacArthur led 1,000 infantry, cavalry, and mechanized troops in dispersing 10,000 protesters, who had refused to leave following the defeat of the War Bonus bill in the U.S. Senate. The general’s forceful handling of the military operation gave him a lasting reputation as a dictatorial, insensitive figure in the national press. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, MacArthur led the Allies’ amphibious ground campaign in the Southwest Pacific. Hopping between islands from Australia to Okinawa, U.S. forces under MacArthur engaged in some of the nation’s heaviest fighting in the entire war. After Japan’s defeat, MacArthur led the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. The public, press, and even critics admired the general’s efforts to stabilize and reform Japan’s social, economic, and political institutions. Some supporters revived efforts to nominate the general as a Republican presidential candidate in 1948. The Korean War heightened Cold War tensions and brought a dramatic end to MacArthur’s career. MacArthur served as commander of United Nations forces against the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea (DPRK), which invaded the Republic of [South] Korea in June 1950. After dramatically landing forces at Inchon in September, MacArthur-led UN forces reversed North Korea’s early offensive. Within weeks, American troops crossed the 38th parallel that divided the two nations. After orchestrating the United Nations–authorized military action beyond the parallel, UN forces pushed north toward the North Korea–China border. By November, MacArthur had nearly succeeded in unifying the divided Korean peninsula under UN administration, in cooperation with South Korea’s authoritarian, anticommunist Syngman Rhee government. After the United States ignored repeated People’s Republic of China (PRC) warnings and MacArthur overrode his orders and used non-Korean troops in sensitive border areas, more than 300,000 soldiers of the PRC entered North Korea in defense of their Communist ally and their own nation. U.S. and UN supporters, including MacArthur, viewed the expanded war as a justified measure of international peace and security against the DPRK’s original aggression. Official U.S. and UN plans envisioned a unified Korea under new, nationwide elections supervised by the UN. Communist powers and other critics condemned the crossing of the parallel and Korea’s attempted unification as acts of U.S. and UN imperialism, aggression, and national aggrandizement. Retreating from the PRC counteroffensive amid hostile mountainous terrain and a bitter Korean winter, U.S. forces under MacArthur suffered from some of the worst fighting and highest casualty rates in the history of the U.S. military. By spring 1951, the fighting stabilized near the 38th parallel. By April, MacArthur’s growing, outspoken public dissatisfaction with official U.S. military strategy compelled President Harry Truman to relieve him of command. MacArthur’s firing and homecoming generated one of Cold War America’s most significant popular uproars, echoing similar frustrations in Congress and the public. In a powerful address to Congress, MacArthur defended his views—widely supported by the American public at the time—that the United States should settle for nothing less than total victory in

Korea by expanding the war outside of Korea and contemplating the use of nuclear weapons (a course that many administration leaders also privately considered). Though his dismissal helped spark a nationwide debate on U.S. national security strategy, MacArthur sank into growing obscurity outside of conservative and military circles until his death in 1964. His life and military record remained one of modern America’s most remembered, influential, and controversial episodes. Kevin Y. Kim See also: Japan, Postwar Occupation of; Korea

Further Reading Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970–1985. MacArthur, Douglas. “ ‘Don’t Scuttle the Pacific’: Communism a Global Enemy.” Vital Speeches of the Day 17, no. 14 (May 1, 1951): 430– 433. Schaller, Michael. Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Marshall Plan (1948–1952) The Marshall Plan, or European Recovery Program, was a foreign economic assistance program through which the United States supplied Britain and nations of Western Europe that had been shattered by the devastation of World War II with $13 billion in economic and technical assistance from April 1948 to the beginning of 1952. Although historians still debate its impact, the fastest economic growth in European history occurred during the plan’s years of operation. The Marshall Plan also served important roles in cultivating European integration, strengthening Cold War alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, fostering postwar employment and trade, and advancing the hegemony of American culture and products in Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was first announced on June 5, 1947, by U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall to the graduating class of Harvard University. His speech was not intended for domestic audiences: President Truman scheduled an unrelated press conference on the same day, and the administration invited only selected British and European journalists to cover the event. Instead, Marshall meant to articulate to Western Europe his State Department’s belief that economic stability and reconstruction would lead to political stability and reconciliation among the former belligerents of the war. Although containing no figures or specific policies, the speech placed special emphasis on what was supposed to be the disinterested and multilateral nature of the aid. “It would be neither fitting nor efficacious,” said Marshall, “for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically…. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all European nations” (Marshall). A number of severe economic and political crises in Europe surrounded the creation of the plan. European industry and agriculture had been destroyed by the war, and despite millions of casualties, higher postwar populations meant even more hunger, malnutrition, and unemployment. Most nations, including America’s closest partner in planning for the postwar settlement, Great Britain, were in desperate need of essential imports but lacked both the dollars with which they could be purchased and the capacity to produce their own. Fresh wounds exacerbated conflict and instability, as France resisted Anglo-American plans to expand coal production in Germany and lessen the burdens of its defeat. In addition, Britain’s worsening finances prevented implementation of the ambitious Anglo-American–

designed International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which the Americans had hoped previously would provide the means and methods for postwar recovery and stabilization.

For both the victorious and defeated of Europe, unemployment, hunger, and resentment increased the popular appeal of Communist parties, and throughout 1947 nervous leaders in Washington and Moscow attempted with confusion and distrust to divine each other’s intentions. In March President Truman asked Congress to send military aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey, which the administration asserted were being destabilized by Soviet influence and whose potential fall to communism was expected to have a domino effect in the region. In April, the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers—arranged by the United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union to settle wartime territorial disputes and craft a peace settlement for Germany—ended in bitterness and deadlock, with Washington and Moscow each believing that the other sought political advantage in continued European instability. Upon returning from the meeting, Marshall instructed officials at the State Department to begin analyses of European aid requirements, and when he delivered his speech in June, plans for a comprehensive program providing for political, economic, and social stability and unity in Europe were in the works. Such a program was deemed necessary by American planners for domestic economic considerations as well. Even before the first Lend-Lease orders, increased demand from the war in Europe was contributing to higher levels of exports and employment in the United States. Yet, in 1940 production and employment were still less than they were in 1932. After the United States entered the war after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration greatly expanded its efforts at industrial and agricultural mobilization, using the bureaucracy of the New Deal to transform American economic activities to match the needs of the Allied forces. By 1947, America had both an unemployment rate of 3.9 percent and a massive export and credit surplus that could only be maintained by sustained, and eventually self-sustaining demand from Europe. Providing badly needed American-made products on credit to European economies—and connecting that money to making European trade open and

multilateral—was an essential strategy in ensuring the continued strength of the American economy, its expanded reach in European markets, and the implementation of the IMF and IBRD. From its inception the Marshall Plan has been the subject of intense criticism and praise. Some Americans believed that the United States was being overly generous, while many Europeans perceived the conditions attached to U.S. aid as efforts to make them economically and politically dependent. The revisionist school of American historians in the 1960s reexamined the latter view, attributing the greatest recoveries in Europe to independent government planning and controls rather than American assistance and free markets. More recent studies examining the effectiveness of foreign aid have complicated and expanded both sides’ arguments, and the findings from formerly closed Russian archives continue to add to our understanding of the Marshall Plan’s role in Washington’s and Moscow’s early Cold War decision making. Yet, the Marshall Plan’s popular reputation as a quintessential act of American enlightened selfinterest has persisted, like the Monroe Doctrine, the Atlantic Charter, and countless other important pronouncements. Policymakers, politicians, and propagandists have since called for “Marshall plans” for a number of problems of international security and development. Sixty years later, the debates concerning the Marshall Plan’s impacts, intentions, and functions remain pertinent and unresolved for historians, political scientists, and economists. Michael Edward Franczak See also: Arsenal of Democracy; Bretton Woods Conference/System; Lend-Lease

Further Reading Hoffman, Stanley P., and Charles Meier, eds. The Marshall Plan: A Retrospective. London: Westview Press, 1984. Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Marshall, George C. Harvard Class of 1947 Commencement Address. http://www.oecd.org/general/themarshallplanspeechatharvarduniversity5june1947.htm. Accessed October 17, 2014. Milward, Alan S. The Reconstruction of Western Europe: 1945–1951. London: Meuthen, 1984.

McCarthyism The term McCarthyism denotes the actions of Wisconsin Republican U.S. senator Joseph (“Joe”) McCarthy and his supporters who sought to use the Cold War–created fears of communism abroad and Communist infiltration in the United States to further their political power and agendas. Actions generally associated with McCarthyism both preceded the rise of Senator McCarthy in 1950 and continued after his death in 1957. Although practitioners of McCarthyism existed in both political parties, the term is more often associated with the Republicans. The use of guilt by association, anonymous accusations, selective leaks, character assassination, and demagoguery influenced American politics and American foreign policy throughout the Cold War. Many of the practices associated with McCarthyism originated with the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), in particular its investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood, which led to the blacklisting of “suspect” individuals. These practices were codified in 1947 by the creation of a federal Loyalty Review Board by the Truman administration, which sought to eliminate security risks, broadly defined as anyone who could be blackmailed for information, from the federal government. Both the Loyalty Review Board (and its state and local imitators) and HUAC ruined the lives of thousands of

individuals who lost their jobs and saw their reputations sullied for actual political or personal activities and behaviors, or on the basis of hearsay and slander. Nevertheless, the term derives from Senator Joe McCarthy, whose name became synonymous with this second Red Scare in American history—the first occurring just after World War I. This was so because McCarthy was willing to take the fear of communism, and the acceptance that it must be combated using any means necessary, to its logical extreme in pursuit of power for himself and his party. McCarthy’s first major statement on this issue came on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, during a speech to a Republican women’s group. McCarthy accused the State Department of harboring “205 known Communists,” a number that fluctuated from speech to speech over the next several months. The attack on the State Department was deliberate and timely; many conservatives in both parties blamed the State Department for the “loss” of China to Mao Zedong’s Communists the previous year. The State Department’s experts on China predicted the Communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and incompetent Nationalists, for which those experts were condemned as pro-Communist. McCarthy’s charges ratcheted up the pressure and forced a Senate investigation by a Senate select committee. The investigation determined that McCarthy’s charges had no merit, a verdict that was overshadowed by the onset of the Korean War. The North Koreans’ surprise invasion in June that year followed by Chinese intervention in November and the ensuing bloody stalemate reinforced the perception that something was amiss in Washington. Thus, McCarthy’s inability to prove his charges did him no damage. Also in November, the chair and vice chair of the investigating committee lost their reelection bids; McCarthy had campaigned vigorously against both incumbent senators. Those electoral defeats confirmed the political value of McCarthy’s charges, value that the Republicans exploited for the 1952 elections. Republican leaders, in particular Ohio senator Robert Taft, encouraged McCarthy to make any charges he liked, promising him the full support of the party. Press coverage of all McCarthy’s statements reinforced his influence and credibility. McCarthy proceeded to accuse Secretary of Defense George Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being soft on communism, if not pro-Communist. Furthermore, McCarthy, along with vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon, condemned the Truman policy of containment as cowardly and dangerous to the United States, calling instead for rolling back communism in Europe and Asia. These attacks contributed to the Republicans’ regaining control of Congress and the election of Dwight Eisenhower as president. With the Republicans now in control of the government, most party members halted their accusations regarding Communist infiltration of the government since it would now embarrass their own party. McCarthy, as chair of the Senate committee on government operations, redoubled his attacks, forcing Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to retire, fire, or reassign almost all of the State Department’s experts on China. Additionally, Dulles authorized McCarthy’s investigators to examine overseas embassies for questionable materials. An attempt by McCarthy to conduct a similar campaign at the CIA was blocked by its director, Allen Dulles. McCarthy then turned to the army, accusing it of being susceptible to Communist infiltration. McCarthy’s charges and the army’s countercharges that the senator abused his power on behalf of friends and staff led to the televised Army-McCarthy Hearings from April to June 1954. Although the hearings revealed that the army acquiesced in all of McCarthy’s demands for special treatment for his chief counsel’s friend, the hearings primarily revealed the extent of McCarthy’s bullying and abuse of power. With McCarthy’s public support waning, the Senate that year condemned McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a senator, stripping him of his committee positions and seniority. McCarthy drank himself to death by May 1957.

McCarthyism continued to overshadow American politics and foreign policy for the remainder of the Cold War. Indeed, Democratic politicians and presidents all faced questions about their ability to stand up to the Communists, often leading to direct action to disprove the charges. In his memoirs, President Lyndon Johnson specifically cited the example of McCarthyism and the damage it did to Truman’s presidency as a motive for escalating the war in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter’s alleged softness on communism was a primary theme of Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980. McCarthyism played a significant role in shaping the political and social landscape of the United States during the Cold War. It also played a significant role in foreign policy decision making, as presidents sought to avoid accusations of being soft on communism or “losing” territory to the Communists. These fears of a new McCarthyism led to American intervention in Vietnam and American support for authoritarian, but noncommunist, governments worldwide. Richard M. Filipink Jr. See also: China, Early Cold War; Cold War Cultural Imperialism; Dulles, Allen; Dulles, John Foster; Marshall Plan; Military-Industrial Complex; Radio Free Europe (RFE); Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; Vietnam War; Primary Documents: Excerpts from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within” Speech, Delivered at Wheeling, West Virginia (February 9, 1950) and Senator McCarthy’s Follow-up Letter to President Harry Truman (February 11, 1950)

Further Reading Fried, Albert. McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare, a Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Morgan, Ted. Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Random House, 2004. Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Shogan, Robert. No Sense of Decency: The Army–McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American Politics. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009.

National Security Act (1947) The 80th Congress of the United States passed the National Security Act of 1947. President Harry S. Truman signed it as Public Law 253 on July 26, 1947. The National Security Act reorganized virtually the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States based on the experiences of World War II. The act created more formalized and more effective coordination between the various government agencies responsible for national security. The overarching goal of the act was the integration of the disparate federal organizations dealing with national security. The National Security Act produced the National Military Establishment (NME), the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Resources Board, among other changes. The act established the United States’ national security apparatus that endured throughout the Cold War. The National Security Act unified the separate military services under one department, initially termed the National Military Establishment. The act placed the department under the leadership of a single civilian known as the secretary of defense. The National Military Establishment consisted of the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, and the newly created and independent Department of the Air Force. Prior to the National Security Act of 1947, there had been a War Department and a Navy Department. The act also formed a War Council within the National Military Establishment. The War Council included the secretary of defense, the service secretaries, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The new

arrangement achieved a major milestone in U.S. national security by unifying all of the armed services under the control of one individual who reported to the president. The National Security Act also instituted the National Security Council (NSC), whose chair was the president of the United States. The council consisted of seven permanent members including the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the secretary of the army, the secretary of the navy, the secretary of the air force, and the chair of the National Security Resources Board. The mission of the NSC was to advise the president on all matters pertaining to national security. In addition, the National Security Act reformed the intelligence organization of the United States. Prior to the act, the U.S. intelligence structure involved the National Intelligence Authority and the Central Intelligence Group. The National Security Act coordinated the intelligence activities of the federal government through the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The National Security Act also established a director of central intelligence in charge of the CIA. The act formally tasked the director of central intelligence with advising the National Security Council on intelligence issues. The director of central intelligence could be either a military officer or a civilian, but regardless would not be subject to any military control. The National Security Act specifically forbade the CIA from any law enforcement activity in the United States. Such a provision countered criticism at that time that the CIA might become too powerful and therefore might interfere with domestic civil liberties. The National Security Act also distinguished between foreign intelligence actions, which fell under the purview of the CIA, and domestic intelligence activities, which belonged under the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The National Security Act initiated several other advisory bodies. The most important one was the National Security Resources Board. The president appointed a civilian chair of the board. The mission of the board was to advise the president about coordination between the military and industry regarding mobilization. In addition to the National Security Resources Board, the act formed a Munitions Board and a Research and Development Board. The National Security Act tasked both of these groups with advising the president on topics related to military procurement, research, and development. Congress amended the National Security Act on August 10, 1949, primarily to strengthen the authority of the secretary of defense. Congress accomplished this by placing the service secretaries and their respective departments directly under the control of the secretary of defense. The amendments stripped the service secretaries of their previous cabinet status and the military departments of their prior executive standing. The amendments renamed the National Military Establishment the Department of Defense (DoD) and officially made the DoD an executive department. The amendments produced the deputy secretary of defense, three assistant secretaries of defense, and the chair of the Joint Chiefs. The amendments also restructured the National Security Council. They removed the service secretaries as permanent members and replaced them with the vice president and the chair of the Joint Chiefs as new permanent members. The amendments formally situated the National Security Council within the Executive Office of the President and restructured the NSC staff. Finally, the amendments stressed that the advisory bodies created in the original act, such as the Munitions Board and the Research and Development Board, served the secretary of defense. William A. Taylor See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Central Intelligence Agency; Korea; National Security Council Paper NSC-68; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; U.S. Military Bases

Further Reading

Bacevich, Andrew J., ed. The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Friedberg, Aaron L. In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Hogan, Michael J. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Stuart, Douglas T. Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

National Security Council Paper NSC-68 National Security Council Paper NSC-68 was a formative document of the Cold War. It was a top-secret, 58-page treatise officially entitled “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security.” The U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff primarily wrote the text. The Policy Planning Staff used NSC-68 to augment and extend NSC-20/4. This was a previous National Security Council paper entitled “U.S. Objectives with Respect to the U.S.S.R. to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security.” The Policy Planning Staff issued NSC-20/4 on November 23, 1948, and President Harry S. Truman approved it the following day. Precipitant advances in the nuclear capabilities of the Soviet Union, demonstrated by the successful detonation of its first atomic bomb in September 1949, heightened international tensions. The timing of this event surprised U.S. policymakers, coming three years ahead of U.S. intelligence predictions of its possibility. As a result, the detonation triggered a reexamination of U.S. strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Immediately thereafter, the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in China occasioned the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, and caused additional dismay among U.S. policymakers. The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on April 4, 1949, coming in the wake of the Berlin Crisis of 1948–1949, underscored the increasingly contentious and crisis-driven international security environment of the period. President Harry S. Truman concentrated on the possibility of the transition from atomic to thermonuclear weapons. On January 31, 1950, he directed the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and the secretary of defense, Louis A. Johnson, to reassess U.S. strategy regarding the Soviet Union. Acheson tasked Paul H. Nitze, the new director of the Policy Planning Staff, with evaluating overall U.S. national security strategy, specifically focusing on the Soviet Union. Several representatives from the Department of Defense joined the Policy Planning Staff to form the State-Defense Policy Review Group to draft NSC68. On April 7, 1950, the State-Defense Policy Review Group completed NSC-68 and presented it to Truman. A few days later, Truman referred the document to the National Security Council for additional analysis and refinement. Truman especially sought specific details of the programs envisioned in NSC-68 and their potential costs. NSC-68 outlined four possible courses of action for the United States. First, the United States could maintain the status quo. NSC-68 argued that U.S. power was falling behind the potency of the Soviet Union and that such an approach would be detrimental to U.S. interests. Second, the United States could increasingly isolate itself from world affairs. NSC-68 maintained that doing so would be problematic, particularly regarding Europe and Asia, and would only strengthen the Soviet Union’s position in those strategically important regions. Third, the United States could initiate a war with the Soviet Union. NSC68 contended that this option, especially a preventive war launched by the United States, would be counter to American values. In addition, NSC-68 claimed that U.S. offensive military capabilities at that time could not guarantee ultimate success in such a war. Fourth, the United States could initiate a rapid

buildup of military power. Such an increase in military force would potentially deter the Soviet Union from expansionism. If deterrence failed, then the swift boost in military capacity would enable the United States to defeat the Soviet Union. Employing rather dark and ominous language, NSC-68 emphasized the threat of the Soviet Union to the United States in a bipolar international security environment. It also stressed the military dimension of the menace that the Soviet Union posed to the United States. Consequently, NSC-68 advocated primarily military power in response to the Soviet danger rather than political or economic might. NSC-68 spurred a massive proliferation of the U.S. military during the Cold War, including both conventional and nuclear capabilities. To accomplish this expansion, NSC-68 recommended significant increases in U.S. military spending. Some senior U.S. policymakers disagreed with the analysis, conclusions, and recommendations of NSC-68. The most notable dissenter was George F. Kennan, Nitze’s immediate predecessor as director of the Policy Planning Staff. Kennan was a career foreign service officer and an acknowledged expert on the Soviet Union. In contrast to NSC-68, Kennan accentuated the political nature of the Soviet challenge to the United States and promoted chiefly political, economic, and psychological responses. The North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, vaulted NSC-68 into prominence among U.S. policymakers and ensured its ultimate implementation. As the Korean War raged during the fall of 1950, President Truman, the National Security Council, and the Policy Planning Staff refined NSC-68. Between September and December 1950, they produced four subsequent revisions (NSC-68/1, NSC68/2, NSC-68/3, and NSC-68/4) with additional details about the specific programs advocated in NSC68 and their anticipated costs. On December 16, 1950, Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2914, which asserted the existence of a national emergency and therefore called for the immediate enactment of NSC-68. Thereafter, NSC-68 was the foundation of U.S. national security policy. It remained so throughout the Cold War. U.S. defense spending nearly tripled over the course of the early 1950s. NSC-68 stayed classified for almost 25 years. Henry A. Kissinger, assistant to the president for national security affairs, declassified the document on February 27, 1975. William A. Taylor See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Kennan, George; Korea; National Security Act; Nitze, Paul; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment; U.S. Military Bases; Primary Documents: NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950)

Further Reading Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: Norton, 1969. Bacevich, Andrew J., ed. The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Cardwell, Curt. NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. May, Ernest R. American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68. New York: Bedford, 1993.

New Look Policy. See Eisenhower, Dwight D., “New Look” Policy of Nitze, Paul (1907–2004)

Paul H. Nitze served several U.S. administrations at the subcabinet level in foreign relations and defense during the Cold War. Nitze’s interpretations and recommendations contributed to Americans’ perceiving the Soviet Union as a military and existential—and not merely political—threat to the United States and its allies, especially in the early 1950s and again in the late 1970s, which in turn contributed to American militarization. Nitze also participated in Soviet-American summitry, specializing in nuclear weapons, during the Nixon and Reagan administrations. He attained ambassadorial-level rank before retiring from government service after the George H. W. Bush administration assumed office in January 1989. Nitze studied economics and sociology at Harvard, graduating in 1928 and intending to engage the world and influence it. Nitze found employment on Wall Street, where he remained through the Depression era, achieving financial self-sufficiency by the late 1930s. There he met James Forrestal, and the two became friends. When President Franklin Roosevelt recruited Forrestal to serve in his administration during the Second World War, Forrestal invited Nitze to accompany him to Washington. Nitze held several positions, ending the war as part of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, where he assessed the Allied bombing effort on the ground in both Germany and Japan. Nitze joined the Department of State as an economist working on the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, and thus witnessed the Cold War’s early years in Washington. Director of Policy Planning George Kennan named Nitze his deputy in summer 1949. Then Nitze succeeded Kennan as director in January 1950. He remained there, advising Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the Truman administration, for three years. Nitze supervised the National Security Council’s drafting of NSC-68, a pivotal planning document that influenced American foreign relations and defense policy for the Cold War’s duration. President Harry Truman instructed the NSC to review and reassess American security requirements subsequent to the Soviet Union’s test-detonating an atomic weapon in August 1949. Nitze and the other contributors assumed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) would soon acquire a hydrogen, or thermonuclear, weapon as well. Truman tasked the NSC with advising him how to proceed, given this new situation.

Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze in Vietnam. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Nitze recommended strengthening the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, while withdrawing American forces. Nitze is better remembered from his years in the State Department as the chief author of several influential documents such as NSC-68 that argued successfully for a global and militaristic response to communism. (National Archives)

According to NSC-68, the United States faced an unescapably militant Kremlin on the march, with designs to dominate the world through whatever means proved most expedient at any given time. It argued that the United States and the USSR represented starkly irreconcilable differences and, although Americans continued demobilizing following the Second World War, the Soviets had remained armed for war and were seizing the initiative in the rapidly evolving Cold War, especially in political and psychological warfare. The United States should reaffirm its values and purpose, as articulated in the U.S. Constitution and the United Nations charter. Further, NSC-68 declared that the U.S. should organize and lead the entire free world, and should do so from a position of clear military superiority, in nuclear weapons and conventional forces, in peace and war, until the Soviet system fundamentally changed. NSC-68 partly derived from Kennan’s containment doctrine, but went beyond those foundational precepts of Cold War thinking in expressly emphasizing military issues and means to achieve victory in the Cold War. Kennan had recommended nuanced political strategies. Kennan had also objected that militarization would needlessly prolong the Cold War. According to Nitze, Kennan remained unrealistically unwilling to acknowledge containment’s practical requirements. Americans, Nitze asserted in the document, must rapidly develop and then project such military strength that the Kremlin would always calculate it would lose any confrontation, in total or limited war or in peace—even in scenarios premised upon a Soviet surprise attack and devastating first strike against the United States and its allies in a nuclear exchange. Nitze’s doctrine therefore required coercive capabilities. Without overwhelming military superiority and well-supported political and military alliances such as NATO, the U.S. posture of containment would remain a bluff. By 1950 the Soviets’ developing nuclear weapons program appeared to demand this sort

of urgent policy shift. The Truman administration enacted NSC-68’s recommendations after the Korean War began, and it remained the United States’ basic policy thrust for the Cold War’s duration. Nitze began concentrating on nuclear weapons and the arms race in the late 1960s and early 1970s, serving the Nixon administration in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks with the USSR. He believed that the Soviets intended to surpass—and by the late 1970s were indeed surpassing—the Americans’ nuclear capabilities, and that this would create dangerous imbalances, possibly tempting the Soviet Union to launch a first strike, particularly during a crisis. He resigned from the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal, and then criticized the Ford and Carter administrations and the intelligence community for underestimating the Soviet threat. Nitze formed the Committee on the Present Danger to better articulate this critique after November 1976, where he met presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who shared his views. He returned to government service in the Reagan administration as a senior armscontrol negotiator, where he advised the president and Secretaries of State Alexander Haig and George Shultz, through the 1980s. Nitze insisted that the United States must not cede strategic advantage to the Soviet Union in unequal agreements, as the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, in his view, had done for political expediency —whether measured in intercontinental ballistic missiles, launchers, or warheads, including multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles, or measured by what he called “throw-weight.” Nitze attempted to negotiate arms-control agreements premised on this equality requirement as well as his longstanding insistence that the United States maintain sufficient nuclear and conventional forces that the Soviet Union would always conclude that it would fail in any conceivable war. This would stabilize the Cold War and reaffirm Americans’ commitment and practical capability to contain the USSR. He achieved some success, experiencing some frustration and disappointment, and sometimes dissenting in the process. His efforts contributed to the Americans and Soviets’ signing an antiballistic missile agreement and the SALT I accords in 1972, and an intermediate-range nuclear forces agreement in 1988, his final year in government service. James Lockhart See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Kennan, George; Marshall Plan; National Security Council Paper NSC-68; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Nitze, Paul H. From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision: A Memoir. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989. Talbot, Strobe. The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace. New York: Knopf, 1988. Thompson, Nicholas. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. New York: Henry Holt, 2009.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), also known as the North Atlantic Alliance, is one of the leading intergovernmental organizations of the world. NATO was established in 1949 with the idea of developing a regional security organization based on the strategic political and military alliances of the member countries, located in North America and Europe. Member states committed to protect each other against any possible attack by the Communist bloc or the Soviet Union, and to prevent any conflict between and among the former enemies of World War II, which then also joined the alliance as members.

As Lord Ismay, the first secretary general of NATO, aptly stated, the organization’s strategic goal was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (Wheatcroft). Originally, NATO was founded by the 12 leading countries of North America and Western Europe, including countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada, on April 4, 1949, in Washington, D.C.; by the end of the Cold War, its membership had increased to 15. By early 2014, NATO had acquired 28 permanent members, including most of the Eastern Europe countries, albeit former members of the Warsaw Pact. Although it was partly first designated in Paris, France, in the early years of its foundation, the headquarters of NATO moved to Brussels, Belgium, in 1967. The North Atlantic Council serves as the highest-level political decision-making board within NATO. The secretary general of NATO holds the chief official position within the organization and serves as the chair of the North Atlantic Council. Each NATO decision within the organization is taken by the consensus of all member states, which demonstrates the common consent of the member states on the decision. Besides, it is important to note that while only permanent members have the full capacity to make decisions, there are also other partner international organizations, including the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and countries, including 41 states from all around the world, that cooperate with the organization; however, their influence on the decision-making process is very limited when compared to the member states. The organization is based on the basic premise of collective defense, and this is emphasized in Article 5—any attack against a member country is considered to be against them all. In other words, the treaty proposed that member states should take the necessary actions to prevent any possible attack and maintain international peace and security by utilizing political and military instruments. This concept is highlighted with the notion of “one for all and all for one” in NATO membership politics. Through the Cold War (1945–1989) years, the United States viewed NATO as a viable instrument to maintain its hegemony against the Warsaw Pact nations, particularly the Soviet Union. In those years, like NATO, the Warsaw Pact served as a vital alliance for the Soviets to leverage the confrontation and hostility that arose between the two ideological poles of capitalism and communism. Such ideologies shaped the political agendas, geopolitical and strategic interests, and expansionist goals of those countries during the Cold War period. Although the founding purpose of NATO as a treaty alliance was to confront a possible attack of the Soviet Union and its alliances after World War II, interestingly, the end of the Cold War, or the demise of the Soviet Union, did not result in the dissolution of NATO. Instead, NATO has transformed its role from a strategic alliance of member countries to an important actor for robust peacekeeping and crisis management in pacifying conflict areas, including the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya, and in shaping world politics in the post–Cold War era. Specifically, in 1999, NATO was accountable for initiating military operations in Kosovo without any UN mandate in spite of Russian and Chinese opposition. This new role helped NATO pave the way for expanding American leadership in a unipolar world for the next three decades. The share of U.S. military spending in proportion to the rest of NATO rose from 50 to 75 percent in the two decades following the end of the Cold War. However, the economic recession of 2007–2010, coupled with rising American federal debt and unmet needs at home, led many Americans and their politicians to question this high level of military expenditures for NATO and European regional security. On the other hand, through the history of NATO, as the indispensable member of the organization, the United States has not only contributed to the development of the organization but also benefited from the existence of NATO in protecting and sustaining U.S. interests around the world. By so doing, the indispensable member’s interests have commonly designed the politics and decisions of NATO. For

instance, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Article 5 was invoked for the first and only time in NATO’s history to show the solidarity among the members toward the United States. This was an important step in the unification of member states against global terrorism. However, throughout the organization’s history, NATO members have not always showed the same solidarity in safeguarding one another; that is why the international community is concerned about whether the principle of equal treatment is still prevalent within the organization. Onur M. Koprulu See also: Balkans, U.S. Interests and Intervention in; Berlin Blockade/Airlift; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Post–Cold War Expansion of; Primary Documents: North Atlantic Treaty, Establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (April 4, 1949)

Further Reading Karns, M. P., and K. A. Mingst. International Organizations: The Politics and Processes of Global Governance. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. Lindley-French, J., and N. Macfarlane. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization: The Enduring Alliance. London: Routledge, 2007. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “What Is NATO?” and “What Is Article 5?” http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/index.htm. Accessed February 17, 2014. Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. “Who Needs NATO?” New York Times, June 15, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16ihtedwheatcroft16.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed May 28, 2014.

Operation Splinter Factor (1948–1956) Operation Splinter Factor is the name given to a U.S. covert mission to infiltrate Eastern Europe’s Communist parties in the depths of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Allen Dulles, an OSS officer during World War II and Central Intelligence Agency director from 1953 to 1961, devised the plan that was intended to destabilize Communist Russia and Europe at the beginning of the Cold War and lead to the domino-like collapse of Communist states. The operation used ideological imperialism as one strategy to achieve victory and yet avoid outright war with the Soviet Union. The plan had its roots at the end of World War II when a British agent (“Michael Sullivan”) began circulating rumors of the horrors of forced collectivization under Communist rule. Simultaneously, Dulles recruited Józef Światło, an official in Poland’s Ministry of Public Security (who dearly wanted to defect to the United States), who in turn enlisted Noel Field, a long-time anti-Fascist and Communist and U.S. State Department employee, who maintained regular communication with high-level domestic and European Communists. His government position and political leanings caused Washington to fear he might be a Soviet spy working against his nation. When stationed in Europe, Field felt it was too dangerous to return home. While relocating to Prague in 1949, Field was arrested for being an American spy with subversive intent; his wife and brother were also arrested. Field was reportedly captured due to the efforts of Światło, who had informed Stalin’s secret police of Field’s presence on Dulles’s instructions. During Field’s five-year captivity (during which he denied repeatedly that he was a spy), his address book was used to incriminate numerous Communist Party officials for alleged collaboration with the United States. The result was massive purges on trumped-up charges. In Czechoslovakia, more than 169,000 people were arrested; other Eastern European nations and Russia were similarly affected. Police arrested thousands of people across the Soviet bloc, and the show trials left behind countless victims of a plan gone terribly awry.

Researchers have offered several interpretations of Operation Splinter Factor. In 1974, British journalist Stewart Steven accused the United States and United Kingdom of purposefully manipulating Stalin, provoking his distrust of Eastern Europe’s high-ranking party members. In 1965 Flora Lewis, a New York Times reporter, had concluded that Field became Stalin’s puppet, providing him an excuse to initiate previously intended show trials and party purges. Recent scholarship confirms Lewis’s interpretation that Field was not an American spy, but a Soviet spy or double agent. Without question, Operation Splinter Factor reinforced Stalin’s paranoia. Field’s presence invoked a deep-seated distrust between Soviet and Eastern European Communists, but clearly did not lead to the destabilization of non-Soviet Communist regimes that Dulles had envisioned. Instead, his goal to spread political chaos and bring down communism in Eastern Europe had only tragic consequences for thousands. Laura Steckman See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Dulles, Allen

Further Reading Blum, William. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII. London, 2003. Corke, Sarah-Jane. US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945–53 (Studies in Intelligence). New York: Routledge, 2007. Schmidt, Mária. “Noel Field—The American Communist at the Center of Stalin’s East European Purge: From the Hungarian Archives.” American Communist History 3, no. 2 (2004): 215–245. Sharp, Tony. Stalin’s American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles and the East European Show-trials. London: C. Hurst, 2013.

Organization of American States (OAS) Founded in 1948 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Organization of American States (OAS) is an intercontinental organization of 35 nation-states of the Americas whose mission is interregional cooperation on a range of issues from social and economic democratic development to regional peace and security. With roots in the period of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, and even deeper origins in the era of the Monroe Doctrine, the OAS has held very different meanings and functions over the course of its history, with the United States often perceived as using the organization to advance its own strategic and imperial interests and Latin American nations feeling themselves very much junior partners. Its earliest history extends to 1826, when Bolivian landowner and liberator Simon Bolivar called for a meeting of pan-American states to discuss regional cooperation and collective security interests throughout the Western Hemisphere following the defeat of the Spanish. The Congress of Panama became the first of several periodic gatherings of the American states over the course of the 19th century. These early meetings were already marked with tensions between Latin American leaders who saw their nations as equal partners with the United States, and American officials who operated under the assumptions embodied in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which called for the United States to provide regional protection of the lesser states to the south from potential European intervention. Those contested viewpoints sharpened at the turn of the century, a period when the United States was increasingly seeking opportunities for overseas economic expansion—the raw materials, lands, and markets of Latin America among them. At the prompting of U.S. big business interests, U.S. secretary of state James G. Blaine in 1899 organized the first International Conference of American States to discuss

intraregional conflict resolution and cooperation on matters of “peace and prosperity” (Bloom, 29). Additional meetings followed and by 1910 the organization had established itself as the Pan American Union (PAU). The PAU’s tenure (1910–1948) was marked by the ongoing consternation of Latin American officials with the continued imperialistic actions of the “Colossus of the North,” the United States intervening in Caribbean nations alone more than 20 times from 1899 to 1917. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration renounced interventionism and promised instead a “Good Neighbor” policy that would put humanitarian and agricultural assistance ahead of military engagement. Discussions about regional security preceding and during World War II dissolved much of the ill will toward the United States and increased hemispheric trust. In 1947, the United States and Latin American nations signed the Rio Treaty that pledged hemispheric cooperation on security matters—a document clearly driven by U.S. strategic interests in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The following year saw the signing of the Pact of Bogota that committed member states to peaceful regional conflict resolution, setting the stage for the creation of the Organization of American States. Throughout the Cold War, the United States saw the OAS as a means of projecting hemispheric hegemony vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and the specter of international communism, while many Latin American leaders tried to bolster the confidence of their OAS peers in the south to stand up to the United States as it continued to meddle in the affairs of nations from Guatemala (1954) to Cuba (1961) to Nicaragua (1980s). Even beyond the Cold War, the United States during the administration of President George W. Bush (2001–2009) attempted repeatedly to use the OAS to undermine the presidency of antiimperialist Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Chris J. Magoc See also: Guatemala (1946–1954); Monroe Doctrine; Nicaragua, Contra War; Venezuela

Further Reading Bloom, Barbara Lee. The Organization of American States. New York: Chelsea House/Infobase, 2008. Holden, Robert, and Eric Zolov, eds. Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Point IV Program (U.S. Home Economics Education in Iran) Starting in the 13th century, household management in Iran was described only by male writers in books of ethics. But as Iran became more modern, the role of women, especially of mothers as educators of children, gained importance. This was mostly because of foreign mentors—first missionaries, then secular educators. French, English, and American missionaries each held an important role in educating young Iranian women, with American Protestant missionaries contributing the most to women’s education in Iran, particularly in homemaking. In 1838 American Presbyterian missionaries established the first school for girls in the northwestern city of Urumiyyeh. Subsequently, other American and British missionaries established girls’ schools in other cities between 1865 and 1900. Iranian missionary schools mostly taught from American books such as Shelter and Clothing (1913) and Food and Household Management (1914). The Iranian response to missionary education varied, from those who embraced it to others who saw it as a tool for converting Iranian Muslim women to Christianity.

After World War II, instead of missionaries, home economic specialists were sent to Iran. This occurred following the American CIA- and British-led 1953 Iranian coup d’état, which ousted the democratically elected government of Iran led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. The coup, which was planned ostensibly to protect Iran from becoming a Communist country, led to the government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (aka the shah). Subsequently, the shah’s character was changed from a constitutional king to an authoritarian monarch. He also relied heavily on U.S. support until his overthrow in 1979. Intending to help establish peace through what American politicians referred to as “quiet diplomacy,” President Truman’s Point IV Program sent experts to Iran in the early 1950s to improve agriculture and health. Indeed, Iran’s rapid population growth (from 18 to 34 million during the period of 1956–1976) was partially due to Point IV’s introduction of the pesticide DDT, which reduced the mosquito population carrying malaria. Point IV also implemented necessary infrastructures such as dams and roads. In the interim, an addition of a home economics program supervised by the U.S. Department of Education was added to the regular curricula of many all-girl high schools. The program aimed to help these young women create a less labor-intensive way of life and develop “good taste” in decorating their homes, and, ultimately, improve the country’s economy. Meanwhile, Iranian home economics books, women’s magazines, and the popular press began to promote the Anglo-American vision of home life, since most of the content of these books was drawn from American publications such as Good Housekeeping. These publications featured texts and images about the home life of white middle- or upper-class Americans. They also encouraged the consumption of imported domestic products by the growing urban population—that segment of Iran that most enjoyed a phenomenal leap in the nation’s oil revenues (from $300 million to $20 billion from the early 1950s to the late 1970s). A 1952 ninth-grade home economics Iranian book further illustrates this notion with a picture of an open refrigerator, which floats in space, and the advice: “Of course not everyone can afford such beautiful, perfect, and valuable appliances, but we all should make an effort to always keep whatever equipment we have available to us neat and clean.” Guidance on keeping things clean could be given without referring to a fully stocked luxury refrigerator. Indeed, the effort to improve the lives of average Iranians linked improved health and hygiene to new material desires and consumption habits. Sometimes this objective was implemented inadvertently. However, it was often perceived as a means of serving the imperialist aspirations of the United States. Relying heavily on American technical and economic assistance, Iran was deemed to have little control over its own resources. Despite efforts to distance itself from imperialist ambitions, Point IV and other post–World War II American-initiated efforts were eventually belittled by leftists, nationalists, and religious groups. In February 1979 Iranians dethroned the shah, established the Islamic Republic of Iran, and wrought a cultural and economic program for their country that was independent of the United States and other Western countries. Islamist groups took charge of the affairs of the Iranian people, including those of women, at all levels. Pamela Karimi See also: Iran, Coup d’etat; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Ansari, Ali. Modern Iran. London: Longman; Pearson Education Series, 2007. Ansari, Sarah, and Vanessa Martin, eds. Women, Religion, and Culture in Iran. London: Curzon Press, 2002.

Karimi, Pamela. Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Warren, William E. Mission for Peace: Point 4 in Iran. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956.

Radio Free Europe (RFE) Radio Free Europe (RFE) was a U.S.-controlled and CIA-funded radio propaganda campaign begun in 1949 to peacefully combat the Soviet Union in its own sphere of influence. The brainchild of prominent Americans such as George F. Kennan, Allen W. Dulles, Joseph Grew, and DeWitt C. Poole, Radio Free Europe directed its broadcasts at those European satellite countries under the influence of Soviet communism, like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The aim was to gradually and incrementally wage a war of ideas against the Communist regime. Unlike Voice of America or other radio programs that highlighted news about the nation from which the broadcasts emanated (to present itself in a positive light), Radio Free Europe was unique in that it advanced an anticommunist agenda by focusing solely on news from the countries where its listeners lived, and Kennan’s policy of containment to halt the imperial ambitions of Soviet communism. RFE, along with its companion service Radio Liberty (which had the same agenda but targeted the Soviet Union itself), also served as an important vehicle for political refugees and émigrés to participate in a free press during its heyday from 1949 to 1995. Though it would eventually broadcast in 28 languages, initially RFE was characterized by a limited repertoire of émigrés serving as collators, commentators, interviewers, and analysts. With increasingly powerful short-wave transmitters installed in Munich and directed at the Eastern Bloc countries, RFE programs consisted of political news as well as coverage of plays and literature that had been banned by the government. Similarly popular were interviews with ex-nationals who had managed to secure asylum in neighboring European countries or the United States, and news on men and women who had been arrested by their nation’s government. Such activities, of course, were not well received by Communist regimes who sought control of the flow of information and ideas. With varying degrees of success, the RFE was jammed using the strategic placement of hardware and engineers from the moment of its first successful broadcast on May 1, 1950. In the United States during the McCarthy years, RFE came under fire from popular radio commentator Fulton Lewis, who was among the first to uncover the financial backing of the CIA—this would eventually lead to dramatic changes in its economic and organizational control. RFE’s fortunes would wax and wane with domestic politics; it enjoyed a period of peaceful coexistence with the New Left (1960s), saw its funding reduced during détente (1970–1980), and then a resurgence under President Reagan in the 1980s. In 1971 it lost CIA funding and came under the control of the Board for International Broadcasting, and in 1976 Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty merged to form the RFE/RL. Radio Free Europe’s legacy remains potent. It is credited with playing a key role in inciting the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (after which it moderated its rhetoric so as not to get embroiled in further violent political revolution) as well as anticommunist activities in Poland. Ry Marcattilio-McCracken See also: Central Intelligence Agency; Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Holt, Robert T. Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.

Johnson, A. Ross. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Mickelson, Sig. America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. New York: Praeger, 1983. Puddington, Arch. Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

South African Apartheid Apartheid was the policy of comprehensive social, economic, and spatial separation along racial lines practiced by the Afrikaner National Party in South Africa from 1948 until 1994. An anomaly during the period of decolonization, this extreme form of segregation reinforced white minority rule. It placed the government at odds with its multiracial population and much of the international community. Nonetheless, South Africa’s ability to maintain control of the strategic tip of Africa during the Cold War made it a valuable if difficult ally for the Western alliance, including the United States. Apartheid, literally meaning “separateness” in Afrikaans, enforced a strict division of the various races of South Africa through the development of an extensive legal code. Daniel Malan’s National Party (Nasionale Party) established the policy in 1948 after its surprise electoral victory. Apartheid expanded on an assortment of laws established during the British colonial period, which guaranteed the availability of cheap labor by limiting the economic and physical mobility of black Africans. The National Party created the first centralized structure for standardizing, maintaining, and enforcing a nationwide application. The government registered each citizen in one of four ethnic categories—white, black, colored, or Indian—and codified where they could live, where they could work, and with whom they could interact. Whites operated under the fewest restrictions. Black Africans lived in ethnically organized settlements apart from major urban areas and required official papers to travel, including commuting to work. National Party governments successfully denied blacks access to the best farmlands, neighborhoods, and elite jobs, creating a permanent servant class with few opportunities for upward mobility. After Hendrik Verwoerd took power in 1958, forced resettlements of black Africans into government-designated homelands known as Bantustans and extralegal detention of resisters further entrenched the apartheid system. Apartheid ran counter to the anticolonial and liberation currents that predominated in the postwar era, but South Africa leveraged its strategic position to gain diplomatic acquiescence. The majority of European empires were slowly retreating from Asia and Africa, while the burgeoning civil rights movement demanded racial equality in the United States. Continuing support for the minority apartheid regime undermined foreign governments’ commitments to equality, especially in the United States and Great Britain—two of South Africa’s most important allies. Nonetheless, South Africa sat on important gold and plutonium reserves. Its relatively developed economy, one of the largest and most modern in Africa, included millions of dollars in British and American investments. The strict apartheid system also protected against the rise of radicalism during the Cold War. Communism was an attractive ideological alternative for the impoverished Africans of the country, as evidenced by the alliance between the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. The National Party’s strict control of the population and its strong anticommunist nationalism ensured that valuable resources and the country’s strategic location at the edge of the continent would not be denied to the West. These economic and political considerations generally trumped any moral qualms held by foreign governments. Thus, the United States and most of its Western allies quietly cooperated with the South African regime for four decades. Rejecting demands for divestment and economic sanctions, American and British administrations embraced a policy of “constructive engagement,” where political and economic ties

would ideally encourage South Africa to moderate its racial policies. Though tensions occured at various points—most notably around the Sharpesville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—the United States maintained cordial relations with the apartheid state into the 1980s. Popular resistance eventually forced South Africa to adjust the policy, which finally ended with the multiracial elections of 1994. R. Joseph Parrott

Further Reading Borstelmann, Thomas. Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Davies, J. E. Constructive Engagement? Chester Crocker and American Policy in South Africa, Namibia, and Angola, 1981–1988. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Irwin, Ryan. Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy. 5th ed. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972), Doctrine of Containment On March 12, 1947, U.S. president Harry Truman addressed a joint session of Congress in one of the most important speeches of his presidency. The Greek Civil War between a democratically elected government and several thousand Communist-led terrorists, the president announced, had reached a crucial phase. Due to England’s financial inability to support the Greek government or its neighbor Turkey, Truman requested that Congress provide both countries an unprecedented amount of economic and military aid: $400 million, an amount of aid far greater than the United States had ever given any nation in peacetime. “This is a serious course upon which we embark,” Truman urged. “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.” Without it, the Middle East, Europe, and much of the world might collapse. If the United States shied from this global leadership, Truman concluded, “we may endanger the peace of the world” (Truman). Truman’s request, which Congress granted, heralded a phase in U.S. foreign policy that became known as “containment” (or the Truman Doctrine, as it was also known). In a positive sense, as the president indicated, the Truman Doctrine stood for the promotion of global democracy and prosperity— goals that Americans had affirmed since America’s independence from Britain, and which many world powers and peoples had affirmed since World War I. In a negative sense, as commentators noted at the time, these idealistic goals also held the cynical, unrealistic purpose of containing Soviet influence within its pre–World War II boundaries. Respectful of the White House’s command of U.S. foreign policy and also fearful of international communism, the U.S. public and Congress largely supported containment. This support came with varying, at times sharp criticisms. The policy’s greatest critics came from the U.S. Left and Right: leftliberal Democratic Party members and organizations, particularly former U.S. vice president Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party, decried U.S. support of the authoritarian Greek regime and further condemned “containment” as an aggressive, unilateral policy that bypassed the United Nations and served reactionary U.S. and European interests seeking to crush legitimate noncommunist movements. Republican Party members, as well as conservative Democrats and civic leaders, attacked containment as ineptly implemented, excessively costly and militaristic, and insufficiently backed by domestic public opinion and Congress.

Like contemporaries at the time, historians disagree over the meaning and evolution of “containment.” Containment is generally understood to have had economic, political, and military aspects that developed in U.S.- and Allied-controlled areas in different ways and times after 1945. Relatively benign versions of containment thinking began appearing as early as the latter part of World War II among U.S. government strategic planners (as well as some concerned U.S. and British leaders). As military victory drew closer after 1944, some U.S. and non-U.S. leaders and officials worried about the immense power vacuums that would be created in Europe and Asia as a result of Germany, Italy, and Japan’s defeat. Faced with a postwar world in which the Soviet Union was emerging as a key partner and rival, and Great Britain and other friendly powers were greatly weakened by the war, many U.S. figures of influence inside and outside of the government grew concerned about Soviet and Communist influence in war-torn, vulnerable areas throughout the colonial and industrialized worlds. Until his death in April 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt shared these concerns to some degree. His administration pursued military and political measures designed to limit Soviet influence in specific areas such as China and nuclear weapons development. But Roosevelt’s strong desire for cooperation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), greater flexibility in various realms of U.S.-USSR relations, dominance of U.S. foreign policy and public opinion, and conscious refusal to engage in postwar planning limited the extent of proto-containment policymaking before the Cold War. In Greece, Roosevelt had reluctantly assented to British prime minister Winston Churchill’s “Percentages Agreement” with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that exchanged Communist control of several Eastern European nations for the reestablishment of British dominance in Greece—a deal that led to the civil war between the British-supported Greek government and Communist-supported Greek rebels that spawned the Containment Doctrine. Despite their greater reservations about the Soviet Union, Roosevelt’s successors in the Truman administration attempted to engage and cooperate with the USSR for many months before Truman’s landmark speech. Their efforts were challenged in virtually every region (particularly Eastern Europe, Iran, and Germany) and subject of international cooperation (including demobilization, international atomic energy control, economic reconstruction, United Nations governance, and the future of former Axis territories). The crisis in Greece and Turkey and a similar one in Iran stemmed from U.S.-British-Soviet disagreement over World War II assurances made to Soviet premier Joseph Stalin by fellow Allied leaders Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that the USSR (which bore a staggering burden of Allied ground fighting against Nazi Germany) had the right of privileged access to the Mediterranean Sea after the war. Frustrated by their inability to craft a constructive postwar peace settlement in the face of Soviet, French, and other nations’ resistance, particularly after Secretary of State James Byrnes’s summit diplomacy in London and Moscow failed, U.S. officials adopted a less compromising, “get tough” approach to the USSR in 1946. Privately and publicly, U.S. and Soviet leaders heightened their concerns and rhetoric about the growing world confrontation. In February 1946, Stalin gave a rare public speech lambasting capitalism and the West, which Time magazine called the most warlike speech since World War II. A month later, Churchill famously declared that “an Iron Curtain” had fallen across Europe as a result of communism. In September 1945, 25 percent of Americans polled had feared communism’s spread in Europe; by late 1946, more than two-thirds thought that the Soviet Union wanted to dominate as much of the world as possible. Despite the diplomatic impasse and heated public sentiment, as a government program, containment developed fitfully from 1945 to the 1950s. In war-stricken nations across Europe and Asia, the Truman administration operated foreign aid programs that became increasingly anticommunist in scale and

purpose. Major turning points included the 1947 Marshall Plan, a U.S.-sponsored European economic recovery program that caused Stalin to tighten Communist control in Eastern Europe; a 1948 “reverse course” program aimed at reviving Japan and neighboring Asian countries as a Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War seemed likely; and the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the first formal U.S. military alliance outside of the Western Hemisphere. Containment became a fully global, militarized policy after Communist China’s entry into the Korean War in late 1950. In response, the United States escalated its military programs to World War II–like levels to maintain military superiority over the Soviet Union, expanded NATO and other alliances, raised foreign military aid across the world, and took other related measures. Though future generations of Americans implemented and understood the original Truman Doctrine differently, its tenets powerfully shaped U.S. and world politics as the dominant form of U.S. foreign policy until the end of the Cold War. Kevin Y. Kim See also: Primary Documents: President Harry S. Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress Declaring the Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947)

Further Reading Gaddis, John Lewis. “Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?” Foreign Affairs 52, no. 2 (January 1974): 386–402. Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Lippmann, Walter. The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947. Truman, Harry S. “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine, March 12, 1947.” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1947. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1963, pp. 176– 180. X [Kennan, George F.]. “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 566–582.

U.S. Military Bases The specificity of U.S. imperialism, the British historian Gareth Steadman Jones once noted, lies in its fundamentally nonterritorial character—and hence its invisibility. Distinct from other empires in history that lived and died by commitments to formal occupation of foreign lands and direct rule of subject peoples, American power is made manifest in part as a smattering of dots representing overseas military bases. Anything but the inconsequential specks they appear, these installations underpin the physical presence of the United States on every continent but Antarctica. As symbolic and material embodiments of America’s geopolitical supremacy, they constitute a key dimension of its empire, providing it with prestige and the projection of its power. It is striking that prior to World War II, there were relatively few overseas U.S. military bases. Beginning in the Cold War era, however, the U.S. government initiated a steady projection of its power, represented most visibly in the building of dozens, and soon hundreds of military bases in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. By 1950, the United States had established more than 200 military bases abroad, asserting its determination to defend U.S. allies from possible Soviet attack and what was universally labeled “Communist aggression.” It is now widely accepted that the bases and the larger deployment of U.S. military power correlated neatly with the globalization of strategic U.S. economic corporate interests and was often driven as much or more by those forces as by any real threat posed by the Soviet Union. Today, the primary practical function of more than 700 U.S. military bases across the globe remains military, as illustrated during recent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq launched from bases in

West, Central, and South Asia with Europe providing transit. Even in an age of drone technology operated from within the United States itself, bases function as barracks, depots for weapons, training facilities, recuperation sites for soldiers, refueling stations, and springboards for conventional combat operations. In 2001, the Department of Defense acknowledged the existence of 725 such bases, a figure that grew to 766 in 2006 according to the Department of Defense Base Structure Report, not including 77 bases in noncontinental territories of the United States. A great many more structures are known to exist above and beyond those listed in official records, leading to problems of definition: some scholars differentiate between bases, in which the user nation (in this case, the United States) has complete freedom of action, and jointly operated installations or facilities that allow the host nation greater agency in making decisions about how bases are used (Harkavy). These latter are shrouded in secrecy to disguise the embarrassing truth of imperialism’s impingements on national-state sovereignty in regions where the United States is unpopular. Their well-documented role in surveillance and command-and-control in covert military operations during the Cold War has been extended in the so-called War on Terror, as indicated by the fact that when the United States was evicted by the Pakistani government from Shamsi Airbase in December 2011, most Pakistani citizens were unaware it had been leased to the CIA and USAF as an airstrip for surveillance and drone operations. The United States itself formally differentiates between occasionally used “cooperative security locations” maintained by contractors or the host nation, “forward operating sites” that retain limited personnel, and “main operating bases”—vast fabricated U.S. counties in which expatriate soldiers raise children, shop, and play golf. Yet the absence of any clear line between bases and installations or facilities has led to calls for a more expansive understanding of bases. The value of a broad understanding would seem to be considerable, given recent shifts toward more agile, nonpermanent structures in regions where the United States wishes to ensure a low profile. A related development is the growing appearance of base-like structures in place of buildings that have historically housed civilian institutions and had ostensibly nonmilitary functions. Scholars have noted the increasingly martial character of consular buildings, which, far from being places whose primary function is to facilitate visas for local people and represent American commercial and diplomatic interests abroad, are now fortified compounds in which spies, soldiers, and intelligence officials monitor hostile populations. There are, then, a great many American military bases or base-like structures of different sizes and types across the world. Their variegated features are determined by their diverse functions, which range from explicit displays of U.S. military might to concealment to provide cover for covert operations and surveillance. What they share in common is their collective function as nodal points of connection holding together a vast network of imperial power centered in Washington, which has made securing overseas base access a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY Hawai‘i’s transformation into a springboard for Pacific expansion after the toppling of Queen Lili’uokalani in 1893 was followed by a century of conquest and expansion through the establishment of overseas military bases. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the intellectual father of U.S. basing strategy, saw sea power and control of the world’s oceans as the key to military success. His naval doctrine was the muscle behind the economic push for “Open Door” access to European colonial markets, beginning with parallel forays into Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America, where the United States began to displace Europe’s colonial military presence in small but steady increments during the early decades of the 20th century. The process of transition from cash-strapped European colonialism to American imperialism was accelerated

with the takeover of key British bases in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean in agreements that traded British bases for U.S. naval destroyers in 1940. World War II was a watershed. By its end some 70 nations housed U.S. bases through bilateral agreements, a sharp increase from fewer than 20 in 1938. Defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, whose sovereignty was restricted through treaties entitling the victorious powers to station troops on their territory, remained the principal homes for America’s major military bases throughout the Cold War, reflected by the fact that in 1989 of the 525,000 U.S. troops deployed around the world, almost half were in the Federal Republic of Germany and another 48,000 in Japan. Multilateral frameworks like NATO and SEATO helped the growth of U.S. bases in the 1950s and 1960s; some 375 military bases allowed the deployment of around half a million troops around the world at the height of the Cold War. Nuclear arsenals capable of wiping out humanity several times over were kept in and passed through Europe’s bases, which housed around 125,000 American troops in 1989 (aside from the quarter of a million stationed in Germany), encircling the Soviet Union, serving as storage facilities, barracks, and trip-wires to justify U.S. involvement in the event of conflict. As nationalist movements with Socialist sympathies gained ground in the global South during the 1970s, they became launch pads and transit points for some 200 military operations in Third World countries. The decade following 9/11 saw important shifts in the geographical and structural pattern of U.S. military basing, with reductions in several major Cold War strategic locations such as Japan, Korea, and Germany and a growth in smaller facilities in Central Asian and Black Sea regions of growing strategic interest. Many new bases are nonpermanent “lily pads” designed to increase American influence in sensitive parts of the world while reducing its political footprint. Their temporary nature reflects the new mobile reality of low-intensity transnational warfare against nonstate actors. The long-term impact of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—hard to assess in precise terms given frequent claims that “America seeks no bases”—is likely to be considerable, with billions spent on constructing base infrastructure and massive troop deployments in each country at various points during the decade of war following 9/11. The U.S. military’s presence in Africa has also been quietly expanding for a decade. Reflected in dozens of recently conducted military exercises involving thousands of troops, the edifice of U.S. basing in Africa is to encompass a host of drone facilities scattered across the continent.

IMPACT AND RESISTANCE The impact of U.S. military bases on the communities and societies affected by their presence in host countries has been the subject of considerable controversy. Beyond geopolitics and security issues, contestation extends to an array of social, political, and ecological ills that have triggered societal mobilization and organized resistance from the Philippines to Puerto Rico and beyond. Across the Muslim world, the military bases have incited Islamist fury and attacks by militants, not least in Saudi Arabia, which the United States officially left in 2003. (Its continued operation of secret drone bases since 2011 has been widely reported.) Other evictions from U.S. bases include Uzbekistan (2005) and Pakistan (2011). Korea’s long list of complaints include many that are typical across Asia: land being grabbed at the expense of local farmers, acute noise pollution caused by jet flights, and the antisocial behavior of arrogant, racist elements within the American soldiery who have on several occasions committed murder with impunity. The 1995 abduction and rape of a 12-year old Okinawan girl by two marines and a sailor brought to light a long and bitter history of sexual violence and molestation of local women and children by American soldiers in Japan. Women’s peace groups claim that pent-up aggression acquired during

combat and training translates into racist misogyny directed at women in the base vicinity (Akibayashi and Takazato, 258–259).

U.S. military guards stop a truck at the gate to Frankfurt’s U.S. Rhein Main Air Base, August 19, 1985. Security measures were tightened after two people were killed and 11 injured in a car bomb blast on August 8. American power is made manifest in part by its hundreds of overseas military bases, located on every continent except Antarctica. (AP Photo/Frank Rumpenhorst)

America has not enjoyed untrammeled rights to do as it wishes with respect to overseas bases, however. In the 1970s, leaderships of Cold War partners began to perceive a divergence in their interests from those of the United States. Turkey, Greece, the Philippines, and Portugal demanded rent for bases they had previously maintained free of cost; Japan became more assertive than it had been during the reconstruction period when base agreements were first negotiated, underlining the contingent nature of base politics, which vary over time with changing contexts. The enduring strength of many bilateral agreements between the United States and nations that host its military installations can be explained in considerable measure by the lack of concern among indigenous rulers for the wider populations they represent but seldom consult. The range of “benefits” they perceive when promoting their individual and class interests include sharing the cost of security against neighboring countries with whom relations are tense (West Germany during the Cold War); preventing subversion of internal enemies (the Philippines under Marcos); prestige and legitimacy from association with the United States (Romania); and aid and loan packages that tend to accompany diplomatic friendship with the United States (Cooling, 1–3, 10–12). Most of these factors rarely benefit ordinary citizens, which is why base negotiations are so secretive. Their protection from wider scrutiny within the media allows politicians in European countries like Spain and Germany to voice criticism of the United States’ campaign in Iraq without interrupting the use of bases within their territory as part of the American war effort. Ali Nobil Ahmad See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011); North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Pakistan; Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)

Further Reading Akibayashi, Kozue, and Takazato, Suzuyo. “Okinawa: Women’s Struggle for Demilitarization.” In Catherine Lutz, ed. The Bases of Empire. London: Pluto Press, 2009, pp. 243–269. Cooling, Alexander. Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Gerson, Joseph, and Bruce Birchard, eds. The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign US Military Bases. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1991. Harkavy, Robert. Bases Abroad: The Global Foreign Military Presence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Johnson, Chalmers. Sorrows of Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Lutz, Catherine. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against US Military Posts. London: Pluto Press, 2009. Reed, John. “Mapped: The U.S. Military’s Presence in Africa.” Foreign Policy, May 1, 2013. http://killerapps.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/01/mapped_the_us_militarys_presence_in_africa_this_spring. Accessed October 17, 2014. Steadman Jones, Gareth. “The Specificity of US Imperialism.” New Left Review I/60 (March–April, 1970).

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS President Harry S. Truman’s Address Before a Joint Session of Congress Declaring the Truman Doctrine (March 12, 1947) In this address framing what soon became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president made the case for $400 million of American aid to anticommunist regimes in Greece and Turkey, arguing the need to do so because the British government was ending its commitment. Truman spoke bluntly about the need for the United States to not only defend what was an authoritarian but “democratic” government in Greece, but “free peoples” everywhere. Given the context of Soviet actions unfolding elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Americans could implicitly draw from the speech a link between what was largely an indigenous Greek revolutionary force and “global communism.” With a single stroke Truman set his nation on a course of global policing of not just communism coming from the Kremlin but any nationalist revolt anywhere that might pose a threat to any nation allied with the foreign policy agenda of the United States. Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Congress of the United States: The gravity of the situation which confronts the world today necessitates my appearance before a joint session of the Congress. The foreign policy and the national security of this country are involved. One aspect of the present situation, which I wish to present to you at this time for your consideration and decision, concerns Greece and Turkey. The United States has received from the Greek Government an urgent appeal for financial and economic assistance. Preliminary reports from the American Economic Mission now in Greece and reports from the American Ambassador in Greece corroborate the statement of the Greek Government that assistance is imperative if Greece is to survive as a free nation. I do not believe that the American people and the Congress wish to turn a deaf ear to the appeal of the Greek Government. Greece is not a rich country. Lack of sufficient natural resources has always forced the Greek people to work hard to make both ends meet. Since 1940, this industrious and peace loving country has suffered invasion, four years of cruel enemy occupation, and bitter internal strife. When forces of liberation entered Greece they found that the retreating Germans had destroyed virtually all the railways, roads, port facilities, communications, and merchant marine. More than a

thousand villages had been burned. Eighty-five per cent of the children were tubercular. Livestock, poultry, and draft animals had almost disappeared. Inflation had wiped out practically all savings. As a result of these tragic conditions, a militant minority, exploiting human want and misery, was able to create political chaos which, until now, has made economic recovery impossible. Greece is today without funds to finance the importation of those goods which are essential to bare subsistence. Under these circumstances the people of Greece cannot make progress in solving their problems of reconstruction. Greece is in desperate need of financial and economic assistance to enable it to resume purchases of food, clothing, fuel and seeds. These are indispensable for the subsistence of its people and are obtainable only from abroad. Greece must have help to import the goods necessary to restore internal order and security, so essential for economic and political recovery. The Greek Government has also asked for the assistance of experienced American administrators, economists and technicians to insure that the financial and other aid given to Greece shall be used effectively in creating a stable and self-sustaining economy and in improving its public administration. The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government’s authority at a number of points, particularly along the northern boundaries. A Commission appointed by the United Nations [S]ecurity Council is at present investigating disturbed conditions in northern Greece and alleged border violations along the frontier between Greece on the one hand and Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia on the other. Meanwhile, the Greek Government is unable to cope with the situation. The Greek army is small and poorly equipped. It needs supplies and equipment if it is to restore the authority of the government throughout Greek territory. Greece must have assistance if it is to become a self-supporting and selfrespecting democracy. The United States must supply that assistance. We have already extended to Greece certain types of relief and economic aid but these are inadequate. There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn. No other nation is willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government. The British Government, which has been helping Greece, can give no further financial or economic aid after March 31. Great Britain finds itself under the necessity of reducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece. We have considered how the United Nations might assist in this crisis. But the situation is an urgent one requiring immediate action and the United Nations and its related organizations are not in a position to extend help of the kind that is required. It is important to note that the Greek Government has asked for our aid in utilizing effectively the financial and other assistance we may give to Greece, and in improving its public administration. It is of the utmost importance that we supervise the use of any funds made available to Greece in such a manner that each dollar spent will count toward making Greece self-supporting, and will help to build an economy in which a healthy democracy can flourish. No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected. The Government of Greece is not perfect. Nevertheless it represents eighty-five per cent of the members of the Greek Parliament who were chosen in an election last year. Foreign observers, including 692 Americans, considered this election to be a fair expression of the views of the Greek people. The Greek Government has been operating in an atmosphere of chaos and extremism. It has made mistakes. The extension of aid by this country does not mean that the United States condones everything

that the Greek Government has done or will do. We have condemned in the past, and we condemn now, extremist measures of the right or the left. We have in the past advised tolerance, and we advise tolerance now. Greece’s neighbor, Turkey, also deserves our attention. The future of Turkey as an independent and economically sound state is clearly no less important to the freedom-loving peoples of the world than the future of Greece. The circumstances in which Turkey finds itself today are considerably different from those of Greece. Turkey has been spared the disasters that have beset Greece. And during the war, the United States and Great Britain furnished Turkey with material aid. Nevertheless, Turkey now needs our support. Since the war Turkey has sought financial assistance from Great Britain and the United States for the purpose of effecting that modernization necessary for the maintenance of its national integrity. That integrity is essential to the preservation of order in the Middle East. The British government has informed us that, owing to its own difficulties [it] can no longer extend financial or economic aid to Turkey. As in the case of Greece, if Turkey is to have the assistance it needs, the United States must supply it. We are the only country able to provide that help. I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey, and I shall discuss these implications with you at this time. One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan. Our victory was won over countries which sought to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other nations. To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations. The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States. The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will. The Government of the United States has made frequent protests against coercion and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta agreement, in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. I must also state that in a number of other countries there have been similar developments. At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. The world is not static, and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in the status quo in violation of the Charter of the United Nations by such methods as coercion, or by such subterfuges as political infiltration. In helping free and independent nations to maintain their freedom, the United States will be giving effect to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. It is necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation. If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. Moreover, the disappearance of Greece as an independent state would have a profound effect upon those countries in Europe whose peoples are struggling against great difficulties to maintain their freedoms and their independence while they repair the damages of war. It would be an unspeakable tragedy if these countries, which have struggled so long against overwhelming odds, should lose that victory for which they sacrificed so much. Collapse of free institutions and loss of independence would be disastrous not only for them but for the world. Discouragement and possibly failure would quickly be the lot of neighboring peoples striving to maintain their freedom and independence. Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East. We must take immediate and resolute action. I therefore ask the Congress to provide authority for assistance to Greece and Turkey in the amount of $400,000,000 for the period ending June 30, 1948. In requesting these funds, I have taken into consideration the maximum amount of relief assistance which would be furnished to Greece out of the $350,000,000 which I recently requested that the Congress authorize for the prevention of starvation and suffering in countries devastated by the war. In addition to funds, I ask the Congress to authorize the detail of American civilian and military personnel to Greece and Turkey, at the request of those countries, to assist in the tasks of reconstruction, and for the purpose of supervising the use of such financial and material assistance as may be furnished. I recommend that authority also be provided for the instruction and training of selected Greek and Turkish personnel. Finally, I ask that the Congress provide authority which will permit the speediest and most effective use, in terms of needed commodities, supplies, and equipment, of such funds as may be authorized. If further funds, or further authority, should be needed for purposes indicated in this message, I shall not hesitate to bring the situation before the Congress. On this subject the Executive and Legislative branches of the Government must work together. This is a serious course upon which we embark. I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious. The United States contributed $341,000,000,000 toward winning World War II. This is an investment in world freedom and world peace. The assistance that I am recommending for Greece and Turkey amounts to little more than 1 tenth of 1 per cent of this investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure that it was not in vain. The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has

died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation. Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events. I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely. Source: Congressional Record, 80 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 1980–1981.

North Atlantic Treaty, Establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (April 4, 1949) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into existence as a result of a confluence of forces: Truman’s containment policy and the related Marshall Plan, Soviet actions in Eastern Europe from 1946 to 1949, the Berlin Crisis of 1948–1949, and America’s own global strategic interests that relied heavily on the fortified geopolitical and military defense of Western Europe. Foreign ministers of Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, the most important provision of which pledged the defense of any member nation in the event of an attack. Greece, Turkey (1952), and the Federal Republic of (West) Germany (1955) later joined. In 1955 the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense alliance of its own of satellite Communist states. Washington, DC Article 1 The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. Article 2 The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them. Article 3 In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack. Article 4 The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened. Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all; and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security. Article 6 For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack: —on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer; —on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer. Article 7 This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting, in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security. Article 8 Each Party declares that none of the international engagements now in force between it and any other of the Parties or any third state is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty. Article 9 The Parties hereby establish a council, on which each of them shall be represented, to consider matters concerning the implementation of this Treaty. The council shall be so organized as to be able to meet promptly at any time. The Council shall set up such subsidiary bodies as may be necessary; in particular it shall establish immediately a defense committee which shall recommend measures for the implementation of Articles 3 and 5. Article 10 The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America. The Government of the United States of America will inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession.

Article 11 This Treaty shall be ratified and its provisions carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited as soon as possible with the Government of the United States of America, which will notify all the other signatories of each deposit. The Treaty shall enter into force between the States which have ratified it as soon as the ratifications of the majority of the signatories, including the ratifications of Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, have been deposited and shall come into effect with respect to other states on the date of the deposit of their ratifications. Article 12 After the Treaty has been in force for ten years, or at any time thereafter, the Parties shall, if any of them so requests, consult together for the purpose of reviewing the Treaty, having regard for the factors then affecting peace and security in the North Atlantic area, including the development of universal as well as regional arrangements under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security. Article 13 After the Treaty has been in force for twenty years, any Party may cease to be a Party one year after its notice of denunciation has been given to the Government of the United States of America, which will inform the Governments of the other Parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation. Article 14 This Treaty, of which the English and French texts are equally authentic, shall be deposited in the archives of the Government of the United States of America. Duly certified copies will be transmitted by that Government to the Governments of the other signatories. Note: Article 6 of the Treaty was modified by Article II of the Protocol to the North Atlantic Treaty on the accession of Greece and Turkey (1952). Source: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “The North Atlantic Treaty.” Online Library. NATO Basic Texts. http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm.

Excerpts from Dean Acheson’s Speech on the Far East (January 12, 1950) In what proved to be a controversial speech, U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson (1893–1971) outlined U.S. policy in Asia at one of the darkest moments of the Cold War. Although Republicans were charging the so-called “fall of China” to Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in 1949 to have been a failure of the Democratic administration of Harry Truman, Acheson tried to offer a nuanced explanation: that the Chinese people had simply had enough of the Nationalist government, that there was a certain inevitability to what was perceived in the U.S. media as a transcendent event in the presumed global march of communism. More disturbing to critics was Acheson’s statement that the U.S. “defense perimeter” in Asia ran from the Aleutians through Japan and the Philippines, presumably excluding South Korea. “Other areas,” he said, would need to be defended by the United Nations. When the regime in North Korea invaded the South just six months later, part of the blame was assigned to Acheson, supposedly for having given a green light to the Communists.

… I am frequently asked: Has the State Department got an Asian policy? And it seems to me that that discloses such a depth of ignorance that it is very hard to begin to deal with it. The peoples of Asia are so incredibly diverse and their problems are so incredibly diverse that how could anyone, even the most utter charlatan, believe that he had a uniform policy which would deal with all of them. On the other hand, there are very important similarities in ideas and in problems among the peoples of Asia and so what we come to, after we understand these diversities and these common attitudes of mind, is the fact that there must be certain similarities of approach, and there must be very great dissimilarities in action…. There is in this vast area what we might call a developing Asian consciousness, and a developing pattern, and this, I think, is based upon two factors…. One of these factors is a revulsion against the acceptance of misery and poverty as the normal condition of life. Throughout all of this vast area, you have that fundamental revolutionary aspect in mind and belief. The other common aspect that they have is the revulsion against foreign domination. Whether that foreign domination takes the form of colonialism or whether it takes the form of imperialism, they are through with it. They have had enough of it, and they want no more…. Now, may I suggest to you that much of the bewilderment which has seized the minds of many of us about recent developments in China comes from a failure to understand this basic revolutionary force which is loose in Asia. The reasons for the fall of the Nationalist Government in China are preoccupying many people. All sorts of reasons have been attributed to it. Most commonly, it is said in various speeches and publications that it is the result of American bungling, that we are incompetent, that we did not understand, that American aid was too little, that we did the wrong things at the wrong time…. Now, what I ask you to do is to stop looking for a moment under the bed and under the chair and under the rug to find out these reasons, but rather to look at the broad picture and see whether something doesn’t suggest itself…. What has happened in my judgment is that the almost inexhaustible patience of the Chinese people in their misery ended. They did not bother to overthrow this government. There was really nothing to overthrow. They simply ignored it…. They completely withdrew their support from this government, and when that support was withdrawn, the whole military establishment disintegrated. Added to the grossest incompetence ever experienced by any military command was this total lack of support both in the armies and in the country, and so the whole matter just simply disintegrated. The Communists did not create this. The Communists did not create this condition. They did not create this revolutionary spirit. They did not create a great force which moved out from under Chiang Kai-shek. But they were shrewd and cunning to mount it, to ride this thing into victory and into power…. Now, let me come to another underlying and important factor which determines our relations and, in turn, our policy with the peoples of Asia. That is the attitude of the Soviet Union toward Asia, and particularly towards those parts of Asia which are contiguous to the Soviet Union, and with great particularity this afternoon, to north China. The attitude and interest of the Russians in north China, and in these other areas as well, long antedates communism. This is not something that has come out of communism at all. It long antedates it. But the Communist regime has added new methods, new skills, and new concepts to the thrust of Russian imperialism. This Communistic concept and techniques have armed Russian imperialism with a new and most insidious weapon of penetration. Armed with these new powers, what is happening in China is that the Soviet Union is detaching the northern provinces [areas] of China from China and is attaching them to the Soviet Union. This process is complete in outer Mongolia. It is nearly complete in Manchuria, and I am sure that in inner Mongolia and in Sinkiang there are very happy reports coming from Soviet agents to

Moscow. This is what is going on. It is the detachment of these whole areas, vast areas—populated by Chinese—the detachment of these areas from China and their attachment to the Soviet Union. I wish to state this and perhaps sin against my doctrine of nondogmatism, but I should like to suggest at any rate that this fact that the Soviet Union is taking the four northern provinces of China is the single most significant, most important fact, in the relation of any foreign power with Asia. What does that mean for us? It means something very, very significant. It means that nothing that we do and nothing that we say must be allowed to obscure the reality of this fact. All the efforts of propaganda will not be able to obscure it. The only thing that can obscure it is the folly of ill-conceived adventures on our part which easily could do so, and I urge all who are thinking about these foolish adventures to remember that we must not seize the unenviable position which the Russians have carved out for themselves. We must not undertake to deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger, and the wrath, and the hatred of the Chinese people which must develop. It would be folly to deflect it to ourselves. We must take the position we have always taken—that anyone who violates the integrity of China is the enemy of China and is acting contrary to our own interest. That, I suggest to you this afternoon, is the first and the great rule in regard to the formulation of American policy toward Asia. I suggest that the second rule is very like the first. That is to keep our own purposes perfectly straight, perfectly pure, and perfectly aboveboard and do not get them mixed-up with legal quibbles or the attempt to do one thing and really achieve another…. What is the situation in regard to the military security of the Pacific area, and what is our policy in regard to it? In the first place, the defeat and the disarmament of Japan has placed upon the United States the necessity of assuming the military defense of Japan so long as that is required, both in the interest of our security and in the interests of the security of the entire Pacific area and, in all honor, in the interest of Japanese security. We have American—and there are Australia[n]—troops in Japan. I am not in a position to speak for the Australians, but I can assure you that there is not intention of any sort of abandoning or weakening the defenses of Japan and that whatever arrangements are to be made either through permanent settlement or otherwise, that defense must and shall be maintained. The defensive perimeter runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus. We hold important defense positions in the Ryukyu Islands, and those we will continue to hold. In the interest of the population of the Ryukyu Islands, we will at an appropriate time offer to hold these islands under trusteeship of the United Nations. But they are essential parts of the defensive perimeter of the Pacific, and they must and will be held. The defensive perimeter runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands. Our relations, our defensive relations with the Philippines are contained in agreements between us. Those agreements are being loyally carried out and will be loyally carried out. Both peoples have learned by bitter experience the vital connections between our mutual defense requirements. We are in no doubt about that, and it is hardly necessary for me to say an attack on the Philippines could not and would not be tolerated by the United States. But I hasten to add that no one perceives the imminence of any such attack. So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack. But it must also be clear that such a guarantee is hardly sensible or necessary within the realm of practical relationship. Should such an attack occur—one hesitates to say where such an armed attack could come from—the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations which so far has not proved a weak reed to lean on by any people who are determined to protect their independence against outside aggression. But it is a

mistake, I think, in considering Pacific and Far Eastern problems to become obsessed with military considerations. Important as they are, there are other problems that press, and these other problems are not capable of solution through military means. These other problems arise out of the susceptibility of many areas, and many countries in the Pacific area, to subversion and penetration. That cannot be stopped [by] military means. The susceptibility to penetration arises because in many areas there are new governments which have little experience in governmental administration and have not become firmly established or perhaps firmly accepted in their countries. They grow, in part, from very serious economic problems…. In part this susceptibility to penetration comes from the great social upheaval about which I have been speaking…. So after this survey, what we conclude, I believe, is that there is a new day which has dawned in Asia. It is a day in which the Asian peoples are on their own, and know it, and intend to continue on their own. It is a day in which the old relationships between east and west are gone, relationships which at their worst were exploitations, and which at their best were paternalism. That relationship is over, and the relationship of east and west must now be in the Far East one of mutual respect and mutual helpfulness. We are their friends. Others are their friends. We and those others are willing to help, but we can help only where we are wanted and only where the conditions of help are really sensible and possible. So what we can see is that this new day in Asia, this new day which is dawning, may go on to a glorious noon or it may darken and it may drizzle out. But that decision lies within the countries of Asia and within the power of the Asian people. It is not a decision which a friend or even an enemy from the outside can decide for them. Source: Dean Acheson. “Crisis in Asia—An Examination of U.S. Policy.” Department of State Bulletin, 22, no. 551 (1950): 111–118.

Excerpts from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Enemies from Within” Speech, Delivered at Wheeling, West Virginia (February 9, 1950) and Senator McCarthy’s Follow-up Letter to President Harry Truman (February 11, 1950) Wisconsin U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) had first won his congressional seat in 1946 partly by his use of vitriolic anticommunist rhetoric. By 1950, anticommunism had come to define much of the nation’s politics. Partly in an effort to insulate his administration from further attack, President Truman had launched a “Loyalty Review” program aimed at purging all Communists from the federal government, while his Justice Department began to persecute members of “subversive” groups thought to be front organizations for the Communist Party. Thus although McCarthy’s infamous 1950 Lincoln Day address did not come out of the blue, his charge of 205 members of the Communist Party “shaping policy” in the State Department—revised down to 57 the next day in the letter to the president—riveted the nation’s attention on both the senator and the dangers of communism from within. The entire phenomenon of “McCarthyism” served in part to mask U.S. policy intentions abroad, further insulating America’s own geostrategic interests entirely behind the threat of communism abroad and from within. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate the one hundred forty-first birthday of one of the greatest men in American history, I would like to be able to talk about what a glorious day today is in the history of the world. As we celebrate the birth of this man who with his whole heart and soul hated war, I would like to be able to speak of peace in our time—of war being outlawed—and of world-wide

disarmament. These would be truly appropriate things to be able to mention as we celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. Five years after a world war has been won, men’s hearts should anticipate a long peace—and men’s minds should be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But this is not such a period—for this is not a period of peace. This is a time of “the cold war.” This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, increasingly hostile armed camps—a time of a great armament race. Today we can almost physically hear the mutterings and rumblings of an invigorated god of war. You can see it, feel it, and hear it all the way from the Indochina hills, from the shores of Formosa, right over into the very heart of Europe itself. The one encouraging thing is that the “mad moment” has not yet arrived for the firing of the gun or the exploding of the bomb which will set civilization about the final task of destroying itself. There is still a hope for peace if we finally decide that no longer can we safely blind our eyes and close our ears to those facts which are shaping up more and more clearly … and that is that we are now engaged in a show-down fight … not the usual war between nations for land areas or other material gains, but a war between two diametrically opposed ideologies. The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political, gentlemen, it is moral. For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous. Likewise, Lenin’s invention of the oneparty police state as a way to make Marx’s idea work is hardly less momentous. Stalin’s resolute putting across of these two ideas, of course, did much to divide the world. With only these differences, however, the east and the west could most certainly still live in peace. The real, basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immoralism … invented by Marx, preached feverishly by Lenin, and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin. This religion of immoralism, if the Red half of the world triumphs—and well it may, gentlemen—this religion of immoralism will more deeply wound and damage mankind than any conceivable economic or political system. Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax, and Lenin and Stalin have added in clear-cut, unmistakable language their resolve that no nation, no people who believe in a god, can exist side by side with their communistic state. Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as love, justice, humanity or morality. He called this “soulful ravings” and “sloppy sentimentality.” … Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down. Lest there be any doubt that the time has been chosen, let us go directly to the leader of communism today—Joseph Stalin. Here is what he said—not back in 1928, not before the war, not during the war— but 2 years after the last war was ended: “To think that the Communist revolution can be carried out peacefully, within the framework of a Christian democracy, means one has either gone out of one’s mind and lost all normal understanding, or has grossly and openly repudiated the Communist revolution.” … Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the Communist world has said the time is now? … that this is the time for the show-down between the democratic Christian world and the communistic atheistic world? Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long. Six years ago, … there was within the Soviet orbit, 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time, roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six

years later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in the cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.” … The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores … but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer … the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous…. I have here in my hand a list of 205 … a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department…. As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason…. He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of honesty and decency in government. Source: U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, 81st Cong., 2nd sess., 1954–1957.

Joseph McCarthy to President Harry Truman, February 11, 1950 In the Lincoln Day speech at Wheeling Thursday night I stated that the State Department harbors a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers who are helping to shape our foreign policy. I further stated that I have in my possession the names of 57 Communists who are in the State Department at present. A State Department spokesman promptly denied this, claiming that there is not a single Communist in the Department. You can convince yourself of the falsity of the State Department claim very easily. You will recall that you personally appointed a board to screen State Department employees for the purpose of weeding out fellow travelers—men whom the board considered dangerous to the security of this Nation. Your board did a painstaking job, and named hundreds which had been listed as dangerous to the security of the Nation, because of communistic connections. While the records are not available to me, I know absolutely of one group of approximately 300 certified to the Secretary for discharge because of communism. He actually only discharged approximately 80. I understand that this was done after lengthy consultation with the now-convicted traitor, Alger Hiss. I would suggest, therefore, Mr. President, that you simply pick up your phone and ask Mr. Acheson how many of those whom your board had labeled as dangerous Communists he failed to discharge. The day the House Un-American Activities Committee exposed Alger Hiss as an important link in an international Communist spy ring you signed an order forbidding the State Department’s giving any information in regard to the disloyalty or the communistic connections of anyone in that Department to the Congress.

Despite this State Department black-out, we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department. This list is available to you but you can get a much longer list by ordering Secretary Acheson to give you a list of those whom your own board listed as being disloyal and who are still working in the State Department. I believe the following is the minimum which can be expected of you in this case. 1. That you demand that Acheson give you and the proper congressional committee the names and a complete report on all of those who were placed in the Department by Alger Hiss, and all of those still working in the State Department who were listed by your board as bad security risks because of their communistic connections. 2. That you promptly revoke the order in which you provided under no circumstances could a congressional committee obtain any information or help in exposing Communists. Failure on your part will label the Democratic Party of being the bedfellow of international communism. Certainly this label is not deserved by the hundreds of thousands of loyal American Democrats throughout the Nation, and by the sizable number of able loyal Democrats in both the Senate and the House. Source: Joseph McCarthy to President Harry Truman, February 11, 1950, Congressional Record, 81st Congress.

NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950) In the wake of a series of alarming events in 1948–1949—most notably, the Berlin crisis, detonation of the Soviet atomic bomb, and the Communist rise to power in China—President Truman in January requested a review of U.S. and Soviet capabilities with an eye to revising U.S. defense strategy. Drafted primarily by Paul H. Nitze, director of policy planning at the State Department, National Security Council Paper NSC-68 was a highly classified 58-page policy document that portrayed the state of the Cold War in ominous, near-cataclysmic terms, arguing that the “slave state” of the Soviet Union was bent on outright global domination. The projection of a geopolitically divided bipolar world of “slavery” versus “freedom” could not—despite its claim to “bring about [global] order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy”—account for such incongruities as the numerous authoritarian, often brutal regimes either supported or installed by the United States throughout the Cold War. The section on “Means” is particularly telling in this regard. Calling for higher defense expenditures and in general a more aggressive application of containment of communism and associated rebellions throughout the world, NSC-68 served as the foundation of U.S. national security policy for the next quarter century. A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950 TOP SECRET [Washington,] April 7, 1950 ANALYSIS I. Background of the Present Crisis Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions—the Russian and the Chinese—of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires—the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese— and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French. During the span of one generation, the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered. For several centuries it had proved impossible for any one nation to gain such preponderant strength that a coalition of other nations could not in time face it with greater strength. The international scene was marked by recurring periods of violence and war, but a system of sovereign and independent states was maintained, over which no state was able to achieve hegemony. Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered this historic distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or nonviolent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war. On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the

Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled. It is in this context that this Republic and its citizens in the ascendancy of their strength stand in their deepest peril. The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions. II. Fundamental Purpose of the United States The fundamental purpose of the United States is laid down in the Preamble to the Constitution: “… to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In essence, the fundamental purpose is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual. Three realities emerge as a consequence of this purpose: Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life, for which as in the Declaration of Independence, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” III. Fundamental Design of the Kremlin The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas now under their control. In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority. The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design. IV. The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas and Values between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design A. NATURE OF CONFLICT The Kremlin regards the United States as the only major threat to the conflict between [the] idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin, which has come to a crisis with the polarization of power described in Section I, and the exclusive possession of atomic weapons by the two protagonists. The idea of freedom, moreover, is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of slavery. But the converse is not true. The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis.

The free society values the individual as an end in himself, requiring of him only that measure of selfdiscipline and self-restraint which make the rights of each individual compatible with the rights of every other individual. The freedom of the individual has as its counterpart, therefore, the negative responsibility of the individual not to exercise his freedom in ways inconsistent with the freedom of other individuals and the positive responsibility to make constructive use of his freedom in the building of a just society. From this idea of freedom with responsibility derives the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society. This is the explanation of the strength of free men. It constitutes the integrity and the vitality of a free and democratic system. The free society attempts to create and maintain an environment in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers. It also explains why the free society tolerates those within it who would use their freedom to destroy it. By the same token, in relations between nations, the prime reliance of the free society is on the strength and appeal of its idea, and it feels no compulsion sooner or later to bring all societies into conformity with it. For the free society does not fear, it welcomes, diversity. It derives its strength from its hospitality even to antipathetic ideas. It is a market for free trade in ideas, secure in its faith that free men will take the best wares, and grow to a fuller and better realization of their powers in exercising their choice. The idea of freedom is the most contagious idea in history, more contagious than the idea of submission to authority. For the breadth of freedom cannot be tolerated in a society which has come under the domination of an individual or group of individuals with a will to absolute power. Where the despot holds absolute power—the absolute power of the absolutely powerful will—all other wills must be subjugated in an act of willing submission, a degradation willed by the individual upon himself under the compulsion of a perverted faith…. The same compulsion which demands total power over all men within the Soviet state without a single exception, demands total power over all Communist Parties and all states under Soviet domination. Thus Stalin has said that the theory and tactics of Leninism as expounded by the Bolshevik party are mandatory for the proletarian parties of all countries. A true internationalist is defined as one who unhesitatingly upholds the position of the Soviet Union and in the satellite states true patriotism is love of the Soviet Union. By the same token the “peace policy” of the Soviet Union, described at a Party Congress as “a more advantageous form of fighting capitalism,” is a device to divide and immobilize the non-Communist world, and the peace the Soviet Union seeks is the peace of total conformity to Soviet policy. The antipathy of slavery to freedom explains the iron curtain, the isolation, the autarchy of the society whose end is absolute power. The existence and persistence of the idea of freedom is a permanent and continuous threat to the foundation of the slave society; and it therefore regards as intolerable the long continued existence of freedom in the world. What is new, what makes the continuing crisis, is the polarization of power which now inescapably confronts the slave society with the free. The assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere. The shock we sustained in the destruction of Czechoslovakia was not in the measure of Czechoslovakia’s material importance to us. In a material sense, her capabilities were already at Soviet disposal. But when the integrity of Czechoslovak institutions was destroyed, it was in the intangible scale of values that we registered a loss more damaging than the material loss we had already suffered. Thus unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully

and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power. B. OBJECTIVES The objectives of a free society are determined by its fundamental values and by the necessity for maintaining the material environment in which they flourish. Logically and in fact, therefore, the Kremlin’s challenge to the United States is directed not only to our values but to our physical capacity to protect their environment. It is a challenge which encompasses both peace and war and our objectives in peace and war must take account of it. 1. Thus we must make ourselves strong, both in the way in which we affirm our values in the conduct of our national life, and in the development of our military and economic strength. 2. We must lead in building a successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world. It is only by practical affirmation, abroad as well as at home, of our essential values, that we can preserve our own integrity, in which lies the real frustration of the Kremlin design. 3. But beyond thus affirming our values our policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system, a change toward which the frustration of the design is the first and perhaps the most important step. Clearly it will not only be less costly but more effective if this change occurs to a maximum extent as a result of internal forces in Soviet society. In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership. It demands that we make the attempt, and accept the risks inherent in it, to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We should limit our requirement of the Soviet Union to its participation with other nations on the basis of equality and respect for the rights of others. Subject to this requirement, we must with our allies and the former subject peoples seek to create a world society based on the principle of consent. Its framework cannot be inflexible. It will consist of many national communities of great and varying abilities and resources, and hence of war potential. The seeds of conflicts will inevitably exist or will come into being. To acknowledge this is only to acknowledge the impossibility of a final solution. Not to acknowledge it can be fatally dangerous in a world in which there are no final solutions…. There is no reason, in the event of war, for us to alter our overall objectives. They do not include unconditional surrender, the subjugation of the Russian peoples or a Russia shorn of its economic potential. Such a course would irrevocably unite the Russian people behind the regime which enslaves them. Rather these objectives contemplate Soviet acceptance of the specific and limited conditions requisite to an international environment in which free institutions can flourish, and in which the Russian peoples will have a new chance to work out their own destiny. If we can make the Russian people our allies in the enterprise we will obviously have made our task easier and victory more certain…. Coupled with the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union, the intensifying struggle requires us to face the fact that we can expect no lasting abatement of the crisis unless and until a change occurs in the nature of the Soviet system. C. MEANS

The free society is limited in its choice of means to achieve its ends. Compulsion is the negation of freedom, except when it is used to enforce the rights common to all. The resort to force, internally or externally, is therefore a last resort for a free society. The act is permissible only when one individual or groups of individuals within it threaten the basic rights of other individuals or when another society seeks to impose its will upon it. The free society cherishes and protects as fundamental the rights of the minority against the will of a majority, because these rights are the inalienable rights of each and every individual. The resort to force, to compulsion, to the imposition of its will is therefore a difficult and dangerous act for a free society, which is warranted only in the face of even greater dangers. The necessity of the act must be clear and compelling; the act must commend itself to the overwhelming majority as an inescapable exception to the basic idea of freedom; or the regenerative capacity of free men after the act has been performed will be endangered. The Kremlin is able to select whatever means are expedient in seeking to carry out its fundamental design. Thus it can make the best of several possible worlds, conducting the struggle on those levels where it considers it profitable and enjoying the benefits of a pseudo-peace on those levels where it is not ready for a contest. At the ideological or psychological level, in the struggle for men’s minds, the conflict is worldwide. At the political and economic level, within states and in the relations between states, the struggle for power is being intensified. And at the military level, the Kremlin has thus far been careful not to commit a technical breach of the peace, although using its vast forces to intimidate its neighbors, and to support an aggressive foreign policy, and not hesitating through its agents to resort to arms in favorable circumstances. The attempt to carry out its fundamental design is being pressed, therefore, with all means which are believed expedient in the present situation, and the Kremlin has inextricably engaged us in the conflict between its design and our purpose. We have no such freedom of choice, and least of all in the use of force. Resort to war is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot definitively end the fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas. The idea of slavery can only be overcome by the timely and persistent demonstration of the superiority of the idea of freedom. Military victory alone would only partially and perhaps only temporarily affect the fundamental conflict, for although the ability of the Kremlin to threaten our security might be for a time destroyed, the resurgence of totalitarian forces and the re-establishment of the Soviet system or its equivalent would not be long delayed unless great progress were made in the fundamental conflict. Practical and ideological considerations therefore both impel us to the conclusion that we have no choice but to demonstrate the superiority of the idea of freedom by its constructive application, and to attempt to change the world situation by means short of war in such a way as to frustrate the Kremlin design and hasten the decay of the Soviet system. For us the role of military power is to serve the national purpose by deterring an attack upon us while we seek by other means to create an environment in which our free society can flourish, and by fighting, if necessary, to defend the integrity and vitality of our free society and to defeat any aggressor. The Kremlin uses Soviet military power to back up and serve the Kremlin design. It does not hesitate to use military force aggressively if that course is expedient in the achievement of its design. The differences between our fundamental purpose and the Kremlin design, therefore, are reflected in our respective attitudes toward and use of military force. Our free society, confronted by a threat to its basic values, naturally will take such action, including the use of military force, as may be required to protect those values. The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of

frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values in actions as well as words forbid such measures, provided only they are appropriately calculated to that end and are not so excessive or misdirected as to make us enemies of the people instead of the evil men who have enslaved them…. B. ECONOMIC The Kremlin has no economic intentions unrelated to its overall policies. Economics in the Soviet world is not an end in itself. The Kremlin’s policy, in so far as it has to do with economics, is to utilize economic processes to contribute to the overall strength, particularly the war-making capacity of the Soviet system. The material welfare of the totalitariat is severely subordinated to the interest of the system. As for capabilities, even granting optimistic Soviet reports of production, the total economic strength of the U.S.S.R. compares with that of the U.S. as roughly one to four. This is reflected not only in gross national product (1949: USSR $65 billion; U.S. $250 billion), but in production of key commodities in 1949: Table 1:

Ingot Steel (million met. tons) Primary aluminum (thousand met. tons) Electric power (billion kwh) Crude oil (million met. tons)

U.S.

USSR

USSR and EUROPEAN ORBIT COMBINED

80.4 617.6

21.5 130–135

28.0 140–145

410 276.5

72 33.0

112 38.9

Assuming the maintenance of present policies, while a large U.S. advantage is likely to remain, the Soviet Union will be steadily reducing the discrepancy between its overall economic strength and that of the U.S. by continuing to devote proportionately more to capital investment than the U.S. But a full-scale effort by the U.S. would be capable of precipitately altering this trend. The USSR today is on a near maximum production basis. No matter what efforts Moscow might make, only a relatively slight change in the rate of increase in overall production could be brought about. In the U.S., on the other hand, a very rapid absolute expansion could be realized. The fact remains, however, that so long as the Soviet Union is virtually mobilized, and the United States has scarcely begun to summon up its forces, the greater capabilities of the U.S. are to that extent inoperative in the struggle for power. Moreover, as the Soviet attainment of an atomic capability has demonstrated, the totalitarian state, at least in time of peace, can focus its efforts on any given project far more readily than the democratic state. In other fields—general technological competence, skilled labor resources, productivity of labor force, etc.—the gap between the USSR and the U.S. roughly corresponds to the gap in production. In the field of scientific research, however, the margin of United States superiority is unclear, especially if the Kremlin can utilize European talents. C. MILITARY

The Soviet Union is developing the military capacity to support its design for world domination. The Soviet Union actually possesses armed forces far in excess of those necessary to defend its national territory. These armed forces are probably not yet considered by the Soviet Union to be sufficient to initiate a war which would involve the United States. This excessive strength, coupled now with an atomic capability, provides the Soviet Union with great coercive power for use in time of peace in furtherance of its objectives and serves as a deterrent to the victims of its aggression from taking any action in opposition to its tactics which would risk war. Should a major war occur in 1950 the Soviet Union and its satellites are considered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be in a sufficiently advanced state of preparation immediately to undertake and carry out the following campaigns. a. To overrun Western Europe, with the possible exception of the Iberian and Scandinavian Peninsulas; to drive toward the oil-bearing areas of the Near and Middle East; and to consolidate Communist gains in the Far East; b. To launch air attacks against the British Isles and air and sea attacks against the lines of communications of the Western Powers in the Atlantic and the Pacific; c. To attack selected targets with atomic weapons, now including the likelihood of such attacks against targets in Alaska, Canada, and the United States. Alternatively, this capability, coupled with other actions open to the Soviet Union, might deny the United Kingdom as an effective base of operations for allied forces. It also should be possible for the Soviet Union to prevent any allied “Normandy” type amphibious operations intended to force a reentry into the continent of Europe. After the Soviet Union completed its initial campaigns and consolidated its positions in the Western European area, it could simultaneously conduct: a. Full-scale air and limited sea operations against the British Isles; b. Invasions of the Iberian and Scandinavian Peninsulas; c. Further operations in the Near and Middle East, continued air operations against the North American continent, and air and sea operations against Atlantic and Pacific lines of communication; and d. Diversionary attacks in other areas. During the course of the offensive operations listed in the second and third paragraphs above, the Soviet Union will have an air defense capability with respect to the vital areas of its own and its satellites’ territories which can oppose but cannot prevent allied air operations against these areas. It is not known whether the Soviet Union possesses war reserves and arsenal capabilities sufficient to supply its satellite armies or even its own forces throughout a long war. It might not be in the interest of the Soviet Union to equip fully its satellite armies, since the possibility of defections would exist. It is not possible at this time to assess accurately the finite disadvantages to the Soviet Union which may accrue through the implementation of the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948, as amended, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949. It should be expected that, as this implementation progresses, the internal security situation of the recipient nations should improve concurrently. In addition, a strong United States military position, plus increases in the armaments of the nations of Western Europe, should strengthen the determination of the recipient nations to counter Soviet moves and in event of war could be

considered as likely to delay operations and increase the time required for the Soviet Union to overrun Western Europe. In all probability, although United States backing will stiffen their determination, the armaments increase under the present aid programs will not be of any major consequence prior to 1952. Unless the military strength of the Western European nations is increased on a much larger scale than under current programs and at an accelerated rate, it is more than likely that those nations will not be able to oppose even by 1960 the Soviet armed forces in war with any degree of effectiveness. Considering the Soviet Union military capability, the long-range allied military objective in Western Europe must envisage an increased military strength in that area sufficient possibly to deter the Soviet Union from a major war or, in any event, to delay materially the overrunning of Western Europe and, if feasible, to hold a bridgehead on the continent against Soviet Union offensives. We do not know accurately what the Soviet atomic capability is but the Central Intelligence Agency intelligence estimates, concurred in by State, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Atomic Energy Commission, assign to the Soviet Union a production capability giving it a fission bomb stockpile within the following ranges: Table 2: By mid-1950 By mid-1951 By mid-1952 By mid-1953 By mid-1954

10–20 25–45 45–90 70–135 200

This estimate is admittedly based on incomplete coverage of Soviet activities and represents the production capabilities of known or deducible Soviet plants. If others exist, as is possible, this estimate could lead us into a feeling of superiority in our atomic stockpile that might be dangerously misleading, particularly with regard to the timing of a possible Soviet offensive. On the other hand, if the Soviet Union experiences operating difficulties, this estimate would be reduced. There is some evidence that the Soviet Union is acquiring certain materials essential to research on and development of thermonuclear weapons. The Soviet Union now has aircraft able to deliver the atomic bomb. Our Intelligence estimates assign to the Soviet Union an atomic bomber capability already in excess of that needed to deliver available bombs. We have at present no evaluated estimate regarding the Soviet accuracy of delivery on target. It is believed that the Soviets cannot deliver their bombs on target with a degree of accuracy comparable to ours, but a planning estimate might well place it at 40–60 percent of bombs sorted. For planning purposes, therefore, the date the Soviets possess an atomic stockpile of 200 bombs would be a critical date for the United States, for the delivery of 100 atomic bombs on targets in the United States would seriously damage this country. At the time the Soviet Union has a substantial atomic stockpile and if it is assumed that it will strike a strong surprise blow and if it is assumed further that its atomic attacks will be met with no more effective defense opposition than the United States and its allies have programmed, results of those attacks could include: a. Laying waste to the British Isles and thus depriving the Western Powers of their use as a base; b. Destruction of the vital centers and of the communications of Western Europe, thus precluding effective defense by the Western Powers; and

c. Delivering devastating attacks on certain vital centers of the United States and Canada. The possession by the Soviet Union of a thermonuclear capability in addition to this substantial atomic stockpile would result in tremendously increased damage. During this decade, the defensive capabilities of the Soviet Union will probably be strengthened, particularly by the development and use of modern aircraft, aircraft warning and communications devices, and defensive guided missiles. Source: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, Volume I.

President Harry S. Truman’s Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea (July 19, 1950) (Including the Text of a Message from General Douglas MacArthur Describing the Situation in Korea) In his July 19, 1950, address to the nation on the situation in Korea, President Truman outlined the steps the United States and its military, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, had already taken to meet the June 25 invasion of the Republic of (South) Korea by the Communist forces of North Korea. President Truman explained the efforts made by his State Department to galvanize the United Nations toward reversing the “raw aggression” of Kim Il Sung’s forces. Not surprisingly, the history of Korea in the intervening five years since World War II was far more complicated than that presented by the president. Further, to count the Republic of Korea as a “free nation” was charitable; the authoritarian rule of the U.S.-supported Syngman Rhee had for several years resulted in widespread revolt and instability throughout the country. Such language, however, reflected the bipolar lens through which the United States viewed the world in these years, and also helped to shroud any strategic interest the United States might have in the greater Asian sphere, beyond protecting “freedom.” Delivered from the White House at 10:30 p.m. My fellow citizens: At noon today I sent a message to the Congress about the situation in Korea. I want to talk to you tonight about that situation, and about what it means to the security of the United States and to our hopes for peace in the world. Korea is a small country, thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American. On Sunday, June 25th, Communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea. This attack has made it clear, beyond all doubt, that the international Communist movement is willing to use armed invasion to conquer independent nations. An act of aggression such as this creates a very real danger to the security of all free nations. The attack upon Korea was an outright breach of the peace and a violation of the Charter of the United Nations. By their actions in Korea, Communist leaders have demonstrated their contempt for the basic moral principles on which the United Nations is founded. This is a direct challenge to the efforts of the free nations to build the kind of world in which men can live in freedom and peace. This challenge has been presented squarely. We must meet it squarely.

It is important for all of us to understand the essential facts as to how the situation in Korea came about. Before and during World War II, Korea was subject to Japanese rule. When the fighting stopped, it was agreed that troops of the Soviet Union would accept the surrender of the Japanese soldiers in the northern part of Korea, and that American forces would accept the surrender of the Japanese in the southern part. For this purpose, the 38th parallel was used as the dividing line. Later, the United Nations sought to establish Korea as a free and independent nation. A commission was sent out to supervise a free election in the whole of Korea. However, this election was held only in the southern part of the country, because the Soviet Union refused to permit an election for this purpose to be held in the northern part. Indeed, the Soviet authorities even refused to permit the United Nations Commission to visit northern Korea. Nevertheless, the United Nations decided to go ahead where it could. In August 1948 the Republic of Korea was established as a free and independent nation in that part of Korea south of the 38th parallel. In December 1948, the Soviet Union stated that it had withdrawn its troops from northern Korea and that a local government had been established there. However, the Communist authorities never have permitted the United Nations observers to visit northern Korea to see what was going on behind that part of the Iron Curtain. It was from that area, where the Communist authorities have been unwilling to let the outside world see what was going on, that the attack was launched against the Republic of Korea on June 25th. That attack came without provocation and without warning. It was an act of raw aggression, without a shadow of justification. I repeat that it was an act of raw aggression. It had no justification whatever. The Communist invasion was launched in great force, with planes, tanks, and artillery. The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up, make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted long in advance. As soon as word of the attack was received, Secretary of State Acheson called me at Independence, Mo., and informed me that, with my approval, he would ask for an immediate meeting of the United Nations Security Council. The Security Council met just 24 hours after the Communist invasion began. One of the main reasons the Security Council was set up was to act in such cases as this—to stop outbreaks of aggression in a hurry before they develop into general conflicts. In this case the Council passed a resolution which called for the invaders of Korea to stop fighting, and to withdraw. The Council called on all members of the United Nations to help carry out this resolution. The Communist invaders ignored the action of the Security Council and kept [r]ight on with their attack. The Security Council then met again. It recommended that members of the United Nations help the Republic of Korea repel the attack and help restore peace and security in that area. Fifty-two of the 59 countries which are members of the United Nations have given their support to the action taken by the Security Council to restore peace in Korea. These actions by the United Nations and its members are of great importance. The free nations have now made it clear that lawless aggression will be met with force. The free nations have learned the fateful lesson of the 1930’s. That lesson is that aggression must be met firmly. Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war. The principal effort to help the Koreans preserve their independence, and to help the United Nations restore peace, has been made by the United States. We have sent land, sea, and air forces to assist in these operations. We have done this because we know that what is at stake here is nothing less than our own national security and the peace of the world.

So far, two other nations—Australia and Great Britain—have sent planes to Korea; and six other nations—Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand—have made naval forces available. Under the flag of the United Nations a unified command has been established for all forces of the members of the United Nations fighting in Korea. Gen. Douglas MacArthur is the commander of this combined force. The prompt action of the United Nations to put down lawless aggression, and the prompt response to this action by free peoples all over the world, will stand as a landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations. Only a few countries have failed to [e]ndorse the efforts of the United Nations to stop the fighting in Korea. The most important of these is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has boycotted the meetings of the United Nations Security Council. It has refused to support the actions of the United Nations with respect to Korea. The United States requested the Soviet Government, 2 days after the fighting started, to use its influence with the North Koreans to have them withdraw. The Soviet Government refused. The Soviet Government has said many times that it wants peace in the world, but its attitude toward this act of aggression against the Republic of Korea is in direct contradiction of its statements. For our part, we shall continue to support the United Nations action to restore peace in the world. We know that it will take a hard, tough fight to halt the invasion, and to drive the Communists back. The invaders have been provided with enough equipment and supplies for a long campaign. They overwhelmed the lightly armed defense forces of the Korean Republic in the first few days and drove southward. Now, however, the Korean defenders have reorganized and are making a brave fight for their liberty, and an increasing number of American troops have joined them. Our forces have fought a skillful, rearguard delaying action, pending the arrival of reinforcements. Some of these reinforcements are now arriving; others are on the way from the United States. I should like to read you a part of a report I have received from General Collins, Chief of Staff of the United States Army. General Collins and General Vandenberg, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, have just returned from an inspection trip to Korea and Japan. This is what General Collins had to say: “The United States Armed Forces in Korea are giving a splendid account of themselves. “Our Far Eastern forces were organized and equipped primarily to perform peaceful occupation duties in Japan. However, under General MacArthur’s magnificent leadership, they have quickly adapted themselves to meet the deliberately planned attack of the North Korean Communist forces, which are well-equipped, well-led, and battle-trained, and which have at times outnumbered our troops by as much as 20 to 1. “Our Army troops, ably supported by tactical aircraft of the United States Air Force and Navy and our Australian friends, flying under the most adverse conditions of weather, have already distinguished themselves in the most difficult of military operations—a delaying action. The fact that they are preventing the Communists from overrunning Korea—which this calculated attack had been designed to accomplish—is a splendid tribute to the ability of our Armed Forces to convert quickly from the peaceful duties of occupation to the grim duties of war. “The task that confronts us is not an easy one, but I am confident of the outcome.” I shall also read to you part of a report that I received from General MacArthur within the last few hours. General MacArthur says:

“It is, of course, impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy the future incidents of a military campaign. Over a broad front involving continuous local struggles, there are bound to be ups and downs, losses as well as successes…. But the issue of battle is now fully joined and will proceed along lines of action in which we will not be without choice. Our hold upon the southern part of Korea represents a secure base. Our casualties, despite overwhelming odds, have been relatively light. Our strength will continually increase while that of the enemy will relatively decrease. His supply line is insecure. He has had his great chance and failed to exploit it. We are now in Korea in force, and with God’s help we are there to stay until the constitutional authority of the Republic of Korea is fully restored.” These and other reports I have received show that our Armed Forces are acting with [cl]ose teamwork and efficiency to meet the problems facing us in Korea. These reports are reassuring, but they also show that the job ahead of us in Korea is long and difficult. Furthermore, the fact that Communist forces have invaded Korea is a warning that there may be similar acts of aggression in other parts of the world. The free nations must be on their guard, more than ever before, against this kind of sneak attack. It is obvious that we must increase our military strength and preparedness immediately. There are three things we need to do. First, we need to send more men, equipment, and supplies to General MacArthur. Second, in view of the world situation, we need to build up our own Army, Navy, and Air Force over and above what is needed in Korea. Third, we need to speed up our work with other countries in strengthening our common defenses. To help meet these needs, I have already authorized increases in the size of our Armed Forces. These increases will come in part from volunteers, in part from Selective Service, and in part from the National Guard and the Reserves. I have also ordered that military supplies and equipment be obtained at a faster rate. The necessary increases in the size of our Armed Forces, and the additional equipment they must have, will cost about $10 billion, and I am asking the Congress to appropriate the amount required. These funds will be used to train men and equip them with tanks, planes, guns, and ships, in order to build the strength we need to help assure peace in the world. When we have worked out with other free countries an increased program for our common defense, I shall recommend to the Congress that additional funds be provided for this purpose. This is of great importance. The free nations face a worldwide threat. It must be met with a worldwide defense. The United States and other free nations can multiply their strength by joining with one another in a common effort to provide this defense. This is our best hope for peace. The things we need to do to build up our military defense will require considerable adjustment in our domestic economy. We have a tremendously rich and productive economy, and it is expanding every year. Our job now is to divert to defense purposes more of that tremendous productive capacity—more steel, more aluminum, more of a good many things. Some of the additional production for military purposes can come from making fuller use of plants which are not operating at capacity. But many of our industries are already going full tilt, and until we can add new capacity, some of the resources we need for the national defense will have to be taken from civilian uses. This requires us to take certain steps to make sure that we obtain the things we need for national defense, and at the same time guard against inflationary price rises. The steps that are needed now must be taken promptly.

In the message which I sent to the Congress today, I described the economic measures which are required at this time. First, we need laws which will insure prompt and adequate supplies for military and essential civilian use. I have therefore recommended that the Congress give the Government power to guide the flow of materials into essential uses, to restrict their use for nonessential purposes, and to prevent the accumulation of unnecessary inventories. Second, we must adopt measures to prevent inflation and to keep our Government in a sound financial condition. One of the major causes of inflation is the excessive use of credit. I have recommended that the Congress authorize the Government to set limits on installment buying and to curb speculation in agricultural commodities. In the housing field, where Government credit is an important factor, I have already directed that credit restraints be applied, and I have recommended that the Congress authorize further controls. As an additional safeguard against inflation, and to help finance our defense needs, it will be necessary to make substantial increases in taxes. This is a contribution to our national security that every one of us should stand ready to make. As soon as a balanced and fair tax program can be worked out, I sha[ll] lay it before the Congress. This tax program will have as a major aim the elimination of profiteering. Third, we should increase the production of goods needed for national defense. We must plan to enlarge our defense production, not just for the immediate future, but for the next several years. This will be primarily a task for our businessmen and workers. However, to help obtain the necessary increases, the Government should be authorized to provide certain types of financial assistance to private industry to increase defense production. Our military needs are large, and to meet them will require hard work and steady effort. I know that we can produce what we need if each of us does his part—each man, each woman, each soldier, each civilian. This is a time for all of us to pitch in and work together. I have been sorry to hear that some people have fallen victim to rumors in the last week or two, and have been buying up various things they have heard would be scarce. That is foolish—I say that is foolish, and it is selfish, very selfish, because hoarding results in entirely unnecessary local shortages. Hoarding food is especially foolish. There is plenty of food in this country. I have read that there have been runs on sugar in some cities. That is perfectly ridiculous. We now have more sugar available than ever before. There are ample supplies of our other basic foods also. Now, I sincerely hope that every American housewife will keep this in mind when she does her daily shopping. If I had thought that we were actually threatened by shortages of essential consumer goods, I should have recommended that price control and rationing be immediately instituted. But there is no such threat. We have to fear only those shortages which we ourselves artificially create. Every businessman who is trying to profiteer in time of national danger—and every person who is selfishly trying to get more than his neighbor—is doing just exactly the thing that any enemy of this country would want him to do. If prices should rise unduly because of excessive buying or speculation, I know our people will want the Government to take action, and I will not hesitate to recommend rationing and price control. We have the resources to meet our needs. Far more important, the American people are unified in their belief in democratic freedom. We are united in detesting Communist slavery. We know that the cost of freedom is high. But we are determined to preserve our freedom—no matter what the cost.

I know that our people are willing to do their part to support our soldiers and sailors and airmen who are fighting in Korea. I know that our fighting men can count on each and every one of you. Our country stands before the world as an example of how free men, under God, can build a community of neighbors, working together for the good of all. That is the goal we seek not only for ourselves, but for all people. We believe that freedom and peace are essential if men are to live as our Creator intended us to live. It is this faith that has guided us in the past, and it is this faith that will fortify us in the stern days ahead. Note: Following is the full text of the message from General Douglas MacArthur, which the president quoted in his address. The message was released by the White House on July 20. The President The White House The following is my current estimate of the Korean situation: With the deployment in Korea of major elements of the 8th Army now accomplished, the first phase of the campaign has ended and with it the chance for victory by the North Korean forces. The enemy’s plan and great opportunity depended upon the speed with which he could overrun South Korea once he had breached the Hart River line and with overwhelming numbers and superior weapons temporarily shattered South Korean resistance. This chance he has now lost through the extraordinary speed with which the 8th Army has been deployed from Japan to stem his rush. When he crashed the Hart Line the way seemed entirely open and victory was within his grasp. The desperate decision to throw in piecemeal American elements as they arrived by every available means of transport from Japan was the only hope to save the situation. The skill and valor thereafter displayed in successive holding actions by the ground forces in accordance with this concept, brilliantly supported in complete coordination by Air and Naval elements, forced the enemy into continued deployments, costly frontal attacks and confused logistics, which so slowed his advance and blunted his drive that we have bought the precious time necessary to build a secure base. I do not believe that history records a comparable operation which excelled the speed and precision with which the 8th Army, the Far East Air Force and the Seventh Fleet have been deployed to a distant land for immediate commitment to major operations. It merits highest commendation for the commanders, staffs and units concerned and attests to their superior training and high state of readiness to meet any eventuality. This finds added emphasis in the fact that the Far East Command, until the President’s great pronouncement to support the epochal action of the United Nations, had no slightest responsibility for the defense of the Free Republic of Korea. With the President’s decision it assumed a completely new and added mission. It is, of course, impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy future incidents of a military campaign. Over a broad front involving continuous local struggles, there are bound to be ups and downs, losses as well as successes. Our final stabilization line will unquestionably be rectified and tactical improvement will involve planned withdrawals as well as local advances. But the issue of battle is now fully joined and will proceed along lines of action in which we will not be without choice. Our hold upon the Southern part of Korea represents a secure base. Our casualties despite overwhelming odds have been relatively light. Our strength will continually increase while that of the enemy will relatively decrease. His supply line is insecure. He has had his great chance but failed to exploit it. We are now in Korea in force, and with God’s help we are there to stay until the constitutional authority of the Republic is fully restored.

MACARTHUR Source: Radio and Television Address to the American People on the Situation in Korea, doc #194. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1966.

United States Embassy, Iran Cable from C. Edward Wells, Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, to the Department of State Regarding the Pro-Soviet Film North Star (December 28, 1950) During the winter of 1942–1943, the news from the Eastern Front of World War II had been grim. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, acting through Office of War Information channels, suggested to MGM producer Samuel Goldwyn that the studio make a film about the courage and resolve of the Russian people in the face of Nazi aggression as a means of bolstering American support for the U.S. alliance with the Communist Soviet Union. The result was North Star, focused on a small Russian farming village early in the war. However, when the film was shown in Iran in 1950—with Cold War tensions reaching fever pitch and concerns about U.S. strategic interests in the country heightening—the U.S. embassy in Tehran made clear its position on the film. Subject: MOTION PICTURES—Pro-Soviet feature film NORTH STAR The Embassy has brought the Department’s attention to the fact that the Soviet-produced film FALL OF BERLIN was shown to the public in one of Tehran’s cinemas. This film was withdrawn at the request of the Iranian Government and replaced with NORTH STAR, an American-made film with a pro-Russian slant. Although NORTH STAR only played about one week, [t]he Embassy is interested in preventing a repetition of the showing of this film. Feature films are normally leased by exhibitors in Iran for a period of three years. As NORTH STAR is quite an old film, in all probability the lease has expired. It is a common practice for exhibitors in Iran to run films when legally they do not have the right to do so. For obvious reasons the Embassy has not made any special inquiry into the status of NORTH STAR. The Embassy would like to suggest, however, that the Department approach the U.S. distributor and request that prints of this film be withdrawn from circulation. To display publicly an American-made film which praises the Soviet Union can do considerable harm at this time. The Embassy feels certain that if the distributor knew the circumstances and the effect this film has in Iran he would be equally interested in seeing that it is no longer shown. Although NORTH STAR is the only film of this type that has come to the [E]mbassy’s attention, there are no doubt others made, with good intentions, when U.S.-Soviet relations were better than they are now. The distributors could assist the Embassy’s information program by making every effort to see that such films are not shown in critical areas such as this. For the Ambassador: C. Edward Wells Public Affairs Officer Source: National Archives. Record Group 59. Records of the Department of State. Decimal Files, 1950–1954.

Cable from U.S. Egyptian Embassy to State Department Regarding an Article in an Egyptian Newspaper on American Aid to Saudi Arabia (January 5, 1951)

This cable from an official at the U.S. embassy in Cairo to the State Department warns of the possibility that the allegedly “anti-American” reporting in an Egyptian newspaper may be cause for concern. The immediate source of apprehension stems first and foremost from the content of the article —focused on the growing U.S. strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia—but also on the source of the story, and the fact that the publication was partly subsidized by the Saudi government itself. The communiqué illustrates on one level how deeply the United States had waded into the geopolitically complex thicket of the Middle East and how sensitive U.S. officials were to representations of American actions in the region. Subject: Egyptian Newspaper Article on American Military Aid to Saudi Arabia The Embassy forwards for the Department’s information the enclosed translation of an article appearing January 1, 1951 in the Egyptian newspaper, El Ahwal, reporting in some detail on proposed American military assistance to Saudi Arabia. The Embassy has been informed that this newspaper is read regularly by a small but increasing number of Saudis. Its editors are apparently attempting to increase Hejaz circulation of the paper with articles of interest to its Saudi readers. The owner and editor-in-chief, Fahm Aql, visited Saudi Arabia some six months ago. At that time the Jidda agent for his paper told an Arab employee of the Embassy that Aql had been successful in his mission and had obtained the promise of a subsidy from the Saudi Government in return for his support of that Government and its policies. Aql has lived up to his part of the bargain. He is also known locally for the strong anti-American tone of his editorialized reporting of international news, although it is not immediately apparent why there should be anti-American bias in a publication subsidized by the Saudi Government. The Washington dateline of the article may be entirely fictitious, and it is possible that the report originated in another Egyptian publication or it may have been pirated from a foreign newspaper. It may even have been originated by a Saudi source familiar with the tenor of the current negotiations. In any case, the timeliness and relative accuracy of the article would appear to make its origin of more than passing interest to the Department. For the Ambassador: William D. Brewer Third Secretary of Embassy Source: National Archives. Department of State Lot Files 52–40. Mutual Defense Assistance Programs—Project Approvals.

Defense of Iceland: An Agreement between the United States and Iceland (May 5, 1951) Iceland and the North Atlantic had proven critically important in the defense of the United States during World War II. In the early years of the Cold War with Pentagon planners preparing for the possibility of a long-range attack from the Soviet Union, the strategic significance of Iceland was further magnified. The 1951 bilateral defense agreement between the United States and Iceland stipulated that the United States would ensure the defense of Iceland (a nation without a standing army) on behalf of NATO. It further provided basing rights for American forces. Iceland, therefore, joined the list of dozens of nations that by the early 1950s were hosting more than 200 U.S. military installations.

PREAMBLE Having regard to the fact that the people of Iceland cannot themselves adequately secure their own defenses, and whereas experience has shown that a country’s lack of defenses greatly endangers its security and that of its peaceful neighbors, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has requested, because of the unsettled state of world affairs, that the United States and Iceland in view of the collective efforts of the parties to the North Atlantic Treaty to preserve peace and security in the North Atlantic Treaty area, make arrangements for the use of facilities in Iceland in defense of Iceland and thus also the North Atlantic Treaty area. In conformity with this proposal the following Agreement has been entered into. ARTICLE I The United States on behalf of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in accordance with its responsibilities under the North Atlantic Treaty will make arrangements regarding the defense of Iceland subject to the conditions set forth in this Agreement. For this purpose and in view of the defense of the North Atlantic Treaty area, Iceland will provide such facilities in Iceland as are mutually agreed to be necessary. ARTICLE II Iceland will make all acquisitions of land and other arrangements required to permit entry upon and use of facilities in accordance with this Agreement, and the United States shall not be obliged to compensate Iceland or any national of Iceland or other person for such entry or use. ARTICLE III The national composition of forces, and the conditions under which they may enter upon and make use of facilities in Iceland pursuant to this Agreement, shall be determined in agreement with Iceland. ARTICLE IV The number of personnel to be stationed in Iceland pursuant to this Agreement shall be subject to the approval of the Icelandic Government. ARTICLE V The United States in carrying out its responsibilities under this Agreement shall do so in a manner that contributes to the maximum safety of the Icelandic people, keeping always in mind that Iceland has a sparse population and has been unarmed for centuries. Nothing in this Agreement shall be so construed as to impair the ultimate authority of Iceland with regard to Icelandic affairs. ARTICLE VI The Agreement of October 7, 1946, between the United States and Iceland for interim use of Keflavik Airport … shall terminate upon the coming into force of this Agreement whereupon Iceland will assume direction of and responsibility for civil aviation operations at Keflavik Airport. The United States and Iceland will negotiate appropriate arrangements concerning the organization of the Airport to coordinate the operation thereof with the defense of Iceland. ARTICLE VII Either Government may at any time, on notification to the other Government, request the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to review the continued necessity for the facilities and their utilization, and to make recommendations to the two Governments concerning the continuation of this Agreement. If

no understanding between the two Governments is reached as a result of such request for review within a period of six months from the date of the original request, either Government may at any time thereafter give notice of its intention to terminate the Agreement, and the Agreement shall then cease to be in force twelve months from the date of such notice. Whenever the contingency provided for in Articles 5 and 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty shall occur, the facilities, which will be afforded in accordance with this Agreement, shall be available for the same use. While such facilities are not being used for military purposes, necessary maintenance work will be performed by Iceland or Iceland will authorize its performance by the United States. ARTICLE VIII After signature by the appropriate authorities of the United States and Iceland, this Agreement, of which the English and Icelandic texts are equally authentic, shall come into force on the date of receipt by the Government of the United States of America of a notification from the Government of Iceland of its ratification of the Agreement. DONE at Reykjavik, this fifth day of May, 1951. Source: American Foreign Policy 1950–1955, Basic Documents Volumes I and II, Department of State Publication 6446, General Foreign Policy Series 117. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1957.

Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan (1951) In postwar Japan, the occupation of the defeated empire, presided over by General Douglas MacArthur, formally ended in 1951 with the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco that restored Japanese sovereignty. This simultaneous security agreement authorized a permanent U.S. military force to remain in Japan, one that has continued for more than 60 years to provide both for the defense of the country and the protection of U.S. interests in greater East Asia. The successful Chinese Communist revolution, coupled with the outbreak of the war in Korea, elevated the strategic importance of the U.S. military presence in Japan, while allowing that now-pacifist nation to channel its resources away from militarism and entirely into rebuilding its economy and society. Japan has this day signed a Treaty of Peace with the Allied Powers. On the coming into force of that Treaty, Japan will not have the effective means to exercise its inherent right of self-defense because it has been disarmed. There is danger to Japan in this situation because irresponsible militarism has not yet been driven from the world. Therefore Japan desires a Security Treaty with the United States of America to come into force simultaneously with the Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and Japan. The Treaty of Peace recognizes that Japan as a sovereign nation has the right to enter into collective security arrangements, and further, the Charter of the United Nations recognizes that all nations possess an inherent right of individual and collective self-defense. In exercise of these rights, Japan desires, as a provisional arrangement for its defense, that the United States of America should maintain armed forces of its own in and about Japan so as to deter armed attack upon Japan. The United States of America, in the interest of peace and security, is presently willing to maintain certain of its armed forces in and about Japan, in the expectation, however, that Japan will itself increasingly assume responsibility for its own defense against direct and indirect aggression, always avoiding any armament which could be an offensive threat or serve other than to promote peace and security in accordance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.

Accordingly, the two countries have agreed as follows: ARTICLE I Japan grants, and the United States of America accepts, the right, upon the coming into force of the Treaty of Peace and of this Treaty, to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about Japan. Such forces may be utilized to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East and to the security of Japan against armed attack from without, including assistance given at the express request of the Japanese Government to put down large-scale internal riots and disturbances in Japan, caused through instigation or intervention by an outside power or powers. ARTICLE II During the exercise of the right referred to in Article I, Japan will not grant, without the prior consent of the United States of America, any bases or any rights, powers or authority whatsoever, in or relating to bases or the right of garrison or of maneuver, or transit of ground, air or naval forces to any third power. ARTICLE III The conditions which shall govern the disposition of armed forces of the United States of America in and about Japan shall be determined by administrative agreements between the two Governments. ARTICLE IV This Treaty shall expire whenever in the opinion of the Governments of the United States of America and Japan there shall have come into force such United Nations arrangements or such alternative individual or collective security dispositions as will satisfactorily provide for the maintenance by the United Nations or otherwise of international peace and security in the Japan Area. ARTICLE V This Treaty shall be ratified by the United States of America and Japan and will come into force when instruments of ratification thereof have been exchanged by them at Washington.(1) IN WITNESS WHEREOF the undersigned Plenipotentiaries have signed this Treaty. DONE in duplicate at the city of San Francisco, in the English and Japanese languages, this eighth day of September, 1951. (1) Instruments of ratification were exchanged Apr. 28, 1952. Source: American Foreign Policy 1950–1955, Basic Documents Volumes I and II, Department of State Publication 6446, General Foreign Policy Series 117. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1957.

CIA Document on the Arbenz Government in Guatemala (1952) The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency began monitoring closely the activities of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1913–1971) in 1950, one year before he was popularly elected president of Guatemala. This fascinating internal communiqué from a CIA official in 1952 offers a full portrait of the president’s program, noting first and foremost that it was not radical as some in the U.S. national security establishment were fearing, but rather one that mirrored in many ways the New Deal program of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The document indicates also that Arbenz, as heavily dependent as his country’s economy was on the U.S. economy and not given ideologically to Soviet-style communism, was unlikely to establish any sort of relationship with America’s Cold War enemy. Nevertheless, the

CIA in June 1954 orchestrated Operation PBSUCCESS, deposing Arbenz Guzmán, installing a brutal military junta, and launching a long and bloody civil war. Guatemala City, October 10, 1952. No. 00-B-57327 1. Although President Arbenz appears to collaborate with the Communists and extremists to the detriment of Guatemala’s relations with the US, I am quite certain that he personally does not agree with the economic and political ideas of the Guatemalan or Soviet Communists, and I am equally certain that he is not now in a position where they can force him to make decisions in their favor. The reasons for my opinion are as follows: (a) The President’s social reform ideas stem from the US New Deal rather than from Soviet Communism. (b) President Arbenz is still convinced that he is “using” Communists and Communism to further his own ends. (c) He is fully aware of Guatemala’s economic dependence on the US. (d) Arbenz has no fear of a conservative coup and has taken no active steps to guard against one. (e) The “opposition” of business groups and conservatives (with the exception of a few landowners) has been greatly exaggerated. This is evidenced by the “surprising” lack of serious concern in most business circles about the effects of the new land reform bill. It is my personal fear that the chief threat to the Arbenz regime is a coup by rank opportunists within the “palace clique” who have sold out to Communist penetration. Such a coup would first assassinate the popular Arbenz, blame the reactionaries for his death, and then proceed to violently wipe out all conservative opposition. 2. Rather than setting up a Communist state, Arbenz desires to establish a “modern democracy” which would improve the lot of its people through paternalistic social reforms. Arbenz’ personal idol is FDR and his reforms are patterned after New Deal reforms and adjusted to the backward economy and social structure of Guatemala. None of the reforms is substantially extreme as compared to many of those in the US, Europe, and even in other Latin American countries. The extremities are relative and seem radical in Guatemala only because of the backward feudal situation they are meant to remedy. Also they seem extreme compared to the ineffective piecemeal measures of his predecessor, Arevalo. During Arevalo’s term, Arbenz often became angry at his weakness as a chief-of-state and realized that no effective social measures could be implemented while Arevalo was president. Satisfying his ambition to become president himself, and also with a sincere desire to fulfill his promises to his people, Arbenz went to work immediately and impatiently to implement his reforms and, as he put it, “to jar Guatemala out of the Middle Ages.” 3. President Arbenz is still convinced that he is “using” Communism to further his own ends and in no sense is he dictated to by Communist elements although he often plays into their hands in his attempts to use them and the Party line of world Communism. (a) When Arbenz came to power he feared a popular revolt more than anything else. He pictured himself as FDR in 1932 and followed what he thought was a similar course, that is, he achieved popular support by relieving some of the immediate economic and social pressure on the very

poor at the expense of the very rich. The reactionary group, in which Arbenz had many personal friends, fully expected him to reverse his field once his presidency was assured and forget his reform promises. When it became evident that he was serious about reform, the landowners became quite bitter and opposed him at every turn. The reactionaries immediately turned the Communist spotlight on all reform measures regardless of merit. (b) Sincere about reform and unable to get support for his program from any other source, he found the Party line of international Communism a ready-made tool with which he could organize the proletariat and control the country. Harping on US financial imperialism and on Guatemala’s oppressive land system, Arbenz became a popular hero at the calculated price of arousing US indignation. His best emotional appeal to the people was a platform that was anti-US and defiant of US corporate imperialism. Meanwhile the Communist organization which lined up and manifested popular support for Arbenz succeeded in penetrating his government. I am not aware of the extent of this penetration and I doubt that Arbenz is aware of it. (c) The President deals with his subordinates as individuals rather than thinking of them as organized groups. Roberto Fanjul, Minister of Economy and a close friend of Arbenz, told me several weeks ago that he was certain that the President’s sources of information were always “filtered through a Communist screen”. (Fanjul is loyal to Arbenz, I am convinced, but under pressure could not be expected to act effectively in his behalf.) Fanjul feels that Arbenz does not believe the Communists have penetrated far enough to harm him and that he does not realize the extent that the Communists claim his reforms as their own. Arbenz still feels he can carry out his objective of using the Communists without being controlled by them. Meanwhile I would say that eight out of ten of the government officials would swear they are not in favor of Communism but that they are using it for their own purposes…. 4. Arbenz realizes that Guatemala is economically dependent on the US but intends to bluff through his defiance of US corporations to any length short of national suicide. An integral part of his program is the removal of Guatemala from the category of a “subsidiary of United Fruit”. He is a stubborn idealist who is willing to risk his own wealth and who is able to enlist the support of others to risk their wealth on the gamble of getting national control of Guatemala’s fruit, coffee and chicle industries and its mineral and petroleum potential. Sacrifices are to be expected under this program and Arbenz is willing to make them. He feels that any hardships on his people resulting from defiance of US imperialism would be politically offset by its nationalistic appeal so as not to [a]ffect the perpetuity of the regime. 5. His goal is to assert the rights of the Guatemalan Government to dictate the terms under which foreign firms shall operate in the country, especially where the exploitation of natural resources is concerned. Knowing that his country will never be a large industrial nation and yet needing a sound economy to carry out his reform programs, Arbenz sees the only answer is expanding production and keeping a larger share of what is produced. Yet he realizes this is not possible without US markets and US capital. He realizes that if prices fell in the US or if US import restrictions barred Guatemala’s goods, his country would go bankrupt. Arbenz is determined this will not happen. He can only bluff because he has no place to turn. The one possibility would be the Soviet bloc, which might conceivably finance the country in order to maintain a western hemisphere subversion base. This is the one thing Arbenz does not want. He definitely would prefer US domination to Soviet domination. The best example of this is the fact that throughout his bluffing of US interests he has never used the potential weapon of proposed trade treaties with Soviet bloc countries, although it seems logical to assume that such commercial overtures have been made to

him. It is my belief that Arbenz will not go that far in bluffing the US. He may, however, bluff too long for the good of his regime. 6. Right now the entire economy is propped up by the price of coffee. A close friend of mine who has been a resident buyer for a US coffee firm for several years told me that if the price of coffee dropped five cents he would get out of Guatemala immediately. The price of coffee is high but the government depends on it to offset some of the losses of the other branches of the economy…. 7. In case of a drop in prices Arbenz still has his oil lands to fall back on, although his use of them as a last resort might come too late politically. He has held up their exploitation so far on nationalistic grounds, holding out for his right to dictate terms for oil exploitation. The government owns most of the oil lands outright and also owns the rights to all underground minerals as only surface rights are included in private titles. 8. Arbenz does not fear overthrow from reactionary groups. When I left Guatemala two weeks ago the President’s wife and three children had flown to Washington and from there to Switzerland where the children will be put in school. Someone asked the President if this household evacuation indicated that he anticipated any trouble. He denied it emphatically, stating the family had planned the move some time ago (Arbenz’ father was a Swiss immigrant). There is little real worry around Arbenz about an antiCommunist or reactionary coup. Arbenz and Fanjul both feel that there are just not enough large landholders who are interested in or capable of accomplishing a coup and that they could not line up the other dissident elements. The President has several very close friends in the reactionary ranks, all of whom are wealthy and would have less personal gain from Arbenz’ overthrow than some of the left-wing government officials. I believe the President is better informed on activities in the rightist opposition camp than within his leftist support groups. 9. The President has not taken the obvious precautions to guard against reactionary revolt. No arms have been distributed to Communist cells or labor groups (at least with his knowledge). 10. Many conservatives have come to view Arbenz as a “moderate” man. Paz Tejada, a staunch reactionary who had once threatened to kill Arbenz, is now on very friendly terms with him. The Communist-inspired agrarian reform bill which was to have met with fierce opposition from all conservative elements has actually been received with surprising calm by business interests and a great part of the landowners. One reason for the relaxing of their fears is the retention of the “last word” power by the President and by the appointment of his private secretary as administrator. 11. President Arbenz, who is constantly aware of the danger of administrative corruption in all reform legislation, has reserved the final authority on reform measures to rest with himself. This relieved the business interests and landholders as it was an indication of a “realistic” approach to land reform. There is confidence that the President himself would veto any attempt to expropriate land which is in active cultivation. 12. This reservation of authority in the case of new land reform law is viewed as unconstitutional by several elements. [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] opinion is that the President’s act definitely was unconstitutional. When I advised him of this fact he passed it off to expediency. No one else seemed to take it too seriously.

13. As most landowners are not too worried about having their cultivated land taken away they have also calmed their fears that the opening of new land would diminish their coffee labor force. It is pretty well agreed among the landowners that the Indians will not take on the extra labor and risk involved in leaving their communities and a steady source of food to take the chances involved in clearing and planting uncultivated, inaccessible land. 14. There may be a slight temporary shortage of auxiliary part-time help, but those that work and live on the fincas will probably not leave. [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] there are 35 families living there permanently. During coffee harvest about 80 more workers are recruited in the hills. These hill people are more or less independent but all envy the life of the workers on our finca, for whom we provide shelter and a year-round source of food. The finca dwellers feel they would be fools to leave and try working a strange plot of land. They would lose their place on the finca and risk crop failure on the government land, which would mean they would have to give it up. There is no entrepreneurial spirit among the native workers. Possibility of a Left-Wing Coup Against Arbenz 15. I believe that the regime is in no danger from a conservative coup but may possibly be in danger of a plot to send Guatemala violently to the left. This will not be possible while Arbenz is President, but there are many opportunists around Arbenz whose personal ambitions outweigh any political convictions. I personally am afraid of a “palace coup” which would accomplish the assassination of the popular Arbenz by the plotters who would blame the killing on reactionary elements. They would use this “outrage” as an excuse to violently “suppress a rightist’s revolution” and inaugurate a “peoples’ democracy” in Guatemala with themselves at the head. 16. These opportunists of whom I speak are such that they could be, and may already have been, approached by the Communist organization in Guatemala. The man I feel would be most capable of this is Alfonso Martinez, recently appointed by Arbenz to head the government department charged with administering the new land reform law. He is a fat, jovial, extrovert who has succeeded in gaining the complete confidence of Arbenz and who has acted as the President’s personal secretary. It was the President’s desire for direct personal supervision that prompted him to appoint Martinez to head this important department rather than a tendency to repudiate the known left-wing advocates of the bill, such as Charnaud MacDonald. This appointment was viewed with relief by the business and coffee growing interests…. 17. Incidentally, the health of the President is excellent, although he has lost about 20 lbs in the past few years. He is quite robust and active. He enjoys recreational sports, especially swimming and horseback. His morale is also excellent. Source: Central Intelligence Agency, Job 79-01025A, Box 139, Folder 6. Confidential; U.S. Officials Only.

CIA Propaganda Document Smearing Prime Minister Mosaddeq of Iran as a “Dictator” (Summer 1953) and CIA Summary Entitled “Campaign to Install a Pro-Western Government in Iran,” a Redacted Draft of the Internal History of the Coup That Overthrew Prime Minister Mosaddeq (1953)

In the early 1950s, Great Britain’s lucrative colonial control of Iran’s oil resources stood threatened by the nationalization policies of elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (1882–1967). In 1952, President Truman rebuffed appeals to collaborate with the British Secret Intelligence Service in an overthrow of the Mosaddeq government. President Eisenhower, however, brought to the national security establishment the Dulles brothers—John Foster as secretary of state and Allen, who headed the CIA. Both men were fervently committed anticommunists and U.S. internationalists, who harbored no compunction about the strongest possible exercise of all instruments of American power to advance the nation’s interests. Allen Dulles authorized the plan to overthrow Mosaddeq and install a pro– United States, Western-friendly government ruled by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–1980). The first document, generated amid the CIA’s Iran coup d’etat that summer of 1953 (code-named Operation AJAX), reveals the extent of the agency’s effort to publicly defame and discredit the popular and democratically elected prime minister. The second document is a heavily redacted draft of the internal agency overview of the success of the operation. CIA Propaganda Document Smearing Prime Minister Mosaddeq of Iran as a “Dictator“ OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER As long as foreigners have been coming to Iran—since the days of Shah Abbas—they have written many flattering things about Iranians in their books published in Italy, Germany, France and England. They complimented us highly and listed us as the most polite people in the world and among the most hospitable. They told their readers in Europe and America that we were polite to visitors and very tolerant of men of a different race and religion. Chardin, the astute French observer of the Iranian scene, made a very profound statement on this characteristic of politeness. The foreign travelers in Iran have described us as a gentle people with a wonderfully rich culture—a people that likes to spend long hours in friendly discussion but that abhors any form of physical violence. They wrote that Iranians love poetry, art and beauty and despise vulgarity and incivility. We Iranians are proud of our reputation abroad and believe that it is justified. There have been times in our past when we have not lived up to our reputation. We remember with shame what happened to Major Imbrie many years ago when a few people forgot our traditions of hospitality and tolerance. We have long been determined that such events do not recur in our country. But what has happened in Iran since the dictator Mossadeq [sic] made an alliance with the Soviet Tudeh Party? In place of our traditional friendliness, politeness, and hospitality, Iranians are becoming rude and unfriendly. Some of our people have been insulting foreigners on our streets. In place of our traditional tolerance, Iranians are acting increasingly hateful towards people who are different. Some of our people have even gone so far as to have thrown acid on the wife of the Argentine Ambassador. In place of our traditional gentleness and abhorrence of violence, Iranians are becoming noisy and rough and are resorting to physical violence. Some of our people have attacked foreigners and have stoned foreign cars and many times in recent days groups of our people have fought each other—even in the Majlis. Already our reputation of old is being destroyed in Europe and America. It is reported that Secretary Dulles was advised not to visit our country because of the dangers of physical violence. Ever since the alliance between the dictator Mossadeq and the Tudeh Party, Iranians have been less polite, less hospitable, and less tolerant. Iranians have been rude, rough, and unfriendly. Many of our people are acting more like Bolsheviks than like Iranians. Dictator Mossadeq. You are corrupting the character of the Iranian people. You have cast aside the qualities that have made us a great people and you are destroying our reputation abroad.

Many of us—but not enough of us—are aware that the fundamental tactics of the communists in Iran is to undermine and discredit everything that keeps the country together, such as family ties and parental authority, respect for law and order, loyalty to the government and the throne. If they can corrupt our characters th[e]n all the rest that they desire will follow along easily. That is the great trap into which Mossadeq has fallen, to join with the communists in encouraging us to be rude, uncouth and coarse. We Iranians must stop acting like Bolsheviks and remain true to our traditional national character. Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release. Available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/

CIA Summary Entitled “Campaign to Install a Pro-Western Government in Iran" CAMPAIGN TO INSTALL PRO-WESTERN GOVERNMENT IN IRAN TARGET Prime Minister Mossadeq [sic] and his government OBJECTIVES Through legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mossadeq government; and To replace it with a pro-Western government under the Shah’s leadership, with Zahedi as its Prime Minister CIA ACTION Plan of action was implemented in four phases: 1. ______________________________________________ to strengthen the Shah’s will to exercise his constitutional power and to sign those decrees necessary to effect the legal removal of Mossadeq as Prime Minister; 2. Welded together and coordinated the efforts of those political factions in Iran who were antagonistic toward Mossadeq, including the powerfully influential clergy, to gain their support and backing of any legal action taken by the Shah to accomplish Mossadeq’s removal; 3. ______________________________________________ disenchant the Iranian population with the myth of Mossadeq’s patriotism, by exposing his collaboration with the Communists and his manipulation of constitutional authority to serve his own personal ambitions for power; 4. ___________________________________________________________________. Simultaneously, conducted a “war of nerves” against Mossadeq designed to reveal to Mossadeq and to the general populace that increased economic aid would not be forthcoming and that the U.S. viewed with alarm Mossadeq’s policies: a. A series of public statements by high U.S. officials implying that there was little hope that Mossadeq could expect increased U.S. aid; b. U.S. press and magazine articles which were critical of him and his methods; and c. ___________________________ absence of the American Ambassador, lending credence to the impression that the U.S. had lost confidence in Mossadeq and his government. RESULTS The original D-Day set by CIA misfired when Mossadeq, learning of the plan through a leak _______________ took immediate counteraction to neutralize the plan.

______________________________________________________ was launched in the interim period between the original and final D-Days to educate the Iranian population to the fact that, in view of the dissolution of the Majlis (effected by Mossadeq at an earlier stage to prevent its voting him out of power) and the Shah’s decree removing Mossadeq as Prime Minister, Mossadeq’s continued exercise of the powers of that office was illegal and that authority to govern the people rested solely and completely in the hands of the Shah. The Nationalists and the Communists during this period inadvertently assisted our cause through their premature attempts to promote a republican government. This theme was contrary to the public’s opinion, whose sympathies were with the Shah. The Shah’s dramatic flight out of the country served to further intensify his people’s sense of loyalty to him. These actions resulted in literal revolt of the population, ____________________________. The military and security forces joined the populace. Radio Tehran was taken over and Mossadeq was forced to flee on 17 Aug 53. The ouster of Mossadeq was successfully accomplished on 19 Aug 1953. NOTE 1. _________________________________________________________________. 2. That an adequate amount of U.S. interim economic aid would be forthcoming to the successor government. Source: CIA Freedom of Information Act release; available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/

Philip C. Roettinger Recalls the 1954 CIA Coup in Guatemala (1986) Former CIA case officer Philip Roettinger (1915–2002) was 70 years old when he wrote this rueful public confessional about his experiences helping to orchestrate the CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS that overthrew Guatemalan president Arbenz Guzmán. It is night and we are encamped in a remote area. A ragtag group rests around a fire. They are rebels, trading war stories and laughingly planning what they will do when they take over the capital [of Guatemala]. Uninterested in social reforms and untouched by ideological conviction, they haven’t heard the President of the United States describe their mission as preventing the establishment of a communist beachhead in the Western hemisphere. They just want to overthrow the government…. As a CIA case officer, I trained Guatemalan exiles in Honduras to invade their country and oust their democratically elected President, Jacob[o] Arbenz. I now think my involvement in the overthrow of Arbenz was a terrible mistake. The reasons the Eisenhower administration gave were false; the consequences were disastrous. In March 1954, three months before we toppled Arbenz and installed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, our handpicked “Liberator,” CIA director Allen Dulles convened his Guatemalan operatives at Opa Locka Marine Base in Miami for a pep talk. Seated in front of us, resplendent [shining] in a tweed sport coat and puffing a pipe, Dulles exhorted [advised] us to do our jobs well and told us the same lie Ronald Reagan is telling the people today: The purpose of the U.S. support for the rebels is to stop the spread of communism. But communism was not a threat we were fighting. The threat was land reform. Fulfilling a pledge to transform Guatemala into a “modern capitalist state,” Arbenz had taken over some unused land belonging

to the United Fruit Company. The Boston-based company, which considered its rights superior to those of Guatemalans, retaliated with a publicity campaign to paint Guatemala red [Communist]…. “Operation PBSUCCESS” was a failure. The new regime [Castillo Armas] burned books. It disfranchised [deprived of the right to vote] three-fourths of Guatemala’s people. It dismantled [took apart] social and economic reforms such as land redistribution, social security, and trade-union rights. Our overthrow began thirty-one years of repressive military rule and the deaths of more than 100,000 Guatemalans…. The coup I helped engineer in 1954 inaugurated an unprecedented era of intransigent [uncompromising] military rule in Central America. Generals and colonels acted with impunity [knew their actions would go unpunished] to wipe out dissent and amass wealth for themselves and their cronies [friends]…. I am 70 years old now. I have lived and worked in Latin America for more than thirty years. Done with skullduggery, I devote my time to painting the region’s beautiful scenery. It’s painful to look as my government repeats the mistake in which it engaged me thirty-two years ago. I have grown up. I only wish my government would do the same. Source: Philip C. Roettinger, “The Company Then and Now,” The Progressive, July 1986, 50. Reprinted by permission of The Progressive, Inc., www.progressive.org.

2. Vietnam and the Limits of American Power, 1955–1975

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In the mid-1950s, American moviegoers could see nearly 50 new Hollywood westerns every year at their local theaters. It is no coincidence that the western, the ultimate mythical expression of American continental expansion, flourished in a postwar climate of not only rapid economic growth at home, but also of widening confidence about the heroic purpose and self-imposed responsibilities of the United States in a dangerous world. In the context of a global Cold War against communism, the western—though an ostensibly “historical” genre—often reinforced both the superiority of free markets and liberal capitalism, and the need to protect that more advanced civilization from menacing forces. Fast-forward two decades and the western was virtually gone from the silver screen, along with much of the Cold War orthodoxy of its glory years. A similar fate befell G.I. Joe, the iconic toy soldier who debuted in 1964. By the 1970s, with America’s real G.I.s retreating from Vietnam, G.I. Joe had been retooled as a series of “Adventure Team” heroes. It was indeed largely the Vietnam War that forced the United States to confront a world that seemed at a minimum far more geopolitically complex than it had 20 years earlier. Along with the fallout from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Vietnam imposed new limits on American foreign policy and rendered John Wayne and G.I. Joe as culture heroes from another age, when Americans still unwaveringly believed in both their moral righteousness and military invincibility. Nevertheless, this critical period in U.S. relations with the world began with an amalgam of both hubris and uncertainty. Presaged by the second phase of the Korean War (1950–1953) that had provoked Chinese intervention and an ultimately unsettling conclusion to the war, the risks and ramifications of an expansionist U.S. foreign policy were made evident early on elsewhere in Asia: in two crises involving the Taiwan Strait that separated the Chinese mainland—after 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) —from Formosa (Taiwan), where the regime of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (ROC) had fled after the Chinese Civil War. U.S. intervention in Korea had effectively delayed a resumption of the war over the fate of Jimmen and Mazu, two groups of islands in the Taiwan Strait. The ROC had established a military presence on the islands and used them as a base from which to begin shelling the coast of what was now Communist China. The creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 and open discussions about a Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of China angered the Chinese Communists. In turn, the PRC’s attack on the Taiwan Strait islands alarmed U.S. officials, who determined to protect the ROC but feared a wider Asian war. Nonetheless, the United States committed military support in the event of war with Communist China. Before the crisis ended, the U.S. Congress passed the “Formosa Resolution,” giving President Dwight D. Eisenhower authority to use military force

to defend American interests in the Taiwan Strait. Hardline anticommunist officials in his administration argued for a nuclear strike. A second Taiwan crisis erupted in August 1958—this time coinciding with U.S. military intervention in Lebanon. The PRC, determined to claim sovereignty over Taiwan and seeing an opportunity to assert its leadership of the Communist world, began shelling Jimmen and Mazu again. The PRC claimed to be acting in solidarity with Lebanese forces resisting U.S. imperial intervention in the Middle East. Amid the two crises, the United Nations General Assembly called for withdrawal of British forces from Jordan and American marines from Lebanon. Meanwhile, PRC leader Mao Zedong, engaged in a strategy to win geopolitical high ground, had managed to lure the United States into exchanging fire briefly with his forces in the Taiwan Strait. Believing he had succeeded in snaring the United States in a diversionary confrontation, Mao stopped the shelling and called for improved U.S.-PRC relations. The 1958 U.S. marine landing in Lebanon, generally hailed as the start of a peaceful and successful intervention, would have far-reaching ramifications. Committed to a U.S. strategy to supplant the British as the dominant Western power in the Middle East, in 1957 Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) articulated the Eisenhower Doctrine, declaring U.S. interests in the region and a willingness to employ military force to protect them. Behind the policy lay not only the alliance of Syria and Egypt with the Soviet Union, but the larger issue of pan-Arab nationalism led by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970). Though Arab nationalism was first and foremost anti-imperialist and secondarily proSoviet, both the United States and the pro-Western president of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun (1900–1987), saw it as a threat. Thus, when a bloody coup deposed the pro-Western king of Iraq in July 1958 and with the appeal of Arab nationalism sweeping his country, Chamoun panicked. His call to change the Lebanese constitution to extend his presidency fueled antigovernment protest. He then hurried a request to Eisenhower seeking U.S. forces to defend his regime. The president deployed 14,000 American troops in a largely bloodless action that ended with U.S. diplomats pressuring Chamoun to accept a peaceful transfer of power. This first-ever U.S. military intervention into the Middle East bolstered Washington’s view of the necessity for a robust projection of U.S. military power. Events in Taiwan and Lebanon not only set the precedent for the use of armed force without a congressional declaration of war, they also complicated the Eisenhower administration’s “New Look” overall national security strategy, one that leaned heavily on the threat of “massive retaliation” by U.S. nuclear forces. National security experts outside the administration wondered aloud whether Taiwan was really worth the risk of nuclear war. These episodes seemed to demand that the United States reassert a credible willingness to respond to threats more nimbly with a range of nonnuclear tactics—what the Kennedy administration would term “Flexible Response.” John F. Kennedy (JFK) was elected president in 1960 in part on a promise to close a “missile gap” that had allegedly opened up between the Soviet Union and the United States, and to act more adroitly and with greater vigor in responding to threats to U.S. interests. However, just as the prior charge of a “bomber gap” turned out to be false, so too did the missile gap. Indeed, as Kennedy took the oath of office in January 1961, it was the United States that had the strategic advantage in overall nuclear weapons delivery systems. Outgoing President Eisenhower had come to the same conclusion based on his own independent assessments of Soviet capabilities—reinforced since 1956 through U-2 surveillance flights over Soviet defense installations. In the meantime, American fear levels had spiked again with the launch of Sputnik and further warnings that U.S. preparedness had fallen dangerously behind that of the Soviets. Eisenhower was having none of it. Confounded by what seemed like the loss of presidential control over the military

procurement process, Eisenhower alerted the nation to an insidious, powerful, and potentially dangerous arrangement of economic and political forces he termed the “military-industrial complex” that was inherent in the growth of a vast military establishment. Eisenhower warned that the interests benefiting from the increasingly militarized national security state Americans had created—from congressmen and defense contractors to the bureaucracies of each branch of the military, to scientists and research universities, to Americans themselves increasingly dependent on a permanent war economy—were not only helping to drive military budgets to exorbitant levels, but also striking at the heart of the institutions of republican government. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, President Kennedy’s foreign policy was far more complicated than the traditional view that has long prevailed: that of a tough cold warrior who was willing to have his nation “pay any price” to win the epic conflict. What has emerged is the portrait of a president who had not only determined to avoid armed confrontation with the Communists, but also was challenging fundamental assumptions about the U.S. relationship with the undeveloped “Third World.” Kennedy clearly believed the United States had a special, indispensable role to play in shaping the course of global events, but he had long espoused the view that America needed to reposition itself strategically amid the forces of nationalist rebellion then sweeping Africa, Asia, and much of Latin America. If the United States were to defeat communism worldwide, JFK concluded, America would need to better understand the aspirations of peoples then in revolt around the world, struggling to free themselves from the yoke of Western imperialism and looking increasingly to Marxist models of liberation. The nation’s foreign policy would have to be redirected away from imperialist policies of armed confrontation and covert operations like the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba he had mistakenly approved, and toward diplomatic engagement and economic development initiatives like his Latin American “Alliance for Progress.” Despite much bellicose rhetoric in the first two years of his presidency, often matched with a buildup of U.S. forces in places like Laos and Vietnam, the strong, persistent undertow of Kennedy’s foreign policy was anti-imperialist. The tragically short Kennedy presidency meant, of course, that the world would never know for certain whether the Cold War could have ended two decades earlier, and if, as many scholars have argued, the Vietnam War would have been avoided. What is clear from the historical record is that Kennedy was challenging the heart of the national security establishment and had repeatedly gone toe-totoe with its most ardent hardline militarists—the real men and mindset that were pilloried in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The escalation of the conflict in Vietnam remains the essential tragedy of America’s resolve to win the Cold War. Students of Vietnamese history and culture could have predicted (and many did) that Americans could not win in Vietnam. The 1958 bestseller The Ugly American had accurately distilled the problem of America’s ignorant hubris in Southeast Asia. Coupled with a strategically distorted inclination to see Vietnam fundamentally as critical to the global containment of communism and not as a localized antiimperial nationalist struggle, the inability to appreciate the history of the Vietnamese struggle for independence doomed U.S. policy. The failure to recognize Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence in 1945, the subsequent support of the French, and the sabotage of the Geneva Accords that would have brought an electoral unification of the country in 1956 put the United States on a path toward direct military conflict with Ho’s Viet Minh forces. The corrupt despotism of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon all but guaranteed the armed insurgency of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960. It long ago became clear that what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 was the inevitable culmination of months of intensified, provocative military activity by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces against North Vietnam. What followed that pivotal event was the rapid buildup of American forces and all

the technological-military firepower that any army has ever brought to war. The U.S. military effort in Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos from 1965 to 1975 featured the use of napalm and other incendiary weapons, 20 million gallons of the defoliating herbicide Agent Orange, and more than 8 million tons of bombs—more than was used in all of World War II. While Americans mourned the loss of more than 58,000 soldiers, well over two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed. Sudden, often savage tactics employed by Communist forces took a heavy psychological toll on American soldiers. In addition, the near obsession of the U.S. military command with high body counts, and the inability of U.S. forces to distinguish “friendlies” from the Vietnamese Communist soldiers produced massive casualties among the rural peasant population. Although the U.S.-Communist “kill ratio” looked good in the U.S. military’s new computers, the essential political war for the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese never had a chance in the face of the U.S. strategy, one that resulted inevitably in widespread, indiscriminate civilian deaths. The Tet Offensive in 1968 proved the turning point at home. Promised repeatedly that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam, Americans were shocked at the ability of a Communist enemy seemingly on the ropes to mount a highly coordinated—and at least initially stunningly successful—series of attacks on dozens of targets throughout South Vietnam. When it was all over a few weeks later, pronouncements of victory by U.S. military officials met a deeply divided and skeptical public. Top officials in the Johnson administration now confronted the reality of a seemingly unwinnable war. Peace talks with the government in Hanoi began that spring, and soon thereafter came the beginning of a slow drawdown of U.S. forces. What transpired between Tet and the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 that ultimately brought a final U.S. withdrawal was President Richard Nixon’s continued prosecution of the war. Although Nixon had promised a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam, he and National Security Adviser (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger determined to keep the military pressure on the North Vietnamese. That they did. The secret bombing of Cambodia alone killed more than 600,000 civilians. Nixon and Kissinger’s bombing campaign, coupled with the 1970 ground invasion of Cambodia, further destabilized that nation’s government and emboldened the Communist Khmer Rouge, indirectly helping to open the door to the genocidal horrors that followed under Pol Pot. In the meantime, the United States withdrew the last of its troops in 1975. Americans at home watched the humiliating spectacle of all remaining U.S. personnel in the country evacuating from the rooftop of the embassy in Saigon—soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City—as Communist forces streamed into the capital and claimed victory. The United States, the greatest military power in world history, had suffered its first significant defeat in war—at the hands of what Kissinger had termed a “fourth-rate” power. At home, U.S. government officials faced growing resistance to U.S. intervention abroad. By the mid1960s, student activists had honed their political skills through involvement in the civil rights movement. A few had raised questions about the U.S. atomic weapons testing program, U.S. support for apartheid South Africa, and the concentration of power in the military-industrial complex. They listened to Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Phil Ochs’s “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and saw films like Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May as not entirely fictional representations of an out-of-control national security state. Campus activists joined other critics of U.S. foreign policy in raising questions over U.S. interventions elsewhere in Greece, Lebanon, and the Dominican Republic. It is not surprising, then, that a fervent antiwar movement paralleled the escalation of the war in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. As the casualties rose, so did the temperament of activists, shifting from peaceful protest to active, often confrontational resistance by 1967—the same year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared the United States to be on the wrong side of history in Vietnam and to be the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

Amid the tumult of 1968, more than a few radicals convinced themselves that they were now engaged in revolutionary struggle against a global empire, their own government. The rebellious lyrics of musical groups like the Jefferson Airplane—“I see the empire is breaking down from the inside,” they sang in 1971—provided the soundtrack for a movement that at times was seduced by fantasies of revolution that bore little resemblance to the realities of power. Equally alluring was the anti-imperialist rhetoric of leaders of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Chicano movement. Although the prolonged end to the Vietnam War gave antiwar activists little sense of victory, it was clear in hindsight that the movement had made a difference in restraining the actions of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. From the beginning, intellectual critics of the war and student activists had raised fundamental questions about the purpose, mission, and image of the United States in the world. In the wake of the defeat in Vietnam, those issues now confronted the nation. Even as Nixon and Kissinger were forced by Congress to end the bombing in Cambodia and pull out of Vietnam, the fact that in 1973 they had to secretly orchestrate through the CIA the overthrow of Salvador Allende from the presidency in Chile signaled in one sense that the United States was now operating in a political climate that restrained the open exercise of American military power. Although covert operations and aggressive support for authoritarian regimes allied with U.S. interests from South Africa to Australia continued unabated, it was a new era calling for limits on the deployment of U.S. troops. That was made clear during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. The United States had supported Israel in its 1967 Six-Day War against neighboring Arab states and now was compelled to send weapons round-the-clock to support the nation’s effort to defend itself from an Arab counterassault. Amid the crisis, President Nixon brought U.S. nuclear forces to their highest stage of alert since the Cuban Missile Crisis and threatened to send U.S. troops into the Middle East to seize Arab oil fields. Ultimately, however, Nixon sent Secretary of State Kissinger on a furious round of “shuttle diplomacy” to help negotiate a cease-fire and engage in longer-range talks on broader regional issues aimed at recognizing both Israeli security and the legitimate demands of Arab peoples. Opinion polls at the time indicated overwhelming opposition to U.S. intervention in the Middle East; diplomacy was both the logical and only course, politically speaking. When Arab member states of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo on oil in retaliation for U.S. support to Israel, it was clear that the American Century had arrived at a difficult passage. The OPEC embargo triggered a sharp rise in the price of gas and energy generally, sending shock waves through the American economy. It became only phase one of the 1970s “Energy Crisis,” the signature event of an “age of limits” in which Americans would have to reckon with the geopolitical realities of not only diminished energy supplies, but perhaps even more disturbingly the incapacity of their leaders to shape and direct global events.

Antiwar Movement Perhaps more than any other segment of the population, youth played a significant role in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. In the spring of 1959, Ken Calkins, while working with the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago, formed the Student Peace Union (SPU). By 1962, the SPU had grown to more than 3,000 members. Along with TOCSIN, a student group at Harvard University, the SPU organized the Washington Action in November 1961 to protest nuclear testing and civil defense. This protest brought more than 5,000 demonstrators to the nation’s capital to march in front of the White House.

Anti–Vietnam War dissent exploded after the Johnson administration initiated Operation Rolling Thunder in the late winter of 1965. Invoking the language of the nonviolent civil rights movement, a “Teach-In” against the Vietnam War was held at the University of Michigan on March 24–25. More than 3,000 students and faculty members took part in debates, discussions, and lectures centered on the history of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia. By the end of the semester, an additional 120 campuses around the nation held teach-ins. An important organization on the campuses was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). After separating from its parent organization, the social-democratic League for Industrial Democracy, in 1962, SDS became the largest and most effective student organization in the country. Although initially more interested in community organizing efforts, SDS organized a march on Washington against the Vietnam War on April 17, 1965. More than 20,000 activists attended the march, making it the largest antiwar demonstration ever organized in America until that point. Following the march, however, SDS, for a variety of reasons, refused to take a leadership role in the antiwar movement. As a result, an umbrella organization, the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, took the lead and organized events across the country for the International Days of Protest held in October 1965. Approximately 100,000 people took part in protests in 80 cities across several countries. While the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) shouted “Black Power” and promoted black separatism, the Black Panthers allied with the mostly white antiwar movement. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the Black Panther Party (BPP) spoke of black people as living in an internal colony within America. The BPP, as a result, viewed the antiwar movement as part of a worldwide anti-imperialist campaign with whites resisting the draft, blacks fighting to end their own colonization in America, and the Vietnamese fighting to force America out of their country. When the draft resistance movement gained momentum in 1967, antiwar activists routinely refuted the Johnson administration’s claims that the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) represented an external Communist threat to Vietnam and required U.S. intervention. Antiwar activists claimed that the NLF sought the liberation of Vietnam from colonial powers like the United States and had the support of the majority of the Vietnamese population. Despite the protests, President Lyndon Johnson continued escalating the war in Vietnam. As the war expanded, so too did the number of draft calls. During the April 15, 1967, Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam—an event attended by several hundred thousand in New York City alone—170 draft-age men burned their draft cards in Central Park. Along with draft card burnings, draft resisters produced “We Won’t Go” statements. Also at the spring protest were six Vietnam veterans marching under a banner emblazoned with VVAW, standing for the newly organized Vietnam Veterans Against War. Antiwar sentiment in the military had risen to the surface in 1966 after three privates stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, refused to fight in Vietnam, claiming the war was illegal since Congress never declared war. Heroic figures to many in the antiwar movement, the “Fort Hood Three” were arrested and prosecuted by the U.S. government. A court-martial found the men guilty and sentenced them to two years in prison.

Over 100,000 antiwar protesters rally near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967, before marching across the Arlington Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon. The march was one of the first important anti–Vietnam War demonstrations in the United States, helping to break the consensus of national support for the war during one of the most difficult years of fighting for American forces. (Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library)

Resistance to the draft continued into the fall of 1967 with Stop the Draft Week in October, which culminated in the March on the Pentagon. Throughout the week, more than 1,000 men took part in draft card “turn-ins” and burnings. The week began when activists in Berkeley blocked the entrance to the Oakland draft induction center by holding a sit-in, leading to the arrest of 120 participants. By Friday, 10,000 activists used street fighting tactics against 2,000 police officers, and in the process destroyed cars and city property. Across the nation on that same day, the March on the Pentagon began with Reverend William Sloane Coffin and other members of the draft resistance group The Resistance bringing turned-in draft cards to the Justice Department, which refused them so as not to be subject to criminal prosecution. More than 100,000 activists marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. Eventually government troops and federal marshals forced protesters from the grounds surrounding the Pentagon. The 1968 presidential election brought the antiwar movement into national politics. Both Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) and Robert Kennedy (D-NY) entered the race for president in 1968 as antiwar candidates. By the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, the contest came down to McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, after Johnson refused the nomination in March and Kennedy’s assassination in June. While delegates in the convention rejected a peace plank that included a bombing halt and gradual withdrawal and then nominated Humphrey, protesters had several skirmishes with the police. The day of Humphrey’s nomination, however, brought 10,000 protesters to Grant Park, where they commenced a march that brought the full force of Chicago’s police department down on them. What was later deemed by an official investigation a “police riot,” the 1968 Chicago protests (as well as the Columbia University actions that spring) revealed the extent to which radical factions in the antiwar

movement had come to see the U.S. war in Vietnam as the violent epitome of an out-of-control imperialistic foreign policy. Victorious in the 1968 election, Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, which involved turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, and the introduction of a draft lottery diminished momentarily some of the opposition to the war. Not until late 1969 would the antiwar movement regain the footing it lost in Chicago. On October 15, the antiwar movement organized its largest protest. In Boston, 100,000 people attended speeches and listened to music; more than 250,000 people attended various functions in New York City; and almost 20,000 took part in events on the UCLA campus in California. The following month, the Mobilization Against War brought 40,000 to Washington for the March Against Death to read the names of Americans killed in Vietnam. When the mobilization reached the Washington Mall, 700,000 people were in attendance. Although the antiwar movement never matched the strength of its 1969 actions, protests continued. Following President Nixon’s announcement on April 30, 1970, of the U.S.–South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, a national student strike took place on more than 700 college campuses. In response to the protest at Kent State University in Ohio, that state’s National Guard opened fire on protesters, killing four students and wounding nine. Protests by the VVAW in 1971 kept the war in the spotlight, but antiwar activities greatly diminished as Nixon continued to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. Although the impact of the antiwar movement on the course of the war is still a matter of some historical debate, it is generally accepted that in 1968–1969 both presidents Johnson and Nixon considered—with much dismay—the growing opposition throughout the country as they weighed decisions on how to continue prosecuting the war. Opponents and some historians maintain that the war would have dragged on even longer than its 1975 end without the pressure of the antiwar movement. Brian S. Mueller See also: King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” Speech; Operation Rolling Thunder; Vietnam War

Further Reading Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Foley, Michael S. Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Zaroulis, Nancy, and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963–1975. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.

Antiwar Protest Songs Protest music in popular culture is a manifestation of the polarizing effects a major conflict can create. During the Vietnam War, artists generated one of the most focused collections of music directly commenting on and reflective of pro- and anti-war sentiments in the country. Regardless of whether artists were for or against the war, lyrics were generally fairly explicit and lacking in subtlety. This war represented one period when artists on both sides of the debate were represented in the lexicon of radioworthy airplay and record sales. The 1960s counterculture stood squarely in opposition to the war and the conservative values of the 1950s, embracing the often-quoted theme “make love, not war.” Artists wrote music and lyrics that

focused on general beliefs and reflections, specific events, politics, and the sentiments of soldiers in the field. Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” (1967) presents a soldier’s account of platoon maneuvers. Although set in 1942, the message of following orders to ford a river in the swamps of Louisiana resonated strongly with soldiers encountering similar terrain in the jungles of Vietnam—and Americans at home who empathized with their struggles in what was proving by then to be a protracted and painful military conflict. Seeger expands his story from a soldier’s individual experience to address the American population in general and Lyndon B. Johnson’s push for escalating the war, saying “we’re all waist deep in the Big Muddy / the Big Fool says to push on.” Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” (1963) and John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son” (1969) both address the political atmosphere overshadowing the war—Dylan’s two years prior to the escalation of the conflict. Both songs spoke to the clear separation of the elite who facilitate and finance war efforts, and those who are sent to ensure the war machine keeps running. Dylan’s lyrics are especially pungent and poignant, referring to the architects of war (Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex) “like Judas of old,” and declaring “even Jesus would never forgive what you do.” While never explicitly mentioning the Vietnam war, Fogerty’s lyrics express frustration with the elite class and patriotism along similar lines: “It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no millionaire’s son / It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one.” Conversely, artists were also writing music and lyrics that represented prowar views. Rooted in traditional patriotic beliefs that once the nation goes to war the cause must be supported at any cost, songs were written to reiterate opinions supporting U.S. military involvement in foreign affairs. Much like their counterparts, these songs focused on general patriotic enthusiasm, references to American moral and military superiority, and commentary from those who unfailingly supported decisions to be involved in Vietnam. One of the most commercially successful prowar songs was Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” (1966), which Billboard magazine lists as the top song of that year. Sadler painted pictures of heroism and men with “silver wings upon their chests / these are men—America’s best” as they leave home to defend America’s interests abroad. This song opened the door for additional prowar songs, especially from sympathetic country and western artists. Dave Dudley’s “What We’re Fighting For” (1965) expresses a soldier’s concern about protests and demonstrations he is learning about through a letter to his mother: “Oh mama, tell them what we’re fighting for.” This song in particular clouds the logic supporting the war, summoning up patriotic emotions with memories of Pearl Harbor while simultaneously stating that soldiers generally do not approve of U.S. involvement. The end results are conflicted themes of supporting the defense of South Vietnam and reviving 1950s McCarthyism in the hunt for potential Communist enemies. Johnny Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” (1966) was a country song written by Tom T. Hall that served to rally support in favor of U.S. involvement. In comparison to subtle patriotic messages that venerate the soldiers in the field or support the general war effort, Hall’s lyrics are very direct in their message: “We must save freedom now at any cost.” Given the blunt themes many songs delivered at this time, both pro- and antiwar, some artists chose to create works that served as satirical messages employing sarcastic tones and dark humor in observations that aligned with American attitudes toward U.S. involvement. The Fugs’ proto-punk “Kill for Peace” (1966) satirizes the escalation of the Vietnam War by situating sampled clips of machine gun fire, distorted tone, and clear delivery of lyrics. The lyrics explore American superiority over any people, anywhere who talk or look differently, and employ some derogatory terms for Asian people.

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE A San Francisco–based psychedelic rock and roll band, the Jefferson Airplane formed in 1965 and quickly became one of the premier American groups of the late-1960s counterculture-antiwar era. Their music was deeply influenced by the psychedelic drugs and countercultural and political ideals of the age. Band founders Paul Kantner and Marty Balin, along with renowned vocalist Grace Slick who joined in 1967, delivered searing, soaring lyrical soundtracks to the issues that were alive during that time, including American militarism and imperialism, environmental degradation, and, most fantastically, the possibility of planetary escape from it all. The group’s antiwar politics and counterculture values were present from its first folk-based album in 1966, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, with their cover of Chet Powers’s “Let’s Get Together.” In 1968, in the context of intensifying militancy in both the African American struggle and antiwar movement, the band released the more politically charged album Crown of Creation. Volunteers, which followed in 1969, featured a song that invoked the incendiary cry of “Up Against the Wall…” of the anti-imperialist Black Panthers. Anticipating an eventual 1973 name change, band members in 1970 released under the name “Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship” the album Blows Against the Empire, which featured an extraordinary ad hoc lineup of some of the era’s greatest musicians, including Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Graham Nash and David Crosby. Centered on the idea of a countercultural revolt against the U.S. empire and the hijacking of a “starship” that could deliver a cadre of freedomloving, technologically experimental hippies and their children into an intergalactic utopian future, Blows proved to be one of the most brilliant “concept” albums in rock and roll history. Sunfighter followed, which included explicit references to the “Yaqui and the Sioux” and other victims of U.S. expansion, along with a declaration that “empire is breaking down from the inside.” The Airplane’s 1973 “When the Earth Moves Again,” appearing on Bark, made explicit references to the death of previous empires of Rome and Egypt, suggesting that the “young dancing children” of the era were the vanguard of the end of American empire.

Country Joe McDonald and the Fish released “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die” (1967) initially to mixed reviews, and enjoyed success as this song slowly permeated American consciousness with continued escalation throughout the late 1960s—seemingly parallel to the worsening situation in Vietnam. The song centers on soldiers’ experiences, focusing on general confusion and a fatalistic philosophy in coming to grips with the politics and horrors of war. Set against the backdrop of an upbeat circus calliope, the chorus concludes: “Ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopee we’re all gonna die.” The song ends with sampled sounds of machine gun fire and explosions. Popular music recorded during the height of the Vietnam War represented every opinion for or against the war and, in some cases, continues to divide audiences and take on new meanings as American foreign policy continues to evolve worldwide. Michael S. Yonchak See also: Country Western Music; Vietnam War

Further Reading Hamilton, Neil A. The ABC-CLIO Companion to the 1960s Counterculture in America. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997. Lynskey, Dorian. 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs. New York: Ecco, 2011.

Apollo Space Program (1963–1972) The Apollo space program was a federally funded program launched by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to expand American space exploration. While Kennedy authorized the program, its origins lie in the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower who first conceived of the Apollo space program as a response to the Soviet Union’s breakthroughs in space technology, particularly the launching of the unmanned satellite

Sputnik in 1957. Fearing Soviet advances in outer space meant a decline in U.S. military and technological prestige, the United States aimed to outpace the Soviets in the “space race.” The ultimate goal of the Apollo space program—as articulated by Kennedy—was to achieve a manned space flight to the moon before the end of the 1960s, and before the Soviet Union could do the same. Created within the broader context of the Cold War (and U.S. efforts to outdo the Soviet Union in the space race), the Apollo program served the larger interests of American foreign policy. By seeking to defeat Soviet communism through a buildup of technological power in space, the United States further sought to contain the Soviet Union and its allies, thus enabling American predominance in the Cold War. In its decade-long existence, the Apollo program engendered 17 Apollo missions, seven of them manned flights to the surface of the moon. In 1969, after 10 preparative efforts, Apollo 11 sent three astronauts, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong, to explore the moon. Apollo 11 was successful, and the three men became the first individuals to conduct field research on the moon, including the collection of soil and rock samples. In stepping down from the lunar craft and onto the moon for the first time, Armstrong stated it was “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong’s line quickly became famous and continues to resonate in American culture. Indeed, the moon landing was celebrated as a crowning achievement for the United States and a victory for the nation during the Cold War—one that provided a capstone to the space race. The moon landing was broadcast to a national audience by network news, and the three men returned from the mission as heroes, celebrated with parades and official commendations from President Richard Nixon and the U.S. Congress. Subsequent efforts to return to the moon were met with more mixed results. While the majority of the Apollo missions saw continued moon landings, Apollo 13 had to be abandoned due to malfunctions with the astronauts’ spacecraft after an oxygen tank exploded. Following Apollo 17, the program was disbanded due to budgetary concerns—and after the program achieved its original intentions. While the Apollo space program gave scientists a unique and important understanding of the moon and its composition, the program also contributed to the heightening of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. The large financial cost of the Apollo space missions also expanded the arms race and space race, helping commit the United States to large defense budgets even after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the early years of détente. The Apollo missions also contributed to the militarization of the American economy, as the space program enlarged the size of the military-industrial complex. The creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and its close connection with private defense firms, meant that the United States continued to rely on military contractors for employment. At one point, the Apollo program employed close to half a million people whose livelihood depended on America’s Cold War foreign policy. The success of the Apollo 11 mission also signaled the triumph of American capitalism and ingenuity, spurring renewed faith in the privatepublic alliance between government and industry to further the strategic interests of American national security. The Apollo space program therefore reinvigorated American militarism in popular culture while solidifying Americans’ support for and dependency on the national security state. Michael Brenes See also: Military-Industrial Complex; Sputnik

Further Reading Kalic, Sean. U.S. Presidents and the Militarization of Space, 1946–1967. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. McDougall, Walter…. the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Argentina The República Argentina (Argentine Republic) is situated furthest to the south on the Atlantic coast of South America, with boundaries between Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay to the north and Chile to the west. Argentina is the second largest Latin American nation after Brazil. The name of the country comes from the Latin name for silver, argentum, as the area was rich in this element. The region was first explored by Juan Diaz de Solís in 1516, but subsequent attempts to colonize the area failed until 1536 when the explorer Pedro de Mendoza founded the settlement of Nuestra Seῇora Santa Maria de los Buenos Aires (Our Lady Saint Mary of the Fair Winds), which ultimately became the nation’s capital city of Buenos Aires. Until 1776, the region of Argentina was under the general jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of Peru, but as a consequence of Spanish colonial reforms, the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (River Plate) was created, and Buenos Aires increased in relevance and increasingly became an agricultural and cattle industry center. As in many other Latin American countries the origins of Argentinean independence can be traced to the Napoleonic wars and the strains they placed on the Spanish Empire. In 1810 Argentinean elites declared autonomy from Spain, beginning a period that culminated in full independence in 1816. A British attempt to secure Buenos Aires in 1806–1807 was repelled, but the English interest in Argentina continued throughout the 19th century, with extensive British investments in cattle ranching, railroads, and communication systems. Argentina’s history since independence has been marred by several repressive military dictatorships, the influences of caudillismo, tumultuous periods of economic prosperity followed by recessions, and halting attempts to democratize and move the nation into First World status—efforts often followed by military takeovers and repressive periods of military rule. The country has also suffered from a prolonged struggle between the rural elements of the country and the interests of urban dwellers, resulting in uneven development and antagonism. The relationship between the United States and Argentina has been complicated, although in general it has been amicable, with high levels of trade, monetary investment, and loans provided by the United States in return for Argentina’s support of U.S. economic and foreign policy objectives. Since the early 20th century, American corporations, supported by friendly trade agreements with Argentina, have made major investments in the country, including railroads and naval armaments. Argentina experienced enormous economic success between 1880 and 1910 as a global beef and grain purveyor, and this prosperity and a desire for a place among global powers occasionally placed Argentina at odds with the United States. Early in the century, Argentina opposed U.S. military interventions in Central and South America and dollar diplomacy objectives, which attempted to influence the Argentinean economy to control its commercial and trade relations. During World War II, Argentina, home to generations of immigrants from European Axis countries, was suspected of Nazi leanings, but declared its neutrality during most of the war—attempting to tilt its neutral status in favor of trade and diplomatic concessions. At times Argentinean governments have fostered anti-American sentiments as propaganda for their own domestic political aims. For example, during the height of World War II the American ambassador to Argentina, Spruille Braden, accused Argentina of pro-Nazi sympathies, to which the government of Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón responded with a campaign attempting to denounce American involvement in Argentine internal affairs. Perón, a colonel in Argentina’s military, had ascended to power during one of the many military government takeovers of the nation and went on to become one of its most influential dictators in Argentinean history.

In an effort to fortify its Western Hemispheric security interests during the Cold War, the United States sent millions of dollars in military aid to Argentinean military forces from 1950 to 1979, and in return found Argentina’s rulers strong, reliable partners in the U.S. struggle to halt communism in Latin America. To advance its own anticommunist and strategic objectives, the United States supported many of the Argentinean military’s repressive measures against Communists, terrorists, or suspected left-wing groups viewed by the American government as a threat to the stability of its economic and political interests in the region. The relationship between the United States and Argentina was strained in the late 1970s as American critics decried human rights abuses allegedly being committed by the Argentinean government in the period known as the Dirty War. Declassified documents in 2003 confirmed that in 1976 U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger approved the Argentine junta’s repressive military action that resulted in the deaths of at least 30,000 people. With human rights advocates in the U.S. Congress poised to condemn the regime, Kissinger reassured Argentine foreign minister Admiral Guzzetti of White House support, but urged the government to act quickly. Further strains occurred in 1982 when Argentina set off an invasion of the British-occupied Falkland Islands/Malvinas, citing long-disputed claims of ownership and quoting the Monroe Doctrine as a pretext for the invasion. The Reagan administration sided with Great Britain during this short-lived conflict, straining the U.S.-Argentina relationship. The country is now a more stable republic with a reduced role for the armed forces in the political life of the country. Jesús E. Sanabria See also: Dollar Diplomacy; Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; Monroe Doctrine

Further Reading Arnson, Cynthia, Tamara Taraciuk, and John Dinges. Relaciones Bilaterales Entre Argentina y Estados Unidos: Pasado y Presente. Woodrow Wilson Center Reports on the Americas. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Latin American Program; CELS, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 2004. Goldwert, Marvin, and University of Texas at Austin. Institute of Latin American Studies. Democracy, Militarism, and Nationalism in Argentina, 1930–1966: An Interpretation. Latin American Monographs, no. 25. Austin: Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies by the University of Texas Press, 1972. Sheinin, David. Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained. The United States and the Americas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Whitaker, Arthur Preston. The United States and the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Australian Coup d’Etat (1975) The strategic relationship of the United States and the Commonwealth of Australia dates to the early days of World War II when British forces were forced into retreat from the Asian sphere and left Australia vulnerable to attack from the Japanese Empire. From the second half of that conflict forward to the present, the Australian government, with one notable exceptional period from 1972 to 1973, has looked to the United States as its primary senior partner in terms of its national defense, as well as the lead guarantor of regional security. Although made momentarily problematic by the prospect of a U.S.Japanese peace treaty and a U.S. security arrangement with a nation that had just invaded it, ultimately post–World War II relations were strengthened with the concurrent ratification of the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty (ANZUS). That military alliance bound the three nations together in a collective security arrangement similar to others from the early Cold War era.

Having already established a military presence during the war, the United States enlarged its military footprint substantially after the war, building over the ensuing decades more than two dozen major U.S. military installations across Australia, including training bases, air and naval bases, launch sites for guided nuclear missiles, intelligence-gathering facilities, and a militarized former site of the National Atmospheric and Space Administration (NASA). The participation of the Australian military in the U.S. war in Vietnam further cemented the strategic partnership of the two countries. Although ANZUS was initially established to protect only the South Pacific region, the obligation of mutual defense came to extend globally. Without formally invoking ANZUS (or the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization’s charter to which they were also bound after 1954), Australia sent nearly 8,000 soldiers (either into combat or in supporting roles) to the American war in Southeast Asia. From 1949 to 1972, Australia was in the hands of the Liberal-National Party Coalition. For 18 of those 23 years, the coalition was led by Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies (1894–1978), who worked to forge the close security relationship with the United States. Liberal Party prime ministers in the late 1960s continued much of the same policy, escalating Australian involvement in Vietnam, for example. In December 1972, however, the Labor Party under Prime Minister Edward Gough Whitlam was elected to power promising a dramatic shift in direction. It passed a wave of sweeping social reforms from women’s equal pay to national health insurance to rights and benefits for Aboriginal peoples, and promised to nationalize major sectors of the economy that had come under foreign ownership. The Whitlam government ended forced conscription in the military and immediately brought Australian forces home from Vietnam. More shocking to the U.S. administration of Richard Nixon, top Australian officials decried the U.S. “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi as the actions of “maniacs” and “murderers,” and Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns called for street protests against continued U.S. prosecution of the war. The Whitlam government also supported the aspirations of Palestinians for a secure homeland in direct opposition to U.S. policy, and it was initiating efforts to investigate and restrain the activities of both the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the latter of which was at the time working closely with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Chile during the CIA’s participation in the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Further, when President Nixon ordered the U.S. Strategic Air Command nuclear nerve center on high alert during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973—and had to use Australian-based U.S. facilities to do so—Whitlam expressed his outrage (and again in 1975 when it was made known that ASIS had also worked with the CIA in Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor). A new U.S. ambassador was immediately ordered to Australia: Marshall Green, who had helped orchestrate the CIA-backed overthrow of several other governments in recent years. It was not long after that, as the evidence now strongly indicates, that Green and CIA officials went to work doing everything they could to undermine the Whitlam government: paid propaganda in the press about falsely concocted scandals orchestrated by government officials, covert efforts to discredit and bring down Jim Cairns, and vast sums of money secretly funneled to Labor’s opposition parties. A final straw came in 1975 when Whitlam suggested that his government might not renew the Pine Gap Treaty authorizing this U.S. military base that did key surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities. Working closely with the CIA, on November 11, 1975, Australian governor-general Sir John Kerr dissolved both houses of the Parliament, dismissed the Whitlam government, and appointed Malcolm Fraser, head of the Liberal Party, the new prime minister. Votes of no confidence in Fraser were ignored. What had transpired was effectively a bloodless coup d’etat against a democratically elected and popularly supported leader who tried to resist the continued U.S. militarization of his nation. Chris J. Magoc

See also: Indonesia/East Timor; Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); U.S. Military Bases; Vietnam War

Further Reading Blum, William K. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Updated ed. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004. “The CIA in Australia.” American Buddha Online Library. http://www.american-buddha.com/cia.australia.htm. Accessed August 30, 2014.

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo) (1966) The Battle of Algiers is a 1966 film that depicts the efforts of the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front or FLN) to oust French colonialists during the Algerian War of Independence. It focuses on the activities of a small cell of the FLN and fictionalized versions of real-life guerrillas. Their revolutionary activities including public bombings launch a spiral of violence, which results in French use of torture and counterrevolutionary terrorism on the part of white settlers. This example of realist cinema became one of the most noteworthy political films of the era and continues to shape perceptions of urban guerrilla warfare. The Algerian War of Independence lasted from 1954 until 1962, pitting Nationalists against the French metropolis that had occupied the North African country since 1830. Created by leftist Italian activistdirector Gillo Pontecorvo, the film follows a cast of characters that take part in the Battle of the Casbah between 1954 and 1957. The central character is the semifictionalized portrayal of Ali La Pointe, whose journey from street tough to revolutionary illustrates how discrimination and poverty inherent in the colonial system pushed average Algerians to action. The meticulous recreation of the FLN’s methods illustrates the tedious realities of a successful insurgency, culminating in a series of assassinations and bombings. French responses—both military and civilian—mirror Nationalist terrorism, leading to the use of equally inhumane tactics for starkly different goals. The film uses these events to reveal the social inequalities and brutal logic that drive both insurrection and response. The Battle of Algiers’ gritty and stark portrayal of modern warfare justifies revolution without romanticizing its violent nature. The film is noteworthy for its realism and critical perspective on French colonialism. Pontecorvo and co-writer Franco Solinas adopted a documentary style of filmmaking to take a seemingly objective approach to the material. Influenced by directors like Roberto Rossellini, the two writers opted for an ensemble cast that included few professional actors and avoided melodramatic antics common to political films of the era. In contrast to mainstream depictions of revolution, the film concentrates on the Algerian nationalist perspective. The memoirs of FLN leader Saadi Yacef (playing a fictionalized portrait of himself) provides a foundation for the film and encourages viewers to identify with the revolutionaries. French colonials appear more superficially, with the exception of the coldly reflective Colonel Mathieu, who represents the brutal but calculating logic of the military counterinsurgency. Despite a clear political identification with the revolution, the film subtly hints at the universal tragedy of violence. It uses the same music and lingering visuals in its portrayal of victims on both sides of the conflict. Pontecorvo crafted a film that succinctly and dispassionately highlights both the injustice and complexity of colonial rule and decolonization. The Battle of Algiers became a rallying point for leftists and anticolonial movements worldwide. France banned the film for four years, though it received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and multiple Academy Award nominations. Groups like the Irish Republican Army considered it a valuable text dramatizing methods of anticolonial terrorism and organization. In the United States, the Black

Panther Party organized public showings of the film using mobile screens as a way of inspiring local activism. Its vivid depiction of modern warfare has also attracted the attention of assorted militaries, which have used screenings to teach the combat methods of urban insurgencies and terrorist cells. The Battle of Algiers has thus established itself as the preeminent representation of the anti-imperial struggle to be placed on film. R. Joseph Parrott

Further Reading The Battle of Algiers. Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. 1966. New York: The Criterion Collection, 2004. DVD. http://www.criterion.com/films/248-the-battle-of-algiers. Connelly, Matthew. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962. 3rd ed. London: Pan Books, 2002. Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. London: Pluto Press, 2001.

Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis (1961, 1962) The Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) was a U.S.-sponsored operation aimed at the overthrow of the Cuban government in April 1961. The failure of this operation paved the way for the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the most terrifying confrontation of the decades-long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The immediate origin of the Bay of Pigs was the Cuban Revolution that culminated in 1959. The sugar economy and its monoculture produced prosperity, but also sustained racism, great economic inequality, social injustice, and widespread insecurity among the Cuban people. Governmental attempts to address these problems through reform had failed repeatedly due to the skewed social structure, massive corruption, uncontrolled violence, and (after 1952) the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship that was allied with the United States. The Cuban Revolution declared a complete break with Cuba’s colonialized past. By appealing to Cuban nationalism, Fidel Castro mobilized workers, peasants, and the middle class. But when he declared the revolution Socialist in intent, radicalized it, and deepened his reliance on the Communist Soviet Union, the middle class fled the country and formed the core of counterrevolutionary forces in the United States. In the context of the Cold War, the U.S. government considered the Cuban Revolution to be a grave threat to U.S. security and interests in the Western Hemisphere. In March 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the Central Intelligence Agency’s proposal to train Cuban émigrés for an invasion of Cuba. Yet it was John F. Kennedy, his successor, who implemented the invasion plan under the assumption that he could keep U.S. involvement secret. The CIA selected the Bay of Pigs as the site for the landing of anti-Castro Cuban forces. Brigade 2506 consisted of 1,600 men. According to the CIA plan, the brigade would win early military successes, secure the beachhead, and allow former prime minister José Miró Cardona to land and be declared president of the interim government of Cuba. The U.S. government would immediately recognize and support the interim government. The landing’s success in toppling Castro’s government depended to a great extent on an expected popular uprising against Castro throughout the island. The CIA was confident in the success of the operation due to its successful experience in toppling the Guatemalan Revolution in 1954.

Artillery fires on CIA-trained Cuban rebels as they invade a beachhead in Cuba, April 17, 1961. The disastrous Bay of Pigs operation embarrassed President Kennedy, led to a sharpening divide between the CIA and the president, and paved the way for a second crisis in Cuba in the fall of 1962. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Castro had long anticipated a U.S. attack on his government. He also obtained information on CIA training in Central America from U.S. news media and agents in the United States. In response, the Cuban government moved closer to the Soviet Union to seek military assistance and mobilized the Cuban population to defend the revolution. On April 15, 1961, eight B-26 bombers, piloted by Cubans and sponsored by the CIA, struck Havana and attacked Cuban airfields to destroy the Cuban air force and to facilitate the incoming invasion. But Castro had covered several aircraft and managed to save them. He also was quick to detain up to 100,000 Cubans (alleged supporters for the invasion), uprooting the seeds of the requisite indigenous uprising. These preemptive moves—combined with the fact that many Cubans supported the revolution—foiled the invasion plan. On April 17, 1961, Brigade 2506’s roughly 1,300 fighters landed at the Bay of Pigs. But they found it impossible to establish the beachhead due to the Cuban planes attacking the invasion force from above and terminating its communication and supply routes. The invasion ended within 72 hours. The brigade surrendered, with 1,180 taken prisoner and more than 100 dead. The Bay of Pigs was a fiasco for U.S. foreign policy. President Kennedy refused to authorize additional air cover for the invasion for fear that it would expose U.S. involvement. Without the air cover and greater U.S. involvement, the invasion force could not match the well-prepared Cuban army. The Cuban population did not rise up as anticipated by the CIA, which tended to overestimate Cuban discontent with the Castro regime and to underestimate the effectiveness of the Cuban government’s preemptive responses. In any case, available records also suggest that the CIA apparently made a selfsatisfied assumption that the president would be pressured to support the invasion force before allowing it to be defeated. Contrary to the anticipated result, the invasion strengthened Castro’s standing in Cuba and his antiimperial credentials in the world. The invasion invited anti-U.S. protests across Latin America and other regions, exacerbating the U.S. preoccupation about Cuban threats to the United States. Kennedy declared that he would assume all responsibility for the failure, and did so—ordering the top three men at the CIA fired and determining to rein in what seemed like an out-of-control agency. Nevertheless, the operation was a huge embarrassment for the president and his country, and U.S. pressure on Cuba led by the CIA continued. Most notably, Operation Mongoose (“The Cuba Project”), orchestrated at the Defense Department by Edward Lansdale, included several projects aimed at overthrowing the Castro

government. In addition, the CIA’s Operation Northwoods drew up plans to stage a “false flag” attack on a U.S. coastal installation and then frame Castro for it—thereby creating overwhelming pressure for an overt U.S. invasion of the island. Cuba enlisted the help of the Soviet Union in strengthening its intelligence organization that foiled several assassination plots against Castro. And, most significantly, Cuba accepted the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles to the island. Most scholars have argued that the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba principally because of its efforts to redress the strategic imbalance with the United States. The United States had drawn a firm line on the issue of Berlin and also had emplaced strategic nuclear-tipped missiles in Turkey, in close proximity to the Soviet Union. Recent scholarship has not entirely rejected this thesis, but illuminated other important factors. Among them is Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s deep sympathy for the Cuban Revolution, which reminded him of the Bolshevik revolution that gave birth to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Moreover, the Cuban Revolution was important because of its symbolic importance as a model revolutionary regime for other Third World countries. In addition, Khrushchev was conscious of Mao Zedong’s China and its challenge to his prestige as the principal leader of the Communist camp. For these reasons, Khrushchev felt obliged to defend the island with a significant force of medium- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Khrushchev tried to install the weapons secretly because he believed the United States would accept the new Soviet-Cuban nuclear alliance as a fait accompli only after he announced its existence. The Soviet premier also feared the early discovery of nuclear alliance would trigger an immediate U.S. attack on Cuba and that the Soviet Union would be forced to accept defeat due to what was then a decided U.S. strategic advantage in weapons capability. But on October 14, 1962, a U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane took photographs that confirmed Soviet missile sites developing in Cuba. President Kennedy immediately formed an Executive Committee (EXCOM) of his National Security Council to discuss possible courses of action. EXCOM members were divided; military-minded “hawks” favored an immediate air strike while “moderates” favored a blockade. President Kennedy himself preferred a blockade for fear that military strikes might bring nuclear war. Kennedy’s resolve grew stronger when he was informed that an air strike was not guaranteed to destroy all Soviet missiles in Cuba. His brother Robert Kennedy also raised the objection of firing a preemptive strike that would resemble the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and damage U.S. moral standing in the Cold War. On October 22, the president addressed the nation, announcing the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba and U.S. initiation of what was termed a naval “quarantine” in the Atlantic, 500 miles from Cuba. Kennedy intensified military and diplomatic pressure. While Secretary of State Dean Rusk obtained approval from the Organization of American States for the quarantine, his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, indicted the Soviet Union before the UN Security Council by presenting the U-2 photographs. The quarantine went into effect and the U.S. Strategic Air Command advanced to DEFCON 2—the highest level of U.S. nuclear war preparedness. The response helped to convince Khrushchev to negotiate a resolution to the crisis. On October 26, Kennedy received a letter from Khrushchev offering to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a pledge that the United States would not invade the island. However, the most dangerous moment came the next day. On October 27, Kennedy received a second note from Khrushchev in which he added a new condition: U.S. removal of missile bases in Turkey. This second offer shocked members of the EXCOM, who doubted the sincerity of Soviet intentions. On the same day the Soviet commander in Cuba shot down a U-2 over the island. Pressure on the president for a military response intensified.

The desire of both Kennedy and Khrushchev to resolve the crisis ended at a meeting of Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The United States made the no-invasion pledge and agreed to withdraw the missiles from Turkey. The Soviets withdrew the missiles from Cuba and agreed (at Kennedy’s request) to keep secret the U.S. removal of the missiles from Turkey. The Soviet premier rushed to accept Kennedy’s proposal, believing he needed to act quickly since the United States might soon attack, and the USSR—and much of the world—could be drawn into catastrophic conflict. Newly declassified documents reveal just how close the world came to nuclear catastrophe. Unknown to U.S. policymakers, there were 41,000 Soviet troops and at least nine Soviet short-range tactical nuclear warheads in Cuba. An air strike would have made almost inevitable a nuclear world war—and annihilation of millions of people in the United States, Soviet Union, Cuba, and elsewhere. Soviet officers in Cuba were prepared to launch nuclear missiles at the United States in the event of military action without authorization from the Kremlin. Further, Soviet missile regiments moved nuclear cruise missiles into position to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo in the event of a U.S. attack on Cuba. The risk of inadvertent escalation also appears to have been greater. During the crisis, a CIA team tried to implement a previously approved plan to blow up a Cuban copper mine. A U-2 accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace near Alaska, nearly being intercepted by Soviet fighters. Under extremely tense circumstances, any misinterpretation or overreaction could easily have led to a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis triggered significant political consequences. The Soviet Union achieved part of its objective in protecting Cuba, but the retreat humiliated the country, helped to oust Khrushchev, and propelled his successors to embark on a military buildup and to redress nuclear power gaps. More immediately, the crisis made both the United States and the Soviet Union realize the danger of Cold War confrontation, leading the two countries to seek détente. More effective communications were established between the Kremlin and the White House in hopes of averting a potentially disastrous miscommunication in some future conflict. Further, the two nations softened their rhetoric—Kennedy delivering his historic “Peace Speech” at American University in June 1963—and also negotiated the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, and outer space—a breakthrough in 1963, which was then seen as a hopeful beginning to more dramatic efforts to rein in the nuclear arms race. Yet, these efforts did not resolve the issue of Cuba’s security. Fidel Castro insisted that the United States end the embargo, halt subversion, terminate attacks by Cubans in the United States, cease to violate Cuban air and naval space, and return Guantánamo. To their disappointment, the Soviet Union never addressed any of the five points that Cubans saw as essential for the resolution of the crisis. In December 1962, the 1,197 prisoners were released from Cuba in exchange for $35 million in U.S. food, medicine, and supplies. Only in September 1970 did U.S. leaders reaffirm the no-invasion pledge against Cuba in return for the Soviet promise that it would not develop offensive weapons on the island. Hideaki Kami See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che”; Kennedy, John F., American University “Peace” Speech

Further Reading Dobbs, Michael. One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. New York: Knopf, 2008. Fursenko, Alexander, and Timothy Naftali. “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964. New York: Norton, 1997. Jones, Howard. The Bay of Pigs. New York: Harper and Row, 2008.

Schoultz, Lars. That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Berlin Crisis (1961–1962) Berlin had been a point of contention between the United States and the Soviet Union since the end of World War II, when the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union put both Germany and its former capital Berlin under joint occupation with a zone for each of them. Berlin was located nearly 100 miles inside the Soviet zone, and access to the city from the western part of the country thus went through Soviet-controlled territory. Controversy soon ensued. In 1948–1949, the Soviets blockaded the city only to have the Americans respond by instituting a massive airlift. A new crisis appeared in 1958, when Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum that called for a removal of Western military forces from Berlin and a diplomatic recognition of the (East) German Democratic Republic (GDR) to which the Soviet Union was turning over responsibility within six months. Access to Berlin was henceforth to be negotiated with the GDR. America and the West responded by saying that they were in Berlin by right of conquest and refused to accept the Soviet demands. Talks between the parties followed but were cut short in 1960 by the downing of an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet territory. After this incident, Khrushchev declared that he would wait to settle the matter with the next president. When John F. Kennedy began his term in office, he knew that a crisis over Berlin was coming. Perfectly happy to let Khrushchev take the initiative, however, Kennedy was more interested in making a deal on nuclear weapons than in confronting Khrushchev over Berlin or solving the problem. But a confrontation came nevertheless, beginning at the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in June 1961. Kennedy believed that a Berlin agreement should come through a wider agreement that also addressed the issue of nuclear weapons development by each nation. Khrushchev, however, insisted that no thaw in the Cold War could come without an altered status for Berlin and East Germany. This led to heated arguments and Khrushchev’s renewed imposition of a 1958 six-month deadline—this time for the conclusion of talks between East and West Germany that would lead to a demilitarized West Berlin on Soviet terms; otherwise the Soviets would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany that would terminate longstanding four-power agreements guaranteeing access to West Berlin. Kennedy in turn let Khrushchev know that the United States and the Western powers were determined to maintain a free Berlin—even at the cost of war, potentially involving nuclear weapons. During the following six weeks, the Kennedy administration debated how to respond to the Soviet challenge. Different courses of action were explored, including a recommendation from high-ranking military officials for military action. President Kennedy seemed to concur, giving a speech to the American people on July 25 in which he argued for the defense of a free West Berlin as central to America’s national security—again, even at the risk of nuclear-armed confrontation. And then on August 13, East German and Soviet authorities began construction of the Berlin Wall, aimed at preventing the continued flow of refugees fleeing from East to West. Between 1949 and 1961 an estimated 3 million people, mostly professionals and skilled laborers, had left East Berlin and this represented a real problem for the GDR and the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall became the symbol of the Cold War divide between East and West and would stand until 1989. Its construction in 1961, however, did not end the crisis. The face-to-face confrontation between Soviet and American tanks at Checkpoint Charlie (by this time the only crossing point between East and West Berlin) in October 1961 brought the crisis to another peak. Unbeknownst to Kennedy,

American general Lucius Clay had a facsimile of the Berlin Wall built near a U.S. military encampment and had his men practice ramming it, presumably to incite Soviet–East German retaliation and ultimately war over Berlin. Soviet harassment of American air traffic to Berlin in February–March 1962 represented an additional point of contention alongside several rounds of Soviet-American talks designed to solve the crisis, but which ultimately failed in April 1962. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev continued to talk tough publicly on Berlin, but quietly took steps to calm the crisis and avoid exacerbating the situation. On June 26, 1963, President Kennedy traveled to West Berlin to give what became one of the great speeches of the Cold War. At a time when West Berliners lived in a Communist-surrounded enclave and still feared a possible occupation by East Germany, Kennedy addressed a throng of 450,000: “Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum [‘I am a Roman citizen’]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ … All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’  ” Demonstrating great solidarity with the people of West Berlin, the speech and more broadly the Berlin Crisis itself are remembered also as an illustration of how far—rhetorically, geographically, and potentially militarily—the thrust of the Cold War–era Pax Americana now extended. By mid-1963, the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought softening relations between the two great powers, and while the Berlin Wall would stand, the Soviets had agreed not to endanger Western access to Berlin again. A fixed agreement was finally reached in 1972, whereby the Americans recognized the GDR in return for guaranteed access rights to Berlin. Kasper Grotle Rasmussen See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis

Further Reading Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy’s Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kempe, Frederick. Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth. New York: Penguin, 2012.

Black Panther Party for Self-Defense The Black Panther Party (BPP, originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was founded by Huey Newton (1942–1989) and Bobby Seale (b. 1936) in Oakland, California, in 1966. Influenced by the philosophy of Malcolm X and inflamed by ongoing, rampant police brutality in Oakland, California, the BPP embodied the evolution of the black freedom struggle toward greater militancy by the late 1960s. Considered the most radical of the Black Nationalist groups to emerge in the period, the organization emphasized self-defense and self-determination, and articulated a program of self-reliance. A significant number of BPP members had participated in organizing during the earlier civil rights movement (ca. 1955–1964), a number of them as leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many thought the movement had reached its goals. Further, many activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., concluded that the successes of the southern-based civil rights struggle had very little impact in urban areas. The BPP gained national notoriety in 1967 when a contingent of members of the party marched to Sacramento, the state capital of California, to stage a protest against a bill outlawing the carrying of loaded weapons in public. Dressed in the traditional gear of black leather jackets and black berets, and carrying loaded weapons, the Panthers were an overnight sensation. The Panthers’ initial goal was to

combat police brutality by patrolling black communities and monitoring police activities. They emphasized that African Americans had a constitutional right to bear arms to defend themselves against police brutality. BPP militancy attracted attention not only in California but throughout the nation—in particular from local, state, and federal authorities. The BPP’s “Ten-Point Program” included demands for freedom, full employment for black people, decent housing, education that would teach the true history of black people, exemption from military service for black men, and an end to police brutality. Although a national organization, the BPP had a decentralized structure, with chapters around the country in virtually every major city. The BPP in Oakland organized a successful free breakfast program for children that expanded to every major city where the BPP had a chapter. Some affiliates created free health clinics and worked with local medical clinics to provide services free of charge. The evolution of the movement in these years was in many ways a generational shift of young African American activists who had not only become disgruntled with the pace and direction of change, but, like Malcolm X, also were influenced by nationalist liberation movements in Africa and Asia. Thus, the Panther vision had a global, fiercely anti-imperialist dimension focused on the connections between American foreign policy, the oppression of peoples of color internationally, and the condition of black Americans in the urban ghetto. The Panthers, revered by many white student leaders in the antiwar movement, played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam protest movement, urging African American soldiers to lay down their arms and join the black liberation struggle, rather than continue to serve as fodder in an imperialist U.S. war in Southeast Asia against other people of color. In part because of its anti-imperialist ideology, the BPP garnered an international following in nations from Japan and China to France and England. The Black Panther Party called for revolutionary political struggle and aligned itself with other oppressed peoples around the world. Eldridge Cleaver made trips to North Korea and North Vietnam to express solidarity with the peoples of those Asian nations who had engaged in armed struggle against what Cleaver and the Panthers had declared was an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. Cleaver also met with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (then a terrorist organization according to the U.S. government), demonstrating support for the PLO’s anti-imperialist fight for their own homeland, a position that aligned the BPP against Israel and its chief Western ally, the United States. Despite these successes and an international profile, the decline of the BPP began in the late 1960s, the result of both internal and external forces. Criminal activity of some Panthers and the murder, arrest, imprisonment, and exile of BPP members took a heavy toll. More significant was the relentless assault on Panther activity that came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program. COINTELPRO aimed to disrupt, infiltrate, and eliminate the perceived threat of all radical groups of the 1960s, and the Black Panthers occupied the top of COINTELPRO’s list of organized threats to American society. Secret FBI files later revealed illegal actions such as wiretapping of activists, infiltration of perceived radical groups, and provocateurs who incited violent exchanges leading to the deaths of several Panther leaders. These actions ultimately were pivotal in the demise of the organization by 1977. Umeme Sababu See also: Antiwar Movement

Further Reading Hilliard, David H., and Cornel West. eds. The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008.

Lazerow, Jama, and Yohuru Williams, eds. In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Brazil (1954–1975) Brazil lay at the center of events in South America during the Cold War. Initially, the U.S. government offered financial aid to secure economic development and an anticommunist ally. However, Brazil’s leaders preferred an independent course in its foreign affairs. U.S. officials thus supported a military coup and offered valuable assistance to the resulting regime. Ultimately, these actions augmented the Cold War’s devastating impact in Brazil and throughout South America. After strained relations, U.S. officials approached Juscelino Kubitschek in the 1950s with anticipation, for Kubitschek welcomed U.S. aid from President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Taking office in 1961, President Jânio Quadros remained committed to the Alliance for Progress yet pursued foreign policies independent of U.S. Cold War goals, such as deploying trade missions to Cuba. The Kennedy administration offered $100 million for Brazil’s support during the Bay of Pigs, but Quadros refused and hosted Cuba’s revolutionary hero Ernesto Guevara. Following Quadros’s 1961 resignation, João Goulart continued these policies, worked with Brazilian Communists, maintained relations with Cuba, and even nationalized U.S. businesses. Consequently, the Kennedy administration approved a gradual campaign to destabilize Brazil. In 1962, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) poured more than $5 million into elections against Goulart’s political allies as U.S. officials redirected Alliance for Progress funds from economic projects in liberal pro-Goulart regions to conservative anti-Goulart politicians. The CIA and U.S. labor unions coordinated with Brazilian unions to protest against Goulart. Arriving in Brazil, Colonel Vernon Walters served as an intermediary between Ambassador Lincoln Gordon and General Humberto Castello Branco. With Gordon’s approval, Castello Branco spearheaded the April 2, 1964, military coup against Goulart, and the Johnson administration immediately recognized the regime and provided $50 million in loans. Into the mid-1970s, Brazil’s military regime generally operated as a U.S. Cold War ally, cutting relations with Cuba and receiving more than $1 billion in U.S. aid. The regime’s anticommunism viciously targeted Brazilian civilians as it repressed students, labor unions, women’s groups, and leftists. From 1964 to 1971, the regime murdered 3,000 civilians and tortured thousands more. Such policies fomented a radical leftist insurgency. Again, U.S. officials provided aid. The Office of Public Safety provided $10 million to train more than 100,000 Brazilian police and integrated military officers experienced in torture into police units among civilian populations. Graduates of U.S. training served in infamous units and operations, such as Operação Bandeirantes, that tortured and murdered civilians. Brazil’s “dirty war” tactics heavily influenced other South American military regimes. Brazil’s military offered their assistance to U.S. anticommunist operations, trained Uruguayan police in repression and torture, and exchanged military personnel with Argentina. Concerned about the election of Socialist Salvador Allende in Chile, Brazilian generals and diplomatic officials provided moral, strategic, and financial support to Augusto Pinochet’s coup and military regime. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Chile; School of the Americas

Further Reading Harmer, Tanya. Allende’s Chile & the Inter-American Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Weis, W. Michael. Cold Warriors and Coups d’Etat: Brazilian-American Relations, 1946–1964. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

British Guiana A small country in northeast South America, British Guiana came under British rule in 1803. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, sugar plantations dominated the economy. These plantations were worked first by imported African slaves and later by indentured servants brought from India, creating the two largest ethnic groups in the country. In the first free elections, held in 1953, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) led by Forbes Burnham and Dr. Cheddi Jaggan gained a substantial majority of the seats in the legislature. The PPP held liberal political views similar to those of the Labour Party in Great Britain or the Democratic Party in the United States. However, five months after the April elections, the British government under Winston Churchill suspended the Guianese constitution and sent in British Army units to enforce their decision. The British feared that the PPP would turn British Guiana into a Communist nation. However, by 1957 the British government under Harold Macmillan decided to partially restore Guiana’s independence and Jaggan was elected chief minister. By this time, Burnham, at the urging of British officials, had split the PPP along racial lines. Burnham and most of the black members of the party broke off from Jaggan and his largely Indian supporters, though small minorities of black Guianese continued to support Jaggan. Cheddi Jaggan’s visit to Cuba in April 1960, his praise for Fidel Castro’s revolution, and his attempts to secure a loan from Cuba after trying to get American help all convinced the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations that Jaggan was a Communist sympathizer. In response, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated a campaign to deny Jaggan and the PPP political power by supporting Burnham. Using American labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the U.S. government incited riots, bombings, arson, murder, and racial warfare between blacks and Indians. Burnham used CIA money to organize riots in the capital city of Georgetown in February 1962 that destroyed several city blocks. Also in February 1962, a series of strikes supported by CIA funds damaged the national economy. The Kennedy administration feared that Jaggan would turn the country into a Communist dictatorship and was determined to prevent another Caribbean nation from following Castro’s turn toward communism in Cuba. In addition to covert actions in British Guiana, the Kennedy administration successfully pressured the British to prevent Guiana from becoming independent, as had been scheduled for 1963. The Americans forced the British to establish an election system that disproportionately favored Burnham and his newly created People’s National Congress (PNC). A second round of Burnham-led and CIA-financed strikes in the summer of 1963 further damaged the economy, shattered the confidence of potential foreign investors, and strengthened existing racial tensions and violence. With further American aid under President Johnson, Burnham came into power in December 1964, inaugurating a dictatorial regime that destroyed the national economy and suppressed the political rights of Indians through a reign of terror and tyranny that lasted until 1992. Corbin Williamson See also: Central Intelligence Agency

Further Reading

Daniels, Oliver Gordon. “A Great Injustice to Cheddi Jaggan: The Kennedy Administration and British Guiana, 1961–1963.” PhD diss., University of Mississippi, 2000. Fraser, Cary. Ambivalent Anti-Colonialism: The United States and the Genesis of West Indian Independence, 1940–1964. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabe, Stephen. U.S Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Sillery, Jane. “Salvaging Democracy? The United States and Britain in British Guiana, 1961–1964.” PhD diss., Queen’s College, Oxford University, 1996.

Cambodia The Theravadan Buddhist country of Cambodia lies between the Bay of Thailand, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. In the context of American imperialism the country is best known for the illegal bombing that occurred in Cambodia on the watch of President Nixon during the Vietnam War. Cambodia was a neutral state during the Vietnam War, but the war destabilized the Cambodian government from 1970 to 1975 and ultimately helped to open the door to the subsequent genocidal policies of the Communist Khmer Rouge or Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime. While Cambodia is predominantly comprised of the Khmer ethnic group, it has historically had considerable Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cham minority populations as well as smaller numbers of Malay, Thai, Lao, Austronesian, Austroasiatic, and European peoples. The Khmer people entered Southeast Asia during the Austroasiatic migrations several thousand years ago. In classical Cambodia an Indianized Khmer elite combined lowland rice agriculture in polities known as “land and water,” Chen La, which engaged in long-distance trade with the Chinese. Trade combined with slave raids, military prowess, and the visions of devaraja (god-kings) or cakravartin (Buddhist monarchs). Portions of Angkor Baray remained inhabited, and the image of Angkor Wat in particular would function prominently in later imaginings of Khmer nationalism. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Khmer were caught between the expansions of the Thai and the Vietnamese. The experience of being pinched between two expansionary states would then be repeated with the entry of French colonial power as King Ang Doung “invited” the French into Cambodia in 1863, though some evidence suggests that the invitation was written at gunpoint. Nevertheless, the Siamese (Thais) recognized the French protectorate of Cambodge in 1867. The colonial influence on Cambodia was similar to that of Vietnam. While the French established important modernizing institutions in the country, they also imposed an extraction economy based upon the widespread abuse of laborers who worked in near-slave conditions, imposing even more desperate poverty on much of the population, who were focused on the harvest of rice and pepper. However, during World War II the Japanese briefly granted independence to arm Cambodia as a Japanese proxy power. Nevertheless, the abuse of laborers remained the major incentive for Khmer elites to incite anticolonial and nationalist sentiment, which was further fueled by the French being drawn into open conflict with the Viet Minh and the Pathet Lao in Laos, resulting eventually in the renunciation of French control over Cambodia in 1953. The colonial exports of rubber, rice, and corn remained the major exports of Cambodia throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Cambodia earned its independence from France on November 9, 1953. Recognized as a constitutional monarchy led by King Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia committed to neutrality in the conflict in neighboring Vietnam. Sihanouk abdicated the throne in 1955 but reassumed the head of state position as prince in 1960. Despite the rapidly militarizing climate of Cambodia in the 1950s and 1960s and the spread of the impact of the Vietnam War throughout Southeast Asia, Cambodia officially remained a nonaligned state. Still, Sihanouk was widely perceived to be sympathetic to the Communist cause and did

not explicitly persecute Vietnamese Communists who took refuge in his country, as the border between Vietnam and Cambodia remained open, allowing both Communist sympathizers and, more importantly to Sihanouk, Khmer nationalists, to transport weapons and stage attacks against the South Vietnamese forces from Cambodia. By proxy this led to attacks on American forces that backed the South Vietnamese. These attacks were led predominantly by the National Liberation Front (NLF). In 1969, U.S. president Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, launched an illegal (and secret, until disclosed by a conscientious staffer at the National Security Council) bombing campaign against the neutral nations of Cambodia and Laos in an attempt to destroy the capacity of the North Vietnamese to stage military operations in those two countries. Combined with the ground invasion of Cambodia led by American and South Vietnamese forces in the spring of 1970 (which triggered the Kent State shootings in the United States), the Khmer infrastructure was totally destroyed and the government increasingly destabilized. The devastating bombing campaign delivered greater bomb tonnage to Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 than that dropped on Japan in all of World War II. More than 600,000 are estimated to have perished. When Cambodia was tragically engulfed in the Vietnam War, a political vacuum opened in the wake of American bombs that eventually allowed the Communist Khmer Rouge to come to power. This began in 1970 with a coup (secretly aided by the United States) led by Sihanouk’s former right-hand military man, Lon Nol, who formed the Khmer Republic (1970–1975). Despite open U.S. support, Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic received little to no international recognition and proved quite unstable. Sihanouk urged an overthrow of Lon Nol’s regime. A bloody civil war broke out, primarily between the United States and the South Vietnamese–backed Cambodian republican army and Khmer Rouge Communist guerrillas backed by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the NLF. However, many more factions emerged and the entire conflict was exacerbated by the U.S. bombing campaign. U.S. forces remained in the country until the victory of the Communist Khmer Rouge in April 1975, the same month of the final evacuation of Americans from South Vietnam.

A shopping center in Cambodia destroyed by bombing in 1970. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War was a devastating and ultimately highly controversial 14-month assault that began in 1969 and was kept secret by the Nixon administration. President Nixon believed it had been a success, emboldening him to launch a ground invasion of Cambodia on April 29, 1970. (William Lovelace/Evening Standard/Getty Images)

When they first entered the streets of the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge were hailed as national liberators who had ended a bloody era of civil strife. However, the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol

Pot, quickly purged more moderate Communists and Socialists, and the Khmer Rouge embarked upon a four-year reign of terror that turned Cambodia inside out, as executions and deaths from starvation soared. The Democratic Republic of Kampuchea was a terribly repressed state with little to no health care, education, press coverage, nor skilled labor as the urban population was either eliminated or forced into the countryside. Politically and religiously motivated slaughter of intellectuals and Muslims soon turned to ethnocide as whole local populations of Chinese and Vietnamese were slaughtered and up to one-half of the Cham died. Estimates of the total genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge vary but tend to center around two million. After a series of border clashes between 1975 and 1977, the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia in November 1978, perceiving Democratic Kampuchea (dominated by Khmer Rouge), partly because of its alliance with long-time nemesis China, as threatening to Vietnam. Within weeks, they ended the genocide, established the Vietnamese-friendly People’s Republic of Kampuchea, and began what turned out to be a 10-year occupation. From 1979 to 1989, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia served to justify the American policy of continuing to recognize the Khmer Rouge’s Democratic Kampuchea as the legitimate government of the country long after they had been removed from power. William Noseworthy See also: French War in Indochina; National Liberation Front (NLF); Southeast Asia; Vietnam War

Further Reading Chandler, David. A History of Cambodia. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2008. Edwards, Penny. Cambodge: The Making of a Nation: 1840–1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Hansen, Anne, and Judy Ledgerwood, eds. At the Edge of the Forest: Essays in Honor of David Chandler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2008. Kiernan, Ben. Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation Denial and Justice in East Timor and Cambodia. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007.

Castro Ruz, Fidel (1926–) Fidel Castro Ruz was the principal leader of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and for decades among the most notable figures in international politics. He led Cuba as prime minister, president, chief of the armed forces, and first secretary of the Communist Party for half a century. Fidel Castro was born on August 13, 1926, near the city of Birán in the eastern province of Oriente. His father, Ángel Castro, was a wealthy Spanish-born landowner. Having received primary education, Castro went to an exclusive Jesuit school, El Colegio de Belén, in Havana. In 1945, Fidel entered law school at the University of Havana, center of student activism and political agitation. As a member of the Revolutionary Insurrectional Union (UIR), Castro joined an expedition force to oust Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. He joined the Orthodox Party founded by Eduardo Chibás, a party of Cuban nationalists calling for political liberty, social justice, an end to corruption, and economic independence from the United States. Castro was among many young Cubans who resented foreign dominance of the Cuban economy and demanded equal access to Cuban resources. Castro earned his law degree in 1950 and began to practice law. But he was interested in politics rather than law; he ran for the national congress in the 1952 elections, which were canceled due to a military coup, orchestrated by Fulgencio Batista. Castro and his brother, Raul, saw no chance to topple

the Batista regime through peaceful means. On July 26, 1953, Fidel led the forces that assaulted the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack failed, and the Batista regime arrested and tried the Castro brothers. During this time Castro made his most famous speech, “History Will Absolve Me.” Although sentenced to 15 years of prison, the Castro brothers were released in a general amnesty in 1955. Fidel, Raul, and others fled to Mexico, where they met Che Guevara and strengthened what became known as the “July 26 Movement.” In December 1956 Fidel Castro returned to Cuba on the boat Granma. The rebel forces quickly established a base of support in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, from which Castro conducted a guerrilla campaign against Batista. By the summer of 1958, Fidel became the most powerful leader of a growing anti-Batista movement that forced the dictator to abandon the country in late December. Fidel Castro entered Havana on January 8, 1959, and embarked on setting up the provisional government. Although he installed moderate supporters of the revolution for cabinet posts, Castro formed an inner decision-making group with Raul, Guevara, and other radicals to promote massive land redistribution and other far-reaching social reforms. While communicating with people through direct dialogue in his inimitable style (Fidelismo), Castro eventually allied with the Communist Party and drove middle-class representatives from the government. The latter sought asylum in the United States and formed the core of anti-Castro, anticommunist opposition. In the face of immediate and strengthening U.S. opposition in 1960–1961, Castro radicalized the revolution. By the time the U.S. government planned a toppling of the Cuban government, Castro had established closer ties with the Soviet Union. On January 3, 1961, Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in response to the Cuban government’s seizure of U.S. petroleum refineries that had refused to process Soviet crude oil. On April 16, Castro formally declared Cuba a Socialist state. He led the victory at the Bay of Pigs, which paved the way for the October 1962 missile crisis. The development accelerated the centralization of Castro’s power in Cuba, as curtailment of civil liberties and elimination of opposition followed the crisis—all in the name of national security. Cuba moved rapidly from capitalism to communism. Regardless of his protest against the Soviet retreat from the missile crisis, Castro made his first visit to the Soviet Union in April 1963 and secured generous Soviet military and economic assistance. Cuba’s initial effort to diversify and industrialize the economy ended in failure, forcing the country to return to its dependency on sugar. In 1976, Castro changed the economic policy and placed greater emphasis on material incentives; Cuba succeeded in sustaining moderate economic growth and diversification of exports throughout the 1970s and 1980s— this despite the U.S. economic embargo on the nation that had been imposed shortly after the revolution. He also enacted the 1976 constitution and set up the Poder popular, a new mechanism for widening participation in decision making. He continued to advance revolutionary achievements in education, nutrition, and health services.

Fidel Castro, the controversial communist leader of Cuba, held power in his country for more than 50 years. Following the revolution Castro visited the United States in April 1959 amid rapidly deteriorating relations between the two nations. Castro led a transformation of every aspect of Cuban culture and politics and played a powerful role in his country’s international affairs, becoming a legendary figure to other movements and leaders seeking to challenge U.S. imperial behavior. (Library of Congress)

Throughout the period Castro also became a force on the international stage. He supported left-wing revolutionary forces in Latin America, notwithstanding Soviet opposition. But in the aftermath of Guevara’s death in Bolivia and Castro’s declaration of support for the 1968 Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, Castro worked closely with Soviet leaders in advancing the interests of communism wherever he could. In addition to his developmental programs, Fidel gained African respect and boosted his anti-imperialist credentials by sending troops to help the Angolan government threated by the apartheid regime of South Africa. He also dispatched new troops to the Horn of Africa in 1978 along with the Soviet Union. His international prestige peaked in 1979, when he chaired the Sixth Nonaligned Summit in Havana. The end of the Cold War required Castro to change his course. Cuba plunged into extreme economic difficulties following the collapse of the Soviet Union, forcing Fidel to announce a “special period.” He expanded trade with noncommunist countries, introduced elements of a market economy, and encouraged travel and remittances by Cuban Americans. Again, despite the continued U.S. embargo, the Cuban economy revived. A new alliance with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez also helped Cuba to secure oil and maintain trade balances. Compared to his economic reforms, Castro proved far less willing to redesign his political system by emphasizing the continuing U.S. hostility against Cuba. On July 31, 2006, Castro delegated all powers to his brother Raul due to his declining health. On February 24, 2008, Raul officially became Fidel’s successor as president of Cuba. Hideaki Kami

See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Dominican Republic (1954–1975); Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che”; Primary Documents: Fidel Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

Further Reading Castro, Fidel, and Ignacio Ramonet. My Life. Translated by Andrew Hurley. London: Allen Lane, 2007. Coltman, Leycester. The Real Fidel Castro. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Deutschmann, David, and Deborah Shnookal, eds. Fidel Castro Reader. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2007. Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Chile (1954–1975) The United States replaced Great Britain as the principal foreign power in Chile at the end of World War I. Initially, the United States concentrated its economic interests on obtaining control of Chile’s abundant mineral resources, primarily copper. By 1918 U.S. investors “controlled over 87 percent by value of Chilean copper production” (Loveman, 213). From that point, U.S. investment in Chile expanded into other strategic sectors of the economy. In 1970 “US direct private investment in Chile was $1.1 billion out of a total foreign investment of $1.67 billion” (Cusak, 102). Increased U.S. interference in Chilean politics accompanied growing American investment in the economy. This involvement intensified at the end of World War II with the onset of the Cold War. Because the United States considered Latin America part of its geopolitical hegemonic sphere, the region became a key battlefield in the Cold War. The United States saw Chile, with its extensive mineral wealth, democratic traditions, politicized population, and powerful Marxist political parties, as critical to U.S. imperialist domination of the region. For that reason, Washington refused to grant Chile any of the loans it desperately needed until the González Videla government (1946–1952) removed members of the Communist Party from the ruling coalition. In 1947 González Videla bowed to U.S. commands, expelled his left-wing coalition partners from the government, declared the Communist Party illegal, and relegated members of the banned party to prison camps. Despite the U.S. government’s best efforts to eliminate the Chilean Left, which consisted of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and a number of smaller organizations, this political force continued to gain popular support during the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, U.S. interference in Chilean politics escalated. During the early 1960s, the U.S. government designated Chile as the embodiment of the Alliance for Progress and anointed the centrist Christian Democrat Party as the organization most suited to counter the appeal of the Left (and the Right) and represent U.S. economic and political interests. U.S. intervention in Chilean domestic politics ratcheted up during the 1964 presidential elections because Washington feared that Socialist Salvador Allende would defeat Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. The U.S. government poured money into radio ads and election material to convince Chileans that a vote for Allende meant a vote for Soviet-style communism. U.S. government agencies spent more per capita in Chile that year than did the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States in the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson campaigns combined. Chilean women were particular targets of the media blitz. U.S. ad agencies worked with conservative Chileans to design a propaganda campaign to convince women that if Allende were elected, his government would take their children away for reeducation and the family and their role within it would be destroyed. This message of fear contrasted sharply with the carefully

constructed image of Frei as a caring, Christian family man. The media campaign helped to convince the majority of Chileans to vote for Frei, not Allende. Although the U.S. government repeated many of the same tactics in the 1970 presidential elections, Salvador Allende, who ran again, triumphed. His democratic victory did not stop U.S. efforts to prevent his assumption of power. The U.S. government attempted unsuccessfully to convince René Schneider, the commander of the Chilean army, that he should lead a military coup d’état, overthrow the government, and hold new elections that would ensure the victory of Eduardo Frei. Both Schneider and Eduardo Frei, along with other politicians, refused to go along with U.S. plans and Allende became president. For the next three years, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger worked assiduously to undermine and then to overthrow the Allende government. The United States sought to, in the words of Richard Nixon, “make the economy scream” to demonstrate to Chileans and the world that socialism could not work. As Kissinger declared, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people” (Blum, 209). To that end, in October 1972 and again in August 1973, the U.S. government paid truck drivers to strike, which effectively paralyzed much of Chile’s transportation system. Washington also slapped an economic blockade on Chile. Because U.S. investors controlled so much of Chile’s economy, the country was highly dependent on the purchase and sale of goods from and to the United States. These tactics produced shortages in everything from spare parts for machines and cars to toothpaste, which increased popular dissatisfaction with the Allende government. The Nixon government worked with the Christian Democrats and the Chilean right to secure enough votes in the March 1973 parliamentary elections to impeach Allende. However, when they failed to do so, they decided that Allende had to be overthrown militarily. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, backed by the U.S. government, ousted the Allende government and imposed a military dictatorship that lasted until 1990. During its rule, the Chilean military arrested, tortured, imprisoned, killed, and “disappeared” more than a hundred thousand Chileans. Despite wide coverage and international repudiation of the military government’s flagrant human rights abuses, the Nixon and Gerald Ford governments continued to support it politically and financially. Although many countries around the world opened their doors to receive refugees fleeing the repressive military government in Chile, the U.S. government refused to do so until 1976, when the U.S. Congress passed legislation allowing them to enter the country. The U.S. government not only turned a blind eye to the torture and murder of Chileans following the coup, it contributed to the deaths of two U.S. citizens in Chile. One of them, Charles Horman, had spoken with U.S. Navy personnel in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso right after the coup. They confided in him that they and the U.S. Navy had participated in the coup. A few days later, the Chilean military picked up Horman, along with Frank Teruggi, his friend, and tortured, then murdered them. Although the U.S. government long denied it had anything to do with their murders, declassified CIA and State Department documents tell a different story (Kornbluh). Margaret Power See also: Church Committee Hearings/Reports; Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; Missing (Konstantine Costa Gavras); Primary Documents: “Memorandum for the Record” on the Orchestration of Chilean Coup (September 17, 1970); Teleconference between President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the Overthrow of President Allende in Chile (September 16, 1973)

Further Reading

Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004. Cusack, David, Revolution and Reaction. The Internal and International Dynamics of Conflict and Confrontation in Chile. Denver: University of Denver, 1977. Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File. A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New York: New Press, 1989. Loveman, Brian. Chile. The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Power, Margaret. Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964–1973. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002. U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Covert Action. 94th Cong., 1st Sess., 4 and 5 December 1975.

Congo Crisis (1960–1961) The year 1960 is often remembered as the “Year of Africa"—the year when 17 former African colonies received independence from European powers. The beginning of sovereignty for peoples on the continent marked the entrance of Africa on the world stage—and it came, fatefully enough, in the midst of the Cold War between the United States and its “free world” allies and the Soviet Union–led Communist bloc nations. At a time of intense rivalry between the superpowers, one African issue dominated news from the continent that year: the “Congo Crisis.” In a year that on the one hand seemed to affirm African nationalism, the Congo Crisis also highlighted the difficulties that new African nations would face in trying to forge their own sovereign futures in a time when the Cold War largely shaped international relations and often undermined the hopes of aspiring nations. The Congo had originally been seized by King Leopold of Belgium in 1885 and used as his private estate. The administration of the Congo Free State was so draconian that some historians have estimated that perhaps 20 percent of the original population died on rubber plantations. News of these atrocities eventually led the Belgian government to administer the colony directly in 1908. While state-sanctioned violence against the Congolese people effectively ended, economic exploitation remained the norm, and white Europeans dominated governance of the colony. Owing to the Congo’s rich mineral resources, mining became an increasingly important sector of the economy. The Congolese were barred from any aspect of administration, and Belgium had no long-term plan in place for the independence of the Congo even as decolonization proceeded all around them. The Belgian government was rattled by riots in Leopoldville in January 1959, and moderate reforms aimed at conciliation backfired, leading to violent riots in Stanleyville later that year. The Belgian government feared a colonial struggle akin to what France was experiencing in Algeria and quickly offered independence to the Congolese. Fewer than 50 Congolese had a university degree at this time, and there were serious divisions among the nascent political parties. Some parties, such as ABAKO, led by Joseph Kasavubu, had an ethnic foundation and were more conservative, being favored by the Belgians. One important nationalist was Patrice Lumumba, head of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC). Lumumba’s sole experience in government had been as a postal clerk, but this had not stopped him from helping to found the MNC and becoming its president. Lumumba was a committed nationalist, Pan-Africanist, and a fiery, charismatic leader. He forged close ties with Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana and also a committed PanAfricanist. Fiercely anti-imperialist and harshly critical of a century of racist colonial rule, Lumumba appeared to the Belgians to be dangerously left wing, leading to his arrest on several occasions. Talks in Brussels led to an agreement for elections on May 22, 1960, and independence on June 30, 1960. Lumumba and the MNC were elected (he as prime minister) as part of a broad coalition, with Kasavubu serving as president as part of a power-sharing agreement. Even with the handover to

independence, tensions simmered in the colony, and a few days after independence, the army mutinied. In the midst of this chaos, Belgian business interests and troops supported the secession of the province of Katanga under Moise Tshombe. Katanga contained the majority of the Congo’s rich mineral resources, and thus its loss would have been catastrophic to the new government. The United Nations under Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld—who was supportive of Belgium and U.S. interests and hostile to Lumumba—sent forces to the Congo but refused to quell the secession. Lumumba appealed to the United Nations and United States for aid in transporting his troops, but they refused. In desperation, he turned to the Soviet Union, although he received little effective support. From the standpoint of the United States, the Congo was extremely important for the uranium that the country possessed; the Manhattan Project had been completed with uranium from the Congo. There was also great interest in some corners (including some members of the Eisenhower administration) in the country’s copper, cobalt, and other mineral resources. While the United States had previously been uneasy regarding Lumumba’s intentions, his appeal to the Soviets convinced American policymakers that he was a Communist threat to U.S. interests, and that the Congo could become another Cuba. Fearing that the USSR would gain a foothold in Africa through the Congo and also determined to secure its own material interests, the United States became increasingly involved in the crisis.

His arms roped behind him, and under guard of Congolese soldiers loyal to strongman Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, ousted Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba leaves a plane at Leopoldville Airport on December 2, 1960. Lumumba was killed in early 1961 under mysterious circumstances, and strong evidence suggests that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the death. (AP Photo/JWB/Brazzaville)

Events in the Congo rapidly deteriorated. Relations between Lumumba and Kasavubu had always been tense, and on September 5, Kasavubu—closely tied to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency— dismissed Lumumba as prime minister despite Lumumba’s strong support in the Congolese Parliament. Hammarskjöld endorsed the dismissal, and when Lumumba tried to make his case by radio to the Congolese people, UN forces closed the radio station. A week later, Colonel Joseph Mobutu—a committed anticommunist supported by the CIA—arrested Lumumba. With CIA support, Mobutu staged a coup that suspended the parliament. Lumumba’s supporters rallied around Antoine Gizenga in Stanleyville, leaving the country split between warring factions. Lumumba escaped house arrest in November. He attempted to reach his supporters but was soon recaptured. Mobutu delivered Lumumba over to Moise Tshombe in Katanga, where he was beaten,

tortured, and executed on January 17, 1961. This was done with the knowledge of the United States and the support of the Belgian government. It has long been alleged that CIA director Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower directly approved Lumumba’s assassination—and in fact the Church Committee in 1975 affirmed the former’s direct role in the episode. Mobutu continued to receive support from the United States, as Mobutu was committed to driving the Soviet presence from the country. Lumumba’s death did not mark the end of the Congo Crisis, though his death made him a martyred symbol to anti-imperialism throughout Africa and in other parts of the world. His murder also cemented the rule of Joseph Mobutu over the country. Hammarskjöld died in September 1961 while flying to mediate a cease-fire in Katanga. Katanga was eventually returned to Congolese control in 1962 after UN military operations weakened the government. Gizenga’s government was recognized as legitimate by the Soviet bloc but was toppled in 1962 as well, though Gizenga survived and eventually went into exile. The Congo was effectively locked down under Mobutu’s dictatorial rule for the next 30 years, and when Mobutu was driven from power in 1997, a civil war broke out shortly thereafter. The seeds of the Congo’s suffering were sown in 1960 amidst a greater struggle between superpowers and the end of European colonialism. In the end, the U.S. imperial role in ending what it called the “chaos” of the Congo Crisis served well its own strategic interests in Africa. Zeb Larson See also: Church Committee Hearings/Reports; Dulles, Allen; Primary Documents: CIA Director Allen Dulles’s Cable on Possible CIA Involvement in Plots against Patrice Lumumba during the Congo Crisis (August 26, 1960)

Further Reading Gondola, Ch. Didier. The History of Congo. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Kalb, Madeleine G. The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—From Eisenhower to Kennedy. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Mazov, Sergey. A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1960–1964. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010. Spooner, Kevin. Canada, the Congo Crisis and UN Peacekeeping, 1960–1964. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2009.

Cuban Missile Crisis. See Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis Diem, Ngo Dinh (1901–1963) Ngo Dinh Diem was a politician of the Republic of South Vietnam (RVN). He rose to power because of his appeal as a potential popular anticommunist counterweight to North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. He was to have run against Ho in the 1956 election that was scheduled in the wake of the 1954 Geneva Accords. In 1955 he was technically serving as prime minister to then emperor Bao Dai, working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop a migration plan for refugees from the north. Diem and his American advisers hoped this would bolster his popularity. However, Diem’s strategies proved to have the opposite effect as large numbers of northern Vietnamese were relocated in Cham, Khmer Krom, and highland minority areas. Meanwhile, Diem opened himself up to accusations of nepotism by placing his three brothers in various senior positions, forming a family oligarchy with Ngo Dinh Can in charge of Hue, Ngo Dinh Thuc as the archbishop and primate of the Vietnamese Catholic Church, and Ngo Dinh Nhu as his principal

adviser and leader of the Personalist Labor Revolutionary Party (PLRP; Vietnamese: Can lao Nhan vị Cach Mang Dang). Under Diem and Nhu the PLRP was the only legal party in the incredibly diverse southern political landscape. Finally, Diem’s sister-in-law Madame Nhu became the leader of a women’s militia and served as hostess in the presidential palace. Despite his political positioning, Ngo Dinh Diem did not even control the streets of his own capital at Saigon when he began his rise to power in 1954. Besides the Communist factions that would become the National Liberation Front (NLF) in 1960, in a direct response to Diem’s policies, he faced threats from the Binh Xuyen—a group formed from former river pirates turned professional opium lords and militia by the French who controlled large portions of Chinatown (Vietnamese: Cho Lon)—and the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai militias that controlled major portions of territory outside Saigon to the north and west. Khmer Krom militarized populations, who became known as the “White Scarves,” were involved with resistance both in the Mekong Delta and in the Western Highlands (Vietnamese: Tay Nguyen, often erroneously translated as the “Central Highlands”). Cham populations were also involved with the Khmer Krom resistance and the Western Highlands. Finally, the Western Highlanders themselves revolted for the first time against Diem with the foundation of BAJARAKA in 1955. Diem’s resistance to working with a diverse political landscape was compounded with the populist appeal of land reform policies. Forty percent of the population in the south controlled as much as 89 percent of the land—with much higher concentrations of land ownership in the Mekong Delta. In a failed attempt to abate calls for land reform promoted by Vietnamese Nationalists, Communists, and Socialists, Diem moved his own land reform to the top of the political agenda by 1955. At the same time, rumors began to spread about the land reform policies in the north. Initial, more realistic estimates of 3,000 to 15,000 executions during the mid-1950s land reform campaigns were compounded to 50,000 and, suddenly, in the (unsubstantiated) words of Richard Nixon, 500,000 were dead while 500,000 were in slave labor camps. Meanwhile Diem’s own policies had very dubious effects by 1960 in the south. By the end of the five-year period the balance had gone from 40 percent of the population controlling 89 percent of the land to 10 percent controlling 55 percent with more corruption within the property exchange system than ever before. The irony of the issue of land reform was that while rumors regarding the land reform in the north created support for Diem among many prominent American political figures, the reality of Diem’s land reform in the south began to turn rural society strongly against him. Furthermore, Diem’s solution was to begin a political purge rather than address economic problems in a deeply divided society based on class, religion, and race. Diem began this purge with former Nationalists who had fought against the French but with the Viet Minh, as tens of thousands of people were arrested, jailed, and sent to reeducation camps. Next, in an election against Bao Dai, voters were only given the opportunity to “recognize” Diem or “not,” rather than vote for Diem or for Bao Dai. Political agitation against the vote was considered grounds for arrest, and charges of “subversion” led to the execution of 12,000 and the imprisonment of up to 50,000. The campaigns were an astounding (if fraudulent) success for Diem as he won a total of 605,025 votes out of 450,000 registered voters, claiming 98.2 percent of the share of total votes cast. Diem’s blatantly illegitimate election only deepened divisions in the south. The political purge continued in direct violation of the Geneva Accords and yet, all efforts to organize against the NLF were disrupted by NLF intelligence. Villages were commanded to inform the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARV) of the NLF’s presence. The NLF created terror as local police immediately assumed the NLF was everywhere. By 1961, the NLF reorganized into the People’s Liberation Armed Force (PLAF), increasing total membership from 17,000 to 25,000 in just one year. Diem’s continued attempts to purge the PLAF from the south only made the organization more popular, while his own support stood at around 5 percent

in most towns and villages. Recommendations were made that Ngo Dinh Nhu leave the country, for Diem to democratize the legislature, and for greater press freedom. When these recommendations were ignored, tensions between Diem and the Americans increased. Diem’s highland “agrovilles” turned into “strategic hamlets,” which had to operate without basic supplies until they “proved” their loyalty, which only alienated more South Vietnamese against him. By 1963 Diem had no support in his country and American support was failing as well, with most U.S. officials at the CIA and the State Department calling for his overthrow. With repression against the Buddhist majority intensifying, on June 11 the venerable Thich Quang Duc self-immolated, shocking the American public. That fall, President John F. Kennedy assented to a plan to overthrow the Diem government. Led by a cadre of Vietnamese generals, the coup d’etat in fact became the assassination of both Diem and his brother on November 1, 1963. William Noseworthy See also: Geneva Accords; Ho Chi Minh; Kennedy, John F.; National Liberation Front (NLF); Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO); Vietnam War

Further Reading Chapman, Jessica. “Staging Democracy: South Vietnam’s 1955 Referendum to Depose Bao Dai.” Diplomatic History 30, no. 4 (September 2006): 671–703. Jacobs, Seth. Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950–1963. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Kahin, George. Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam. New York: Anchor Press / Doubleday, 1986. McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003.

Dominican Republic (1954–1975) The Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic occupied a key place in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, dictator Rafael Trujillo described himself as the most important anticommunist and U.S. ally in all of Latin America. However, his repressive actions led to his CIA-backed assassination. Initially supportive of President Juan Bosch, U.S. policy reversed following a military coup and U.S. occupation of the capital. Withdrawing its military, the U.S. government continued to influence Dominican politics by propping up Trujillo’s protégé, Joaquín Balaguer. In 1956, Trujillo ordered the kidnapping of exile Jesús Galíndez in New York, provoking a congressional inquiry by Oregon congressman Charles Porter. In June 1959, Dominican exiles with Fidel Castro’s endorsement launched expeditions against Trujillo, and Trujillo ordered more assassinations that increased international outrage. The Organization of American States then cut diplomatic relations upon discovering Trujillo’s plot to assassinate Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt. In response, U.S. officials terminated support to the dictator, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) provided weapons to anti-Trujillo leaders used in Trujillo’s assassination on May 30, 1961. Into 1962, the Kennedy administration backed democratic elections that brought anti-Trujillo exile Juan Bosch to the presidency. Receiving $40 million in U.S. aid, Bosch supported a new liberal constitution. Reactionary conservatives, military forces, and pro-Trujillo remnants ousted Bosch in September 1963 and installed a military junta. Mocking Bosch’s capabilities, U.S. officials recognized this junta. In April 1965, a small group of military officers, joined by leftist factions, rose against the junta

and demanded the restoration of Bosch and constitutional rule. The military, led by Colonel Elías Wessin y Wessin, began targeting these Constitutionalist groups as well as civilian neighborhoods. Despite the domestic nature of this civil war, the Johnson administration feared connections between the Constitutionalists and Castro, despite the complete absence of such ties. Consequently, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the deployment of 22,200 U.S. troops and a naval blockade beginning April 28. Constitutionalists vehemently opposed this act of U.S. intervention and resisted U.S.-sanctioned ceasefire arrangements, for the military junta used the U.S. presence to deploy its forces and attack Constitutionalists. As a result, the junta destroyed most Constitutionalist bases and effectively ended the war. Dominicans and Americans prepared for the June 1966 presidential election between Bosch and Trujillo’s loyal official Balaguer. To ensure a Balaguer victory, the CIA poured money into Balaguer’s campaign and allowed suspicious electoral practices. After Balaguer’s supposed election, U.S. officials provided him more than $400 million in aid as he in turn backed U.S. Cold War policies. Into the late 1970s, Balaguer manipulated Dominican politics and eliminated his political opponents, often with the use of U.S.-trained forces. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Dominican Republic (1893–1945); School of the Americas

Further Reading Chester, Eric. Rag-Tags, Scum, Riff-Raff, and Commies: The U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965–1966. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Rabe, Stephen. The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick) (1964) Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (hereafter referred to as Dr. Strangelove) is a 1964 Hollywood film directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film is a black comedy depicting a fictional incident between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that leads the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The plot follows the exploits of the U.S. and Soviet military complexes as rogue U.S. general “Jack D. Ripper” orders a nuclear strike against the USSR, despite no such order being given by the U.S. president for an attack. The crux of the film follows the American and Soviet administrations as they attempt to divert the strike only to realize that ordering a nuclear strike is much easier than cancelling one. In Dr. Strangelove Kubrick showcases the tensions and contradictions of Cold War posturing. Much of the narrative revolves around the inability of the United States to call off the airstrike due to bureaucratic idiosyncratic quirks. This becomes a major plot point when it is discovered that the Soviet military has a series of doomsday countermeasures that will automatically retaliate against the United States when attacked. This part of the narrative revolves around the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD) between the superpowers: a real, hypothetical military axiom prevailing during the Cold War in which the United States and the Soviet Union would destroy each other if one was attacked by the other— effectively serving as a check against a first strike by either country.

Another theme present in the film is the inflexibility and inhumanity of large state bureaucracies, and the concentration of ultimate power in the hands of military men. Although Ripper is acting alone as he orders the strike against the USSR, when the U.S. president attempts to call off the attacks, it quickly becomes apparent that because of a series of fail-safe measures, the only person with the authority to cancel the attack is the very same one who ordered it. Similarly, the Soviet defense system is set to automatically reciprocate in the case of an attack; not even the premier can call off the strike. When it is realized that worldwide nuclear annihilation is imminent, the state elites on both sides start planning damage control scenarios. One strategy the United States comes up with is to strike immediately at the Soviets to take out as much of their military as possible, thus minimizing U.S. casualties if war breaks out. The ensuing argument over the ethical implications of such a maneuver leads to an especially enthusiastic general (inspired in part by General Curtis LeMay) arguing to the U.S. president, “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.” In Dr. Strangelove Kubrick confronted in darkly comic terms the nuclear fears of Americans in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Though fantastic in plot, the film and characters were realistic enough to leave American filmgoers—for the first time in the history of the nuclear age—pondering the profound implications of living under the shadow of nuclear apocalypse, and wondering about the men and the mechanisms put in place to prevent it. Cory C. Martin See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; LeMay, Curtis

Further Reading Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1987. McDonough, David S. “Nuclear Superiority or Mutually Assured Deterrence: The Development of the US Nuclear Deterrent.” International Journal 60, no. 3 (2005): 811–823.

Ecuador (1954–1975) Ecuador emerged as one of the Latin American countries impacted indirectly by U.S. policies during the Cold War. Due to its position in South America rather than Central America, Ecuadorean officials were able to challenge U.S. goals, although organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sought to influence the country’s domestic affairs after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Consequently, U.S.Ecuadorian relations appeared far more stable, in contrast to events elsewhere in the continent. U.S. officials did not pay significant attention to Ecuador until Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. Against U.S. claims in the early 1960s that Cuban agents attempted to network with Ecuadorean leftists or that communism threatened Ecuador, populist president José María Velasco Ibarra remained ambivalent. When Ecuador’s military removed Velasco Ibarra in 1961, new president Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy continued opposing U.S. policies throughout Latin America. He maintained relations with Poland and Czechoslovakia and even visited the Soviet Union against U.S. wishes. Although the country supported most measures directed against Castro’s Cuba, Ecuador still opposed trade embargoes or removing Cuba from international organizations. When eight people drove a truck through the gates of the Ecuadorean embassy in Havana to obtain political asylum, the Cuban military fired at the truck, killing

three and wounding others. It was this incident, rather than direct pressure from U.S. officials, that led to Arosemena Monroy’s breaking Ecuador’s relations with Cuba. However, U.S. policies did indirectly shape events in Ecuador during the Cold War. U.S. Cold War institutions, such as the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and the United States Agency for International Development, made inroads. According to former CIA agent Philip Agee, the CIA targeted the country’s leftist organizations in the early 1960s. To damage the groups’ reputations, the CIA printed radical propaganda under leftists’ names and even paid students to vandalize walls and universities to frame leftist groups. The CIA provided fake documents that led to alleged Communists being imprisoned, funneled money to right-wing organizations, and tried to buy votes and rig elections. The organization also funded student newspapers at the universities, paid editors to publish CIA-produced materials in the leading Ecuadorean journals, and organized anticommunist demonstrations. Through their contacts, the CIA obtained reports from Ecuador’s military junta between 1963 and 1966. During the 1972 military coup, one of the leading officers, General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, happened to be a graduate of the U.S.-sponsored School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. While links between U.S. officials and Ecuador’s development remain vague, many blame the military and the elite’s repression of leftist and indigenous activists, smeared as Communists, on U.S. policies. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Brazil; Chile; United Fruit Company; Uruguay

Further Reading Agee, Philip. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Reprint ed. New York: Bantam, 1989. Pineo, Ronn. Ecuador and the United States: Useful Strangers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Striffler, Steve. In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

East Timor. See Indonesia/East Timor Ellsberg, Daniel. See Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg G.I. Joe G.I. Joe was an action figure created in 1964 by the Hasbro toy company. Still in production, G.I. Joe (the term deriving from anything “Government Issued” in World Wars I and II, but ultimately denoting in the vernacular ordinary soldiers who served during World War II) went through a variety of iterations during the Cold War. These changes include the size of the action figure, the background story of the toy, marketing, and villains. G.I. Joe was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2003. This distinction, along with sales numbering over 400 million units, make G.I. Joe an iconic toy in U.S. cultural history. In the five decades of the toy’s existence, G.I. Joe has impacted cultural, social, and political thought through children’s play. The action figures and their accessories transmitted generational values regarding social constructs, morality, and the perception of the military. Released soon after American citizens

experienced the fear of nuclear destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis, G.I. Joe became a reflection and reinforcement of Cold War–era ideology and domestic norms. The original G.I. Joe line included an action figure for the main branches of the U.S. military (army, navy, air force, and marines) and presented a hardened face (including a scarred right cheek) symbolizing rugged individuality. In contrast, Joe’s counterparts in Europe were designed to be slightly smaller and less battle ready. In 1965, to mirror President Johnson’s “Great Society” and the civil rights movement, Hasbro added an African American G.I. Joe. However, opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s marked G.I. Joe for criticism by antiwar protesters and young baby boom parents of the era. Succumbing to parental claims that G.I. Joe was teaching children that violence could be fun, Hasbro replaced the toy’s tagline, “America’s Movable Fighting Man,” with “America’s Movable Adventure Man.” Likewise, story lines distanced G.I. Joe from combat scenarios. Instead, during the 1970s with U.S. foreign and military policy undergoing critique from many corners, G.I. Joe traveled rough terrain, explored the unknown, rescued those in danger, and tracked wild animals. As Cold War hostilities resurfaced in the 1980s, G.I. Joe was remarketed once again as “a Real American Hero.” However, realizing that direct conflict with the Soviet Union was unlikely, a terrorist organization, COBRA, was created by Hasbro to challenge the patriotic values of G.I. Joe. Likewise, the change moved G.I. Joe away from the celebration of individuality and toward teamwork as an essential value. COBRA, whose members were made up of disgruntled attorneys and accountants, wore masks similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan and were a domestic threat headquartered in Springfield (a city name common in many states in the United States), not an overseas enemy. The finality of the Cold War coincided with the end of G.I Joe’s “golden era” of popularity. However, the toy left a powerful mark on American identity. Everyday items like toys, which enter so many homes, are constant reminders of certain values for children who play with them. For decades, G.I. Joe was a symbol of masculinity, nationalism, morality, and righteous American power. Craig J. Perrier See also: Militarization of American Culture; Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Engelhardt, Tom. “How Star Wars Saved American Triumphalism.” Mother Jones (2013). National Toy Hall of Fame. “G.I. Joe.” http://www.toyhalloffame.org/toys/gi-joe. Accessed October 18, 2014. Schwartz, Helen S. “When Barbie Dated G.I. Joe: Analyzing the Toys of the Early Cold War Era.” Material History Review 45 (Spring 1997).

Greece, Military Coup d’Etat and Junta (1967–1974) The Greek Civil War of 1944–1949 provided the flash point crisis for the launch of President Harry S. Truman’s Containment Doctrine that put the United States on a course of supporting and arming anticommunist efforts all around the world. Following the delivery of massive amounts of American military aid in 1947, the conservative Greek government turned the corner and achieved a victory over the military forces of the Greek Communist Party, thereby strengthening the dependency of the repressively anticommunist, authoritarian regime on U.S. military aid. U.S. military bases were established throughout the country, which joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, further cementing Greece’s geostrategic importance in the Cold War. After a decade of U.S.-driven internal reform, by the mid-1950s Greece could claim to be a stable parliamentary democracy whose government was solidly in the pro-Western U.S. camp of the Cold War. By the 1960s, however, the heavy U.S. presence—and the conservative regime itself—had become more unpopular, with protest rising about the continued imposition of U.S. policies. After having been defeated in allegedly suspect elections in 1961, George Papandreou was elected prime minister in 1964 on a campaign of “unyielding struggle” against the corruption of the Greek government. By 1967, with elections once again scheduled, ongoing tensions between Papandreou and King Constantine surrounding a restructuring of the military boiled over, and King Constantine authorized a coup led by generals loyal to the monarchy. However, before that could be carried out, and before what would have been a certain reelection of Papandreou—and with his son Andreas Papandreou waiting in the wings to further succeed him and push the government even further to the political Left—another plot of Greek army colonels to overthrow him was successfully carried out. On April 21, 1967, a military dictatorship commenced in Greece that would last until 1974. Evidence of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) awareness of the 1967 coup includes a raft of documents from the CIA showing that the agency saw Andreas Papandreou as the real threat to U.S. security interests. Emerging as a charismatic and stronger figure than his father, the younger Papandreou was a left-wing intellectual who had openly and repeatedly declared that since the Civil War Greece had become a puppet of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and called for greater economic and foreign policy independence from the Western bloc. The highest officials in the Lyndon Johnson administration, including the president himself, railed against the “betrayal” of Andreas Papandreou—a reference to the fact that he had become a naturalized U.S. citizen while teaching at the University of California. Although there is no evidence of direct CIA involvement in the 1967 coup— indeed, they were fully expecting the king’s coup instead—the leader of the military junta was Georgios Papadopoulos, a former Nazi collaborator during World War II, who had been trained in the United States as a CIA agent. Papadopoulos became the first CIA agent to serve as head of state of a Western European nation. The Papadopoulos dictatorship, which suppressed all political liberty and carried out widespread imprisonment and torture against its political opponents, received intensified U.S. support during the presidency of Richard Nixon (1969–1974) until it finally collapsed in the face of overwhelming protest and a return to democracy. Decades later, the unshakeable perception in Greece that the United States sponsored the coup is undoubtedly owed to long-standing U.S. intervention in the country and to Nixon’s embrace of the regime. Chris J. Magoc

See also: Greek Civil War; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Further Reading Keeley, Robert V. The Colonels’ Coup and the American Embassy: A Diplomat’s View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece. State College: Penn State University Press, 2011. Klaveras, Louis. “Were the Eagle and the Phoenix Birds of a Feather? The United States and the Greek Coup of 1967.” Discussion Paper No. 15. London: Hellenic Observatory—European Institute, London School of Economics, February 2004. http://www.scribd.com/doc/53211288/the-United-States-and-the-greek-military-dictatorship-of-1967. Accessed October 18, 2014.

The Green Berets (1968) The Green Berets (1968) is a Hollywood film about the Vietnam War starring John Wayne as Colonel Mike Kirby. Inspired by Wayne’s patriotism and his bitter feelings about the antiwar movement, the movie was unabashedly anticommunist and pro–South Vietnam in its message and was intended to help buttress what was withering support for the prosecution of the war. That goal was especially urgent in 1968, the year of the pivotal Tet Offensive of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong that widened considerably the “credibility gap” of the Johnson administration with respect to its pronouncements about progress in the war. It is no surprise, then, that the making of the film received extensive support and cooperation from the Pentagon and the Johnson administration. The filmmakers were determined to reduce the Vietnam War to a moralized tale of evil Communists who committed one atrocity after another (with presumably no larger political goal in mind); of good American soldiers simply and bravely trying to do their best to give South Vietnam a bright and democratic future free from Communist incursion; and of American journalists who either maliciously— or in the case of the character played by David Janssen, unwittingly—misinterpreted the reality of the war to the American public back home. As critics pointed out, the film grossly oversimplified the very complicated realities of the war, as well as the people and cultures of Vietnam. In the film’s closedcaptioning even simple Vietnamese phrases remain untranslated, but are rather labeled as “speaking Vietnamese.” More substantively, there is no National Liberation Front fighting to restore the Vietnamese independence (denied them in the 1950s in no small part by the United States), no Ho Chi Minh, no memory of the horrors of the U.S.-supported Diem regime, only despised “VC,” “Charlies” and “gooks.” Further, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam—contrary to the experience of many if not most U.S. soldiers—is depicted as brave and quite willing and capable of defending their country. Other inaccuracies and slanderous episodes aimed at the Vietnamese Communists abound. In one scene, Colonel Kirby offers a tale of a rape of a (Vietnamese) “chieftain’s wife” by “40” Communists. No such accounts in the history of the war have been substantiated, contrary to the documented pattern of rape incidents by American soldiers. When the reporter, initially cynical of the American war effort, declares that he will write an honest (pro-American) story about a fierce attack by Communist forces on a U.S. Special Forces camp, he notes that he will be fired for doing so. This was at best a misleading characterization of the American media’s treatment of the Vietnam War in 1967–1968. Scholars have pointed to the revealing nature of iconic western film star Wayne’s role in the film and its reflection of the greater psychology of both the Vietnam War and its connections to the U.S. war of conquest against Native Americans. Soldiers in Vietnam frequently referred to areas held by the Vietnamese Communists as “Indian country.” Air and ground operations often were given names evocative of the Western frontier (e.g., Operation Ranch Hand for a massive defoliation program). In the

film, the Special Forces camp is called “Dodge City,” and Wayne’s on-screen persona automatically invoked the righteously violent American moralism associated with frontier mythology. Despite the film receiving scathing critical reviews—or perhaps partly because of them—The Green Berets was a stunning commercial success, although its popularity dropped off steeply after the news of the My Lai massacre broke and investigations into the Phoenix program began. Consequentially, no major studio put out another Vietnam movie for nearly another decade. William Noseworthy See also: My Lai Massacre; Phoenix Program; Vietnam War

Further Reading Aldair, Gilbert. Vietnam on Film: From the Green Berets to Apocalypse Now. New York: Proteus, 1981. Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. The Green Berets. DVD. Burbank, CA: Batjac Productions and Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2007 [1968].

Guatemala (1954–1975) Between 1954 and 1975, Guatemala became a laboratory of U.S. Cold War policies in Latin America following the 1954 U.S.-sponsored coup. To support Guatemala’s military government, U.S. officials invested vast sums of economic aid, yet anticommunist priorities undermined the intentions behind these programs. As a result, Guatemala descended into a decades-long civil war during which the military government utilized U.S. assistance to attack not only guerrilla rebels but thousands of citizens. After 1954’s Operation PBSUCCESS that resulted in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, numerous international actors condemned the coup. To bolster the regime’s image, the Eisenhower administration sent officials to search for Communist propaganda, the coup’s leader Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas to meet U.S. students, and U.S. labor activists to the countryside. In Guatemala, the Eisenhower administration provided more than $100 million in aid in the 1950s and created a “parallel government” of U.S. officials to institute tax reform, agrarian projects, and economic aid. However, U.S. officials’ intransigence and Guatemalan officials’ corruption resulted in misallocated funds and graft, as when President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes’s associates bought U.S. corn below market value or when U.S. construction firms underpaid Guatemalan laborers on the Atlantic Highway. Furthermore, Castillo Armas dissolved the previous government’s programs, abolished labor laws, condemned student demonstrations, and suppressed nonradical democratic and social reformers. In November 1960, a cadre of military officers rose against Ydígoras Fuentes while protesting U.S. influence in Guatemala. Fearing such instability jeopardized the U.S.-trained Cuban exiles in Guatemala prior to the Bay of Pigs operation, U.S. officials redirected resources and helped the military crush the rebellion. Silenced over the past decade and unable to peacefully challenge governmental policy, many leftists joined the rebellion’s survivors as guerrilla rebels. In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration provided more than $4 million to suppress rebels as well as alleged sources of Communist influences. When Ydígoras Fuentes welcomed former president Juan José Arévalo in 1963, U.S. officials encouraged a military coup and sent advisers and counterinsurgency trainers. Even U.S.-directed social projects suffered from U.S. anticommunist fears. U.S. Agency for International Development and Alliance for Progress officials trained some indigenous groups to demand democratic reforms. When these peoples demanded the right to vote and organized

protests against Guatemalan elites, Kennedy and Johnson officials joined the Guatemalan military in labeling U.S.-trained peasant leaders as Communist agitators. Over time, the leftist insurgency escalated, resulting in the assassinations of Guatemalan and U.S. officials, including U.S. ambassador John Gordon Mein. Guatemalan military and police targeted more than armed guerrilla rebels. Guatemalan officials alleged that Communist and leftist forces received support from activists and indigenous populations. Based on this argument and with U.S. knowledge and resources, security forces in the early 1970s “disappeared” students and labor leaders and initiated genocidal massacres against Mayan peoples. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Dominican Republic (1954–1975); Guatemala (1946–1954); School of the Americas

Further Reading Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Streeter, Stephen. Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000.

Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che” (1928–1967) Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna was one of the key leaders of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Guevara championed the cause of anti-imperialism and toward that goal was a practitioner of guerrilla warfare in Africa and Latin America. His image became a symbol of the spirit of willpower and social justice as it appeared—even decades after his death—on posters and T-shirts throughout the world. Ernesto Guevara was born to an upper-middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, in June 1928. His mother, Celia, was a Socialist and anticlerical feminist who had a strong influence on her son. Guevara attended public school, associated with diverse populations, and played sports. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires and earned a medical degree. His eight-month trip in 1951 through much of South America with his friend Alberto Granado increased his awareness of the realities of poverty and strengthened his antipathy to the United States. He journeyed again from 1953 to 1955, this time through Central America where he witnessed the 1954 overthrow of the Guatemalan Revolution by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, Guevara attempted to become a leader of the Guatemalan resistance fighting the newly installed right-wing military junta of Carlos Castillo Armas. Guevara’s experience in Guatemala convinced him that only armed struggle could defeat the forces of imperialism and lead oppressed peoples of Latin America to a more just—and Marxist—future. In the summer of 1955, Guevara met Fidel and Raul Castro and decided to join the Cubans fighting against dictator Fulgencio Batista. He was among the 12 survivors of the famous Granma expedition in December 1956. Guevara commanded one of the guerrilla units in the Sierra Maestra and formed the radical wing of the 26th of July Movement. In August 1958 Guevara marched toward Havana and won a major battle in Santa Clara, paving the way for the final victory of the Cuban Revolution. Guevara became a key economic planner during Cuba’s early revolutionary era; he took several important posts, such as director of the Industrial Department of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, president of the National Bank of Cuba, and minister of industry. Following Marxist theory, Guevara initiated central economic planning that required extensive state ownership of productive enterprises. But

his plan for the rapid industrialization of Cuba failed. To create a “new man” dedicated to the revolution, Guevara also tried to abolish all market and monetary relations on value in favor of moral incentives. He believed that revolutionaries’ work performances should be rewarded by higher social reputation rather than better access to commercial products.

Serving alongside Fidel Castro as one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna became the most recognizable face of guerrilla warfare and revolution of the 20th century. A fervent and effective anti-imperialist, Guevara advocated guerrilla warfare as a means of liberation for the peoples of Africa and Latin America. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

On the international stage, Guevara gained fame through several trips and meetings with global leaders such as Ahmed Ben Bella, Mao Zedong, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. He led Cuba’s diplomatic missions to the Soviet Union and played a central role in cementing a Soviet-Cuban alliance. Guevara soon became a vocal critic of the Soviet reluctance to support revolutions. He instead called for uprisings around the world. Guevara himself went to the Congo in 1965 to assist a revolt against Belgian colonial rule. When this mission failed, Guevara shifted his focus to Bolivia, where he was captured and executed in October 1967 by forces trained and supported by the CIA. He has since become an international symbol for many of resistance to imperialist control of oppressed populations. Hideaki Kami See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Guatemala (1954–1975); Primary Documents: Cuban Revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara’s Speech to the Santa Clara, Cuba, Sugar Workers (March 28, 1961)

Further Reading Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press, 1997.

Castañeda, Jorge G. Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Translated by Marina Castañeda. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution (1964) The Gulf of Tonkin is the body of water that connects the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam to the South China Sea. The geography includes the stunningly beautiful bay of Ha Long and a large series of volcanic islands that were the territory of notorious pirates throughout the early modern period. In the context of American imperialism, however, the Gulf of Tonkin is best known for the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which would be better described as three Gulf of Tonkin Incidents and resulted in what was tantamount to a U.S. declaration of war against North Vietnam, giving three U.S. presidents unbridled authority for a decade to wage war in Southeast Asia.

President Lyndon Johnson signs the August 7, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which as he put it, “was like Grandma’s nightshirt —it covered everything.” Passing with little debate and only two dissenting votes, the resolution gave Johnson a free hand to launch a full-scale war in Vietnam. (Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library)

The events leading up to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident were primarily the result of U.S. aggression against Communist North Vietnam. In 1961 the American Central Intelligence Agency instituted the “DESOTO Patrol” electronic surveillance missions. When DESOTO was transferred to the Defense Department in 1964, American military planners devised the clandestine “US Operation Plan 34 Alpha” (OPlan 34-A). To support OPlan 34-A, by the spring of 1964 South Vietnamese patrol boats were staging sporadic attacks against North Vietnamese coastal installations (against the protests of the North Vietnamese government). In addition the U.S. Military Assistance Command’s Vietnam Studies and Observations Group had simultaneously launched a land-based covert operation that included attacks on North Vietnamese military outposts that were supported by the Laotian air force and Thai mercenaries. To

support these operations, the American veteran destroyer USS Maddox was deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin in July 1964. On July 30, 1964, the USS Maddox was patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin, equipped with a team of Vietnamese translators. The command was nominally South Vietnamese. However, the real senior command of the USS Maddox (and all South Vietnamese gunboats then in the gulf) was American. On July 30–31, South Vietnamese and U.S. forces initiated a series of heavy raids on two islands in the Gulf of Tonkin: Hon Me and Hon Ngu. As they had been doing for several months, the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi raised an official protest that went unanswered. On August 1, the Maddox came within firing range of the two islands, inciting further protest from Hanoi. The first Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred on August 2, 1964. Provoked most immediately by the close proximity of the USS Maddox to North Vietnamese positions on Hon Me and Hon Ngu, three North Vietnamese patrol boats began observing the Maddox, which at the time was in disputed waters: three to four miles inside the 12-mile territorial limit claimed by North Vietnam. Wary of North Vietnamese retaliation against the Americans for the OPlan 34-A clandestine attacks, American commanders declared the patrol boats as being “in pursuit” of the Maddox. However, as declassified documents later showed, no shots were fired by the North Vietnamese before the USS Maddox opened fire on the North Vietnamese patrols. The USS Maddox fired what commanders claimed were “warning shots.” However, other sources have confirmed that initial orders were “shoot to kill” as soon as they were within range of the Maddox and its massive arsenal, which unloaded on the patrols. In response the North Vietnamese patrols managed to fire just one torpedo before one or more of the patrols sank or was critically damaged. On August 3 the Maddox was joined by a second American vessel: the USS Turner Joy in the waters off Hon Me island, under the personal orders of American president Lyndon B. Johnson. On August 4, a second DESOTO patrol was deployed. Late that night, an “unidentified” radar blip on the Turner Joy and radar pings bouncing off their own rudder read by the Maddox induced a series of wildly evasive maneuvers that produced more unreadable radar signals—and then, full open fire command by both U.S. vessels on an enemy that was not there. The commander of the Turner Joy concluded that any contact was “very doubtful” and a “complete evaluation [should be made] before further action” (Young, p. 117). Despite that suggestion, the ships received orders for further action. However, there was no enemy to be fought. Nevertheless, the USS Maddox launched another attack complete with air support against a nonexistent enemy force. Shortly after this exchange commenced, President Lyndon B. Johnson reported on national TV that American vessels “on routine patrol” and in “international waters” had been attacked by the Communist forces of North Vietnam. That was enough for Congress to act—although they did not declare war on North Vietnam as required by the Constitution. Instead, on August 7, they briefly debated and nearly unanimously supported the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: 416–0 in the House of Representatives and 82–2 in the Senate. The resolution declared that North Vietnam had “deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States naval vessels.” Ultimately the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (which had been drafted in May of that year) was a declaration that gave the U.S. president full authority to launch a massive military escalation against both North Vietnam and South Vietnamese Communist (VC) guerilla forces— one that featured a devastating bombing campaign on the North that illegally spilled over into Cambodia and Laos, along with more than a half-million American ground forces, napalm, and a devastating defoliation campaign. The Gulf of Tonkin events were contested almost immediately by critics of the war. An official investigation began as early as 1967, foreshadowing a series of investigations on American actions at My Lai and into the details of the Phoenix program. Statements were leaked by two crew members of the USS Maddox and middle-ranking Pentagon officials that convinced Senator William Fulbright to begin an

investigation. Overwhelming public opposition to the Vietnam War led to both the repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1971 and to the 1973 War Powers Act, an attempt by the Congress to restrain and provide more careful oversight of the president’s ability to engage Americans in hostilities. William Noseworthy See also: My Lại Massacre; Phoenix Program; Vietnam War; Primary Documents: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Message to Congress on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (August 5, 1964) and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964)

Further Reading Kahin, George. Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986. “The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” in Marvin E. Gettlemen et al., eds. Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War. New York: Grove Press, 2005, pp. 248–273. Sheenan, Neil. “The Covert War and Tonkin Gulf: February–August, 1964.” In The New York Times: The Pentagon Papers. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971, pp. 244–278. Young, Marilyn. The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Haiti (1954–1975) Haiti witnessed the years of the François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1957–1971) and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1971–1986) dictatorships. During this era, the Duvaliers built a vicious dictatorship that siphoned off economic resources. The dictators justified their murdering and torturing thousands of Haitians by labeling all opponents as Communists. Focused on the international Cold War, U.S. officials maintained a conflicted relationship with these corrupt Caribbean dictators who utilized anticommunism to serve their own ends at the expense of their citizens. Anticommunism dominated U.S. policy toward the Caribbean and influenced U.S.-Haitian relations under the Duvalier dictatorships. Although wary about the regime’s repression of Haitians, the Eisenhower administration sought to bolster anticommunist governments in Latin America through military aid. The Kennedy administration’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, even described François Duvalier as “a disgrace to this hemisphere” (Plummer, 184), but U.S. officials needed allies after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro. After François installed himself as “President for Life,” the dictator immediately offered his country to the United States as a base for military organizations, satellite tracking, and more against Castro, thus manipulating anticommunism to serve his own ends. In the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) even considered plans for Haitian exiles to invade and overthrow the Duvalier regime, and CIA allies, such as Cuban exiles against Castro, networked with Haitian exiles. However, U.S. officials remained more concerned not with the brutality of the Duvalier regime but that any potential instability in Haiti following a Duvalier ouster would benefit Communists or Castro sympathizers. The Duvalier regime also manipulated U.S. assistance. Facing international debts and severe poverty, Haiti solicited economic aid from abroad. Through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other organizations, Haiti received millions in the 1950s for infrastructure. When U.S. officials in the early 1960s warned of the dictatorship’s cruelties, the Kennedy administration still viewed the Duvalier regime as an anticommunist ally against Castro, so Haiti received $14.1 million in 1961 from USAID as well as more than $10 million in technical and economic assistance. During the Johnson administration, some U.S. officials noted that the Duvalier dictatorship stole U.S. aid. In the late

1960s, these officials cut military assistance programs while encouraging organizations such as the InterAmerican Development Bank to provide loans for education and infrastructure projects without direct links to the regime. By the end of the decade, the Nixon administration endorsed the Duvalier dictatorship as an anticommunist government. As New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller helped resume military assistance to the Duvaliers. The regime’s military executed various dissidents while stifling the press. Despite François’s death in 1971, the Duvalier regime continued under Jean-Claude while obtaining U.S. economic and military aid into the 1980s. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Dominican Republic (1954–1975); Guatemala (1954–1975); Haiti (1990–2014)

Further Reading Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Hanoi-Haiphong Bombing (1966–1972) During the Vietnam War, Hanoi and Haiphong became targets of three massive aerial bombing campaigns. American forces devastated Hanoi, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945–1975), also known as North Vietnam, and Haiphong, the North’s major port city. The first of these aerial attacks occurred in 1966 and intensified U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The second bombardment occurred in the spring of 1972 while the United States was in the final phase of withdrawing from the war. Peace talks between all warring parties including the Viet Cong (VC) in the South had stalled. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had crossed the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in a massive, conventional frontal attack aimed at conquering the South once and for all, but in doing so had violated an agreement that in 1968 had called for a cessation of attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong. The third and final pounding, also known as the Christmas Bombing, also took place in 1972 following the breakdown of peace negotiations. The 11-day campaign may have brought “peace with honor,” the stated aim of U.S. president Richard M. Nixon, but only after U.S. aircraft dropped 40,000 tons of bombs—the equivalent explosive power of two Hiroshima atomic bombs—in and around Hanoi. Peace accords were signed very soon afterward, signaling the near end of U.S. expansion in Southeast Asia. The year 1965 was the pivotal moment of U.S. escalation in the conflict. A year earlier, in response to Lyndon B. Johnson’s request, the U.S. Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that allowed for the full-scale use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia without a formal declaration of war. By this time the North Vietnamese Army was moving supplies and troops into South Vietnam, thereby rapidly improving the military capabilities of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) forces in the South. In 1965, Johnson authorized Operation Flaming Dart and, for the first time in history, U.S. military aircraft dropped bombs on Vietnam. The first combat troops—3,500 marines—also came ashore at Da Nang. Soon thereafter, Operation Rolling Thunder began in March 1965 with 100 fighter bombers targeting transportation and communication infrastructure in the North. One month later, long-range B-52 bombers, which flew at altitudes of up to six miles and could carry an exploding payload of 35 tons, rolled into the North. On June 29, 1966, Johnson lifted a self-imposed restriction on targets, and U.S. aircraft raided Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor for the first time, marking a major escalation in the undeclared war.

Many governments around the world condemned the attacks, as did many Americans. The response by U.S. Cold War foes was swift: both China and the Soviet Union would now dedicate resources to the North Vietnamese government in Hanoi that they believed had the right to defend itself against U.S. aggression. The most effective air defense weapon came from the Soviets, who supplied the North with surface-to-air-missile systems (SAMS) that became the dread of U.S. forces. Operation Rolling Thunder carried on for three and one-half years, during which time three million sorties were flown and eight million tons of bombs struck Vietnam (four times the tonnage dropped during all of World War II), but mostly in the South on the Viet Cong.

Civilians and military survivors of the battle for An Loc wander around in the battered city’s marketplace during the Easter Offensive in Hanoi, Vietnam, on June 22, 1972. This assault by the People’s Army of Vietnam was aimed at strengthening the position of the North Vietnamese government as the Paris Peace talks moved toward their final stage. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

By 1968, Johnson’s Vietnam policy was being ridiculed from all sides as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers neared 1,000 per month. By the fall of that year the 900th U.S. aircraft had been shot down. The Tet Offensive earlier that year made it clear to a growing number of critics that Operation Rolling Thunder was doing little to impede the North’s support of the Viet Cong. Critics on the right alleged that too many targets had been placed off limits. Following Tet, Johnson had partially halted the bombing of the North by delimiting attacks to below the 20th parallel, which effectively placed Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor out of reach. This was done under the condition that the North Vietnamese Army would not cross the DMZ. All parties agreed and peace talks began in Paris. The two cities and their outlying areas once again became targets in both spring and winter of 1972. For four years negotiations between the warring sides waxed and waned. North Vietnam believed that its long-sought victory was at hand. President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger implemented the strategy of “Vietnamization,” which saw the gradual transfer of responsibility for fighting the ground war to the Army of South Vietnam. By the spring of 1972, only 69,000 U.S. combat troops remained in the country. Earlier that year, Nixon had visited Communist China, a first for a U.S. president. This was seen as a provocation by the North, which depended on China for economic and military assistance. They launched a massive invasion of the South—unprecedented thus far in the war. “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time,” said Nixon when he learned of the onslaught (Wells, 533). Nixon proceeded with Linebacker I, a massive bombing campaign. For three months bombs fell on roads, bridges, warehouses, and fuel depots in and around Hanoi and

Haiphong and in the South, in fact, on anything that Nixon asserted contributed to the North’s capacity to wage war. As negotiations continued to stall, Nixon on December 18 launched Linebacker II: aerial attacks against Hanoi and Haiphong led by the widest formation of large (B-52) bombers since World War II. Whether these cities were “carpet bombed” remains a matter of some historical debate; nevertheless, many schools, pagodas, homes, and hospitals were destroyed, along with infrastructure contributing to the North’s military capabilities. More than a thousand civilians were killed and a thousand more wounded. The bombing received widespread international condemnation—particularly in light of Kissinger’s declaration just weeks before that “peace [was] at hand.” A break in the blitz came on Christmas Day along with an overture for peace from the Nixon administration, which North Vietnam seemed to have ignored in an apparent effort to wait for the newly elected Congress to take office and press Nixon for an end to hostilities. The world was horrified by the intensity of what became known to many as “the Christmas Bombing.” In the end, the North returned to the negotiating table within five days after the cessation of the bombing, leading to the signing in January 1973 of the Paris Peace Accords that ended the U.S. war in Vietnam. Ken Whalen See also: Operation Rolling Thunder; Paris Peace Accords; Tet Offensive; Vietnam War

Further Reading “The History of Place, The Vietnam War: The Bitter End, 1969–1975.” http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/index-1965.html. Accessed October 18, 2014. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Prado, John. The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. Wells, Tom. The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam. Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1994.

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese politician and nationalist who during his lifetime and ever since is revered by many Vietnamese as “Uncle Ho” (Vietnamese: Bac Ho), the father of the Vietnamese nation. He was born Nguyen Sinh Cung to a family that afforded him a good education, which resulted in his mandarin name: Nguyen Tat Thanh. He then spent several years abroad, highlighted by his international petitioning for the recognition of Vietnamese independence. In the wake of World War I and the inspiring promises for self-determination for all nations contained in the League of Nations vision, he made appearances in New York, Paris, and Moscow. During the early years of the formation of Vietnamese nationalist resistance he was known as “Nguyen the Patriot” (Vietnamese: Nguyen Ai Quoc), and he went on to work with the OSS, the predecessor organization to the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Finally, with the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945, which was based on the wording of the American Declaration of Independence, Nguyen Sinh Cung emerged under a new name: Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh was a central figure, if not the central figure in Vietnamese politics for all six decades of his incredible political career. His character and overall personality were notable: he always dressed humbly, studied hard, lived very simply, smoked a lot, and took special time to care for children. He was not portrayed as a military figure leading a Communist army, as many of his contemporaries were.

Vietnamese communist and nationalist Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 and served as president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 to 1969. Fiercely anti-imperialist, Ho Chi Minh led the political and armed struggle of the Vietnamese people to free themselves from French rule and unite the country. Allied with the United States during World War II, Ho would become the chief communist foe of the Americans during the Vietnam War. (Library of Congress)

Ho Chi Minh’s politics and ideology were neither simple nor overly complex. He was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist, and only secondarily a Marxist. Nevertheless, a prevailing attitude among many American political, military, and scholarly experts during the Cold War (and since) has been that he was a Stalinist. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh did adapt certain ideals of Marxist-Leninist ideology that had been used in Soviet Russia. For example, he wanted to form “Autonomous Zones” for ethnic minorities, particularly in the Western Highlands. Even though by the time of the Republic of South Vietnam (post1955) this territory was decidedly under the command of that nation’s army, this did not change his views. Further, he advocated for land reform across Vietnam in the mid-1950s to break up the concentration of land and wealth that had defined much of the country since French colonial rule began in the 19th century. Some of these efforts resulted in the deaths of thousands of people (estimates range from 3,000 to 15,000). Land reform was aimed at advancing Ho Chi Minh’s overarching goal of a unified and selfgoverning Vietnam. Although he was certainly Marxist, the major trends of Vietnamese revolutionary Marxist-Leninist ideology were developed by figures such as Ho Chi Minh’s right-hand man, Truong Trinh, Le Duan, and General Vo Nguyen Giap. Although land reform and other initiatives of Ho Chi Minh found favor with countless Vietnamese, he was not without his critics. Individuals wondered why he was not married, to which he replied that his only family was the Vietnamese people. More substantively, his adaptation of certain state policies from the governments of Stalin and Mao Zedong earned him further critique. Beyond the deadly collateral results of land reform, there was also the Nhan Van Giai Pham affair of the mid-1950s, a political crackdown that paralleled and seemed to mimic the events of the 100 Flowers movement in Mao’s China. Thus, a popular critique among American sources—even during his association with the United States

during World War II—was that Ho Chi Minh was actually a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and that, despite his rather benign and fatherly persona and popularity in Vietnam, he was in fact an evil Communist and a potent enemy of the United States and its interests in the Cold War. Nevertheless, Ho’s positive public image in Vietnam was remarkably enduring. Never portrayed Stalin-like, he was almost always depicted as a humanitarian, an intellectual, and a caring father figure whose family was the Vietnamese people. Above all, Ho Chi Minh was seen—even by his American enemies—as a shrewd visionary. This was perhaps best demonstrated when he borrowed the form—and invoked some of the language—of the American Declaration of Independence in his authoring of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945. Nevertheless, this determined effort to link the Vietnamese struggle for self-rule and an end to French colonial subjugation failed. In the context of the emerging Cold War, U.S. president Harry S. Truman rejected Ho Chi Minh’s international appeals for independence, as well as a series of eight letters penned by Ho to Truman in 1945–1946. The result, of course, was the eight-year French war with Ho Chi Minh’s forces of Viet Minh. What followed were the American efforts to undermine unification of the country in 1954–1956 that ultimately led to the 10-year conflict between the United States and Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese Army, supported by the National Liberation Front in the South. From the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945 until his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh remained the central figure and force of the Communist Party in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh actually headed the Workers Party (Lao Dong), later incorporated into the Vietnamese Fatherland Front. Despite the essential role of Ho Chi Minh, it was Truong Trinh and not Ho who emerged as the central ideologue for Vietnamese revolutionary Marxist-Leninist ideology. Although Ho Chi Minh reportedly wished to be buried in urns in the three geographical and cultural regions of Vietnam (North, Center, and South—all of which he identified with), he was buried in a tomb in Hanoi. However, his image can be found throughout Vietnam in virtually all Vietnamese provinces, cities, towns, and villages—in classrooms, police departments, public buildings, and museums all dedicated to his memory. William Noseworthy See also: French War in Indochina; National Liberation Front (NLF); Vietnam War; Primary Documents: Ho Chi Minh’s Appeal on the Occasion of the Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party, Delivered at Hong Kong (February 18, 1930)

Further Reading Brocheux, Pierre. Ho Chi Minh: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Duiker, William. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion Press, 2000. Osborne, Milton. Ho Chi Minh. New York: St. Lucia, 1982. Quinn-Judge, Sophie. Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Indonesia/East Timor On December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, a small Portuguese colony situated on the eastern half of Timor Island. For several months prior, Indonesia, a Southeast Asian dictatorship, had made overtures about annexing the colony on two grounds: to arrest the alleged “domino effect” of spreading communism after the Communist victory in Vietnam; and in the belief that any solution for East Timor not resulting in its annexation would destabilize and threaten the region. The invasion occurred one day after President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concluded a visit to Jakarta. In visiting

with Indonesian president Suharto, Ford and Kissinger declared that they understood the situation, the caveat being that they could not condone the use of U.S. weapons. Suharto took the visit as approval, drastically changing the fate of the Timorese. Though the United States did not participate directly, it did approve Indonesia’s imperialist intervention and subsequent occupation of East Timor. Suharto mostly held to the agreement—he armed KOPASSUS, the Special Forces unit, with foreignpurchased light weapons. However, he did employ other U.S.-made equipment, including ships, planes, and helicopters, during the occupation. Hundreds of people died initially, killed while fighting for Timor’s freedom. Response to the invasion varied. The U.S. State Department discussed cutting aid, though ultimately the administration doubled military aid and prevented the United Nations from interfering. Congress began an investigation to determine the United States’ prior knowledge. The CIA allegedly had forewarning, which is not surprising given the agency’s well-documented role in the 1965– 1966 overthrow of former President Sukarno, who had led the nation along the path of nonalignment in the Cold War, which had displeased Washington. The House International Relations Committee determined the United States sold weapons to Jakarta around this time. The government justified these sales as an important channel in maintaining alliances with Indonesia, a country that was pivotal for its geostrategic location, abundance of resources, market potential, and alleged vulnerability to communism. Media coverage of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor was heavily restricted. Few reports came from East Timor; often, the only material that passed the censors was “fictionalized,” exemplified by the 1996 award-winning novel Jazz, Parfum dan Insiden (“Jazz, Perfume and the Incident”). There were occasional reports discussing Indonesia targeting Timorese through arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, and torture. The U.S. government continued providing aid and military support to Indonesia despite ongoing human rights abuses. Other Western nations also turned a blind eye to East Timor. In hindsight, President Ford later regretted the U.S. role in East Timor’s occupation, especially after reports of genocide surfaced. Despite reports of widespread violence and human rights abuses, the Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush administrations remained silent. Toward the end of Bush’s term in office, two American journalists were beaten during the Santa Cruz Massacre (1991). They reported police opening fire on a funeral procession, officially killing 271 people, though the exact death toll remains unknown. These events sent shockwaves across the globe. The United States responded by severing military ties with Jakarta, vowing only to renew them when Indonesia demonstrated a solid commitment to human rights. The Santa Cruz Incident marked a dramatic shift in U.S. diplomacy. While military ties were continuously debated, U.S. policies shifted to development strategies. Congress, ardently opposed to genocide, played a fundamental role in shifting America’s strategy. Post-1991 activities utilized nongovernmental organizations and the diplomatic corps to exert pressure on Indonesia. For example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gave East Timor $27 million for development projects from 1988 to 1999, making the United States the area’s largest donor. After his 1993 inauguration, President Bill Clinton actively pursued pro–human rights policies for East Timor. He was the first president to embrace this approach, and the United States gained more traction supporting local development than protesting Indonesian-backed military violence. The U.S. relationship with Indonesia over the role of its military was extremely complex. After the initial ban, ties were partially restored in 1995. However, some parts of the government subverted the ban. For example, the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program conducted training exercises with the Indonesian military 36 times from 1992 to 1997. Congress, angered at the technically legal violation, renewed the ban through 1998. The United States provided economic aid to bolster the Indonesian economy after a 1997 fiscal crisis, but restricted military funding until Jakarta demonstrated

its commitment to human rights. After Suharto finally relinquished power in 1998 following his brutally authoritarian 31-year rule, the United States began to pursue a policy that unequivocally condemned violence and supported democracy. The dissolution of Suharto’s dictatorship left Indonesia in a position to adopt democracy. The new government began to rebuild, installing democratically based institutions and laws. Indonesia’s new president Habibie believed in democracy and placed the East Timor issue in the limelight. He stated that the United States could not blame Indonesia for acting in its own best interests, especially when the United States did not prevent the invasion. He was, however, open to compromise on East Timor because he felt that the United States supported Indonesia’s democratic endeavors and growing market confidence. The U.S. embassy responded that it condemned the human rights violations, not the occupation. The embassy demanded that the violence be stopped and investigated. On May 20, 2002, East Timor gained its independence and began to recover from almost 30 years of occupation. More than 200,000 people, one-third of the population before the invasion, had died; an estimated 75 percent had been forcibly relocated. The Indonesian invasion prolonged East Timor’s oppressive colonial experience—which had extended back to the 16th century. It was only in the last decade predating independence that Western powers—including, somewhat tragically and ironically, the United States—made an effort to protest brutality against the people. Though the United States did not participate directly, the reticence to condemn Indonesia’s imperialist designs on East Timor appeared to acknowledge its indirect complicity. Laura Steckman See also: Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; Non-Aligned Movement

Further Reading Ajidarma, Seno Gumira. Jazz, Perfume and the Incident. Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2013. Clear, Annette. “International Aid and Political Change in Southeast Asia.” In Ann Marie Murphy and Bridget Welsh, eds. Legacy of Engagement in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 2008, pp. 216–247. Crain, Andrew Downer. The Ford Presidency: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Kivimäki, Timo. US-Indonesian Hegemonic Bargaining: Strength of Weakness. Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2003.

Jazz The U.S. State Department enlisted distinguished American jazz musicians to serve as cultural ambassadors in an act of global diplomacy during the Cold War, mostly from 1954 to 1968. The jazz musicians toured the Soviet Union and other regions with the premise that their music could help improve and influence the rest of the world’s perception of American democracy and cultural life. In July 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower called for the creation of a global cultural exchange program for the performing arts to improve the perception of American cultural and political life abroad. Eisenhower assisted in building a program of global jazz diplomacy in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, and in August 1954, the U.S. Congress authorized the President’s Emergency Fund for Participation in International Affairs. The International Cultural Exchange and Trade Fair Participation Act of 1956 granted such a fund permanent status, and it was renamed the President’s Special International Program for Participation in International Affairs, also becoming known as the Cultural Presentations Program. The act of 1956 additionally called for the creation of an Advisory Committee on the Arts, endowed with the oversight to aid in selecting the program’s participants and to evaluate its

effectiveness. In 1954, the State Department also approved the creation of several panels of select American performing artists to tour abroad for the United States, groups that encompassed drama, dance, and music, including, ultimately, jazz. When the first music panel met in New York City in October 1954, American officials emphasized the Cultural Presentations Program’s primary purpose, which was to counteract Russian propaganda that portrayed the United States as culturally barbaric. Jazz as an instrument in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War cultural rivalry really began to emerge late in 1955, when the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs was informed that American jazz and dance music had a momentous, committed, and ardent following in the Eastern bloc. In the events surrounding the Geneva Summit, Vice Consul Ernest A. Nagy reported that the American cultural influence remained remarkable and it was obvious that the United States could take advantage of its great popularity. After observing the Hungarians’ and Czechs’ desire for American jazz, he strongly recommended that the State Department employ jazz as a device to support the American cultural and geopolitical agenda. On November 6, 1955, the New York Times released a front-page article proclaiming that the United States had a “Secret Sonic Weapon” in jazz. A jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air that year and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them from the Soviet Union. What has been labeled as jazz diplomacy with the Soviet Union and other regions of the world from 1954 to 1968 highlighted the U.S. and Soviet cultural rivalry as global superpowers. It has been argued that the proliferation of jazz in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe helped determine the course of the Cold War cultural rivalry between the United States and the Soviets (Davenport). This argument presupposes that American jazz musicians who served as cultural ambassadors played a significant role in shifting the rest of the world’s perceptions of the U.S. democracy. Distinguished American jazz musicians Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman were all enlisted by the U.S. State Department as cultural ambassadors. In March 1956, U.S. congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. sent his close friend Gillespie and an 18-piece band to Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, marking the first State Department jazz diplomacy tour. Gillespie himself thought that one of the tours to the Middle East as cultural ambassador was effective in combating Communist propaganda. Davenport argues that Goodman’s State Department tour of the Soviet Union in 1962 was instrumental in forming a cultural rivalry between the United States and the Soviets, and it emerged as a global symbol of the two superpowers’ cultural dialogue that temporarily emerged in the early 1960s. The American jazz musicians’ tours of global diplomacy lasted several weeks, and sometimes months. Dustin Garlitz See also: Cold War Cultural Imperialism; Eisenhower Doctrine; McCarthyism; Middle East; Southeast Asia

Further Reading Crist, Stephen A. “Jazz as Democracy?: Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics.” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009): 133–174. Davenport, Lisa E. Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Hatschek, Keith. “The Impact of American Jazz Diplomacy in Poland During the Cold War Era.” Jazz Perspectives 4, no. 3 (2010): 253–300. Von Eschen, Penny M. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Kennedy, John F. (1917–1963)

Historical interpretations of the foreign policy of John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, have long held that he was toughest of Cold War presidents, the man who launched the failed invasion of Castro’s Cuba, who stared down Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet missiles on the island, and took the first fateful steps toward America’s war in Vietnam. A new generation of scholarship has challenged and complicated that view, arguing that while Kennedy may have campaigned for president in 1960 on the fiction of a “missile gap” between the United States and Soviet Union, approved the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) plan to invade Cuba, talked tough on Berlin and Laos, and appeared to have taken the early steps escalating America’s involvement in Vietnam, he in fact was quietly but determinedly moving toward a policy of rapprochement and détente with the Soviet Union and had made the decision to disengage from Vietnam. In the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs operation, Kennedy believed he had been set up by the agency, that top officials knew the invasion would fail but were confident the new president would accede to their emergency request for U.S. military intervention to save face and rescue the Cuban exiles. As scholars have argued, JFK then exercised his fury at the CIA by firing the top three officers at the agency and signing National Security Agency memoranda that reasserted Department of Defense control over all covert operations. Further, as the new wave of scholarship has documented, following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was secretly reaching out to Fidel Castro through third parties in hopes of attaining some kind of diplomatic accommodation with the Castro government.

Democrat John F. Kennedy was elected president in November 1960, ushering in a new era in U.S. history at home and abroad. Elected as a tough cold warrior, Kennedy often moved along two tracks when dealing with foreign policy crises: very tough talk in public and moves toward escalation, while simultaneously and often quietly seeking diplomatic means of avoiding military confrontation. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

Kennedy’s Berlin policy included increasing the draft calls, mobilizing National Guard forces, and warning Americans about the possibility of a nuclear confrontation over the freedom of West Berlin. And

yet in the end Kennedy refused the demands of a number of his top generals who were strenuously urging a military conflict over the building of the Berlin Wall. Similarly, in Laos, the CIA had been working assiduously for nearly a decade to help install a military strongman (General Phoumi Nosavan) who could fend off a growing Communist insurgency. Kennedy spoke publicly about the need to prevent the fall of another nation in Asia to Communist control, and in 1961 with war raging in the country he stationed U.S. troops in the region as a show of American resolve. But he resisted Pentagon calls for combat forces, ended support for Nosavan, and successfully urged his State Department to negotiate a fragile coalition government that represented all factions—including the Communist Pathet Lao. In the summer of 1963 Kennedy gave his “Peace Speech” at American University, widely perceived as a call for a new relationship of détente with the Soviet Union. By that summer, Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev had exchanged nearly 20 personal letters on a range of matters personal and geopolitical, each expressing his desire for a less dangerous, adversarial relationship between their two countries. The consensus view of Kennedy and Vietnam holds that because he committed an additional 15,000 American forces to the country, many of them counterinsurgency Special Forces, and because he had long publicly voiced support for the American-anointed South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, he would have pursued the same policy as his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. As James Douglass, Jim DiEugenio, James K. Galbraith, and others have documented, however, it is quite clear that the independent foreign policy direction Kennedy had pursued in Cuba, Berlin, and Laos was also being applied to Vietnam. Indeed, it was long in the making. During his Senate career Kennedy condemned the French imperialist war in Algeria in a speech on the Senate floor entitled “Imperialism—the Enemy of Freedom.” This is one of JFK’s most notable public expressions of his sympathies for nationalist forces fighting to defeat imperialism in many corners of the world. In this speech—roundly condemned at the time—Kennedy articulated his belief that the age of imperialism was dying, that Africa would one day be free, and that the sooner America positioned itself on the side of nationalist struggles, the better for the nation’s long-term security interests. Time and again, JFK voiced support for leaders of the emerging “nonaligned” nations like Sukarno of Indonesia who sought to avoid being swept into the Cold War. The United States, he argued, should pursue anti-imperialist policies, even when those leaders, like Patrice Lumumba of the Congo whom Kennedy also admired, had espoused anti-imperialist rhetoric that many in the U.S. national security establishment in that era interpreted as anti-American. In 1951, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert visited Vietnam in the midst of the French–Viet Minh conflict. During the visit, they met with Edmund Gullion, longtime State Department diplomat who had already greatly influenced Kennedy’s support for Third World nationalism and indeed served as Kennedy’s foreign policy speechwriter for a time. Gullion told Kennedy that France would lose the war and that American intervention would be futile in the face of Nationalist-Communist Ho Chi Minh’s rising support among the people. Documentary evidence points to the fact that beginning in May 1962 and culminating in October 1963, Kennedy, working through his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, insistently demanded from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) a Vietnam withdrawal plan that would have all American soldiers out of the country by the end of 1965. By the late summer of 1963, Kennedy told close advisers and others that he planned to disengage from Vietnam following his reelection. National Security Action Memoranda, Secretary of Defense records, transcripts and tapes of White House conversations, and JCS documents all support the argument that Kennedy had made the withdrawal decision. On November 24, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Action Memorandum 273. Although it indicated “continuity” with the previous Kennedy policy, in fact Kennedy had rejected

the document. NSAM 273 called for intensified levels of military activity directed against the Communists of North Vietnam. Indeed, aggressive covert action followed that winter and spring, leading ultimately to the fateful events the following August in the Gulf of Tonkin. Preceding its signing by two days was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Chris J. Magoc See also: Berlin Crisis; Congo Crisis; Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution; Kennedy, John F., American University “Peace” Speech; Non-Aligned Movement; Primary Documents: Senator John F. Kennedy’s Speech in the United States Senate: “Imperialism—The Enemy of Freedom” (July 2, 1957)

Further Reading Douglass, James W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. Galbraith, James K. “JFK’s Vietnam Withdrawal Plan Is a Fact, not Speculation.” The Nation (November 22, 2013). http://www.thenation.com/article/177332/jfks-vietnam-withdrawal-plan-fact-not-speculation#. Accessed June 5, 2014. Newman, John M. JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue and the Struggle for Power. New York: Warner Books, 1992.

Kennedy, John F. (1917–1963), American University “Peace” Speech (1963) On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered the Commencement Address at American University in Washington, D.C. The speech had a dual purpose. First, it was meant to announce to the world that high-level negotiations between representatives of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States were scheduled to take place in Moscow over the summer on the subject of making a treaty banning atmospheric, underwater, and outer space testing of nuclear weapons (what became the Limited Test Ban Treaty). The second aim was more broadly to address the world on the need for universal peace in a time of nuclear-armed Cold War. Kennedy came to office wanting to limit the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War competition between East and West. It was one of his many strategic foreign policy goals along with the desire to engage more vigorously the newly decolonizing Third World. But an active approach to doing something on nuclear weapons was effectively hampered by other crises, most notably the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, and Cuban Missile Crises, where the administration was forced to focus much of its energy. But following the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis—seemingly in America’s favor, but really more of a mutually beneficial arrangement between the two superpowers—it was clear that the arena was set for a potential treaty on nuclear weapons. The speech itself was full of hope for peace. “I speak of peace,” Kennedy said, “because of the new face of war,” indicating that all-out war now meant the use of nuclear weapons and potentially catastrophic destruction on an unprecedented scale. The only alternative, Kennedy asserted, was peace— the “necessary rational end of rational men” (Kennedy). Kennedy was no starry-eyed idealist looking for “the absolute, infinite concept of universal peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream.” He was looking for a way for the United States to engage with the Soviets without conflict. For the first time in the history of the Cold War, an American president spoke of the achievements and the extraordinary World War II sacrifices of the Russian people, and their desire to avoid war as well. He made that point clear in this much-quoted passage that alluded to the public health threat of atmospheric nuclear tests and of nuclear weapons: “For, in the final analysis,

our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal” (Kennedy). The speech was written by advisers from Kennedy’s inner circle, including the president’s chief speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, and his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. The State Department, for example, was not involved or informed until the very last minute, because there were significant policy differences between the White House and State—the former wanted change and the latter did not. The Pentagon was even more vehement in its opposition, seeing the president’s address and the treaty—in the context of other decisions on Cuba and elsewhere—as indicative of Kennedy’s increased desire for détente with the Soviet Union (which they thought dangerous to U.S. interests), and potentially an end to the Cold War in his second term. Indeed, many scholars now support this interpretation. The Peace Speech stands clearly as the quintessential rhetorical expression of Kennedy’s quest for a new relationship with the Soviet Union following the Cuban and Berlin crises. Further, it challenged prevailing and fundamental Cold War assumptions of a militarily enforced global American hegemony— as Kennedy put it, “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war … not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women” (Kennedy). What it may have foretold in a Kennedy second term would, of course, never be known. Kasper Grotle Rasmussen See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Kennedy, John F.

Further Reading Beschloss, Michael. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Kennedy, John F. “Commencement Address at American University, 10 June 1963.” The American Presidency Project: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9266. Accessed October 18, 2014. Wenger, Andreas, and Marcel Gerbet. “John F. Kennedy and the Limited Test Ban Treaty: A Case Study in Presidential Leadership.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 2 (June 1999).

King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968), “Beyond Vietnam” Speech (1967) On April 4, 1967, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his first widely publicized speech against the U.S. war in Vietnam in front of 3,000 clergy and laypersons concerned about the war at the Riverside Church in New York City. Also known as “A Time to Break Silence,” this speech was one of King’s most important, if only for the reactions it caused at the time and how it has been hidden in the subsequent mainstream media coverage of King’s legacy, which depicts him solely as a U.S. civil rights hero. Yet by 1967 King had increasingly turned his attention to Vietnam as it became clear funds were shifting from Johnson’s War on Poverty to a war in Vietnam and as his philosophy of nonviolence evolved into a more public antipoverty and antiwar critique. In this speech, King’s philosophy of nonviolence for social justice in the United States is extended to a broader critique of America’s use of massive violence to suppress the aspirations of the majority of Vietnamese people. King outlined seven reasons for his opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He declared first that the escalating costs of the war were, he argued, shifting funds away from President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Beyond that, according to King, there was a “cruel irony” in watching young white and black men die fighting alongside each other for a country that had not yet been able to put young black and white children together in schools. In addition, King acknowledged that young African Americans in the exploding northern ghettoes had been questioning King’s philosophy of nonviolence

amid both the slow pace of change in America and the powerful use of violence by the U.S. government (“the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King declared) in Vietnam—about which King had said nothing; he could bear the contradictory position no more. Finally, King also spoke to the deep moral obligation that the Vietnam War presented—to the nation, its commitment to end poverty and bring civil rights for all, and to himself as the recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and as a Christian minister. Equally important, King emphasized the need for understanding Vietnamese history and its struggle for independence. The United States, King reminded his audience, fought a losing colonial battle for the French, supported a ruthless dictator against the majority of the Vietnamese people, did not permit free and fair elections, violated the Geneva Accords of 1954, and was now destroying the homes and villages of Vietnamese. The United States did these things, he declared, because of blind “anti-communism,” a Western/U.S. false sense of superiority, and a complete ignorance of the Vietnamese history of anticolonialism. In King’s mind, the war symbolized America’s penchant to not promote its ideals of a free and democratic society but rather to join the wrong side of history and fight against the hopes and aspirations of the majority of the world’s peoples. In King’s estimation, if people did not speak out against the war, then there would be many more Vietnams. After this speech, major U.S. newspapers like the New York Times (which previously supported King’s civil rights activities) denounced King, and some civil rights leaders criticized his linking of the two movements. The address also further drove a wedge between King and President Lyndon Johnson, who was trying to maintain national support for his administration’s Vietnam policy. Although the speech has been generally forgotten (or, many argue, deliberately suppressed) from the national memory of Dr. King, it remains a profound and eloquent statement of his moral vision as well as a stirring indictment of U.S. imperial policy in the modern era. Eric L. Payseur See also: Antiwar Movement; French War in Indochina; Geneva Accords; Vietnam War

Further Reading Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Greenwald, Glenn. “MLK’s Vehement Condemnations of US Militarism Are More Relevant Than Ever.” The Guardian (January 21, 2013). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/21/king-obama-drones-militarism-sanctions-iran. Accessed October 18, 2014. Hall, Simon. Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam.” Address Delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church. April 4, 1967. Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project Speeches: “Beyond Vietnam” http://mlkkpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/. Accessed October 18, 2014.

Kissinger, Henry (1923–), and Realpolitik Born May 27, 1923, in the Bavaria region of Germany, Henry Kissinger became a Harvard professor and took on a leading role in U.S. foreign policy under the Richard Nixon and the Gerald Ford administrations. Kissinger served as both U.S. national security adviser (January 1969–November 1975) and U.S. secretary of state (September 1973–January 1977). Kissinger was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the war in Vietnam, as well as a beneficiary of numerous national and international awards. However, this influential and powerful diplomat also proved to be one of the most controversial political theorists and statesmen in American history. Kissinger and the presidents he

served (Nixon and Ford) authorized a number of overt and covert actions at home and abroad, which, while aimed at advancing American hegemonic interests in the world, continue to provoke fierce condemnation from human rights advocates around the world. Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, the son of Jewish parents, Louis Kissinger and Paula Stern. After enduring the first years of the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Kissingers escaped, emigrating to America in 1938, the year of the Kristallnacht (a nationwide pogrom). A shy and introverted child, Kissinger spent much time early in his life in America studying the Bible and the Talmud. He quickly learned English and in 1943 became a naturalized American citizen. After graduation from high school Kissinger enrolled at the City College of New York to become an accountant, but abandoned this idea after World War II. From 1943 to 1945 Kissinger found himself back in his homeland, initially fighting the Nazi regime he once fled and later—owing to his German-speaking abilities—as a bureaucrat in postwar occupied Germany. As administrator of the city of Krefeld, Kissinger demonstrated his superior organizational talent; he later worked in counterintelligence in Hanover and denazification in Bergstrasse, Hesse. During the postwar period Kissinger also witnessed the war crimes trials.

Henry Kissinger was national security advisor (1969–1975) and secretary of state (1973–1977) under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Although he and Nixon sought “peace with honor” in Vietnam, Americans suffered more casualties during the Nixon-Kissinger era than during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. (Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress)

Gifted with an exceptional intellect, Kissinger graduated with distinction from his studies of politics and international relations from Harvard University with a BA (1950), MA (1952), and PhD (1954) degrees, and then joined his alma mater as a professor. At Harvard the German emigrant wrote his dissertation about Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, whose political approach of Realpolitik would be a guiding framework for Kissinger’s conduct of foreign policy, most notably in his firm belief that even a deeply flawed international order was preferable to revolutions and social unrest.

TRILATERAL COMMISSION Established in 1973 by American banker David Rockefeller (b. 1915), the Trilateral Commission is a nongovernmental, nonpartisan “discussion group” or think tank of political and economic elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan aimed ostensibly at fostering greater dialogue, understanding, and cooperation among the tripartite corners of what was then known as the “free world.” Many of its goals of intergovernmental cooperation and the forward advance of liberal capitalism and free markets closely align with those of the Council of Foreign Relations. The first executive director of the Trilateral Commission was the Russian scholar Zbigniew Brzezinski (b. 1928), who later served as national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981). Carter himself joined Trilateral Commission discussions and thereafter invited a number of its top thinkers into his administration. Though he was critical of the Trilateral Commission when running for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan also appointed a number of influential Trilateral Commission figures to top posts in his administration (1981–1989). Indeed, from leading politicians and influential academics to the central bankers of the United States and Europe, the Trilateral Commission membership over its first four decades includes many of the most important figures of the era. Although (or perhaps because) it operates largely out of the spotlight, the Trilateral Commission has been feared and condemned by critics on the political far right who believe it to be a shadowy instrument of one-world government that threatens U.S. economic sovereignty and security. Sharing some of that critique are those on the left who see it as an antidemocratic, Machiavellian force for global domination by American and European capitalists.

A distinguished academic, Kissinger in the 1950s and 1960s became the author of numerous widely acclaimed articles and books on international relations, foreign policy, and diplomatic history. Kissinger served as a member of the Harvard faculty from 1954 until 1969 in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs, and as director of the Harvard International Seminar (1952–1969). Throughout his academic career Kissinger kept his eye on national foreign policymaking and became an increasingly influential figure for presidents of both parties. From 1961 through 1968 Kissinger served in various capacities on foreign affairs issues in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations while maintaining his professorship at Harvard. Kissinger left Harvard in 1969 when he was appointed national security adviser under President Nixon, and moved on to become secretary of state in 1973.

REALPOLITIK Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy approach is closely associated with the term Realpolitik. The term originates from the German real (realistic, pragmatic, or actual) and Politik (politics). Philosophically, the concept of Realpolitik draws upon some ideas of political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469– 1527). In his widely influential The Prince (Italian: Il Principe, published in 1532) Machiavelli portrayed a coercive and amoral ruler in contemporary Renaissance Italy who based all political thinking and actions upon two premises: first, his own pursuit and possession of power; and second, the reason of state (German: Staatsräson, French: raison d’état), or national interest, according to which all political actions—and the application of power—only served to ensure the longevity and well-being of the state. Living during a period of constant conflict, shifting alliances, and political instability in Italy, Machiavelli stressed the need for realism as opposed to idealism in the formulation of policy to advance the interests of the state. Machiavellianism—power politics devoid of any moral considerations other than to prolong the existence of one’s reign—has often been used as a pejorative term synonymous with unscrupulous, immoral political behavior. Centuries later many of Kissinger’s critics would ascribe some of those same characteristics to his tenure in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. For example, it is now well documented that as part of the diplomatic team representing the Johnson administration at the 1968 Paris peace talks, Kissinger played a key role in sabotaging an agreement that might have brought an end to the war in Vietnam and helped to

deliver the U.S. presidential election to Hubert Humphrey. Evidence points to two factors driving Kissinger’s covert, underhanded role: his Realpolitik-framed belief that the agreement would have undermined U.S. interests in the broader context of the Cold War, and his close relationship with Richard Nixon, who in the end would win a very close election and deliver Kissinger the position of U.S. national security adviser. The term Realpolitik was coined by Ludwig von Rochau (1810–1873), a German journalist and politician whose 1853 book Realpolitik envisioned a philosophy and approach to politics based on pragmatics and practicality as opposed to unrealistic politics based upon ideological notions and ethnic premises. In a very actual sense Realpolitik concentrates on what is doable under certain social, economic, and political conditions; and it is frequently associated with relentless, “realistic” pursuit of the national interest. Realpolitik and its no-nonsense view of politics is somewhat related to other political philosophies such as political realism and pragmatism. The first modern statesman to explicitly describe an affinity for Realpolitik was Austrian Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859), whose career Henry Kissinger sought to emulate. Metternich was the chief architect of the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 and the fundamental restructuring of Europe between the major powers at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The Congress of Vienna sought to settle outstanding issues stemming from the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire; it also functioned as a framework for European relations until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. A conservative, Metternich was keen on maintaining the balance of power in Europe and the status quo ante—that is, restoring the political order of the ruling families deposed by the prior revolutions. Metternich was also fundamentally opposed to both nationalism and liberalism, which threatened a breakup of the old order. Metternich stuck to conservative principles and fought reformist dissent through censorship and political repression, but only gained a temporary reprieve until the liberal revolutions of 1848 forced his resignation. Another skilled advocate of Realpolitik and idol of Kissinger was Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898). During his chancellorship to Wilhelm I of Prussia, Bismarck dominated German and European affairs with his conservative politics. In 1871, following a series of wars against other European states, Bismarck was instrumental in unifying Germany into a German Empire under Prussian leadership. As a statesman Bismarck exercised tremendous influence and established a balance of power that brought peace across Europe from 1871 until 1914, earning him the nickname “The Iron Chancellor” in recognition of his Realpolitik. Bismarck’s system of alliances held the European powers in check, isolated France, prevented the encirclement of Germany, and ensured the continuation of European monarchies. With the ascension of Wilhelm II (1854–1941) as emperor (from 1888 to 1918), Bismarck’s system of intertwined alliances ultimately collapsed under its inherent contradictions, as well as the force of rising nationalism, resulting in a major European war of unforeseen dimensions (World War I); Bismarck’s nightmare of encircling coalitions (cauchemar des coalitions) and a two-front war had become a reality. Throughout his career Bismarck frequently manipulated political issues to antagonize other countries and cause wars to advance his own particular objectives—a trait that has been part of the criticism of Henry Kissinger’s own Realpolitik statesmanship.

KISSINGER IN THE WHITE HOUSE Indeed, Kissinger brought the Realpolitik approach into American foreign affairs through his insistence on the raison d’état and the balance of power concept. Kissinger famously declared that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests” (U.S. State Department Speech, 1976). He also has argued

that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” (New York Times, October 28, 1973). As a diplomat Kissinger skillfully exercised this approach with regard to the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and China. Despite Cold War anticommunist ideology the United States embarked on a policy of détente, resulting in talks with the Soviet Union to reduce strategic arms (SALT, 1972) to ensure a global balance of power. Despite his earlier alleged role in 1968, Kissinger negotiated with Communists in North Vietnam to end American involvement in Southeast Asia. He promoted Nixon’s historic rapprochement to Communist China to expand economic relations, help advance a U.S.-friendly settlement in Vietnam (which proved to be illusory), and, in classic Realpolitik fashion, to use a warming U.S.-China relationship as leverage against the Soviet Union (with which China had increasingly been at odds). Beyond these achievements Kissinger as secretary of state in 1973 led the brokering of a cease-fire in the Yom Kippur War, preventing further escalation of a brutal Mideast conflict between Israel, an American ally, and Egypt, a Soviet ally. More than anything else, however, it is the Vietnam War that continues to complicate the legacy of both Henry Kissinger and President Nixon. By the early 1970s the war in Vietnam had turned into an extremely lethal, costly, and unpopular quagmire. As the Nixon administration sought “peace with honor,” it resorted to a combination of diplomatic initiatives, troop reductions, and devastating bombing campaigns to attempt to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table on American terms, straining to maintain credibility internationally. On January 27, 1973, Kissinger and his negotiating partner Le Duc Tho signed a cease-fire to end direct American involvement in the war. For their joint efforts both were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, but Le Duc Tho declined, leaving Kissinger the sole recipient of the award. Critics charge Kissinger with having unnecessarily prolonged the Vietnam War through his aforementioned role in Paris in 1968—advising the South Vietnamese government to pull out of peace negotiations—and then, subsequently, his role in directing a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia from 1969 to 1975. Although he and Nixon intended that military campaign strategically, to force North Vietnam to negotiate and on more favorable U.S. terms, the Cambodian bombing resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Further, although throughout the Cold War America had supported authoritarian regimes (which frequently disregarded human rights) in an attempt to pursue U.S. national interests, that approach intensified under Nixon and Kissinger’s application of Realpolitik. Two cases in point are the covert plot to overthrow the Chilean Socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, as well as arms transfers in support of the Indonesian government at a time when that very government invaded East Timor in 1975. In 2001 France and Chile demanded Kissinger’s extradition due to human rights violations committed in Chile in the early 1970s. To his critics, Kissinger’s realism equals a complete lack of moral scruples and an undermining of American principles. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh characterized Kissinger as a war criminal “who lies like other people breathe” (Schmitz). Nonetheless, critics may also admit to the fact that power politics and morality cannot be completely divorced. However, both adherents and critics alike recognize the fact that the international order of the early 21st century—along with such continuing U.S. actions as drone warfare—are a result in part of Kissinger’s policies.

POST–WHITE HOUSE YEARS Following the 1976 successful presidential election of Jimmy Carter, Kissinger turned to writing, speaking, and consulting, along with serving on policymaking boards and think tanks. Under the Republican presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., Kissinger’s advocacy of détente was seen as a

weakness; and Kissinger discontinued serving in a major public office, although his counsel was frequently sought. From July 1983 to January 1985 Kissinger chaired the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America; served as member on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990; and was a member of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy of the National Security Council and Department of Defense. Currently he serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board. In the wake of 9/11 President George W. Bush appointed Kissinger chair of the investigative committee examining the fateful events leading up to that day, drawing heavy criticism due to Kissinger’s involvement in the aforementioned war crimes and covert actions. Beyond his Nobel Prize, Henry Kissinger is the recipient of a host of awards and honors, among which are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1995), and the Medal of Liberty (1986). His memoir, The White House Years, was awarded the National Book Award (1980). Matthias Voigt See also: Cambodia; Indonesia/East Timor; Paris Peace Accords; Yom Kippur War

Further Reading Berman, Larry. No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 2001. Hersh, Seymour, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983. Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Morris, Roger, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Schmitz, Gregor Peter. “Obama Returns to Kissinger’s Realpolitik.” Spiegel Online International, May 22, 2013. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/realpolitik-of-henry-kissinger-making-a-comeback-under-obama-a-901195.html. Accessed January 15, 2014.

Kitchen Debate (1959) The Kitchen Debate occurred on July 24, 1959, between U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. It is known as the Kitchen Debate because it took place in a model kitchen that was part of a larger exhibit visiting Moscow that summer aimed at advancing cultural and technological understanding between the two Cold War giants. In addition to the model middle-class American model home, the exhibit also featured a beauty parlor, a TV studio, a Pepsi-Cola soda stand, contemporary works of art, and a car show. The United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from World War II as the world’s two superpowers. The competing ideologies and interests of the capitalist United States and the Communist Soviet Union soon turned the former allies into adversaries. Instead of fighting their battles with bombs and soldiers (with the notable exceptions of ongoing proxy wars in various parts of the world and the nuclear arms race), they fought a war of political rhetoric and social propaganda. When Nixon arrived in Moscow in 1959, many thought that America might be losing this war. Only two years before, in 1957, the Soviet Union had successfully launched Sputnik, the world’s first unmanned artificial satellite. Since then the Soviets had achieved several scientific milestones as the United States struggled to get its space program off the ground, leaving some in the United States and elsewhere to doubt the superiority of the American way of life. Nixon aimed to prove them wrong during his Moscow trip. As he escorted Premier Khrushchev through the exhibit they came upon the RCA TV studio and the premier decided to have a friendly,

impromptu debate for the cameras. Nixon seemed to be caught off-guard and frustrated by the unexpectedly serious accusations being thrown at him by the unpredictable and verbally aggressive Khrushchev. Nixon appeared confrontational and desperately defensive on camera, noting at one point that, “while you [USSR] may be ahead of us in some instances, for example in the development of your rockets … there may be some instances where we’re ahead of you, like color television” (“The Kitchen Debate”). This first exchange posed a major challenge for Nixon who had his eye on the Republican nomination for president in the 1960 election. One of the main hurdles in that campaign would undoubtedly be demonstrating a tough stance against communism. Nixon knew that he had performed poorly in the TV studio and found his second chance to debate Khrushchev on more friendly ground when they reached the model kitchen.

U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev engage in a discussion as they stand in front of a kitchen display at the United States exhibit at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, July 24, 1959. During the famous “Kitchen Debate,” Nixon trumpeted the virtues of the “American way of life,” while Khrushchev in turn saw America’s fixation on buying innumerable gadgets and appliances as evidence of a morally negligent and greedy society. (AP Photo)

“I want to show you this kitchen. It is like those of our houses in California,” Nixon invited Khrushchev in a friendly voice. Khrushchev examined the kitchen’s many features and appliances. He observed the brightly colored washer and dryer set, the refrigerator and stove, and the endless gadgets, including a lemon squeezer and electric can opener. The exhibit was meant to showcase the aesthetically pleasing and labor-saving devices that were widely available to working-class Americans. The Soviets interpreted the kitchen as being full of decadent luxuries intended to distract the average citizen from the social injustices facing America’s poor and minority groups. Izvestia newspaper wrote that the exhibit looked more like an extension of a department store than the representation of a national culture. Nixon attempted to explain to Khrushchev that the time saved by a housewife using the appliances available to her could be spent on leisure activities. He felt that consumerism manifested itself in a truly democratic freedom of choice that was simply not available to people living in Communist countries. The

implicit, imperious assumption in his performance was that the highly touted “American way of life” was the right way of life for all the world—including, most importantly, those living in Communist countries. While Nixon touted America’s material goods production as proof that capitalism was economically superior to communism, Khrushchev saw America’s fixation on buying innumerable gadgets and appliances as evidence of a morally negligent and greedy society. Khrushchev found particular fault with planned obsolescence, the process of constantly producing slightly different variations of a product in order to induce consumers to replace properly functioning items every few years. Examples of such purchases could be replacing the refrigerator because it no longer suits the color theme in the kitchen or buying a new car because this year’s model has an AM/FM radio and bigger tail fins. Khrushchev felt that this consumer-driven mindset robbed people of their hardearned money. He argued with Nixon about the idea of families moving into newer and better homes every few years with the rebuke, “We build firmly. We build for our children and grandchildren.” Khrushchev also stressed that the color or style of an appliance had very little relevance to the appliance’s usefulness. It did not take long for the conversation to turn from the seemingly frivolous to the real cause of the tensions between the two countries. Premier Khrushchev accused the United States of imperialistically trying to destroy the Soviet Union. Vice President Nixon waved his finger aggressively in Khrushchev’s face, insisting that it was in fact the Soviets who were causing military unrest in the world. Khrushchev knew at this time that the United States had been sending illegal U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union for several years, though he was unable to convince the United Nations of this until Francis Gary Powers’s spy plane was shot down the following spring. The Kitchen Debate ended peacefully, although the United States would soon have another chance to make its case for the merits of a consumer-based society. In September 1959 Nikita Khrushchev embarked on a whirlwind American tour, meeting with Wall Street bankers and Hollywood actors. In 1964, Khrushchev was encouraged to retire from government, due in large part to his policy of defunding the military in favor of improving material conditions for the Soviet people. Kristin Apeck See also: Cold War Cultural Imperialism

Further Reading Gillon, Steven M. The American Paradox: A History of the US Since 1945. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. “The Kitchen Debate: Khrushchev vs. Nixon.” http://watergate.info/1959/06/24/kitchen-debate-nixon-khrushchev.html. Accessed October 20, 2014. Marling, Karal Ann. As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Lebanon, U.S. Interventions in The first U.S. intervention in Lebanon occurred in 1958 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered U.S. Marines to the tiny nation to support a peaceful transition of power. This action was in direct response to Cold War concerns of instability that might benefit the Soviet Union in the Middle East as well as to the perceived threat from Arab nationalism then being promoted by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. This intervention has generally been considered a success, and a peaceful transition of power was brokered by the United States. The second U.S. intervention in Lebanon took place during 1982–1984, when President Ronald Reagan similarly deployed U.S. Marines, first to act as a buffer

between an invading Israeli military force and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headquartered in Beirut, and later to serve as peacekeepers. In January 1957, President Eisenhower requested a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in the Middle East to prevent the spread of communism. This policy, which became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, was formed in response to waning British influence in the region following the Suez Crisis of 1956. Prior to this, the Eisenhower administration had been willing to allow the British to take the lead in protecting the Middle East, particularly its vital oil fields. By 1957, however, the president had lost faith in British capabilities and declared his intention to take the lead in keeping the region out of Soviet control. The doctrine was therefore used as a guarantee to the noncommunist governments in the region as well as a threat to those who would support alliances with the Soviets. Events in the region during 1957 and 1958 were seen by the United States as warning signs that both communism and radical Arab nationalism were on the rise. In 1957, King Hussein of Jordan, considered a moderate, established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In February 1958, the most radical regimes in the region, Egypt and Syria (both supported by the USSR), merged to form the United Arab Republic (UAR). In July 1958, the pro-Western Iraqi monarchy was overthrown by a radical military junta. In the face of these developments, along with relentless propaganda by Arab nationalists against his more pro-Western regime and internal threats to his rule, Lebanese president Camille Chamoun asked for direct American intervention to defend his government. President Eisenhower, invoking his new doctrine, immediately ordered U.S. Marines to Lebanon. The main issue at stake in Lebanon was Chamoun’s effort to change the constitution to allow him to continue to rule the nation after his term of office expired. Eisenhower instructed his personal representative in Lebanon, noted diplomat Robert Murphy, to pressure Chamoun to give up power in order to circumvent an all-out civil war in Lebanon. Chamoun eventually conceded, and a popular favorite for the presidency replaced him, allowing American troops to withdraw peacefully. The second American intervention in Lebanon, during 1982–1984, was similar in many ways to the first, at least in the beginning. On June 6, 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon in an effort to crush the PLO, which had been using Lebanon as a base of operations for attacks against Israel. Although a staunch supporter of Israel, by 1982 President Reagan had begun to fear that Israeli actions in Lebanon (and elsewhere) would inflame anti-Western sentiments in Arab nations and provide an opportunity for increased Soviet influence in the region. Therefore, his administration attempted to broker an arrangement whereby the PLO would be evacuated from Lebanon in exchange for an Israeli promise to withdraw to its own borders. When worldwide pressure intensified against Israel after its relentless attacks in Lebanon, especially in the PLO’s West Beirut stronghold, and after direct threats by the Reagan administration, the PLO was allowed to leave Beirut in late summer 1982. As part of the agreement, a multinational force (MNF) of American, French, and Italian troops was sent to Beirut to ensure the safety of those departing from its harbor. More than 15,000 Palestinians were successfully evacuated by the end of the operation on September 1, 1982. Following the evacuation of the PLO, however, the ongoing civil war escalated among various Christian, Muslim, and Druze factions vying for control of Lebanon. Furthermore, Israeli and Syrian forces in Lebanon continued to clash, threatening an all-out war between the two nations. Reagan ordered the marines back to Beirut (and convinced the other members of the MNF to do the same) to serve as peacekeepers. As time passed, the MNF was embroiled in the fighting and became viewed as supporting the Lebanese government.

When a bomb exploded outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983, the justification for the MNF to stay in Lebanon changed. Secretary of State George Shultz argued that America would not give in to terrorists, and so the marines stayed in place as the civil war raged on. Then, on October 24, 1983, an event occurred that forced the United States and the MNF from Lebanon for good. A suicide bomber, believed to be from a Shiite Muslim terrorist group, drove a vanload of explosives into the marine barracks at the Beirut airport, killing 241 troops. Across town at the French headquarters, another bomb killed 58 soldiers. Public pressure in the United States and the collapse of the Lebanese Army in February 1984 finally forced Reagan to withdraw the marines from Lebanon, and the other MNF nations soon followed. The Lebanese Civil War raged for years afterward. Brent M. Geary

Further Reading Kaufman, Burton I. The Arab Middle East and the United States: Inter-Arab Rivalry and Superpower Diplomacy. New York: Twayne, 1996. Wright, Robin. Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

LeMay, Curtis (1906–1990) Curtis Emerson LeMay was a general in the U.S. Air Force, known for his no-nonsense command style and aggressive views during the Cold War. LeMay graduated from Ohio State University with a degree in civil engineering. He joined the Army Air Corps and soon distinguished himself by his navigation and piloting skills. Soon after the United States entered World War II, LeMay led his B-17 bomber group on some of the most dangerous missions of the war. He developed innovative formations and tactics and became known as an uncompromising commander who demanded exceptional performance from his men. In 1944, LeMay (by now a major general) was transferred to the Far East and soon thereafter became responsible for bombing Japan using the new B-29 Superfortress bomber from islands in the Pacific. LeMay conceived of sending the B-29 bombers on low-altitude night missions to drop incendiary bombs on Japanese cities. These raids were highly destructive, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. LeMay also organized the aerial mining of Japanese home waters to deny shipping and food distribution. LeMay understood the controversial nature of his tactics, but believed that if his methods shortened the war by even one day, they were worthwhile. He recognized, however, that if the United States had lost the war, he probably would have been tried as a war criminal. In 1947, LeMay assumed command of the U.S. Air Force in Europe and operated the Berlin Airlift after the Soviet Union’s blockade of the city in 1948. LeMay then returned to the United States and took command of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), the nation’s nuclear deterrent. He transformed an ineffective and poorly trained command into a first-rate organization, developing the concept of 24-hour readiness and maintaining a portion of SAC’s bombers continuously in the air. In 1951, LeMay became the youngest full general in the U.S. military since Ulysses S. Grant. He commanded SAC until 1957, when he became vice chief of staff of the Air Force. LeMay became chief of staff in 1961. Here, his aggressive views and positions often caused conflict with the nation’s civilian leaders—particularly in the Kennedy administration. Throughout the Cold War, he supported launching a massive, preemptive nuclear strike if it became clear the Soviet Union was going to attack. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay argued for a military strike against Cuba. During the Vietnam War, LeMay argued for a sustained strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. LeMay stated that the United

States should tell North Vietnam it would “bomb them back into the Stone Age” if they did not cease their aggression against South Vietnam. LeMay retired in 1965 and three years later accepted George Wallace’s offer to be the vice presidential candidate of the American Independent Party. LeMay’s controversial views regarding the use of nuclear weapons did not help Wallace’s candidacy, and in turn LeMay became associated with Wallace’s segregationist positions, despite his opposition to Wallace’s views. His reputation diminished as a result of the 1968 presidential campaign, LeMay retreated from public life and died in California on October 1, 1990. Alan M. Anderson See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Berlin Blockade/Airlift; Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; Kennedy, John F.

Further Reading Coffey, Thomas M. Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay. New York: Crown, 1986. Keeney, L. Douglas. 15 Minutes: General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011. Kozak, Warren. LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009. LeMay, Curtis E., with MacKinlay Kantor. Missions with LeMay: My Story. New York: Doubleday, 1965.

Madman Theory Upon entering office in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon assigned the war in Vietnam as his foremost priority. During his 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon touted a secret plan for honorably ending the war in Vietnam. While his strategy for victory was mired in ambiguity, the basis of the plan rested on the notion of diplomacy supported by military pressure. Pressure was pivotal to Nixon’s strategy because he contended that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) viewed him as more dangerous than his predecessor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon reinforced this initial trepidation by promoting the “madman theory.” Prior to Nixon developing the “madman theory” in 1969, he provided the DRV with a chance to reenter the peace negotiations that had begun in 1968, but on terms more favorable to the United States. The North Vietnamese rejected Nixon’s proposal, insisting on the complete removal of U.S. forces from Vietnam and the abdication of Nguyen Van Thieu, president of the Republic of South Vietnam (RVN). Nixon determined to pressure Hanoi through any means necessary. The “madman theory” was grounded in fear and intimidation. Nixon pursued a policy that was essentially psychological terrorism. The strategy aimed to have the DRV see Nixon as an unstable, unpredictable, and irrational leader who was willing to do whatever was necessary to secure peace in Vietnam on American terms. He intended to show the North Vietnamese (as well as China and the Soviet Union) that he had taken a hard line on the expansion of communism, and he would be willing to pursue drastic measures—even nuclear annihilation—to prevent a Communist victory. Nixon believed the madman strategy could bring final resolution to the war by the end of 1969. The North Vietnamese, however, refused to budge from their terms. Frustrated and furious with the DRV, Nixon chose to demonstrate to the DRV that the “madman theory” was not simply psychological brinksmanship. He responded to a North Vietnamese offensive along the Cambodian border by launching Operation Menu, a large-scale series of air strikes targeted at enemy encampments within the RVN.

Simultaneously, Nixon considered a plan called Operation Duck Hook that would have been the most savage assault of the entire war: ground assault into North Vietnam, mining of harbors, and the use of nuclear weapons—all intended to annihilate North Vietnam’s economic and political foundations and make it virtually impossible for it to continue to wage war. In the face of increasingly overwhelming opposition to the Vietnam War at home, the plan was ultimately aborted, although Nixon continued to make the government in Hanoi aware that the United States would use nuclear weapons, and he placed the Strategic Air Command (nerve center for the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal) on a series of terrifying highlevel alerts. As the war raged on, Nixon continued his saber rattling. The massive air campaigns of 1972— Operation Linebacker I and II—were both a by-product of Nixon’s psychological volatility. The North Vietnamese, however, never wavered. Ultimately, Nixon’s “madman theory” proved to be a dramatic, yet ineffective extension of the Johnson administration’s policies in Vietnam. Adam C. Richards See also: Cambodia; Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; Paris Peace Accords; Vietnam War

Further Reading Bundy, William. A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency. New York: Hill & Wang, 1998. Dallek, Robert. Partners in Power: Nixon and Kissinger. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Kimball, Jeffrey. Nixon’s Vietnam War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Scribner, 2008.

Mayaguez Incident (1975) The Mayaguez Incident refers to the Cambodian seizure of an American cargo ship and the subsequent military retaliation of the Gerald Ford administration. Occurring on May 12–15, 1975, just two weeks after the fall of Saigon, the incident was used by the Ford administration to reassert both American credibility abroad and the centrality of the executive branch in U.S. foreign policymaking. The successful recovery of the crew boosted Ford’s popularity, but the incident is more important in its broader, post– Vietnam War dimensions. The Cambodians who captured the Mayaguez on May 12 represented the Communist Khmer Rouge government that had come to power in mid-April 1975. The Mayaguez was in Cambodian territorial waters, as long defined by Cambodia, though the United States did not recognize that boundary. This was not the first Cambodian boat seizure that spring, nor was it the first American ship ever to be taken. However, given the location, timing, and perpetrators, the Ford administration chose a militarized response. In addition, the administration wished, by choosing force, to avoid the predicament of the Johnson administration in the Pueblo Incident of 1968, when a crew taken by North Korea was held over a year. From the first, the administration, led by National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was most concerned with the image of the United States in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia—reaching its conclusion that very month—and the opportunity to reassert credibility abroad and White House centrality to foreign policymaking at home. The fate of the captured Americans was secondary, though the administration publicly denied that its response was about anything other than their safe return.

On May 12, 1975, Cambodian forces seized the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. Trying to secure the release of the crew, U.S. forces attacked Koh Tang Island in the Gulf of Siam, suffering significant casualties in the process. Later released, crew members disembark here at Singapore on May 18, 1975. (AP Photo)

The administration’s military moves made clear its priorities, however, and in some cases could have killed the Americans, whose whereabouts were unknown. For example, when Cambodian boats thought to be transporting the captives headed for the Cambodian mainland, the American military fired on them. Later, over Pentagon objections American airplanes bombed Cambodia—despite the Cooper-Church Amendment prohibiting all U.S. military actions there—because it showcased American toughness and punished Cambodia for its actions. In Washington, the incident was the first episode of U.S. military action to fall under the War Powers Act of 1973, which required the executive branch to consult with Congress “in every possible instance” when committing American troops to hostilities. Responding minimally, Ford informed the congressional leadership of his actions and called that “consultation.” In doing so, the executive branch defined the act so narrowly that it would be unlikely to stand in the way of any administration committed to future military action. Ultimately, the Cambodians released the boat and the crew separately, as U.S. Marines stormed an island where they thought the Americans might be and before the scheduled airstrikes on the mainland. The bombings proceeded anyway. In the near term, with the crew recovered, the Ford administration was cheered for its success. However, the 40 sailors had been recovered in an operation that killed 41 Americans and, by the 1976 campaign, the Ford administration was promoting the incident to illustrate the president’s toughness. In retrospect, the Mayaguez Incident was a minor event that was used by the Ford administration to attempt to reassert U.S. credibility in the wake of the Vietnam War and is, thus, most interesting for what it shows about the U.S. reaction to the loss in Vietnam. In that way, it can be seen as the first attempt to remedy the perceived affliction of “Vietnam Syndrome”—an unwillingness to act militarily in the wake of the defeat in Southeast Asia.

Derek N. Buckaloo See also: Cambodia; Vietnam Syndrome; War Powers Act

Further Reading Greene, John Robert. The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Lamb, Christopher Jon. Belief Systems and Decision Making in the Mayaguez Crisis. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989. Mahoney, Robert J. The Mayaguez Incident: Testing America’s Resolve in the Post-Vietnam Era. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011.

Military-Industrial Complex Referring to a deadly configuration of interests shaping U.S. foreign policy and American society itself, the term military-industrial complex (MIC) was used by President Eisenhower in his January 17, 1961, farewell address to the nation. It was defined in 1967 by a leading scholar of American military history as the “integration of economic and military institutions for the purpose of national security” (Koistinen, 378). For all the technical proficiency of this minimalist phrasing, few writings are more insightful than the original text of Eisenhower’s televised warning about the dangers posed by the “conjunction of an immense military establishment [with a] large arms industry,” which the president asserted held the potential to penetrate multiple arenas of social and political life and fundamentally alter the nation in ways that were alien to its democratic traditions. The inextricably entwined interests of defense corporations and other corporate interests with the U.S. national security establishment, Eisenhower suggested, held the potential for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” and posed a threat to the “democratic processes” of decision making. The widely recognized primary shortcoming of Eisenhower’s MIC address—an absence of explicit reference to politics and politicians—is thought to have been a product of self-censorship. An earlier draft of the speech made reference to the “military-industrial-congressional complex” [emphasis added] and would have made more clear from the start what only fully surfaced for most Americans in the 1980s: the waste, fraud, and abuse of the defense contract procurement system that fattened the profits of defense corporations and was made possible by large contributions from the same defense contractors to members of Congress who voted for increased military spending, which in turn helped ensure their reelection as many of their constituents depended on defense-related jobs. These troubling aspects of the MIC, which concerned Eisenhower through much of his administration (even as he presided over it), are essential to the entire structure of the military-industrial complex and speak to the endangerment of the “democratic processes” to which the president referred: abuse by lobbies and individuals of their access to the corridors of power leading to corruption, fraud through overpricing, opaque “black projects” that escape public scrutiny, and manipulation of policy by warmongering profiteers with a material interest in U.S. engagement in international conflict. This integration of economic and military institutions with power that is political is key to understanding the MIC: a nexus of structural relationships or “Iron Triangle” connecting the arms industry to government (primarily Pentagon officials who work at the Department of Defense) and politicians in Congress reliant on industry for jobs in their constituencies to boost their popularity and to fund reelection campaigns.

ORIGINS AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

Despite its foresight, Eisenhower’s prognosis was somewhat scant on historical depth and imbued in American exceptionalism. The U.S. MIC’s formation constitutes one phase of a world historical process with precedents and parallels in contexts like Germany, where corporatist relations between fascism and big business identified by French historian Daniel Guérin provide interesting cross-national comparisons. The first generation of scholars to chart the origins of the MIC in the United States wasted little time in establishing its pre–Cold War origins. The 1808 Militia Act provides an early instance of institutionalized arms purchase by the federal government from domestic producers; the Civil War and early imperial forays of the 19th century established close alliances between government and industrial arms producers. However, government-industry ties tended to be temporary and strained before World War I. The First World War would serve as the watershed when historical distinctions between civilianmilitary and public-private worlds and institutions began to erode upon the recommendations of a committee of military officers and civilians set up under the National Defense Act of 1916. The Kernan Board, as it was known, called for a comprehensive plan of industrial mobilization to ensure the immediate availability of wartime weapons for government and, more significantly, to prevent production plants remaining idle during peacetime—thereby setting the stage for the establishment of a permanent military-dependent economy. Initially, the military remained somewhat reluctant to cede its separation from civilian institutions (i.e., industrialists) from whence initiatives for close cooperation and coordination initially came. However, the basis of government-industry partnerships laid down during the war gave peacetime cooperation and planning enough momentum to align it with industrialists in small increments; by the end of the 1930s, the skeletal framework for the MIC had been erected. When the Nye Committee of that era (formally, the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry) conducted a protracted inquiry into the entwined interests of the financial and banking interests that underlay America’s entrance into World War I, it noted the tendency of retired army and navy officers to join firms contracted by the government and warned of “an unhealthy alliance … that brings into being a self-interested power which operates in the name of patriotism and satisfies interests that are purely selfish” (Koistinen, 833). The MIC’s origins thus long predate President Eisenhower’s warning of 1961. If in this interwar period the American MIC had equivalents in Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and other national economies, the ”international orgasm” (Cooling, 974) of industrial arms production and technological advancements during World War II that was centered in American industry sealed the U.S. position as the world’s leading industrial military power. What followed in its aftermath was, among other elements of the MIC, increased arms production to advance America’s own national security and global strategic and economic interests, aid and sales to other nations and nonstate actors, and a proliferating space program that was insidiously linked to the defense-dependent aerospace industry. The single most important conceptual development in the Truman-Eisenhower era was the permanence of the production, cooperation, and industrial mobilization that ensured the militarizing of America and its society as never before. Despite instances of sordid corruption and waste, including tales of $400 toilet seats and $5,000 coffee pots on weapons systems, the real story of the MIC lay in well-documented structural alignments, not conspiracies. The MIC became a major employer; to this day calls for a reduction in military spending are deflected with the assertion that it would be harmful to the U.S. economy (a claim that has long been contested by critics). Like most aspects of state and society, the political economy of the MIC since the 1980s has undergone important transformations under neoliberalism. Scholars point to the apparent fragmentation and dispersion of military industry within and beyond the borders of the American nationstate. Subcontracting to private security firms has further globalized the American MIC, bringing the

unprecedented and exceedingly profitable involvement of what are effectively mercenaries and contractors like Blackwater. Technological developments have also been significant: as MIC defenders are quick to point out, defense-related research has yielded a host of beneficial technological innovations, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS navigation. Critics argue, however, that beyond the pleasures of techno-consumerism, the implications of these developments are complex and, at best, ambiguous, bringing such mixed legacies as the increased integration of the information technology sector with a vast, ubiquitous machinery of security surveillance that invades the privacy of virtually everyone everywhere. Moreover, the MIC also encompasses various additional facets of social and public life. As Eisenhower realized all too well, the media and educational institutions have played a key role in mainstreaming the MIC as part of the “American Way of War” (to borrow Russell Weigley’s term), in creating what Eisenhower and other critics in the 1950s called a permanently armed “garrison state.” Following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, for example, warnings poured forth from the MIC, further exaggerated by the media, about a “missile gap” that posed an imminent threat to the United States; years of equally hysterical and false warnings of a “bomber gap” from the aerospace industry aimed to drive up the budgets of the Air Force. Despite Eisenhower’s best efforts to curb the hysteria and trim obsolete weapons systems or curtail the numbers of new systems that he believed unnecessary overkill, the congressional arm of the MIC, aided by the media, persistently reinserted the spending. More than a halfcentury later, it continues. The media’s murky links to government, industry, and business together with its promotion of a jingoistic, hypermasculine aesthetic in American life and culture have moved a number of intellectuals to suggest it could constitute a fourth pillar of the MIC. Higher education, too, has long been aligned with military-industrial-business power. Once again, Eisenhower and other critics of the era like C. Wright Mills saw this insidious pattern developing as major universities increasingly courted Defense Department research grants. As a result, greater percentages of university-based scientific research became captured by the MIC. Perhaps more disturbingly, university faculties over time have become less open to critical thinking that might question the superstructure of global American militarism. If such processes of diffusion within and beyond the national-state economy and polity justify revision of older models, the waning of scholarly and journalistic interest in the MIC, together with occasional proclamations of its “death,” indicates that perhaps a new turning point has been reached. The tendency in some quarters to view the MIC as an antiquated Cold War relic signals the realization of Eisenhower’s greatest fears of complacency: the spread of the MIC’s tentacles throughout society together with its ideological mainstreaming has led to a dissipation of even minimal public concerns of the kind that surrounded it in the first decades of its unbounded growth from the 1950s through the 1980s. Indeed, the MIC’s rise—though punctuated by periodic bouts of self-awareness and calls heeding Eisenhower’s warning—continues unabated in the contemporary world. With economic justifications buttressing ideological fears, attempts at demobilization after the post–Cold War were abruptly halted by the George W. Bush administration: spending rose at an average rate of 10 percent per year between 2000 to 2006 (the annual growth rate for the overall economy was 2.7 percent); as a share of GDP, the military budget rose from 3.0 to 4.4 percent during the Bush presidency as a whole. President Barack Obama has continued the trend: in 2011, the United States spent more than $700 billion on national security—around half of all military spending in the world. The incestuous relationship between the military and business, moreover, has if anything deepened in recent years: in 2011, the Economist reported (approvingly) that 10 percent of the bosses of America’s 500 biggest companies are former military officers. A Boston Globe investigation the previous year revealed that the number of retired three- and four-star generals and

admirals moving into lucrative defense industry jobs rose from less than 50 percent between 1994 and 1998 to 80 percent between 2004 and 2008. If anything, the MIC is poised to expand in directions that were barely imaginable during the Cold War. The New York Times recently reported talk of “effective control” and “persistent surveillance” of the entire 1,969-mile land border with Mexico, something never before accomplished. Together with military-style buildups begun under Bush, immigration discourse suggests the discovery of a new home front in America’s permanent war, as does the fact that its largest military contractors, facing federal budget cuts and the pullout from Afghanistan in 2014, appear to be turning their sights to immigration control as a new source of profit. With news that billions of dollars are expected to be spent on tighter security in the coming years, military-grade radar and long-range camera systems built for the Pentagon have been pitched as devices that could be attached to aerial drones to find illegal border crossers. Evidence of a lethal symbiosis among government, business, and industry of the kind Eisenhower warned about permeates society. Critics warn that an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” of the sort Eisenhower hoped for is more desperately needed than ever. Ali Nobil Ahmad See also: Militarization of American Culture; Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis; Private Military Contractors; Primary Documents: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in Which He Warns of the Military Industrial Complex (January 17, 1961)

Further Reading Bender, Bryan. “From the Pentagon to the Private Sector.” Boston Globe, December 26, 2010. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/12/26/defense_firms_lure_retired_generals/. Accessed October 18, 2014. Cooling, Benjamin Franklin. “The Military-Industrial Complex.” In James C. Bradford, ed. A Companion to American Military History. New York: Blackwell Malden, 2010, pp. 966–989. Giroux, Henry. “The War on Terror: The Militarising of Public Space and Culture in the United States.” Third Text 18, no. 4 (2004): 211–221. Guérin, Daniel. Fascism and Big Business. Translated by Mason Merr Press. 2nd ed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1994. “Khaki Capitalism.” The Economist, December 3, 2011. http://www.economist.com/node/21540985?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/ar/khakicapitalism. Accessed October 18, 2014. Koistinen, Paul. “The ‘Industrial-Military Complex’ in Historical Perspective: World War I.” The Business History Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 378–403. Lipton, Eric. “As Wars End, a Rush to Grab Dollars Spent on the Border.” New York Times, June 6, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/us-military-firms-eye-border-security-contracts.html. Accessed October 18, 2014. O’Connell, Daniel. “The Permanent Militarization of America.” New York Times, November 4, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print. Accessed October 18, 2014.

My Lai Massacre (1968) My Lai refers to a village in Quang Nam province, Vietnam, which is best known for the events of the massacre that began in the hamlet of My Lai 4 on the morning of March 16, 1968. Using the widespread American tactic of “search and destroy,” the frustrated and enraged soldiers of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry took part in the unchecked slaughter of roughly 500 Vietnamese civilians— most of them women, children, and old men. A number of the women were raped and many bodies were mutilated. Disclosure of the massacre in 1969 further weakened support for the American war in Vietnam and raised additional questions about the actions of U.S. soldiers throughout the conflict.

It began with a roundup of the villagers and paranoid screaming on the part of the company, which had endured weeks of ferocious fighting during the Tet Offensive and had lost a number of men. The first deaths occurred from bayonet stabbings of villagers the Americans were attempting to interrogate. Grenades followed, after which came a number of execution-style murders. The violence peaked when a machine gun was turned on the villagers who had been positioned at the center of the hamlet. Many were killed trying to flee or running from their huts. In the wake of the initial killings of about 150 villagers, it became clear that the few National Liberation Front (NLF or, pejoratively, “VC”) guerrillas who had been present had fled in advance of the noisy American entry. Those villagers who survived mostly did so by hiding under the bodies of the murdered. Two figures—Second Lieutenant William Calley and Captain Ernest Medina—were primarily responsible for the “shoot to kill” orders that were carried out over the course of the morning. After My Lai 4 was “cleared,” the platoons of Charlie Company continued on to the adjacent hamlets and took the lives of more than 300 additional villagers (the Vietnamese official count of the slaughter is 504). Although most American soldiers did not participate in the crimes, neither did they attempt to stop them. While virtually no NLF suspects were detained or killed at My Lai, the events turned the villagers in the area against the Americans: while almost none had been supporters of the NLF before the My Lai massacre, almost 100 percent were NLF supporters afterwards. This was a pattern repeated over the course of the Vietnam War. The initial reports from the U.S. military declared that 128 enemy soldiers and 22 civilians were killed at “Pinkville” (the military code word for the village) that morning. What really happened at My Lai did not begin to come to light until a year and a half later in November 1969, due to the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism of Seymour Hersh. His reporting, based on an interview with a Vietnam veteran who had heard the story from soldiers who had been present, recounted the horrors that transpired, including chilling accounts of Calley’s role in ordering his men to conduct the execution-style killings. One lieutenant described how the platoon he commanded burned 13 villages in the same region with “Zippo [lighter] squads.” Widespread shock and outrage followed Hersh’s story, with growing calls across the country and in Congress for a wider investigation of the conduct of American soldiers in Vietnam. Although that did not happen, a military investigation and court martial of Lieutenant Calley did ensue, with Calley found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison but served only three years, his release coming in 1974. Hersh’s report on My Lai and the subsequent Calley trial did shine a spotlight on the atrocities committed by U.S. forces elsewhere in the conflict. In the 1971 “Winter Soldier Investigation” organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, many veterans publicly confessed (and VVAW leader John Kerry also testified in Congress) about the widespread pattern of unspeakably atrocious killings and mutilations that they had either witnessed or participated in. These accounts further divided the country over the righteousness of the cause, but for many also revealed the utter folly of U.S. military strategy in the war. Many soldiers and critics of the war pointed out that the combination of vicious and unrestrained guerrilla war waged by the South Vietnamese Communists, the pressure for high “body counts” from U.S. military superiors, and the soldiers’ instinct to assume the worst in South Vietnamese villagers to survive, constituted a deadly mix that inevitably led to these kinds of atrocities—My Lai being just the worst of them. Or was it? In 2003, the Toledo Blade published a serial investigation by Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss that revealed similar horrific acts being committed by American soldiers over a much longer period of time than at My Lai. Operating in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, the unit known as Tiger Force killed and mutilated (and often wore the body parts of) hundreds of Vietnamese villagers (the

exact number of civilians is unknown) between May and November 1967. As at My Lai, there were poor leadership, frustration with the inability to distinguish between civilians and NLF guerrillas, combined with a fixation on body counts. Unlike at My Lai, Tiger Force soldiers kept silent for decades, paralleling the military’s refusal to conduct a serious investigation. This pattern of conduct may have run even deeper. As the investigative reporting of Turse and Nelson (2006) in the Los Angeles Times suggested, many, many reports were covered up, while soldiers were tried within the military system and often given minimal sentences. They describe a 9,000-page report ordered in the 1970s that suggested the pressure to produce high body counts resulted in a policy that led to widespread atrocities. In the end, the indiscriminate killing by U.S. forces decreased the success of the missions and ultimately undermined any chance American forces might have had to win the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese people. William Noseworthy See also: National Liberation Front (NLF); Phoenix Program; Vietnam War

Further Reading Hersh, Seymour M. “My Lai.” In Marvin E. Gettlemen et al., eds. Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War. New York: Grove Press, 2005, pp. 410–424. Sallah, Michael D., and Mitch Weiss. “Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths—Tiger Force.” Toledo Blade, October 22–26, 2003. Turse, Nick. “A My Lai a Month.” The Nation (New York), 18 November 2008. http://www.thenation.com/article/my-lai-month?page=0,2#. Accessed October 18, 2014. Turse, Nick, and Deborah Nelson. “Civilian Killings Went Unpunished.” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2006. http://www.latimes.com/news/lana-vietnam6aug06,0,7018171,full.story. Accessed October 18, 2014.

National Liberation Front (NLF) The National Liberation Front may actually refer to one of any number of National Liberation Fronts that were generally Socialist leaning and that tended to side against American interventionism during the Cold War. In the context of American imperialism, the most significant National Liberation Front was that faced by U.S. military forces in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Mat tran dan toc giai phong mien nam Viet Nam). Officially the NLF was renamed the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) in 1961. However, even in NLF publications the initial acronym seems to have remained prevalent throughout the Vietnam War. In the wake of the McCarthy-era purges of the State Department in the 1940s and 1950s and the Communist revolution in China, little high-level scholarship was available on such Socialist-leaning nationalist organizations in Asia. Thus, the National Liberation Front was more commonly represented in American discourse by the pejoratives Viet Cong, VC, and Charlie, each with its own origins. The Vietnamese term Viet Cong itself appeared as early as the 1950s in the South and was roughly the equivalent of the English “Commie.” Meanwhile, VC was American shorthand for “Viet Cong” that then became “Victor Charlie” following military shorthand and eventually the pejorative “Charlie” seen in so many accounts by American soldiers in the war. The National Liberation Front (NLF) itself emerged in 1960 in an attempt to throw off the dictatorial, corrupt, and abusive Ngo Dinh Diem regime. Its organizational roots are found as early as 1954 following the Geneva Accords when Ho Chi Minh deployed more than 5,000 members of the Viet Minh to begin organizing support for unification of the country and to counter the resistance of those who had been sympathetic to the Bao Dai regime (and soon that of Ngo Dinh Diem). Following Diem’s cancellation of

mandated elections in 1956 and his increasingly authoritarian and violent resistance to reform, the NLF began engaging Diem’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam in sporadic fighting, by the end of the decade explicitly calling for armed struggle to defeat the regime. It formed the People’s Liberation Armed Forces as the military arm of the organization, one that was modeled on Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh that ultimately evolved into the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

South Vietnamese communist guerrillas north of Saigon before the start of the U.S. Operation Cedar Falls in January 1967. (AP Photo)

Ironically, many of the NLF’s stated ideals and goals would likely have been supported by many Americans had they known of them: freedom of the press, freedom of opinion, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, organized social welfare; protection of orphans, old people, and invalids; and the elimination of illiteracy. However, the organization was also explicitly against American intervention, a point that American officials emphasized—along with both a documented and manufactured record of NLF’s savagery against both civilians and American soldiers (failing to note that atrocities were pervasive on both sides of the war). The purpose of the NLF was to liberate South Vietnam from outside imperialist occupation and to unify the country, a goal shared by Ho Chi Minh in the North. Further, with the extension of American intervention into Cambodia and Laos, the efforts of the NLF extended into those countries as well. Although village farmers made up the NLF’s popular base, the rank and file as well as the leadership included a broad cross section of South Vietnamese society: lawyers, physicians, former Diem employees and supporters, Buddhist monks and high-ranking religious leaders, teachers, civil servants, journalists, union leaders, Catholic priests, professors, electrical engineers, playwrights and authors, and many more. Ideologically speaking, the Communist Party of South Vietnam (People’s Revolutionary Party) was the leading political force of the NLF, but it did include a number of other organized parties as well. Although much of the leadership was indigenous to the South, for much of the conflict Hanoi continued to direct the actions of the NLF. Despite the fact that the NLF already enjoyed a wide base of political support from peasants, the middle class, and members of the upper class as well, this did not stop U.S. analysts from declaring that the organization was totally incapable of orchestrating a Communist unification of the country with Ho Chi Minh’s forces to the north. U.S. officials had grossly underestimated the unequaled determination of the NLF to reclaim their country after decades of colonial rule by the French and two brutal wars with the

Japanese and the French. And the first years of the American war only further steeled their resolve. A congress of the NLF held in August 1967 produced a declaration indicting the “monstrous crimes of the US … [which] only served to deepen our people’s hatred and increase their indomitable will” (p. 1). The NLF was fiercely determined to fight and halt what they saw as unchecked aggression by the U.S. military. U.S. military escalation, combined with the expansion of the war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, only served to swell the ranks of NLF supporters. Moreover, the 1967 NLF report damned American efforts to publicly promote the war as being in the defense of a supposedly democratic regime in Saigon as nothing more than “an attempt to fool the American and world’s peoples” (p. 3). The 1967 publication explicitly calls for respect for various religious creeds, which was not part of the NLF’s 1960 original declaration (p. 13), and may have been an effort to respond to condemnation by the United States for anti-Catholic policies of the early Ho Chi Minh regime. The National Liberation Front depended on the support of local villagers in mounting and sustaining operations against the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. This proved to be a successful tactic, but one that left villagers vulnerable to indiscriminate attacks by frustrated American forces engaged in search and destroy missions. To be sure, the long-term pattern was one of growing support for the NLF, which was hastened and not weakened by American military strategy. The peak moment for NLF success came in the 1968 Tet Offensive. In the end, although it was a military defeat for Communist forces, the coordinated NLF-NVA assault proved a psychological turning point in weakening support for the war in the United States. William Noseworthy See also: Diem, Ngo Dinh; Geneva Accords; Tet Offensive; Vietnam War

Further Reading “Founding Program of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.” In Marvin E. Gettlemen et al., eds. Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War. New York: Grove Press, 2005, pp. 188–192. Permanent Representation of the South Vietnam National Front for Liberation in Czechoslovakia: Commission for the Foreign Relations of the South Vietnam National Front for Liberation (CFRSVNFL). Personalities of the South Vietnam Liberation Front, 1965. Political Programme of the South Vietnam National Front for Liberation. Adopted at an Extraordinary Congress of the Front held in midAugust 1967.

Non-Aligned Movement The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a loosely organized assembly of nations that cooperate on matters of economic development, peace, and political self-determination with membership primarily in the countries of South America, Africa, and Asia. Initially developed in the early 1960s, the NAM sought to establish a third pathway for independent-minded nations that avoided the great geopolitical division of the Cold War. Many of its most important member states like India, Egypt, and Ghana suffered through some form of colonialism and conducted their diplomacy in a way that promoted peaceful, independent national development. Internal divisions hampered the development of the NAM as a cohesive power on the world stage, but it continues to offer a cooperative platform for more than 100 developing countries that represent more than half of the world’s population. The Non-Aligned Movement emerged during the tumultuous years of the 1950s and 1960s, when newly independent countries sought autonomous foreign policies during the Cold War. Between the British exit from India in 1947 and the “Year of Africa” in 1960, more than 30 countries gained independence from European colonial rule, with dozens more following in subsequent decades. Many of these countries were economically and politically underdeveloped as a result of a century or more of colonial occupation. Generally, these new governments preferred state-centered economic development and peaceful, nonaligned exchange at the international level so they could build stable and prosperous nations. This period of decolonization occurred during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union led competing political blocs. The United States had assembled a coalition of countries nominally committed to democratic capitalism through cooperative arrangements like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). The Soviet Union consolidated power in Eastern Europe through the Warsaw Pact and had strong ties with Communist states like North Korea. Former colonies were understandably concerned about the continuing influence of the European powers, especially after a failed attempt to seize the Suez Canal from Gamel Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Though the Soviet Union openly favored decolonization, its military intervention in Hungary raised the specter of a Communist form of domination. As a result, leaders in Egypt, India, Yugoslavia, Ghana, and elsewhere sought a middle path that did not directly ally them with either of the coercive blocs. A number of conferences unified these states, culminating in the creation of the NAM. The first conference occurred in 1955 at Bandung in Indonesia. Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru of India invited Afro-Asian leaders together to discuss problems of economic underdevelopment, neocolonialism, and the world arms race. Though seeking to assert a common regional independence from the bipolar conflict, the conference produced minimal results due to participation by states like Japan and China, which were allied with the United States and Soviet Union, respectively. Bandung did communicate to the world that Afro-Asian states were seeking an alternative form of development. Among those who took notice of the event was Josip Broz Tito, the independent Communist leader of Yugoslavia who feared domination by his Soviet neighbor. Tito saw the combined power of the independent states of the world as an important check on both Eastern and Western hegemony. He invited Nehru, Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia, leaders of 19 other Afro-Asian states, and of Cuba to Belgrade in 1961 to consult on the matter. This first meeting set up a series of future consultations, in which a growing number of

states agreed to work together to ensure independence and national sovereignty on a foundation of international equality, thus forming the Non-Aligned Movement. NAM unity rested on three central tenets, the first of which was national security. Rejecting the two prevailing global ideologies, members sought peaceful coexistence among states with different political and economic systems. The group criticized external interventions, the establishment of foreign military bases, and the nuclear arms race and proliferation as direct threats to this goal. Second, the NAM was strongly anticolonial, favoring national self-determination for all peoples. Governments opposed South African apartheid, Portuguese colonialism, Israel’s treatment of Palestine, and the American war in Vietnam. Finally, the NAM addressed the problem of global economic inequality. Specific demands included better terms of trade between the global North (Europe, North America, and Russia) and the South, commodity stabilization, agricultural modernization, industrialization, and economic cooperation between member states. This final issue has grown in importance over the years, becoming the main priority of the NAM since the Cold War ended. The creation of a movement around these tenets challenged Cold War bipolarity. American officials were fearful that state-run economic policies and anticolonialism would increase the nonaligned states’ affinity with the Soviet Union, especially at the United Nations. Cooperation between the NAM and the Communist world would put the United States at a strategic disadvantage. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy believed wooing independent nations might keep the Cold War out of Asia and Africa, but more often than not Western officials viewed the NAM with suspicion and its members as unreliable global partners. Such attitudes complicated American relationships with key states like India and Egypt. Contrary to Western fears, no strong diplomatic bloc emerged from the NAM. Members generally agreed on matters of colonialism and the goals of development, but they differed on specific policies. Institutionalization and regularization of consultations increased in the 1970s, but smaller states rejected compulsory political and economic obligations, fearing domination by more powerful allies. Moreover, differing attitudes toward the superpowers weakened unity. Countries like India depended on Western aid and regularly moderated radical initiatives. Communist states refrained from criticizing the Soviet Union even when its actions served to increase global tensions, notably after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Meaningful cooperation also suffered from regional disputes that pitted member states against each other in South Asia, the Near East, and East Africa. As a result, NAM cooperation has varied considerably from issue to issue. These failures should not overshadow the utility of the NAM. Regular summits of the heads of state every three years and more common ministerial meetings provide for coordination of priorities and tactics, most importantly at the UN. Since the end of the Cold War, the NAM has adjusted to meet new challenges. It has placed emphasis on multilateralism and argued against globalization, while continuing to denounce economic dominance by developed nations. Avoiding binding statements, it has issued especially strong criticisms of the United States’ invasion of Iraq and overriding influence in international organizations. Through these methods, the NAM continues to act as the collective voice of the developing world. R. Joseph Parrott

Further Reading Brands, H. W. The Specter of Neutralism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Rakove, Robert. Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Willets, Peter. The Non-Aligned Movement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance. London: Francis Pinter, 1978.

Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1968) Operation Rolling Thunder was the central U.S. air strike campaign of the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968 and one of the largest air operations in American history. The campaign was conceived by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in February 1965. Initially Rolling Thunder was designed as an eight-week bombing program concentrating on targets over the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The goals were twofold: interdict supply lines that were aiding the Viet Cong (National Liberation Front) in South Vietnam (RVN) and force the North Vietnamese into negotiating an end to the war that would accept the sovereignty of South Vietnam. The campaign was also intended to demonstrate to the U.S.-allied government in Saigon the American resolve to defeat the Communists. In the end, this may have been the only real success of Rolling Thunder. In 1965, priority was given to targeting enemy supply and communication lines. President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara rejected rapid expansion of the target base in favor of a graduated, incremental escalation. Johnson ordered a bombing pause in May to allow the DRV a chance to enter negotiations, but upon the intransigence of the North Vietnamese, Rolling Thunder resumed a week later. After months of destruction, a second bombing pause was initiated December 24. The air campaign failed to achieve its goals by year’s end and was thus resumed on January 31, 1966. Upon the assessment of Rolling Thunder in January 1966 Johnson and the JCS decided that the operation would assume a larger role in two ways. First, the air campaign would support more closely the expanding ground war. In addition, the United States chose to strike newly developed DRV radar sites and combat aircraft. The JCS also lifted restrictions on previously off-limits sites in North Vietnam, including targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Once again, the United States inflicted incredible damage on the DRV. Rolling Thunder was further revised in 1967 to include the bombing of more restricted targets, with the renewed goal of forcing the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table on American terms. Remarkable success was achieved in damaging pivotal war-making facilities in the DRV, and yet the government in Hanoi, aided by antiaircraft weaponry from its Communist allies China and the Soviet Union, developed a formidable defense against the American air assault. By April 1968, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, President Johnson decided to end all bombing campaigns above the 19th parallel as a sign of American intentions at the revived peace talks that summer. In November, frustrated by the inability to achieve the central goals of the air campaign, Johnson terminated Rolling Thunder—although bombing would resume dramatically the next year under President Nixon and new military code names. Neither Rolling Thunder nor Nixon’s bombing, however, achieved the goals of completely interdicting enemy supplies from infiltrating the RVN, nor compelling peace on American terms. The endurance and determination of the North Vietnamese proved too effective even in the face of the enormously destructive air power of the United States. Adam C. Richards See also: Tet Offensive; Vietnam War

Further Reading Clodfelter, Mark. The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1989. Frankum, Ronald. Like Rolling Thunder: The Air War in Vietnam, 1964–1975. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2005. Sharp, Ulysses S. G. Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1978. Thompson, James Clay. Rolling Thunder: Understanding Policy and Program Failure. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Paris Peace Accords (1973) On January 27, 1973, the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, along with the Republic of (South) Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam or Viet Cong, signed “An Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam” in Paris. Otherwise known as the Paris Peace Accords, the agreement officially brought to an end direct—and ultimately all— U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia that had spanned several decades beginning with the end of WWII. The Paris Peace Accords included a cease-fire; the withdrawal of U.S. troops and advisers from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia within 60 days; the abandonment of U.S. bases in return for an exchange of prisoners; and an understanding for an eventual reunification of Vietnam “through peaceful means,” confirming South Vietnam’s right to self-determination. The Paris Peace accords transpired following years of tough negotiations between both sides and a carrot-and-stick approach by the United States. By 1968, U.S. involvement in Vietnam had become increasingly costly, deadly, and unpopular with the American public. Following the Tet Offensive, public opinion moved toward peace as increasing numbers of Americans took to the streets in demonstrations and other acts of opposition to what they regarded as a morally unjustifiable war. Against this backdrop the outgoing Johnson administration entered into preliminary peace talks in 1968 in Paris to deescalate the war in Vietnam; yet by year’s end negotiations had broken down. President Nixon won the 1968 presidential election on a promise of “peace with honor.” In its effort to bring the war to an end the Nixon administration resorted to a strategy that combined devastating bombing campaigns with troop withdrawals and diplomatic initiatives in an effort to bring the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. In combining strength with diplomacy, Nixon and National Security Adviser (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger sought to improve the U.S. bargaining position and maintain international credibility vis-à-vis allies and foes alike. Although both sides sought peace, the deadlock dragged on for another three and a half years with the United States insisting that the North Vietnamese government withdraw troops from South Vietnam and recognize a South Vietnamese government. In June 1969, the United States began the first troop withdrawals as part of its new strategy of “Vietnamization” whereby the South Vietnamese would gradually take over military responsibilities from the United States. In 1972, negotiations resulted in a breakthrough. By then, the Nixon administration sought détente with the chief Communist powers, China and the Soviet Union. The North Vietnamese, concerned that negotiations could result in a rapprochement, feared political isolation; but they also knew that a settlement would halt U.S. bombing and lead to a further withdrawal of U.S. troops. Negotiations, however, only came to a major breakthrough in October when Kissinger allowed North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South and backed down on his support for the South Vietnamese government. In return, the North Vietnamese granted a halt to the flow of their troops to the South. On October 22, 1972, Nixon halted all bombing campaigns north of the 20th parallel, and Kissinger declared that “peace was at hand” four days later. However, talks stopped on December 13 after South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu—who had not been consulted about the secret talks between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, lead Communist negotiator for the Viet Cong insurgency—demanded far-reaching concessions from North Vietnam. Only after a promise from Kissinger—$1 billion in military equipment and an assurance that the United States would reenter the war should the North not abide by the peace—did Thieu give in. Following Nixon’s intensive “Christmas bombing” of the North—12 days of concentrated bombing— peace talks resumed on January 8, 1973. The signed accords closely resembled the agreement made

earlier in October. For their joint efforts Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Le Duc Tho declined it, leaving Kissinger as the sole recipient of the award.

Flanked by members of the United States delegation, Secretary of State William P. Rogers signs the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973, thus ending direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam conflict. (National Archives/Robert Knudsen)

Although there were seven sections and 23 articles to the agreement, arguably the most important provision of the Paris Peace Accords was stated at the outset: U.S. recognition and respect for Vietnamese independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity. The accords also foresaw the complete cessation of hostilities on January 27, 1973; the discontinuation of U.S. military involvement or participation in the internal affairs of South Vietnam; total withdrawal of the last remaining U.S. troops, military advisers, and other military personnel; as well as the dismantlement of bases—all to commence 60 days after the signing of the agreement. The agreement also made arrangements for the mutual return and exchange of captured personnel and advisers, both military and civilian. Further, the accords recognized the Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination through general elections and included a mutual pledge to refrain from further hostilities and respect the cease-fire, an understanding to refrain from reprisal, and to ensure the democratic liberties of the people. The accords tackled the relationship between North and South Vietnam, envisioning the reunification of Vietnam through “peaceful means” without any annexation or foreign interference, claiming what was to have been the provisional, temporary nature of the military demarcation line at the 17th parallel. The parties participating in the Paris conference agreed to form two Joint Military Commissions to enforce the cease-fire and agreed to refer to an International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) in cases of disagreements. Finally, the Paris Peace Accords pledged to recognize the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia (as set forth in the 1954 Geneva Agreements), reconciliation between the United States and all the peoples of Indochina, and pledged friendship between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, in accordance with the Paris Peace Accords. When Congress, reflecting a war-weary nation, cut off all military aid to the Vietnamese in December 1974, the situation worsened, as the United States could no longer use air strikes as a threat should the North Vietnamese break the agreement. On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnamese regime surrendered to the Communist onslaught. After 30 years of almost continuous conflict and nearly a century of external occupation, the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on July 2, 1976.

Matthias Voigt See also: French War in Indochina; Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; Vietnam War

Further Reading Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, signed in Paris and entered into force January 17, 1973. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/treaty.htm. Accessed May 25, 2014. Dillard, Walter Scott. Sixty Days to Peace, Implementing the Paris Peace Accords—Vietnam 1973. Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002. Guan, Ang Cheng. Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists’ Perspective. Routledge Curzon Studies in the Modern History of Asia. New York: Routledge, 2004. Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2001. Kissinger, Henry. Ending the Vietnam War, A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an international youth volunteer program overseen by the U.S. government. It was first enacted by President John F. Kennedy through executive order in March 1961, then authorized by the U.S. Congress with the passage of the Peace Corps Act the following autumn. Its goal is to promote peace and friendship through service to the developing world. The organization was established at the pinnacle of two inseparable global developments, the heightening of Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the decolonization of the Third World. President Kennedy believed the United States must “do better” in its efforts to align itself with these newly independent nations or risk losing them to Soviet influence. He saw the Peace Corps as a vehicle by which the United States could both aid in global development and promote its values to the rest of the world.

U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has its roots in World War I and II–eras programs like the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which worked to resist the encroachment of the Nazi Third Reich into the Western Hemisphere. The Marshall Plan (1947) is the most famous progenitor of the USAID, offering billions in reconstruction dollars to European nations to help them rebuild their economies, while carrying the added benefit of fortifying Western Europe as an anticommunist bulwark in the emerging Cold War. Similarly, the Mutual Security Agency of the Korean War era and subsequently the Foreign Operations Administration provided technical assistance and foreign aid programs to bolster U.S. influence in, and reinforce friendly U.S. relations with nations around the world. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act, which combined within the State Department a number of U.S. foreign aid programs into the Agency for International Development (later USAID). USAID staff fanned out across the globe in dozens of countries with the dual, complementary mission of administering antipoverty programs while also working to advance U.S. security interests. One important area of focus for the agency in the 1960s was confronting catastrophic famine and drought in Asia. USAID led the coordination of a massive U.S. naval flotilla carrying grain to India, and then spearheaded what its director William Gaud in 1968 famously called the “Green Revolution”: a revolutionary program of technologically centered agricultural assistance that dramatically increased food production in the Third World. More controversial were USAID’s family planning activities to help arrest the “population explosion,” and its reconstruction and development programs during the Vietnam War that aimed ineffectually at winning the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese. USAID continues in the early 21st century to combat poverty around the world while serving as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy goals.

The Peace Corps encouraged other nations in the Western bloc to get involved as well. By the end of the 1960s most European countries, as well as Israel and Japan, had implemented similar volunteer programs. This reflected the duality of U.S. foreign policy goals in the developing world during the Cold War. By encouraging other nations to participate, the Kennedy administration hoped to depict the United States as an ambassador of international goodwill, and in doing so, counter criticism that it was imperial and paternalistic in its dealings with the Third World. The Kennedy administration even went as far as to direct the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, to push a resolution before the UN Economic and Social Council calling for some American volunteers to be put directly under UN control. The Peace Corps was well received by most in the international community. U.S. missions and embassies reported overwhelmingly positive reactions among local governments and populations, and foreign newspapers provided enthusiastic commentary. Moreover, as an example of the emphasis the Kennedy administration put on international perceptions of the United States, it directed the U.S. Information Agency to monitor global opinions of the program. By 1965, the Peace Corps had reached unprecedented heights. The United States boasted more than 13,000 volunteers working in more than 100 countries across the globe, and every Western industrialized nation had either initiated or expanded its own sister organizations. The program also continued to grow throughout the 20th century with some 200,000 volunteers serving in more than 135 countries by the turn of the millennium. Andrew Scott Barbero See also: Soft Power

Further Reading Hoffman, Elizabeth Cobbs. “Decolonization, the Cold War, and the Foreign Policy of the Peace Corps.” In Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, eds. Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. Meisler, Stanley. When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years. Boston: Beacon, 2011.

Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg (1931–) The Pentagon Papers, officially known as United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, was a secret study detailing gradual and deepening U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia from World War II to May 1968. It was commissioned by U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara in 1967 in response to frustrated U.S. efforts in Indochina. When amassed after a period of 18 months, it totaled 47 volumes amounting to 7,000 papers, with 3,000 in the form of narrative, 4,000 by way of appended documents. The study revealed a pattern of deception by the presidential administrations of Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson regarding the deepening involvement of the United States in Vietnam. It documented support for the French colonial regime from the Truman administration in its efforts to resist the Communist Viet Minh; it noted a concerted campaign on the part of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 to prop up the South Vietnamese regime and prevent it from capitulating to Communist forces. It highlighted deepening involvement on the part of the Kennedy administration from a policy of “limited-risk gamble” to one of “broad commitment.” It noted the plans and actions on the part of the Johnson administration to wage a fully engaged war against the North, including covert operations in Laos. At all points, expansion of the U.S. role was to be minimized from public discussion.

Daniel Ellsberg, formerly a U.S. Marine Corps officer (1954–1957), was a defense analyst with a specialization in counterinsurgency ideas and nuclear weapons theory. After joining the RAND Corporation, he was invited to join the Vietnam Study Task Group responsible for the Pentagon Papers study. Ellsberg, once an advocate for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, came to question its purpose. In the belief that a public discussion of the Pentagon Papers would be instructive to further a closer examination of secret U.S. involvement in the conflict, he pressed various members of Congress to enter the study into the Congressional Record. Individuals such as Senator George McGovern (D-SD), Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) and Congressman Paul (Pete) McCloskey Jr. (R-CA) were not convinced. In 1971, while working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, Ellsberg passed portions of the study to Neil Sheehan of the New York Times. After the third daily installment in the New York Times appeared, a temporary restraining order was sought and obtained by the U.S. Department of Justice in U.S. District Court. The Washington Post and other papers, including the Boston Globe and Chicago Sun-Times, chose to print extracts instead. Democratic senator Mike Gravel began to read extracts of the study into the Congressional Record. The appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court by the New York Times, with the Washington Post as coappellant, was successful in a 6–3 decision in favor of lifting the prior restraint. The justices in favor of its removal were not satisfied that publication would result in harm to national security. Furthermore, the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press had been breached by the government’s conduct. The Nixon administration began a campaign to discredit Ellsberg. Nixon attempted to link Ellsberg to an external Communist influence, and failed. He cited inability on the part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and lack of enthusiasm on the part of its director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose close friend was Ellsberg’s father-in-law. A White House unit, colloquially termed the Plumbers, was formed to investigate Ellsberg outside the formal channels of the law, while also seeking to plug further leaks. It was led by an ex-CIA employee, E. Howard Hunt. The unit subsequently staged a break-in into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, feeling that a psychological profile might be of some value. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had previously refused to hand over any documentation to the FBI. Nothing of much consequence was found, though the subsequent drafting of a profile by the CIA found aggressive characteristics on the part of Ellsberg. In 1971, Ellsberg was indicted, along with Anthony Russo of the Times, on charges of espionage, theft, and conspiracy. On May 11, 1972, the charges were dismissed by Federal Court judge Matthew Byrne, who cited improper government conduct as fundamental grounds. It transpired that Ellsberg had been covertly taped 15 times outside formal legal channels on one of the secret Kissinger Tapes, despite denials to the contrary. The Plumbers’ break-in also came to light. Such behavior was deemed offensive to any sense of justice, and added to the crisis surrounding the White House in the midst of the unfolding Watergate scandal.

Daniel Ellsberg, who helped compile the Defense Department’s record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and was at the center of the Pentagon Papers scandal, testifies before a House panel investigating the leak in July 1971. The release of the Pentagon Papers dissolved most of whatever credibility the military establishment and the White House still held on Vietnam by 1971. (AP Photo)

The debate surrounding the Pentagon Papers remains pivotal in balancing the unorthodox, even illegal disclosure of state secrets with the pressing importance of transparent and accountable government. It resurfaced as a point of reference with the release of more than 251,287 U.S. State Department cables by the Internet publisher WikiLeaks after November 2010. Ellsberg came out in defense of WikiLeaks, arguing that it was performing an important role in disclosing the secret cables to a public forum. Others preferred to see the Pentagon Papers as singular in effect, the necessary antidote to an imperial presidency. Binoy Kampmark See also: Vietnam War

Further Reading Campbell, Geoffrey A. The Pentagon Papers: National Security Versus the Public’s Right to Know. San Diego: Lucent Books, 2000. Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002. The Pentagon Papers: as published by the New York Times, based on investigative reporting by Neil Sheehan, written by Neil Sheehan [and others]. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1971. Rudenstein, D. The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Phoenix Program (1968–1972) The Phoenix Program was a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operation that aimed to eliminate the popular success of the National Liberation Front’s (NLF or, pejoratively, the Viet Cong, “VC”) armed insurgency in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War between 1968 and 1972 (though some elements of Phoenix carried on until 1975). Phoenix used a variety of tactics—capture, infiltration, terrorism, torture, and assassination of NLF operatives (soldiers and civilians)—to extract information on NLF activities in a particular region, and ultimately to silence effective elements of the NLF infrastructure in South

Vietnam. Phoenix’s Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) infiltrated villages, seeking and capturing civilians deemed likely supporters of the NLF and sending them to interrogation centers for torture. The program was highly secretive and controversial from its earliest days. The origins of Phoenix began as early as 1964 as adaptations of NLF strategy were used to target civilian supporters of the NLF for torture. The adaptations continued with the strategic hamlets of Ngo Dinh Diem, where highland minorities were forced to prove their loyalty before receiving basic living supplies. Other counterintelligence (CI) efforts continued with the so-called “Ruff-Puffs” or the RF/PF program and other programs begun by CIA director William Colby in 1965. In 1967 CI programs were broadened with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and Intelligence Coordination Exploitation Program (ICEX) before Phoenix emerged from the ashes of these earlier CI attempts in 1968. Nominally, Phoenix was under the central command of the Civil Operations and Development Support (CORDS) program. However, CORDS was simply a means to shield the Phoenix program from any connection to the CIA, essentially serving as a front organization for the agency, while providing no actual oversight. There was no responsibility for the Phoenix operatives to report to the CORDS command structure. Agents, occasionally recruits from Vietnamese prisons, were trained by American soldiers from Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and the CIA’s Revolutionary Development Cadres (RDC). The program also included U.S. Special Operations personnel and participation from the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. With the lack of oversight and no real accountability, the Phoenix program utilized brutal torture tactics including but not limited to electric shock (including wires attached to genitals and other sensitive body parts like the tongue), waterboarding, rape and gang-rape, starvation, and tapping a wooden rod through the ears, all frequently resulting in or followed by outright murder. The program also executed a large number of the accused without evidence or based on faulty intelligence. The program invited abuse, as Vietnamese would sometimes report enemies or rivals as “VC” so that U.S. officials would then kill them. The numerical goal was to “neutralize” 3,000 supporters or suspected supporters of the NLF per month, with paid incentives for numbers higher than the minimum. By 1972, Phoenix had effectively “neutralized” more than 81,000 NLF operatives or suspects—of whom nearly one-third (more than 26,000) were killed. When exposed in 1971, Phoenix became a target of the American antiwar movement. William Noseworthy See also: Central Intelligence Agency; National Liberation Front (NLF); Vietnam War

Further Reading Andrade, Dale. Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990. Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. Moyar, Mark. Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 2001. Valentine, Douglas. The Phoenix Program. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Red Power Movement The Red Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s was the struggle of American Indian people to redress overwhelming conditions of political, economic, cultural, and religious shortcomings not only on the reservations, but also in urban centers. During the Red Power era American Indians, a tiny, formerly “invisible” minority, silenced through a long history of cultural and political repression and social disadvantage, regained their voice. Indians demanded a voice in decision making and appropriated such a

voice for themselves, forcing the dominant society to respond to their actions and agendas. Activists drew attention to destructive government assimilationist policies, treaty violations, assaults on Indian lands, discriminatory practices, and abysmal social conditions on reservations and in the cities. In effect the Red Power Movement was a far-reaching effort of American Indians to reclaim power and authority over their own lives. While Red Power was an attempt to seek change and inclusion in American society, it was likewise an endeavor to retain Indian cultural identity. The single most important component in the building of a pan-Indian identity and Red Power activism was the growth of an urban Indian population that began during and after World War II as part of federal policies of integrating Native peoples into mainstream society. In 1960 nearly a third or 27.9 percent of all Indians lived in an urban environment (that is, 146,000 out of a population of 523,591); and in 1970 that number had risen to nearly half of the entire Native population or 44.9 percent (356,000 of 792,730). The urban experience of discrimination, loneliness, and poverty was instrumental in the emergence of supratribal or pan-Indian identity. Red Power activism did not occur overnight; rather it developed in response and as a reaction to various assimilationist federal Indian policies; the increased social turmoil across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and the anti-imperialist decolonization struggles across the Third World; and the selfrenewing power of Indian activism itself. Characteristics of the Red Power movement were an urbanraised, college-educated, and thus highly articulate leadership; the assertion of a pan-Indian identity; the formation of various pan-Indian organizations; a new confrontational style in Indian politics (e.g., property seizures), which in turn assured media attention; and conscious building on past resistance and social movements. For American Indians, protest activism offered an opportunity to challenge the status quo in America by confronting “paternalizing” institutions such as the federal government, boarding schools, and churches. It also provided a chance to cast off “othered” (or imposed, frequently negative) ethnic stereotypes, to restore racial pride, and to empower themselves within the dominant society. American Indian activists spoke from the vantage point of a distinct history: their claims were rooted in indigenous claims to American land. And as tribal communities they had a unique relationship to the federal government compared to other ethnic and minority groups. In the early 1960s, two initial major pan-Indian events occurred that were precursors of the national Red Power movement. At the American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961 Native peoples articulated a vision for a new federal Indian policy, and in the same era Native tribes of the Pacific Northwest led a series of “fish-ins” in the spirit of the civil rights movement that aimed to reclaim the right of Native peoples to fish on ancient tribal lands that had been commandeered in broken treaties. Beyond these events, a number of historians regard the takeover of Alcatraz Island, California, in 1969 by “Indians of All Tribes” as the starting point of a nine-year period of Red Power protest. It included a large number of takeovers and demonstrations that began shortly after November 20, 1969, and continued well into the late 1970s. These protests included the week-long occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1972 at the conclusion of the Trail of Broken Treaties, a transcontinental caravan to call attention to the 371 treaties ratified by Congress and the U.S. presidents; the 71-day takeover of Wounded Knee II; and the June 26, 1975, shootout between American Indian Movement (AIM) members and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Between 1969 and 1978 there were more than 70 property takeovers and other numerous protest events in cities and around reservations in the United States. The last major event of this activism was the Longest Walk, a transnational march that concluded with a demonstration in the nation’s capital in 1978. The Longest Walk marked the conclusion of nearly a decade of Red Power

activism that had begun at Alcatraz. Both the Trail of Broken Treaties and the Longest Walk departed from the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Red Power movement had begun. By the end, Red Power had moved in a circle, from the festive Alcatraz occupation, to armed confrontations, to a quest for Indian unity marked by the Longest Walk.

American Indian Movement members march in Washington, D.C., at the culmination of “The Longest Walk” to protest anti-Indian legislation in 1978. The final major event of a decade of Red Power activism, The Longest Walk was a transnational march that recalled centuries of injustice against American Indians, and called for specific actions to remedy the condition of native peoples. (Wally McNamee/Corbis)

The government response to American Indian activism came in a number of forms ranging from efforts to suppress the radical elements, led by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program; anti-Indian legislation aimed at offsetting Indian political and legal gains; symbolic reforms such as the American Policy Review Commission of 1973; and a series of substantive reforms including the Indian Education Act (1972), the Indian Self-Determination Act (1975), the Indian Health Care Improvement Act (1976), the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). Since the end of the 1970s, the legacy of American Indian activism lies in a cultural, political, and economic renaissance in Indian Country. Cultural renewal is evident in the flourishing of Indian writing and arts. Economic development has come through increased federal funding and a higher degree of independence from Washington. Political reform can be measured by the widening and growth of Indian rights. Virtually all politics prior to the era of self-determination had been made with no regard to the opinions of American Indians. The Red Power activism of the 1960s and 1970s turned the world of Indian-white relations upside-down: for the first time it was American Indians who made these changes happen. Matthias Voigt

Further Reading Cobb, Daniel M. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Johnson, Troy, Joanne Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism, Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Nagel, Joanne. American Indian Ethnic Renewal, Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Warrior, Robert Allen, and Paul Chaat Smith. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997.

Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (1975) Known as Saigon for more than two centuries, in 1975 this Vietnamese city’s name was changed to Ho Chi Minh City in honor of North Vietnam’s national hero at the end of the war with the United States. Originally settled as a small fishing village, Saigon grew to be an important city in southern Vietnam. During the century of French colonial rule (1858–1954), the city was greatly influenced by French architecture and culture. Following the 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended France’s colonial war with Vietnamese revolutionaries, Saigon became the capital of the newly created nation of South Vietnam. From that point on the number of U.S. personnel in Saigon grew greatly, and the city contained a mix of both French and American influences. The United States provided much aid to South Vietnam and heavily supported its first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch anticommunist but severely autocratic leader. Following the introduction of American combat troops in 1965, Saigon became filled with U.S. servicemen. The city was also vulnerable to attacks from North Vietnam. A constant goal for North Vietnamese leaders was to wrest control of South Vietnam’s largest city. They reasoned that if Saigon fell, then the rest of the country would not hold. Most significant was the 1968 Tet Offensive, during which South Vietnamese Communist forces besieged the city and even attempted to overtake the U.S. embassy. Following the Paris Peace Accords signed in January 1973, the remaining U.S. forces began a twoyear withdrawal from Vietnam. North Vietnam’s desire to achieve its ultimate goal of taking Saigon and unifying the country never diminished. Toward that goal, in December 1974 the strategy for an all-out assault that would end the war was implemented. Forces were moved into place with the goal of taking the Central Highlands of South Vietnam once and for all and then continuing to push south. The original planning of what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Campaign called for waiting until 1976 to initiate a final attack on Saigon, but the early success of the campaign caused leaders in the North to hasten the drive to take the city. In early April 1975 commanders in charge of North Vietnamese forces in the South received orders to proceed. By month’s end, North Vietnamese forces were on the outskirts of South Vietnam’s capital. The United States then implemented Operation Frequent Wind—a plan to evacuate embassy personnel and South Vietnamese citizens who had worked closely with the U.S. government. On April 30, 1975, the final evacuation took place. Images of the last Huey helicopters lifting off from the roof of the U.S. embassy became darkly iconic representations of what seemed a shattering defeat for American global ambitions. Within hours, North Vietnamese tanks burst through the gates of the Presidential Palace, and Saigon had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Matthew D. Jacobs See also: Diem, Ngo Dinh; French War in Indochina; Geneva Accords; Ho Chi Minh; Paris Peace Accords

Further Reading Butler, David. The Fall of Saigon: Scenes from the Sudden End of a Long War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Veith, George. Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975. New York: Encounter Books, 2012.

Six-Day (Arab-Israeli) War (1967) The 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Six-Day War, began in the early morning of June 5 with a surprise aerial attack by Israeli warplanes on neighboring Arab forces in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Approximately 200 Israeli aircraft launched from various military stations throughout Israel intended for targets to the north, south, and east. The majority of those warplanes were destined for Egypt. One of those squadrons flew out over the Mediterranean to mask their real destinations in Egypt, while a second flew quickly south into Sinai airspace. To maximize the surprise all the approaching aircraft flew low enough to avoid radar detection. Moreover, radio communication was strictly prohibited. The Israeli command restricted all pilot-to-pilot communication and disallowed distress calls. Approximately 30 minutes after takeoff, Israeli aircraft were over their intended targets. The first wave of bombers destroyed Egyptian runways at critical military bases in both the Sinai Desert and in the more populated interior west of the Suez Canal. The second and third waves targeted idle Egyptian aircraft parked along the now cratered runway as Egyptian pilots scrambled for cover from Israeli aircraft strafing. Once the Israeli command received word of the successful air campaign, Operation Red Sheet went into effect. Red Sheet called for an immediate deployment of Israeli ground forces into the Sinai Desert. By approximately 8:30 a.m., Israeli tanks and soldiers had crossed the border and quickly engaged stunned Egyptian ground forces. The Sinai campaign would become one of the most lopsided ground wars in Middle East history.

Israeli troops in armored vehicles advance against Egyptian troops near Rafah, Gaza Strip, at the start of the Six-Day War, June 5, 1967. Also known as the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, the Six-Day War was launched by Israelis against the Arab nations of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and ended with the Israeli occupation of the Sinai and Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. (Getty Images)

According to the Israeli government, the June 5 surprise attack was in retaliation for the perceived acts of aggression by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Months prior, Nasser had successfully negotiated the removal of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed in the Sinai Desert—a

peacekeeping force deployed as a consequence of the 1956 Arab-Israeli War. Nasser then remilitarized the Sinai with Egyptian forces. The Israeli government, however, was more alarmed by Nasser’s closing of the Straits of Tiran, and thus access to the port of Eilat. Egypt, along with other Soviet-backed Arab countries, claimed Israel was the aggressor. Nasser announced the closure of the straits only after receiving Soviet reports, later determined to be false, that Israeli forces were massing along the northern Israel-Syria border. In reality, Syrian and Israeli forces were merely engaged in an ongoing exchange of fire over the Jewish settlements in the disputed border territories. Amid all the tensions, the Jordanians in the east reluctantly agreed to side with Egypt and Syria, fearing possible backlash from their large Palestinian refugee population and fellow Arab countries. For the United States, the situation represented another facet of the Cold War. As the Soviets expanded their interests in the region by supporting Israel’s Arab neighbors, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson became more inclined to favor the Jewish state. In prior decades, U.S. relations with Israel had been cordial, but restrained. The United States had historically offered limited military and economic assistance to the burgeoning nation, and President Johnson continued, at least initially, these previous policies. Preoccupied with the costly war in Vietnam and a domestic civil rights movement, Johnson preferred the use of diplomatic channels to quell tensions. Rather than offering overt support like the Soviets, Johnson merely cautioned Israel against any military action. Johnson determined that the United States could not provide Israel with military assistance lest the country entangle itself in yet another embarrassing anticommunist campaign, as in Vietnam. Johnson’s strategies changed, however, after Nasser refused to open the straits and allow redeployment of UNEF forces to the Sinai. Urgent back-channel dialogue ensued between Israel and the United States. The two governments reached an agreement that the United States would support Israel at the UN and would act as a deterrent to Soviet intervention. The region had become yet another proxy war for competing Soviet and American interests. By the second day of fighting Operation Red Sheet had so severely damaged Egyptian ground forces that Israel was then able to enter and occupy the Gaza Strip on Israel’s western coast. The Israelis’ speed and lethality led Nasser to claim that Israel had help from American and British forces. President Johnson called Nasser’s claim the “Big Lie” as Israel had carried out its military missions without immediate support from outside countries. By June 7, the conflict had reached an international level. The UN Security Council scrambled to construct a cease-fire that would appease all sides, including both American and Soviet interests. Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Israeli forces had now completely repelled Jordanian troops and for the first time in 19 years were face to face with the Wailing Wall, the last vestige of the Jewish temple. The fourth day of fighting ended with Egypt’s defeat and by day five Israel began troop movement into Syria. After Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s approval, Israeli ground troops and armored divisions immediately moved into Syrian territory. Israel suffered heavy losses before finally advancing so far into Syria that Syrian leadership believed the approaching Israeli forces would capture Damascus. The Soviets threatened to intervene if Israel did not halt the advance. President Johnson, thrilled with Israel’s military achievements, responded by sending warships to Syrian waters as a warning against Soviet intervention. Israel halted the advance, but only after securing perhaps the most important position in the north, the Golan Heights. A UN cease-fire officially ended the war on June 10, 1967, but not before completely reshaping the Middle East and forever changing U.S.-Israeli relations. With U.S. support, Israel was able to keep all land captured during the war, tripling its territory. More importantly, though, Israel had decisively won a

Cold War battle against Soviet-backed Third World armies. The victory inspired the United States to foster a more permanent and supportive relationship with Israel. The Jewish state became an important democratic ally in the region and conceived an unprecedented relationship that continues to inform relations between the two countries. David Grantham See also: Israel (1946–1954); Yom Kippur War

Further Reading Bowen, Jeremy. Six Days: How the 1967 War Shaped the Middle East. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003. Brenchley, Frank. Britain, the Six Day War and Its Aftermath. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005. Oren, Michael B. Six Days War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Segev, Tom. 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005.

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) (1954–1976) The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), also known as the Manila Pact, existed from 1954 to 1976 and was headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand. Conceived as an Asian version of the successful post–World War II North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), SEATO functioned as a joint defense alliance of the United States and European, Pacific, and Asian nations. As a product of Cold War tensions between the capitalist and Communist spheres of influence, the organization’s primary functions were to block the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Although SEATO’s transcontinental membership suggests broad international support, the organization was established by the United States primarily as a strategic means of securing its interests in Southeast Asia in the wake of the failed French effort to defeat the Viet Minh in Vietnam. SEATO came into existence on September 8, 1954, with the drafting of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty in Manila, Philippines. Between December 1954 and February 1955, eight nations ratified the treaty and accepted membership in the organization. The United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand subsequently comprised SEATO’s initial membership. Although Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos received protective observer status, no additional states joined SEATO throughout the organization’s existence. As indicated by the list of member nations above, most SEATO nations were located in areas other than Southeast Asia. With the exceptions of Thailand and Pakistan, all SEATO member states were outside mainland Asia. Each member state, however, claimed strong strategic or economic interests in the region. The United States’ interest in the region stemmed from the nation’s leadership role in the post– World War II struggle against the spread of communism. U.S. political leaders in the postwar era embraced President Harry S. Truman’s containment policy as the strategy to fight communism globally. Containment was premised on the assumption that communism was an aggressive system determined to spread internationally. Thus, containment policy held that if communism was allowed to gain a foothold in a region, it would spread rapidly throughout the region and ultimately threaten to displace capitalism worldwide. Australia and New Zealand, also steadfast in their opposition to the spread of communism, sought membership in SEATO due to their close geographical location to Southeast Asia. The primary interest of Great Britain and France in SEATO grew from the nations’ anticommunist Cold War position and their historical colonial ties to the region. The Philippines maintained membership due to the nation’s close alignment with the United States.

SEATO, unlike NATO, did not maintain standing military forces. The organization did, however, hold annual joint military operations with the forces of member nations. Often, such exercises consisted of large-scale naval and ground operations. SEATO sponsored joint defense activities throughout the region and also emphasized training in antisubversive and counterinsurgency tactics. Beyond military activity, SEATO members also sought to contain communism’s spread by improving the quality of life of Southeast Asians. Member states attempted to accomplish this through economic assistance and development along with increased cultural and educational exchanges. This was particularly evident through the granting of fellowships, scholarships, and faculty appointments in American and European institutions. SEATO played a significant historical role relative to the U.S. war in Vietnam. The existence of the organization and its mission of containing the spread of communism came in response to the 1954 Geneva Accords that called for free elections and an independent, unified state of Vietnam. Ultimately, SEATO’s call for mutual defense of all member states served as a rationale—many scholars argue a calculated pretext—for U.S. intervention in Vietnam. The United States effectively used SEATO as a means of opposing unifying elections between North and South Vietnam by 1956 that had been called for at Geneva following the conclusion of the French Indochina War. Further, while the Geneva Accords prohibited Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from joining international defense alliances, SEATO gratuitously granted the nations protection under observer status. The United States used this protected status as further rationale for its involvement in Vietnam during the two decades that followed. The organization was not without criticism and unintended consequences. China, due to SEATO’s makeup, characterized SEATO and its successor, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as tools of Western imperialism. With only three Asian member states, SEATO was susceptible to such references to Western imperialism and colonialism. SEATO’s existence also had the unforeseen consequence of creating tension among Asian nations. Thailand and the Philippines’ membership, for example, resulted in strained relations with Indonesia. Indonesia, which adhered to a Cold War policy of nonalignment, viewed the two nations’ membership in SEATO as alignment with the United States and Western European powers. SEATO entered a period of decline in the 1970s, as several member states left the organization and the Vietnam War came to an end. France and Pakistan withdrew from SEATO during the early 1970s and undermined the organization’s rationale for continued existence. SEATO formally disbanded in 1977, two years after the fall of South Vietnam to North Vietnam. Jonathan Foster See also: French War in Indochina; Geneva Accords; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Truman, Harry S., Doctrine of Containment

Further Reading Acharya, Amitav. Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia. London: Routledge, 2001. “Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (Manila Pact); September 8, 1954.” American Foreign Policy 1950–1955. Basic Documents Volumes I and II. Department of State Publication 6446. General Foreign Policy Series 117. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/usmu003.asp. Accessed October 18, 2014. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).” http://history.state.gov/milestones/19531960/seato. Accessed October 18, 2014.

Sputnik (1957)

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR) launched Sputnik1 (which means “fellow traveler” in Russian), the world’s first unmanned artificial satellite. This launch sparked the space age and initiated the space race between the United States and the USSR. The launch did not come as a surprise to U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower or his administration, which had been tracking the development of the USSR’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program and had been watching the Tyuratam missile launch site in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic through the U-2 spy program initiated in 1956. Nevertheless, this launch, followed so closely by the launches of Sputnik-2 with Laika, the first dog in space, on November 3, 1957, and Sputnik-3 on May 15, 1958, did cause a psychological shock to the United States and was a surprise to much of the world. Prior to this, global perception was that the United States was far more advanced technologically than any other nation. It had ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and had tested the first hydrogen bomb in November 1952. The USSR did not successfully test its first such bomb, a much smaller version, until August 1953. At the same time, however, the USSR was putting a significant amount of effort into its missile program under the leadership of Sergei Korolev. One successful cross-country test followed by the launch of Sputnik-1 demonstrated that the USSR could reach both Europe and the United States and could carry a heavy payload, including a nuclear bomb. Suddenly, the United States seemed behind, and the fact that only one in eight students in the United States studied physics, and even fewer students studied Russian—a result in part of the era of McCarthyism— intensified the national sense of inferiority and vulnerability. Democratic Party politicians, including Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, wasted no time in criticizing the Eisenhower administration, whom they had already been accusing of allowing a so-called “bomber gap” to develop between the United States and the USSR; now came charges of an even more terrifying “missile gap.” This would become a recurring theme of the John F. Kennedy campaign in 1960; in fact, the U-2 flights demonstrated that there were no such gaps. Eisenhower knew it, and soon Kennedy would as well. For the time being, however, it led to pressure to increase military spending. Fully aware of the U.S. nuclear-strategic advantage and overall military superiority, Eisenhower tried in earnest to resist the calls for additional weapons spending. Already concerned about what he would later famously term the “military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower grew more convinced than ever after the outcry over Sputnik that the intensified pressure for additional spending was less about national security than it was about political and economic interests. The launch of these rockets and accompanying satellites helped launch the Cold War “space race” and spurred two legislative milestones. First, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded on July 29, 1958, which pulled the various strands of space research together and committed the United States fully to victory in the space race. Second, Sputnik fueled rising demands for a securityrelated investment in education by the federal government. Hence, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed in 1958 to address precisely this glaring deficiency in U.S. Cold War preparedness. The NDEA invested one billion dollars at all levels in education—particularly focused on mathematics and science—as a means for the United States to regain its competitive technological edge over the Soviet Union. Jonathan Z. Ludwig See also: Military-Industrial Complex

Further Reading Brzezinski, Matthew. Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age. New York: Times Books, 2008.

Dickson, Paul. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: Walker, 2011. Siddiqi, Asif A. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Taiwan Strait Crisis, Second (1958) Artillery bombardment of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait from August 23 to October 25, 1958, was initiated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Unlike the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954– 1955), the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis may be attributed to PRC chairman Mao Zedong’s desire to enhance his country’s international standing in view of its growing diplomatic isolation. This isolation was chiefly a result of poor relations with the United States and a deteriorating rapport with China’s erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. Sino-American ambassadorial talks following the Bandung Conference and the First Taiwan Strait Crisis had been suspended in late 1957 because of irreconcilable positions over Taiwan. By mid-1958, after Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s Beijing visit and his advocacy of peaceful coexistence with the West, Mao realized that the Soviet Union could not be counted on to lead the Communist bloc. Mao was thus emboldened to pursue his own independent course in hopes of establishing himself as the true leader of the Socialist world. International events during July 1958 provided Mao with the perfect opportunity to test his mettle. The United States sent troops to intervene in Lebanon’s civil disorder, and Britain deployed troops to quell uprisings in Jordan. Meanwhile, Taiwanese president Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) ordered his military on alert, which the PRC perceived as provocation. In response, on August 23, 1958, Mao ordered the shelling of Jinmen and Mazu, known to Westerners as Quemoy and Matsu, two island groupings eight miles off mainland China’s southeastern coast. Mao rationalized his actions as providing moral support to the Middle East’s “anti-imperialist struggles.” Several days after the bombing began, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed a resolution requesting the withdrawal of Anglo-American troops from the Middle East. Mao played this up by publicly denouncing “continuing U.S. imperialism” in the Taiwan Strait. He also restated the PRC’s claim of sovereignty over Taiwan and its offshore islands. At the same time, he momentarily drew closer to the Soviet Union when Khrushchev gave his full support to the PRC’s claims over the offshore islands. Soviet support, as it turned out, was halfhearted. Disturbed by Mao’s seemingly irrational and independent conduct, Khrushchev decided to rescind his earlier promise of sharing nuclear secrets with the PRC. Unlike in the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, the United States was fully prepared to defend Taiwan and the offshore islands. In a show of force, the United States deployed additional air and naval forces to protect the Taiwan Strait, and as a result, American and Chinese forces exchanged fire. The United States and the PRC appeared to be headed for a full-fledged conflict, which was not what Mao had intended. He had only wanted to keep the Taiwan question in play by applying what he called his noose strategy. He viewed Jinmen and Mazu as nooses constraining the United States, with Taiwan as another more distant noose. He reasoned that America, by committing itself to the defense of these three areas, had put a rope around its neck by trapping itself in the Taiwan Strait. This, he thought, would not only stretch U.S. resources but would also provide the PRC with the upper hand in the region. Having successfully hooked the U.S. on the nooses, Mao decided to ease tensions in the Taiwan Strait. On September 6, 1958, the PRC proposed the resumption of the Sino-American ambassadorial talks, which finally reconvened at year’s end. On October 5, 1958, the PRC issued the “Message to the Compatriots in Taiwan,” restating the PRC’s claim to sovereignty over the Taiwan Strait and its willingness to settle the crisis by peaceful means. On October 25, 1958, the PRC issued the “Second Message to the Compatriots in Taiwan,” announcing that the shelling of Jinmen and Mazu would be

restricted to odd-numbered days and would be limited by certain conditions, which helped defuse the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. Periodic bombardment continued until January 9, 1959, when Mao lifted the shelling orders. Law Yuk-fun

Further Reading Garver, John W. The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and the American Cold War Strategy in China. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1997. Li, Xiaobing, and Hongshan Li, eds. China and the United States: A New Cold War History. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. Soman, Appu K. Double-Edged Sword: Nuclear Diplomacy in Unequal Conflicts: The United States and China, 1950–1958. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Stolper, Thomas E. China, Taiwan, and the Offshore Islands. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1985. Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf, ed. Dangerous Strait: The U.S.-Taiwan-China Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Tet Offensive (1968) The Tet Offensive occurred on Tet Nguyen Dan, the Vietnamese lunar New Year of 1968 when North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, working closely with National Liberation Front (NLF) Communist forces in South Vietnam, launched a coordinated wave of surprise attacks on more than 100 cities and military targets throughout South Vietnam in a bold attempt to break the three-year-long stalemate of the Vietnam War. Although military forces of the United States and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) successfully repelled the attacks after several weeks of ferocious fighting, the Tet Offensive stunned and shocked the American public, which had been led to believe that U.S. and ARVN forces were nearing a victorious end to the war. Therefore, Tet, though an American military “victory,” proved to be the critical turning point that marked the beginning of the end for U.S. involvement. The genius behind the offensive derived from a Vietnamese hero: Nguyen Hue, who had led an offensive on Tet Nguyen Dan against the Chinese in 1789. As opposed to the earlier strategy of clinging to the jungles and forcing U.S. and ARVN forces to go after the enemy, the Tet Offensive brought the war to the American enemy. Tet had traditionally been the occasion for a truce between the belligerents, but after three years of a prolonged and punishing conflict, General Giap saw the opportunity to launch an assault that he hoped would stoke widespread rebellion and chaos throughout South Vietnam and force the collapse of a weak ARVN, leading the Americans to withdraw from the war. Giap prepared for the offensive by launching a series of attacks on American bases and other strongholds in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam and along the Laotian border in the fall of 1967. And then on January 21 he ordered his People’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (PAVN) forces to begin a ferocious artillery bombardment of an American marine base at Khe Sanh. The defense of Khe Sanh became a near-obsession of the White House, coming quickly (and falsely, as it turned out) to be seen as comparable to Dien Bien Phu (or, as Texan Lyndon Johnson thought, the struggle at the Alamo), which had pushed the French out of Vietnam in 1954. The U.S. Marine Corps sustained particularly heavy casualties in the months-long successful effort to hold Khe Sanh. More than 100,000 tons of bombs and napalm were dropped by the U.S. Air Force to support the marines’ effort— the largest aerial bombardment in the history of warfare in a single battle. Therefore, the U.S. military’s decision to redeploy forces, abandon the base, and destroy it that summer was shocking. By July the flag of the NLF flew over the former Khe Sanh base. It was a terribly destructive battle in which both sides

claimed victory, but for the United States—as with Tet generally—the victory was quite hollow and left Americans at home distressed and confused as to how this constituted “victory.”

Heavy black smoke rises from fires in Saigon during the Tet Offensive in early 1968. Despite a prolonged and costly American– South Vietnamese victory over communist forces, the scale and suddenness of the Tet Offensive proved the critical turning point of the conflict, as Americans at home increasingly doubted the credibility of their government and called for an end to the war and a return of their soldiers. (National Archives)

While General Westmoreland had Americans bogged down, arguably distracted by Khe Sanh (and this was indeed General Giap’s strategy), the PAVN and NLF attacked with lightning ferocity, with 70,000 soldiers striking towns, cities, and government buildings alike throughout South Vietnam. General Giap ordered the NLF to make a series of 24 punctuated attacks. In televised scenes that horrified the American public, more than 4,000 NLF soldiers fought U.S. and ARVN forces in the streets of Saigon—capital of the South—even penetrating the courtyard of the U.S. embassy. The offensive also penetrated to the Cambodian border area and the southern delta. Hue, the ancient provincial capital city of the Nguyen Dynasty, was occupied by PAVN and VC forces. Most areas taken by the NLF early in the Tet Offensive were quickly retaken within a month. However, to “liberate” these contested towns and cities, American forces frequently virtually wiped the locations off the map. At Hue, in a city of roughly 17,000 homes only 25 percent remained habitable after the Americans and the South Vietnamese retook the city. Nevertheless, American reports claimed that there had been a Communist-led massacre at Hue with death tolls from 2,800 to 5,700. More reliable reporting has since demonstrated that the death tolls at Hue at the hands of North Vietnamese and NFL forces were at most 400, mostly those who appeared to be associated with the South Vietnamese or the Americans. Meanwhile, thousands of civilians died during the U.S. recapture of the city. The famous line uttered by an American military officer in reference to Ben Tre was that the Americans had to “[destroy] the city in order to save it [from the Communists]” (Young, 220). Civilian deaths in the recapture of

Saigon alone came to 6,300. Throughout the south, more than 14,000 died in the Tet Offensive, with nearly twice that number wounded and more than 600,000 made homeless. In the end the offensive of Tet Nguyen Dan in 1968 became one of the most famously cited events in the American Vietnam War. The fighting continued with three more phases carried out during May, June, and August 1968. General Westmoreland complained that the Tet Offensive was reported as an American loss, which he bitterly disputed—the Americans and ARVN forces having retaken all major areas once held by the enemy. Nevertheless, what Americans at home saw was not an “enemy on the ropes” or “light at the end of the tunnel,” as they had been promised by Westmoreland throughout much of 1967. Instead they saw a fiercely determined enemy that would fight to the end to repel the Americans. The Tet Offensive also raised the possibility that Americans might have to destroy not just the village, but the entire country to “save” it from communism, raising questions about what victory would look like in Vietnam, as well as whether that victory was worth the cost of any more American lives. These profoundly disturbing doubts about the war were confirmed by CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite (the most trusted man in America, according to a Gallup poll in 1967): in a broadcast near the end of the Tet Offensive, Cronkite announced that he had reached the conclusion that Americans had done their best in Vietnam but that they were now “mired in stalemate” from which there seemed no path to success. American support for the war dropped precipitously following the Tet Offensive, and when General Westmoreland asked for another 200,000 troops to pursue what he believed was still an achievable victory, President Johnson refused. Instead, he announced a partial halt to the bombing in Vietnam and the initiation of peace talks with the Hanoi government aimed at bringing an end to American involvement. Further, with his own poll numbers collapsing, Johnson withdrew from the 1968 presidential race. Tet, therefore, while on paper an American “victory,” proved to be a turning point at home, as more than half the nation now demanded an end to the war in Vietnam. In many ways, Tet may be viewed as a crushing blow for the imperial hubris that had taken Americans into Vietnam in the first place. William Noseworthy See also: French War in Indochina; My Lai Massacre; National Liberation Front (NLF); Vietnam War

Further Reading Schmitz, David F. The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Willbanks, John H. The Tet Offensive: A Concise History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Wirtz, James. The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, 1991. Young, Marilyn. The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Tijerina, Reies Lopez (1926–2015) Born in Falls City, Texas, in 1926, Reies Lopez Tijerina led a storied career in the 1960s as a determined advocate for the restoration to Mexican Americans of lands in the American Southwest that were taken in violation of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War. Behind United Farmworkers organizer Cesar Chavez (1927–1993), Reies Lopez Tijerina became arguably the second most celebrated figure in the decades-long Chicano movement for civil rights and social justice for Mexican Americans. He is most famous for having led an armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in northern New Mexico in 1967 over the issue of land rights for Mexican Americans, an event that brought that struggle international attention.

Tijerina began his public life as a pastor in the early 1950s, leading a community of followers who called themselves los bravos (“Heralds of Peace”) on a parcel of southern Arizona desert country they termed the “Valley of Peace.” Here they built subterranean homes beneath the ground and successfully petitioned the right to build their own school and educate their own children, insulating them from what they believed were the threatening influences of Anglo society. At one point the schoolhouse was burned down, and then a group of Anglo-American youths rode roughshod over the community’s homes, damaging them. A subsequent fire destroyed two homes but the local Anglo sheriff refused to investigate. It was around this same time, in 1956, that Tijerina traveled to northern New Mexico where he met with a group of elders from the Penitente Brotherhood, a Roman Catholic fraternity of laymen, who began educating Tijerina about the dispossession of lands belonging to Hispanic peoples in their region and throughout the American Southwest. This proved a turning point. Tijerina spent much time in Mexico over the next several years poring through the records of the Spanish Crown’s land grant system of protocols and the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that should have guaranteed title to the descendants of the original grantees. Soon thereafter, the Arizona Department of Education began threatening Tijerina over his and other bravos parents’ defiance of an order to send their children to public school. Believing that the Anglo education system was very much part of the longstanding subjugation of Hispanic peoples, Tijerina defied them. Almost immediately he ran afoul of the law, accused of theft several times by Arizona local authorities. He was by 1957 a man on the run. Taking refuge in an abandoned mining town in New Mexico, Tijerina learned still more about the history and local legacies of land dispossession by corrupt Anglo politicians and economic elites. He returned briefly to the Valley of Peace, only to be arrested and imprisoned. Freed on bond, he took the advice of his attorney who feared for his life if he stayed in Arizona, and left the state. Tijerina lived the next seven years as a fugitive, running from the law throughout New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. One public appearance at a land-rights event in 1958 left him beaten senselessly over the head. An appeal in 1959 to President Dwight D. Eisenhower for the restoration of land rights to 80 families was ignored. In August 1962, Tijerina organized La Alianza de Pueblos and Pobladores (The Alliance of Towns and Settlers). La Alianza organized a public education and lobbying campaign pressing for the return of lands to the rightful heirs of New Mexico. They published a newspaper and soon had their own radio program to carry Tijerina’s message to thousands more supporters, claiming 20,000 members within just a few years. His work provoked bitter condemnation from New Mexico officials—some calling them “outside agitators” and Communists, the same labels that had been affixed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American civil rights movement. A 1966 Independence Day march from Albuquerque to Santa Fe elicited rock throwing and shots fired from Anglo counterprotesters. In October of that year La Alianza staged an occupation of Echo Amphitheatre Park in Carson National Forest—what had once been a large Mexican land grant. La Alianza elected their own local government and two of their marshals promptly arrested two U.S. Forest Service Rangers for trespassing and other offenses. Days later Tijerina and several others were arrested and taken into custody. After posting bail, La Alianza organized a meeting for June 3, 1967, in Coyote, New Mexico, to plan the next phase of the campaign. The local district attorney ordered roadblocks and arrested 11 members of La Alianza. On June 5, Tijerina led an armed La Alianza raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in an attempt to liberate their imprisoned compatriots and to arrest the district attorney for what they alleged was his violation of their constitutional rights. Shots were exchanged and several were wounded. La Alianza leaders escaped the scene with two prisoners into the mountains of northern New Mexico. The largest manhunt in New Mexico history ensued. In the end, Tijerina surrendered to authorities and was

ultimately convicted of several offenses. His trial in 1970, though it ended in a two-year sentence, featured a sterling legal self-defense in which Tijerina verbally excoriated the entire legal, political, and judicial system that had resulted in the wrongful taking of Hispano lands that had ultimately led to the courthouse raid. Chris J. Magoc See also: Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of; Mexican Land Grants

Further Reading Busto, Rudy V. King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies Lopez Tijerina. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Meier, Matt S. Mexican Americans, American Mexicans: From Conquistadors to Chicanos. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

The Ugly American (Eugene Burdick and William Lederer) (1958) The Ugly American is a novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. Published in 1958, it went through 20 printings within just five months of its first publication, headed the best-seller lists for 78 weeks, was made into a Hollywood movie in 1963, sold more than five million copies to date, and became one of the most politically influential fiction books of the Cold War era. The book portrays the losing struggle of America against insurgent Communists in Southeast Asia. Set in the fictional nation of Sarkhan (which represents South Vietnam), it contrasts the American ambassador, Louis Sears—who lives isolated from the local population on his luxurious estate in the capital, meets with “scores of senators, congressmen, generals, admirals,” and regularly hosts “cocktail parties”—with the engineer Homer Atkins, “The Ugly American,” who is willing “to get his hands dirty,” living and working with local villagers in the countryside and helping them improve their daily lives through inventions such as a bicycle-powered water pump. Unlike his Soviet counterpart, the American ambassador does not speak the local language or understand the native culture and is thus responsible for the deteriorating image of America in the Third World. The Communists, by contrast, resemble Atkins in that they win the trust of the local population by providing useful services. To win the struggle against communism in Asia, the authors declare, Americans must live up to their own ideals: “We have so lost sight of our own past that we are trying to sell guns and money alone, instead of remembering that it was the quest for the dignity of freedom that was responsible for our own way of life” (284–285). In the context of the 1957 Sputnik shock—the sudden realization that the United States might no longer be technologically superior to the Soviet Union—the novel struck a chord with American readers. National concerns about the implications of America’s transformation into a consumer society in the 1950s might also have contributed to the success of the book, as Americans could compare Sears’s complacency to their own increased desire for material goods in the postwar era, which was described with remarkable effect in another 1958 best seller (this one nonfiction): The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith. The Ugly American was particularly popular with John F. Kennedy, who mailed a copy of the book to each senator and who, after he was elected president, created the Peace Corps, thus following The Ugly American’s call for “a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals” (284) who were fluent in the local languages. Kennedy’s buildup of U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets), trained to wage clandestine guerrilla warfare, and his early emphasis on counterinsurgency in the fight against Communists in South Vietnam were also in line with the political messages of the book.

Jasper M. Trautsch See also: Kennedy, John F.; Peace Corps; Sputnik; Vietnam War

Further Reading Hellmann, John. “Vietnam as Symbolic Landscape: The Ugly American and the New Frontier.” Peace & Change 9, nos. 2/3 (1983): 40–54. Lederer, William J., and Eugene Burdick. The Ugly American. New York: Norton, 1958. Nashel, Jonathan. “The Road to Vietnam: Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction.” In Christian G. Appy, ed. Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000, pp. 132–154. Végsö, Roland. The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

Uruguay The República Oriental del Uruguay (Oriental Republic of Uruguay) is situated on the Atlantic coast of South America, wedged between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. The area comprising Uruguay was first explored by Juan Díaz de Solís in 1516 and subsequently neglected, until the Spanish government established the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo in 1726. Until 1776, the expanse that now encompasses Uruguay was part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, but as a consequence of Spanish colonial reforms, the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata (River Plate) was created. The origins of Uruguayan and Latin American independence can be traced to the strain of the Napoleonic Wars. These European conflicts brought about a period of discord across the Spanish Empire, resulting in a breakdown of Spain’s colonial authority. In subsequent years, British incursions and commercial interests fomented already strong anti-Spanish tensions that had been brewing for several years. The British briefly occupied Montevideo in 1807, establishing a pattern of direct and indirect foreign intervention throughout the history of Uruguay. Uruguayan independence was proclaimed in 1828, followed by a constitutional charter in 1830. Uruguayan democracy did not follow until the first years of the 20th century, when José Batlle y Ordóñez sparked the evolution of Uruguay into a liberal democracy that became a model of stability in Latin America for decades. Uruguayan democratic institutions were put to the test during the 1960s and 1970s as the economic demands of an expensive welfare system strained the political system, resulting in civil unrest as the country was forced to deal with economic changes and terrorism brought about by Tupamaro movement guerrillas. The zeal of the United States to halt Soviet interposition in the hemisphere during the Cold War years, and the fear of a domino effect of Communist expansionism led to a policy of interventionism in Uruguayan affairs. As a result the American government, under the veil of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its satellite arm, the now-defunct Office of Public Safety (OPS), ratcheted up its involvement throughout Latin America. In Uruguay, the presence of alleged Communist groups led the OPS to deploy military and police equipment and advisers as early as 1965 in an effort to aid the Uruguayan government’s attempt to control subversive elements in the country. The OPS provided experts in crowd control methods, counterespionage, and interrogation techniques, which included the torture of prisoners or those suspected of antigovernment activity. Tupamaro guerrillas kidnapped and murdered one of the most active CIA advisers in Uruguay, Daniel Mitrone, in 1970. The robust program of fighting guerrillas and other groups considered a threat to the Uruguayan state, in unison with the expertise acquired by the

military and police as a result of U.S. involvement, can be interpreted as an aspect of the establishment of the military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay until 1985. The country has since transitioned into democracy. Jesús E. Sanabria See also: Argentina; Central Intelligence Agency

Further Reading Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004. Mora Mérida, José Luis. Paraguay y Uruguay Contemporáneos. Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1981. Whitaker, Arthur Preston. The United States and the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

U-2 Spy Plane Incident (1960) On May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet airspace by a Soviet surface-to-air missile while on a highly classified aerial reconnaissance mission. Flown by Central Intelligence Agency pilot Francis Gary Powers (1929–1977), the plane was hit and Powers successfully escaped, parachuting safely to the ground near Sverdlovsk. Taking place at a crucial juncture of the Cold War, the downing of the U-2 spy plane became a major international incident in worsening relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, damaging attempts at détente in the last year of the administration of U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969). Despite initial denials to the contrary, the incident also further revealed that the United States had been engaged in U-2 aerial espionage over the Soviet Union since 1956. The shoot-down of the U-2 might have been nothing more than a minor footnote in Cold War history if not for the fact that U.S. intelligence officials—not knowing that Powers had been captured and taken into captivity—initially denied its involvement. For several days they ran with the cover-up story: a weatherrelated aircraft belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had drifted off-course north of U.S. ally Turkey. Believing they could get away with the ruse, CIA officials even painted another U-2 plane in NASA colors and paraded it before the media. All the while, Soviet premier and Communist Party chairman Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1977) waited to see how far the Americans would continue with their duplicity, denying what the Communist leader would soon describe to the world as U.S. aggression. Khrushchev initially revealed only that a spy plane had been shot down—but not indicating that its pilot had been captured, was alive, and had acknowledged to Soviet officials the intent of his mission. On May 7, Premier Khrushchev went public with the news and the face of Francis Gary Powers was soon known around the world. The incident preceded by just a few days the planned Four Powers Summit meeting in Paris among leaders of the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France at which there were to be discussions about issues ranging from the status of Berlin to possible nuclear arms reductions. The U-2 incident, however, led to Khrushchev flinging charges at the Americans about the territorial sovereignty of his country, Eisenhower defending the program as a response to Soviet actions, and ultimately the Soviet premier walking out of the summit after just one day. At home, the revelations damaged the credibility of Eisenhower’s control of the national security establishment. Official reports from the CIA indicated only that the president had been aware of the U-2 program, not that he had directed it.

CIA operation of the U-2 aerial espionage program had broader implications beyond the Powers incident and the subsequent Cuba episode in 1960–1962. Eisenhower had indeed been privy to U-2 spying. In fact, U-2 surveillance photographs of Soviet missile installations had for four years affirmed for him U.S. superiority over the intercontinental missile (nuclear weapons delivery) capabilities of the Soviet Union—despite the hyperbolic inflated warnings coming from the U.S. national security establishment of an alleged Soviet edge, a “missile gap” between the two nuclear powers. The U-2 program reinforced Eisenhower’s conviction about what he had come to label the “military-industrial complex.” Chris J. Magoc See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Dulles, Allen; Military-Industrial Complex

Further Reading Beschloss, Michael R. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Powers, Francis Gary, with Curt Gentry. Operation Overflight: A Memoir of the U-2 Incident. Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2003.

Vietnam War (1955–1975) The Vietnam War was in fact part of a much larger series of “Vietnam Wars” or “Wars in Indochina” that lasted for much of the 20th century. In Vietnamese historiography the Vietnam War is generally referred to as the “American War” (Vietnamese: Chien Tranh Hoa Ky). The war itself was not only in Vietnam, but part of a larger extension of American anticommunist policy in Southeast Asia that extended to conflicts in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. In total, of the 2.8 million total Americans who served and the 1.6 million American men who served during the conflict, 58,196 died or were reported missing in action (MIA). While the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. commemorates the deaths of those Americans who died in the war, Vietnam is speckled with monuments to those Vietnamese who fought in the war, and in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) one can find memorials in the War Remnants Museum, the Women’s Museum, and the city History Museum, to name but a few locations. The roots of the Vietnam War were both deep and far-spread. President Truman’s decision in 1945 not to accept Vietnamese independence was a major factor leading to the French War in Indochina between the French and the Viet Minh. The U.S. refusal to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords and the refusal to support the reunification election of 1956 led to the creation of South Vietnam, propped up by American economic and military aid. This false backing, personified by Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime, was then exposed as corrupt, opening a rotating door for military commanders in the South. Further, the U.S. decision to escalate the war in the winter of 1963–1964 and the subsequent false information regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incidents that August led to unchecked authority for President Lyndon Johnson to wage war in Southeast Asia. When the National Liberation Front (NLF) attacked the American airbase at Pleiku in February 1965, killing 9 and wounding 128 others, the Johnson administration began the deployment of ground forces (ultimately reaching more than 500,000 by 1967) and the massive bombardment of Vietnam in a desperate—and ultimately futile—attempt to crush the NLF, defend a hopelessly authoritarian and undemocratic government in South Vietnam, and destroy the ability of the North Vietnamese to wage war in the South. Throughout the Vietnam War the United States consistently—and fatally—backed the dictatorial tendencies of Ngo Dinh Diem, his 10 military successors between 1963 and 1965, the autocratic but more

stable regime of General Nguyen Cao Ky (1965–1967), and finally the government of Nguyen Van Thieu, which endured to the end of the war. Although some policies were moderated in the post-Diem era, no government in Saigon was able to win over, as U.S. officials continued to desperately hope, the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese people. As one measure of that fact, desertions in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—the allies fighting alongside American soldiers—more than doubled from 1965 to 1967. At the same time, the NLF and North Vietnamese Army were winning converts in the villages and coming to control more than 40 percent of the South Vietnamese countryside. The American fixation on body counts, kill ratios, percentages of the South Vietnam countryside “pacified” and under “control” by way of massive bombing and relocation of the people to strategic hamlets, number of sorties flown, and other arithmetical measures of “progress” in the war all proved delusional. Exaggerated and falsified body counts that appeared to show U.S. dominance on the battlefield did not reflect the reality that the United States and its ARVN allies were creating Communist operatives out of people who had formerly been either neutral or pro-Saigon villagers, leading to dramatic increases in NLF membership throughout the 1960s. Unbeknownst to Americans at home, the numbers often included innocent civilians, whose survivors were then inclined to join the opposition. Moreover, the U.S. military’s difficulties in the war were compounded by the fact that from late 1965 (after a fierce battle in the Ia Drang Valley in which they absorbed heavy casualties) until the 1968 Tet Offensive, the NLF and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) refused to engage the Americans in conventional battle. Instead they forced the Americans to come after them and fight on their terms—in rice paddies, mountainous terrain, thick jungle cover, and more than 30,000 miles of tunnels they constructed to move personnel and supplies from North Vietnam into the South, in an attempt to be better shielded from U.S. air strikes. Approximately 85 percent of combat was successfully initiated by the NLF or NVA, not Americans and South Vietnamese. Nevertheless, the use of land mines, booby traps, snipers, and ambushes took both a physical and psychological toll on U.S. forces. Consequently, indiscriminate killing of Vietnamese became standard procedure as it was increasingly difficult if not impossible to distinguish civilians from NLF operatives. Further, most soldiers did not have a basic knowledge of Vietnamese culture and language, and ethnocentrism and racism were prevalent. These were all factors that contributed to the inability of U.S. forces to win the elusive “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese people. After the U.S. “victory” of the 1968 Tet Offensive—in reality a psychological defeat and a turning point toward American withdrawal—U.S. president Johnson initiated peace talks with Hanoi. By the fall, those talks appeared to be reaching a successful conclusion until South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu rejected the agreement. There is now substantial evidence that Henry Kissinger, a member of the diplomatic team negotiating the agreement in Paris, secretly helped to convince the South Vietnamese government not to accept the deal. Why? An agreement before the U.S. presidential vote in November would likely lead to the election of U.S. senator Hubert Humphrey, who would accelerate a withdrawal of American forces, which Kissinger believed would endanger American credibility in the Cold War and the security interests of the United States. Kissinger’s sabotage of the peace agreement helped ensure the election of Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a promise to bring “peace with honor” by way of a plan he would not disclose. Nixon continued to escalate the conflict with a ferocious air war (with Kissinger serving as his national security adviser and then secretary of state). Nixon’s illegal expansion of the bombing campaign into Cambodia in 1969 occurred simultaneously with his “Vietnamization” of the ground war, which turned combat operations over to ARVN forces and slowly withdrew American soldiers from Vietnam from 1969 to 1972. With a strong antiwar movement and the release of the Pentagon Papers (1971), Nixon had little

choice but to bring American troops home, and by 1972 he campaigned for reelection proclaiming that “peace [was] at hand.” Following his landslide reelection that fall, Nixon unleashed the infamous “Christmas Bombing” (code-named Operation Linebacker II)—the most savage air assault of the entire war, shocking the global community. North Vietnam was devastated. The massive casualties included many civilian areas. The operation was intended to demonstrate that though the United States was about to withdraw the last of its forces, it would nevertheless maintain its commitment to the government in Saigon. Three weeks later the Paris Peace Accords were signed, bringing an official end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam on January 27, 1973. The U.S. secretary of state and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Thọ, won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts (though Tho refused to accept it). Remaining American forces were withdrawn over the next 28 months, with the last U.S. military personnel evacuated from the rooftop of the U.S. embassy on April 30, 1975, as the NLF was closing in on Saigon (thereafter renamed Ho Chi Minh City). As suggested above, the prevalence of war memorials in Vietnam testifies to the tremendous cost borne by the Vietnamese people in this conflict. Even the impressive number of Americans who served and died in the war pales by contrast to the number of Vietnamese casualties, to say nothing of those of the Lao, Khmer, and other Southeast Asian peoples. According to American military reports an estimated 800,000–900,000 “enemy soldiers” were killed between 1965 and 1972 alone. The Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) had between 300,000 and 500,000 casualties. However, many of these “enemy soldiers” were civilians. By the end of the war in 1975, at least 4 million Vietnamese were killed, wounded, or went missing in just a 10-year period between 1965 and 1975. However, American reports often did not distinguish between NVA soldiers or NLF guerrillas and innocent Vietnamese villagers; they simply counted them all as “enemy.”

Although American forces fought with extraordinary bravery and heroism in Vietnam, it is now well documented that the pressure they faced to produce high body counts, in combination with the savage nature of guerrilla war, their training, the punishing topography and climate, and the desire simply to survive led to widespread civilian casualties, far more than has ever been officially acknowledged by the United States government. (Bettmann/Corbis)

South Vietnam, which had a population of 18 million in 1972, experienced an estimated number of between 1,225,000 and 1,350,000 civilian casualties between 1965 and 1972. The entire South was

virtually decimated in only three years. Over the course of the entire war, more than 7.5 million tons of bombs were dropped by the United States throughout Southeast Asia—more than three and one half times the total dropped by all belligerent forces in World War II. Roughly 4 million tons of these bombs were dropped on South Vietnam alone, 1 million on the North, a staggering 1.5 million on Laos, and a half million on Cambodia. More than 4,000 out of a total of 7,888 villages were either destroyed or severely damaged in North Vietnam. During the “Christmas Bombing” of 1972 40,000 tons were dropped on Hanoi alone. Beyond conventional bombing were the other elements of industrial warfare deployed by the United States in Vietnam. More than 12 million tons of defoliants were dropped by U.S. forces as a means of eliminating forest cover refuge for guerrillas of the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army, and to make the bombing campaign and search and destroy operations more effective. These defoliants—“Agent Orange,” most notoriously—were used predominantly in the South and continue to affect the geography and people of Vietnam to this day. Birth defects are just one of the deleterious health impacts suffered by both the Vietnamese and American soldiers and their families as a result of the use of defoliants in the war. In South Vietnam, one third of cropland was destroyed and half of the total peasant hamlets. An estimate in 1972 reported 800,000 orphans were created as a result of the bombing and defoliant campaigns, to cite just one social cost of the war. Despite the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the United States continued to provide massive military aid to the ARVN right to the moment the Republic of South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. In 1976 the U.S. Congress barred all funding to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. With such widespread devastation in the newly united nation, two million Vietnamese refugees left the country, along with 250,000 ethnic Chinese. Many thousands of these so-called “boat people” perished at sea. From 1975 to 1991, more than 1 million refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia arrived in the United States. The Vietnam War transformed both Southeast Asia and the United States, in many ways unforeseen. The murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia came to power at least partly and inadvertently due to the destabilizing impact of the U.S. bombing campaign and invasion of 1969–1973. In addition, centuries-long interregional tensions among Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and China erupted in 1979 into a devastating open border war between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China. American analysts tended to look at the Sino-Vietnamese War as a demonstration of the weakness of Soviet power, a symptom of their amnesia as to the importance of Soviet arms, which had been integral for the Vietnamese in the war that had ended just four years prior. That Communist China invaded Communist Vietnam, and then that Vietnam invaded and occupied Communist Cambodia to secure its own interests and in the process end a four-year genocide that took the lives of two million people, reinforced how terribly complex international relations now appeared—a far cry from the bipolar “Free World versus Communist Bloc” refrain that had dominated the U.S. view of the globe and that had justified the American war in Vietnam. The war led to a sobering reassessment of the U.S. role in the world, which took the form most notably of a human rights–centered foreign policy in the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977– 1981). For critics of what appeared to them an American retreat from forceful international engagement, it seemed that the United States suffered from a “Vietnam Syndrome” of weakness or unwillingness to project force to defend or advance American interests in the world. “Curing” the nation of its Vietnam Syndrome would be the goal of an entire generation of neoconservative foreign policy hawks from the 1980s forward. The “lessons of Vietnam” would continue to be a matter of fierce debate on all sides of the political spectrum, one that reemerged sharply with the prolonged conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the many differences between those two conflicts and Vietnam (including, for a decade, a ban on

images of flag-draped coffins on television of the now all-volunteer military force), the country heard haunting echoes of Vietnam: a protracted and seemingly insoluble U.S. effort to win the “hearts and minds” of Iraqis and Afghans, occasional reports of the killing of civilians by frustrated American soldiers, and an endless struggle to help build stable and popularly supported governments amid a complex world of sectarian violence and a multiplicity of cultures that Americans could hardly fathom. For many old enough to remember, it seemed all too familiar. William Noseworthy See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Cambodia; Diem, Ngo Dinh; French War in Indochina; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011); Southeast Asia; Vietnam Syndrome; Primary Documents: Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (September 2, 1945); Telegram from Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the U.S. Consulate in Hanoi (May 20, 1949); Excerpts from President Dwight Eisenhower’s News Conference, Remarks on Future of Indochina (April 7, 1954); Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s Statement on Indochina (May 7, 1954) and Communiqué to State Department Diplomats at Geneva Regarding Indochina (May 7, 1954)

Further Reading Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Americans and the Vietnamese in Vietnam. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1972. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin, 1983. Rotter, Andrew J., ed. Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology. Rev. ed. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Young, Marilyn. The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991, pp. 300–330.

War Powers Act (1973) The 1973 War Powers Act, a direct response to the policies of presidents Lyndon Johnson (1963–1969) and Richard Nixon (1969–1974) in Vietnam, was a concerted effort by the U.S. Congress to reassert its influence and authority over U.S. foreign policy. The context for the War Powers Act is crucial to comprehend. As in the Korean War (1950–1953), Congress never officially provided the executive branch with a declaration of war during the Vietnam War. In response to an alleged North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox, Congress issued the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964), which granted the Johnson administration carte blanche authorization to wage war in Vietnam. As the conflict escalated, the Johnson administration inaccurately claimed that the United States was making progress in Vietnam, and it hid the true nature of the conflict from Congress and the American people. The Tet Offensive (1968) revealed that a “credibility gap” had emerged between the Johnson administration’s rhetoric and the reality in Vietnam. Although Nixon inherited Johnson’s war in Vietnam, he, too, excluded Congress from the decision-making process. Most notably, Nixon authorized a secret massive bombing campaign and then a ground incursion to destroy Communist sanctuaries in neighboring Cambodia in 1969–1970, resulting in congressional backlash and massive grassroots antiwar protests. The War Powers Act was designed to curtail the president’s authority to send troops into battle without congressional approval. At the same time, Congress reasoned that a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution was no longer viable in the atomic age and the Cold War. Although the Constitution explicitly reserved to Congress the right to declare war, the War Powers Act granted the executive branch the ability to project U.S. military power abroad for 60 days without receiving congressional approval, and it allowed for a 30-day withdrawal period. Congress, however, inserted several caveats into the War Powers Act to ensure that future administrations could not emulate Johnson and Nixon’s policies in

Vietnam: the War Powers Act, for instance, forced the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying U.S. military forces abroad, and it required the executive branch to collaborate with the legislative branch throughout the process. Once enacted, the War Powers Act immediately affected U.S. foreign policy. As expected, Nixon vetoed the War Powers Act, which he viewed as an unconstitutional infringement on executive power. Congress, however, overrode Nixon’s veto by a vote of 280–139, one vote more than the two-thirds majority necessary. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford (1974–1977), also opposed the War Powers Act. As South Vietnam crumbled under the weight of a North Vietnamese military offensive in the winter of 1974– 1975, Ford requested an additional $722 million in military assistance and $250 million in humanitarian aid for South Vietnam. Congress, however, balked at Ford’s request: it was determined to reassert its authority and doubted that any amount of American aid could save Saigon’s regime. President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger later blamed Congress for Saigon’s collapse, but there is little evidence to sustain their assertions. Although future American presidents, such as Ronald Reagan (1981– 1989) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001), would challenge the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, it continues to offer a modest constraint on the power of the president to engage American forces in hostilities. Luke Griffith See also: Cambodia; Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution; Korea

Further Reading Johnson, Robert. Congress and the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 190–195, 214–218. Patterson, James. Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 84–86, 98–104.

Westerns The Hollywood film genre of the western was born in 1903 with Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery. The western became an easily produced “pulp” genre in the silent era of the 1920s and into the Depression decade of the 1930s, but only began to fully mature as a popular art form in 1939 with the release of classics like Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific and John Ford’s Stagecoach. Its popularity peaked from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, as the production of westerns dominated both the big screen and, by the late 1950s, television as well. Cultural historians generally characterize the western as the quintessential, defining genre of American cinema—not only because of the role of the genre in Hollywood’s birth and its endurance, but more importantly because of the significance of the frontier, westward expansion, rugged individualism, and other themes of the western that are central in American history and culture. Indeed, among the early roots of the Hollywood western are captivity narratives of the late 17th century, semimythical and popular histories of such western heroes as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, and western dime novels of the mid- to late-19th century, which in various ways reinforced the righteousness of western conquest. The postwar era that marked the zenith of the western coincided with the emergence of the United States as the predominant global superpower locked in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. Drawing on popular culture traditions of the 19th century, westerns produced during this era tended, not surprisingly, to vilify Native Americans as primitive, bloodthirsty “savages” standing in the way of the forces of civilization: pioneering settlers, cattlemen, and railroad builders. John Ford’s monumental

“cavalry trilogy” of films produced from 1948 to 1950 (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande) exemplified the pattern of glorifying the military exploits of the U.S. Cavalry and generally depicting whites as innocent victims of Indian barbarity in the “winning” of the West—themes that resonated well in the context of the early Cold War. As a number of scholars have written, the metaphorical connections between America’s violent frontier mythology and its modern imperial adventures run deep and long—including, for example, the use of terms like “Indian country” by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam when referring to areas held by the Viet Cong. Beyond westerns’ representation (and misrepresentation) of historical events like the Battle of Little Bighorn, scholars have analyzed many of the western films of these years as parables of America’s just and rightful intentions to advance free markets and democratic institutions into a hostile world. In this way, these early classic westerns (distinguished from more morally complex films made after about 1962) effectively helped to sanction the projection of American economic interests abroad and justify imperial military intervention in a dangerous world. Depictions of good men in white hats outgunning both dangerous savages and ruthless, greedy cattle barons reverberated in a world where Americans were confronting the cunning duplicity and violent hostility of territorially ambitious “Red” Communists in Eastern Europe and Asia. For example, Shane (1953), regarded as one of the greatest westerns ever, has been interpreted as an allegorical reflection of America’s efforts to contain with reluctant but righteous violence the aggression of North Korea and China and ultimately to make the world at large safe for U.S.style democratic institutions. Chris J. Magoc See also: Korea; Vietnam War

Further Reading Anderson, Mark Cronlund. Cowboy Imperialism and Hollywood Film. New York: Peter Land, 2007. Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Yom Kippur War (1973) In 1973, the devastating and embarrassing losses in the June 1967 Six-Day War were still fresh in the minds of Egyptian and Syrian leaders. The subsequent 1967–1970 War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt designed to repel Israeli forces from the Sinai and repair Arabs’ demoralized pride had failed. Meanwhile, unsuccessful negotiations aimed at returning Israel, Egypt, and Syria to pre-1967 borders further undermined the possibilities for peace. By 1971, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat decided that without further military conflict that would retake lands lost in the 1967 Six-Day War, there could be no peace. From 1971 to 1973, Egypt and Syria completely rebuilt their respective militaries. Sadat overhauled the Egyptian command structure by replacing inadequate leadership with more qualified personnel. Meanwhile, Egypt used its relationship with the Soviets to acquire scores of tanks and warplanes and improved its fighting capabilities with Soviet training. The Soviets also restocked Egypt’s arsenals with an unprecedented amount of surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPG), and antitank weapons, providing the tools necessary to counter Israeli tank and air supremacy. Syria also

obtained SAMs to counter the powerful Israeli air force, but still had a much smaller force than Egypt. The Soviets, in particular, recognized that Syria’s primary strength lay in its location. With no vast desert separating Syria and Israel, Syrian troops could be quickly deployed to within striking distance of major Israeli cities. The Soviets provided Syria numerous military personnel to ensure the defeat of U.S. interests. Meanwhile, the unique bond between Israel and the United States had grown into a strategic Cold War partnership. Since June 1967, the United States had significantly increased military and financial aid to the Jewish state, while becoming a champion for Israel on the international stage. However, even with the Cold War at dangerous levels, Israel and the United States believed Egyptian and Syrian military upgrades were not threats. Israeli and American intelligence were convinced as late as October 1973 that despite the new equipment and training, neither country was equipped for war. Egypt and Syria used the opportunity to incrementally mass their respective forces along the northern and southern borders under the guise of military exercises. To maximize the surprise, Sadat and Syrian leader Al-Assad scheduled the coordinated invasion for both the beginning of Yom Kippur—the holiest day in Judaism—and the month-long Muslim holiday of Ramadan. Israeli border outposts would be minimally manned for the holiday, and Sadat knew a recall of Israeli forces would take days. Israel would not expect an invasion during the two most important religious celebrations in the Muslim and Jewish calendars. On October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces, backed by Soviet allies, launched simultaneous attacks against Israel. At approximately 2:05 p.m., 250 Egyptian warplanes took off from various bases in Egypt and within minutes had destroyed numerous Israeli SAM sites, command posts, and airfields in the Sinai. At the same time, Egyptian artillery units opened fire on Israeli artillery strongholds, command posts, and tank areas across the Suez Canal. Under the protection of aircraft and artillery fire, Egyptian soldiers conducted their amphibious assault. Upwards of 8,000 Egyptian soldiers used inflatable rafts to cross the heavily fortified Suez Canal and within two hours had accomplished perhaps the most ambitious facet of the Egyptian war plan—crossing the Suez. The Second and Third Armies now held strategic positions on the Israeli side of the canal. By the end of the day 80,000 Egyptian troops occupied the eastern bank and had penetrated Israel’s famous, supposedly impenetrable, Bar Lev Line. The infantry quickly advanced with the support of paratroopers dropped miles ahead of the advance to stall Israel’s response force.

An Israeli armored column on its way to the Syrian front during the Yom Kippur War, October 11, 1973. The Yom Kippur War was the fourth Arab-Israeli war since the the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. With Arab states backed by the Soviet Union, and

the United States heavily supporting Israel with a critical round-the-clock weapons airlift, Yom Kippur became another proxy conflict in the Cold War. (Daniel Rosenblum/Keystone/Getty Images)

Syria’s attack in the north caught the Israeli command completely off guard. Syria’s 1,400 tanks easily outmatched Israel’s 177 currently stationed in the Golan Heights. Meanwhile, 40,000 Syrian infantry and 115 artillery batteries assaulted the meager 200-man Israeli force spread thinly throughout the area. Within 12 hours Syrian forces with the assistance of Soviet personnel were deep into the Golan Heights. Days later they reached the city of Nafakh, a short distance from the Jordan River and close to Israel proper. For the next three days Israel desperately tried to recall all its forces. On October 6, U.S. government officials convened emergency meetings to discuss additional support for their most important Cold War ally in the region as word came from Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that Israel was facing total defeat. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested the United States send additional weaponry immediately. The decision came on October 9, 1973. After urgent dialogue between the two countries, President Richard Nixon approved Operation Nickel Grass. The 30-day strategic airlift campaign resupplied Israeli forces with tanks, artillery, and ammunition, followed later by bombers, fighter aircraft, and attack helicopters. The airlift was also an overt show of force against the Soviet presence in both Egypt and Syria. The Soviets responded with their own resupply efforts. The regional conflict had become, yet again, a proxy of the Cold War. The U.S. airlift, at least initially, was a show of support for Israel more than tangible material relief. Before supplies could even reach the intended troops the Israeli army had halted Egypt’s advance and attacked at the seam between Egypt’s two major forces in the Sinai. The Israelis were able to then immediately cross the Suez and effectively encircle Egypt’s Second and Third Armies. In the Golan Heights, poor terrain completely stalled Syrian armored divisions. Israeli ground forces quickly went on the offensive and within days were within striking distance of Damascus. After previous failed cease-fires, fears of nuclear war, and with Israeli forces now close to both Cairo and Damascus, all parties agreed to a cease-fire on October 25, 1973. The U.S. resupply operations continued until December, proving the extent to which the United States would now go to stop Soviet movement in the Middle East. The airlift and Secretary Kissinger’s intimate involvement in the negotiations further strengthened the bond between Israel and the United States, and threatened to exacerbate Soviet-U.S. tensions. Secretary Kissinger later brokered more important peace agreements that led to the 1978 Camp David Accords. The peace agreements resulted in Israel returning the Sinai, while Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize the Jewish state. David Grantham See also: Six-Day (Arab-Israeli War)

Further Reading Allen, Peter. The Yom Kippur War. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. O’Ballance, Edgar. No Victor, No Vanquished: The Yom Kippur War. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1991. Rabinovich, Abraham. The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East. New York: Schocken Books, 2004. Zohdy, Badri Magdoub. The Ramadan War, 1973. Dunn Loring, VA: T. N. Dupuy Associates, 1979.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS Ho Chi Minh’s Appeal on the Occasion of the Founding of the Indochinese Communist Party, Delivered at Hong Kong (February 18, 1930) Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), revolutionary leader of the Vietnamese anticolonial liberation struggle, had first appealed to Western powers for the independence of the Vietnamese people at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. His pleading on behalf of the colonized of French Indochina fell on the deaf ears of Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing—interestingly, the uncle of the Dulles brothers who would preside over the formulation of U.S. policy in Indochina in the 1950s as secretary of state and CIA director, respectively. In 1930, Ho co-founded the anti-imperialist Indochinese Communist Party and called upon the masses to rise up against French imperialist control of the country. Workers, peasants, soldiers, youth and school students! Oppressed and exploited fellow-countrymen! Sisters and brothers! Comrades! Imperialist contradictions were the cause of the 1914–1918 World War. After this horrible slaughter the world was divided into two camps: one is the revolutionary camp which includes the oppressed colonial peoples and the exploited working class throughout the world. Its vanguard is the Soviet Union. The other is the counter-revolutionary camp of international capitalism and imperialism, whose general staff is the League of Nations. That war resulted in untold loss of life and property for the peoples. French imperialism was the hardest hit. Therefore, in order to restore the forces of capitalism in France, the French imperialists have resorted to every perfidious scheme to intensify capitalist exploitation in Indochina. They have built new factories to exploit the workers by paying them starvation wages. They have plundered the peasants’ land to establish plantations and drive them to destitution. They have levied new heavy taxes. They have forced our people to buy government bonds. In short, they have driven our people to utter misery. They have increased their military forces, firstly to strangle the Vietnamese revolution; secondly to prepare for a new imperialist war in the Pacific aimed at conquering new colonies; thirdly to suppress the Chinese revolution; and fourthly to attack the Soviet Union because she helps the oppressed nations and the exploited working class to wage revolution. World War Two will break out. When it does the French imperialists will certainly drive our people to an even more horrible slaughter. If we let them prepare for this war, oppose the Chinese revolution and attack the Soviet Union, if we allow them to stifle the Vietnamese revolution. This is tantamount to letting them wipe our race off the surface of the earth and drown our nation in the Pacific. However, the French imperialists’ barbarous oppression and ruthless exploitation have awakened our compatriots, who have all realized that revolution is the only road to survival and that without it they will die a slow death. This is why the revolutionary movement has grown stronger with each passing day: the workers refuse to work, the peasants demand land, the students go on strike, the traders stop doing business. Everywhere the masses have risen to oppose the French imperialists. The revolution has made the French imperialists tremble with fear. On the one hand, they use the feudalists and comprador bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit our people. On the other, they terrorize,

arrest, jail, deport and kill a great number of Vietnamese revolutionaries. If the French imperialists think that they can suppress the Vietnamese revolution by means of terror, they are grossly mistaken. For one thing, the Vietnamese revolution is not isolated but enjoys the assistance of the world proletariat in general and that of the French working class in particular. Secondly, it is precisely at the very time when the French imperialists are frenziedly carrying out terrorist acts that the Vietnamese Communists, formerly working separately, have united into a single party, the Indochinese Communist Party, to lead the revolutionary struggle of our entire people. Workers, peasants, soldiers, youth, school students! Oppressed and exploited fellow-countrymen! The Indochinese Communist Party has been founded. It is the Party of the working class. It will help the proletariat lead the revolution waged for the sake of all oppressed and exploited people. From now on we must join the Party, help it and follow it in order to implement the following slogans: 1. 2. 3. 4.

To overthrow French imperialism and Vietnamese feudalism and reactionary bourgeoisie; To make Indochina completely independent; To establish a worker-peasant-soldier government; To confiscate the banks and other enterprises belonging to the imperialists and put them under the control of the worker-peasant-soldier government; 5. To confiscate all the plantations and property belonging to the imperialists and the Vietnamese reactionary bourgeoisie and distribute them to the poor peasants; 6. To implement the 8-hour working day; 7. To abolish the forced buying of government bonds, the poll-tax and all unjust taxes hitting the poor; 8. To bring democratic freedoms to the masses; 9. To dispense education to all the people; 10. To realize equality between man and woman. Source: Ho Chi Minh. Selected Writings: 1920–1969. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1977, pp. 39–41.

Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (September 2, 1945) At the conclusion of World War II, Ho Chi Minh looked to lead the Vietnamese people to their liberation from colonial control once and for all. His broad-based League for the Independence of Vietnam—better known as the Viet Minh—had fought against the merciless takeover of their country by the Japanese during World War II, begun implementing a social and economic revolution throughout northern Vietnam, and was by the summer of 1945 fully anticipating the end of decades of colonial control by the French. Invoking the words of Thomas Jefferson in its opening, Ho’s Declaration of Independence appealed for support to the United States, a nation with which he and his fighters had been allied during the war. He would then write a series of letters to President Harry Truman seeking U.S. backing for Vietnamese independence in the face of the French effort to retake control of the country.

All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.” Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Viet-Nam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank notes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers. In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese fascists violated Indochina’s territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that, from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri Province to the North of Viet-Nam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation. On March 9 [1945], the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered, showing that not only were they incapable of “protecting” us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese. On several occasions before March 9, the Viet Minh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Viet Minh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yen Bay and Cao Bang. Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese Putsch of March, 1945, the Viet Minh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.

From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Viet-Nam, and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland. The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Teheran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of selfdetermination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Viet-Nam. A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of VietNam, solemnly declare to the world that Viet-Nam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact it is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty. Source: Ho Chi Minh. Selected Works. Vol. 3. Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960–1962, pp. 17–21.

Telegram from Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the U.S. Consulate in Hanoi (May 20, 1949) As U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson makes clear in this telegram to the U.S. consulate in Hanoi, the United States had determined soon after the end of World War II that Ho Chi Minh, nationalist leader of the Viet Minh, was very much part of the international Communist movement and potentially a strategic threat to U.S. interests in greater Asia—particularly since the success of Mao Zedong’s revolution in China. Despite the advice of some U.S. diplomats in Vietnam during the war that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist along the lines of Josip Tito in Yugoslovia with whom the United States might be able to develop a strategic relationship and exploit for its own ends, such an accommodation was not to be. Acheson also made clear that the possibility of integrating the Viet Minh into a national unity government, although ostensibly a French decision, was not the preferred outcome for the United States. … In light Ho’s known background, no other assumption possible but that he outright Commie so long as (1) he fails unequivocally to repudiate Moscow connections and Commie doctrine and (2) remains personally singled out for praise by international Commie press and receives its support. Moreover, US not impressed by nationalist character red flag with yellow stars. Question whether Ho as much nationalist as Commie is irrelevant. All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists. With achievement national aims (i.e., independence) their objective necessarily becomes subordination state to Commie

purposes and ruthless extermination not only opposition groups but all elements suspected even slightest deviation. On basis examples eastern Europe it must be assumed such would be goal Ho and men his stamp if included in Baodai Govt. To include them in order to achieve reconciliation opposing political elements and “national unity” would merely postpone settlement issue whether Vietnam to be independent nation or Commie satellite until circumstances probably even less favorable nationalists than now. It must of course be conceded theoretical possibility exists establish National Communist state on pattern Yugoslavia in any area beyond reach Soviet army. However, US attitude could take account such possibility only if every other possible avenue closed to preservation area from Kremlin control. Moreover, while Vietnam out of reach Soviet army it will doubtless be by no means out of reach Chi Commie hatchet men and armed forces. Following is for your information and such reference as you deem judicious: State Department naturally considers only French can through concessions to nationalist movement lay basis for solution to Indochina problem…. Source: “Telegram from Dean Acheson to the U.S. Consulate in Hanoi, May 20, 1949.” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949. Volume Seven. Washington, DC: G.P.O., 1975, pp. 29–30.

Excerpts from President Dwight Eisenhower’s News Conference, Remarks on Future of Indochina (April 7, 1954) In this famous exchange between the press corps and President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), the president attempts to explain the rationale and strategic purpose for U.S. support of the French war effort—by this time nearly 80 percent of the cost of the war. The press conference happened right in the middle of the two-month siege of Dien Bien Phu, the last (and failed) stand of the French in Vietnam. Eisenhower argues that the scenario of leaving Vietnam to dictatorship under Ho Chi Minh was unthinkable, and that further, if all of Vietnam were to succumb to Communist takeover from the north, it would be like dominoes falling across south Asia and hundreds of millions of people could soon fall to communism. The implication was that the falling dominoes led right to San Diego. Q. Robert Richards, Copley Press: “Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.” THE PRESIDENT: “You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things. “First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs. “Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world. “Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. “Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on. “Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can’t afford greater losses.

“But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people. “Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand. “It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go—that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live. “So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.” * * * Q. Robert G. Spivack, New York Post: “Mr. President, do you agree with Senator Kennedy that independence must be guaranteed the people of Indochina in order to justify an all-out effort there?” THE PRESIDENT: “Well, I don’t know, of course, exactly in what way a Senator was talking about this thing. “I will say this: for many years, in talking to different countries, different governments, I have tried to insist on this principle: no outside country can come in and be really helpful unless it is doing something that the local people want. “Now, let me call your attention to this independence theory. Senator Lodge, on my instructions, stood up in the United Nations and offered one country independence if they would just simply pass a resolution saying they wanted it, or at least said, ‘I would work for it.’ They didn’t accept it. So I can’t say that the associated states want independence in the sense that the United States is independent. I do not know what they want. “I do say this: the aspirations of those people must be met, otherwise there is in the long run no final answer to the problem.” Q. Joseph Dear, Capital Times: “Do you favor bringing this Indochina situation before the United Nations?” THE PRESIDENT: “I really can’t say. I wouldn’t want to comment at too great a length at this moment, but I do believe this: this is the kind of thing that must not be handled by one nation trying to act alone.” Source: Eisenhower, Dwight D. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954. Entry 73, 382– 383. Washington, DC: GPO, 1960.

U.S. Mission to the United Nations Dispatch 790, (UN-UND) Petition from the Marshallese People Concerning the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (May 5, 1954) After World War II, the Marshall Islands, an exquisitely beautiful collection of coral atolls, islands, and islets in the Pacific Ocean just west of the International Date Line, were incorporated as part of the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. Soon thereafter, in 1946 the United States launched its atomic testing program at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands—the heart of what the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Pacific Proving Grounds. From 1946 to 1958 the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, including Castle Bravo in 1954, the most powerful device

ever exploded by the United States. At 16 megatons, Castle Bravo was nearly four times the explosion anticipated by scientists. By this time, the people of the Marshall Islands had been subjected to staggering amounts of radioactivity from fallout produced by the tests, which resulted in cancers and other illnesses never before seen by the islanders. This petition to the United Nations came near the beginning of what became a decades-long, continuing quest for economic and environmental justice from the United States. United States Mission to the United Nations PETITION FROM THE MARSHALLESE PEOPLE CONCERNING THE TRUST TERRITORY OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS Transmitted herewith is a note from the SYG-UN, dated May 5, 1954, enclosing a petition from the Marshallese People concerning the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The SYG requests to be informed of the date on which the petition is received by the Administering Authority. Petition of the Marshallese People The Secretary-General of the United Nations presents his compliments to the Secretary of State of the United States of America and has the honour to transmit a copy of the petition noted above concerning the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The Secretary-General will be obliged if he may be informed of the date on which the petition is received by the Administering Authority. 5 May 1954 To: The United Nations From: The Marshallese people Subject: Complaint regarding the explosion of lethal weapons within our home islands The following should not be misconstrued as a repudiation of the United States as our governing agency for the United Nations under the trusteeship agreement, for aside from the complaint registered in this petition we have found the American administration by far the most agreeable one in our memory. But in view of the increasing danger from the experiments with deadly explosives thousands of times more powerful than anything previously known to men, the lethal effects of which have already touched the inhabitants of the two atolls in the Marshalls, namely, Rongelap and Uterik, we are now suffering in various degrees from “lowering of the blood count,” burns, nausea, and the falling off of hair from the head, and whose complete recovery no one can promise with any certainty, we, the Marshallese people feel that we must follow the dictates of our consciences to bring forth this urgent plea to the United Nations, which has pledged itself to safeguard the life, liberty and the general well being of the people of the Trust Territory, of which the Marshallese people are a part. The Marshallese people are not only fearful of the danger to their persons of these deadly weapons in case of another miscalculation, but they are also very concerned for the increasing number of people who are being removed from their land. Land means a great deal to the Marshallese. It means more than just a place where you can plant your food crops and build your houses; or a place where you can bury your dead. It is the very life of the people. Take away their land and their spirits go also. The Marshall Islands are all low coral atolls with land area where food plants can be cultivated quite limited, even for today’s population of about eleven-thousand people. But the population is growing rapidly; the time when this number will be doubled is not far off.

The Japanese had taken away the best portions of the following atolls; Jaliut, Kwajalein, Enewetak, Mille, Maloelap and Wotje to be fortified as part of their preparation for the last war, World War II. So far, only Imedj Island on Jaluit Atoll has been returned to its former owners. For security reasons, Kwajalein Island is being kept for the military use. Bikini and Eniwetak were taken away for the Atomic bomb tests and their inhabitants were moved to Kili Island and Ujelang Atoll respectively. Because Fongelab and Uterik are now radio-active, their inhabitants are being kept on Kwajalein for an indeterminate length of time. “Where next?” is the big question which looms large in all our minds. Therefore, we the members of the Marshallese Congress Hold-Over Committee, writers of this petition, who are empowered by the Marshallese Congress, to act in its name when it is not in session and which is in turn a group of members representing all the municipalities in the Marshalls, due to the increasing threat to our life, liberty, happiness and possession of land, do hereby submit this petition to the United Nations with the hop[e] that it will act on our urgent plea. Thus, we request that: 1. All the experiments with lethal weapons within this area be immediately ceased. 2. If the experiments with said weapons should be judged absolutely necessary for the eventual well being of all the people of this world and cannot be stopped or changed to other areas due to the unavailability of other locations, we then submit the following suggestions: a. All possible precautionary measures be taken before such weapons are exploded. All human beings and their valuable possessions be transported to safe distances first, before such explosions occur. b. All the people living in this area be instructed in safety measures. The people of Rongelap would have avoided much danger if they had known not to drink the waters on their home island after the radio-active dusts had settled on them. c. Adequate funds be set aside to pay for the possessions of the people in case they will have to be moved from their homes. This will include lands, houses and whatever possessions they cannot take with them, so that the unsatisfactory arrangements for the Bikinians and Eniwetak people shall not be repeated. d. Courses be taught to Marshallese Medical Practitioners and Health-Aides which will be useful in the detecting of and the circumventing of preventable dangers. We would be very pleased to submit more information or explain further any points we have raised that may need clarifications. The Marshallese people who signed this petition are on the following sheets, divided in the following manner: The first group are members of the Marshallese Congress Hold-Over Committee. The second group are some of the many interested Marshallese citizens. The name of each person appears on the left hand side and his or her home atoll and occupation on the right hand side opposite the signature. If more signatures are needed we will promptly supply them. The only reason we are not supplying more now is because to do so would mean a delay of some three months, the time necessary to make complete circuit of our far-flung atolls and islands by ship. Source: U.S. Department of State, 1950–1954, files, 711.5611 or 211.9441, National Archives.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s Statement on Indochina (May 7, 1954) and Communiqué to State Department Diplomats at Geneva Regarding Indochina (May 7, 1954) In the entire history of the Cold War, there was arguably no more ardent anticommunist high-ranking U.S. official than John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), who served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959. His statement here, issued while the three-month Geneva Conference was barely two weeks underway, indicates skepticism that any agreement on the future of Vietnam could be reached that would not somehow “provide a road to a Communist takeover and further aggression.” Even as Dulles was issuing his statement, the United States was working to put together the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, a mutual defense alliance that would help legally justify armed U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Minh and other nationalist-Communist leaders in the region condemned the pact as an extension of U.S. imperialism in the region; Dulles, in turn, tried in this statement to link such criticisms to that of the defeated Japanese empire. As for Geneva, a final declaration that would have unified Vietnam with free and fair democratic elections by 1956 was not signed by the United States. His communiqué to his U.S. diplomats at Geneva was issued the same day. Dulles never would have allowed elections when he and the CIA knew at the time that Ho Chi Minh would have won. Dulles’s use of such imaginative rhetoric as the “new imperialist colonialism of communism,” and “the imperialistic dictatorship” of the Communist bloc in Asia was of course fiercely rejected by Ho Chi Minh and countless more in Southeast Asia who saw the United States as following in the footsteps of imperial France. Let me turn now to the problem of Southeast Asia. In that great peninsula and the islands to the south live nearly 200 million people in 7 states—Burma; the three states of Indochina—Laos, Cambodia, and Viet-Nam; Thailand; Malaya; and Indonesia. Communist conquest of this area would seriously imperil the free world position in the Western Pacific. It would, among other things, endanger the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand, with all of which the United States has mutual-security treaties. It would deprive Japan of important foreign markets and sources of food and raw materials. In Viet-Nam, one of the three Indochinese states, war has been going on since 1946. When it began, Indochina was a French colony just liberated from Japanese occupation. The war started primarily as a war for independence. What started as a civil war has now been taken over by international communism for its own purposes. Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader in Viet-Nam, was trained in Moscow and got his first revolutionary experience in China. * * * In Indochina, the situation is far more complex. The present conditions there do not provide a suitable basis for the United States to participate with its armed forces. The situation may perhaps be clarified as a result of the Geneva Conference. The French have stated their desire for an armistice on honorable terms and under proper safeguards. If they can conclude a settlement on terms which do not endanger the freedom of the peoples of Viet-Nam, this would be a real contribution to the cause of peace in Southeast Asia. But we would be gravely concerned if an armistice or cease-fire were reached at Geneva which would provide a road to a Communist takeover and further aggression. If this occurs, or if hostilities continue, then the need will be even more urgent to create the conditions for united action in defense of the area.

In making commitments which might involve the use of armed force, the Congress is a full partner. Only the Congress can declare war. President Eisenhower has repeatedly emphasized that he would not take military action in Indochina without the support of Congress. Furthermore, he has made clear that he would not seek that unless, in his opinion, there would be an adequate collective effort based on genuine mutuality of purpose in defending vital interests. A great effort is being made by Communist propaganda to portray it as something evil if Asia joins with the nations of the Americas and Europe to get assistance which will help the peoples of Asia to secure their liberty. These Communist nations have, in this connection, adopted the slogan “Asia for the Asians.” The Japanese war lords adopted a similar slogan when they sought to subject Asia to their despotic rule. The similar theme of “Europe for the Europeans” was adopted by Mr. Molotov at the Berlin Conference when he proposed that the Europeans should seek security by arrangements which would send the United States back home. Great despotic powers have always known that they could impose their will and gain their conquests if the free nations stand apart and none helps the other. It should be observed that the Soviet Communist aggression in Europe took place only against countries which had no collective security arrangements. Since the organization of the North Atlantic Treaty, there has been no successful aggression in Europe. Of course, it is of the utmost importance that the United States’ participation in creating collective security in Asia should be on a basis which recognizes fully the aspirations and cultures of the Asian peoples. We have a material and industrial strength which they lack and which is an essential ingredient of security. Also they have cultural and spiritual values of their own which make them our equals by every moral standard. The United States, as the first colony of modern history to win independence for itself, instinctively shares the aspirations for liberty of all dependent and colonial peoples. We want to help, not hinder the spread of liberty. We do not seek to perpetuate Western colonialism and we find even more intolerable the new imperialist colonialism of communism. That is the spirit that animates us. If we remain true to that spirit, we can face the future with confidence that we shall be in harmony with those moral forces which ultimately prevail. Source: Address by Secretary Dulles Delivered to the Nation over Radio and Television, May 7, 1954, The Issues at Geneva, Department of State Bulletin, May 17, 1954, pp. 740, 744.

SENT TO: AMCON GENEVA TOSEC 138 FOR THE UNDER SECRETARY FROM THE SECRETARY BEGIN VERBATIM TEXT The following basic instructions, which have been approved by the President, and which are in confirmation of those already given you orally, will guide you, as head of the United States Delegation, in your participation in the Indochina phase of the Geneva Conference. 1. The presence of a United States representative during the discussion at the Geneva Conference of “the problem of restoring peace in Indochina” rests on the Berlin Agreement of February 18, 1954. Under that agreement the US, UK, France, and USSR agreed that the four of them plus other interested states should be invited to a conference at Geneva on April 26 “for the purpose of reaching a peaceful settlement of the Korean question” and agreed further, that “the problem of restoring peace in Indochina”

would also be discussed at Geneva by the four powers represented at Berlin, and Communist China and other interested states. 2. You will not deal with the delegates of the Chinese Communist regime, or any other regime not now diplomatically recognized by the United States, on any terms which imply political recognition or which concede to that regime any status other than that of a regime with which it is necessary to deal on a de facto basis in order to end aggression, or the threat of aggression, and to obtain peace. 3. The position of the United States in the Indochina phase of the Geneva Conference is that of an interested nation which, however, is neither a belligerent nor a principal in the negotiation. 4. The United States is participating in the Indochina phase of the Conference in order thereby to assist in arriving at decisions which will help the nations of that area peacefully to enjoy territorial integrity and political independence under stable and free governments with the opportunity to expand their economies, to realize their legitimate national aspirations, and to develop security through individual and collective defense against aggression, from within or without. This implies that these people should not be amalgamated into the Communist bloc of imperialistic dictatorship. 5. The United States is not prepared to give its express or implied approval to any cease-fire, armistice, or other settlement which would have the effect of subverting the existing lawful governments of the three aforementioned states or of permanently impairing their territorial integrity or of placing in jeopardy the forces of the French Union in Indochina, or which otherwise contravened the principles stated in (4) above. 6. You should, insofar as is compatible with these instructions, cooperate with the Delegation of France and with the Delegations of other friendly participants in this phase of the Conference. 7. If in your judgment continued participation in the Indochina phase of the Conference appears likely to involve the United States in a result inconsistent with its policy, as stated above, you should immediately so inform your Government, recommending either a withdrawal or the limitation of the US role to that of an observer. If the situation develops such that, in your opinion, either of such actions is essential under the circumstances and time is lacking for consultation with Washington, you may act in your discretion. 8. You are authorized to inform other delegations at Geneva of these instructions. Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Volume XVI, Geneva Conference, Document 503. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1981.

Senator John F. Kennedy’s Speech in the United States Senate: “Imperialism—The Enemy of Freedom” (July 2, 1957) Although the consensus view of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) is that of a tough cold warrior who stared down Khrushchev over the missiles in Cuba and initiated the escalation of the war in Vietnam, recent scholars have painted a far more complex picture of a president who had not only determined to avoid armed confrontation with the Communists, but also was challenging fundamental assumptions about the U.S. relationship with the undeveloped “Third World.” Kennedy clearly believed the United States had a special, indispensable role to play in shaping the course of global events, but he had long espoused the view that America needed to reposition itself strategically amid the forces of nationalist rebellion then sweeping Africa, Asia, and much of Latin America. In this 1957 speech—roundly criticized by many of his colleagues at the time—Kennedy condemned the losing French war in Algeria. Further, he declared that the age of imperialism was dying, that Africa would

one day be free, and that the sooner America put itself on the right side of history, as an anti-imperial, anticolonialist force for freedom, the better it would be for the nation’s long-term security interests. Mr. President, the most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile, it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this Nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security. I am concerned today that we are failing to meet the challenge of imperialism—on both counts—and thus failing in our responsibilities to the free world…. … The war in Algeria, engaging more than 400,000 French soldiers, has stripped the continental forces of NATO to the bone. It has dimmed Western hopes for a European common market, and seriously compromised the liberalizing reforms of OEEC, by causing France to impose new import restrictions under a wartime economy. It has repeatedly been appealed for discussion to the United Nations, where our equivocal remarks and opposition to its consideration have damaged our leadership and prestige in that body. It has undermined our relations with Tunisia and Morocco, who naturally have a sense of common cause with the aims of Algerian leaders, and who have felt proper grievance that our economic and military base settlements have heretofore required clearance with a French Government now taking economic reprisal for their assistance to Algerian nationalism. It has diluted the effective strength of the Eisenhower doctrine for the Middle East, and our foreign aid and information programs…. It has affected our standing in the eyes of the free world, our leadership in the fight to keep that world free, our prestige, and our security; as well as our moral leadership in the fight against Soviet imperialism in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. It has furnished powerful ammunition to anti-Western propagandists throughout Asia and the Middle East—and will be the most troublesome item facing the October conference in Accra of the free nations of Africa, who hope, by easing the transition to independence of other African colonies, to seek common paths by which that great continent can remain aligned with the West. Finally, the war in Algeria has steadily drained the manpower, the resources, and the spirit of one of our oldest and most important allies—a nation whose strength is absolutely vital to the free world, but who has been forced by this exhausting conflict to postpone new reforms and social services at home, to choke important new plans for economic and political development in French West Africa, the Sahara, and in a united Europe, to face a consolidated domestic Communist movement at a time when communism is in retreat elsewhere in Europe, to stifle free journalism and criticism, and to release the anger and frustrations of its people in perpetual governmental instability and in a precipitous attack on Suez…. Yet, did we not learn in Indochina, where we delayed action as the result of similar warnings, that we might have served both the French and our own causes infinitely better, had we taken a more firm stand much earlier than we did? Did that tragic episode not teach us that, whether France likes it or not, admits it or not, or has our support or not, their oversea territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably

going to break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their steps to independence? In the words of Turgot: “Colonies are like fruit which cling to the tree only till they ripen.” I want to emphasize that I do not fail to appreciate the difficulties of our hard-pressed French allies. It staggers the imagination to realize that France is one nation that has been in a continuous state of war since 1939—against the Axis, then in Syria, in Indochina, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Algeria. It has naturally not been easy for most Frenchmen to watch the successive withdrawals from Damascus, Hanoi, Saigon, Pondicherry, Tunis, and Rabat. With each departure a grand myth has been more and more deflated. But the problem is no longer to save a myth of French empire. The problem is to save the French nation, as well as free Africa…. Unfortunately, the Tunisians and the Moroccans also know they owe little, if anything, to the United States for their new-found freedom. To be sure, we hedged our consistent backing of the French position with occasional pieties about ultimate self-government and hopes for just solutions. And, fortunately, our Government did not offer recognition to the French-sponsored Ben Arafa after the deposition of Sultan Ben Youssef, with whom President Roosevelt had conferred at the time of the Casablanca Conference. But in the series of discussions which began in 1951 in the United Nations over Morocco and Tunisia, the United States, in vote after vote, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, argued either that the U.N. had no real competence to deal with these issues, or, after this argument had petrified, that to do so would only inflame the situation. In short, on every single U.N. vote concerning the issues of Morocco and Tunisia, we failed to vote against the French and with the so-called anticolonial nations of Asia and Africa even once…. … Another step which we can take immediately, of the highest priority yet small in cost, is to step up considerably the number of young people of north Africa who have so far come to the United States for higher education and technical training, and to increase our own educational and training missions in that area. The building up of a national civil service, a managerial talent, and a pool of skilled tradesmen and professionals is an immediate prerequisite for these countries—and the addition of even a few trained administrators, engineers, doctors, and educators will pay off many times over in progress, stability, and good will…. Perhaps it is already too late for the United States to save the West from total catastrophe in Algeria. Perhaps it is too late to abandon our negative policies on these issues, to repudiate the decades of antiWestern suspicion, to press firmly but boldly for a new generation of friendship among equal and independent states. But we dare not fail to make the effort. Men’s hearts wait upon us— Said Woodrow Wilson in 1913— Men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? Source: Congressional Record, July 2, 1957, 85th Congress, 1st Session.

CIA Director Allen Dulles’s Cable on Possible CIA Involvement in Plots against Patrice Lumumba during the Congo Crisis (August 26, 1960) The crisis in the African nation of the Congo came to a head in the last months of the Eisenhower administration. A Belgian colony on the verge of its independence, the Congo was increasingly deemed

in the State Department as strategically important to the United States. A central figure in the 1960– 1961 crisis was Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961), a committed Pan-Africanist and charismatic leader of the nationalist struggle for independence. By 1960, U.S. officials were convinced that Lumumba was a threat to U.S. interests, and that the Congo could become another Cuba—a determination made clear in this cable from CIA director Allen Dulles. Events in the Congo soon descended into chaos and Lumumba was beaten, tortured, and executed on January 17, 1961. Executed with at least the knowledge of the United States; it has long been alleged that Dulles and President Eisenhower directly approved Lumumba’s assassination. EMBASSY AND STATION BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT. MANY FORCES AT WORK HERE: SOVIETS COMMUNIST PARTY, ETC. ALTHOUGH DIFFICULT DETERMINE MAJOR INFLUENCING FACTORS TO PREDICT OUTCOME STRUGGLE FOR POWER, DECISIVE PERIOD NOT FAR OFF. WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER, ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER CONGO AND THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA. Source: Church Committee Interim Report: Section 2, Dulles Cable to Leopoldville, August 26, 1960 (Sec 2). http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1156&relPageId=28.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in Which He Warns of the Military-Industrial Complex (January 17, 1961) On the eve of his successor taking office, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a televised “Farewell Address” to the nation. In the speech, which became one of the most important by any 20thcentury American president on any subject, Eisenhower spoke about the postwar development of “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” The president warned his countrymen of what he famously termed the “military-industrial complex”—a dangerous confluence of forces that had led to pressure for ever larger military budgets, the increased capture of the nation’s scientific and intellectual resources, and weakened presidential authority. The former general had presided over the enormous growth of the military establishment during his eight years as president, but by 1960 feared the growing influence of powerful interests in and out of government that were increasingly shaping America’s national security policy and leading the United States toward a permanent war footing. The president saw his authority overwhelmed by forces controlling the military budgeting and weapons procurement process: defense contractors led by the aerospace industry, high-ranking generals, retired military men now employed in the defense industry, and congressmen representing districts that were home to major weapons makers. My fellow Americans: Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor. This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation. My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years. In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together. II We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this preeminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment. III Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad. Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology—global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle—with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research —these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we [wish] to travel. But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs—balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage—balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only. IV A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted[:] only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of [the] huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

V Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. VI Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war—as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years—I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road. VII So—in this my last good night to you as your President—I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find something worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future. You and I—my fellow citizens—need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation’s great goals. To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing inspiration: We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love. Source: National Archives. http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=90&page=transcript.

Cuban Revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara’s Speech to the Santa Clara, Cuba, Sugar Workers (March 28, 1961)

In this speech, less than three weeks before the CIA’s Bay of Pigs operation, Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) reminded Cuban sugar workers that the Cuban Revolution that he and Fidel Castro had led represented more than a new future for the island nation. Cuba’s revolution, said Guevara, represented for peoples throughout Latin America the possibility of standing up to and defeating the imperialist objectives of the United States. That truth, of course, was what made it so dangerous to U.S. interests and to policymakers; as long as the revolution stood, it represented the possibility that its Marxist ideology, organizing strategy, and guerrilla tactics could spread to other countries. Guevara also noted the recent death of revolutionary and kindred spirit Patrice Lumumba in the African Congo, a blow to the forces of anti-imperialism on that continent. Mobilising the Masses for the Invasion Speech made to sugar workers in Santa Clara on March 28, 1961; twenty days before the Bay of Pigs invasion. We have to remind ourselves of this at every moment: that we are in a war, a cold war as they call it; a war where there is no front line, no continuous bombardment, but where the two adversaries—this tiny champion of the Caribbean and the immense imperialist hyena—are face to face and aware that one of them is going to end up dead in the fight. The North Americans are aware, they are well aware, compañeros, that the victory of the Cuban Revolution will not be just a simple defeat for the empire, not just one more link in the long chain of defeats to which its policy of force and oppression against peoples has been dragging it in recent years. The victory of the Cuban Revolution will be a tangible demonstration before all the Americas that peoples are capable of rising up, that they can rise up by themselves right under the very fangs of the monster. It will mean the beginning of the end of colonial domination in America, that is, the definitive beginning of the end for North American imperialism. That is why the imperialists do not resign themselves, because this is a struggle to the death. That is why we cannot take one backward step. Because the first time we retreat a step would mean the beginning of a long chain for us too, and would end up the same way as with all the false leaders and all the peoples who at a particular moment of history did not measure up to the task of withstanding the drive of the empire. That is why we must move forward, striking out tirelessly against imperialism. From all over the world we have to learn the lessons which events afford. Lumumba’s murder should be a lesson for all of us. The murder of Patrice Lumumba is an example of what the empire is capable of when the struggle against it is carried on in a firm and sustained way. Imperialism must be struck on the snout once, and again, and then again, in an infinite succession of blows and counter-blows. That is the only way the people can win their real independence. Never a step backward, never a moment of weakness! And every time circumstances might tempt us to think that the situation might be better if we were not fighting against the empire, let each one of us think of the long chain of tortures and deaths through which the Cuban people had to pass to win their independence. Let all of us think of the eviction of peasants, the murder of workers, the strikes broken by the police, of all those kinds of class oppression which have now completely disappeared from Cuba…. And, further, let us understand well how victory is won by preparing the people, by enhancing their revolutionary consciousness in establishing unity, by meeting each and every attempt at aggression with our rifles out in front. That is how it is won….

We must remember this and insist again and again upon this fact: The victory of the Cuban people can never come solely through outside aid, however adequate and generous, however great and strong the solidarity of all the peoples of the world with us may be. Because even with the ample and great solidarity of all the people of the world with Patrice Lumumba and the Congolese people, when conditions inside the country were lacking, when the leaders failed to understand how to strike back mercilessly at imperialism, when they took a step back, they lost the struggle. And they lost it not just for a few years, but who knows for how many years! That was a great setback for all peoples. That is what we must be well aware of, that Cuba’s victory lies not in Soviet rockets, nor in the solidarity of the socialist world, nor in the solidarity of the whole world. Cuba’s victory lies in the unity, the labour, and the spirit of sacrifice of its people. Source: Marxists.org. http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1961/03/28.htm.

Fidel Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana (1962) Although the Fidel Castro–led Cuban Revolution had begun with an ideological fervor that was more nationalistic in emphasis, by 1960–1962 the rhetoric, and Castro himself, had turned decidedly Marxist and fiercely anti-imperialist. In his “Second Declaration of Havana,” Castro gave great weight not only to the history of Spanish imperialism and the struggle against it in the 19th century but to what he called the exploitative history of “rapacious” capitalism in the world. The speech, delivered less than one year after the failed Bay of Pigs operation, echoed the position of his comrade Che Guevara in calling for continued armed resistance in the face of continuing efforts from the “Yankee imperialists” to overthrow his government, and to help advance the Marxist struggle worldwide. On May 18, 1895, on the eve of his death from a Spanish bullet through the heart, José Martí, apostle of our independence, said in an unfinished letter to his friend Manuel Mercado: “Now I am able to write I am in danger each day now of giving my life for my country and for my obligation to prevent before it’s too late—through achieving Cuba’s independence—the United States from extending its control over the Antilles and consequently falling with that much more force upon our countries of America. Whatever I have done till now, and whatever I shall do, has been with that aim. “The people most vitally concerned with preventing the imperialist annexation of Cuba, which would make Cuba the starting point of that course which must be blocked and which we are blocking with our blood—of annexation of our American nations to the violent and brutal North which despises them, are being hindered by lesser and public commitments from the open and avowed espousal of this sacrifice, which is being made for our and their benefit. “I have lived inside the monster and know its guts; and my sling is the sling of David.” In 1895, Martí already pointed out the danger hovering over America and called imperialism by its name: imperialism. He pointed out to the people of Latin America that more than anyone, they had a stake in seeing that Cuba did not succumb to the greed of the Yankee, scornful of the peoples of Latin America. And with his own blood, shed for Cuba and America, he wrote the words which posthumously, in homage to his memory, the people of Cuba place at the head of this declaration. Humiliation Sixty-seven years have passed. Puerto Rico was converted into a colony and is still a colony saturated with military bases. Cuba also fell into the clutches of imperialism. Their troops occupied our

territory. The Platt Amendment was imposed on our first constitution, as a humiliating clause which sanctioned the odious right of foreign intervention. Our riches passed into their hands, our history was falsified, our government and our politics were entirely molded in the interests of the overseers; the nation was subjected to sixty years of political, economic, and cultural suffocation. But Cuba rose, Cuba was able to redeem itself from the bastard guardianship. Cuba broke the chains which tied its fortunes to those of the imperialist oppressor, redeemed its riches, reclaimed its culture, and unfurled its banner as the Free Territory of America. Now the United States will never again be able to use Cuba’s strength against America, but conversely, dominating the majority of the other Latin American states, the United States is attempting to use the strength of America against Cuba. What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world? At the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, a handful of economically developed nations had finished partitioning the world among themselves, subjecting to its economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries. The historical circumstances which permitted certain European countries and the United States of America to attain a high level of industrial development placed them in a position to subject the rest of the world to their domination and exploitation. What motives compelled the expansion of the industrial powers? Were they moral motives? Was it a matter of “civilizing,” as they claimed? No: They were economic reasons. Since the discovery of America, which hurled the European conquerors across the seas to occupy and exploit the lands and inhabitants of other continents, the fundamental motive for their conduct was the desire for riches. The discovery of America itself was carried out in search of shorter routes to the Orient whose goods were highly paid for in Europe. A new social class, the merchants and the producers of manufactured articles for commerce, arose from the womb of the feudal society of lords and serfs in the decline of the Middle Ages. The thirst for gold was the motive which spurred the efforts of that new class. The desire for gain was the incentive for its conduct throughout history. With the growth of manufacturing and commerce, its social influence also grew. The productive forces which were developing in the womb of feudal society clashed more and more with the relationships of servitude characteristic of feudalism, with its laws, its institutions, its philosophy, its morality, its art, and its political ideology. New philosophical and political ideas, new concepts of right and of the state were proclaimed by the intellectual representatives of the bourgeoisie, which—because they responded to the new necessities of social life—gradually entered into the consciousness of the exploited masses. They were then revolutionary ideas opposed to those outworn ideas of feudal society. The peasants, the artisans, the workers, led by the bourgeoisie, overthrew the feudal order, its philosophy, its ideas, its institutions, its laws, and the privileges of the ruling class, that is, the hereditary nobility. At that time, the bourgeoisie considered revolution necessary and just. It did not think that the feudal order could and should be eternal—as it now thinks of its capitalist social order. It encouraged the peasants to free themselves from feudal servitude, it turned the artisans against the medieval guilds, and demanded the right to political power. The absolute monarchs, the nobility, and the high clergy stubbornly defended their class privileges, proclaiming the divine right of kings and the immutability of the social order. To be liberal then, to proclaim the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, or Jean Jacques Rousseau,

spokesmen for bourgeois philosophy, constituted in the eyes of the ruling classes as serious a crime as it does today in the eyes of the bourgeoisie to be a socialist and to proclaim the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. When the bourgeoisie took political power and established its capitalist mode of production on the ruins of feudal society, it was on this mode of production it erected its state, its laws, its ideas, and institutions. Those institutions sanctified, in the first instance, the essence of class rule: private property…. Exploitation Where did the colossal quantity of resources come from which permitted a handful of monopolists to accumulate billions of dollars? Simply from the exploitation of human labor. Millions of men, forced to work for subsistence wages, produced with their strength the gigantic capital of the monopolies. From the workers came the fortunes of the privileged classes, ever richer, ever more powerful. Through the banking institutions, these classes were able to make use, not only of their own money, but that of all society. Thus was brought about the fusion of the banks with giant industry, and finance capital was born. What should they do with the great surplus of capital which was accumulating in ever greater quantities? Invade the world with it. Always in pursuit of profit, they began to seize the natural resources of all the economically weak countries and to exploit the human labor of the inhabitants, paying even more wretched wages than they were forced to pay to the workers of their own developed countries. Thus, began the territorial and economic division of the world. By 1914, eight or ten imperialist countries had subjugated territories beyond their own borders, covering more than 83,700,000 square kilometers, with a population of 970,000,000 inhabitants. They had simply divided up the world. But as the world was limited in size and already divided down to the last corner of the earth, a clash ensued among the different monopolistic nations and struggles grew for new divisions, struggles originating in the disproportionate distribution of industrial and economic power which the various monopolistic nations had attained in their uneven development. Imperialist wars broke out which would cost humanity fifty million dead, tens of millions wounded and the destruction of incalculable material and cultural wealth. Even before this had happened, Karl Marx wrote that “capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot through every pore with blood and mire.” The capitalist system of production, once it had given all of which it was capable, became an abysmal obstacle to the progress of humanity. But from its origins, the bourgeoisie carried within itself its contradiction. In its womb gigantic productive instrumentalities were developed, but with time a new and vigorous social force developed: the proletariat. The proletariat which was destined to change the old and worn-out social system of capitalism into a superior socio-economic form in accordance with the historic possibilities of human society, by converting into social property those gigantic means of production which the people, and none but the people, had created and amassed by their work. At such a state of development, the productive forces made completely anachronistic and outmoded the regime which stood for private ownership and the economic subordination of millions and millions of human beings to the dictates of a small, social minority…. The interests of humanity cried out for a halt to the anarchy of capitalist production; for a halt to the waste, the economic crises, and the rapacious wars which are part of the capitalist system. The growing necessities of the human race and the possibility of satisfying them demanded the planned development of the economy and the rational utilization of means of production and natural resources. It was inevitable that imperialism and colonialism would fall into a profound and insoluble crisis. The general crisis began with the outbreak of World War I, with the revolution of the workers and

peasants which overthrew the Czarist empire of Russia and founded, amidst the most difficult conditions of capitalist encirclement and aggression, the world’s first socialist state, opening a new era in the history of humanity. From that time on, the crisis and decomposition of the imperialist system has incessantly worsened. Imperialist Powers World War II, unleashed by the imperialist powers—and into which were dragged the Soviet Union and other criminally invaded peoples of Asia and Europe who were invaded in a criminal manner and engaged in a bloody struggle of liberation—culminated in the defeat of fascism, formation of the worldwide socialist camp and the struggle of the colonial and dependent peoples for their sovereignty. Between 1945 and 1957, more than 1.2 billion human beings gained their independence in Asia and Africa. The blood shed by the people was not in vain. The movement of the dependent and colonial peoples is a phenomenon of universal character which agitates the world and marks the final crisis of imperialism. Cuba and Latin America are part of the world. Our problems form part of the problems engendered by the general crisis of imperialism and the struggle of the subjugated peoples—the clash between the world that is being born and the world that is dying. The odious and brutal campaign unleashed against our nation expresses the desperate, as well as futile, effort which the imperialists are making to prevent the liberation of the people. Cuba hurts the imperialists in a special way. What is it that is hidden behind the Yankee’s hatred of the Cuban Revolution? What is it that rationally explains the conspiracy which unites, for the same aggressive purpose, the most powerful and richest imperialist power in the modern world and the oligarchies of an entire continent, which together are supposed to represent a population of 350 million human beings, against a small country of only seven million inhabitants, economically underdeveloped, without financial or military means to threaten the security or economy of any other country? What unites them and stirs them up in fear? What explains it is fear. Not fear of the Cuban Revolution but fear of the Latin American revolution. Not fear of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, students, and progressive sectors of the middle strata which, by revolutionary means, have taken power in Cuba; but fear that the workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, and progressive sectors of the middle strata will, by revolutionary means, take power in the oppressed and hungry countries exploited by the Yankee monopolies and reactionary oligarchies of America; fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from the oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free people of America. By crushing the Cuban Revolution, they hope to dispel the fear that torments them, the specter of the revolution that threatens them. By liquidating the Cuban Revolution, they hope to liquidate the revolutionary spirit of the people. They imagine in their delirium that Cuba is an exporter of revolutions. In their sleepless merchants’ and usurers’ minds there is the idea that revolutions can be bought, sold, rented, loaned, exported, and imported like some piece of merchandise. Ignorant of the objective laws that govern the development of human societies, they believe that their monopolistic, capitalistic, and semi-feudal regimes are eternal. Educated in their own reactionary ideology, a mixture of superstition, ignorance, subjectivism, pragmatism, and other mental aberrations, they have an image of the world and of the march of history conforming to their interests as exploiting classes. They imagine that revolutions are born or die in the brains of individuals or are caused by divine laws, and, moreover, that the gods are on their side. They have always thought that way—from the devout patrician pagans of Roman slave society who hurled the early Christians to the lions at the circus, and the inquisitors of the Middle Ages who, as guardians of feudalism and absolute monarchy, burned at the stake the first representatives of the

liberal thought of the nascent bourgeoisie, up to today’s bishops who anathematize proletarian revolutions in defense of the bourgeois and monopolist regime…. What is Cuba’s history but that of Latin America? What is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the cruelest exploitation of the world by imperialism? At the end of the last century and the beginning of the present, a handful of economically developed nations had divided the world among themselves subjecting two thirds of humanity to their economic and political domination. Humanity was forced to work for the dominating classes of the group of nations which had a developed capitalist economy. The historic circumstances which permitted certain European countries and the United States of North America to attain a high industrial development level put them in a position which enabled them to subject and exploit the rest of the world. What motives lay behind this expansion of the industrial powers? Were they moral, “civilizing” reasons, as they claimed? No. Their motives were economic. The discovery of America sent the European conquerors across the seas to occupy and to exploit the lands and peoples of other continents; the lust for riches was the basic motivation for their conduct. America’s discovery took place in the search for shorter ways to the Orient, whose products Europe valued highly. A new social class, the merchants and the producers of articles manufactured for commerce, arose from the feudal society of lords and serfs in the latter part of the Middle Ages. The lust for gold promoted the efforts of the new class. The lust for profit was the incentive of their behavior throughout its history. As industry and trade developed, the social influence of the new class grew. The new productive forces maturing in the midst of the feudal society increasingly clashed with feudalism and its serfdom, its laws, its institutions, its philosophy, its morals, its art, and its political ideology…. Since the end of the Second World War, the Latin American nations are becoming pauperized constantly. The value of their [per] capita income falls. The dreadful percentages of child death rate do not decrease, the number of illiterates grows higher, the peoples lack employment, land, adequate housing, schools, hospitals, communication systems and the means of subsistence. On the other hand, North America investments exceed 10 billion dollars. Latin America, moreover, supplies cheap raw materials and pays high prices for manufactured articles. Like the first Spanish conquerors, who exchanged mirrors and trinkets with the Indians for silver and gold, so the United States trades with Latin America. To hold on to this torrent of wealth, to take greater possession of America’s resources and to exploit its longsuffering peoples: this is what is hidden behind the military pacts, the military missions and Washington’s diplomatic lobbying…. Wherever roads are closed to the peoples, where repression of workers and peasants is fierce, where the domination of Yankee monopolies is strongest, the first and most important lesson is to understand that it is neither just nor correct to divert the peoples with the vain and fanciful illusion that the dominant classes can be uprooted by legal means which do not and will not exist. The ruling classes are entrenched in all positions of state power. They monopolize the teaching field. They dominate all means of mass communication. They have infinite financial resources. Theirs is a power which the monopolies and the ruling few will defend by blood and fire with the strength of their police and their armies. The duty of every revolutionary is to make revolution. We know that in America and throughout the world the revolution will be victorious. But revolutionaries cannot sit in the doorways of their homes to watch the corpse of imperialism pass by. The role of Job does not behoove a revolutionary. Each year by

which America’s liberation may be hastened will mean millions of children rescued from death, millions of minds freed for learning, infinitudes of sorrow spared the peoples. Even though the Yankee imperialists are preparing a bloodbath for America they will not succeed in drowning the people’s struggle. They will evoke universal hatred against themselves. This will be the last act of their rapacious and caveman system…. Source: Walter Lippman: http://www.walterlippmann.com/fc-02-04-1962.html.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Message to Congress on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (August 5, 1964) and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964) In support of increasingly aggressive U.S. and South Vietnamese military operations along the coast of North Vietnam throughout the winter and spring of 1964, the American destroyer USS Maddox was deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin. On July 30–31, South Vietnamese and U.S. forces initiated a series of raids on two islands in the gulf. The North Vietnamese government raised an official protest that went unanswered. Two days later North Vietnamese patrol boats began observing the Maddox. American commanders declared the patrol boats as being “in pursuit.” Documents later showed that the North Vietnamese fired no shots on the night of August 2 before the USS Maddox began to unload. President Lyndon Johnson then deployed the USS Turner Joy to the area. The next night, “unidentified” radar sounds led to both U.S. vessels firing away at an enemy that was not there. Despite the suggestion from the Turner Joy commander calling for review of the incident, Johnson reported to the American people that U.S. vessels “on routine patrol” and in “international waters” had been attacked. That was enough: Congress nearly unanimously supported the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that was tantamount to a declaration of war, giving the president full authority to launch a massive military escalation against the Communists in Vietnam. Last night I announced to the American people that the North Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters, and I had therefore directed air action against gunboats and supporting facilities used in these hostile operations. This air action has now been carried out with substantial damage to the boats and facilities. Two U.S. aircraft were lost in the action. After consultation with the leaders of both parties in the Congress, I further announced a decision to ask the Congress for a resolution expressing the unity and determination of the United States in supporting freedom and in protecting peace in southeast Asia. These latest actions of the North Vietnamese regime have given a new and grave turn to the already serious situation in southeast Asia. Our commitments in that area are well known to the Congress. They were first made in 1954 by President Eisenhower. They were further defined in the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty approved by the Senate in February 1955. This treaty with its accompanying protocol obligates the United States and other members to act in accordance with their constitutional processes to meet Communist aggression against any of the parties or protocol states. Our policy in southeast Asia has been consistent and unchanged since 1954. I summarized it on June 2 in four simple propositions: America keeps her word. Here as elsewhere, we must and shall honor our commitments.

The issue is the future of southeast Asia as a whole. A threat to any nation in that region is a threat to all, and a threat to us. Our purpose is peace. We have no military, political, or territorial ambitions in the area. This is not just a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity. Our military and economic assistance to South Vietnam and Laos in particular has the purpose of helping these countries to repel aggression and strengthen their independence. The threat to the free nations of southeast Asia has long been clear. The North Vietnamese regime has constantly sought to take over South Vietnam and Laos. This Communist regime has violated the Geneva accords for Vietnam. It has systematically conducted a campaign of subversion, which includes the direction, training, and supply of personnel and arms for the conduct of guerrilla warfare in South Vietnamese territory. In Laos, the North Vietnamese regime has maintained military forces, used Laotian territory for infiltration into South Vietnam, and most recently carried out combat operations—all in direct violation of the Geneva Agreements of 1962. In recent months, the actions of the North Vietnamese regime have become steadily more threatening…. As President of the United States I have concluded that I should now ask the Congress, on its part, to join in affirming the national determination that all such attacks will be met, and that the United States will continue in its basic policy of assisting the free nations of the area to defend their freedom. As I have repeatedly made clear, the United States intends no rashness, and seeks no wider war. We must make it clear to all that the United States is united in its determination to bring about the end of Communist subversion and aggression in the area. We seek the full and effective restoration of the international agreements signed in Geneva in 1954, with respect to South Vietnam, and again in Geneva in 1962, with respect to Laos…. Joint Resolution of Congress H.J. RES 1145 (August 7, 1964) Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. Section 2. The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. Consonant with the Constitution of the United States and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom. Section 3. This resolution shall expire when the President shall determine that the peace and security of the area is reasonably assured by international conditions created by action of the United Nations or otherwise, except that it may be terminated earlier by concurrent resolution of the Congress. Source: The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/tonkin-g.asp.

“Memorandum for the Record” on the Orchestration of Chilean Coup (September 17, 1970) As declassified CIA documents later revealed, the genesis of Project FUBELT—to prevent Salvador

Allende, the elected but left-leaning president of Chile, from taking office, or to ensure his overthrow from power—was first conceived immediately following Allende’s election on September 4, 1970. This “Memorandum for the Record” indicates that CIA director Richard Helms (1913–2002) called a meeting of top agency officials to convey the word that President Richard Nixon had authorized the expenditure of $10 million that was to be funneled entirely (and secretly) through the CIA to ensure that Allende was removed. As National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) had told the president, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD SUBJECT: Genesis of Project FUBELT 1. On this date the Director called a meeting in connection with the Chilean situation. Present in addition to the Director were General Cushman, DDCI; Col. White, ExDir-Compt; Thomas Karamessines, DDP; Cord Meyer, ADDP; William V. Broe, Chief WH [Western Hemisphere] Division; [Name deleted on national security grounds.] Deputy Chief, WH Division, [Name deleted on national security grounds.] Chief, Covert Action, WH Division; and [Name deleted on national security grounds.] Chief, WH/4. 2. The Director told the group that President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him. The President authorized ten million dollars for this purpose, if needed. Further, the Agency is to carry out this mission without coordination with the Departments of State or Defense. 3. During the meeting it was decided that Mr. Thomas Karamessines, DDP, would have overall responsibility for this project. He would be assisted by a special task force set up for this purpose in the Western Hemisphere Division. [Sentences deleted on national security grounds.] 4. Col. White was asked by the Director to make all necessary support arrangements in connection with the project. 5. The Director said he had been asked by Dr. Henry Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, to meet with him on Friday, 18 September to give him the Agency’s views on how this mission could be accomplished. William V. Broe Chief Western Hemisphere Division SECRET/SENSITIVE EYES ONLY Source: National Archives: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/ch03-01.htm.

Teleconference between President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the Overthrow of President Allende in Chile (September 16, 1973)

In this transcript from a teleconference between Secretary of State Kissinger and President Nixon just five days following the overthrow of “anti-American” Chilean president Salvador Allende that they helped to orchestrate, the two men bemoan the fact that the American press was not interpreting it as a victory for U.S. interests, but was raising questions about the possible U.S. role in the toppling of the duly elected leader of a sovereign country. Mr. Kissinger/The President: K: Hello. P: Hi, Henry. K: Mr. President. P: Where are you? In New York? K: No, I am in Washington. I am working. I may go to the football game this afternoon if I get through. P. Good. Good. Well it is the opener. It is better than television. Nothing new of any importance or is there? K: Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown. P: Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something. K: I mean instead of celebrating—in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes. P: Well we didn’t—as you know—our hand doesn’t show on this one though. K: We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them. ______ created the conditions as great as possible (??) P: That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played. But listen, as far as people are concerned let me say they aren’t going to buy this crap from the Liberals on this one. K: Absolutely not. P: They know it is a pro-Communist government and that is the way it is. K: Exactly. And pro-Castro. P: Well the main thing was. Let’s forget the pro-Communist. It was an anti-American government all the way. K: Oh, wildly. P: And your expropriating. I notice the memorandum you sent up of the confidential conversation _________ set up a policy reimbursement on expropriations and cooperation with the United States for breaking relations with Castro. Well what the hell that is a great treat (?) if they think that. No don’t let the columns and the bleeding on that— K: Oh, oh it doesn’t bother me. I am just reporting it to you. P: Yes, you are reporting it because it is just typical of the crap we are up against. K: And the unbelievable filthy hypocrisy. P: We know that. K: Of these people. When it is South Africa, if we don’t overthrow them there they are raising hell. P: Yes, that is right. K: But otherwise things are fairly quiet. The Chinese are making very friendly noises. I think they are just waiting for my confirmation to make a proposal. P: When you say their noises are friendly, what do you mean?

K: Well their newspapers have stopped attacking us. They are blasting the Russians like crazy. And they have blasted them so much with Pompidou there that he is embarrassed…. P: That is good. K: You know that they wouldn’t do that unless they wanted to ingratiate themselves. P: Right, right. K: And I told you from the European front that is going along very well but I think they ought to play it cool until next spring. Source: National Security Archive. http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437.

3. Confronting the Vietnam Syndrome, 1976–1989

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW No matter where an American stood on the political spectrum in the late 1970s, it was impossible to deny the profound impact of the Vietnam War on both U.S. foreign policy and the national psyche. Although attitudes were wide-ranging, generally there were two camps. Conservatives thought the war was, as Ronald Reagan later called it, a “noble cause” that the United States could have won. They argued that the war was lost not by soldiers, but by politicians in Washington and the antiwar movement that imposed political restraints on the U.S. military. Some claimed further that the consequences of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam had been disastrous; America had been rendered, as President Richard Nixon had warned in 1970, “a pitiful, helpless giant” on the world stage. This represented the genesis of the argument of defense “hawks” that crystallized in the late 1970s as the “Vietnam Syndrome”: the idea that the United States lacked not the military or technological force to defeat communism worldwide, but the political will. Conservative foreign policy experts argued that the war had been lost when a relative few antiwar radicals duped a weak American polity, and an undisciplined conscripted army had shown itself not up to the challenge of defeating the Communists. This, they asserted, must never be allowed to happen again. Americans needed to get over their fear of militarily engaging in a still-dangerous world. Treating the affliction of the Vietnam Syndrome—a term that became a kind of metonym for a general American malaise or weakness—became a consuming objective for many authoritative voices of the national discourse. On the other side were those who had opposed the war, many of whom believed U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia had been a grievous mistake from the beginning. Some thought so for strategic reasons—as General Omar Bradley had said of Korea, that it was “the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Antiwar activists had opposed escalation in Vietnam from the start as an affront to international law. Whatever one’s position, the Vietnam War stood as one of the great national failures in the nation’s history, one that would cast a long shadow on America’s foreign policy and its image both at home and internationally. Not unrelated to the collapse of national faith and confidence that emerged from Vietnam was a trove of shocking revelations about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the first three decades of the Cold War. Many of these came through the work of the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee that investigated and exposed the clandestine activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The committee revealed CIA involvement in efforts to destabilize and overthrow foreign governments and assassinate foreign leaders who were deemed threats to U.S. interests in the Cold War. The committee also laid bare the extent to which U.S. intelligence agencies had been spying illegally on American citizens. Fourteen Church

Committee reports in 1975–1976 disclosed a range of covert operations, including the subversion of democratic elections in foreign countries and assassination plots against foreign leaders. Coming on the heels of the Watergate scandal that had also brought to light wide-ranging abuses of government power (many involving former intelligence agency operatives), the reports were for many a clarion call for oversight and restrictions of U.S. intelligence operations. The work of the Church Committee reinforced a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate season of reform, the centerpiece of which was legislative restraints on the exercise of foreign policy by the executive branch that extended the spirit of the 1973 War Powers Act. For example, Congress established committees to review CIA activities more closely. In 1976 President Ford issued an executive order outlawing political assassination as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Further, world events such as the war launched by Communist Vietnam against Communist Cambodia in 1978 that ended the genocide of Pol Pot, and then the invasion of Vietnam by China—the nation often cited publicly by U.S. officials as the real strategic threat in the Vietnam conflict—further underscored the need to critically reexamine many of the fundamental assumptions of a bipolar world that had guided U.S. policy during the Cold War. The sobering view of American actions in Vietnam was reflected in a number of Hollywood films that depicted returning Vietnam veterans as either deeply tormented victims of the war, or as in Apocalypse Now (1979), latent psychopaths easily driven to madness by a savage war. Vietnam movies of the era uniformly steered clear of any critique of American policy in Southeast Asia, often deflecting the actions of their rogue heroes as a response to the savagery of the Viet Cong enemy. A few years later, Missing (1982) did level a fairly direct indictment of U.S. policy, the subject being the murder of an American journalist during the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. Responding in part to the national mood of self-recrimination, President Jimmy Carter (1924–) pledged a foreign policy that would be guided by a commitment to human rights. Carter condemned traditional Communist foes like the Soviet Union and Cuba, but also for the first time since the Cold War condemned human rights abuses committed by U.S.-allied authoritarian regimes. Although Carter’s human rights–centered policy was inconsistent—he overlooked dictatorships in the Philippines and elsewhere, for example—the president did voice unprecedented criticism of U.S. friends like South Africa, Chile, and Guatemala with notorious human rights records. Central America posed the greatest test. Here the president tried to straddle a fine line: protecting U.S. interests while trying to forge a policy that could transform the image of the United States away from that of the imperialist power to the north. That difficult balancing act was seen in the signing of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties that transferred control of the canal to Panama, while guaranteeing the United States the right to defend the canal against threats to its neutrality—a reflection of a desire to retain regional hegemony. In Nicaragua, the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza II ended with the Sandinista revolution in 1979. Carter tried to thread the needle again—seeking a “moderate” alternative to the Marxist Sandinistas by way of covert CIA financial support to their political opponents, while offering conditional but unprecedented aid to the Sandinista government. What to do in El Salvador proved a more daunting human rights challenge. Fraudulent national elections in February 1977 brought national protests that triggered violent government repression, suspension of civil liberties, widespread torture, and the state-sanctioned disappearance and execution of antigovernment activists. Many of these activities were carried out by paramilitary “death squads” linked to the government, some of whose leaders were trained at the U.S. School of the Americas. The generous flow of U.S. weapons and other military assistance continued throughout 1980, despite the killing of some 8,000 noncombatant Salvadorans that year—including the shocking assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Following the murder of four American Catholic nuns in December, Carter gave in to mounting

pressure to cut off aid. But the incoming administration of President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) promised to restore and increase military aid to the government. Minimizing allegations of human rights abuses, Reagan officials promised to mount far more vigorous resistance to what it labeled Soviet- and Cuban-inspired Communist revolution throughout Central America. Fueled in part by U.S. weapons, the Salvadoran Civil War continued until 1992, by which time more than 75,000 Salvadorans had been killed, the majority by the government or death squads. In Iran, Jimmy Carter faced a policy dilemma of equally grave consequences. Despite gross violations of human rights committed by U.S.-supported Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980)—at least 50,000 had been held as political prisoners at one time, many of them tortured—President Carter early in his administration hailed the regime as an “island of stability” in a troubled Middle East. By mid-1978, however, the majority of Iranians turned against the shah and supported the revolutionary forces led by the exiled religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Shortly after the shah fell to the revolution in January 1979, he sought treatment in the United States for advanced lymphoma, a request Carter granted. What ensued—the Iran Hostage Crisis—helped seal Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election. The taking of 66 Americans at the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries was a major diplomatic crisis lasting from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981. Images of burning U.S. flags and shackled, blindfolded Americans being led through the streets of Tehran enraged Americans at home and intensified the Vietnam Syndrome. America appeared a weakened nation at the mercy of geopolitical forces beyond the control of its own feckless government. Although from Iran the crisis—known as the “Conquest of the American Spy Den”—represented a comeuppance for past imperialist actions, most Americans demanded a foreign policy of fewer platitudes about human rights and the fortifying of U.S. military capabilities. Just one month after the hostages were taken, American chauvinism was further stoked when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter’s critics alleged that it was his vacillating foreign policy that had invited the invasion. Rejecting such assertions and facing a tough reelection, Carter called for increases in military spending and declared that the United States was prepared to militarily defend its vital strategic interests in the Persian Gulf. The frustrations of Americans were heard that spring of 1980 in the jingoistic lyrics of the hit song “In America” by the Southern country rock group, the Charlie Daniels Band, in which the Russians were told they “could all go all straight to hell.” Thus did Ronald Reagan come to the presidency amid widespread perceptions of a weakened nation. Reagan promised to “rebuild” America’s military forces, restore the U.S. role as a stalwart defender of freedom against Communist incursion, and renew America’s confidence regarding its righteous place in the world. The president called for significant increases in military spending, accelerating the buildup of U.S. nuclear weapons and delivery systems initiated by Carter. Reagan declared his policy to be one of “peace through strength,” and most Americans applauded. The popularity of such films as Invasion USA and Red Dawn reflected a broadly felt desire to “get tough” again against the Communists. The years 1981–1983 marked the darkest time of the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. military carried out exercises simulating a “nuclear exchange” between the Cold War powers and appeared from leaked documents to be preparing for such a confrontation. Soviet leaders were convinced that the United States was indeed planning a nuclear first-strike on their country. When the president declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and joked on another occasion that “the bombing begins in five minutes,” relatively few Americans protested. They cheered the prospect of the technologically fantastic Strategic Defense Initiative that would, insisted Reagan, protect Americans from incoming nuclear attack. When a South Korean civilian airliner strayed far off course and was shot down over Soviet air space in September 1983, Reagan denounced it as a “crime against humanity.” The next month,

more than 100 million Americans watched ABC’s The Day After dramatically depicting a nuclear attack on the United States. Heightened fears of nuclear war produced the Nuclear Freeze movement, the largest peace movement in world history. Beyond directly confronting the Soviets, the so-called “Reagan Doctrine” promised to challenge the influence of communism internationally in ways that would lead to victory in the Cold War. Reagan administration officials sought to move beyond the Truman “containment” strategy that had long guided U.S. actions, turn away from the Carter human rights policy that they believed had undermined U.S. strategic interests, and instead go on the offensive aggressively against Communist forces. From the last year of the Carter administration to the end of the war in 1987, the United States increased military aid and training for the mujahideen battling the Soviet Union in the mountains of Afghanistan from $20 million to more than $600 million per year. The Reagan administration restored aid to U.S. allies Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and South Korea despite the poor human rights records of those nations. The authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) in the Philippines was hailed as a beacon of democracy—a position the Reagan White House was later forced to reverse in the face of massive popular revolt from 1983 to 1986. The Reagan Doctrine was most vigorously applied in Central America. Beyond increased military aid for repressive governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, it was Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua that became the focus of U.S. efforts to achieve an anticommunist victory in the hemisphere. With qualified congressional support, the administration armed, trained, and financed a band of Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries known as the Contras to wage a violent guerrilla war against the government. Leading human rights organizations alleged that the CIA-trained Contras systematically targeted health care workers, local Sandinista officials, and civilians for political assassination and torture, seized and destroyed the homes and property of Nicaraguan civilians who supported the government, and utilized rape as a form of political terror. When it was disclosed that the Contras had mined the country’s harbors, Nicaragua took the United States to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Rejecting U.S. claims that its actions were justified because of Nicaragua’s support of Salvadoran rebels, the ICJ found the United States guilty of violating international law by waging war against a sovereign nation. CIA and National Security Council officials minimized the allegations and mounted a concerted propaganda campaign aimed at convincing Americans that it was the Sandinistas who were guilty of human rights crimes and that the Contras were the “freedom fighters”—as the president claimed, “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” In sharp contrast, critics by this time were calling the Contras little more than mercenary thugs, and in 1984 the U.S. Congress cut off their funding. President Reagan, however, remained resolutely committed to the Contras, as were a number of key officials at the National Security Council and CIA, who from 1984–1986 set out on a series of covert and highly illegal activities aimed at sustaining Contra operations. These efforts came to include the scandalous affair known as Iran-Contra: siphoning funds from the sale of antitank and antiaircraft missiles to Iran—itself a violation of numerous federal laws— and diverting the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua. Beyond supporting the Contras, the other goal in selling weapons to a nation on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism was to win favor with officials in the Iranian government who might be able to help win the release of seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by the Iran-sponsored terror organization Hezbollah. Beginning in 1982, Americans and other Western European foreign nationals had been seized by Hezbollah following U.S. and European nations’ “peacekeeping” intervention in Lebanon that followed the Israeli invasion of that country. The bombing of the U.S. Marines’ barracks in Beirut in October 1983 that killed 241 Americans provoked a U.S. withdrawal (and interestingly was followed

immediately by the successful U.S. invasion of the Central American nation of Grenada). Hezbollah, acting as an extension of Iranian foreign policy, continued to exact retribution for U.S. actions and aimed to extract a change in U.S. policy. The Reagan Doctrine was applied with vigor in Africa. In 1986, President Reagan authorized air strikes against Libya in retaliation for Muammar Qaddafi’s (1942–2011) alleged involvement in a wave of terrorism. Despite evidence of Qaddafi’s complicity, the U.S. attack was condemned in the UN General Assembly as a violation of international law. In Angola, Reagan offered generous support to Jonas Savimbi (1934–2002) and his army of anticommunist rebels fighting to overthrow a Marxist government that enjoyed significant military support from the Soviet Union and the Cuban army. U.S. military aid to Savimbi’s forces helped to fuel a brutal civil war that lasted more than a quarter-century and took the lives of more than 500,000 civilians. U.S. involvement in Angola tied the United States more closely to apartheid South Africa, Savimbi’s greatest supporter. From the mid-1970s forward, the United States faced growing calls to impose economic sanctions against South Africa—pressure President Reagan resisted in his first term, given the apartheid government’s strategic importance as a Cold War ally. By 1986, however, U.S.-Soviet relations were thawing and U.S. support for both South Africa and Angola was increasingly difficult to defend. Late in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, dramatically symbolizing larger events that had been unfolding since the early 1980s. The Central Intelligence Agency had not foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the loosening of its stranglehold over Eastern Europe. As late as 1987 hardliners at the CIA and Pentagon were still asserting that Soviet reforms and concessions on arms control were deceptive subterfuges for some sort of renewed Communist aggression. It seemed that the national security establishment was so hardwired for confrontation with the Soviet Union that it could not foresee the possibility that the Cold War could end peacefully, that the Soviet empire would eventually crumble under its own weight. On December 5, 1989, just one month after passage between East and West Berlin was reopened, President George H. W. Bush launched “Operation Just Cause,” an invasion of Panama. The nation’s strongman leader, General Manuel Antonio Noriega (1938–), had served as a vital link to U.S. intelligence-gathering operations in Cuba and provided key support for the U.S. Contra war, but that conflict also was winding down. The U.S. “War on Drugs,” however, was not. Noriega’s involvement in drug trafficking had come to light and now was an embarrassment to the United States. In addition, Noriega now asserted a more independent foreign policy. Noriega stood no chance against U.S. forces and was quickly deposed. Two weeks after watching the military operation in Panama, many Americans went to movie theaters and saw the premier of Born on the 4th of July, Oliver Stone’s biopic centered on the life of Vietnam veteran and paraplegic Ron Kovic. Tom Cruise’s Oscar-nominated depiction of Kovic’s transformation from gung-ho marine to embittered critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam offered a searing reminder that despite whatever ephemeral satisfaction might have come from the military triumphs of the decade, for many soldiers the Vietnam War was far from over. At the turn of the century’s last decade, the fate of the Vietnam Syndrome and the true long-term implications of that war for future U.S. actions still hung in the air.

Afghanistan (1976–1989)

Afghanistan is a nation geographically situated between the regions of South Asia, Central Asia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. From ancient times to the present era, Afghanistan’s history is so laden with failed occupations by invading imperial forces that the country has been called “the graveyard of empires.” The United States’ current and prolonged involvement in Afghanistan has its origins in the late Cold War era, coinciding with the Soviet Union’s own intervention in the country. Although the first formal diplomatic opening between the United States and Afghanistan dates to the 1920s, a diplomatic legation was not opened until 1942, succeeded in 1948 by the opening of a U.S. embassy in Kabul. By that time, the country had assumed growing importance for the United States with the outbreak of the Cold War and the related geostrategic significance of Central Asia and the neighboring oil-rich Middle East. During the 1950s and 1960s the United States extended a series of generous aid packages to Afghanistan, in large part to stem the influence of the Communist Soviet Union with which the country shared a thousand-mile northern border. Overlapping with that period was the pivotal reign of Muhammad Daoud Khan (1953–1963) as Afghanistan’s royal prime minister. Daoud supported a range of transformational policies—many heavily financed by the United States—aimed at improving agricultural and industrial production and modernizing the society. Some of Daoud’s policies brought tensions with neighboring Pakistan and internal economic crises. They also helped trigger a growing infusion of economic and military aid from the Soviet Union. In response, the United States urged Iran, then a strong U.S. client state under Shah Reza Pahlavi, to funnel aid to Afghanistan as a means of weakening Soviet influence. Iran’s notorious secret police, the CIAtrained SAVAK, worked to purge alleged Communist sympathizers from the Afghanistan government. Daoud was forced to resign in 1963 as part of the resolution of a Pakistan border crisis. For the next decade and a half the U.S. government continued to infuse the country with foreign aid, Peace Corps volunteers, and other programs to keep a check on Soviet influence. The United States remained confident that its interests in the broader region were secure. That confidence began to weaken with a series of events unfolding in the 1970s in both Iran and Afghanistan. In 1973 Daoud Khan led a coup d’etat against King Zahir Shah. Aided by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDP), Daoud abolished the monarchy and declared himself president of the new Republic of Afghanistan. In 1975, after having promoted successful progressive policies supported by the PDP, Daoud Khan sharply curtailed Soviet influence in Afghan military training and also moved toward the creation of his own political party and the termination of all political rights for the PDP. These moves came at the urging of the shah of Iran, who threatened to cut off economic assistance if Daoud did not comply. When in April 1978 Daoud had a leader of the party killed and arrested its top leadership, the PDP retaliated, seizing power and executing Daoud in the “Saur Revolution.” The new president, Mohammed Noor Taraki, declared that the new government would administer the Islamic state in a secular manner and remain nonaligned in foreign affairs. Nevertheless, the fact that it immediately established friendly relations with the Soviet Union, advanced socialist programs like land reform and labor rights, espoused anti-imperialist rhetoric, and welcomed the support of Communist governments like Cuba and North Korea, all greatly antagonized the United States. In addition, the collapse of the shah’s government in Iran in 1978 and the associated loss of that nation as a base for U.S. military installations heightened the strategic importance of Afghanistan for the United States. Since 1953, the United States had relied on Iran as an anti-Soviet bulwark, fortifying the U.S. ability to project its power into the Middle East and South Central Asia and advance its regional strategic interests. During that quarter century, the United States viewed Soviet influence in Afghanistan as a marginal threat at best, given the shared geographic border of the two countries and the existence of strong U.S. allies in the region. That equation changed with the fall of the shah.

In the spring of 1978 U.S. president Jimmy Carter moved to support the convergence of a number of conservative Islamic factions into an effective fighting force to contest increased Soviet interference in Afghanistan. The CIA viewed the “holy warriors” of the mujahideen—many arriving from neighboring Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—as more reliably anti-Soviet and a less fractious partner in fighting Soviet intervention than indigenous Afghan elements. Osama bin Laden was among the anti-Soviet Arab zealots of the mujahideen who welcomed U.S. support in their effort to oust a regime they saw as anti-Muslim “infidels.” In the spring of 1979, as war began to rage in the eastern part of the country between the Sovietbacked Afghan government and the mujahideen, the United States warned the Soviets to adhere to principles of nonintervention—even as it (along with neighboring Pakistan) stepped up support for the extremist mujahideen fighters. In March the Taraki government, having grown increasingly repressive in imposing a modernization program that included the elimination of Islamic civil and marriage laws, requested direct Soviet intervention and was denied. On July 3, President Carter authorized American aid to the mujahideen. That fall Taraki was murdered by forces associated with his prime minister, the more severe Hafizullah Amin. Disliked by Soviet officials, by Afghan Islamists, and suspected by the United States as the killer of its ambassador in Kabul, Amin imposed harsh reforms that further inflamed the climate of civil war. Even when Taraki was still alive, as prime minister Amin had met uprisings of the mujahideen with bloody reprisals that killed and tortured thousands of innocent Afghan civilians, including many children. The volatile instability of Amin’s rule (and his having overthrown the Soviet-backed Taraki) proved the final trigger for Soviet intervention—the first time in the postwar era the USSR had deployed military forces beyond Eastern Europe. Soviet military forces rolled across the border late that December, took control of the palace and assassinated Amin, and installed as president Babrak Kamal, the Afghan ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Widespread international condemnation met these actions, declared by President Carter to be “the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War” (Galster). American politicians widely interpreted the invasion as a Soviet advance in the direction of Middle East oil resources, though little evidence ever emerged to support the charges.

Rebel soldiers known as mujahideen (“holy warriors”) rest high in the mountains in the Kunar province of Afghanistan, in May 1980. It was the spring of 1978—a year and a half before the Soviet Union sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan—when U.S. president Jimmy Carter began supporting the convergence of a number of conservative Islamic factions into an effective fighting force to contest increased Soviet interference in the country. (AP Photo)

President Carter responded with a series of largely unpopular actions, including an embargo of wheat sales to the Soviet Union and an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games being held in Moscow. He announced the “Carter Doctrine,” a declaration of U.S. willingness to engage in military action to defend its strategic interests in the Persian Gulf region, a position that carried especially powerful weight with the shah of Iran gone and a fiercely anti-American regime now ensconced in Tehran. From 1979 to 1988, more than 100,000 Soviet troops fought an extremely costly and failed guerrilla war against the mujahideen in the mountains and villages of Afghanistan. Soviet losses in what was declared the “Soviet Vietnam” (their assassination of Amin even evoking the Diem murder of 1963) neared 20,000. This paled compared to the costs for Afghanistan: one million deaths and nearly one-third of its population becoming refugees. In this bloody proxy Cold War conflict, the United States spent more than $20 billion in military aid to arm and train the Afghan mujahideen, providing an impressive mix of Stinger missiles, small arms, tactical training, and logistical and intelligence support in what became the largest CIA paramilitary operation since Vietnam. When Soviet forces withdrew, the United States also withdrew its involvement in Afghanistan. The post-1998 political vacuum and social and economic crisis that came in the wake of the Soviet war in Afghanistan ultimately gave rise to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which provided a haven for the terrorist organization Al Qaeda that was led by Osama bin Laden. Critics contend that U.S. support for the mujahideen is a classic example of what the CIA terms “blowback”: severe negative consequences for a policy that might serve well the strategic interests of the United States in the short term, but over the course of time proves to be detrimental—in the case of Al Qaeda and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, catastrophically destructive. Chris J. Magoc See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Al Qaeda; Bin Laden, Osama; Carter Doctrine; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Pakistan; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Galster, Steve. “Afghanistan: The Making of US Policy, 1973–1990; The National Security Archive: Volume II: Lessons from the Last War.” http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/essay.html. Accessed July 9, 2014. Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Vintage, 2007.

Angola A country in west-central Africa, Angola was a colony of Portugal until 1975. One of the last European colonies in Africa, the nation suffered through nearly 15 years of revolution and infighting among nationalist groups before gaining independence. Internecine conflict continued for almost three decades, pitting the Communist government of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) against Jonas Savimbi’s guerrilla army, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The ideological overtones of the civil war attracted the attention of the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, turning Angola into a Cold War flashpoint. The end of the Cold War effectively halted the inflow of arms and international assistance, but the Angolan civil war continued until Savimbi’s

death in 2002. Devastated by decades of fighting, the country has only recently begun to recover due to the development of its oil reserves by foreign companies. The Angolan revolution had its origins in the international sphere. The Socialist MPLA and the ethnically shaped Bakongo Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) led by Holden Roberto reached out to foreign governments to help fund their national liberation struggles even before campaigns against Portugal began in 1961. Roberto received a small retainer from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1960s, but turned to Algeria and China when more generous assistance appeared unlikely. The MPLA under poet Agostinho Neto developed relations with the Soviet Union and received arms from Eastern European states like the German Democratic Republic. Personal, ethnic, and ideological conflicts prevented a unified front against Portugal, with tensions further worsening after Jonas Savimbi broke with the FNLA to found UNITA among the Ovimbundu peoples. The divided Angolan nationalists never achieved the diplomatic or military success of the more cohesive armed struggles in the sister colonies of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, but the economic and political strain placed on Portugal by these latter campaigns led to the peaceful coup known as the Carnation Revolution. In 1975 the newly democratic government in Lisbon granted independence to all of its colonies. The collapse of the Portuguese empire created a power vacuum in Angola. Rejecting the Portuguesesponsored Alvor Agreement that established a government of national unity, each of the nationalists claimed control of the government. They looked to the Cold War superpowers for support. The MPLA quickly consolidated its control over the capitol of Luanda using Soviet arms and the aid of airlifted Cuban troops, forcing the FNLA to retreat to the north and UNITA to the south. The minority white government of South Africa responded by launching a military invasion in support of the anticommunists, fearing that an MPLA-led Angola might aid the liberation movements of Southwest Africa (Namibia) and South Africa. At the same time, the American administration of President Gerald Ford provided tens of thousands of dollars to the FNLA and UNITA in an attempt to force a stalemate that would deny the Soviet Union total influence in the region. The assistance could not prevent the MPLA and its Cuban allies from taking control of the majority of the country, especially after world opinion turned dramatically against the noncommunist forces after the unpopular South African intervention. The MPLA essentially destroyed the FNLA, isolated UNITA in the south of the country, and began aiding nationalists working for the liberation of Namibia and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). Thus, Angolan independence shifted the momentum of both the Cold War and the ongoing struggle for black liberation on the African continent. The conflict had wide-ranging effects given its timing and cast of characters. The Angolan conflict helped undermine the period of lessened Cold War tensions known as détente. American secretary of state Henry Kissinger had argued for aid to the anticommunists because he feared that a victory by the MPLA would upset the status quo, though intervention by the two superpowers proved even more damaging to bilateral relations with the Soviet Union. The collapse of détente helped launch an expensive new arms race, advocated by a hawkish element of society that legitimately feared Communist expansion. Angola also revived deep divisions within American society due to its similarities with the recently ended Vietnam War. A war-weary nation rallied against President Ford’s intervention. Congress constrained presidential power by defunding the covert operation and demanding congressional approval of any future aid to Angola through passage of an amendment to the Arms Export Control Act sponsored by Senator Dick Clark (D-IA). Defeat in Angola helped define a line between primarily liberal American critics of the Cold War and a rising conservative movement deeply concerned about Soviet expansion in the developing world. Vocal anticommunists found a willing collaborator in Jonas Savimbi and UNITA. The MPLA and its Cuban allies could not dislodge UNITA from its southern base, partially due to the continuing assistance

of the South African Defense Force. Savimbi also proved an able diplomat who successfully sold his personal war as a Cold War struggle. In the United States, he gained allies among hawkish groups like the American Security Council and the Heritage Foundation. Successful lobbying of politicians overturned the Clark Amendment and helped persuade the administration of Ronald Reagan to contribute advanced weapons directly to Savimbi’s army. This internationalized war continued until the Angolan-Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanavalee forced South Africa to withdraw its military in 1988. The expensive battle convinced both sides to accept American mediation, which resulted in peace accords that withdrew foreign fighters from Angola and granted Namibia independence. The close of the Cold War ended international backing for the civil war, but it did not stop the fighting. Savimbi continued his rebellion after he lost elections monitored by the United Nations in 1992. Financing its war through the sale of natural resources—most notably the infamous “blood diamonds”— UNITA refused to lay down its arms until Savimbi died in battle in 2002. After nearly three decades of war, casualty estimates numbered more than a half million including civilians, while more than four million people had been displaced. Fighting also destroyed much of the country’s constructed infrastructure and disrupted normal economic activity. Angola now has one of the lowest standards of living and highest levels of inequality in the world. Once among the most productive agricultural states in Africa, the country is now a net importer of food and has struggled to restart its commercial agriculture due to the widespread presence of land mines planted by both sides during the civil war. Recent growth in the oil sector has helped improve economic prospects, but government corruption and poor public services have prevented this wealth from reaching much of the population. R. Joseph Parrott See also: Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; Rhodesia/Zimbabwe; South African Apartheid

Further Reading Chabal, Patrick, ed. Angola: The Weight of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Gliejeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Guimaraes, Fernando Adresen. The Origins of the Angolan Civil War: Foreign Intervention and Domestic Political Conflict. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Marcum, John. The Angolan Revolution. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969, 1978. Wright, George. The Destruction of a Nation: United States’ Policy Towards Angola since 1945. Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997.

Antiapartheid Movement The antiapartheid movement was a global protest movement that demanded South Africa abandon its policy of complete racial segregation. Antiapartheid activism arose in the 1950s and reached its peak in the 1980s, when a number of prominent states, including the United States, broke ties with South Africa due to popular pressure. Tactics included public demonstrations, boycotts, political lobbying, divestment campaigns, and direct aid to liberation organizations like the African National Congress (ANC). Emerging from the era of civil rights and decolonization, the antiapartheid cause created one of the first truly transnational movements that bridged geographic, racial, and political divides. The success of the antiapartheid movement isolated the South African regime on the world stage, helping to weaken the minority government and force a transition to democratic rule in 1994.

Apartheid inspired strong international reaction in an era of racial liberalization. Beginning in 1948, the Afrikaner National Party established a rigid system of segregation. Black and Indian Africans publicly protested the loss of economic and social opportunity, most notably in the ANC’s Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws. International organizations supported these local resistance movements, especially in the English-speaking world. In 1953, for example, civil rights organizers in the United States associated with the Congress of Racial Equality founded Americans for South African Resistance, which later became the American Committee on Africa. Six years later, ANC president Albert Luthuli helped inspire the formation of the boycott movement in Britain, which evolved into the highly successful antiapartheid movement. Made up of South African exiles, religious, anticolonialists, and political activists of all races, the decentralized movement highlighted the inequality of apartheid through public demonstrations and boycotted South African goods to economically isolate the oppressive regime. Activism at this point remained relegated to a small if vocal minority, but the creation of linkages with African nationalists and public informational campaigns laid the groundwork for later growth. The movement gained momentum during the 1960s and 1970s. Violent attempts to quell black South African protests brought renewed global attention to apartheid, most notably after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976. In an era of widespread social agitation, activists across the globe viewed apartheid as an extension of their own national struggles for social and economic justice, democracy, and peace. Successful movements developed in Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, India, the Soviet Union, Japan, and many other countries. In the United States, minorities working for the empowerment of their local communities rallied around the antiapartheid cause, with black organizations like the grassroots African Liberation Support Committee and the lobbying organization TransAfrica becoming especially noteworthy. South African groups like the Non-Racial Olympic Committee also moved to the international stage when nationalists such as Dennis Brutus fled into exile, finding refuge among sympathetic communities in the United States, Britain, and Sweden. The growth of the movement during the Cold War was especially surprising, as many nationalist groups like the ANC gravitated toward Communist-influenced revolutionary ideologies. The appeal of antiapartheid’s vision of international equality had begun to trump Cold War fears and racial hostility. Despite its widespread success, the popular movement struggled to sway South Africa’s key allies. Postcolonial states in Africa and Asia along with allies in the Nordic countries actively worked to isolate South Africa in global forums like the United Nations, but the United States, Great Britain, France, and many other Western governments continued to cooperate with the minority government. For these latter countries, South Africa remained a valuable if problematic ally in the Cold War struggle. It provided a relatively stable Western presence amidst seemingly unpredictable postcolonial neighbors. Britain and the United States also had important economic, scientific, and military interests in South Africa. As a result, many countries ignored the economic sanctions pushed by the United Nations and retained political and economic ties. The United States in particular offered rhetorical support for African self-determination, but policymakers hesitated to support any action that would weaken the existing government or threaten trade. This ambiguous policy reached its peak under Ronald Reagan and his assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker. Their policy of “constructive engagement” embraced South Africa as a reliable economic and military partner, whose peaceful evolution depended on continued American influence. Thus, Cold War considerations and reluctance to abandon a culturally similar ally placed Western governments at loggerheads with antiapartheid activists.

Antiapartheid demonstrators march down the street through the traffic on the University of California—Berkeley campus on April 17, 1985. The antiapartheid movement in the United States proved to be critical in moving the United States Congress toward supporting sanctions against the South African regime. (AP Photo/Ron Tussy)

This standoff over South Africa ended when the antiapartheid movement used its mass appeal to force change on the reluctant democratic governments. Successful organizing in the 1970s, the victories of African nationalists in Portuguese Africa and Zimbabwe, and the expansion of the guerrilla war against South Africa provided new momentum for the international movement. Leaders used established tactics to mount larger and more effective campaigns. Protests outside South African embassies were common. Concerts featuring artists like Miriam Makeba introduced millions to the cause and spurred many to action. Antiapartheid became a trendy cause, especially among young people. Popular pressure pushed educational institutions and local governments to cut ties with businesses that continued to operate in South Africa. By the end of the 1980s, these divestment campaigns and boycotts forced major corporations like Barclay’s and General Motors to withdraw from the minority-controlled state. The sheer number of supporters placed the cause on the agenda of politicians, especially within legislative bodies that were necessarily more reflective of constituent interests. In the Netherlands, for example, the parliament provided humanitarian assistance through the auspices of antiapartheid organizations, even as the government refused to sever its ties with South Africa. The greatest breakthrough occurred in the United States, when Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over the veto of President Reagan in 1986. The law established sanctions and banned direct air links, inspiring the adoption of similar policies in Japan and Europe. With the minority government isolated internationally, African nationalists consolidated the gains of their domestic revolution. Economic conditions within South Africa worsened, feeding the internal agitation of the African nationalists (particularly the ANC) and encouraging whites to seek accommodation. The National Party government felt obliged to release political prisoners like Nelson Mandela and introduce modifications to apartheid in an attempt to soften international reactions and undermine domestic discontent. African nationalists capitalized on the situation and pushed the government to abandon its segregationist policy altogether. The product was a series of negotiations between Mandela as head of the ANC and the government of F. W. de Klerk, which resulted in truly democratic elections in 1994. The victory of the ANC and the creation of a unity government achieved the goals of the global antiapartheid movement and launched the newly multiracial state of South Africa. R. Joseph Parrott

See also: South African Apartheid; Primary Documents: Profile of Antiapartheid Activist Jennifer Davis (2007)

Further Reading Davies, J. E. Constructive Engagement? Chester Crocker and American Policy in South Africa, Namibia, and Angola. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Hostetter, David. Movement Matters: American Anti-Apartheid Activism and the Rise of Multicultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 2009. Nesbitt, Francis Njubi. Race for Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946–1994. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. South African Democracy Education Trust, ed. The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 3: International Solidarity. 2 Parts. Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2008. Thörn, Håkan. Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola) (1979) Apocalypse Now is a 1979 film directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. The film also features appearances by Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford, and R. Lee Ermey. The story is based loosely on the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s original anti-imperialist tale, set in the 19th-century Belgian Congo, was grounded in his real experience as a steamboat captain in Africa. Essentially Coppola replaced Conrad’s critique of European colonialism with one of the dark, violent, and surreptitious duplicity that underlay American interventionism in Southeast Asia. The film follows the exploits of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observations Group) special operations agent Benjamin Willard (Sheen) during the Vietnam War as he is assigned to find and “exterminate with extreme prejudice” decorated American war hero Walter Kurtz (Brando) who has gone rogue. Kurtz is AWOL and reportedly leading a ragtag band of Americans, Laotians, and Vietnamese somewhere in the depths of Cambodia. Kurtz was a war hero who for reasons unknown went insane and started his own pseudo-army based around a charismatic cult of personality. The U.S. military becomes very concerned after losing contact with Kurtz and Willard’s predecessor, who was also tasked with reining in Kurtz. The film differs from many other films based on the Vietnam War in that it focuses less on the horrors of close personal combat and more on the philosophical and moral implications of war. Although the film does feature scenes of military fighting, most of the plot follows Willard as he makes his way further and further away from American-held territory as he and the navy PBR (patrol boat, river) on which he is escorted move up the Nung River in search of Kurtz. During this trip Willard and the crew of the PBR are geographically moving further away from U.S.-controlled Saigon and deeper and deeper into the jungle. The journey serves as a metaphor for the war; as the protagonists travel away from Saigon they move into new realms of insanity and chaotic disorder, accompanied by the physical violence that follows inevitably from distancing oneself from civilization. As the mission moves closer to Kurtz’s base, the lines between legitimate/illegitimate, civilized/uncivilized, and irrational/rational become blurred as Coppola juxtaposes these dichotomies to show that the lines may not be as clean as we think. As with many works of art, Apocalypse Now is less about the images shown than the implications of those images for the human condition. The film seeks to showcase the sides of darkness and violence that are often lost in traditional narratives of the Vietnam War. Just under the surface of the plot run themes such as the alienation of soldiers, the construction of the “other” through dehumanization in war situations,

the hyperviolence of the U.S. military complex, charismatic authority, the inadequacy of U.S. military command, ecological destruction in the name of progress, and descents into madness brought on by the inhumanity of war—in particular the American war in Vietnam. Cory C. Martin

Further Reading Adair, Gilbert. Vietnam on Film: From the Green Berets to Apocalypse Now. New York: Proteus, 1981. Lacy, Mark J. “War, Cinema and Moral Anxiety.” Alternatives: Global, Local and Political 28, no. 5 (2003): 611–636.

Born on the 4th of July (Oliver Stone) (1989) Born on the 4th of July is a 1989 film directed by Oliver Stone and starring Tom Cruise, Kyra Sedgwick, and Willem Dafoe. The film is an adaptation of Ron Kovic’s autobiography of the same name that chronicles the author’s upbringing on Long Island, his two tours of duty in Vietnam, and his eventual disenchantment with the war, which led to him becoming involved in the antiwar movement. The title of the film works on two levels, literal and metaphoric. Ron Kovic was born on July 4, 1946, quite literally born on the Fourth of July. However, more important to the narrative arc is Kovic’s transformation from child to soldier to antiwar activist. This allegorical meaning is underscored by the metaphor of how patriotism was instilled in the young Kovic and countless other youths of his generation. Kovic was born into a generation raised during the pinnacle of anticommunist rhetoric. This was a generation born during the time of rising American hegemony in a nation that had never known military defeat. By way of Fourth of July parades, marine recruiters, the political speeches of John F. Kennedy, and other flag-waving public displays of nationalist pride, Kovic and his contemporaries were indoctrinated with love of flag and country. Across every town in America Independence Day parades would instill a sense of pride in young men and women by showing them the American war machine’s conspicuous displays of greatness. In this sense Fourth of July parades can be seen as part of the socialization process that turns children into red-blooded patriots. Kovic’s personal story took him to Vietnam in the late 1960s, where he would see two tours of duty. During his second tour, in 1967–1968, Kovic experienced a series of life-changing experiences that eventually led him to disenchantment with the military to which he was so committed. The first of these incidents saw Kovic and his platoon massacre a village of Vietnamese civilians. In the ensuing chaos Kovic mistakenly shoots an American private. The soldier later dies from his wounds. This incident had a lasting effect on Kovic, leading to an overwhelming feeling of guilt at his responsibility in the young soldier’s death. The second incident, which took place in January 1968, involved Kovic being wounded by enemy fire. A fellow marine dragged Kovic off the battlefield, saving his life. The wound left Kovic a paraplegic, permanently in a wheelchair. Because of his wounds Kovic was sent to a veteran’s hospital in the Bronx. Here he saw wounded veterans living in deplorable conditions. This experience would further his disenchantment with the war. Kovic’s physical state led him down a road of depression and posttraumatic stress. Extending his disillusionment with the war itself, Kovic felt alienated from his family and friends who could not relate to his experiences or injury. This separation from the rest of society led him to join Vietnam Veterans Against the War. While Kovic’s story is a deeply personal one of the metamorphosis of one man, more importantly it stands as a representation of a whole generation’s transformation from Cold War patriotism to profound

disillusionment with the colonial aims of the Vietnam War. This was a unique time in American history and like any good biography, the importance of the story is less in Kovic’s experience than in how his life stands for the whole postwar generation. Cory C. Martin See also: Antiwar Movement; Vietnam War

Further Reading Burgoyne, Robert. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Kovic, Ron. Born on the Fourth of July. New York: Akashic Books, 2005. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Inventing Historical Truth on the Silver Screen.” Cineaste 29, no. 2 (2004): 29–33.

Camp David Accords (1978) In one important respect, President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy followed Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist aim of protecting the world from evil—specifically, advancing a vision in which American interests would be best served by advocating human rights for all peoples everywhere. Carter believed the United States could act as the world’s protector, encouraging all countries to treat citizens within and beyond their borders with respect for universal human rights (e.g., freedom of speech, religious expression). This internationalist vision influenced Carter’s meeting between the leaders of Egypt and Israel at the Camp David, Maryland, presidential retreat in 1978 that aimed to bring several years of dialogue to a culminating peace agreement between the two Middle East nations. When ultimately signed—due in no small part to Carter’s determined leadership in keeping the leaders talking— the Camp David Accords contained two agreements: “A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel,” which resolved longstanding issues of security and territory between the two nations extending back decades; and “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” dealing with the future aspirations for Palestine. The first agreement of the two received the most public attention because of its great achievement in bringing peace between two countries that had fought two destructive wars in 1967 and 1973. When Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt met at Camp David on September 5, 1978, bitterness permeated the meeting. The two leaders continued to spar and often left meetings fuming, disagreeing on nearly every issue. Carter, however, persisted, holding the two leaders at Camp David for almost two weeks and winning satisfactory concessions from each party. At the meeting’s conclusion, Egypt agreed to grant formal diplomatic recognition to the state of Israel and guaranteed free passage through the Suez Canal—a longstanding point of contention. In turn, Israel retracted its border with Egypt, returning the Sinai Peninsula that had been seized in the 1967 Six-Day War. Each nation would withdraw its armed forces from the Israeli-Egyptian border as an important step toward long-term peace and security in the region. Sadat and Begin signed the agreement on September 17, 1978, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their respective roles in the negotiations.

Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat shakes hands with Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin at Camp David, September 5, 1978. For the United States, the Camp David Accords represented an important effort to improve the prospects for peace in the region and also modify the U.S. image toward one that accepted the legitimate territorial and security issues of Arab and Palestinian peoples. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)

The second of the two agreements sought a long-term solution to the issue of displaced Palestinian refugees—one of the fundamental problems that had resulted from decades of war in the region, in particular the 1967 conflict. The 1978 agreement aspired to an autonomous government for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in Palestine, and as a first step toward that end, Israel agreed to withdraw its troops from the two regions. Additionally, the agreement promised to recognize ultimately the rights of the citizens of Palestine. However, these provisions would only be implemented once Palestine cast its first democratic elections, an event that would allow for the withdrawal of the Israeli military presence. For the United States, the Camp David Accords represented an important effort to improve the prospects for peace in this troubled region and in the process modify the U.S. image toward one that accepted the legitimate territorial and security issues of Arab and Palestinian peoples. At the same time, the accords advanced the security interests not only of Israel, the most important U.S. ally in the region, but also Egypt, which, though governed by an authoritarian regime, became a recipient of even greater volumes of U.S. foreign and military aid and was a key to ongoing U.S. efforts to achieve what it has long termed “stability” in the Arab world. Nina Teresi and Chris J. Magoc See also: Carter Doctrine; Egypt

Further Reading Lenczowski, George. American Presidents and the Middle East. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Stein, Kenneth. Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin, and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace. London: Taylor & Francis, 1999.

Carter Doctrine (1980) President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist and messianic view of the U.S. role in the world following World War I found particularly strong expression in the foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter (1924–). Like Wilson, Carter believed strongly that the United States needed to serve in a forceful role as a beacon

of positive good in the world. Even in the wake of the loss in Vietnam, the United States, asserted Carter, was unlike any other nation in having both the destiny and the capacity to rid the world of the dark forces that restricted human rights: that set of liberties and entitlements that over the course of the 20th century— particularly after World War II and the establishment of the United Nations—were perceived as the universal entitlements of humanity. That vision served as the cornerstone of much of his foreign policy. The Carter Doctrine, articulated by the president during his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, stood both alongside his overarching human rights–centered foreign policy, and apart from it. Carter’s address came in the wake of two seismic events that shook U.S. policy in the region: the overthrow of the authoritarian, U.S.-supported shah of Iran, and the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a nation in close proximity to the Straits of Hormuz, through which the movement of oil was also dependent. The doctrine proclaimed that the United States would not tolerate interference in the flow of oil from the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf region. On one level, it represented only the clearest acknowledgment of a policy that dated to World War II, when the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, because of the urgent importance of oil in the Allied war effort, initiated a U.S. policy that would begin securing its long-term interests in the Middle East. Framing the doctrine within the familiar terms of the Cold War, President Carter stated that the Soviet Union’s presence in the region containing “more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil” was a “grave threat to the free movement of the Middle East oil”—posing a challenge not just to the United States but to other countries Middle Eastern and Western alike. Carter called upon nations of the Middle East to pressure the Soviet Union to leave the region, freeing it from its possible restraints. President Carter proclaimed that if needed, the United States would use the force of its military to defend its interests in the Middle East, specifically the Persian Gulf region, from foreign threats. On one level, the Carter policy evoked the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century that had declared an American right to police its hemisphere, paving the way for U.S. hegemony in the region. Likewise, the Carter Doctrine explicitly declared U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf region and a willingness to defend them militarily, a position made seemingly justifiable by identifying the Soviet Union as an aggressive and hostile power in the Middle East. Following Carter, Present Ronald Reagan created the “Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine” in October 1981. The corollary extended the Carter Doctrine by proclaiming that the United States would be compelled to intervene in order to secure the Persian Gulf region, specifically Saudi Arabia. Reagan’s corollary came in response to further apparent threats in the region as the Iran-Iraq War escalated. Decades later, the doctrine and its corollary appeared to many scholars and other critical observers to have had critically important consequences—most notably pointing the way toward both Operation Desert Storm in 1990–1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nina Teresi and Chris J. Magoc See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm); Iraq, Gulf War II; Oil Industry in the Middle East; Primary Documents: President Jimmy Carter’s State of the Union Address Declaring the Carter Doctrine (January 23, 1980)

Further Reading Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Teicher, Howard, and Gayle Radley Teicher. Twin Pillars to Desert Storm: America’s Flawed Vision in the Middle East from Nixon to Bush. New York: Morrow, 1993.

Children’s Toys For much of 19th-century American life, toy wagons, bats and balls, and other objects of children’s play were handcrafted, either by parents or by local manufacturers. For wealthier families, a smaller market existed for mass-produced toys imported from Germany. However, during World War I the dramatic decrease of imports and the rapid emergence of America as a major industrial power gave American manufacturers the opportunity to begin to mass-produce toys and strengthen the nascent toy industry. Cheap toys—not subject to tariffs and import costs—began to dominate the American toy market. Between 1914 and 1939, imported toys went from 50 percent of the American market to 5 percent. The early-20th-century industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization of America laid the groundwork for the growth of the country’s global economic and political power, and children’s toys became an integral part of a larger effort to ready Americans for the new role the nation would play. Toys were tools for promoting national pride among newly arrived young Americans. The Toy Industry Association—established in 1916 as the Toy Manufacturers of America—saw their mission as rooted in Americanism and patriotism. They wrote limericks that linked children’s toys with the American workingman and established the “American-Made Toy Brigade,” which youngsters were able to join by promising to buy only domestically made toys. Toys were a way for children to learn to participate in the American economy as citizens. Through their trade association, the budding industry pushed Congress to tax toy imports heavily, while also declaring foreign-made toys flimsy, poorly made, and antiunion. Toys also supported jingoistic, America-centered attitudes. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States took over remnants of the former Spanish Empire, President Theodore Roosevelt became a popular model for toys, as he embodied ideas of vitality, masculinity, and American strength. Roosevelt inspired more than one toy when he led the charge of the Rough Riders on San Juan Hill in Cuba. The Teddy bear became wildly popular in the early 1900s after Roosevelt went on a hunting trip and an incident with a black bear inspired the toy’s production. These toys promoted a vision of a powerful, imperial America. Toys based on frontier characters like the Lone Ranger, Buffalo Bill, or Davy Crockett made expansionism entertaining for generations of young American children, helping to acculturate and naturalize the story of the conquest of the American West. In the early 1900s, games like “Cowboys and Indians” captured the imaginations of children, and as the increasingly conflict-filled 20th century rolled on, toy soldiers continued this tradition of glamorizing war. Toys also functioned to train young people in their roles in American society and to support the idea that capitalist American culture was superior to other foreign cultures. This was never more true than in the early years of the Cold War. Miniature railroads (icons themselves of 19th-century imperial conquest) and mechanical toys taught boys to explore, build, and mechanize. At the so-called “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon identified household appliances as emblems of the superiority of American capitalism over the Soviet Union’s Communist government. Concurrently, dolls and miniature appliances like Easy-Bake ovens and vacuum cleaners taught girls to mimic their mothers’ behavior and associate domestic goods and capitalism with American superiority. Indeed, after World War II, when America’s economy and world power boomed, many of the toy companies we know today formed. Mattel produces Barbie, the doll mainly known for her shopping proclivities, and American Girl Dolls, which focus on American history and identity. Hasbro produced G.I. Joe, which was heavily associated with the military until the unpopular Vietnam War. Parker Brothers created popular board games like Monopoly, which allows children to participate in capitalist ventures by trading land rights and trying to bankrupt competitors. Further, as television and film grew in

popularity throughout the 20th century and the licensing of popular figures like Shirley Temple took off, more toys were explicitly linked with American celebrities and characters, which also helped export American culture around the world. Changes in media have not altered the pattern: military recruitment today, for example, includes the production and use of war-related video games. The promotion of violence, gun play, consumer capitalism, and hegemonic power are central themes in the history of American toys. In many ways, from the standpoint of production as well as consumption, toys influenced how children think of, and act out foundational precepts of American economic and military power. Molly Rosner See also: GI Joe; Militarization of American Culture; Westerns

Further Reading Bernstein, Robin. Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Chudacoff, Howard P. Children at Play: An American History. New York: NYU Press, 2007. Cross, Gary. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Englehardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Forman-Brunell, Miriam. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Church Committee Hearings/Reports (1975–1976) The Church Committee, formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, was established in 1975 to investigate the operations of U.S. intelligence agencies following persistent rumors and recent revelations of U.S. government involvement in efforts to subvert, destabilize, and overthrow foreign governments and assassinate foreign leaders in the first quarter-century of the Cold War. Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, chaired the committee. The committee also attempted to determine the extent of U.S. government spying on American citizens. Events in the early 1970s, such as the continuing U.S. war in Vietnam, U.S. participation in the 1973 overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende, the Republican Party’s break-in at the Watergate Hotel headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and Seymour Hersh’s 1974 New York Times article that documented abuses by intelligence agencies, propelled members of the U.S. Senate to undertake a large-scale examination of U.S. intelligence activities at home and abroad. Hersh startled some and confirmed the fears of others when he wrote, “The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources” (New York Times, December 22, 1974). Realizing that they had failed to exercise oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies throughout this era, senators convened the Church Committee, with Texas Republican John Tower as vice chair. The Senate committed 11 members to the committee and assigned 150 staffers to conduct its work. Although the Republican administration of President Gerald Ford and a number of Republican senators attempted to block the investigation, the committee doggedly undertook a thorough examination of several decades of U.S. government illegal activities. It “interviewed 800 individuals, and conducted 250 executive and 21 public hearings” (U.S. Senate, “1964–Present”).

The committee published the results of its investigation in 14 reports in 1975 and 1976. The reports document a wide range of U.S. government illegal and imperialistic operations against nations and leaders around the world and U.S. citizens alike. If, as one of the reports shows, a leader challenged U.S. interests or control, then officials of the U.S. government invariably plotted to eliminate him, at times successfully. For example, the report presents detailed evidence of U.S. government covert, criminal operations to assassinate left-wing or nationalistic leaders: army general René Schneider in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The extended section on Cuba notes, “We have found concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro from 1960 to 1965,” with one failed plot involving the fabrication of poisoned cigars shipped to Havana (Alleged Assassination Plots, pp. 71–73). The report further points out that “Officials of the CIA made use of persons associated with the criminal underworld in attempting to achieve the assassination of Fidel Castro” (Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 257). The committee’s conclusions on U.S. interventions abroad were cautious and mixed. The committee found that it had no evidence that directly linked any U.S. president to the assassination plots, that officials probably believed that “assassination was an acceptable course of action,” that officials failed to “disclose their plans and activities to superior authorities,” and that administration officials had not clearly ruled out assassination as an acceptable tactic (Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 7). Despite the weak findings, the committee decisively urged that “a flat ban against assassination should be written into law” (Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 281). The committee also investigated the nature, extent, and targets of U.S. spying on American citizens and organizations. It determined that the FBI had files on 500,000 domestic subjects, 65,000 of which had been opened in 1972, but indicated that the actual number was actually far larger since each file included the names of many more individuals and organizations. In addition to keeping files, the FBI opened and photographed 130,000 letters sent to individuals in eight U.S. cities. It also drew up a list of 26,000 people “to be rounded up in the event of a ‘national emergency.’” The CIA, which was legally prohibited from operating domestically, opened and photographed nearly 250,000 first-class letters, indexed 300,000 individuals, and created files on 7,200 Americans and 100 domestic groups between 1967 and 1973. The National Security Agency obtained millions of private telegrams between 1947 and 1975. The IRS investigated 11,000 people based on their political beliefs (Intelligence Activities, pp. 6–7). Targets of U.S. domestic spying included members and organizations involved in the women’s liberation movement, an adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, the John Birch Society, the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society, Black Student Unions, President Johnson’s critics in the Senate, a Supreme Court justice, and ironically, a letter sent by Richard Nixon, who had himself authorized and ordered much of this activity (Intelligence Activities, pp. 7–10). One of the FBI’s most destructive policies was COINTELPRO, the Counter-Intelligence Program. The goal of COINTELPRO was to “disrupt” and “neutralize” individuals and organizations the FBI deemed were “a threat to national security.” Black leaders and organizations, such as Martin Luther King and the Black Panther Party, were particular targets because the FBI realized their ability to mobilize black people against white supremacy, exploitation, and oppression. To undermine their capacity, the FBI gathered information on King’s personal life in an effort to discredit him. It sought to destroy King because he had the potential to be a “black Messiah” who could “unify and electrify … the black nationalist movement” (Intelligence Activities, p. 1). COINTELPRO sent threatening letters purportedly from one Panther leader to another to create distrust and division between the party’s different chapters.

The findings of the Church Committee educated and outraged many Americans and led to a number of reforms, most notably the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The act required a special court to issue warrants for domestic wiretapping. Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has spied on thousands of U.S. citizens has led to calls for an investigation into and curtailment of the NSA’s infringement of Americans’ privacy rights, which echoes the conclusion of the 1975 Church Hearings. They also produced a national debate in the mid- to late1970s regarding the imperial nature of much of U.S. foreign policy, a jarring glimpse of which was revealed by the hearings. Margaret Power See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Congo Crisis; Dominican Republic (1954–1975)

Further Reading Hersh, Seymour. “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” New York Times, December 22, 1974. U.S. Senate. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_ir.htm. Accessed October 19, 2014. U.S. Senate, “1964–Present. Church Committee Created.” http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Church_Committee_Created.htm. Accessed October 19, 2014. U.S. Senate. Book II. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_book2.htm. Accessed October 19, 2014.

Country Western Music (1970s–2014) Country music has for decades appealed to rural white, Southern, Evangelical, heterosexual, patriotic, and politically conservative audiences, due in no small part to its origins in the Appalachian Mountains. Since the 1970s, the lyrics of this genre have increasingly reflected the conservatism of that audience, often explicitly invoking patriotic and occasionally jingoistic themes of a righteous American militarism. Country music singers have often aligned themselves with conservative causes and political figures. During the Vietnam era of the Cold War, patriotism became a common topic, most notably, perhaps, in Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” from 1969, which targeted anti-Vietnam protesters. Charlie Daniels’s “In America,” released in 1980, optimistically predicted prosperity despite the fiscal troubles of the “Crisis of Confidence” during the Jimmy Carter administration; in addition, the work responded to the “Vietnam Syndrome” of perceived U.S. military weakness, characterized by the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “In America” was a call for a return to American military triumphalism. Daniels’s subsequent recording, “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” capitalized on his earlier success by expressing the “silent majority’s” dislike of hippies and radicals. Conversely, radicals from the 1960 have associated cowboys, and thus country and western music with American expansionism, genocide, and imperialism; derogatory “cowboy” comments persisted throughout the ensuing decades from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Patriotism and jingoistic sentiments sharpened considerably with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The music that resulted included elegies, such as Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning,” to anger and tributes to those serving in the armed services. The latter is exemplified through the Shock’n Y’all album of Toby Keith, a twist on the U.S. military’s devastating

“shock and awe” assault that bombarded Baghdad, Iraq, in the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. While the majority of country singers capitalize heavily on jingoism, the Dixie Chicks’ career suffered substantially after making a disparaging remark about then president George W. Bush that implied antiIraq war sentiment that resulted in a public feud between the group and Keith. Charlie Daniels’s “That Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag,” released in 2001, expressed the xenophobic terror of the fan listening base, particularly through mentioning that the “rag” was not worn on their heads, alienating and angering Muslim groups in the United States. Finally, Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?” anthem was released the month the United States invaded Iraq, and the lyrics of the second chorus indicated that the song, and thus Worley, supported this military venture. Christina L. Reitz See also: Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Neal, Jocelyn R. “Country Music.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. http://0www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wncln.wncln.org/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224075. Accessed October 19, 2014. Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001.

Dellums, Ronald V. (1935–) Born into a family of labor activists in Oakland, California, in 1935, Ron Dellums attended local schools and then served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956. He earned several degrees in the Oakland– San Francisco area, including an MA in social work from the University of California–Berkeley. After completing his education in 1962, Dellums worked as a social worker for five years, during which time he became politically active. In 1967 he won a seat on the Berkeley City Council, serving there for four years until being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and it was in that capacity for the next 27 years that he earned a well-deserved reputation as a tireless opponent of American imperialism. A staunch opponent of U.S. militarism, Dellums instead supported a progressive vision of American engagement with the world through, for example, opposition to apartheid in South Africa or battling HIV/AIDS in the less-developed world. When he went to Congress in 1971, Dellums joined a small group of legislators attempting to launch an investigation of war crimes committed by American military personnel in Vietnam. Though the proceedings never achieved the status of formal hearings, they did help shed light on unethical and potentially criminal behavior by U.S. troops shortly after the story of the My Lai Massacre broke. Not surprisingly, Dellums found himself on President Richard Nixon’s notorious “Enemies List.” A few years later, when Congress discovered that the Gerald Ford administration had decided to intervene covertly in the Angolan civil war, Dellums joined the movement to halt U.S. involvement in Angola that culminated in the January 1976 Clark-Tunney amendment banning further aid to Angolan rebels. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for 14 consecutive years, Dellums sponsored legislation mandating tough economic sanctions against the South African government to help force an end to the official system of racism known as apartheid. With a huge boost from grassroots organizers around the nation, Dellums led the way in finally getting tough sanctions passed: known as the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, the bill passed over Reagan’s veto in the fall of 1986, a tribute to the work Dellums and others had done for more than a decade. The sanctions had teeth, and partly because of the impact they inflicted on the regime in Pretoria, new president F. W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from jail in February 1990. A

few weeks later Mandela flew to Lusaka, Zambia, to meet with other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC). Dellums led a U.S. congressional delegation to Zambia that met with Mandela and his colleagues and presented an overview of American efforts to help end apartheid. Impressed by the presentation, Mandela thanked Dellums for his long and tireless efforts to bring an end to apartheid, a moment Dellums would call one of the highlights of his life. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Dellums took a leadership role against what he and many others viewed as wasteful and excessive military spending, leading congressional criticism of expensive items such as the B-2 stealth bomber. Dellums believed that the money would be better spent on domestic social programs. He also led the failed legislative charge to prevent President George H. W. Bush from mounting Operation Desert Storm against Saddam Hussein in 1990–1991. After leaving Congress in 1998, Dellums joined the effort to lobby the White House for stronger leadership in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, particularly in Africa. Again his efforts would yield results when President George W. Bush announced a major U.S. initiative in 2003. From 2007 to 2011, Dellums served as mayor of Oakland. Andy DeRoche See also: Antiapartheid Movement; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm)

Further Reading Dellums, Ronald V., and H. Lee Halterman. Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

El Salvador (1976–1989) El Salvador throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s severely aggravated U.S. Cold War objectives. An entrenched conservative elite and military controlled the country’s resources and government while more than a third of the population remained landless and more than half were impoverished, contributing to leftist demands for reforms. When the rebel insurgency escalated, U.S. officials followed their wellestablished Cold War anticommunist foreign policy and provided immense military aid. However, Salvadoran conservatives and military officials utilized this policy to pursue their own goals, frequently in direct conflict with U.S. demands. In the mid-1970s, violence defined El Salvador. Students, labor activists, and middle-class entrepreneurs pushed for economic and social reform. Vocal Catholic activists, priests, and nuns organized peasants and landless Salvadorans into “base communities” to discuss the country’s economic plight and lobby for land reform. However, the military, with the aid of conservative elites, blocked these efforts as the military and its paramilitary units attacked, tortured, and murdered leftists. Death squads operated openly in the countryside, targeting labor and Catholic activists. These actors coalesced under the right-wing party, the National Republican Alliance (ARENA), its control epitomized in the “Law for the Defense and Guarantee of the Public Order,” outlawing dissent and criticism against the regime. This conflict influenced U.S. policy in El Salvador in the late 1970s. Previously, U.S. officials provided resources that strengthened Salvadoran anticommunist units, especially the paramilitary forces ORDEN and intelligence network ANESESAL, which now refused to engage in U.S.-endorsed economic programs or agrarian reforms that would improve the country and weaken leftist insurgents. On October 15, 1979, a conflict within the military gave rise to a military-civilian junta. Here, the Carter

administration endorsed reform, hoping to hinder leftist revolutionary movements as witnessed next door in Nicaragua. In February 1979, Oscar Romero, appointed Catholic archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, called for an end to U.S. support for the murderous regime, a request ignored by President Carter. Romero continued to speak out across the country and in radio sermons in support of the poor and against the government’s persecution of the Catholic Church. He was ultimately assassinated while saying mass on March 24, 1980, by death squads closely associated with the junta. It was widely believed that the order came from Salvadoran politician and former military officer Roberto D’Aubuisson, who had been trained at the U.S. School of the Americas in 1972. Watching the 1980 U.S. presidential elections, conservatives donated to Ronald Reagan’s campaign as Salvadoran military officials again took power, both groups hoping to follow their own policies without the Carter administration’s interference. The regime deployed death squads and assassins, targeting the very reformers whom U.S. officials championed, such as Attorney General Mario Zamora. In December, a death squad under military orders kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed four U.S. Catholic missionaries. In January 1981, Salvadoran soldiers killed two U.S. citizens from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) who had worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to organize Salvadoran peasants into noncommunist organizations.

A U.S. military adviser instructs a Salvadoran Air Force cadet in the use of an M-60 mortar, March 8, 1983. The Salvadoran Civil War between the U.S.-supported military junta and the leftist coalition, Farabundo MartiNational Liberation Front, brought warnings from the Reagan administration of a communist takeover, millions of dollars in military aid, and the deployment of dozens of U.S. advisers. (UPI/Bettmann/Corbis)

Upon taking office, the Reagan administration reversed many of the previous administration’s policies toward El Salvador. United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Alexander Haig presented victims of the military’s repression, including U.S. nuns, as guerrillas or violent Communists. Furthermore, Reagan officials claimed that Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan Communists aided Salvadoran rebels organized under the Farabundo Martí Liberation Movement (FMLN). U.S. officials produced documents, such as the February 1981 Communist Interference in El Salvador, to show these links, though journalists later proved much of the evidence to be incorrect. Reagan officials also stalled inquiries into the murders of the U.S. nuns and AIFLD workers. Beginning in March 1981, the Reagan administration provided what would amount to more than $1 billion in U.S. aid over the decade.

Salvadoran officers attended U.S. institutions, such as the School of the Americas in Panama. Thirty million dollars improved the Salvadoran air force while bringing 1,000 Salvadoran infantry to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and 490 officers to Fort Benning, Georgia. Ultimately, the Salvadoran military further expanded its influence and power due to such policies. During the 1980s, the global community found right-wing forces culpable for most of El Salvador’s violence. The United Nations, Amnesty International, and the Salvadoran Catholic Church determined the military was responsible for 85 percent of human rights violations and murders. Furthermore, U.S.-trained officers perpetrated 75 percent of civilian massacres. For example, on December 11, 1981, the Atlacatl Battalion arrived at El Mozote and destroyed the village. The unit was a creation of U.S. programs, and commander Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa attended the School of the Americas. At El Mozote, the battalion raped women, killed babies, and massacred over 800 peasants, more than half under 14 years of age. The Reagan administration denied reports of the massacre, defending continued U.S. aid as part of its anticommunist policy in Latin America. When U.S. ambassador Deane Hinton deplored the military’s atrocities and pushed for land reform, the Reagan administration encouraged his resignation. Many Reagan officials sought to encourage domestic reforms in El Salvador, akin to the Carter administration’s policies. From 1982 to 1984, the CIA provided $4 million in electoral aid for ARENA’s opposition, the Christian Democrats, and the State Department gave $10 million. The AIFLD funneled $1 million to Christian Democrat labor unions, even producing anti-ARENA comic books for children. By supporting Christian Democrats, U.S. officials hoped to ease ARENA and its leader Roberto D’Aubuisson out of power. As Christian Democrats triumphed in 1984 and 1985, D’Aubuisson plotted the assassination of U.S. ambassador Thomas Pickering in retaliation. Upon taking power, Christian Democrats received $2.6 billion in economic aid as U.S. officials hoped to rein in the military. Still, the military remained independent of civilian authority and worked with ARENA. Against U.S. objectives, the military and ARENA continued utilizing U.S. military aid, assassinated prominent Christian Democrats, and destroyed U.S.-endorsed reform projects. Furthermore, D’Aubuisson cultivated strong relationships with Republicans, such as Senator Jesse Helms, and conservative organizations, like Young Americans for Freedom, to ensure the flow of U.S. aid. At the end of the decade, ARENA and the military remained the country’s dominant force, as when the Atlacatl Battalion murdered six priests and two women in 1989. Only with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s would negotiations to end these conflicts begin. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Honduras (1976–1989); Nicaragua, Contra War; School of the Americas; Primary Documents: President Ronald Reagan’s Address on Central America (April 27, 1983)

Further Reading Carothers, Thomas. In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy toward Latin America in the Reagan Years. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Danner, Mark. The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. New York: Vintage, 1994. LeoGrande, William. Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick) (1987)

Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, and Vincent D’Onofrio. The film is an adaptation of Gustav Hasford’s 1979 semiautobiographical book The Short-Timers that chronicles the author’s experiences during the Vietnam War. The film follows Private “Joker” (Modine) as he enlists in the marines and eventually deploys to Vietnam during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The narrative of the film is divided into two acts, each following a different chapter of Joker’s military career. The first act shows the experience of new recruits as they navigate the basic training process. The second act follows them into Vietnam and the chaos and loss of humanity that ensues. The first act of the film follows Joker and other recruits as they arrive at Parris Island for basic training. The theme of this section is the dehumanization process that transforms young men from empathetic social creatures into hardened killing machines that will follow orders without question. Joker is assigned to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s drill squad. Hartman’s job is to undo the years of socialization that the recruits have internalized by tearing down their individuality and remolding them into the automatons necessary for effective warfare. The overall theme of this section has to do with the disparate ways by which the recruits deal with the process of basic training. The main plotline of Full Metal Jacket follows Joker’s attempts to retain a sense of his humanity. He embodies the challenges faced by soldiers in Vietnam (and other wars) in surrendering one’s individuality while giving oneself over to the military. In contrast to Joker’s effective identity management is that of Leonard Lawrence (nicknamed “Gomer Pyle,” played by D’Onofrio). Pyle fails at most aspects of soldiering. Hartman consequently punishes him —and the entire squad—for each of his transgressions. This effectively isolates Pyle from the group and drives him insane as he fails to adapt to the radical changes of military life. The second act picks up Joker’s career as a war reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes after his deployment to Vietnam. As the Tet Offensive starts he finds himself assigned to cover the chaos that ensues in the wake of the surprise attack. Where the first section of the film focuses on the transformation of civilians into mechanized war machines, part two shows the metamorphosed soldiers dealing with the realities of warfare in Vietnam. The experience of Joker’s squad embodies that of many units in Vietnam—dealing with, for example, the question of how to treat wounded enemy soldiers in the midst of ferocious military combat. Joker faces many moral dilemmas as he continues his balancing act between soldier and human, symbolized by two pins on his helmet: one reading “Born to Kill” and the other the iconic peace sign of the 1960s antiwar movement. When questioned by a senior officer about the message embodied in this apparent dichotomy, Joker explains that it is a statement about the Jungian duality of the human spirit. The symbolism of this dichotomy is the central issue the film grapples with. And like other Vietnam War films of the 1980s (e.g., Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July), the film’s core message was a severe questioning of the Cold War orthodoxy of good Americans and evil Communists that had led the United States into Vietnam, as well as a challenge to the imperial assumptions that had long ago made war and its concomitant dehumanization virtuous. Cory C. Martin See also: Tet Offensive

Further Reading Gyori, Zsalt. “Mimicry and Hybridity in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket.’” Hungarian Journal of English and Hungarian Studies 7, no. 2 (2001): 151–167. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. “Full-Metal-Jacketing, or Masculinity in the Making.” Cinema Journal 33, no. 2 (1994): 5–21.

Grenada (1976–1989) Grenada became a brief yet surprisingly important component of a resurgent U.S. foreign policy in the last years of the international Cold War. When Grenada’s Marxist-Leninist government experienced a coup, U.S. military forces invaded the Caribbean island in October 1983 to protect American citizens, facilitate a regime change, and demonstrate U.S. military capabilities. With numerous disasters elsewhere and the memory of the Vietnam War, the invasion’s triumph and popularity at home invigorated the Reagan administration’s global, especially Latin American, foreign policy. A former British colony and English-speaking island nation in the Caribbean with around 100,000 citizens, Grenada received its independence in the 1970s. The island’s first prime minister, Eric Matthew “Hurricane” Gairy, repressed the population and amassed wealth at the people’s expense. Such developments fueled the emergence of the New Jewel (Joint Endeavour for the Welfare, Education and Liberation of the People) movement, a coalition of opposition groups led by Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard. When Gairy left the island to discuss spaceships at the United Nations (UN), the New Jewel movement seized the government in March 1979 and established the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) with Bishop as prime minister. Despite Marxist-Leninist influences, the new government’s policies remained fairly moderate. The PRG encouraged tourism, legalized unions, and invested in the country’s infrastructure. However, the marginalization of the island’s parliamentary traditions and the suspension of the constitution worried many citizens. The Carter administration hoped to guide the new government by offering economic assistance, yet Bishop never realized any agreements. When the PRG reached out to Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba and the Soviet Union, U.S. officials discouraged tourism to Grenada and limited economic aid. After discovering the presence of a Soviet military unit in Cuba, the Carter administration feared similar events in Grenada, so U.S. officials considered potential covert operations to weaken the PRG. The most radical component of the government was the PRG’s foreign policy. Bishop established close relations with Castro’s Cuba, in which the Cuban ambassador in Grenada supposedly participated in PRG meetings. Grenada joined Cuba as the only Western Hemisphere nations not to vote at the UN against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and obtained millions in Soviet military aid. Bishop received Cuban aid to construct a flight runway and gave the Soviets permission to use it. U.S. officials interpreted this as the growing influence of communism in Latin America, alongside Castro’s Cuba and the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua. On the other hand, Venezuela and some European nations financed and U.S. and British firms participated in the runway’s construction. Still, the Reagan administration prevented the PRG’s obtaining loans from the World Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank.

REAGAN DOCTRINE The Reagan Doctrine was the centerpiece of the foreign policy of U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) to more directly confront the influence of the Soviet Union internationally in ways that would lead to victory for the United States and the West in the Cold War. A reflection of the rise of neoconservatives in the U.S. foreign policy establishment after the Vietnam War, it sought to move beyond the “containment” strategy of the Truman Doctrine that had long guided U.S. foreign policy, and instead pursue a “rollback” of Soviet advances and ultimately a defeat of Communists around the world. The doctrine was most vigorously applied in Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa. It was executed through overt intensified support as well as covert aid for armed anticommunist resistance groups in nations from Nicaragua to Afghanistan to Angola. The phrase “Reagan Doctrine” was never articulated by the president himself, but rather by conservative journalist Charles Krauthammer in a 1985 Time magazine column applauding the president’s vigorous support for the mujahideen of Afghanistan. During Reagan’s first term, the apparent success of the U.S. effort in that Central Asian nation was being

applauded by foreign policy experts at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who, along with members of the president’s national security team, argued for its global extension. Reagan Doctrine advocates claimed that the strategy was a cost-effective way of confronting Communist forces across the globe without committing U.S. troops, for which the American people still had little appetite a decade after Vietnam, and that it helped lead to a victorious end to the Cold War. Critics argued that support for anticommunists like the mujahideen, the Nicaraguan contras, and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola served ultimately to fuel anti-American sentiments, promote weapons proliferation, and in the end led to a “blowback” against long-term U.S. national security interests.

Popular discontent and lack of democratic opportunities weakened Bishop’s government, and growing U.S. opposition to the PRG unnerved Bishop. When Bishop traveled to Washington to discuss matters with the Reagan administration, radical Marxist-Leninists in the PRG government denounced Bishop. Upon Bishop’s return, Coard led the extremists in executing Bishop in October 1983, abolishing the PRG, and establishing a Revolutionary Military Council. When Bishop’s supporters protested the coup, the council fired into the demonstration and killed more than a hundred civilians. U.S. and Caribbean officials immediately worried about the coup’s alleged threat. During the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Iranians took American hostages, and attempts to free the hostages failed miserably. In Lebanon, terrorists killed 241 U.S. marines, bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, and captured a handful of Americans. Perceived threats of international communism and events in Lebanon shaped U.S. officials’ policies. The U.S. ambassador immediately suggested the evacuation of the 800 American students on the island, the State Department reported the need to take the entire island and ensure stability, and some U.S. officials sought a diversion from events in Lebanon. While the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States opposed any invasion but suggested assistance and mediation as the Caribbean Community encouraged diplomatic and economic tactics, representatives from Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent feared the coup’s regional impact. Barbados and Dominica emerged as the most vocal supporters of a U.S. invasion of Grenada.

U.S. Marines sit aboard captured Soviet-made armored vehicles during Operation Urgent Fury, October 28, 1983. When Grenada’s Marxist-Leninist government experienced a coup, U.S. military forces invaded the Caribbean island in October 1983, to protect American citizens, facilitate a regime change, and demonstrate U.S. military capabilities. (Department of Defense)

In Operation Urgent Fury, Reagan ordered fewer than 2,000 U.S. soldiers to invade Grenada on October 25 with assistance from Barbados and Jamaica. U.S. officials lacked thorough intelligence and interdepartmental military coordination and unexpectedly encountered a small contingent of Cuban military advisers upon their forces’ landing. Between shootouts with Cubans, friendly fire, and accidents, the invasion force lost 9 helicopters and 29 soldiers with more than 100 wounded. Forty-five Grenadians,

half of them civilians, died with more than 300 wounded, and 24 Cubans died with 59 wounded. The invasion cost just over $75 million. Ultimately, 7,000 U.S. soldiers occupied the island. The Reagan administration provided around $120 million in assistance and helped establish a new government under the National Party. U.S. military officials claimed to have found hidden ammunition in the Cuban embassy and documents demonstrating links between Grenada and Cuba, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. For the rest of the decade, Grenada recovered and remained stable. Reactions to the U.S. invasion varied. The UN Security Council denounced the invasion, but the U.S. representative vetoed the censure. Even Margaret Thatcher, an important U.S. ally in the Cold War, criticized Reagan’s policy. Reagan’s popularity in the United States greatly increased. Democrats in the U.S. Congress who originally criticized the invasion quickly recognized domestic support for Reagan’s policies and gave their support. Most importantly, U.S. officials and the American public claimed the invasion’s success in Grenada overshadowed events in Lebanon and Iran and helped “heal” the nation’s so-called Vietnam Syndrome. Fueling concerns of further operations in Nicaragua, Reagan concluded, “we have again assumed our role as the leading force for freedom in the world” (Grow, 157). Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Haiti (1990–2014); Panama Invasion; Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Crandall, Russell. Gunboat Democracy: U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Grow, Michael. U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Honduras (1976–1989) Honduras generally supported U.S. policies throughout the Cold War. At the time, such action seemed normal due to the country’s perceived legacy as a so-called U.S. “puppet” or “banana republic” due to U.S. officials’ and transnational corporations’ influences as well as an entrenched military controlling its politics. With the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the late 1970s and subsequent U.S.-sponsored Contra war in that country, Honduras took on a greater role in U.S. foreign policy. As the 1980s evolved, however, a shift in Honduras’s international policies took place, as its leaders, with popular support, pursued goals more aligned with Honduran rather than U.S. interests. Despite its economic inequality, Honduras appeared in the mid-1970s unscathed by the leftist guerrilla movements seen in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Furthermore, the 1969 “Soccer War” against El Salvador cut Honduras out of the Central American Defense Council (CONDECA), a military intelligence network among Central American nations. In the 1970s, Honduras received substantial U.S. military assistance. As the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua escalated, Honduran leaders prepared for the worst, including a spillover of the conflict and refugees from Nicaragua. Beginning in late 1979, the Carter administration turned to Honduras for support in the emerging U.S.Sandinista conflict. To contain leftist revolutions throughout the Cold War, U.S. officials always secured agreements with regional actors, and in Latin America in the late 1970s the Carter administration found an ally in Honduras. U.S. officials provided $500,000 in military aid, deployed 10 helicopters, sent military

advisers, and integrated Honduras back into CONDECA. As a result, Honduras condemned the Sandinistas across the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. The Reagan administration repeatedly alleged that Sandinistas, along with Soviets and Cubans, sought to topple Central American governments and presented Honduras as a susceptible target and funnel for Communist weapons and guerrillas. Additionally, former Somoza officials and National Guardsmen on the border often fought in Nicaragua before retreating back into Honduras. U.S. officials believed these “counterrevolutionaries” (Contras) could encourage more attacks within Nicaragua and weaken the Sandinista government. Opposed to a leftist government nearby, some Honduran military leaders suggested war against Nicaragua, but these officials needed U.S. assistance and alliances with other nations. As a result, John Negroponte arrived as U.S. ambassador and developed a strong relationship with Colonel Gustavo Alvarez Martínez. CIA head Duane “Dewey” Clarridge also arrived, bringing along Argentina’s intelligence vice chief Colonel Mario Davico, as former Somocista official Emilio Echevarry convinced his friend Alvarez Martínez to help the Contras. These actions set the foundation for the three-way coordination of Contra operations between U.S., Argentine, and Honduran military and intelligence officials. In December 1981, President Ronald Reagan approved National Security Decision Directive 17, authorizing the CIA to utilize the Contras against the Sandinista government. Honduras provided a staging ground for these operations, especially special operations units that monitored Nicaraguan territory. Alvarez Martínez, now a general, utilized these programs to cultivate U.S. assistance for Honduras, bringing in almost 100 U.S. military advisers and building military bases. Additionally, U.S. general Vernon Walters helped Honduras acquire Argentine military missions. With U.S. involvement in Nicaragua receiving international criticism, Honduras played a central role as Reagan officials lobbied for Central American support. When Alvarez Martínez proposed utilizing CONDECA to unite Central American military forces behind U.S. policy, U.S. officials increased military aid to $31 million and sent 300 military advisers. By 1984, Honduras was receiving $77.4 million in military aid, second most in Latin America despite the absence of leftist insurgencies. Alvarez Martínez even manipulated his CIA connections to become chief of Honduras’s armed forces and work with the CIA and Argentine intelligence to create the Directorate of Special Investigations that kidnapped, tortured, and killed leftists in Honduras. In fact, when Clarridge brought in former Sandinista leader Edén Pastora, Alvarez Martínez refused and forced the CIA to use Pastora in a different capacity and location. Mid-1980s changes in U.S. policy toward Nicaragua caused Honduran officials to reconsider their relationship with the United States. When the various Boland Amendments limited U.S. aid to the Contras, the Reagan administration redirected Honduran funds, much to Honduran officials’ dismay. International opposition to the Contras also encouraged many to castigate Honduras for serving as a base for U.S. operations and an alleged pawn in U.S. foreign policy. In early 1985, vice president George H. W. Bush flew to Honduras to ensure its leaders’ support for the Contras, but opposition flourished, influencing Alvarez Martínez’s removal. General Walter López Reyes and foreign minister Edgardo Paz Barnica championed more independent foreign policies while President José Azcona Hoyo campaigned against the Contras in Honduras. Honduran officials criticized the Contras for having pushed refugees from Nicaragua into Honduras and grew exasperated as Sandinista troops crossed into Honduran territory to attack Contra camps and sometimes nearby Honduran forces. As a result, Honduran hostility grew, leading to the Honduran military’s seizing money and resources allocated for the Contras and forcing the 1985 closing of a U.S. training center for Salvadoran officers. In the late 1980s, Honduran leaders backed Costa Rican president Oscar Arias’s peace proposals. As the U.S. legislature limited funding for Contras, Honduran military officials feared that, without U.S.

involvement, Nicaragua would attack Honduras for having aided the Contras. Large numbers of Nicaraguan refugees poured across the border as Azcona Hoyo claimed 200,000 refugees were settled in Honduras. Without sufficient U.S. support, Contras joined these refugees and remained in Honduras. As the George H. W. Bush administration lobbied Central American nations to support the Contras, Honduran officials refused pressure directed from Secretary of State James Baker and the U.S. president himself. Azcona Hoyo even agreed to host further peace negotiations in Tela in August 1989. As these agreements progressed, the Agency for International Development utilized Honduras not to provide military aid to the Contras but to integrate Contras back into Nicaraguan society. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Nicaragua, Contra War; School of the Americas; Primary Documents: Excerpts from In Search of Hidden Truths, the Second Interim Report of the National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras (1998)

Further Reading Armony, Ariel. Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1997. LeoGrande, William. Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Leonard, Thomas. Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Hussein, Saddam (1937–2006) Although most Americans were not aware when the invasion of Iraq began in 2003, the relationship of the United States with that nation and its autocratic leader extended back more than four decades. In 1962– 1963, Saddam was a rising young member of the authoritarian, anticommunist Baathist Party that received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in toppling the regime of nationalist leader Abdel Karim Kassem. Kassem had overthrown the Western-supported monarchy in 1958 and had been tacitly supported by Washington for several years. By 1962, however, he had become harshly critical of Western oil interests and the growing American presence in the Middle East and sought to build a military force that could rival that of Israel. The CIA, therefore, began planning a number of strategies that would lead to his demise—including a failed effort by the agency’s “Health Alterations Committee” to send Kassem a poisoned handkerchief. Kassem fell in a bloody Baathist coup in February 1963 that included the murders of hundreds of leftist educated professionals and political figures, killings in which it is widely believed Saddam Hussein participated. Many of those killed came from lists provided by the CIA. So began the long and complicated association of the United States with the leader it would 40 years later seek to depose. The United States immediately began sending weapons to the new Baathist regime, and Western corporations began to establish operations in Baghdad for the first time. Continued internecine conflict plagued the regime, however, and in 1968 the CIA backed another coup, this time by General Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr (1914–1982), whose top protégé was Saddam Hussein. Ensconced in top leadership positions in the government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Saddam Hussein pursued domestic policies that both brutally repressed the various warring factions of Iraqi society and also raised the living standards of the country on the whole. His 1972 seizure of Western oil interests, combined with the oil

shocks and rising oil revenues of the mid-1970s, allowed Saddam and the Baathist government to provide education and health care services unheard of in the Arab world. The rising prosperity fueled by oil revenues also allowed Saddam to build a cult of personality around himself and position himself to take total control of the country. Following a failed CIA-colluded collaboration from 1973 to 1975 with Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi to arm Kurdish rebels and weaken the now Soviet-friendly Baathist government, Saddam became a general in the Iraqi army and took firm and unyielding control of both the party and his country. With al-Bakr’s failing health, Saddam was effectively running Iraq before his formal ascension to the presidency in 1979. Saddam’s authoritarian rule was marked by arbitrary arrests, executions, and a range of other atrocities. Saddam controlled profitable businesses and placed family members in top posts even as he modernized the country in many ways, including introducing a Western-style legal system and abolishing of Islamic laws. The status of women was elevated. With the passing of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the widely criticized Camp David Accords between Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin of Israel, Saddam positioned himself as the new pan-Arab leader with an anti-imperialist critique directed at what he labeled Israeli aggression and American and European encroachment in the Middle East.

Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq from July 1979 until he was driven from power by a U.S.-led coalition during the Iraq War, in April 2003. Despite the absence of any link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., in January 2002 President George W. Bush denounced Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and called for Saddam’s ouster. (Reuters/Ina/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In 1980 Saddam turned his attention toward Iran, where religious conservative forces under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979. Against the backdrop of Iranian revolution that was followed by the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of American hostages, the United States supported Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980. U.S. support of Iraq came to include the sale of massive amounts of weapons over the next decade, including voluminous shipments of materials used in the manufacture of Saddam’s chemical weapons arsenal. The shipments continued even after the internationally condemned genocidal campaign ordered by Saddam against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq in which as many as 100,000 men, women, and children were killed, many by chemical weapons attacks. More than 5,000 were killed in Halabja alone. Although the United States was among the leading supporters of Iraq during the 1980s (the nation having become the third largest recipient of U.S. aid by 1990), America was not alone in having supported the

chemical weapons program of Saddam, as he also received massive shipments from West Germany and France, among others. By the time the Iran-Iraq War ended in a bloody stalemate in 1988, Iraq owed some $30 billion to neighboring Kuwait from the Iran-Iraq war and asked the Kuwaiti government to forgive the debt; it refused. In addition, Saddam began to pressure Kuwait with respect to cutting oil production, to which it balked. Further, Saddam, like many Iraqis, had long asserted that Kuwait as a nation was an artifice of the age of empire, and that the significant oil reserves of the country rightly belonged to Iraq. By the spring of 1990, Saddam had determined to take aggressive action against Kuwait. After hearing somewhat contradictory statements from the American ambassador April Glaspie in an April 1990 meeting, Saddam construed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the United States had no position on the border dispute with Kuwait. And so on August 2, 1990, Saddam ordered six divisions of the Iraqi army into Kuwait. Iraq took control of the country. The United Nations demanded the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces and imposed economic sanctions. The United States put its forces in Saudi Arabia on alert. President George H. W. Bush, warning of a regional, Hitler-like takeover of the Middle East, organized a multinational coalition. The U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991. Dramatic televised air attacks by U.S. forces continued for several weeks. The ground attack began in February and Kuwait was liberated, but Saddam was allowed to remain in power. As President Bush and other members of his administration later pointed out, the UN resolution authorizing force did not allow for the removal of Saddam Hussein. American and British-led UN sanctions were imposed after the war and had crippling effects on the economy of Iraq. In spite of 50,000–100,000 civilian deaths and a crippled economy, Saddam remained in power. Relations between the United States and Iraq deteriorated rapidly following the September 11 attacks. President George W. Bush and members of his administration insinuated repeatedly that Saddam had had some role in providing a haven for Al Qaeda, which carried out the attacks; that he supported terrorism throughout the region; and most frighteningly, that Saddam was in possession of chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear weapons that threatened the United States. In January 2002, with the fear of Americans still palpable following the 9/11 attacks, President Bush denounced Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and called for Saddam’s ouster. Notwithstanding his atrocious and despotic human rights record, in the wake of 9/11 it was the charge that Saddam was harboring “weapons of mass destruction” that ultimately compelled action against him. Despite UN Security Council efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the crisis—including the toughest weapons inspection regime ever imposed on any country —the United States and Britain persisted in urging military action. By March 2003 the American troops were put on alert in the region. Bush finally gave Saddam an ultimatum of 48 hours to leave Iraq or face invasion. Saddam remained defiant. In the face of international criticism, including millions marching in the streets in protest before the war started, Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched on March 20, 2003, by U.S.-led forces. About 98 percent of a force numbering 300,000 were American and British troops. The speed and accuracy of the strikes crumbled the Iraqi command structure. Baghdad fell to the invasion on April 9. Saddam along with his family members and leaders of the Baath Party went into hiding. After months of an intensive nationwide search, no substantial evidence of weapons of mass destruction was found. In place of Saddam, a Coalition Provisional Authority was established to run the country in the interim. The objective of the United States to topple Saddam was accomplished, but the country soon witnessed chaos and anarchy. Various insurgent groups targeted U.S. and coalition forces and collaborators of the new government. Amid an increasingly violent insurgency in that summer of 2003, Saddam’s two sons were killed, and then on December 13, 2003,

Saddam was captured near his hometown of Tikrit. The Iraqi Special Tribunal put Saddam on trial for widespread crimes committed against his own people. Found guilty, he was hanged on December 26, 2006. Saddam’s demise did not end the violence in Iraq. Indeed, the United States came under increasing criticism as the death toll of Iraqis and Americans soldiers mounted and the country remained mired in violently unstable conditions that resembled civil war even a decade later. Though it was hard to regret the passing of a despot like Saddam Hussein, how he had come to power in the first place and how he was deposed were other matters altogether. Finally, what the preemptive invasion of a sovereign country said about the U.S. hegemonic role in the world seemed to many observers to be ominous indeed. Patit Paban Mishra and Andrew J. Waskey See also: Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm); Iraq, Gulf War II; September 11, 2001 (9/11); Primary Documents: Excerpts from a Cable Sent from the U.S. Embassy in the United Kingdom by Charles H. Price II to the Department of State on Donald Rumsfeld’s Meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (December 21, 1983)

Further Reading Aburish, Said K. Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Allawi, Ali A. The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. London: Yale University Press, 2007. Balaghi, Shiva. Saddam Hussein: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. Cockburn, Andrew, and Patrick Cockburn. Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession. London: Verso, 2002. Coughlin, Con. Saddam: King of Terror. New York: Ecco, 2002. Fattah, Hala Mundhir, and Frank Caso. A Brief History of Iraq. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Mackey, Sandra. The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein. Scranton, PA: W. W. Norton, 2002. Mishra, Patit Paban. “Hussein Saddam.” Counter Terrorism: From the Cold War to the War on Terror. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012, pp. 283–284. Mishra, Patit Paban. “Saddam Hussein.” Encyclopedia of Global Terrorism and the War on Terror. Clarksville, TN: Diversion Press, 2011. Murray, Williamson, and Robert H Scales. The Iraq War: A Military History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Shields, Charles J. Saddam Hussein. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Woods, Kevin M. et al., eds. The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Working of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978–2001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Invasion USA (Joseph Zito) (1985) Amid the post-Vietnam/Reagan-era decade of the 1980s, American society saw no shortage of testosterone-packed, jingoistic, shoot-’em-up films featuring a tough-guy action star defending liberty, justice, and American democracy itself against a seemingly infinite army of antifreedom enemies. Such films often revisited the Vietnam War, focused on the infiltration of Soviet or anti-American forces into the United States, or depicted American mercenaries valiantly preserving liberty by confronting and defeating Communist and terrorist organizations. The year 1985 represented the zenith of this genre of films with the releases of Commando, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rocky IV, and Invasion USA. Released in September 1985, Invasion USA was directed by Joseph Zito and stars Chuck Norris, Richard Lynch, Melissa Prophet, and Alexander Zale. The film was produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Chuck Norris and James Bruner developed the film’s screenplay. Invasion USA grossed $6.89 million during its opening weekend, making it the top-grossing film at the box office that week. It went on to generate $17.5 million in total box office revenue in U.S. theaters, reflecting less the quality of

the film than the American appetite for movies that inspired martial, patriotic sentiments at the height of renewed tensions with the Soviet Union. The film features Chuck Norris in the lead role as retired CIA agent Matthew Hunter, who lives a quiet life in the Florida Everglades as a rogue guerrilla army of international terrorists, led by Soviet mercenary Rostov (Lynch), commandeer a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, annihilate a boat filled with Cuban refugees, and land on the shores of Miami during the Christmas season, thus providing them with a foothold on American soil. The terrorist soldiers are comprised of America’s real-life geopolitical enemies of the era, including Communists from Cuba, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Rostov ominously declares that his mission is to use American freedoms, which he alleges Americans take for granted, to destroy the United States from within. The terrorists commit a variety of attacks against civilians intended to generate mass public paranoia, incite race riots, and spark distrust and disregard for civil authority and the rule of law; these atrocities include blowing up houses in a suburban neighborhood, opening fire on unarmed civilians while disguised as police, and instigating violence at a shopping mall. Suspecting Rostov is behind the multiple acts of terrorism, Hunter comes out of retirement. The central action of the film follows Hunter’s efforts to thwart additional terrorist acts and ultimately kill Rostov. Invasion USA has taken on additional historical significance in the post-9/11 era. The scenes depicting attacks on civilians and, specifically, Rostov’s contempt for Americans he thinks are “soft” and “don’t understand their own freedoms, or how [these freedoms] can be used against them” became widespread concerns in American society following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. From its inception, the film bore strong political connotations. Chuck Norris was an outspoken champion of the hardline anticommunist policies of Ronald Reagan and warned in 1985 of the possibility of a terrorist attack if America did not better prepare itself militarily. Justin D. García See also: “Rambo” Films; Red Dawn (John Milius); September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Prince, Stephen, ed. American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Sachleben, Mark, and Kevan M. Yenerall. Seeing the Bigger Picture: American and International Politics in Film and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

Iran-Contra Scandal (1985–1987) The Iran-Contra Scandal, or “Irangate,” featured insurgent guerrillas, international terrorists, U.S. officials committing various unconstitutional acts, and an American president presiding over it all with some combination of willful ignorance and knowing support. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration provided crucial aid to the Contras who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After the U.S. Congress prohibited further assistance, the Reagan administration supported the Contras by selling weapons to Iran, a government that supported anti-American terrorists. Enriching many of the participants and violating U.S. law, the affair did little to weaken the Sandinista government. Upon assuming office, U.S. president Ronald Reagan swore to “roll back” international communism. Offering “overt and unabashed American support for anti-Communist revolutions” (Scott, 1), the Reagan Doctrine asserted that the U.S. government would provide resources to any force or movement opposed to Communist-based or Soviet-supported governments. After the Vietnam War and recent embarrassments in

the Middle East, the Reagan administration turned to Central America as a traditional region of U.S. influence where U.S. officials could achieve decisive victories and reestablish an image of U.S. dominance. In the 1970s, a coalition of socialists, Catholic activists, and middle-class leaders called the Sandinistas had ousted Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Labeling the Sandinista government a Communist regime, Reagan authorized U.S. aid for Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries or Contras. Disputes immediately surrounded U.S.-Contra relations. Based primarily in Honduras, the Contras crossed the Nicaraguan-Honduran border to attack not just soldiers but peasants. The Contras sabotaged Nicaragua’s infrastructure and violated international law by mining Nicaragua’s harbor with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the process wounding numerous civilians and destroying other countries’ ships. Various Latin American governments opposed such conflicts in Central America and lobbied for peace between the Sandinistas and the Contras. Reports soon emerged of the Contras’ working with Panamanian general Manuel Noriega to smuggle cocaine for the Colombian drug cartel. Ultimately, the World Court found the Contras’ activities and U.S. involvement illegal. The Reagan administration’s funding of the Contras became a contentious issue. Many Americans and the U.S. Congress worried about the dangers of deep U.S. involvement in a foreign nation, as had occurred in Vietnam. Contra leaders diverted U.S. funding into personal bank accounts, manipulated U.S. aid at the expense of operations, and profited from drug smuggling, but the Reagan administration knowingly lied about such activities. The House of Representatives passed the Boland Amendments that limited funding the Contras, and Congress approved only nonlethal aid until late 1986. Reagan ordered his administration to continue supporting the Contras. When U.S. intelligence analysts reported that the Contras had little potential of overthrowing the Sandinistas, Reagan’s leading advisers ignored such warnings. As early as 1983, CIA director William Casey began circumventing congressional limitations by shifting costs to the CIA. U.S. officials even obtained weapons from the Pentagon and opposed Latin American leaders’ peace plans. Casey and marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North turned to Enterprise, a company under retired general Richard Secord that provided ships, planes, and runways in El Salvador and Costa Rica for the Contras. Casey and North created fake corporations and bank accounts and lobbied for money from Taiwan, Brunei, Saudi Arabia, and wealthy U.S. citizens such as beer magnate Joseph Coors. Out of the millions, much of the money disappeared into participants’ hands without arriving to Contra insurgents on the ground while Secord received millions in profits. Events in the Middle East intersected with the Reagan administration’s policies in Nicaragua. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, destabilizing the country and escalating terrorism. By the mid-1980s, terrorists in Lebanon held a handful of Americans hostage. In the late 1970s, a revolutionary movement ousted Iranian dictator Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a U.S. ally. The anti-American Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged as the movement’s leader, but U.S. officials hoped to maintain contact with Iranian moderates who could shape the country’s government. As Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq continued what would be a decade-long conflict, Hussein obtained military assistance from the Soviet Union and undermined U.S. officials’ confidence in their Iraqi ally. Now opposing a complete Iraqi victory, U.S. officials saw an opportunity to benefit from the country’s internal divisions and factionalism by working with moderate Iranians. Spurred by Israeli advice, U.S. officials reported that Iran had the ability to encourage the release of the American hostages in Lebanon. What emerged was the Iran-Contra Scandal. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane set in motion plans to work with Iran that Reagan approved in early 1986 presidential findings. McFarlane and North traveled to Iran on fake passports, and North welcomed an officer from Iran’s military to the White House. In the process, officials from Reagan’s National Security Council sold 2,004 TOW (Tubelaunched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) antitank missiles and 50 HAWK (colloquially “Homing All the

Way Killer”) antiaircraft missiles to Iran in 1985 and 1986. U.S. officials hoped Iran would encourage the release of American hostages in Lebanon. Very few hostages were released as U.S. officials recognized working with Iran resulted in few positive dividends, but McFarlane and North sought the money from the weapons sales to fund the Contras. Of $16 million, however, less than $4 million went to the Contras, and Contra leaders stole most of it, causing intense disagreements and disorder among the insurgents. The entire affair violated numerous laws and the U.S. Constitution. Not only was Iran under an arms embargo; U.S. policy specifically prohibited providing arms to nations such as Iran that sponsored terrorists. The Reagan administration was required to notify the U.S. Congress about providing weapons to Iran, and Congress criminalized any funding to the Contras beyond that for “nonlethal” operations. As investigators in Miami looked into U.S. officials’ ongoing links with the Contras, U.S. journalists published articles on Reagan’s illegally funding the Contras. As more reports began to emerge, the Sandinistas took down an airplane from the Enterprise company that was carrying arms to the Contras, and the surviving pilot publically divulged Enterprise’s operations. Finally, in late 1986, a Lebanese newspaper exposed how the arms sales to Iran funded the Contras. To the American public, Reagan first denied any involvement. The Justice Department delayed investigations, North shredded documents, McFarlane altered the timeline of the events, and National Security Adviser John Poindexter tried deleting electronic messages. Taken aback by the blatant violation of U.S. law, Congress initiated investigations into the affair. The Iran-Contra Scandal investigations hurt Reagan’s popularity as Reagan eventually admitted to his involvement. However, investigators were never able to ascertain Reagan’s exact role or begin impeachment hearings. Most of those convicted received pardons from Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush or plea-bargained for lighter sentences. Noting the involvement of numerous other U.S. officials, North admitted to lying and deceiving Congress, but he still emerged as a prominent hero for American conservatives. Some participants such as John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams returned to service during the administration of George W. Bush and played prominent roles in events in Iraq. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Iran Hostage Crisis; Lebanon (1976–1989); Nicaragua, Contra War

Further Reading Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: PublicAffairs, 1991. LeoGrande, William. Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Scott, James M. Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Iran Hostage Crisis (1979–1981) The Iran Hostage Crisis was a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Iran lasting from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981. Known in Iran as the “Conquest of the American Spy Den,” the crisis began with the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of what were initially 66 Americans by Iranian revolutionary students associated with a group calling itself “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line.” Thirteen women and African Americans were soon released, and another hostage in July 1980 because of illness, but the remaining 52 hostages were held for the entirety of the 444-day crisis. In the United States, the crisis dramatically underscored for many Americans the perceived failure of President Jimmy Carter’s (1977–1981) foreign policy. More fundamentally, it

appeared to signify a post-Vietnam weakened nation now at the mercy of geopolitical forces beyond its control. The hostage crisis was precipitated by several events, the most forgotten of which in the United States was the central role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and installation of the authoritarian Mohammad Shah Reza Pahlavi. With the shah’s overthrow in February 1979, Iranian student revolutionaries that summer, as well as the new Iranian revolutionary government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, suspected that the United States was plotting the subversive overthrow of the new regime. Finally, on October 22, President Jimmy Carter granted the shah’s request for admission to the United States to be treated for his terminal cancer. For the revolutionaries in Iran, that decision confirmed their suspicions of another imminent U.S. coup d’etat. Carter’s subsequent freezing of Iranian assets, and his refusal to consider the extradition of the shah to stand trial for crimes committed against the Iranian people, inflamed anti-American, anti-imperialist rhetoric in Iran—the ayatollah himself declaring the United States to be “the Great Satan.” Although the embassy’s seizure was initially intended by the students to be temporary, after seeing the political value of the action for his own government, Khomeini embraced the hostage taking. President Carter condemned the action as terror and anarchy and initially refused to negotiate for the hostages’ release. Feeling the pressure of an election year and the patriotic anger among the American people, on April 24, 1980, Carter attempted Operation Eagle Claw, a doomed rescue mission that resulted in the deaths of eight American soldiers and one Iranian civilian. A second planned rescue attempt was never carried out, as U.S. diplomatic overtures to Iran to win the hostages’ release began to take precedence. Two months after the failed rescue, the shah’s death, followed by the Iraq invasion of Iran in September, compelled the Iranian government to want to settle the crisis. President Carter, anxious for the hostages’ return in time for the November election, accelerated diplomatic efforts and appeared to have an agreement in October. A number of scholars of the event have argued that officials of Ronald Reagan’s campaign covertly interfered with the negotiations, believing that the hostages’ release would torpedo Reagan’s election. In the end, none of the original demands of the Iranian government was granted by Carter and the negotiated release culminated as hostages flew to their freedom the hour Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. The economic sanctions that were imposed on Iran during the crisis only deepened in subsequent years, and the United States had effectively no diplomatic relations with the regime for the next 30 years.

Taken on the first day of occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, this photo shows American hostages being paraded by their militant Iranian captors, November 4, 1979. The Iran Hostage Crisis began with the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the capture of Americans by Iranian revolutionary students. (Bettmann/Corbis)

The Iran Hostage Crisis stands as the nadir of the era of the “Vietnam Syndrome”: images of shackled, blindfolded Americans and burning American flags in the streets of Tehran enraged Americans at home and fueled the desire for the return to the kind of more muscular policy that Reagan would bring. From Iran and other corners of the world, the crisis represented just retribution for the past imperialist actions of U.S. foreign policy. Chris J. Magoc See also: Carter Doctrine; Iran, Coup d’etat; Iran (1990–2014); Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Harris, David. The Crisis: The President, the Prophet and the Shah—1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. New York: Wiley, 2008.

Israel (1976–1989) From the creation of the nation-state of Israel, the United States has played a critical role in its foreign policy. Conversely, Israel has been both a linchpin and a liability in American Middle East diplomacy. Due to heightened tensions in the Middle East and expanding American interests in the region, the period spanning 1976–1989 was one fraught with enormous challenges for Israeli-American relations. The era began hopefully with the protracted negotiations leading to the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979, but then turned violent in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Several years later (1985) saw the creation of the U.S.-Israel Joint Economic Development Group, and in 1988—to the dismay of the Israelis—came the opening of American dialogue with Palestinian resistance organizations. The Camp David Accords, brokered by President Jimmy Carter between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and signed in 1978, laid the groundwork for the forthcoming Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, agreed to in 1979. The treaty was a watershed moment for the Middle East; Egypt had become the first Arab nation to recognize the state of Israel. Arab nations felt betrayed by Egypt: the nation that had led the Arab Nationalism movement now signed a treaty against a perceived enemy of the movement. In anger, his own people assassinated President Sadat over the treaty. For Israel, the American-negotiated peace proved strategically significant, freeing units from the Israeli Defense Force to leave the Egyptian border and operate in other Middle Eastern theaters. Major offensives, including the bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor and the invasion of Lebanon, strained relations with America. On June 7, 1981, the Israeli Air Force launched Operation Babylon, a preemptive strike designed to destroy the Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq. The operation was a complete success militarily; however, international backlash was severe. Although the United States condemned the attack, its longstanding strategically allied relations with the Jewish state created new reasons for hostility toward America from several corners in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Syria were two of the nations to speak out against America for its support of Israel, which, in response, temporarily withheld a scheduled deliverance of new fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. Despite its criticism, the Saudi

government was also receiving military aid from the United States and subsequently tensions in the region cooled. The appointment of Ariel Sharon to the position of minister of defense later that year, August 1981, marked a new ignition of Middle East tensions. Israel began to develop a plan for an invasion of Lebanon, where a civil war had been raging since 1975. The plan ostensibly sought to accomplish two goals: first, the destruction of the PLO, a longtime nuisance to Israeli security; and second, the weakening of Syrian power both in Lebanon and the region. Sharon advertised the plan to the Israeli senate as a small and quick incursion. However, to the Americans, Sharon promoted the operation as one that would destroy rising Syrian power in the Middle East—and consequently, severely damage the threat of the Soviet Union (Syria’s major supporter) in the region. Launched on June 6, 1982, with tacit American encouragement, Operation Galilee achieved spectacular military results, encircling and entering an Arab capital for the first time when it occupied parts of Beirut. The results came, however, with massive civilian casualties suffered mostly in Palestinian refugee camps. The United States deplored the loss of life, but did not support a UN Security Council resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal. Instead, Philip Habib, designated as American special envoy for the Lebanese Civil War by Reagan, arrived in Damascus with orders to form a peace treaty between Israel and Syria (which had long had PLOsupporting forces in Lebanon engaged in the civil war). The Israelis, however, used this as a smoke screen to lull the Syrians into a false sense of security and pounced, destroying 19 air defense batteries, hundreds of tanks, and nearly 100 fighter jets during combat without taking a single loss. America instantly lost further credibility in the Middle East. Searching for regional stability, the United States, Israel, and Lebanon signed the May 17 Agreement, which ended Operation Galilee. The agreement called for a withdrawal of Israeli forces to be replaced by a multinational peacekeeping operation that would oversee the withdrawal of the PLO. The peacekeeping force in Beirut, supported by large numbers of American marines, faced an aggressive Syria bolstered by a Soviet influx of military equipment. The weak position of the Christian-minority Lebanese government and its armed forces meant the peacekeeping force would face the worst of opposition attacks. American marines suffered large casualties resulting from engagement with the Syrians and two terror attacks. The loss of U.S. military life was the worst since the Tet Offensive. With the American position in Lebanon crumbling, the PLO made a successful return to the country, frustrating Israeli politicians and military leaders.

A woman walks past a convoy of Israeli troops as they pass through a village in the Bekaa Valley following their invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. On June 6, Israel invaded Lebanon with a massive force, eventually placing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Lebanese civilian population of the city, under siege. (Bryn Colton/Getty Images)

Despite exhibiting frustration with continued Israeli military excursions in the 1980s, the United States continued to strengthen the ties between the two nations for the purpose of securing stability in the region and furthering American interests. The American government advanced two major developments in 1985 for the creation of an economically strong Israel. The United States–Israel Joint Economic Development Group (JEDG), an annual meeting designed to discuss ways to grow the Israeli economy, developed as part of a stipulation for the $3 billion worth of aid Israel received in 1985. Simultaneously, President Reagan pushed for a free trade agreement, which easily passed through the American Congress and was signed between the two nations that year. Undeterred by the aggressive actions during the decade, the United States drew Israel further into its sphere of influence through economic means. American-Israeli relations ended on a sour note at the close of the period. The Palestinian Declaration of Independence in November 1988 served to open a line of communication between Palestine and the United States. Because the PLO had long been viewed as the prime enemy of Israeli statehood, the opening of basic dialogue between the PLO and the United States disturbed many in Israel. On December 14, 1988, President Reagan issued a statement that both authorized the State Department to begin a dialogue with the PLO and reaffirmed that the United States took this action with the security and wellbeing of Israel as its foremost objective. Marc Sanko See also: Lebanon (1976–1989)

Further Reading Mansur, Kamil. Beyond Alliance: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Reich, Bernard. Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations after the Cold War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Tyler, Patrick. A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East—From the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Lebanon (1976–1989) In Lebanon, the period 1976–1989 marks the era of the destructive Lebanese Civil War, a conflict that ravaged the small nation. Similar to most postcolonial nations, Lebanon struggled to unify its varied ethnic and religious communities that now sought different paths for their new nation. The minority Christian population held political power; meanwhile, the Arab Nationalism movement springing from Egypt as a counter to the Cold War superpowers was radicalizing the Lebanese Muslim population. In 1976, the growing national divide, exacerbated by the turbulent political situation of hosting the refugee Palestinian population, erupted into civil war. For the United States, Lebanon was a familiar state. Nearly 20 years prior in 1958, the United States intervened with Operation Blue Bat in an attempt to prop up the Christian, and pro-Western, government. The initial operation in 1958 temporarily stopped hostilities from escalating into a long drawn-out war. By 1975, in the waning spirit of Cold War détente, American policy toward Lebanon was one of caution. While both the Americans and Soviets viewed the Middle East as important, neither saw it as vital or worthy of direct confrontation. The two superpowers attempted to disengage from Lebanon, first by avoiding direct action in Lebanon, and later by using proxy nations or puppet governments to stabilize the nation.

The first American response to the crisis in Lebanon aimed to halt the internal strife through external forces. This opportunity presented itself in the form of Syria. Fearing instability in the region, Syrian forces entered Lebanon at the behest of Lebanese president Suleiman Frangieh in May 1976. Viewing the Syrian government and military as a tool that could ease tensions and advance American interests in the region, the United States backed its invasion of Lebanon, despite strong Syrian-Soviet ties. By 1977, the Lebanese Civil War, though not extinguished, was seemingly contained. Syrian refusal to withdraw from Lebanon, however, angered American officials who sought to create a Lebanon squarely within Western influences. The appointment of Ariel Sharon in August 1981 as the Israeli minister of defense, and his subsequent invasion of Lebanon in 1982, led to a major reignition of the Civil War. Israel, which had backed several Lebanese Christian armies throughout the course of the war, grew weary of constant raids from the PLO, based in the south of Lebanon, and resolved to end the conflict on its terms. For Washington, Israeli military action offered only the promise of exacerbating the Lebanese crisis. American attempts to advance its strategic interests in an ever-changing Middle East landscape while rhetorically supporting democracy proved difficult while supporting autocratic Arab regimes like the Saudi government and often rubber-stamping Israeli military excursions. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) invasion of Lebanon pushed Washington policymaking to the brink. Only two outcomes, both disastrous, could come from the IDF action: both a complete Israeli success and a stable, democratic Lebanon at the expense of souring American relations with other Middle Eastern states, or an American call to cease the invasion and a continuation of the violence and political instability in Lebanon. Additionally, Israeli action in Lebanon automatically brought the United States into a quasi-proxy war with the Soviet Union, which was backing Syria. Lebanon in 1982–1983 became an American geopolitical nightmare, and ultimately a setback for advocates of an American quasi-imperium in the Middle East. Following months of deadly Israeli military assault on PLO strongholds (and refugee camps) around Beirut, the United States in the summer of 1982 supported a cease-fire to halt the Israeli invasion and prevent an all-out war between Syria and Israel. Philip Habib, designated as the American special envoy for the Lebanese Civil War by President Ronald Reagan, left for Damascus to forge a truce, accomplished on August 12. Nine days later American marines, accompanied by French and Italian forces, landed in Beirut to begin their peacekeeping mission, which included the oversight of the Israeli and PLO withdrawal from the Lebanese capital. The arrival of American forces coincided with the election of Bashir Gemayel, a Maronite Christian backed by the United States, as president of Lebanon. The young politician, whose election, to American pundits, offered glimmers of a peaceful resolution to the Civil War, was assassinated just three weeks after his victory. Controversy and trouble were brewing for the United States in 1983. In conjunction with Israel and new president Amine Gemayel, brother of the slain Bashir, Lebanon signed the May 17 Agreement. The agreement, a peace treaty with Israel, called for the withdrawal of both Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon and a strict no-fly zone established and patrolled by the Israeli Air Force over Lebanon. The treaty produced severe backlash from the Arab world, which viewed it as an insult. With Israeli troops pulling out of Lebanon, the opposition struck. A combined force of Syrian, PLO, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard units buckled the inept Lebanese army. Supporting the fragile Lebanese government turned into a highly risky position for the United States. Washington, with images of Vietnam still fresh, was hesitant to engage in direct combat, even though American marines were stationed in Beirut. Instead, President Reagan responded to the fresh hostilities by approving the use of the USS Virginia and later the battleship USS New Jersey to shell Syrian positions. Limited response, in this case, proved to be a failure.

Suicide bombings throughout 1983–1984, including attacks on the U.S. embassy, American military barracks, and the American University of Beirut, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of American service personnel and civilians. U.S. military action in Lebanon subsequently ended in 1984 with the withdrawal of American marines from the United Nations Peacekeeping force, UNIFIL. From 1984 to 1987 Lebanon became engulfed in the U.S.-Israeli Iran-Contra Scandal in which U.S. arms were traded for the release of American hostages being held by the Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, with some of the profits being redirected to support the illegal U.S. war of the Contras against the government of Nicaragua. The latter half of the 1980s witnessed a change in U.S. policy. With the Soviet Union and its external bloc collapsing, Lebanon no longer represented a Cold War battleground. Additionally, it was clear to policymakers that further American action would likely cause more harm than good to its reputation both in Lebanon and in the Middle East. By 1989, the American and Israeli presence having long retreated, the Lebanese Civil War finally approached an end. Marc Sanko See also: Iran-Contra Scandal; Israel (1976–1989)

Further Reading Hallenbeck, Ralph A. Military Force as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Case of America’s Intervention in Lebanon, August 1982–February 1984. New York: Praeger, 1991. Harris, William W. Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997. Tyler, Patrick. A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East—From the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Libya (1976–1989) In the first half of the 20th century, Libya was occupied by a host of foreign powers, including the Ottomans, Italians, British, and French. This colonial status changed when in 1951, the United Kingdom of Libya was formally declared with King Idris al-Sanusi (1889–1983) as the country’s first and last monarch. In its early years, Libya was a troubled state that suffered from a host of political, social, and economic maladies. While the discovery of large oil fields in 1959 did bring some economic improvement, it would not be enough to prevent revolutionary forces from permanently dislodging the monarchy. In 1969, Muammar Qaddafi (1942–2011) and a band of army officers orchestrated a successful, bloodless coup d’état while King Idris was seeking medical treatment outside of Libya. The new regime under Qaddafi and his Revolution Command Council (RCC) endeavored to embrace the tenets of “freedom, socialism, and unity.” The regime immediately embarked on a plan of nationalization that removed all vestiges of foreign power and presence in the country, including the British and American military bases that remained on Libyan soil. In 1973, Qaddafi described the course of the revolution stressing his “Third Universal Theory.” This theory rejected capitalism and communism and put forward an alternative approach that stressed the union of nationalism and religion. In 1977, the official name of the country changed from the Libyan Arab Republic to the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. The term Jamahiriya is loosely translated to mean a “state of the masses” whereby the citizenry is divided into committees that are responsible for controlling state structures and distributing publically owned resources. This ideology is largely contained in Qaddafi’s Green Book published in segments during the 1970s. Though Libya in the 1970s was marked by domestic reform and the articulation of revolutionary principles, the 1980s would be characterized by confrontation with both Libya’s regional neighbors and the Western world, particularly the United States. The relationship between Libya and the United States markedly deteriorated during the 1980s. In addition to closing its embassy, the United States also imposed a trade embargo and severe economic sanctions on Libya. These managing economic sanctions would shortly translate into military action following Libya’s role in the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub that resulted in the death of two American military personnel and the injury of 79 more. In the same year, the United States initiated Operation El Dorado Canyon, a military campaign targeting several strategic locations in Libya, including Qaddafi’s residence. The American campaign attempted to teach the Libyan regime that aggressive posturing coupled with sponsoring terrorism would not be tolerated. However, despite the American demonstration of military force, the Libyan regime continued to incite conflict and inflict damage. In 1988, Pan American Flight 103 traveling from London to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 individuals. The American, British, and French governments demanded that Libya extradite those responsible for the terrorist attack. The United Nations Security Council not only supported the petition of the three nations, but threatened Libya with economic sanctions if it failed to comply with the extradition order. The Libyan regime refused to comply with the Security Council’s order, resulting in the levy of sanctions in 1993. These international sanctions, compounded with the paralyzing body of sanctions enacted by the American government and embodied in the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, proved detrimental to Libya’s economy. By 1999, the Libyan regime conceded to international pressure and extradited the two suspects to The Hague. This rare instance of compromise with the international community defined Libya’s foreign policy into the 21st century. John Cappucci

Further Reading Ronen, Yehudit. Qaddafi’s Libya in World Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008. St John, Ronald Bruce. Libya: From Colony to Independence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2008. Vandewalle, Dirk. A History of Modern Libya. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Wright, John. A History of Libya. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Marcos, Ferdinand (1917–1989), and the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986 as a dictator before fleeing the country in 1986. Throughout most of his presidency Marcos benefited from the unwavering political support and economic aid of the United States despite international condemnation for having committed widespread human rights violations. In return, President Marcos proved a stalwart ally in the United States’ international fight against communism and a defender of U.S. economic interests in the archipelago. Marcos was born in Ilocos Norte, a province in the far northwest, and belonged to the Ilocanos tribe. His father was Ferdinand Chua, a wealthy Chinese businessman and judge. In 1935 Julio Nalundasan defeated his stepfather, Mariano, for a seat in the National Congress. The same evening Marcos went to Nalandasan’s home and shot him to death. Four years later, Marcos, then a law student at the University of the Philippines, was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murder. He appealed to the Philippine Supreme Court and successfully defended himself at trial. A short time later he was elected to the Congress himself, becoming its youngest member. Although there remains some historical debate about the issue, evidence suggests that Marcos fought for both the Japanese and the Americans during World War II and became wealthy doing so. During and following the war, Marcos used his congressional seat, connections to businessmen, and military record to become one of the rising stars of the Liberals who competed with President Ramon Magsaysay’s Nacionalistas Party for control of the country. Marcos had his sights on the presidency for a long time, and his marriage in 1954 to Imelda Romauldez, a former beauty queen from Leyte, helped to advance his goal. Her family was a powerful clan that could deliver votes in Leyte, where Marcos was mostly unknown. Imelda proved to be a fine hostess to the elite Filipinos and foreigners Marcos courted. Magsaysay died in a plane crash in 1957, and within a decade Marcos became president of the Senate and joined the Nacionalistas. He ran as their presidential candidate in 1965 and won.

Backed by the Nationalista Party, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines in November 1965, and ruled the country until he and his wife, Imelda Marcos, were forced into exile in 1986 by a popular uprising against his increasingly corrupt government. (AFP/Getty Images)

Marcos set high goals for his administration: reduce poverty, improve education, and attract foreign businesses. From the start he was criticized by journalists, clerics, and political activists on the left for favoring the wealthy and attempting to eliminate opposition by restricting basic political freedoms. Marcos and his supporters used a host of methods to stifle opposition, including bribery, vote-buying, and harassing and jailing opponents, most notably Benigno Aquino, secretary-general of the Liberal Party. In 1970, Marcos called a constitutional convention to reform the constitution. Two years later, it proposed replacing the presidential system of government with a cabinet headed by a prime minister. The election to ratify the new constitution was not held. Instead, on September 23, 1972, frustrated by his inability to quell the opposition and fearing a possible insurrection by the New People’s Army (NPA), the military branch of the illegal Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), he declared martial law. Newspapers, radio stations, and publishing houses were shut down, guns were confiscated, opposition leaders were jailed for allegedly maintaining private militias, and rule by presidential decree was instituted. Marcos insisted that martial law was necessary to prevent Communists from launching a civil war or taking over the country, and in this he was supported by U.S. president Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He promised to lift it when conditions improved. Martial law remained in effect, however, until he fled the country 14 years later. In the 1970s Marcos organized a “People’s Congress” to draft a new constitution. In 1978 he announced that he had accepted it, as well as an offer of the dual offices of president and prime minister. The new constitution revoked basic freedoms—speech, press, and assembly—and it outlawed labor strikes. Opponents charged that the delegates were bribed. With the regime’s powers strengthened, dissidents found themselves under increasing scrutiny. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations condemned abuses such as extrajudicial executions under the Marcos regime.

Marcos’s most important friend overseas was by far the United States. Long after the United States granted the nation its independence in 1947, American influence remained strong. This was especially true in the 1970s at a time when Marcos was facing increased resistance to his policies. Under Marcos the Philippines continued to be the recipient of generous American financial aid programs, such as the Military Assistance Program (MAP). The war in nearby Vietnam (1962–1975) proved a bonanza to the Philippine budget. The United States needed bases in the region and was willing to pay handsomely for them. Two of its biggest military installations in the world—Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base—were in the islands. In the 1980s the United States was paying $900 million annually in rent for the use of these bases. U.S. businesses had long been heavily invested in the Philippines. Among the biggest investors were fruit producers such as Dole, which owned thousands of hectares of land, and Caltex, Exxon, Mobil, and Getty, major oil producers that dominated the energy market. U.S. leaders tended to turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses committed by the Marcos regime, and indeed indirectly benefited from them as the dictator kept a lid on any demands for improving the economic conditions for laborers and other substantive calls for economic reform. As late as 1985, human rights were rarely if ever brought up in the many discussions between President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) and Marcos. Reagan was a friend of Marcos and stayed at Marcos’s palace at least four times. He saw Marcos as a valuable ally and fellow anticommunist. Opposition to Marcos’s rule was widespread as early as the late 1960s. One of the driving forces of the opposition was the New People’s Army (NPA), a revolutionary organization that planned for a long armed struggle against the regime and counted the peasants as one of their main constituencies. Students, political activists on the Left, the NPA, and peasants were at the forefront of the opposition. On the other side was a Marcos dictatorship well protected by the military and secret police (armed with U.S. weapons), the business community, and media. The steady flow of American dollars was crucial to funding and supplying the fascist-style military machine of Marcos. Riddled with corruption, the Philippine economy did not progress very much under the Marcos regime, even as the personal worth of Marcos and his wife was estimated at more than $2 billion by the 1980s. At the same time the average Filipino earned about $200 per year. In August 1983, former senator Benigno Aquino, a popular opponent of Marcos on the Left and critic of U.S. foreign policy, was murdered while in police custody. Although still unproven, it was widely assumed that Marcos ordered the assassination. Aquino’s death galvanized opposition to Marcos and seems to have convinced Reagan that Marcos was losing his grip on the country, although he still resisted the idea of the autocrat stepping down. On February 7, 1986, Marcos faced off in a presidential election with Corazon Aquino, Benigno’s widow and a devout Catholic. According to international observers, Marcos’s supporters engaged in widespread voter fraud and intimidation. Ten days later, the National Assembly, Marcos’s tool, declared Marcos the victor by 1.5 million votes. Aquino and various rebel groups, such as the Reform the Army Movement (RAM), claimed the election was bogus and called for him to resign immediately. Instead, Marcos prepared for the military to strike back at RAM and other rebel forces. Recognizing this, Cardinal Sin and other opposition leaders told ordinary citizens to march on the presidential compound in Manila to shield the rebels. Hundreds of thousands responded to this appeal, and the army’s forces could not reach the palace. After days of negotiation with rebel leaders and Washington that went nowhere, Marcos recognized that the situation was hopeless. He boarded a U.S. military helicopter to Clark Air Force Base. From there he flew to Guam and then Hawai‘i, where he spent the last years of his life dreaming of a return to power that never happened.

The 20th century witnessed dozens of dictatorships in nearly every part of the world. The evidence suggests that the Marcos regime ranks as one of the most avaricious and corrupt. Decades after its collapse due to a democratic uprising, no one knows how much the autocrat and his cronies stole from the Filipino people. In the process, the image of the United States also suffered enduring damage as the staunchest defender and supporter of what was effectively a U.S. client state during the Cold War. Matthew McMurray See also: Kissinger, Henry, and Realpolitik; U.S. Military Bases

Further Reading Aquino, Felinda A. Politics of Plunder: The Philippines under Marcos. Quezon City: Great Books Trading, 1987. McDougald, Charles C. The Marcos File: Was He a Philippine Hero or Corrupt Tyrant? San Francisco: San Francisco Publishers, 1987. Seagrave, Sterling. The Marcos Dynasty. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Youngblood, Robert L. Marcos Against the Church: Economic Development and Political Repression in the Philippines. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Missing (Konstantine Costa Gavras) (1982) Missing is the prize-winning 1982 film made by world-renowned Greek director Konstantine Costa Gavras. Set in Santiago, Chile, it recounts the true life and death story of American journalist Charles Horman, who went missing following the Chilean military’s violent overthrow of President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Actors Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon play the wife (Joyce) and father (Edmund), respectively, of Charles Horman. The film won several international awards and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including best film, best actor (Lemmon), and best actress (Spacek), and received the Oscar for best screenplay. Thomas Hauser worked with Joyce and Edmund Horman to write The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, the book upon which the film was based. Charles Horman, who graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1964, went to Chile in the early 1970s, along with close to 100 other North Americans who supported the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende. He, like compatriot Frank Terrugi, worked as a journalist in the Chilean capital. Following the military coup, the Chilean military kidnapped both men, along with thousands of Chileans, and took them to the National Stadium in Santiago. There, they tortured and killed both the North Americans, along with thousands of Chileans. The Chilean armed forces also abducted North American David Hathaway, but he was released and returned to the United States. Missing dramatically re-creates Joyce and Ed Horman’s efforts to discover what happened to Charles and why. Joyce Horman shares Charles’s support for the Allende government and repudiates the military coup. She mistrusts the U.S. embassy and Chilean government officials who supported the overthrow of Allende. When Ed Horman first arrives in Chile to find out where his son is, he believes the U.S. embassy officials, but they repeatedly and inaccurately inform him that they know nothing about his son’s whereabouts. Joyce and Ed’s shared love for Charles and their dogged determination to find out where he is lead them to the truth: not only did the U.S. embassy officials know all along that Charles was dead, they were almost certainly complicit in his murder. According to declassified State Department documents, “At best, [U.S. intelligence] was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his [Horman’s] murder by the government of Chile. At worst, U.S. intelligence was aware the government saw Horman in a rather serious light and

U.S. officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of government of Chile paranoia” (Kornbluh, 311–312) Based on the historical record of events that Joyce and Ed had first begun to investigate, the film suggests that the U.S. government wanted Charles Horman eliminated because U.S. Navy personnel in the port city of Valparaiso, Chile, boasted to him about U.S. involvement in the Chilean military’s seizure of power and its overthrow of the Allende government. Missing therefore belongs with that series of films produced in the wake of the Vietnam War (most of them about Vietnam itself) that shone a light on U.S. imperial actions at the height of the Cold War when CIA and U.S. military excesses were easily justified. Margaret Power See also: Chile; Church Committee Hearings/Reports

Further Reading Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File. A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Washington, DC: National Security Archives, 2004. Power, Margaret. “North Americans and Chile: Building and Sustaining a Solidarity Movement.” Latin American Perspective, November 2009. “US Victims of the Chilean Coup: The Uncensored File.” New York Times, February 13, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/13/world/usvictims-of-chile-s-coup-the-uncensored-file.html?pagewanted=1. Accessed October 19, 2014.

Nicaragua, Contra War (1981–1990) The Contra War was a counterrevolutionary war directed by the United States against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s. In July 1979, a popularly supported revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The Somoza family dynasty had been in power for 43 years, supported by U.S. military and economic aid. During the last months of the revolutionary struggle, however, the Carter administration held back from providing arms to the Somoza government because of human rights abuses. President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) sought a constructive relationship with the new Sandinista government, offering $20 million in emergency aid and meeting with junta leaders Daniel Ortega, Sergio Ramírez, and Alfonso Robelo at the White House in September 1979. Another $75 million aid package to Nicaragua was approved by Congress in May 1980, but its distribution was suspended in mid-January 1981, pending investigation into reports of Nicaraguan arms transfers to revolutionaries in El Salvador. The issue of arms transfers opened the door for the incoming Reagan administration to initiate a covert war against Sandinista Nicaragua—what became the Contra War. President Ronald Reagan (1981– 1989) and his New Right supporters viewed the leftist Sandinista government as a threat to the United States and the region. On March 9, 1981, Reagan signed a secret Presidential Finding authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to organize an anti-Sandinista guerrilla force, ostensibly to interdict weapons transfers from Nicaragua to El Salvador. Scattered groups of former National Guardsmen of the ousted Somoza regime had already begun to form guerrilla units in Honduras and Guatemala, assisted by Argentine military advisers. In August 1981, these counterrevolutionaries—or “Contras"—established the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) under the auspices of the CIA. The FDN became the centerpiece of the Reagan administration’s strategy to oust the Sandinista government. The CIA, in addition to training, arming, and directing the Contras, conducted military actions on its own, including aerial raids against military bases and oil storage tanks, and mining Nicaraguan harbors in early 1984.

On the Atlantic coast, an FDN attack on a Sandinista military outpost in the Río Coco region near Honduras in December 1981 prompted the FSLN government to relocate Miskito, Sumu, and Rama indigenous communities to resettlement camps south of the border. The move sparked resistance, which in turn led to FSLN security sweeps, arrests, and unauthorized extrajudicial killings. The FSLN government belatedly recognized its errors and began a series of negotiations in late 1983 that led to a return of these Afro-Caribbean peoples to their lands in 1985, followed by an Autonomy Statute in September 1987, which largely ended the fighting. A third Contra force formed on the Costa Rican border. Sandinista military hero Edén Pastora, known as Comandante Cero, defected in July 1981 and was recruited by the CIA. In April 1982, he announced via radio that he was at war with the Sandinistas. His small band of fighters remained independent of the Honduran-based FDN, despite repeated attempts by Washington to bring the factions together. Pastora abandoned the fight in 1986 and returned to Nicaragua in 1989. The FDN, the main Contra force, rarely engaged the FSLN military directly. Its preferred method of “warfare” was to attack weakly defended rural communities deemed pro-Sandinista and kill government civilian workers—doctors, nurses, educators, and local officials. Such tactics were utterly repugnant to the vast majority of Nicaraguans, as noted by the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, Anthony Quainton. In a memo dated August 13, 1983, the ambassador informed the State Department that Nicaraguan newspapers were full of photographs and eyewitness accounts of a recent Contra ambush of a bus carrying 18 civilians near the town of Jinotega two days earlier. Quainton commented, “Incidents such as this in which unarmed civilians, including women and children, are victims provide invaluable grist for the Sandinista propaganda mill. Reports of such activities revive memories of the brutality of Somoza’s National Guard” (Quainton). Yet Contra attacks on civilians were not occasional incidents, but the main military strategy. As explained in the New York Times by former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro, who left the FDN in the fall of 1984, “During my four years as a ‘Contra’ director, it was premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government. Hundreds of civilian murders, tortures, and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the ‘Contra’ leaders and their C.I.A. superiors were well aware” (Chamorro).

The Reagan administration denied allegations of Contra atrocities, attributing them to Sandinista propaganda, but the discovery of a CIA “assassination manual” in Nicaragua in late 1984 prompted scrutiny by the media and Congress. The manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, published in Spanish and distributed to the FDN Contras, advised the selective use of violence against Nicaraguan officials, judges, security officers, and other civilians. Upon learning of the manual, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commented, “The administration has launched an aggressive anti-terrorism campaign, and yet we seem to be engaged in the very same terrorist activities which we deplore elsewhere” (Brinkley).

Nicaraguan Contra soldiers raise clenched fists at a training camp in Honduras in 1989. The Contras were the armed opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the 1980s. Despite international condemnation for human rights abuses and the violation of Nicaraguan sovereignty, the rebel group received clandestine military and financial support from operatives within the administration of U.S. president Ronald Reagan long after the Congress terminated such aid. (Cindy Karp/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

The Reagan administration’s justifications for U.S. intervention in Nicaragua were framed in the Cold War context. Administration officials asserted that Nicaragua was an “outpost of the Soviet empire,” engaged in a military buildup beyond its defensive needs, “exporting revolution,” and intent on creating a totalitarian society. Sandinista leaders, for their part, believed they made reasonable concessions to U.S. security interests. They promised to end arms transfers from Nicaragua, even calling for joint border patrols; pledged not to allow any Soviet or Cuban bases on Nicaraguan soil; and refrained from importing Soviet warplanes. Beyond these concessions, they asserted the right to defend Nicaragua against a foreign-supported insurgency and to govern without outside interference. Sergio Ramírez, who was elected vice president in November 1984, explained that Nicaragua’s “export of revolution” was not based on encouraging violent revolution abroad but on promoting an alternative to the capitalist model of underdevelopment in Latin America. “How can one prevent a peasant from another Central American

country from hearing, from finding out, from realizing that in Nicaragua land is given to other poor and barefoot peasants like him? … In this sense, we export our revolution” (Ramírez, 211). Beyond Cold War rationales lay a long history of U.S. interventionism in Central America, predicated upon the assumption that the United States has the right and responsibility to control affairs in “our backyard.” The Reagan administration was particularly keen on reasserting U.S. power in the wake of the Vietnam War. According to the historian William LeoGrande, the administration “went to war in Central America to exorcise the ghosts of Vietnam and to renew the national will to use force abroad” (LeoGrande, 590). In Washington, Congress was almost evenly divided on the issue of Contra aid, thus allowing a few “swing votes” to determine the outcome on successive legislative proposals. Congress cut off aid to the Contras completely in 1984, following revelations of the administration’s mining of Nicaraguan harbors —an act of war. The Contras nevertheless remained active in the field through the administration’s illegal supply network, later revealed in the Iran-Contra congressional hearings of 1987. Operating out of the basement of the White House, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and company tapped hidden Pentagon funds, solicited money from other nations, and used the profits from arms sales to Iran to purchase arms for the Contras. Congress resumed “nonlethal” aid to the Contras in mid-1985, and full military aid in mid-1986, then shifted back to providing only “nonlethal” aid from 1987 on. During the Iran-Contra hearings, North testified that his superiors authorized his actions, but Congress refrained from indicting President Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. Nine administration officials were ultimately convicted of criminal offenses. The Reagan administration also ran afoul of international law. Nicaragua filed suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice in April 1984. The Reagan administration refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction in the matter but nonetheless argued in public that its actions were consistent with the principle of “collective defense.” On June 27, 1986, the court ruled against the United States in a 142page opinion, supported by 12 of the 15 judges. The ruling stated that “the evidence is insufficient to satisfy the Court that the Government of Nicaragua was responsible for any flow of arms.” It declared that “by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the [C]ontra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua,” the United States was acting “in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State.” The court ordered the United States to end its support for the Contras and make reparation payments to Nicaragua “for all injury caused” (International Court). The Reagan administration blocked enforcement of the ruling in the United Nations Security Council. The favorable World Court ruling was nonetheless a major diplomatic coup for Nicaragua, buttressing Western European and Latin American opposition to U.S. policy. Across Europe, parallels were drawn between Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and U.S. hegemony in Central America. Latin American leaders initiated diplomatic efforts to peacefully resolve the conflicts in Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala). In January 1983, the foreign ministers of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama launched a regional peace initiative known as Contadora, named for the island off Panama where the diplomats met. In July 1985, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Peru formed the Contadora Support Group. Together, the eight governments represented 85 percent of the population of Latin America. Diplomatic negotiations eventually led to a peace treaty signed by five Central American presidents at Esquipulas, Guatemala, on August 7, 1987. Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez played a key role in pressuring all sides to compromise. The agreement required a cessation of all outside support for guerrilla forces and stipulated that the Sandinistas hold talks with the Contras. The Sandinistas did so, but the Reagan administration refused to comply with the treaty. According to Representative

James M. Jeffords, a moderate Republican congressman from Vermont who lobbied the White House to support the Arias peace plan, “Our government undermined that agreement almost immediately” (Jeffords, 184). By the end of 1984, it was clear to Reagan administration officials that the Contras would not be able to topple the Sandinista government on their own. CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates recommended to his superior, William Casey, that the United States initiate air strikes against Nicaragua and recognize the Contras as a government in exile. Such plans for direct U.S. intervention were kept on the back burner, however, while the administration pursued a less controversial strategy that combined sustained Contra military pressure with increased economic pressure and increased support for internal opposition groups. On May 1, 1985, the Reagan administration announced an economic embargo against Nicaragua, cutting off all U.S. trade. Although the embargo hurt private business owners in Nicaragua, the administration calculated correctly that it would further depress the Nicaraguan economy and thus undermine popular support for the Sandinistas. In 1989, the Bush administration enticed and pressured opposition political parties to unite under the banner of the National Opposition Union (UNO), in preparation for national elections on February 25, 1990. UNO consisted of 14 political parties—four on the right, seven in the middle, and three on the far left, including the Nicaraguan Communist Party. UNO presidential candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro carried the day, winning 55 percent of the popular vote against Daniel Ortega’s 41 percent. The Contra War ended thereafter, although reintegration of the Contras into Nicaraguan society took many years. The costs of the eight-year Contra War were substantial: approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans killed, thousands more maimed and wounded, 350,000 internally displaced, and $9 billion in economic damages. Thomas Walker, distinguished Latin Americanist scholar at Ohio University, described the Contra War as “one of the greatest human tragedies of the second half of the twentieth century” (Walker, xiii). For many Latin Americans today, the episode is a harsh reminder of persistent U.S. imperial interests in the region. Roger Peace See also: El Salvador; Guatemala (1954–1975); Iran-Contra Scandal; Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Brinkley, Joel. “Democrats Assail C.I.A. Primer for Latin Rebels.” New York Times, October 18, 1984. Chamorro, Edgar. “Letter to the Editor.” New York Times, January 9, 1986. International Court of Justice. “Case Concerning the Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America).” http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?sum=367&p1=3&p2=3&case=70&p3=5. Accessed October 19, 2014. Jeffords, Senator James M. An Independent Man: Adventures of a Public Servant. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. LeoGrande, William M. Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Quainton, Anthony. “Allegations of Contra Massacre.” Confidential Cable from Ambassador Anthony Quainton to Dept. of State, Aug. 13, 1983, 1–2. National Security Archive, Nicaragua collection, NI01791. Ramírez, Sergio. “The Unfinished American Revolution and Nicaragua Today.” July 14, 1983. Reprinted in Marlene Dixon and Susanne Jonas, eds. Nicaragua under Siege. San Francisco: Synthesis, 1984. Walker, Thomas, ed. Reagan Versus the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987.

Nuclear Freeze Movement Described by some scholars as the largest peace movement in world history, the Nuclear Freeze Movement emerged in 1981 with the intention of immediately halting the production, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons by both the United States and the Soviet Union as a first step toward

nuclear disarmament. Supported by millions across Europe and in the United States—in the streets, state legislatures, local referenda, and in Congress—the movement helped to compel national leaders to begin to address what had been a decades-long spiral of the nuclear arms race that Nuclear Freeze supporters believed threatened the existence of life on Earth. The rise to power and influence of the Right in the late 1970s and 1980s led to an increasingly militaristic U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it related to the development and possible use of nuclear weapons. In response, calls broadened for an end to the production of nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, before the clamor for what became a movement for a “Nuclear Freeze” gained popularity, many of the same activists had been protesting the expansion of nuclear power plants across America. Though the plants were seemingly unrelated to war, many activists saw them as directly connected to the issue of nuclear weapons development linked to the Cold War. In a core argument that was rooted in the Vietnam era, activists declared that the national security establishment had removed important decision-making processes related to foreign policy from the people, especially on the all-important matter of nuclear weapons policy. Located in people’s own backyards, nuclear power plants seemed like a more immediate danger—particularly after reported safety problems at a number of facilities around the country. By demanding their voices be heard, opposition to nuclear power offered residents a way to reclaim a democratic voice in protecting their communities. Additionally, some activists considered nuclear power —in part because of its fuel source and production processes—as indistinct from nuclear weapons. The anti–nuclear power movement reached a peak with events such as the 1977 Clamshell Alliance demonstrations against a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and the 1979 No Nukes concerts organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy.

Demonstrators march to Central Park in New York City on June 12, 1982, to join with nearly one million supporters of the Nuclear Freeze Movement. By the time of this demonstration, the Nuclear Freeze had become the largest peace movement in world history. (Lee Frey/Authenticated News/Getty Images)

Inspired by the anti–nuclear power campaigns, representatives from 49 peace and anti–nuclear energy organizations met in Philadelphia in April, 1977, to form Mobilization for Survival (MFS). Former activists such as Sidney Lens, David Dellinger, Sidney Peck, and Dave McReynolds all took part in the creation of MFS. MFS sought to dismantle all nuclear weapons, end the arms race, ban nuclear power, stop U.S. intervention in the Third World, and increase spending on social programs. In its first year, MFS

held commemorations of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and organized more than 200 1960s-style teach-ins. In May 1978, MFS held a rally at the United Nations during the UN Special Session on Disarmament. More than 15,000 people took part in the day’s activities, making it the largest disarmament demonstration until that point. The Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign offered an alternative to the nonviolent civil disobedience favored by the Clamshell Alliance and other groups. The campaign owed its start to Dr. Randall Forsberg. Prior to forming the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) in 1980, Forsberg had given talks to various peace groups on the dangers of nuclear war and the need for nuclear disarmament. By 1979, Forsberg started proposing an immediate Nuclear Freeze on the continued development of weapons, as well as a policy of non-U.S. intervention in foreign countries. When she spoke at the MFS national meeting in December, 1979, Forsberg, fearing the nonintervention clause would dissuade some activists from supporting the Nuclear Freeze, offered the Nuclear Freeze proposal as a unitary goal. Following the conference, Forsberg wrote a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race.” Forsberg’s “Call” proposed an immediate end to the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Though not mentioned in the “Call,” Forsberg viewed the Nuclear Freeze as a precursor to even greater changes in America’s foreign policy. Forsberg hoped that the coalition formed in support of the Nuclear Freeze would also demand drastic changes in America’s Latin America policy, including an end to interventions in the region and a greater emphasis on economic development and human rights. In the end, however, with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons deployed on both sides of the Cold War, the Nuclear Freeze proposal mattered most urgently, and also stood the chance of winning broader support than if it had remain linked to a broader challenge to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Thus to gain the support of moderates, the Nuclear Freeze campaign did not vocally support the anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist, antiracist, and antisexist policies favored by some groups. MFS, for instance, endorsed the Nuclear Freeze but did not actively promote the measure because the proposal offered little in the way of ending U.S. military intervention in the Third World. While national organizations played a pivotal part in the Nuclear Freeze campaign, the campaign’s early successes came from the grassroots. Local activists in western Massachusetts succeeded in forcing a freeze referendum onto the November 1980 ballot in 62 towns, out of which 59 towns voted in favor of the freeze. The following spring, on March 20–22, 1981, 300 activists from various peace groups, including the American Friends Service Committee and the War Resisters League, met in Washington, D.C. to discuss strategy. Out of this conference came the creation of the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Clearinghouse (NWFC). The overall strategy devised at the meeting strongly emphasized the need to gain the support of local citizens before attempting to pass Nuclear Freeze legislation on the national level. In early 1982, the NWFC—initially based out of the IDDS in Brookline, Massachusetts—moved to St. Louis, Missouri, under the direction of Randy Kehler, who had previously led the campaign to pass Nuclear Freeze resolutions in Massachusetts. Within months of the move to St. Louis, the NWFC hired additional personnel, including a Washington liaison officer and a national media coordinator, signifying the Nuclear Freeze’s transition to a national campaign. Also in 1982, national politicians began paying attention to the Nuclear Freeze. Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a Nuclear Freeze resolution in the House, followed by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Mark Hatfield (R-OR) in their body of Congress. When 750,000 to 1,000,000 million Nuclear Freeze supporters packed Central Park in New York City on June 12, 1982, the campaign began its march away from grassroots activism to national politics. Across the country, another 100,000 people supported the Nuclear Freeze in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. The

widespread support mattered little to MFS, whose founders, Lens and Dellinger, continued their call for a complete abolition of nuclear weapons. On May 4, 1983, the House of Representatives passed a weakened Nuclear Freeze resolution, which included provisions that exempted certain weapons systems, 278 to 149, but the Senate, on October 31, 1983, rejected even this bill 58 to 40. The Nuclear Freeze campaign continued, and in fact formed a political action committee (Freeze Voter) in 1984 to support pro-Freeze candidates. Support for the Nuclear Freeze, however, had already peaked, in part due to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense proposal of 1983 that pledged to protect Americans from the threat of nuclear weapons. Moreover, by the mid-1980s, many peace activists had turned their attention to the Reagan administration’s bellicose policy in Central America. Brian S. Mueller See also: Atomic Bomb/Nuclear Weapons; Nicaragua, Contra War

Further Reading Epstein, Barbara. Political Protest & Cultural Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Meyer, David S. A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics. New York: Praeger, 1990. Surbrug, Robert, Jr. Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974–1990. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Wittner, Lawrence S. Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present. Vol. III of The Struggle Against the Bomb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Oil Industry in the Middle East The U.S. oil industry’s initial advance into the Middle East resulted from private business’s ability to take advantage of American “Open Door” ideology. Following World War I, industry executives from Standard Oil of New York requested U.S. State Department assistance to break the British hold on Middle Eastern oil. Worried about potential trade sanctions, American companies secured a foothold in a newly organized Iraq Petroleum Company in 1922. Soon after in 1933, Standard Oil of California signed a 60year agreement with Saudi Arabia giving U.S. interests control of one of the region’s largest oil reserves. American oil companies drove expansion in the region after World War II, but not before the U.S. government attempted to exert more direct influence during the war. In 1943, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, head of the Petroleum Administration for War, floated a plan for the government’s Petroleum Reserves Corporation (PRC) to purchase a controlling share of the Saudi Arabian venture, a plan that received little support from the American companies involved. In 1944, he tried and again failed to persuade the British government to part with a portion of its Kuwaiti concession. Ickes then proposed U.S. management of Middle Eastern oil through control of its transport. This time, oil companies in the United States cried foul and halted the pipeline’s construction, claiming that a flood of Middle Eastern oil, subsidized by the U.S. government, would drive prices so low that it would put them out of business. In August 1944, Ickes worked out a deal between U.S. and British concerns, the Anglo-American Oil Agreement, meant to provide joint management of world oil markets through quotas. This plan, too, faced tough opposition and never generated the needed support domestically. American independents feared that the major oil companies could use the accord to put them out of business, while the major corporations worried about future antitrust cases should they participate. With U.S. government attempts to take more direct control of Middle Eastern oil rebuffed, the State Department turned to companies to lead the way. American oil consumption increased nearly 20 percent

through the war. Combined with postwar European reconstruction needs and the emerging Cold War, the Middle East became ever more important, both economically and strategically. The “postwar petroleum order,” as oil historian Daniel Yergin calls it, came to rely on government-industry cooperation. Private companies became agents of American foreign oil policy, as the U.S. government and private firms sought access to oil at stable prices. The largest American venture in the Middle East, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), established private relations with the Saudi monarchy and founded its own colony in the kingdom’s Eastern Province. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, materialized from the desert as an American-made oasis, housing workers in racially divided communities and providing the comforts of home to many American workers. While the American zone included tree-lined boulevards, swimming pools, and air-conditioned homes, Arab workers endured the elements in cinder block apartments with few amenities. This disparity mirrored employer-employee relations, setting off periods of violence. A general strike in 1953 saw thousands of workers protest second-class treatment, but company-kingdom cooperation brought it to a quick end. Aramco built hospitals for Saudi workers, engaged in public health campaigns, taught new agricultural techniques, and engaged in various large construction projects, all with an eye toward improved relations with the Saudi monarchy. The American expansion in Saudi Arabia continued apace in the early Cold War, providing much needed oil resources for the U.S. military and postwar European reconstruction. While companies assumed an important leadership role in U.S. foreign oil policy, the U.S. government remained an essential ally to corporate expansion. In 1945, Aramco looked to construct a pipeline from Saudi oil fields to the Mediterranean and secured rights-of-way from all countries except Syria. Due to U.S. recognition of Israel in May 1948, the Syrian parliament rejected company appeals and threats. American support led to a Syrian coup in March 1949, and the new government ratified a new pipeline agreement with Aramco in May that same year. Aramco’s interests further received U.S. government support in 1950 when the company agreed to a fifty-fifty split of profits with Saudi Arabia. To sweeten the deal and make it more palatable to the oil giant, the U.S. government allowed Aramco’s royalty payments to be written off its U.S. taxes, thereby transferring substantial funds to the Saudi government that otherwise were bound for the U.S. Treasury. The Iranian government received a far less receptive response from the British, which combined with other complaints led to the Iranian nationalization crisis in the early 1950s. After the U.S. government attempted to mediate a negotiated settlement, a U.S.-British backed coup in the summer of 1953 led to substantial American corporate expansion into Iranian oil. The U.S. Justice Department granted American firms antitrust protection, allowing it to participate fully in the newly formed Iranian oil consortium. Despite U.S. government support for corporate expansion in the Middle East, the continuing ArabIsraeli conflict signaled the American oil industry’s loosening grip on power. Western coordination foiled attempts to use oil as a weapon during the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 1973, however, Western demand for oil had outpaced supply, and in 1960 the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was able to wrestle control of production and pricing from private firms. American corporate control of Middle Eastern oil declined rapidly as producing nations took control of operations, bringing an end to American oil industry expansion in the Middle East. Symbolizing this shift in 1973, the Arabian American Oil Company signed an agreement turning over 25 percent of operations to the Saudi Arabian government, initiating an eventual turnover to the monarchy by the end of the next decade. Chad H. Parker

See also: Eisenhower Doctrine; Iran, Coup d’etat; Israel (1976–1989); Open Door Policy

Further Reading Heiss, Mary Ann. Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–1954. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Painter, David. Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Panama Canal (Torrijos-Carter) Treaties (1977) On September 7, 1977, U.S. president Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) and Panamanian General Omar Torrijos (1929–1981), the recognized leader of the country since 1968, signed two Panama Canal Treaties, the most significant provision of which transferred control of the U.S.-built Panama Canal to the nation of Panama beginning in the year 2000. The first agreement, formally known as the Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal, guaranteed the right of the U.S. military to defend the Panama Canal against threats to its neutrality. This was in some ways a reflection of the U.S. desire to retain its continued hemispheric hegemonic dominance in the region, which extended back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The second, the Panama Canal Treaty, ensured that Panama would take custody of the canal at the end of 1999. Since its construction in the first decade of the 20th century following a U.S.supported revolt in the Colombian province of Panama, the canal had been not only a U.S. engineering wonder and an important commercial and naval waterway linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans; it was also a concrete symbol of America’s imperialistic attitude and policies toward all of Latin America. The idea of granting sovereignty of the canal and its 10-mile-wide Panama Canal Zone to Panama gained support during the administration of John F. Kennedy (1917–1963). More broadly, Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress sought to infuse foreign aid into Latin America as a bulwark against the appeal of indigenous nationalist-Communist rebellions like that in Cuba. In January 1963, Kennedy authorized the flying of the national flag of Panama at all non-U.S. military sites within the Canal Zone alongside the U.S. flag. One month following JFK’s assassination, the U.S. governor general in command of the Zone greatly delimited the order, effectively rescinding it. In January 1964, a crowd of Panamanian students attempted to fly their flag alongside a U.S. flag, in accordance with the original directive. American students and parents and officials at a U.S. school in the area harassed and heckled the Panamanian students, in turn triggering rioting from growing crowds. The flag—one of symbolic significance as it was used in a 1947 protest against the presence of the U.S. military in the Canal Zone—was torn in the melee. What followed was violent rebellion throughout the Panama Canal Zone. U.S. soldiers, there to protect U.S. property, began firing. Twenty Panamanians were killed and nearly 500 injured in what became known as Martyrs Day in Panama. Although Panama briefly terminated diplomatic relations with the United States following the incident, by the end of 1964 negotiations between the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) and the government of Panama had commenced in earnest. In 1967, a treaty was successfully negotiated but not approved by the Panamanian assembly. There things stood until 1977 and the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who determined to remake American foreign policy and the image of the United States internationally in the years following Vietnam. Although Carter seemed to oppose the treaty during the 1976 presidential campaign, once in the White House, granting sovereignty over the Canal Zone to

Panama fit squarely within these efforts. By August 1977, diplomats completed negotiations on the treaties. Panama put the agreements to a referendum, which nearly went down to defeat because of the Neutrality Treaty. Conversely, in the United States, the U.S. Senate barely ratified the treaty by the necessary two-thirds vote, largely because of opposition from conservatives who saw the treaty as a sign of American weakness and retreat. The national debate over the Panama Canal Treaties came amid rising fears of a “Vietnam Syndrome” of humiliating, dangerous American withdrawal from the world and a perceived (if largely overblown) weakening of military strength after that disastrous Southeast Asian conflict. The fierce debate in the Senate—the first-ever live radio broadcast from the Senate chamber— featured invective from conservative senators who saw a U.S. global “surrender” in the ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties. Nevertheless, both treaties passed by identical narrowly close votes of 68–32. The treaties picked up some support from business-minded conservatives of both parties because they allowed Panama to more easily pay back its sizable debt of $1.8 billion to American banks. On January 1, 2000, the Panama Canal Zone—nearly 370,000 square acres and more than 7,000 buildings—became sovereign territory of the nation of Panama. Chris J. Magoc See also: Monroe Doctrine; Panama/Panama Canal; Primary Documents: President Jimmy Carter’s Address to the Nation on the Panama Canal Treaties (February 1, 1978)

Further Reading Clymer, Adam. Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Moffett, George D., III. The Limits of Victory: The Ratification of the Panama Canal Treaties. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Panama Invasion (1989) The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama is fraught with irony, contradiction, and paradox. It centers on the U.S. relationship with General Manuel Antonio Noriega (b. 1938), who, with considerable assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, rose through the ranks of Panama intelligence agencies and the military to become dictator of the Central American country in 1983. He served in that role until his overthrow by the U.S. military in what was dubbed by the U.S. military “Operation Just Cause.”

U.S. Marines stand guard outside a destroyed Panama Defense Forces building on the first day of the U.S. invasion of Panama, known as Operation Just Cause, on December 20, 1989. As was the case with other long-time authoritarian U.S. allies during the Cold War, the relationship between Panama’s president General Manuel Antonio Noriega and the United States soured (in part) when the dictator began to exercise a more independent voice on international relations that was critical of the U.S. (U.S. Department of Defense)

The U.S. cultivation of Noriega has its roots in the Cuban Communist revolution of the late 1950s, which led the CIA to seek sources of intelligence on the new regime throughout Latin America. In 1960, just after the revolution, Noriega was a student at the Peruvian Military Academy. There he was recruited as a CIA informant and later received training in intelligence and counterintelligence at the School of the Americas and at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Noriega loyally supported the U.S. strategic agenda in Latin America for more than two decades of the Cold War. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Noriega’s rise to power was aided by his involvement with the notorious Colombian-based drug-running Medellin Cartel. Simultaneously, he served as a vital link not only to U.S. intelligence-gathering operations in Cuba, but also the ongoing conflict in Latin America emerging between America’s ally, Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and the Sandinista revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. During Ronald Reagan’s administration, Noriega provided vital support for the U.S.-Contra war against the Sandinistas, allowing CIA listening posts aimed at the Nicaraguan government and laundering money through Panama to illegally support the Contras. By the end of the 1980s, the end of both the Cold War and Contra war was in sight. The U.S. “War on Drugs,” however, was not, and as Noriega began to assert a more independent foreign policy for his country (that is to say, less reliably pro–United States), the general became expendable. Noriega was now openly receiving support from Communist Cuba and Nicaragua and Libyan anti–United States strongman Muammar Qaddafi. Noriega’s involvement in drug trafficking had come to light and now was an embarrassment to the U.S. administration. Noriega successfully rebuffed an internal coup attempt in 1988. Members of the Reagan administration national security team argued for an invasion but the president rejected these requests, fearing the impact on his vice president’s run for president; George H. W. Bush was the CIA director during a critical period of Noriega’s rise to power. Reagan attempted to peacefully remove Noriega from office but he was not willing to relinquish power. In February 1988, Noriega was indicted by two grand juries in Miami and Tampa on 12 counts of racketeering, drug trafficking, money laundering, and assisting the Medellin Cartel. In May 1989, Noriega refused to honor the results of national elections that went decisively against his regime. A second coup attempt in October 1989 failed, even as the United States fortified its military base in the Panama Canal Zone with additional troops and began to prepare for military action. On December 5, 1989, the Panamanian General Assembly announced that a state of war existed between the country and the United States. Two weeks later, on December 20, the U.S. president announced that military operations had begun in Panama. The invasion and overthrow of Noriega was justified on these grounds: given the “state of war” declaration, it was necessary to safeguard the lives of the 35,000 Americans living in Panama; to confront Noriega’s role in drug trafficking; to promote democracy and human rights; and to ensure the protection of U.S. access to the Panama Canal. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977 had signed over control of the canal by the year 2000, but the United States, said the president, needed to respond militarily to what appeared to be a threat to its interests in the Canal Zone. U.S. forces quickly defeated Panama Defense Forces (PDF), with 24 American soldiers losing their lives in the operation and some 200 Panamanians. With U.S. forces surrounding him, General Noriega sought protection at a Catholic Church site, the Apostolic Nunciature in Panama City. In what seems a

moment of imperialist comedy, U.S. soldiers blasted loud American rock music in their successful effort to force his surrender. Umeme Sababu and Chris J. Magoc See also: Nicaragua, Contra War; Panama Canal (Torrijos-Carter) Treaties; School of the Americas

Further Reading Jones, Christina J., and P. Ward Johnson. State Crime, the Media and the Invasion of Panama. New York: Greenwood, 1993. McCullough, Douglas J., and Les Pendleton. Sea of Greed: The True Story of the Investigation and Prosecution of Manuel Noriega. New York: Deer Hawk, 2014. Tanner, Stephen. The Wars of the Bushes: A Father and Son as Military Leaders. Philadelphia: Casemate, 2004.

Permanent Court of International Justice The Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) was a pioneering tribunal established as part of the international arrangements set out by the League of Nations Covenant after the First World War (1914– 1918). Article XIV of the covenant advocated the establishment of the PCIJ to facilitate the peaceful settlement of international disputes. States who were members of the League of Nations Covenant could hear cases against other signatory states that had also ratified the court statute. States could, in exceptional cases, still participate in court proceedings even if they were not members of the league. Member states participated in electing judges and sharing operating costs. The PCIJ held its inaugural sitting in The Hague in January 1922. It was formally dissolved in 1946 to make way for the International Court of Justice. During the years of its sitting, the PCIJ proved valuable in clarifying and shaping aspects of international law. Its advisory function was sought to examine key questions of international rights and obligations between states. The PCIJ’s role has been regarded as conservative, resisting the path of judicial innovation notably in the area of its advisory jurisdiction. Its creation, however, was regarded at the PCIJ’s inaugural meeting in 1922 by the League of Nations’ Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond as “the greatest and … most important creative act of the League” (quoted in Aljaghoub, 26). The British attorney general, Sir Ernest Pollock, saw the PCIJ as a means of building “reverence and respect for public law, for international rights, and international aims” (quoted in Fitzmaurice and Tams, 1). It is precisely the nature of the more understated role of the PCIJ that enabled dispute resolution between states and international organizations to be more effective. While being nonbinding, such opinions directed negotiations between contesting parties in the settlement of disputes. Decisions were made covering such areas as contentious jurisdiction, minority rights, human rights law, the law of treaties, and international trade. From 1922 to 1940, the PCIJ sat for 65 proceedings, the vast majority of which fell between 1922 and 1932. It rendered 32 judgments and 27 advisory judgments. Governments withdrew another 10 cases from consideration before the court’s final deliberation. Various revisions and changes were implemented to the PCIJ during its years of operation. The rules of the court were revised in 1926; additional modifications in 1936 replaced ordinary and extraordinary session with judicial years in office. The composition of the court and its overall structure were changed in 1931 with the second election of jurists. In February 1940, the PCIJ held its last session, prior to the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany.

With the Second World War (1939–1945) raging, delegates sought the creation of a new international court to replace the PCIJ, which was considered too closely linked to the League of Nations and its deficiencies. The decision to establish the International Court of Justice was made at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C. (August–October 1944). Despite suggestions that the ICJ would offer a break in the functional legacy of the PCIJ, continuity in terms of practice and jurisprudence has persisted. Binoy Kampmark

Further Reading Aljaghoub, Mahassen Mohammad. The Advisory Function of the Court of International Justice. New York: Springer, 2007. Fitzmaurice, Malgosia, and Christian Tams, eds. Legacies of the Permanent Court of International Justice. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013. Wehberg, Hans. The Problem of an International Court of Justice. Translated by Charles G. Fenwick. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2008.

“Rambo” Films (1982, 1985, 1988, 2008) The 1980s brought movie viewers the big-budget action movie, and U.S. foreign policy adventures abroad featured prominently in these films. Along these lines, one of the era’s most popular celluloid heroes, John Rambo, came to symbolize the rejuvenation of American power abroad in the post-Vietnam era. The “Rambo” series includes the films First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood, Part 2 (1985), Rambo III (1988), and the more recent Rambo (2008). While the first film remains more critically acclaimed than the others, the second was a major box office success, establishing Rambo as an American cultural icon. A warrior sculpted by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War, John Rambo epitomizes American masculinity in the 1980s, but his reemergence 20 years later in Rambo signified a crisis in American imperialism in the 21st century, one in need of a hero. Hollywood came to the rescue, reawakening the dormant character. Movie audiences first met Rambo as he strolled into Hope, Washington, in First Blood (1982) to visit an army buddy. Mistaken for a drifter, or worse, a hippie, he is dishonorably escorted out of town, leading, upon his defiant return, to his arrest, torture, escape, hunt, and destruction of the town. The postVietnam government and armed forces, represented by the National Guard, provided no match for John Rambo, who honed his skills in another era, before America’s global limits emerged and the “Vietnam Syndrome” inflicted impotence on the nation. Forced to act, the Vietnam veteran becomes the hero, fighting not just for his own survival, but also, as the film argues, against a general, collective, national attitude that led to the American defeat in Vietnam. In the film, the wounded Vietnam veteran emerges the hero. Rambo: First Blood, Part 2 (1985) transports the hero to Vietnam, this time to locate American prisoners of war left behind by inept and immoral U.S. government officials. Rambo once again overcomes torture, although this time it is not just his own suffering viewers witness, but that of POWs as well, and with them, all of America. Rambo wins the war in Vietnam “this time” and punctuates his success through violence against his American handlers upon his return. He is antibureaucratic and antigovernment. As a number of scholars have noted, Rambo was a ready-made representation of President Ronald Reagan’s ideology; indeed, Reagan invoked the Rambo mythology in his call for Americans to support his administration’s Contra War in Nicaragua. With these movies, the American project in Vietnam is pulled from history and reimagined as a victory, if not for the United States, at least for the Vietnam veteran. The character came to represent renewed American strength through individual action and righteousness, but when we see Rambo again in Rambo III (1988), he is a Buddhist. So when his former

commander, Colonel Trautman, asks him to travel to Afghanistan to help deliver Stinger missiles to the mujahideen, he refuses. Soon, however, American arms shipments become personalized through the Soviet capture of Trautman. The suffering of “Third World” peoples at the hands of the Soviets becomes clear as Soviet soldiers wantonly kill Afghan women and children, destroying entire villages. The captured Trautman undergoes “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Soviets to locate Stinger missiles. His torture leads to no actionable intelligence, instead producing false information. “Where are the Stinger missiles?” Trautman is asked. “In your ass,” is his only response. Rambo, of course, rescues his former commander, helps the Afghan rebels, and exacts vengeance on the Soviets, but what will Rambo’s future bring? His new comrades in the mujahideen ask after victory, “Are you sure you don’t want to stay, you fight good?” Rambo’s response: “Maybe next time.” The next time, however, would not come for 20 years, and it would not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, where the United States was engaged in prolonged conflicts. This time we find Rambo back in Southeast Asia, where Burma serves as a surrogate for Vietnam, and where Rambo can demonstrate once more how individuality, power, and righteousness can support American leadership in the world, all the while making Americans feel good about the violence it exports. This time, Rambo is hired to transport Christian missionaries from Thailand to war-torn Burma. These missionaries hope that medical supplies, books, and messages of peace, not weapons, can make a difference in a nation said to be ruled by a military regime that commits untold atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons, but Rambo knows better. When the missionaries are captured by Burmese fighters, Rambo moves in to rescue them along with an international coalition of mercenaries. The climactic scene brings a level of violence to the Rambo series that is unseen in the first three films. Rambo brutally kills hundreds, and audiences see one of the missionaries take a life, as well. He is converted to reality and does what must be done to combat evildoers in the world who look to do harm to Americans who have “done nothing wrong,” as he pleaded only moments earlier. The leader of the Burmese army forces, represented as a cowardly homosexual, is killed while sneaking away, bringing an end to the fighting. Rambo survives to return home to see his father, and it seems he will be available again when his country needs him. Chad H. Parker See also: Militarization of American Culture; Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Boggs, Carl, and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006. Franklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other Fantasies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Olson, James S., and Randy Roberts. “Coming to Terms with the Vietnam War.” In Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts, eds. Hollywood’s America: United States History Through Its Films. Rev. ed. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1993, pp. 284–297. Rowe, John Carlos. “Culture, U.S. Imperialism, and Globalization.” American Literary History 16, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 575–595.

Red Dawn (John Milius) (1984) Red Dawn is a 1984 Hollywood film directed by John Milius, starring Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, and Powers Booth. The film imagines a Communist invasion of the town of Calumet, Colorado, in the 1980s, organized by Cuban, Soviet, and Nicaraguan forces. The film’s release coincided with renewed tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union during the

administration of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s interventions in Nicaragua and El Salvador exacerbated these tensions, and the film reflected the heightened fears in American culture during the 1980s over the escalation of the Cold War. The film opens with a description of Communist advances in the developing world and the collapse of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Communist forces then parachute into Calumet near the local high school, indiscriminately murdering civilians and taking over the government. A small group of high school students escapes the attack by fleeing into the mountains, living a survivalist existence in preparation for a counterassault. The group then secretly makes trips into the Communist-occupied town, collecting supplies and weapons. On one of these trips, the students, led by brothers Jed (Swayze) and Matt (Sheen), welcome two teenage girls, Toni (Grey) and Erica (Thompson), into the group. Along with the girls, a downed air force pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Tanner (Booth), joins their ranks, providing assistance with military strategy and tactics. The teenagers and Tanner form a paramilitary guerrilla unit, calling themselves the “Wolverines,” a name taken from the town’s high school mascot, and begin launching sporadic and surprise assaults on the Communist forces. As the Wolverines mount successful strikes against the invading militaries, the officer in command of the Communists, Colonel Bella, takes escalated measures against the guerrillas. Bella’s actions prove lethal for the Wolverines. Starving and weakened by casualties, the Wolverines attempt to escape from the town, leading to the deaths of Jed and Matt. The film concludes with a shot of a plaque commemorating the lives of the teenagers, presumably after the defeat of the Soviets and their allies during “World War III.” With its gratuitous violence and overt nationalistic themes, Red Dawn sought to unify a cultural consensus behind the Reagan defense buildup and U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s. The movie celebrated the military-industrial complex and American hegemony, while implicitly promoting American imperialism in Latin America to ward off Communist insurgencies. Red Dawn also celebrated gun violence, echoing slogans made by organizations like the National Rifle Association that private gun ownership was needed to protect Americans from internal and external threats. Along with other films released in the 1980s such as Rambo, Top Gun, and Invasion USA, Red Dawn was American conservatives’ answer to the Vietnam Syndrome and the years of détente, as its supporters welcomed the film as a patriotic antidote to critiques of American foreign policy. Michael Brenes See also: Invasion USA; Militarization of American Culture; Nicaragua, Contra War; “Rambo” Films; Top Gun

Further Reading Bacevich, Andrew. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Prince, Steven. Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film. New York: Praeger, 1992.

Rhodesia/Zimbabwe Zimbabwe is a landlocked country in southern Africa. Known as Rhodesia during the years of white minority rule, its unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965 inaugurated more than a decade of tense official relations with its black majority and the world community. International isolation and the internal revolution known as the Second Chimurenga or Bush War eventually forced the government to integrate and dissolve its government. After democratic elections in 1980, President

Robert Mugabe led the transition to the new nation of Zimbabwe and began three decades of increasingly authoritarian rule. The British carved out Southern Rhodesia during the final stages of the scramble for Africa. Mineral magnate Cecil Rhodes obtained mining rights to the region in the late 19th century. In contrast to neighboring protectorates like Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia) and Nyasaland (modern Malawi), white settlement earned the colony the distinction of self-government. This minority of a few hundred thousand whites lorded over more than five million African peoples, developing an economy based on tobacco, copper, and chrome. Minority control became increasingly tenuous as decolonization swept through Africa in the 1950s. The British attempted to chart a middle path between white and popular rule through the creation of a federation that united the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, but black nationalists demanded a greater role in government than southern whites would concede. The collapse of the federation forced Britain to accept African nationalist demands. Zambia and Malawi gained independence under African governments in 1964. Fearing similar recognition of self-determination, the settlers of Southern Rhodesia declared independence without British consent in 1965. Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) resulted in tense domestic and international relations. African nations lobbied for armed British intervention and sanctions, but the United Kingdom refrained from invading the country. It lacked domestic support and feared the regional ramifications of such a war. Britain did lead the United States and other countries in placing economic sanctions on Rhodesia. These measures isolated the minority regime and slowly weakened its economy. Nonetheless, import substitutions and continuing trade with countries like France, Germany, Portugal, and the neighboring minority government of South Africa allowed Rhodesia to maintain its rogue independence for 15 years. The inability of foreign states to compel Rhodesia’s acceptance of majority rule pushed African nationalists to launch the Second Chimurenga, led by the united Patriotic Front of sometimes rivals Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union. American policy supported multiracial majority rule, but popular anticommunism, racial tensions, and commercial interests made actual relations with Rhodesia more ambiguous. President Lyndon Johnson worked closely with the British in 1965, fearing that the UDI could inflame racial tensions and invite Cold War competition into southern Africa. A hard line played well with African American voters, but the government hesitated to adopt a policy beyond sanctions and fines for American violators. Popular sympathy with Rhodesia—especially in the south and west where racial thinking and southern African business ties were strong—restricted the president’s policy options. The Nixon administration rhetorically maintained calls for self-determination, though its adoption of the “Tar Baby Option” encouraged limited acceptance of Rhodesia as a way of managing change through increased influence. A number of congressional initiatives also helped weaken American sanctions, most notably the Byrd Amendment that allowed for the importation of chrome in defiance of the United Nations. The collapse of Portugal’s African empire in 1975 and Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights helped transform these ambiguous relations concerning Rhodesia. Despite the existence of a reactionary minority, most Americans accepted the need for majority rule in Africa. African Americans in particular advocated for more aggressive U.S. policies through demonstrations like the annual African Liberation Day celebrations of the 1970s and the formation of lobbying group TransAfrica. Carter’s administration included a number of these critics like Andrew Young, who helped strengthen sanctions. Eventually, economic pressure and the rapidly expanding guerrilla war forced the minority government to modify its policies. An attempt to install a friendly black African–led government ultimately failed when the United States and Britain refused to loosen sanctions, greatly pleasing Mugabe and Nkomo, who vowed to

continue their struggle. The Lancaster House Agreement of 1979 finally ended the war, declaring a ceasefire, mandating temporary British oversight, and setting elections for the following year. The Carter administration did not play a direct role in the agreement, but its demands that all parties negotiate from equal positions and softening of sanctions helped convince the nationalists to accept the agreement. With the United States and Britain promising financial aid, Zimbabwe (named after the ancient African city) gained independence under the leadership of the newly elected president, Robert Mugabe.

U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance meets with Joshua Nkomo (right) and Robert Mugabe at the State Department in Washington, D.C., March 11, 1978. Nkomo and Mugabe were the two heads of the armed nationalist struggle fighting to lead Rhodesia toward multiracial majority rule. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma)

Zimbabwe initially provided a glimmer of hope amidst regional problems, but Mugabe’s autocratic rule has strained the country’s economy and relations with foreign states. The nationalist struck a conciliatory tone when he came to power, inviting whites into his government and moderating his racial and Communist rhetoric of the revolutionary period. Britain, the United States, and other international donors provided Zimbabwe with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid—$533 million in 1982 alone. The economy began to recover and a brief expansion of public services allowed the country to claim one of the highest standards of living on the continent. But when problems arose in land redistribution schemes and the agricultural sector became less productive, Mugabe adopted increasingly racist rhetoric to explain away official failings. He also openly tolerated governmental corruption, distributing benefits to allies as a way of retaining power. Countries like the United States ceased providing aid in the mid-1980s as Mugabe became more authoritarian and began lambasting foreign governments for supposedly undermining his rule. Most notably, Mugabe alienated foreign and domestic supporters alike when his quest to gain absolute power resulted in voter fraud, intimidation, and abuse of the legal system. Laws like the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 2001 froze assets and aid distributions due to this prolonged mismanagement of the state and economy. Regional

adventurism also undermined the once successful state. The expenses of intervening in the Second Congo War helped destroy the value of the Zimbabwean dollar, ushering in an era of high inflation and extreme unemployment estimated at over 70 percent of the population. By the turn of the century, Zimbabwe had become one of the poorest nations in the world, despite retaining a well-educated and relatively dynamic civil society. Still in power as of 2013, Mugabe has continued to resist domestic and international calls for truly democratic elections and more responsible governance. R. Joseph Parrott See also: South African Apartheid

Further Reading DeRoche, Andrew. Black, White, and Chrome: The United States and Zimbabwe, 1953–1998. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001. Godwin, Peter, and Ian Hancock. “Rhodesians Never Die”: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, 1970–1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Horne, Gerald. From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War Against Zimbabwe, 1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Meredith, Martin. Mugabe. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007. Raftopoulos, Brian, and A. S. Mlambo. Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008. Harare: Weaver Press, 2009. Watts, Carl Peter. Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence: An International History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

School of the Americas With roots in the Cold War, the School of the Americas represented the deep and often controversial links between the United States and Latin America during the period. Based in the Panama Canal Zone, the school provided training in the latest counterinsurgency techniques to Latin American soldiers. After the end of the Cold War, the school was relocated to the state of Georgia and given a new name. It remains, however, a heavily contested component of U.S.–Latin American relations. Supporters of the school claim that the institution fosters U.S.–Latin American military alliances and bolsters the security of the Western Hemisphere. Critics allege that the school’s students return to their countries of origin well versed in torture and repression, demonstrated by graduates who participated in military coups and human rights abuses. During the Cold War, the U.S. government sought reliable allies in Latin America to support the overarching policy of the containment of the Soviet Union. With military aid, U.S. officials hoped to encourage stable anticommunist governments that would defend the Western Hemisphere in the event of war. Following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, U.S. officials grew alarmed over potential links between Fidel Castro and leftist groups in Latin America. From the Office of Public Safety to deepening relations between the Central Intelligence Agency and Latin American intelligence agencies, the School of the Americas represented new strategic initiatives aimed at domestic surveillance and counterinsurgency. The school’s predecessor, the Latin American Ground School, started in 1946 to train Latin American students in the use of U.S.-manufactured arms and present a positive image of the United States. Renamed the School of the Americas in 1963, the institution began devoting more attention to counterinsurgency programs. While fewer than 8,000 students attended before 1959, the school received 16,000 Latin Americans between 1961 and 1964 alone. The school reinforced an emerging ideology, defined as national security doctrine, which identified communism as a destabilizing threat to a nation’s internal security and social order. This concept argued that the military, through centralized and integrated security

methods, needed to remove any alleged “internal subversives,” a definition that could include student groups, labor unions, religious activists, and peasants. Under U.S. military officers, the school’s courses ranged from counterinsurgency training and interrogation methods to intelligence-sharing and covert operations. During the Cold War, the number of the school’s students often related to “hot spots” in Latin America. Bolivian graduates utilized their training from the school to defeat Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s insurgent following in the 1960s, while the school in the 1980s received many students from the Central American governments facing guerrilla movements. Debates over the school remain highly contentious. Critics claim the school trained and indoctrinated Latin American soldiers in not just counterinsurgency but repressive techniques of state-sponsored terrorism aimed against civilians, such as torture and kidnapping. Numerous graduates participated in military coups against democratically elected governments or are charged with human rights violations. In El Salvador, graduates Major Roberto D’Aubuisson and Colonel Domingo Monterrosa organized death squads and military units that killed U.S. citizens and massacred Salvadorans. Notorious military dictators emerged from the school, including Argentine generals Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola, Bolivian generals Hugo Banzer Suárez and Guido Vildoso Calderón, Ecuadoran general Guillermo Rodríguez, Panamanian general Omar Torrijos, and the genocidal Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt. However, defenders assert that the school cannot be held responsible for the actions of a handful of its graduates who received the majority of their military training in their countries of origin and never acted as mere “puppets” of U.S. policymakers. With the transfer of the Panama Canal Zone, the school moved in 1984 to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, and is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. There, the institution continues to provide military training to Latin American soldiers while shaping Columbus’s economy and infrastructure. Despite such changes, the school’s role remains disputed, as when its graduates, generals Romeo Vásquez Velásquez and Luis Javier Prince Suazo, spearheaded a 2009 military coup in Honduras. Protests by student, Christian, and grassroots activist groups continue in front of the institution, just as they had occurred during the Cold War. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: Church Committee Hearings/Reports; El Salvador; National Security Council Paper NSC-68; U.S. Military Bases; Primary Documents: Excerpts from a Report to Congress on Congressional Concerns Regarding the School of the Americas (April 16, 2001)

Further Reading Danner, Mark. The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. New York: Vintage, 1994. Gill, Leslie. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Schoultz, Lars. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Top Gun (Tony Scott) (1986) Top Gun is a 1986 motion picture distributed by Paramount Pictures, directed by Tony Scott, and featuring the actors Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards, Val Kilmer, and Kelly McGillis. The film received multiple nominations and awards for its sound effects and music score, including the 1987 Academy Award for Best Music, Original Song (“Take My Breath Away”). Despite mixed critical reviews upon its opening,

Top Gun was the highest grossing film in 1986 and has accumulated a global box office total of more than $300 million. Its release date and military-focused plot and setting place Top Gun in the genre of late–Cold War movies. It is often analyzed in contexts that consider the bipolar international order and the competition between the United States and Soviet Union that had spiked for one last time from 1979 to 1985. Top Gun’s imagery and the “playboy” lifestyle of naval aviators glamorized a new generation of military personnel unhindered by the forgotten memories of the Vietnam War. This victorious post–Vietnam Syndrome reframing of the U.S. military reflects Reagan-era foreign policy that in 1986 was basking in popular, albeit low-risk, victories in Grenada (1983) and Libya (1986). With the positive reassertion of the U.S. military as a muscular force for moral good abroad came increased recruitments at home. Spiking enlistment numbers were facilitated by military recruitment tables set up outside theaters playing Top Gun. The result was an enlistment influx of more than 15,000 uniformed naval personnel a year after the release of the film. The “Need for speed” espoused by Cruise’s character Maverick fueled the imagination of moviegoers and was validated by the militaristic realism at both 30,000 feet and sea level. To achieve authenticity the U.S. Navy made several F-14 fighter aircraft available to Paramount, and aircraft carrier shots were filmed aboard the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Commissioned in 1961, the USS Enterprise, at the time the largest warship ever built, saw action as part of the naval blockade of Cuba in 1962 and later in the Vietnam War providing bombing sorties from its deck between 1965 and 1973. In 1964 the USS Enterprise set a world record by becoming the first ship to travel around the world without refueling. Top Gun provided a template for a revitalized “military-entertainment complex” partnership that had flourished during World War II but which had suffered during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era. In addition to the recruitment efforts, hardware, and positive martial semiotics, the Pentagon had a direct influence on the film’s script. In exchange for the military’s support, Paramount was required to submit the script to high-ranking Pentagon officers to review and edit. Time magazine reported that the death of Maverick’s co-pilot Goose was changed from a midair collision to an ejection scene, because “the Navy complained that too many pilots were crashing.” Top Gun’s success lured future filmmakers to seek the assistance and resources of the Pentagon in exchange for relinquishing their creative control. This trend secured the impact of the military-entertainment complex’s vision on the American and global film audience. Craig J. Perrier See also: Invasion USA; Militarization of American Culture; Red Dawn; True Lies; Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Bowman, Tom. “Farewell: USS Enterprise Starred in History and Film.” National Public Radio (December 2012). Story Running Time—5:24. http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166242595/farewell-uss-enterprise. Accessed October 20, 2014. Evje, Mark. “Top Gun Boosting Service Sign-ups.” Los Angeles Times, July 1986. Kellner, Douglas. “Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan.” http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/filmpoliticsideology.pdf. Accessed October 20, 2014. Sirota, David. “25 Years Later, How Top Gun Made America Love War.” Washington Post, August 2011.

United States Central America Peace Movement

Ending U.S. imperial interventionist policies in Central America was a dream of many Americans for much of the 20th century. With U.S. intervention intensified and more overt than ever in the 1980s—and in the context of the disastrous defeat in Vietnam—that decade witnessed the largest public expression ever of opposition to U.S. imperial policy in Central America. Broadly speaking, public opinion opposed U.S. involvement in the Sandinista conflict and aid to military regimes, especially in Guatemala and El Salvador, yet Reagan administration officials and legislators persistently espoused traditional Cold War anticommunist objectives and fears of “allowing” Communist advancements in Central America. Additionally, leftist forces in Central America opposed U.S. relations with reactionary governments while growing public disapproval mocked conservatives for their having supposedly given their nations’ sovereignty over to U.S. foreign policy objectives. It took the end of the Cold War as a central force in U.S. policy and renewed diplomatic efforts by Central American leaders to change U.S. policies. In the United States, numerous groups criticized U.S. policy toward Central America. University students protested the School of the Americas, and although evangelical Protestant groups supported the Guatemalan regime, Catholic activists excoriated U.S. aid to the Salvadoran regime. More than 500 religious congregations across the nation participated in the Sanctuary Movement that evoked the Underground Railroad of the 19th century. Sanctuary sites provided—in violation of U.S. law—safe haven to tens of thousands of victims of U.S.-supported repressive Central American regimes and the associated wars. With most conservatives positioned against the Sandinista government, moderates divided. Lobbying, such as veterans’ letters to Democrat Daniel Inouye over El Salvador, played a slight role. Uncovering Reagan officials’ illegal actions in the Iran-Contra Scandal and the influx of more than one million Central American refugees helped as well. However, the most important factor was the end of the Cold War. Liberal Democrats and moderates no longer feared that a reduction in U.S. aid to Central American regimes strengthened Communist forces, and the George H. W. Bush administration focused its attention on developments in Europe and the Soviet Union. In the United States, a vigorous peace movement, emerging alongside the massive Nuclear Freeze movement of the same era, aimed to bring an end to U.S. intervention throughout the region. In addition to the Sanctuary Movement, the Pledge of Resistance, which had chapters all over the nation, declared its intention to engage in acts of nonviolent resistance in the event of an outright U.S. invasion of any Central American nation. More radically, Witness for Peace participants offered themselves as human shields who would put themselves between the U.S.-supported Contras and Nicaraguan peasants. Peace activists deplored the human rights abuses of both the Contras and U.S.-aided governments of the region. They lobbied, led marches on the U.S. capital, petitioned, and generally fanned the flames of a latent antiwar— or certainly war-weary—sentiment among Americans, reinforcing national fears of “another Vietnam.” Without question, the movement was viewed with disdain by ardent prointerventionist figures in the Reagan administration such as Secretary of State Al Haig, United Nations (UN) ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and others who saw the movement as a check on the administration’s desire to prosecute a tough “anticommunist” policy in the region. As important as the movement was in restraining U.S. policy, more important actors in bringing an end to the region’s conflicts were Central America’s leaders. In 1987, Central American presidents, led by Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias Sánchez, came together at Esquipulas, Guatemala, to draft an agreement for free elections, laying down arms, and amnesty in Nicaragua. While many senior Reagan and Bush officials criticized or tried to outmaneuver the plan, Central American leaders remained committed and received the support of congressional Democrats. As a result, Nicaragua held elections in 1990 with international observers from the UN, the Organization of American States, and even former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Though the Central Intelligence Agency’s funding aided Violeta Chamorro’s election, most

observers considered the event a success. With a combination of international and domestic pressure, both sides in El Salvador agreed to negotiations beginning in 1989. Although guerrillas often escalated their demands for the removal of death squad–associated military officers and the military assassinated leftists, the UN served as intermediary. This culminated with the January 16, 1992, agreement in Mexico City, allowing UN forces to serve as peacekeepers during democratic elections with leftists’ legally sanctioned participation. While the U.S. role in Guatemala diminished, the conflict continued. Aaron Coy Moulton See also: El Salvador; Iran-Contra Scandal; Nicaragua, Contra War; School of the Americas

Further Reading Brett, Edward. The US Catholic Press on Central America: From Cold War Anticommunism to Social Justice. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Rabe, Stephen. The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Smith, Christian. Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Vietnam Syndrome The Vietnam Syndrome refers to debates over commitments of the United States military to actions abroad that followed the unsatisfying ending to the American War in Vietnam in 1975. The phrase rose to prominence around 1980 during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, and it is often used as a political accusation against opponents of militarized policies, who are described as being inappropriately weak and fearful of an interventionist U.S. military posture in the world. Since the Vietnam War, politicians who have favored more aggressive use of the military abroad have tried to avoid or vanquish the syndrome, sometimes going so far as to declare their victory over it, but, as more recent U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated, the Vietnam War remains a prominent experience that, for many, counsels caution toward such interventionist choices. Thus, one legacy of the Vietnam War remains a divided American polity that deeply disagrees about how the United States should engage with the world. The root of the Vietnam Syndrome is the divisive Vietnam War experience. Underpinned by the Cold War consensus that supported efforts to contain communism, the war grew out of American attempts to dictate the terms of Vietnamese independence in the wake of French colonialism. The U.S. commitment to South Vietnam turned into a full-fledged war in 1965, an experience that devastated Vietnam and proved terribly destructive for many Americans as well. The brutality of the war wounded and killed Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians by the tens of thousands, and both the brutal and failing realities of the experience posed serious questions for broadly shared American ideas about the United States as a righteous and victorious defender of freedom. In addition, the Vietnam-era military draft also led many to question the war. While debates over war had occurred before in American history, the divisions created by the Vietnam War were new in the era of the United States as a superpower, shattering the Cold War consensus that had led to the war in the first place. After the war ended in the Communist-nationalist victory that the United States had fought to avoid, many Americans agreed that the United States should not do “that” again, but they often disagreed profoundly over what the actual “lessons of Vietnam” were. It is this disagreement, the absence of consensus in the conceptual space where the Cold War consensus once stood, that is the Vietnam Syndrome. The term was originally used as early as 1971 to describe the struggles of returning veterans with what would be defined as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By the late 1970s, the phrase had

taken on its broader political meaning, the hesitance or unwillingness to commit U.S. troops to wars overseas out of fear that “another Vietnam,” unwinnable and unjustifiable, might result. Thus, for prointerventionist conservatives, the Vietnam Syndrome is, indeed, “a syndrome,” a disorder to be healed so that a presumably healthy U.S. body politic can return to supporting proper interventionist policies. However, for mainstream liberals, as well as critics of American empire, the hesitant reaction to the Vietnam War experience is more aptly defined as healthy skepticism, or even proper moral questioning of the means and ends of U.S. policies. Since 1975, administrations that have favored activist military policies have been forced to respond to the broadly held understanding of the Vietnam War as a cautionary tale, while those opposed to overseas military commitments have often used public memory of the war to buttress their critiques. Strategies for undermining the war’s limiting effects have included trying to ignore the war, to deny its applicability to other places, to redefine the war as a righteous conflict, and to intervene abroad in smallscale, or even hidden, ways that could succeed quickly without raising comparisons to Vietnam. In addition, the government has altered the ways in which it goes to war, from ending the draft in favor of an all-volunteer military, to funding proxy forces in low-intensity conflicts, to controlling the media and images of war that Americans see, to make the use of force more acceptable. Carefully framed in these ways, some activist U.S. military episodes, such as Ronald Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada and George H. W. Bush’s 1991 liberation of Kuwait in the First Persian Gulf War, have succeeded on their own terms, and these have often led to self-congratulatory declarations of victory over the Vietnam Syndrome. For example, within days of the end of hostilities in 1991, President Bush famously declared, “By God, we have kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” However, in practice, it is clear that such victories have been short-lived, if they have happened at all. For example, even as President Bush asserted the end of the syndrome, his administration made choices that illustrated its continuing power by refusing to pursue Saddam Hussein or to intervene to aid domestic rebellions against him, even after calling for them. As CIA director Robert Gates explained later, “Therein [lay] Vietnam, as far as we were concerned” (Frontline, “The Gulf War”). Even beyond the searing and supposedly transformational events of 9/11, the legacy of the Vietnam War remains a cautionary tale for U.S. military commitments, as the discussions of the bogged-down and difficult-to-end wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate. The Vietnam Syndrome persists because the war from which it derives was a scarring experience that posed deep questions about the U.S. role in the world. The cautionary impact of that experience poses problems for prointerventionist policymakers, who strongly wish to move past the syndrome. As a fierce, post–Vietnam War argument over how the United States should engage with the world, the Vietnam Syndrome persists, and it is likely to do so well into the future. Derek N. Buckaloo See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Grenada; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Vietnam War; Primary Documents: Tom Carhart’s Statement to the U.S. Fine Arts Commission Opposing the “Black Gash of Shame,” the Design Selected for the Vietnam Wall Memorial (October 13, 1981)

Further Reading Buckaloo, Derek. “The Cold War and Beyond: The Persistent, Troubling Presence of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome.’” New England Journal of History 64, no. 1 (2007): 233–252. Frontline, “The Gulf War.” Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation and Public Broadcasting System, January 10, 1996. Transcript at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html. Accessed October 20, 2014.

Herring, George C. “The Vietnam Syndrome.” In David L. Anderson, ed. The Columbia History of the Vietnam War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 409–429. Herring, George C. “The War That Never Seems to Go Away.” In David L. Anderson and John Ernst, eds. The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007, pp. 335–350.

Young, Andrew (1932–) Best known as a civil rights hero and close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young holds a distinguished though somewhat complex record when it comes to America’s hegemonic role in the world. As an activist, politician, diplomat, and businessman, he strongly resisted American military imperialism in places such as Vietnam and Angola. Later in his career, however, he championed U.S. economic expansionism in places with highly suspect human rights records such as South Korea and Nigeria. Born in New Orleans in 1932, Young first played a key role in the debates over international affairs while serving as executive assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. In the early 1970s he served as a member of the U.S. Congress, and in the late 1970s he was appointed by Jimmy Carter as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, where he contributed key diplomacy that helped facilitate peace and independence for Zimbabwe. In the 1980s he was a globetrotting mayor of Atlanta, promoting trade with the far corners of the earth. In the 1990s and beyond, Young worked as a private-sector agent to promote American economic and cultural involvement around the world. After graduating from Howard University and Hartford Seminary, Young ministered to a church in Georgia and then worked for the National Council of Churches in New York. In 1961, he moved back to Georgia and became immersed in the civil rights movement. Young first oversaw a voter education program, then joined King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Young’s leadership in nonviolent civil rights demonstrations was significant, particularly his role in the pivotal events in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964, where he nearly lost his life. In August 1965 he denounced the war in Vietnam at the SCLC convention—not a position widely supported in the movement at the time. In early 1967 he helped King pen his landmark and controversial “Beyond Vietnam” speech, and he was at King’s side during peace rallies around the nation that year. Young gave several antiwar addresses in 1967. For King and Young, opposing American militarism and imperialism in Vietnam was rooted in their lives as Christian ministers and pacifists. After King’s assassination in 1968, Young served as SCLC vice president. He joined Georgia’s congressional delegation in 1972, winning a seat after having lost two years earlier. While in Congress (1973–1977), he forcefully opposed the war in Vietnam and more broadly U.S. imperialism in Cambodia, and most notably on the issue of Angola, where he successfully crafted an amendment that prohibited Portugal from using future American assistance in its colonial wars in Africa. Though criticizing militarism, Congressman Young supported U.S. economic expansionism, advocating American participation in the Africa Development Fund. When newly elected President Jimmy Carter asked Young to serve as UN ambassador, Young accepted with the understanding that he would be able to take King’s message onto the world stage. His most significant contribution in that role was helping the Carter administration play a role in facilitating peace and democracy in Zimbabwe in 1980. Ambassador Young also succeeded in resuscitating U.S. connections with Nigeria, contending that economic expansionism in that west African oil-producing country was in the national interest—despite the brutal human rights conditions of that nation at a time when President Carter was emphasizing human rights as the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

As a globetrotting mayor of Atlanta in the 1980s, Young negotiated trade agreements with South Korea and Japan, brokered the opening of a Nigerian consulate, and lambasted the Reagan administration for its militaristic imperialism in Central America. He called for diplomatic recognition of the socialist regime in Angola, partly to expand U.S. trade (and oil acquisition) in southern Africa. In the 1990s and beyond, as a private-sector diplomat, Young lobbied Congress to pass the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Quite controversially, after visiting Nike factories in Vietnam, he issued a positive report about labor conditions in the plants. In his late seventies he began yet another career as a filmmaker, producing documentaries on Nigeria and Rwanda that encouraged Americans to invest in those troubled nations. During his long service as an official and unofficial “civil rights ambassador,” Andrew Young consistently opposed American military imperialism while championing U.S. economic and cultural expansionism, particularly pushing for the spread of peace, democracy, and capitalism. Andy DeRoche See also: Angola; Rhodesia/Zimbabwe

Further Reading DeRoche, Andrew J. Andrew Young: Civil Rights Ambassador. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Young, Andrew. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS President Jimmy Carter’s Address to the Nation on the Panama Canal Treaties (February 1, 1978) President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) determined to remake American foreign policy and the image of the United States internationally in the years following Vietnam. Although Carter seemed to oppose the Panama Canal Treaties during the 1976 presidential campaign, once in the White House, granting sovereignty over the Canal Zone to Panama fit squarely within these efforts, given that U.S. control of the Canal Zone had long symbolized the United States’ imperial attitude toward Latin America. In an effort to win the support of the American people and the necessary two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, President Carter on February 1, 1978, addressed a televised audience, trying to persuade Americans that the treaties would not compromise U.S. security and the treaties did not represent a sign of weakness or international retreat, as many opponents argued. Good evening. Seventy-five years ago, our Nation signed a treaty which gave us rights to build a canal across Panama, to take the historic step of joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The results of the agreement have been of great benefit to ourselves and to other nations throughout the world who navigate the high seas. The building of the canal was one of the greatest engineering feats of history. Although massive in concept and construction, it’s relatively simple in design and has been reliable and efficient in operation. We Americans are justly and deeply proud of this great achievement. The canal has also been a source of pride and benefit to the people of Panama—but a cause of some continuing discontent. Because we have controlled a 10-mile-wide strip of land across the heart of their

country and because they considered the original terms of the agreement to be unfair, the people of Panama have been dissatisfied with the treaty. It was drafted here in our country and was not signed by any Panamanian. Our own Secretary of State who did sign the original treaty said it was “vastly advantageous to the United States and … not so advantageous to Panama.” In 1964, after consulting with former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, President Johnson committed our Nation to work towards a new treaty with the Republic of Panama. And last summer, after 14 years of negotiation under two Democratic Presidents and two Republican Presidents, we reached and signed an agreement that is fair and beneficial to both countries. The United States Senate will soon be debating whether these treaties should be ratified. Throughout the negotiations, we were determined that our national security interests would be protected; that the canal would always be open and neutral and available to ships of all nations; that in time of need or emergency our warships would have the right to go to the head of the line for priority passage through the canal; and that our military forces would have the permanent right to defend the canal if it should ever be in danger. The new treaties meet all of these requirements. Let me outline the terms of the agreement. There are two treaties—one covering the rest of this century, and the other guaranteeing the safety, openness, and neutrality of the canal after the year 1999, when Panama will be in charge of its operation. For the rest of this century, we will operate the canal through a nine-person board of directors. Five members will be from the United States and four will be from Panama. Within the area of the present Canal Zone, we have the right to select whatever lands and waters our military and civilian forces need to maintain, to operate, and to defend the canal. About 75 percent of those who now maintain and operate the canal are Panamanians; over the next 22 years, as we manage the canal together, this percentage will increase. The Americans who work on the canal will continue to have their rights of employment, promotion, and retirement carefully protected. We will share with Panama some of the fees paid by shippers who use the canal. As in the past, the canal should continue to be self-supporting. This is not a partisan issue. The treaties are strongly backed by President Gerald Ford and by Former Secretaries of State Dean Rusk and Henry Kissinger. They are endorsed by our business and professional leaders, especially those who recognize the benefits of good will and trade with other nations in this hemisphere. And they were endorsed overwhelmingly by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which, this week, moved closer to ratification by approving the treaties, although with some recommended changes which we do not feel are needed. And the treaties are supported enthusiastically by every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—General George Brown, the Chairman, General Bernard Rogers, Chief of Staff of the Army, Admiral James Holloway, Chief of Naval Operations, General David Jones, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and General Louis Wilson, Commandant of the Marine Corps—responsible men whose profession is the defense of this Nation and the preservation of our security. The treaties also have been overwhelmingly supported throughout Latin America, but predictably, they are opposed abroad by some who are unfriendly to the United States and who would like to see disorder in Panama and a disruption of our political, economic, and military ties with our friends in Central and South America and in the Caribbean. I know that the treaties also have been opposed by many Americans. Much of that opposition is based on misunderstanding and misinformation. I’ve found that when the full terms of the agreement are known, most people are convinced that the national interests of our country will be served best by ratifying the treaties.

Tonight, I want you to hear the facts. I want to answer the most serious questions and tell you why I feel the Panama Canal treaties should be approved. The most important reason—the only reason—to ratify the treaties is that they are in the highest national interest of the United States and will strengthen our position in the world. Our security interests will be stronger. Our trade opportunities will be improved. We will demonstrate that as a large and powerful country, we are able to deal fairly and honorably with a proud but smaller sovereign nation. We will honor our commitment to those engaged in world commerce that the Panama Canal will be open and available for use by their ships—at a reasonable and competitive cost—both now and in the future. Let me answer specifically the most common questions about the treaties. Will our Nation have the right to protect and defend the canal against any armed attack or threat to the security of the canal or of ships going through it? The answer is yes, and is contained in both treaties and also in the statement of understanding between the leaders of our two nations. The first treaty says, and I quote: “The United States of America and the Republic of Panama commit themselves to protect and defend the Panama Canal. Each Party shall act, in accordance with its constitutional processes, to meet the danger resulting from an armed attack or other actions which threaten the security of the Panama Canal or [of] ships transiting it.” The neutrality treaty says, and I quote again: “The United States of America and the Republic of Panama agree to maintain the regime of neutrality established in this Treaty, which shall be maintained in order that the Canal shall remain permanently neutral….” And to explain exactly what that means, the statement of understanding says, and I quote again: “Under (the Neutrality Treaty), Panama and the United States have the responsibility to assure that the Panama Canal will remain open and secure to ships of all nations. The correct interpretation of this principle is that each of the two countries shall, in accordance with their respective constitutional processes, defend the Canal against any threat to the regime of neutrality.” It is obvious that we can take whatever military action is necessary to make sure that the canal always remains open and safe. Of course, this does not give the United States any right to intervene in the internal affairs of Panama, nor would our military action ever be directed against the territorial integrity or the political independence of Panama. Military experts agree that even with the Panamanian Armed Forces joined with us as brothers against a common enemy, it would take a large number of American troops to ward off a heavy attack. I, as President, would not hesitate to deploy whatever armed forces are necessary to defend the canal, and I have no doubt that even in a sustained combat, that we would be successful. But there is a much better way than sending our sons and grandsons to fight in the jungles of Panama. We would serve our interests better by implementing the new treaties, an action that will help to avoid any attack on the Panama Canal. What we want is the permanent right, to use the canal—and we can defend this right through the treaties—through real cooperation with Panama. The citizens of Panama and their government have already shown their support of the new partnership, and a protocol to the neutrality treaty will be signed by many other nations, thereby showing their strong approval. The new treaties will naturally change Panama from a passive and sometimes deeply resentful bystander into an active and interested partner, whose vital interests will be served by a well-operated canal. This agreement leads to cooperation and not confrontation between our country and Panama.

Another question is: Why should we give away the Panama Canal Zone? As many people say, “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours.” I must repeat a very important point: We do not own the Panama Canal Zone. We have never had sovereignty over it. We have only had the right to use it. The Canal Zone cannot be compared with United States territory. We bought Alaska from the Russians, and no one has ever doubted that we own it. We bought the Louisiana Purchases—Territories from France, and that’s an integral part of the United States. From the beginning, we have made an annual payment to Panama to use their land. You do not pay rent on your own land. The Panama Canal Zone has always been Panamanian territory. The U.S. Supreme Court and previous American Presidents have repeatedly acknowledged the sovereignty of Panama over the Canal Zone. We’ve never needed to own the Panama Canal Zone, any more than we need to own a 10-mile-wide strip of land all the way through Canada from Alaska when we build an international gas pipeline. The new treaties give us what we do need—not ownership of the canal, but the right to use it and to protect it. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said, “The strategic value of the canal lies in its use.” There’s another question: Can our naval ships, our warships, in time of need or emergency, get through the canal immediately instead of waiting in line? The treaties answer that clearly by guaranteeing that our ships will always have expeditious transit through the canal. To make sure that there could be no possible disagreement about what these words mean, the joint statement says that expeditious transit, and I quote, “is intended … to assure the transit of such vessels through the Canal as quickly as possible, without any impediment, with expedited treatment, and in case of need or emergency, to go to the head of the line of vessels in order to transit the Canal rapidly.” Will the treaties affect our standing in Latin America? Will they create a so-called power vacuum, which our enemies might move in to fill? They will do just the opposite. The treaties will increase our Nation’s influence in this hemisphere, will help to reduce any mistrust and disagreement, and they will remove a major source of anti-American feeling. The new agreement has already provided vivid proof to the people of this hemisphere that a new era of friendship and cooperation is beginning and that what they regard as the last remnant of alleged American colonialism is being removed. Last fall, I met individually with the leaders of 18 countries in this hemisphere. Between the United States and Latin America there is already a new sense of equality, a new sense of trust and mutual respect that exists because of the Panama Canal treaties. This opens up a fine opportunity for us in good will, trade, jobs, exports, and political cooperation. If the treaties should be rejected, this would all be lost, and disappointment and despair among our good neighbors and traditional friends would be severe. In the peaceful struggle against alien ideologies like communism, these treaties are a step in the right direction. Nothing could strengthen our competitors and adversaries in this hemisphere more than for us to reject this agreement. What if a new sea-level canal should be needed in the future? This question has been studied over and over throughout this century, from before the time the canal was built up through the last few years. Every study has reached the same conclusion—that the best place to build a sea-level canal is in Panama. The treaties say that if we want to build such a canal, we will build it in Panama, and if any canal is to be built in Panama, that we, the United States, will have the right to participate in the project.

This is a clear benefit to us, for it ensures that, say, 10 or 20 years from now, no unfriendly but wealthy power will be able to purchase the right to build a sea-level canal, to bypass the existing canal, perhaps leaving that other nation in control of the only usable waterway across the isthmus. Are we paying Panama to take the canal? We are not. Under the new treaty, any payments to Panama will come from tolls paid by ships which use the canal. What about the present and the future stability and the capability of the Panamanian Government? Do the people of Panama themselves support the agreement? Well, as you know, Panama and her people have been our historical allies and friends. The present leader of Panama has been in office for more than 9 years, and he heads a stable government which has encouraged the development of free enterprise in Panama. Democratic elections will be held this August to choose the members of the Panamanian Assembly, who will in turn elect a President and a Vice President by majority vote. In the past, regimes have changed in Panama, but for 75 years, no Panamanian government has ever wanted to close the canal. Panama wants the canal open and neutral—perhaps even more than we do. The canal’s continued operation is very important to us, but it is much more than that to Panama. To Panama, it’s crucial. Much of her economy flows directly or indirectly from the canal. Panama would be no more likely to neglect or to close the canal than we would be to close the Interstate Highway System here in the United States. In an open and free referendum last October, which was monitored very carefully by the United Nations, the people of Panama gave the new treaties their support. The major threat to the canal comes not from any government of Panama, but from misguided persons who may try to fan the flames of dissatisfaction with the terms of the old treaty. There’s a final question—about the deeper meaning of the treaties themselves, to us and to Panama. Recently, I discussed the treaties with David McCullough, author of “The Path Between the Seas,” the great history of the Panama Canal. He believes that the canal is something that we built and have looked after these many years; it is “ours” in that sense, which is very different from just ownership. So, when we talk of the canal, whether we are old, young, for or against the treaties, we are talking about very deep and elemental feelings about our own strength. Still, we Americans want a more humane and stable world. We believe in good will and fairness, as well as strength. This agreement with Panama is something we want because we know it is right. This is not merely the surest way to protect and save the canal, it’s a strong, positive act of a people who are still confident, still creative, still great. This new partnership can become a source of national pride and self-respect in much the same way that building the canal was 75 years ago. It’s the spirit in which we act that is so very important. Theodore Roosevelt, who was President when America built the canal, saw history itself as a force, and the history of our own time and the changes it has brought would not be lost on him. He knew that change was inevitable and necessary. Change is growth. The true conservative, he once remarked, keeps his face to the future. But if Theodore Roosevelt were to endorse the treaties, as I’m quite sure he would, it would be mainly because he could see the decision as one by which we are demonstrating the kind of great power we wish to be. “We cannot avoid meeting great issues,” Roosevelt said. “All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.” The Panama Canal is a vast, heroic expression of that age-old desire to bridge the divide and to bring people closer together. This is what the treaties are all about.

We can sense what Roosevelt called “the lift toward nobler things which marks a great and generous people.” In this historic decision, he would join us in our pride for being a great and generous people, with the national strength and wisdom to do what is right for us and what is fair to others. Thank you very much. Source: Jimmy Carter. Address to the Nation on Panama Canal Treaties. February 1, 1978. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Jimmy Carter: 1978. Book 1, p. 258.

Testimony of Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz on Vieques, Puerto Rico (October 2, 1979) Since assuming imperial custody of Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States has used portions of the Caribbean island territory for a variety of military exercises and operations. During the Cold War, the islands of Culebra and Vieques had become especially valuable as sites for bombing practice, producing in the process considerable damage to land, buildings, and infrastructure. Vieques was in fact used as a staging area for operations against Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961, and Grenada in 1983, among other events. Prolonged protest ended the bombing on Culebra, but the people of Vieques continued to endure the practice until 2003. Fully two-thirds of Vieques had been commandeered by the U.S. military and used by the navy, army, and air force since the 1940s. This testimony from Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz (an organizer of one of the first protests in 1964) on the severe impacts of the bombing occurred in 1979, the same year that a group of Vieques protesters were arrested for trespassing on navy property, a number of them sentenced to six months in a Tennessee prison. My name is Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz. I am thirty-five years old. All my life I have lived in Vieques. For the past thirteen years I have been a high school teacher in the public school system of Vieques. Many years ago, I began to fight for the right of my Viequense brothers to live in peace. Since 1978 I have been one of the directors of the Crusade to Rescue Vieques. This organization, that includes Viequenses of diverse political ideologies, religious philosophies, and various social positions, have carried on their shoulders the responsibility to unite in order to be most effective in our s[tr]uggle against the U.S. Navy. When I speak of the struggle against the U.S. navy in Vieques, and what the presence of this armed force represents on our land, I am speaking of something concrete. The violation of our land by the U.S. Navy began before I was even born. When I was born, La Isla Nena was already physically occupied and divided by this navy that today presumes to bring us here as the accused. Today, I come here not as the accused, I come as the accuser. I accuse the U.S. Navy and the court of the U.S. in Puerto Rico, of conspiring to commit against all Viequenses, one of the greatest abuses ever brought against a people in our America. I am not exaggerating. I accuse the U.S. Navy and its legal arm, the federal court, of expropriating and throwing into the street, thousands of human beings that live on these lands, and that now, this navy claims is theirs. Who are the witnesses that I will call to prove my accusation? To begin with, my own parents [Narciso Guadalupe Guadalupe and Mercedes Ortiz Maldonado] were victims of this expropriation. To continue, I call hundreds of Viequenses who are still alive to attest to how it was in the 1940s. Women who had to give birth in cane fields, because the birth coincided with the passage of the bulldozers that

were knocking down their houses. Of men and women who woke up without a piece of land to cultivate for their or their family’s sustenance. I am not going to limit myself to generalities and damage to property. I am going to talk of lives, of precious Viequense lives that have been lost, and continue to be lost, as a consequence of the abuses and crimes of the U.S. Navy on our island of Vieques. I personally know and remember more than a dozen Viequenses who died or were assassinated at the hands of drunken marines or by bombs left on our land by this navy who today I accuse as a criminal. All Viequenses remember the death of Chulto Legran, a twelve-year-old boy, victim of one of the many bombs that the navy left on our soil. This occurred in 1953. The elders tell us how the body of Alejandro Rosado was found on the lands occupied by the navy, buried with his head down and his feet up. This occurred in the early 1940s. The assassination of Felipe Francis Christian in April 1954 is still fresh in our memory. The elders tell us about the deaths of Anastasio and Domingo Acosta, father and son, victims of the navy’s bombs. Juan Maysonet, Helena Holiday, and many more form links in the chain of victims, of flesh and blood, and of names and surnames. We remember also the so-called riots of 1952, 1958, 1964, and 1968 that were no other than hordes of drunken marines who fell upon our civilian population like savages. All these crimes have gone unpunished. The criminals roam free, and not this court or any other court has judged them. Nonetheless, today you judge me for getting together with my brother Viequenses in the Crusade to Rescue Vieques to fight against these injustices committed by the North American navy in my island of Vieques. In addition to these crimes against individuals, there is the collective crime against the 8,000 Viequenses that live on this island. They have taken 26,000 of the 33,000 acres that we had for our economic development and have prohibited us from fishing in our waters, the source of sustenance for hundreds of Viequenses, and our free air and land transportation has been impeded by this North American navy that occupies our territory by force. Viequenses are a people imprisoned between two bases, between the storage of explosives and bombing and shooting that little by little takes thousands of Viequenses away from their island in a forced exile. We could continue speaking about the serious problems caused by unemployment, of an education system that offers nothing to children and young Viequenses, but I will not go on. Suffice to say, that as a Viequense, as a Puerto Rican, and as the father of two children, I feel legitimately proud to be at the side of my people at this time. That my children will be able to say that I am a prisoner because I do not want Vieques to be for them what it was for me. That I do not want for them, or any other child of my small island, to be a land bombed and shot at wildly at the whim of foreigners. That I do not want for them to have a drunken marine corps, humiliating and abusing them on their own land. That for my children and for their little friends, the abuses of today will be a thing of the past, or perhaps a lesson in a schoolroom about what happened in Vieques, and never to let it happen again anywhere else. This is why I fight. My crime is to walk on the land where I was born and have lived all my life. My crime is to fight along with my Puerto Rican and Viequense brothers against the abuses and injustices the United States navy represents. It is for these crimes that I am being tried in this court that represents the interests of the government of the United States in Puerto Rico and consequently the interests of the navy of that government. This is the same court that some days ago decided that the right of the navy to shoot and to bomb is more important than the right of 8,000 Viequenses to live in peace. This foreign court has no

moral or legal authority to judge me. As a Puerto Rican, I will not find justice in the court of the invader that today attacks my people. This court can today send me to prison, but outside remain thousands who will continue the struggle, which is the struggle of all the people. Source: Testimony of Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz on Vieques, Puerto Rico (October 2, 1979). Text first printed in Spanish in Arturo Metendez Lopez, La Batalla de Vieques (Bavamdn, Puerto Rico: COPEC, 1982). Translation courtesy of Ismael Guadalupe Ortiz.

President Jimmy Carter’s State of the Union Address Declaring the Carter Doctrine (January 23, 1980) President Jimmy Carter delivered his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, just weeks after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Combined with the fall the year before of the U.S. ally in Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi (triggering by year’s end the Iran Hostage Crisis), the Soviet invasion posed a threat to the flow of oil from the Middle East and the stability of world markets. The price of gasoline was about to hit $1 a gallon for the first time ever, driving the rate of inflation to record highs. In what became known as the “Carter Doctrine,” the president stated that the Soviet Union’s menacing presence in the region containing “more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil” was a “grave threat to the free movement of the Middle East oil.” President Carter proclaimed that if needed, the United States would deploy military force to defend its interests in the Middle East, specifically the Persian Gulf region, from foreign threats. On the defensive from critics and facing a tough reelection fight, Carter announced a number of other steps he was taking to reassert American resolve as he sought to confront renewed Soviet belligerence and the Iran Hostage Crisis, including beefing up intelligence gathering and reviving the Selective Service system. Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the 96th Congress, fellow citizens: This last few months has not been an easy time for any of us. As we meet tonight, it has never been more clear that the state of our Union depends on the state of the world. And tonight, as throughout our own generation, freedom and peace in the world depend on the state of our Union. The 1980’s have been born in turmoil, strife, and change. This is a time of challenge to our interests and our values and it’s a time that tests our wisdom and our skills. At this time in Iran, 50 Americans are still held captive, innocent victims of terrorism and anarchy. Also at this moment, massive Soviet troops are attempting to subjugate the fiercely independent and deeply religious people of Afghanistan. These two acts—one of international terrorism and one of military aggression—present a serious challenge to the United States of America and indeed to all the nations of the world. Together, we will meet these threats to peace. I’m determined that the United States will remain the strongest of all nations, but our power will never be used to initiate a threat to the security of any nation or to the rights of any human being. We seek to be and to remain secure—a nation at peace in a stable world. But to be secure we must face the world as it is. Three basic developments have helped to shape our challenges: the steady growth and increased projection of Soviet military power beyond its own borders; the overwhelming dependence of the Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East; and the press of social and religious and economic and political change in the many nations of the developing world, exemplified by the revolution in Iran. Each of these factors is important in its own right. Each interacts with the others. All must be faced together, squarely and courageously. We will face these challenges, and we will meet them with the best that is in us. And we will not fail. In response to the abhorrent act in Iran, our Nation has never been aroused and unified so greatly in peacetime. Our position is clear. The United States will not yield to blackmail. We continue to pursue these specific goals: first, to protect the present and long-range interests of the United States; secondly, to preserve the lives of the American hostages and to secure, as quickly as

possible, their safe release, if possible, to avoid bloodshed which might further endanger the lives of our fellow citizens; to enlist the help of other nations in condemning this act of violence, which is shocking and violates the moral and the legal standards of a civilized world; and also to convince and to persuade the Iranian leaders that the real danger to their nation lies in the north, in the Soviet Union and from the Soviet troops now in Afghanistan, and that the unwarranted Iranian quarrel with the United States hampers their response to this far greater danger to them. If the American hostages are harmed, a severe price will be paid. We will never rest until every one of the American hostages are released. But now we face a broader and more fundamental challenge in this region because of the recent military action of the Soviet Union. Now, as during the last 3 1/2 decades, the relationship between our country, the United States of America, and the Soviet Union is the most critical factor in determining whether the world will live at peace or be engulfed in global conflict. Since the end of the Second World War, America has led other nations in meeting the challenge of mounting Soviet power. This has not been a simple or a static relationship. Between us there has been cooperation, there has been competition, and at times there has been confrontation. In the 1940’s we took the lead in creating the Atlantic Alliance in response to the Soviet Union’s suppression and then consolidation of its East European empire and the resulting threat of the Warsaw Pact to Western Europe. In the 1950’s we helped to contain further Soviet challenges in Korea and in the Middle East, and we rearmed to assure the continuation of that containment. In the 1960’s we met the Soviet challenges in Berlin, and we faced the Cuban missile crisis. And we sought to engage the Soviet Union in the important task of moving beyond the cold war and away from confrontation. And in the 1970’s three American Presidents negotiated with the Soviet leaders in attempts to halt the growth of the nuclear arms race. We sought to establish rules of behavior that would reduce the risks of conflict, and we searched for areas of cooperation that could make our relations reciprocal and productive, not only for the sake of our two nations but for the security and peace of the entire world. In all these actions, we have maintained two commitments: to be ready to meet any challenge by Soviet military power, and to develop ways to resolve disputes and to keep the peace. Preventing nuclear war is the foremost responsibility of the two superpowers. That’s why we’ve negotiated the strategic arms limitation treaties—SALT I and SALT II. Especially now, in a time of great tension, observing the mutual constraints imposed by the terms of these treaties will be in the best interest of both countries and will help to preserve world peace. I will consult very closely with the Congress on this matter as we strive to control nuclear weapons. That effort to control nuclear weapons will not be abandoned. We superpowers also have the responsibility to exercise restraint in the use of our great military force. The integrity and the independence of weaker nations must not be threatened. They must know that in our presence they are secure. But now the Soviet Union has taken a radical and an aggressive new step. It’s using its great military power against a relatively defenseless nation. The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War. The vast majority of nations on Earth have condemned this latest Soviet attempt to extend its colonial domination of others and have demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Moslem world is especially and justifiably outraged by this aggression against an Islamic people. No action of a world

power has ever been so quickly and so overwhelmingly condemned. But verbal condemnation is not enough. The Soviet Union must pay a concrete price for their aggression. While this invasion continues, we and the other nations of the world cannot conduct business as usual with the Soviet Union. That’s why the United States has imposed stiff economic penalties on the Soviet Union. I will not issue any permits for Soviet ships to fish in the coastal waters of the United States. I’ve cut Soviet access to high-technology equipment and to agricultural products. I’ve limited other commerce with the Soviet Union, and I’ve asked our allies and friends to join with us in restraining their own trade with the Soviets and not to replace our own embargoed items. And I have notified the Olympic Committee that with Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan, neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow. The Soviet Union is going to have to answer some basic questions: Will it help promote a more stable international environment in which its own legitimate, peaceful concerns can be pursued? Or will it continue to expand its military power far beyond its genuine security needs, and use that power for colonial conquest? The Soviet Union must realize that its decision to use military force in Afghanistan will be costly to every political and economic relationship it values. The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil. This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come. It demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened. Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region. Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. During the past 3 years, you have joined with me to improve our own security and the prospects for peace, not only in the vital oil-producing area of the Persian Gulf region but around the world. We’ve increased annually our real commitment for defense, and we will sustain this increase of effort throughout the Five Year Defense Program. It’s imperative that Congress approve this strong defense budget for 1981, encompassing a 5-percent real growth in authorizations, without any reduction. We are also improving our capability to deploy U.S. military forces rapidly to distant areas. We’ve helped to strengthen NATO and our other alliances, and recently we and other NATO members have decided to develop and to deploy modernized, intermediate-range nuclear forces to meet an unwarranted and increased threat from the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union. We are working with our allies to prevent conflict in the Middle East. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel is a notable achievement which represents a strategic asset for America and which also enhances prospects for regional and world peace. We are now engaged in further negotiations to provide full autonomy for the people of the West Bank and Gaza, to resolve the Palestinian issue in all its aspects,

and to preserve the peace and security of Israel. Let no one doubt our commitment to the security of Israel. In a few days we will observe an historic event when Israel makes another major withdrawal from the Sinai and when Ambassadors will be exchanged between Israel and Egypt. We’ve also expanded our own sphere of friendship. Our deep commitment to human rights and to meeting human needs has improved our relationship with much of the Third World. Our decision to normalize relations with the People’s Republic of China will help to preserve peace and stability in Asia and in the Western Pacific. We’ve increased and strengthened our naval presence in the Indian Ocean, and we are now making arrangements for key naval and air facilities to be used by our forces in the region of northeast Africa and the Persian Gulf. We’ve reconfirmed our 1959 agreement to help Pakistan preserve its independence and its integrity. The United States will take action consistent with our own laws to assist Pakistan in resisting any outside aggression. And I’m asking the Congress specifically to reaffirm this agreement. I’m also working, along with the leaders of other nations, to provide additional military and economic aid for Pakistan. That request will come to you in just a few days. In the weeks ahead, we will further strengthen political and military ties with other nations in the region. We believe that there are no irreconcilable differences between us and any Islamic nation. We respect the faith of Islam, and we are ready to cooperate with all Moslem countries. Finally, we are prepared to work with other countries in the region to share a cooperative security framework that respects differing values and political beliefs, yet which enhances the independence, security, and prosperity of all. All these efforts combined emphasize our dedication to defend and preserve the vital interests of the region and of the nation which we represent and those of our allies—in Europe and the Pacific, and also in the parts of the world which have such great strategic importance to us, stretching especially through the Middle East and Southwest Asia. With your help, I will pursue these efforts with vigor and with determination. You and I will act as necessary to protect and to preserve our Nation’s security. The men and women of America’s Armed Forces are on duty tonight in many parts of the world. I’m proud of the job they are doing, and I know you share that pride. I believe that our volunteer forces are adequate for current defense needs, and I hope that it will not become necessary to impose a draft. However, we must be prepared for that possibility. For this reason, I have determined that the Selective Service System must now be revitalized. I will send legislation and budget proposals to the Congress next month so that we can begin registration and then meet future mobilization needs rapidly if they arise. We also need clear and quick passage of a new charter to define the legal authority and accountability of our intelligence agencies. We will guarantee that abuses do not recur, but we must tighten our controls on sensitive intelligence information, and we need to remove unwarranted restraints on America’s ability to collect intelligence. The decade ahead will be a time of rapid change, as nations everywhere seek to deal with new problems and age-old tensions. But America need have no fear. We can thrive in a world of change if we remain true to our values and actively engaged in promoting world peace. We will continue to work as we have for peace in the Middle East and southern Africa. We will continue to build our ties with developing nations, respecting and helping to strengthen their national independence which they have struggled so hard to achieve. And we will continue to support the growth of democracy and the protection of human rights. In repressive regimes, popular frustrations often have no outlet except through violence. But when peoples and their governments can approach their problems together through open, democratic methods,

the basis for stability and peace is far more solid and far more enduring. That is why our support for human rights in other countries is in our own national interest as well as part of our own national character. Peace—a peace that preserves freedom—remains America’s first goal. In the coming years, as a mighty nation we will continue to pursue peace. But to be strong abroad we must be strong at home. And in order to be strong, we must continue to face up to the difficult issues that confront us as a nation today. The crises in Iran and Afghanistan have dramatized a very important lesson: Our excessive dependence on foreign oil is a clear and present danger to our Nation’s security. The need has never been more urgent. At long last, we must have a clear, comprehensive energy policy for the United States. As you well know, I have been working with the Congress in a concentrated and persistent way over the past 3 years to meet this need. We have made progress together. But Congress must act promptly now to complete final action on this vital energy legislation. Our Nation will then have a major conservation effort, important initiatives to develop solar power, realistic pricing based on the true value of oil, strong incentives for the production of coal and other fossil fuels in the United States, and our Nation’s most massive peacetime investment in the development of synthetic fuels. The American people are making progress in energy conservation. Last year we reduced overall petroleum consumption by 8 percent and gasoline consumption by 5 percent below what it was the year before. Now we must do more. After consultation with the Governors, we will set gasoline conservation goals for each of the 50 States, and I will make them mandatory if these goals are not met. I’ve established an import ceiling for 1980 of 8.2 million barrels a day—well below the level of foreign oil purchases in 1977. I expect our imports to be much lower than this, but the ceiling will be enforced by an oil import fee if necessary. I’m prepared to lower these imports still further if the other oil-consuming countries will join us in a fair and mutual reduction. If we have a serious shortage, I will not hesitate to impose mandatory gasoline rationing immediately. The single biggest factor in the inflation rate last year, the increase in the inflation rate last year, was from one cause: the skyrocketing prices of OPEC oil. We must take whatever actions are necessary to reduce our dependence on foreign oil—and at the same time reduce inflation. As individuals and as families, few of us can produce energy by ourselves. But all of us can conserve energy—every one of us, every day of our lives. Tonight I call on you—in fact, all the people of America —to help our Nation. Conserve energy. Eliminate waste. Make 1980 indeed a year of energy conservation…. Source: Jimmy Carter. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, 1980–1981. Book 1, pp. 194–200. Washington, DC: GPO, 1981.

Tom Carhart’s Statement to the U.S. Fine Arts Commission Opposing the “Black Gash of Shame,” the Design Selected for the Vietnam Wall Memorial (October 13, 1981) When Maya Lin’s remarkable vision was chosen as the winning design in the competition to establish a memorial on the National Mall to honor veterans of the Vietnam War, the selection reopened the wounds of a war that had bitterly divided America. On one side were veterans and other Americans like Tom Carhart who believed that the design was a “black trench that scars the mall.” For critics it seemed to embody not, as war memorials traditionally had, patriotism and pride in country, but rather

defeat, sorrow, shame, and weakness—characteristics more broadly associated with the supposed “Vietnam Syndrome” that afflicted America’s postwar view of itself and its role in the world. The Washington Star called the memorial design “an open grave for the collective conscience of a guilty nation,” and veteran and future navy secretary and U.S. senator James Webb labeled it a “mockery of [military] service, a wailing wall for future anti-draft, anti-nuclear demonstrators.” The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund—composed of veterans of the war—saw it quite differently, and the memorial went forward. A series of traditional sculptures of Vietnam soldiers and nurses was later positioned nearby to partially mollify remaining criticism of what became one of the most visited memorials in Washington. My name is Tom Carhart. I graduated from West Point in 1966 and received a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1972. I am employed as a government bureaucrat, but I appear today as a private citizen. In 1968, while serving as an Infantry platoon leader in Vietnam, I was awarded two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in combat. I am proud to have served my country, and proud of all who served in Vietnam, especially those who gave their lives. When I came to Washington in March of 1980, I immediately joined the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, or VVMF, wanting, as I did, to help in the establishment of a Memorial not only to my fallen brothers and sisters, but also, more broadly, to the noble sacrifices of all those who served in a misunderstood war in a strange and distant land. Robert E. Lee once said: “To be called to serve one’s homeland is a high call; to be called to serve one’s homeland under arms in time of war is the highest call.” The intention of this Memorial, as I understand it, is to honor all those men and women who answered the call of this, their homeland, and served her under arms in time of war in Vietnam. It is also clear that this memorial will convey to posterity, through symbolic imagery, some sense of the meaning of our Vietnam experience. President Reagan has called our Vietnam experience a “noble cause,” and I believe that perception is shared by virtually all Vietnam veterans. When I went to Vietnam, I was a young man. I didn’t know much. I believed that we were fighting to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese people. I still believe that today. I recognize that differences of opinion still exist over that war, and so I applauded the apolitical stance of the VVMF when I joined their ranks. One of the immediate problems that the organization faced at that time was a lack of funds to finance a first campaign mailing. Within a few weeks, I was able to arrange an unsecured loan of $45,000 to VVMF from a local bank. Over the next year and more, I contributed considerable time and effort in areas that ranged from hard physical labor to tedious administrative matters. I mention these things for no reason other than to show that I have been both active and strongly dedicated to the goals of VVMF. When the design competition opened, I submitted a very amateurish design—the first I have ever done, with the first statue I have ever sculpted as the centerpiece—out of love for the whole effort, and in order to participate in the fullest way possible. I was not competitive, but I didn’t expect to be. Indeed, when I went to the display of the thousands of entries at Andrews Air Force Base, I was very impressed by the level of thought and effort that had gone into most of the designs that were submitted. But when I saw the winning design, I was truly stunned. I felt that design to be very directly and intentionally insulting to all those who served in Vietnam. Initially, I thought it better to keep my opinions to myself, realizing that any objection I might make could be quickly and easily dismissed as “sour grapes.” But since that time, I have realized that this is too important an issue to our entire nation for me to be deterred by concern that my motives might be misconstrued. The jury which selected the winning design was composed exclusively of individuals who not only never served in Vietnam, but who also, I understand, have never rendered any military service to

America. The jury was made up of artists, sculptors, and architects, but it did not include any laymen to give the “man in the street” opinion, which I have learned is the commonly accepted safety valve on juries of this sort. I don’t know how the members of the jury were selected, but I do know that when the Chairman of the Board of the VVMF was asked by one of my friends why there were no Vietnam veterans on the jury that selected the winning design, he answered that no Vietnam veterans were qualified. That’s a very astounding thing for any knowledgeable Vietnam veteran to say. Part of VVMF’s official statement on the selection of the jury reads: The purpose of the Memorial is not to literally depict the experience and motivations of Vietnam veterans, but to express America’s honor and recognition of them. We realized that the important skill of a juror was not so much having an experience or feeling, but the ability to interpret how well a particular design expressed that experience or feeling. In order to interpret how well a particular design expresses an experience or feeling, an important qualification (when possible) would seem to be to have actually had that experience or feeling. Many Vietnam veterans are undeniably fine artists, sculptors, and architects. Why weren’t some of them appointed as jurors, since they clearly had the best qualifications for this competition? What went wrong? Some five hundred years before the time of Christ, a Chinese philosopher named Sun Tzu wrote that fighting was the crudest form of warfare. He advised instead that warfare be differently pursued, particularly against a stronger enemy. He wrote: Break the will of the enemy to fight and you accomplish the true objective of war. Cover with ridicule the enemy’s traditions. Exploit and aggravate the inherent frictions within the enemy country. Agitate the young against the old. Prevail if possible without armed conflict. It is self-evident that North Vietnam adopted Sun Tzu’s policies in fighting against the United States. The result was two wholly distinct and totally different wars. The first War was a military war. It was fought in the rice paddies and the jungles of South Vietnam. The adversaries were the Americans and the South Vietnamese on one side, against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese on the other side. VVMF has been licensed, by the Congress and the President, to memorialize this war on the Mall. The names of the 55,000 men and women who died in that war will be inscribed on the Memorial. The second war was a political war. It was fought on the college campuses, on television, and in the newspapers here in America. The adversaries were the formal American governmental structure and the older and more generally conservative citizens on one side, against many of the young, particularly students, and writers, artists, newspaper and television people, and the more generally liberal citizens on the other side. Because of the open nature of our society, the North Vietnamese were abler [sic] to implement the precepts of Sun Tzu in our homeland, through their allies, with impunity. We who wore the uniforms often became the enemy to the people on one side of this second political war. When I came home from Vietnam in December 1968, I was literally spat upon as I walked through the Chicago airport in my uniform, by a young girl in a band of hippies, this some six months after the Chicago Democratic Convention riots. I didn’t like that feeling. That spit went through me like a spear. Welcome home. I hadn’t said anything, but I was a target, I was the enemy. Naturally, I buried my Vietnam experiences for a long time: I didn’t want to be spat on again. That was many years ago, of course, and now, at last, America seems ready to honor her Vietnam dead with a Memorial. It’s no surprise to me that few people want to talk about Vietnam or Cambodia anymore. After all, their new communist governments have not exactly shown themselves to be the bands of angels

they had once been portrayed to be. And now both sides of that political war here in America are confused and frustrated and embittered. A few lines from Kipling say it all: And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, “A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East.” That’s the real lesson of Vietnam, of course—not that we shouldn’t fight against popular revolutions, nor that we should adopt the tactics of the enemy, nor even that we used the wrong weapons for the wrong war—the lesson is, for all our sophisticated technology, and our bottomless treasury, and our deeply principled commitment to concepts of personal freedom, we, the veterans of the military war in Vietnam and both sides in the political war at home, simply got outhustled by the East. I never really felt good about my Vietnam experiences until March of 1980, when I joined VVMF. There we were, a group of veterans of the military war in Vietnam, who simply wanted to honor our dead and all those who served on our side. We won the overwhelming support of Congress and the White House, and the money started rolling in. Those were good times, and a sense of brotherhood quickly sprang up, or rather, was reawakened after a long slumber. I feel those bonds still, and support the goals of VVMF still, even though I now speak out strongly against the design that won the competition. I don’t blame the individuals at VVMF, of course; I simply believe they got outhustled. Now, having committed themselves so totally to the concepts of “professional” judging of the competition by non-Vietnamveterans, it is unlikely that they will agree with views that differ from their institutional position. When we Vietnam veterans sought to actually build the Memorial to our experience, we needed some professional artistic assistance in selecting an appropriate design from among those submitted to the competition. Unfortunately, VVMF somehow got talked into allowing the selection to be made by a jury of professional artists with no Vietnam or other military experience. Can there be any doubt that the jury chose a design that reflects only their interpretation of the war they saw here at home? It may be that black walls in a hole conveying shame and degradation to future generations are an appropriate statement of their perception of the political war, which is the only one they could possibly know. But that is not our military war, and it is our military war that we here seek to memorialize. Are we to honor our dead and our sacrifices to America with a black hole? I don’t care about artistic perceptions. I don’t care about the rationalizations that abound. One needs no artistic education to see this design for what it is, a black trench that scars the Mall. Black walls, the universal color of shame and sorrow and degradation. Hidden in a hole in the ground, with no means of access for those Vietnam veterans who are condemned to spend the rest of their days in a wheelchair. Perhaps that’s an appropriate design for those who would spit on us still. But can America truly mean that we should feel honored by that black pit? In a city filled with white monuments, this is our reward for faithful service. There are presently three monuments that could be called “black” in Washington, and they are all on the other side of the river, on the edge of Arlington Cemetery. The first is the SeaBee Memorial, a statue of a man on top of a pedestal, cast in black metal and looking out over the horizon. The second is the 101st Airborne Division Memorial, and it is again a black pedestal some ten feet high, atop which is a bronze eagle with wings spread, soaring in flight. The third is the Marine Corps Iwo Jima Memorial—a cluster of Marines cast in now-green bronze, atop a black stand ten feet high, raising a staff with the Stars

and Stripes on the end. But these are all heroic images. And then we have this proposed design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black gash of shame and sorrow. It is important that this matter be very carefully and rationally considered, for we are here making history. If a design were chosen from among the thousands of entries by a jury of Vietnam veterans who were qualified as artists, sculptors, or architects, I assure you that they would choose something white and graceful and above ground that would both be unobtrusive and serve to honor those who fought, and especially those who died, in Vietnam. We Vietnam veterans don’t want to divide society, we want to rejoin it, we’re still waiting to be welcomed home! We want peace and acceptance and closure. The other option is to allow the design that was chosen by the jury of non-Vietnam-veterans to be built. If you do that, you will only add fuel to a fire that we want to put out. One hundred years from now, long after we’re all dead and gone, visitors to the Mall will see only one thing—a black wall in a trench with a random scattering of names on it, such that brother, father, friend or loved one could never be found. No flag. No inscription. They will see this as the Memorial established long ago by America to those who served in Vietnam, and they can only see that as some ugly, dirty experience of which we were all ashamed. Over the past weekend, people in VVMF got wind of my intention to speak to you today, and I received several phone calls from intermediary friends. What would it take, I was asked, to call you off? What is it that you want and that would keep you from attacking the design? You say you want an inscription? That’s okay, we can take care of that. You say that you want a flag? We can talk about that. But please, don’t attack this design. My answer to them is the statement I give here today. Cosmetic changes are not enough. I am tired of the implication that we should be apologetic for our service to America. I am tired of being made to feel that all of us who served in Vietnam are losers. The only thing we lost over there was the support of our countrymen back here. I am proud that I fought for my country. I am proud that I bled for my country. I am prouder still of the men and women who gave their lives in Vietnam for America. I do not regret my actions, and I will not apologize! Are we Vietnam veterans so blind? Are we so dumb? Will we be outhustled once again? I will not stand idly by while the experiences of those who served in Vietnam, the living and the dead, are memorialized on some sunken black wall of shame. This is the wrong Memorial, chosen by the wrong jury, for the wrong reasons, for the wrong war. Please extend to us the grace and the dignity to choose our own Memorial that will fairly represent our Vietnam experience to posterity. None of us want to be memorialized as a black spot in American history. Let our own artists and sculptors and architects select the most appropriate design. As a Vietnam veteran who feels dishonored by the design that was declared the winner of the VVMF competition, I call on the United States Fine Arts Commission to reopen the selection process of the design competition, and to require that the winning design be chosen by a jury composed exclusively of Vietnam veterans, for only they are truly qualified to judge. I hope that you will allow us this chance to recapture our rightful position of honor in our nation’s history. Source: Tom Carhart. Statement to the U.S. Fine Arts Commission, October 13, 1981. Available online at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/vietnam/files/round3/tomcarhart.pdf.

President Ronald Reagan’s Address on a Plan for Middle East Peace (September 1, 1982) On June 6, 1982, Israeli Defense Forces attacked Lebanon, then in the midst of a prolonged civil war. Israel aimed to remove the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon, eradicate Syrian

influence from the country, and establish a pro-Israeli government in Beirut. The invasion, which shattered an 11-month U.S.-brokered Israel-PLO ceasefire, was internationally condemned, particularly after it turned into a bloody occupation with massive civilian casualties. Although the Reagan national security team was divided over the invasion and U.S. support for the Israeli offensive was put in measured tones, most of the Arab world saw the United States as complicit in the invasion. This was a logical conclusion to draw, given the long-term strategic support for Israel from the United States. The Reagan administration had been working assiduously to cultivate Arab states’ opposition to Soviet inroads into the region. By summer 1982 they were failing, in no small measure because of continued, seemingly unequivocal U.S. support for its ally Israel, which in turn played up its antiSoviet position to its own strategic advantage. Even moderate Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt expressed disappointment that Israel’s stalwart ally the United States could not use its influence to stop the invasion of Lebanon. This, then, was the context for President Reagan’s proposed peace plan—an effort to build on the success of the 1978 Camp David Accords. It should be noted that Israel was furious that President Reagan had not consulted them prior to announcing the plan publicly, and Israel remained steadfastly resistant to most of the plan’s principal provisions. My fellow Americans: Today has been a day that should make us proud. It marked the end of the successful evacuation of [the] PLO from Beirut, Lebanon. This peaceful step could never have been taken without the good offices of the United States and especially the truly heroic work of a great American diplomat, Ambassador Philip Habib. Thanks to his efforts, I’m happy to announce that the U.S. Marine contingent helping to supervise the evacuation has accomplished its mission. Our young men should be out of Lebanon within 2 weeks. They, too, have served the cause of peace with distinction, and we can all be very proud of them. But the situation in Lebanon is only part of the overall problem of conflict in the Middle East. So, over the past 2 weeks, while events in Beirut dominated the front page, America was engaged in a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to lay the groundwork for a broader peace in the region. For once there were no premature leaks as U.S. diplomatic missions traveled to Mideast capitals, and I met here at home with a wide range of experts to map out an American peace initiative for the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East—Arab and Israeli alike. It seemed to me that with the agreement in Lebanon we had an opportunity for a more far-reaching peace effort in the region, and I was determined to seize that moment. In the words of the scripture, the time had come to “follow after the things which make for peace.” Tonight I want to report to you the steps we’ve taken and the prospects they can open up for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. America has long been committed to bringing peace to this troubled region. For more than a generation, successive United States administrations have endeavored to develop a fair and workable process that could lead to a true and lasting Arab-Israeli peace. Our involvement in the search for Mideast peace is not a matter of preference; it’s a moral imperative. The strategic importance of the region to the United States is well known, but our policy is motivated by more than strategic interests. We also have an irreversible commitment to the survival and territorial integrity of friendly states. Nor can we ignore the fact that the well-being of much of the world’s economy is tied to stability in the strife-torn Middle East. Finally, our traditional humanitarian concerns dictated a continuing effort to peacefully resolve conflicts. When our administration assumed office in January of 1981, I decided that the general framework for our Middle East policy should follow the broad guidelines laid down by my predecessors. There were

two basic issues we had to address. First, there was the strategic threat to the region posed by the Soviet Union and its surrogates, best demonstrated by the brutal war in Afghanistan, and, second, the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors. With regard to the Soviet threat, we have strengthened our efforts to develop with our friends and allies a joint policy to deter the Soviets and their surrogates from further expansion in the region and, if necessary, to defend against it. With respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we’ve embraced the Camp David framework as the only way to proceed. We have also recognized, however, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict in and of itself cannot assure peace throughout a region as vast and troubled as the Middle East. Our first objective under the Camp David process was to ensure the successful fulfillment of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. This was achieved with the peaceful return of the Sinai to Egypt in April 1982. To accomplish this, we worked hard with our Egyptian and Israeli friends and, eventually, with other friendly countries to create the multinational force which now operates in the Sinai. Throughout this period of difficult and time-consuming negotiations, we never lost sight of the next step of Camp David— autonomy talks to pave the way for permitting the Palestinian people to exercise their legitimate rights. However, owing to the tragic assassination of President Sadat and other crises in the area, it was not until January 1982 that we were able to make a major effort to renew these talks. Secretary of State Haig and Ambassador Fairbanks made three visits to Israel and Egypt early this year to pursue the autonomy talks. Considerable progress was made in developing the basic outline of an American approach which was to be presented to Egypt and Israel after April. The successful completion of Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai and the courage shown on this occasion by Prime Minister Begin and President Mubarak in living up to their agreements convinced me the time had come for a new American policy to try to bridge the remaining differences between Egypt and Israel on the autonomy process. So, in May [I] called for specific measures and a timetable for consultations with the Governments of Egypt and Israel on the next steps in the peace process. However, before this effort could be launched, the conflict in Lebanon preempted our efforts. The autonomy talks were basically put on hold while we sought to untangle the parties in Lebanon and still the guns of war. The Lebanon war, tragic as it was, has left us with a new opportunity for Middle East peace. We must seize it now and bring peace to this troubled area so vital to world stability while there is still time. It was with this strong conviction that over a month ago, before the present negotiations in Beirut had been completed, I directed Secretary of State Shultz to again review our policy and to consult a wide range of outstanding Americans on the best ways to strengthen chances for peace in the Middle East. We have consulted with many of the officials who were historically involved in the process, with Members of the Congress, and with individuals from the private sector. And I have held extensive consultations with my own advisers on the principles that I will outline to you tonight. The evacuation of the PLO from Beirut is now complete, and we can now help the Lebanese to rebuild their war-torn country. We owe it to ourselves and to posterity to move quickly to build upon this achievement. A stable and revived Lebanon is essential to all our hopes for peace in the region. The people of Lebanon deserve the best efforts of the international community to turn the nightmares of the past several years into a new dawn of hope. But the opportunities for peace in the Middle East do not begin and end in Lebanon. As we help Lebanon rebuild, we must also move to resolve the root causes of conflict between Arabs and Israelis. The war in Lebanon has demonstrated many things, but two consequences are key to the peace process. First; the military losses of the PLO have not diminished the yearning of the Palestinian people

for a just solution of their claims; and, second, while Israel’s military successes in Lebanon have demonstrated that its armed forces are second to none in the region, they alone cannot bring just and lasting peace to Israel and her neighbors. The question now is how to reconcile Israel’s legitimate security concerns with the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. And that answer can only come at the negotiating table. Each party must recognize that the outcome must be acceptable to all and that true peace will require compromises by all. So, tonight I’m calling for a fresh start. This is the moment for all those directly concerned to get involved—or lend their support—to a workable basis for peace. The Camp David agreement remains the foundation of our policy. Its language provides all parties with the leeway they need for successful negotiations. I call on Israel to make clear that the security for which she yearns can only be achieved through genuine peace, a peace requiring magnanimity, vision, and courage. I call on the Palestinian people to recognize that their own political aspirations are inextricably bound to recognition of Israel’s right to a secure future. And I call on the Arab States to accept the reality of Israel—and the reality that peace and justice are to be gained only through hard, fair, direct negotiation. In making these calls upon others, I recognize that the United States has a special responsibility. No other nation is in a position to deal with the key parties to the conflict on the basis of trust and reliability. The time has come for a new realism on the part of all the peoples of the Middle East. The State of Israel is an accomplished fact; it deserves unchallenged legitimacy within the community of nations. But Israel’s legitimacy has thus far been recognized by too few countries and has been denied by every Arab State except Egypt. Israel exists; it has a right to exist in peace behind secure and defensible borders; and it has a right to demand of its neighbors that they recognize those facts. I have personally followed and supported Israel’s heroic struggle for survival, ever since the founding of the State of Israel 34 years ago. In the pre-1967 borders Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again. The war in Lebanon has demonstrated another reality in the region. The departure of the Palestinians from Beirut dramatizes more than ever the homelessness of the Palestinian people. Palestinians feel strongly that their cause is more than a question of refugees. I agree. The Camp David agreement recognized that fact when it spoke of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements. For peace to endure it must involve all those who have been most deeply affected by the conflict. Only through broader participation in the peace process, most immediately by Jordan and by the Palestinians, will Israel be able to rest confident in the knowledge that its security and integrity will be respected by its neighbors. Only through the process of negotiation can all the nations of the Middle East achieve a secure peace. These, then, are our general goals. What are the specific new American positions, and why are we taking them? In the Camp David talks thus far, both Israel and Egypt have felt free to express openly their views as to what the outcome should be. Understandably their views have differed on many points. The United States has thus far sought to play the role of mediator. We have avoided public comment on the key issues. We have always recognized and continue to recognize that only the voluntary agreement of those parties most directly involved in the conflict can provide an enduring solution. But it’s become evident to me that some clearer sense of America’s position on the key issues is necessary to encourage wider support for the peace process.

First, as outlined in the Camp David accords, there must be a period of time during which the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza will have full autonomy over their own affairs. Due consideration must be given to the principle of self-government by the inhabitants of the territories and to the legitimate security concerns of the parties involved. The purpose of the 5-year period of transition which would begin after free elections for a self-governing Palestinian authority is to prove to the Palestinians that they can run their own affairs and that such Palestinian autonomy poses no threat to Israel’s security. The United States will not support the use of any additional land for the purpose of settlements during the transitional period. Indeed, the immediate adoption of a settlement freeze by Israel, more than any other action, could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks. Further settlement activity is in no way necessary for the security of Israel and only diminishes the confidence of the Arabs that a final outcome can be freely and fairly negotiated. I want to make the American position well understood. The purpose of this transitional period is the peaceful and orderly transfer of authority from Israel to the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, such a transfer must not interfere with Israel’s security requirements. Beyond the transition period, as we look to the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it is clear to me that peace cannot be achieved by the formation of an independent Palestinian state in those territories, nor is it achievable on the basis of Israeli sovereignty or permanent control over the West Bank and Gaza. So, the United States will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and we will not support annexation or permanent control by Israel. There is, however, another way to peace. The final status of these lands must, of course, be reached through the give and take of negotiations. But it is the firm view of the United States that self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan offers the best chance for a durable, just, and lasting peace. We base our approach squarely on the principle that the Arab–Israeli conflict should be resolved through negotiations involving an exchange of territory for peace. This exchange is enshrined in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which is, in turn, incorporated in all its parts in the Camp David agreements. U.N. Resolution 242 remains wholly valid as the foundation stone of America’s Middle East peace effort. It is the United States position that, in return for peace, the withdrawal provision of Resolution 242 applies to all fronts, including the West Bank and Gaza. When the border is negotiated between Jordan and Israel, our view on the extent to which Israel should be asked to give up territory will be heavily affected by the extent of true peace and normalization, and the security arrangements offered in return. Finally, we remain convinced that Jerusalem must remain undivided, but its final status should be decided through negotiation. In the course of the negotiations to come, the United States will support positions that seem to us fair and reasonable compromises and likely to promote a sound agreement. We will also put forward our own detailed proposals when we believe they can be helpful. And, make no mistake, the United States will oppose any proposal from any party and at any point in the negotiating process that threatens the security of Israel. America’s commitment to the security of Israel is ironclad, and, I might add, so is mine. During the past few days, our Ambassadors in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have presented to their host governments the proposals, in full detail, that I have outlined here today. Now I’m convinced that these proposals can bring justice, bring security, and bring durability to an Arab-Israeli peace. The United States will stand by these principles with total dedication. They are fully consistent with Israel’s security requirements and the aspirations of the Palestinians.

We will work hard to broaden participation at the peace table as envisaged by the Camp David accords. And I fervently hope that the Palestinians and Jordan, with the support of their Arab colleagues, will accept this opportunity. Tragic turmoil in the Middle East runs back to the dawn of history. In our modern day, conflict after conflict has taken its brutal toll there. In an age of nuclear challenge and economic interdependence, such conflicts are a threat to all the people of the world, not just the Middle East itself. It’s time for us all—in the Middle East and around the world—to call a halt to conflict, hatred, and prejudice. It’s time for us all to launch a common effort for reconstruction, peace, and progress. It has often been said—and, regrettably, too often been true—that the story of the search for peace and justice in the Middle East is a tragedy of opportunities missed. In the aftermath of the settlement in Lebanon, we now face an opportunity for a broader peace. This time we must not let it slip from our grasp. We must look beyond the difficulties and obstacles of the present and move with a fairness and resolve toward a brighter future. We owe it to ourselves—and to posterity—to do no less. For if we miss this chance to make a fresh start, we may look back on this moment from some later vantage point and realize how much that failure cost us all. These, then, are the principles upon which American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict will be based. I have made a personal commitment to see that they endure and, God willing, that they will come to be seen by all reasonable, compassionate people as fair, achievable, and in the interests of all who wish to see peace in the Middle East. Tonight, on the eve of what can be a dawning of new hope for the people of the troubled Middle East —and for all the world’s people who dream of a just and peaceful future—I ask you, my fellow Americans, for your support and your prayers in this great undertaking. Thank you, and God bless you. Source: Ronald Reagan. Address to the Nation on United States Policy for Peace in the Middle East, September 1, 1982. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Ronald Reagan, 1982, Book 2, p. 1093. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983.

President Ronald Reagan’s Address on Central America (April 27, 1983) In this televised address to a joint session of Congress, President Reagan made an impassioned appeal for increased support of his policy in Central America, which by then was facing increased criticism both at home and abroad. Historical references were key in the speech: beyond his passing reference to Hitler and Nazism, the president implicitly contrasted the stakes of the national security threat posed by the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua with what had transpired in faraway Vietnam by noting the geographic proximity of Central America to the Texas border. Attempting to link his anticommunist policy with that of a once criticized but now popular former Democratic president, Reagan invoked the historic 1947 address of Harry Truman that launched the doctrine of containment. Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, distinguished Members of the Congress, honored guests, and my fellow Americans: A number of times in past years, Members of Congress and a President have come together in meetings like this to resolve a crisis. I have asked for this meeting in the hope that we can prevent one. It would be hard to find many Americans who aren’t aware of our stake in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, or the NATO line dividing the free world from the Communist bloc. And the same could be said for Asia.

But in spite of, or maybe because of, a flurry of stories about places like Nicaragua and El Salvador and, yes, some concerted propaganda, many of us find it hard to believe we have a stake in problems involving those countries. Too many have thought of Central America as just that place way down below Mexico that can’t possibly constitute a threat to our well-being. And that’s why I’ve asked for this session. Central America’s problems do directly affect the security and the well-being of our own people. And Central America is much closer to the United States than many of the world trouble spots that concern us. So, we work to restore our own economy; we cannot afford to lose sight of our neighbors to the south. El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson as those cities are to Washington, where we’re gathered tonight. But nearness on the map doesn’t even begin to tell the strategic importance of Central America, bordering as it does on the Caribbean—our lifeline to the outside world. Two-thirds of all our foreign trade and petroleum pass through the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. In a European crisis at least half of our supplies for NATO would go through these areas by sea. It’s well to remember that in early 1942, a handful of Hitler’s submarines sank more tonnage there than in all of the Atlantic Ocean. And they did this without a single naval base anywhere in the area. And today, the situation is different. Cuba is host to a Soviet combat brigade, a submarine base capable of servicing Soviet submarines, and military air bases visited regularly by Soviet military aircraft. Because of its importance, the Caribbean Basin is a magnet for adventurism. We’re all aware of the Libyan cargo planes refueling in Brazil a few days ago on their way to deliver “medical supplies” to Nicaragua. Brazilian authorities discovered the so-called medical supplies were actually munitions and prevented their delivery. You may remember that last month, speaking on national television, I showed an aerial photo of an airfield being built on the island of Grenada. Well, if that airfield had been completed, those planes could have refueled there and completed their journey. If the Nazis during World War II and the Soviets today could recognize the Caribbean and Central America as vital to our interests, shouldn’t we, also? For several years now, under two administrations, the United States has been increasing its defense of freedom in the Caribbean Basin. And I can tell you tonight, democracy is beginning to take root in El Salvador, which, until a short time ago, knew only dictatorship. The new government is now delivering on its promises of democracy, reforms, and free elections. It wasn’t easy, and there was resistance to many of the attempted reforms, with assassinations of some of the reformers. Guerrilla bands and urban terrorists were portrayed in a worldwide propaganda campaign as freedom fighters, representative of the people. Ten days before I came into office, the guerrillas launched what they called “a final offensive” to overthrow the government. And their radio boasted that our new administration would be too late to prevent their victory. Well, they learned that democracy cannot be so easily defeated. President Carter did not hesitate. He authorized arms and munitions to El Salvador. The guerrilla offensive failed, but not America’s will. Every President since this country assumed global responsibilities has known that those responsibilities could only be met if we pursued a bipartisan foreign policy. As I said a moment ago, the Government of El Salvador has been keeping its promises, like the land reform program which is making thousands of farm tenants, farm owners. In a little over 3 years, 20 percent of the arable land in El Salvador has been redistributed to more than 450,000 people. That’s one in ten Salvadorans who have benefited directly from this program.

El Salvador has continued to strive toward an orderly and democratic society. The government promised free elections. On March 28th, a little more than a year ago, after months of campaigning by a variety of candidates, the suffering people of El Salvador were offered a chance to vote, to choose the kind of government they wanted. And suddenly, the so-called freedom fighters in the hills were exposed for what they really are—a small minority who want power for themselves and their backers, not democracy for the people. The guerrillas threatened death to anyone who voted. They destroyed hundreds of buses and trucks to keep the people from getting to the polling places. Their slogan was brutal: “Vote today, die tonight.” But on election day, an unprecedented 80 percent of the electorate braved ambush and gunfire and trudged for miles, many of them, to vote for freedom. Now, that’s truly fighting for freedom. We can never turn our backs on that. Members of this Congress who went there as observers told me of a woman who was wounded by rifle fire on the way to the polls, who refused to leave the line to have her wound treated until after she had voted. Another woman had been told by the guerrillas that she would be killed when she returned from the polls, and she told the guerrillas, “You can kill me, you can kill my family, you can kill my neighbors. You can’t kill us all.” The real freedom fighters of El Salvador turned out to be the people of that country—the young, the old, the in-between—more than a million of them out of a population of less than 5 million. The world should respect this courage and not allow it to be belittled or forgotten. And again I say, in good conscience, we can never turn our backs on that. The democratic political parties and factions in El Salvador are coming together around the common goal of seeking a political solution to their country’s problems. New national elections will be held this year, and they will be open to all political parties. The government has invited the guerrillas to participate in the election and is preparing an amnesty law. The people of El Salvador are earning their freedom, and they deserve our moral and material support to protect it. Yes, there are still major problems regarding human rights, the criminal justice system, and violence against noncombatants. And, like the rest of Central America, El Salvador also faces severe economic problems. But in addition to recession-depressed prices for major agricultural exports, El Salvador’s economy is being deliberately sabotaged. Tonight in El Salvador—because of ruthless guerrilla attacks—much of the fertile land cannot be cultivated; less than half the rolling stock of the railways remains operational; bridges, water facilities, telephone and electric systems have been destroyed and damaged. In one 22-month period, there were 5,000 interruptions of electrical power. One region was without electricity for a third of the year. I think Secretary of State Shultz put it very well the other day: “Unable to win the free loyalty of El Salvador’s people, the guerrillas,” he said, “are deliberately and systematically depriving them of food, water, transportation, light, sanitation, and jobs. And these are the people who claim they want to help the common people.” They don’t want elections because they know they’d be defeated. But, as the previous election showed, the Salvadoran people’s desire for democracy will not be defeated. The guerrillas are not embattled peasants, armed with muskets. They’re professionals, sometimes with better training and weaponry than the government’s soldiers. The Salvadoran battalions that have received U.S. training have been conducting themselves well on the battlefield and with the civilian population. But so far, we’ve only provided enough money to train one Salvadoran soldier out of ten, fewer than the number of guerrillas that are trained by Nicaragua and Cuba. And let me set the record straight on Nicaragua, a country next to El Salvador. In 1979 when the new government took over in Nicaragua, after a revolution which overthrew the authoritarian rule of Somoza, everyone hoped for the growth of democracy. We in the United States did, too. By January of 1981, our emergency relief and recovery aid to Nicaragua totaled $118 million—more than provided by any other

developed country. In fact, in the first 2 years of Sandinista rule, the United States directly or indirectly sent five times more aid to Nicaragua than it had in the 2 years prior to the revolution. Can anyone doubt the generosity and the good faith of the American people? These were hardly the actions of a nation implacably hostile to Nicaragua. Yet, the Government of Nicaragua has treated us as an enemy. It has rejected our repeated peace efforts. It has broken its promises to us, to the Organization of American States and, most important of all, to the people of Nicaragua. No sooner was victory achieved than a small clique ousted others who had been part of the revolution from having any voice in the government. Humberto Ortega, the Minister of Defense, declared MarxismLeninism would be their guide, and so it is. The Government of Nicaragua has imposed a new dictatorship. It has refused to hold the elections it promised. It has seized control of most media and subjects all media to heavy prior censorship. It denied the bishops and priests of the Roman Catholic Church the right to say Mass on radio during Holy Week. It insulted and mocked the Pope. It has driven the Miskito Indians from their homelands, burning their villages, destroying their crops, and forcing them into involuntary internment camps far from home. It has moved against the private sector and free labor unions. It condoned mob action against Nicaragua’s independent human rights commission and drove the director of that commission into exile. In short, after all these acts of repression by the government, is it any wonder that opposition has formed? Contrary to propaganda, the opponents of the Sandinistas are not diehard supporters of the previous Somoza regime. In fact, many are anti-Somoza heroes and fought beside the Sandinistas to bring down the Somoza government. Now they’ve been denied any part in the new government because they truly wanted democracy for Nicaragua and they still do. Others are Miskito Indians fighting for their homes, their lands, and their lives. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua turned out to be just an exchange of one set of autocratic rulers for another, and the people still have no freedom, no democratic rights, and more poverty. Even worse than its predecessor, it is helping Cuba and the Soviets to destabilize our hemisphere. Meanwhile, the Government of El Salvador, making every effort to guarantee democracy, free labor unions, freedom of religion, and a free press, is under attack by guerrillas dedicated to the same philosophy that prevails in Nicaragua, Cuba, and, yes, the Soviet Union. Violence has been Nicaragua’s most important export to the world. It is the ultimate in hypocrisy for the unelected Nicaraguan Government to charge that we seek their overthrow, when they’re doing everything they can to bring down the elected Government of El Salvador. Thank you. The guerrilla attacks are directed from a headquarters in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. But let us be clear as to the American attitude toward the Government of Nicaragua. We do not seek its overthrow. Our interest is to ensure that it does not infect its neighbors through the export of subversion and violence. Our purpose, in conformity with American and international law, is to prevent the flow of arms to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. We have attempted to have a dialog with the Government of Nicaragua, but it persists in its efforts to spread violence. We should not, and we will not, protect the Nicaraguan Government from the anger of its own people. But we should, through diplomacy, offer an alternative. And as Nicaragua ponders its options, we can and will—with all the resources of diplomacy—protect each country of Central America from the danger of war. Even Costa Rica, Central America’s oldest and strongest democracy—a government so peaceful it doesn’t even have an army—is the object of bullying and threats from Nicaragua’s dictators. Nicaragua’s neighbors know that Sandinista promises of peace, nonalliance, and nonintervention have not been kept. Some 36 new military bases have been built. There were only 13 during the Somoza years.

Nicaragua’s new army numbers 25,000 men, supported by a militia of 50,000. It is the largest army in Central America, supplemented by 2,000 Cuban military and security advisers. It is equipped with the most modern weapons—dozens of Soviet-made tanks, 800 Soviet bloc trucks, Soviet 152-millimeter howitzers, 100 anti-aircraft guns, plus planes and helicopters. There are additional thousands of civilian advisers from Cuba, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Libya, and the PLO. And we’re attacked because we have 55 military trainers in El Salvador. The goal of the professional guerrilla movements in Central America is as simple as it is sinister: to destabilize the entire region from the Panama Canal to Mexico. And if you doubt beyond this point, just consider what Cayetano Carpio, the now-deceased Salvadoran guerrilla leader, said earlier this month. Carpio said that after El Salvador falls, El Salvador and Nicaragua would be “arm-in-arm and struggling for the total liberation of Central America.” Nicaragua’s dictatorial junta, who themselves made war and won power operating from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, like to pretend that they are today being attacked by forces based in Honduras. The fact is, it is Nicaragua’s government that threatens Honduras, not the reverse. It is Nicaragua who has moved heavy tanks close to the border, and Nicaragua who speaks of war. It was Nicaraguan radio that announced on April 8th the creation of a new, unified, revolutionary coordinating board to push forward the Marxist struggle in Honduras. Nicaragua, supported by weapons and military resources provided by the Communist bloc, represses its own people, refuses to make peace, and sponsors a guerrilla war against El Salvador. President Truman’s words are as apt today as they were in 1947 when he, too, spoke before a joint session of the Congress: “At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternate ways of life. The choice is not too often a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. “Collapse of free institutions and loss of independence would be disastrous not only for them but for the world. Discouragement and possibly failure would quickly be the lot of neighboring peoples striving to maintain their freedom and independence.” The countries of Central America are smaller than the nations that prompted President Truman’s message. But the political and strategic stakes are the same. Will our response—economic, social, military—be as appropriate and successful as Mr. Truman’s bold solutions to the problems of postwar Europe? Some people have forgotten the successes of those years and the decades of peace, prosperity, and freedom they secured. Some people talk as though the United States were incapable of acting effectively in international affairs without risking war or damaging those we seek to help. Are democracies required to remain passive while threats to their security and prosperity accumulate? Must we just accept the destabilization of an entire region from the Panama Canal to Mexico on our southern border? Must we sit by while independent nations of this hemisphere are integrated into

the most aggressive empire the modern world has seen? Must we wait while Central Americans are driven from their homes like the more than a million who’ve sought refuge out of Afghanistan, or the 1 1/2 million who have fled Indochina, or the more than a million Cubans who have fled Castro’s Caribbean utopia? Must we, by default, leave the people of El Salvador no choice but to flee their homes, creating another tragic human exodus? I don’t believe there’s a majority in the Congress or the country that counsels passivity, resignation, defeatism, in the face of this challenge to freedom and security in our own hemisphere. Thank you. Thank you. I do not believe that a majority of the Congress or the country is prepared to stand by passively while the people of Central America are delivered to totalitarianism and we ourselves are left vulnerable to new dangers. Only last week, an official of the Soviet Union reiterated Brezhnev’s threat to station nuclear missiles in this hemisphere, 5 minutes from the United States. Like an echo, Nicaragua’s Commandante Daniel Ortega confirmed that, if asked, his country would consider accepting those missiles. I understand that today they may be having second thoughts. Now, before I go any further, let me say to those who invoke the memory of Vietnam, there is no thought of sending American combat troops to Central America. They are not needed— Thank you. And, as I say, they are not needed and, indeed, they have not been requested there. All our neighbors ask of us is assistance in training and arms to protect themselves while they build a better, freer life. We must continue to encourage peace among the nations of Central America. We must support the regional efforts now underway to promote solutions to regional problems. We cannot be certain that the Marxist-Leninist bands who believe war is an instrument of politics will be readily discouraged. It’s crucial that we not become discouraged before they do. Otherwise, the region’s freedom will be lost and our security damaged in ways that can hardly be calculated. If Central America were to fall, what would the consequences be for our position in Asia, Europe, and for alliances such as NATO? If the United States cannot respond to a threat near our own borders, why should Europeans or Asians believe that we’re seriously concerned about threats to them? If the Soviets can assume that nothing short of an actual attack on the United States will provoke an American response, which ally, which friend will trust us then? The Congress shares both the power and the responsibility for our foreign policy. Tonight, I ask you, the Congress, to join me in a bold, generous approach to the problems of peace and poverty, democracy and dictatorship in the region. Join me in a program that prevents Communist victory in the short run, but goes beyond, to produce for the deprived people of the area the reality of present progress and the promise of more to come. Let us lay the foundation for a bipartisan approach to sustain the independence and freedom of the countries of Central America. We in the administration reach out to you in this spirit…. What the administration is asking for on behalf of freedom in Central America is so small, so minimal, considering what is at stake. The total amount requested for aid to all of Central America in 1984 is about $600 million. That’s less than one-tenth of what Americans will spend this year on coin-operated video games. In summation, I say to you that tonight there can be no question: The national security of all the Americas is at stake in Central America. If we cannot defend ourselves there, we cannot expect to prevail elsewhere. Our credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety of our homeland would be put in jeopardy.

We have a vital interest, a moral duty, and a solemn responsibility. This is not a partisan issue. It is a question of our meeting our moral responsibility to ourselves, our friends, and our posterity. It is a duty that falls on all of us—the President, the Congress, and the people. We must perform it together. Who among us would wish to bear responsibility for failing to meet our shared obligation? Thank you, God bless you, and good night. Source: Ronald Reagan. Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on Central America. April 27, 1983. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Ronald Reagan, 1983. Book 1, p. 601.

Excerpts from a Cable Sent from the U.S. Embassy in the United Kingdom by Charles H. Price II to the Department of State on Donald Rumsfeld’s Meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (December 21, 1983) U.S. officials had long been cultivating Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as a Cold War ally to help guard against Soviet incursion into the Middle East. By 1980 Saddam was Iraq’s president and led his nation in an invasion of Iran—in the eyes of the United States, a rogue state, supporter of terrorism and leading threat to regional stability. Although the United States remained officially neutral in the IranIraq war, the U.S.-Iraq relationship became crucial to both nations. The United States saw Iraq as a check against not only Soviet but Iranian ambitions and as the best means to achieve the goal of regional stability, leading it to provide key intelligence and to sell Iraq chemical and biological weapons (despite its use of such weapons against its own people). In 1983 President Ronald Reagan appointed former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld special envoy to Iraq. This communiqué from a U.S. official in London to the State Department summarizes a key meeting between Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in December 1983 that helped to cement the relationship. The summary by Charles H. Price is perhaps most notable for how much common ground was reached between an emissary of a great democracy and the brutal, authoritarian leader of a nation against which the United States would soon wage war. Subject: Rumsfeld Mission: December 20 Meeting with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 1. S-Entire Text. 2. Summary and Comment: In his 90-minute meeting with Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein showed obvious pleasure with President’s letter and Rumsfeld’s visit and in his remarks. Removed whatever obstacles remained in the way of resuming diplomatic relations, but did not take the decision to do so. He said Arabs should press Syria to leave Lebanon and also that Iraq favored development of positive relations between PLO and Jordan. Rumsfeld told Saddam U.S. and Iraq had shared interests in preventing Iranian and Syrian expansion. He said he was urging other states to curtail arms sales to Iran and believed it had successfully closed off U.S.-controlled exports by third countries to Iran. In response to Rumsfeld’s interest in seeing Iraq increase oil exports, including through possible new pipeline across Jordan to Aqaba, Saddam suggested Israeli threat to security of such a line was major concern and U.S. might be able to provide some assurances in this regard. Our initial assessment is that meeting marked positive milestone in development of U.S.-Iraqi relations and will prove to be of wider benefit to U.S. posture in the region. End of Summary and Comment.

3. Tariq Aziz, interpreter and notetaker attended on Iraqi side; Eagleton and Pelletreau on U.S. Both Iraqi leaders were in military dress with pistols on hips. While security was elaborate, both appeared vigorous and confident. Iraqi TV photographed Saddam’s initial greeting of Rumsfeld and presentation of President Reagan’s letter. Rumsfeld opened by conveying the President’s greetings and expressing his pleasure at being in Baghdad with his interesting and informative exchange with Foreign Minister previous evening. 4. Saddam welcomed Rumsfeld and said he had read President’s message and been briefed on meeting with Foreign Minister. He said he was pleased that political discussions had been taking place with seriousness and frankness. He was also pleased that President’s message indicated deep and serious understanding of implications of confirmation of Iraq/Iran war and its dangers. Thirdly, he was pleased that U.S. wished to see further development in its relations with Iraq, including exchange of ambassadors. Iraq valued this positive appreciation by the U.S. of the need for a high level of relations…. Source: Declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. Available through the National Security Archives, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq31.pdf.

Excerpts from In Search of Hidden Truths, the Second Interim Report of the National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras (1998) Published in 1998, In Search of Hidden Truths was the result of a thorough investigation by the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras of widespread human rights crimes committed in that Central American nation during the 1980s. The report documents a pattern of illegal detention, torture and forced disappearance of untold numbers of Hondurans throughout the decade. The full details of this episode remained frustratingly unknown. Indeed, substantial portions of the report describe the process pursued by investigators, Baltimore Sun journalists, and the family of “disappeared” American priest Father James Francis Carney of seeking and not finding many key documents. The report nevertheless leads the reader to reasonably conclude that the United States, with a major presence in the country because of the Contra War it was waging against the government of Nicaragua, was if not culpable directly in the persecution of Hondurans, well aware of these human rights violations being committed by Honduran military and government officials. INTRODUCTION In Search of Hidden Truths is the second interim report of the National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras. The report focuses on a fundamental and simple right: the right to know the truth. It addresses a sensitive and controversial topic—the declassification of foreign government documentation which contains information regarding Honduran human rights abuses in the 1980s. These abuses include the disappearance of more than 184 people, among them a U.S. citizen, Father James Francis Carney, known in Honduras as “Padre Guadalupe.” The National Commissioner, otherwise known as the Human Rights Ombudsman, is a position created by the Honduran constitution. The current Commissioner, Dr. Leo Valladares Lanza, has been gathering evidence from victims as well as perpetrators of human rights abuses that took place during the 1980s. As a critical supplement to their eyewitness testimony, over the last four years, the Commissioner has sought documentation from Honduras, as well as two other countries involved in the strife during that period: Argentina, and, most importantly, the United States, which was heavily involved in Honduran security operations during the Contra war against Nicaragua.

In Honduras, the Commissioner’s office discovered that government documents are simply “desaparecidos"—disappeared like so many human rights victims. As in the majority of Latin American nations, Honduras has no clear laws to preserve State archives nor any legal process for public disclosure of internal records. Honduran citizens, unfortunately, do not, at this time, have the legal right to gain access to internal information about the activities of their own government officials. Consequently, efforts by the office of the National Commissioner to recover relevant Honduran documents relating to multiple past abuses of human rights have proven fruitless. After considerable investigation, the Commissioner was able to identify the location of an archive in the military intelligence offices in Tegucigalpa. When investigators arrived, however, the file cabinets were empty. For reasons of space, they were told, military files are burned every five years. To establish the historical record, therefore, obtaining documents from the two foreign governments which collaborated closely with the Honduran military during the 1980s has become critical for this human rights inquiry. Commissioner Valladares formerly requested the cooperation of Argentina, and subsequently traveled to Buenos Aires in October 1996. Since Argentinian agents had worked closely with the Honduran high command and trained Nicaraguan Contras on Honduran soil in the early 1980s, the office of the Commissioner believed that Argentinian documents might yield hard information from that era. Regrettably, the government of Argentina has to date produced only a slim file of responsive material. The United States, which has the most advanced archival and freedom of information system in the world, offered the best opportunity and hope for uncovering hard historical documentation on Honduras’ violent past. During the Reagan administration, the CIA, Pentagon, and other U.S. intelligence agencies worked closely with the Honduran military. A June 1995 expose in The Baltimore Sun revealed the extensive CIA role in the creation and training of Battalion 3–16—the Honduran military unit primarily responsible for many of the human rights atrocities in the 1980s—as well as documents on U.S. knowledge of abuses. In the United States, The Sun series generated several internal CIA investigations, which centralized hundreds of relevant documents, and a CIA Inspector General’s report on the agency’s relationship to the Honduran military…. The ongoing process to obtain U.S. documents has, however, proven exceedingly frustrating. Far more has been promised than has actually been produced. The CIA, for example, has yet to release the recent report of its own Inspector General. Many of the documents that have been released are either irrelevant to the specific requests of the Commissioner, or, as in the case of CIA records, are almost entirely deleted. The censored pages are a metaphor—the excised sections of text are black, as are the violations which remain hidden. The United States government agreed to help the Commissioner because it understood that the transition to strong civilian rule necessitates a comprehensive rendering of the past. Indeed, this inquiry is part of the broader process of consolidating democracy which is now occurring in Honduras. This process is full of hopes and dreams, but it is overshadowed by the memory of events of the last decade— events which remain unresolved in the national consciousness. In the conclusions of The Facts Speak for Themselves, a preliminary report on disappeared persons which he published in 1993, the Commissioner stated, “It is necessary to speak the truth and to do justice. Forgiveness and reconciliation are possible only after the truth is known.” It is urgent that the truth be known so this process can continue unabated. The Human Rights Commissioner has made this urgency known to U.S. authorities; and this report is intended to reiterate the need for the Clinton administration’ s support for the declassification of documentation on human rights

violations in Honduras. Despite inexplicable delays, the Commissioner continues, in good faith, to hope and expect that release of the documents will be forthcoming in the near future…. * * * The U.S. government is a meticulous record-keeper. It has clear regulations which guide what information is recorded, how it is safeguarded, and whether or not it is available to the public. The world can be certain that, when perceived U.S. interests are at stake, that government will gather and systematize reams of information. During the decade of the 1980’s, there was significant U.S. involvement in Honduras and in the neighboring countries of Central America. The U.S. government compiled detailed records on happenings throughout the Central American region. Disclosures at the Iran-Contra hearings, to the Truth Commission in El Salvador, and in conjunction with the Intelligence Oversight Board investigation on Guatemala give one a sense of the type and scope of information collected routinely by the U.S. The re is no doubt that U.S. government files contain ample information about Honduras, and that some of it would be extremely helpful to human rights investigators. For this reason, over the years a number of declassification requests have been submitted to the U.S. government for human rights information on Honduras. These declassification requests fall into two broad categories, those made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and those made government-togovernment…. To date, three FOIA requests have yielded human rights information on Honduras. The first was submitted by several U.S. citizens to petition for information on the circumstances surrounding the “disappearance” of one individual, Father James Carney. The second request was made by a newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. This request sought information from a set time period, while at the same time pursuing documents on specific issues and individuals. The third request was filed by a former U.S. diplomat and presidential appointee, Jack R. Binns, for documents generated during his years as Ambassador to Honduras…. THE CARNEY FAMILY REQUEST: Since Father James Francis Carney, also called “Padre Guadalupe”, disappeared in Honduras in September, 1983, his family has persisted in their efforts to determine his fate. Virginia Carney Smith sent an initial hand-written request for information on her brother’s case to the U.S. government in October, 1983, shortly after learning that Fr. Carney was missing. Declassified State Department cables between headquarters and the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa indicate that the request was received. It was assigned the FOIA Case Identification Number 8303036, and initial steps were taken to process it. However, Smith received no communication from the U.S. government concerning the request, and no documents were forthcoming. Given the government’s lack of responsiveness, family members (Maureen Frances Carney, Virginia Carney Smith, Eileen Carney Connolly, John Patrick Carney, and W. Joseph Connolly) filed a FOIA request on August 25, 1984 through their attorney, Peter A. Schey. Their FOIA request sought information from the following U.S. government entities: • • •

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Department of State (DOS) Department of Justice—Office of Legal Policy (DOJ-OLP)

• • • • • • •

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Department of the Army (ARMY) Department of the Navy (NAVY) Department of the Air Force (AIR FORCE) National Security Agency (NSA) Department of Defense (DOD) Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)

This request was assigned the FOIA Case Identification Number 8403222. The documents which the Carney family received in response to their FOIA request, and their contents, are described in more detail in Chapter II. Nonetheless, the U.S. government denied the release, in full or in part, of more than 300 documents in response to the Carney family FOIA. The agencies claimed that the “national security” and “foreign policy” exemptions of the FOIA all owed the withholding of information. Of all the U.S. government agencies, the CIA was the least forthcoming in its response to the Carney family. In response to the petition to release any documents indicating “the involvement or noninvolvement of personnel from the Central Intelligence Agency … in the ‘debriefing’ or interrogation of Padre Guadalupe in Honduras in August or September 1983,” the CIA stated that “the fact of the existence or non-existence of any documents which would reveal a confidential or covert CIA connection with, or interest in, those items of your request … is classified.” The CIA further clarified that by denying the plaintiffs’ request, they were “neither confirming nor denying that any such documents exist.” Of the responsive documents that did surface during the CIA’s review, 118 were withheld in their entirety and fourteen in part under the FOIA exemptions. CIA information contained in one FBI document was also denied…. Despite the diligent pursuit of relevant information by Fr. Carney’s family over so many years, some in the U.S. government had earlier made the determination that the case was closed. A declassified handwritten note on an August 19, 1985 telephone conversation stated outright: “Fr. Carney case transferred to POL 6 months ago—case is dead. Front office does not want the case active … we aren’t telling that to the family!!” In the face of such resistance, the persistence of the family of Fr. Carney in their quest for the truth regarding the fate of their brother is truly admirable. THE BALTIMORE SUN REQUEST John Carroll, editor of The Baltimore Sun, was intrigued by a wire service report about the The Facts Speak for Themselves, the Honduran Human Rights Commissioner’s preliminary report about forced disappearances in that country. He instructed reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson to investigate. They pursued the story for 14 months, an unusual commitment for a North American newspaper. The Sun published a prize-winning, four-part series in June, 1995 to report its extensive findings of U.S. knowledge of, and complicity in, human rights violations in Honduras. As part of its information-gathering efforts for that series, The Baltimore Sun filed a FOIA request on May 26, 1994. The Sun request covered the period from 1979 through April, 1994. It included: Any and all information related to the origin, structure, members and functions of Battalion 3–16; any and all information relating to assistance and training provided by the United States government and others to members of Battalion 3–16, and any all [sic] information relating to possible human rights violations committed by members of Battalion 3–16.

It specifically requested any and all information on the case of Inés Consuelo Murillo, a young Honduran lawyer who survived 80 days in illegal detention, and on the activities of two Honduran military personnel, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martínez and Major Ricardo Zuniga Morazán. The request also sought, “All documents and information requested by Dr. Valladares.” Almost a year passed, and no documents were surfaced in response to The Sun’s FOIA request. The newspaper grew impatient. It hired the law firm of Baker & Hostetler, and threatened to sue the CIA to obtain documents. The very next day a packet of fourteen declassified documents was delivered to The Sun. More time elapsed. Then, on January 24, 1997, the CIA delivered two training manuals to The Baltimore Sun in response to the newspaper’s request. The two manuals were titled: Human Resources Exploitation (1983) and Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation (1963)…. THE HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER’S REQUEST The National Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr. Leo Valladares, made his initial request for human rights information from the U.S. government on November 15, 1993 to aid in the preparation of The Facts Speak for Themselves, a preliminary report on the forced disappearance of persons in Honduras. The response from the U.S. government was positive. In a December 8, 1993 letter to U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell, President Bill Clinton indicated: “We are willing to assist Dr. Valladares. However, it is not feasible to review all the reporting on Honduran human rights matters since 1980 for material related to the 140-plus disappearance cases, as Dr. Valladares has so far requested.” The Commissioner was asked to narrow his request. On December 21, 1993, Dr. Valladares submitted a second, more focused request to the U.S. government. Valladares gave then U.S. Ambassador William Pryce a letter to which was appended a “List of Questions on Topics About Which Information Is Requested from the United States Government.” This list included questions on general topics and on specific human rights cases. Again, the Clinton administration expressed a willingness to cooperate, but indicated that the request list was still too broad. Valladares presented a third, profoundly abridged declassification request to Ambassador Pryce on August 1, 1995. Information was requested on: (1) six human rights cases; (2) General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez; and (3) on Battalion 3–16…. U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Of all of the U.S. government agencies, the DOD has been the least forthcoming in its response to the Honduran government’s declassification requests. A total of 34 heavily excised documents were made available on March 13, 1997. At the time, it was unclear whether or not this would be all the DOD material released. Therefore, on June 10, 1997, Dr. Valladares wrote a letter to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Affairs, Maria C. Fernández-Greczmiel, seeking clarification. He queried: “Will more documents be forthcoming from the DOD which are responsive to my request, or have I already received all the documents that you intend to release? If more documents are ‘in the pipeline’, as you say, please specify a date by which I might expect to receive them.” In her June 18, 1997 response to Dr. Valladares, Fernández-Greczmiel stated: … after making an initial submission of documents, the Department of Defense initiated another comprehensive survey involving all major agencies within DOD to determine if there were additional documents which were responsive to your request. This process is still underway. We anticipate receiving the results of that search soon, but it is difficult to predict the exact date as to when and what documents will be available. Please be assured that this process is being expedited

as much as possible, and I am hopeful that we can make this submission to you, through the State Department by early July. The early July date has come and gone. Months have passed without any additional communication from DOD as to the status of their declassification effort. Most recently, in December, Clinton himself indicated in a letter that the release of DOD documents would take place “by year’s end.” Indeed, 1997 has come and gone. In addition, Dr. Valladares was advised early on that U.S. Army and National Security Council documents would be processed through the Pentagon. No document recognizable as having originated with either of those two entities has been turned over thus far. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The CIA has released two batches of documents in response to the declassification requests from the Honduran government. The first consisted of 36 documents (124 pages) related to the Carney case, and a “Summary of CIA Documents on Father Carney.” The release occurred on March 13, 1997. A second batch of 97 CIA documents (313 pages) were turned over on August 29, 1997. This information focused on the remaining five human rights cases involving Honduran citizens which were included in the Commissioner’s request. The documents are excessively excised. They contain more information on the organization and activities of leftist groups in Honduras than they do on the kidnappings, illegal detentions, torture, and extrajudicial killings which occurred in the individual cases in question. It is the latter information that Honduran human rights investigators urgently seek to obtain. The CIA has delayed the release of Honduran human rights information despite clear target dates which have been laid out by President Clinton himself. On June 13, 1997, in a letter to 51 Members of Congress, Clinton wrote that the: “CIA expects to release any human rights-related material on General Alvarez by early September and on Battalion 3–16 by late November.” In December, 1997, Clinton wrote another letter, indicating that the release of the same material would take place “by year’s end.” Again, these dates have passed without any explanation to Honduran authorities. Chapter II THE CARNEY CASE: AN ANALYSIS OF INFORMATION FROM DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS The forced disappearance of a person is a terrible crime. The fate of each “desaparecido”, or disappeared person, is forever shrouded in mystery. Loved ones pray and worry and grieve and fear the worst. They must endure the pain of loss and uncertainty. There are no mortal remains to lay to rest. In Honduras, 184 cases of disappearances have been documented by the National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras. Father James Francis Carney is one of the 184 disappeared of Honduras. The case of Fr. Carney is illustrative because the U.S. government has declassified more information on this particular case of forced disappearance tha[n] on any other. This is due to a combination of factors, not the least of which is the fact that Fr. Carney is the only U.S. citizen among the disappeared. Loved by many humble, hardworking peasants and hated by some of Honduras’ most powerful men, Fr. Carney was an outspoken public figure in that country for almost two decades. Over more than a decade, numerous overtures by relatives and Jesuit colleagues to both the Honduran and U.S. governments to try to determine Fr. Carney’s fate have helped to keep this case in the public eye.

The declassified material related to the Carney case, examined in this chapter, illustrates … the type of information contained in U.S. government documents which is of interest to Honduran human rights investigators. In addition, this chapter identifies information gaps and questions raised by the declassified documents that have yet to be resolved, and makes recommendations as to how to proceed with the investigation of this particular case. WHO WAS FATHER CARNEY? James Francis Carney was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 28, 1924. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the United States Army, stationed primarily in France and England. After World War II, he returned to the United States, where in 1948 he entered the Jesuit Novitiate in Florissant, Missouri, to study for the priesthood. Ordained in 1961, he was assigned to a Jesuit mission in Honduras where he served for almost twenty years. Father Carney, known to Honduran peasants as “Padre Guadalupe,” became a naturalized Honduran citizen in September, 1974 and subsequently renounced his U.S. citizenship. On November 17, 1979, Carney was expelled from Honduras by the military government of General Policarpo Paz García. A State Department telegram from that period indicates that Carney was “considered somewhat controversial by the GOH [Government of Honduras] because of his strong feelings about social justice, and his work with campesinos.”1 Shortly thereafter, in a diplomatic note dated November 24, 1979, the Honduran government informed the U.S. Embassy that Carney’s Honduran citizenship had been revoked. Despite the petitions of the official Church hierarchy and 25,000 signatures of lay persons, Fr. Carney’s attempts to legally re-enter Honduras were refused. He became the parish priest of San Juan de Limay in the Province of Esteli, Nicaragua. In July of 1983, Fr. Carney crossed from Nicaragua into Honduras with a small guerrilla column of the Central America Revolutionary Workers Party (Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores Centroamericanos—PRTC) led by Dr. José María Reyes Mata. Before accompanying this group as their chaplain, he submitted his resignation to the Society of Jesus. Fr. Carney disappeared some time in mid-September 1983. Multiple versions of his death have surfaced. Some involve serious allegations of complicity by Honduran military officials and U.S. personnel. For example, Florencio Caballero, a former member of the 316th Military Intelligence Battalion, testified that Honduran soldiers captured Carney and other PRTC guerrillas in a military operation named “Patuca”. Carney was then taken to El Aguacate, a supply base of the Nicaraguan “Contras,” where he was interrogated. He was subsequently thrown to his death from a helicopter. Caballero revealed that the orders for Carney’s disappearance came from the Chief of the Honduran Armed Forces General Alvarez Martínez during a planning meeting for the so-called “Patuca Operation.” According to Caballero, North American personnel, including one man he knew only as “Mr. Mike”, were present at that meeting when Alvarez ordered his men to kill Carney after interrogating him. DECLASSIFICATION REQUESTS FILED The U.S. government has received both Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and government-togovernment requests for human rights information regarding the case of Fr. Carney. As part of their investigation of the circumstances surrounding his death, Fr. Carney’s siblings submitted FOIA requests in October, 1983 and August, 1984. Their hypothesis that the U.S. government must have information on the Carney case had been reinforced by conversations at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa. Indeed, a declassified telegram recounts the very first visit of Carney’s relatives to the U.S.

Embassy on September 28, 1983, noting that: “EMBOFFS [Embassy officials] ASSURED THAT GOVERNMENT OF HONDURAS WOULD HAVE TOLD EMBASSY OF ANY INFORMATION HELD ON FATHER CARNEY.”2 Over the past decade, Carney’s family has been untiring in its quest for information on the case. Investing considerable time and financial resources, they exercised their right of access to U.S. government information to the fullest extent possible under the FOIA…. In addition to the Carney family FOIA request, three government-to-government declassification requests have been submitted which specifically mention … the Carney case. The first two originated in the Public Ministry of the Republic of Honduras. On June 13, 1995, Honduran Attorney General Edmundo Orellana Mercado directed a letter to thenU.S. Ambassador William T. Pryce which explained that the investigation of the Carney case was a priority for the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Human Rights. Dr. Orellana went on to ask: “That all of the information that lies in the Department of State and other Governmental Offices about the forced disappearance of Father Carneige [sic] be given to us.” Two days later, then-Special Prosecutor for Human Rights Sonia Marlyna Dubón de Flores sent a second, more specific request to Amb. Pryce for U.S. information on nineteen different topics. Among these topics, Ms. Dubón petitioned for: “Reports and documents of the CIA with respect to the death of the Jesuit priest of North American nationality JAMES FRANCISCO CARNEIGE [sic], known as ‘Padre Guadalupe.’” The Carney case was also one of the six cases about which Human Rights Commissioner Dr. Leo Valladares Lanza requested U.S. information in a formal petition which was personally presented to Amb. Pryce on August 1, 1995. The Commissioner sought: “All the records concerning the disappearance of Father JAMES FRANCISCO CARNEY, known as ‘FATHER GUADALUPE.’” THE PRTC GUERRILLAS AND THE PATUCA OPERATION Fr. Carney served as a chaplain to a group of fewer than one hundred men and women belonging to the Central America Revolutionary Workers Party (PTRC) that crossed by foot from Nicaragua into Honduras on or about July 19, 1983. Carney’s presence with the group is confirmed in diary entries of the group’s leader, Dr. José María Reyes Mata, who chronicled the journey of the guerrillas through a mountainous region of Honduras.3 When Reyes Mata was killed by Honduran soldiers, his diary was retrieved, though several pages were missing. An English translation of the diary, prepared by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), has been declassified by the CIA. The diary makes several references to a “Mario,” the name which is known to be Fr. Carney’s pseudonym. The August 15 entry notes that: “… Mario, the one who was presumed to be the weakest of all, had reached the ravine about 600 meters from the camp.”4 This is the last mention of Mario in the text of the diary. The PRTC group was considered a serious threat to Honduras’ national security. “The infiltration from Nicaragua of a Cuban-trained guerrilla force into a remote region of Honduras” was characterized as “the most significant international security threat of 1983” in a 1988 report on an investigation for the CIA Inspector General. The report declared: “The guerrilla infiltration was disturbing evidence that Havana and Managua were intent on introducing guerrilla war to Honduras.”5 A full-scale military operation was mounted against the PRTC group. Passages from formerly secret U.S. documents provide a partial response to key questions regarding the destiny of the PRTC guerrillas, among them: When did the Honduran military begin to monitor the movements of the PRTC guerrillas? When did the Honduran military become aware of Fr. Carney’s presence with the PRTC group? How were PRTC guerrillas treated by the Honduran military upon their

capture or desertion? To what extent was there U.S. involvement in the detection, tracking and elimination of the PRTC group? What did employees of the U.S. government know about the welfare and whereabouts of Fr. Carney, and when did they learn it? Detection of PRTC guerrillas On August 1, 1983, two PRTC guerrillas deserted near the town of Catacamas and turned themselves in to the Honduran army. According to a declassified State Department telegram: “WHEN GOH [Government of Honduras] FIRST BECAME AWARE OF THE GROUP’S PRESENCE IN HONDURAS, BY THE ARRIVAL OF TWO DESERTERS AT CATACAMAS ON AUGUST 1, THEY SHARED THIS INFORMATION WITH U.S. DEFENSE ATTACHE OFFICE. THE U.S. DEFENSE ATTACHE OFFICE DID NOT HAVE INFORMATION PRIOR TO THIS DATE REGARDING THIS GROUP’S PRESENCE IN HONDURAS.”6 Immediately after the deserter’s [sic] appearance, the Honduran military mounted the “Patuca Operation” in order to locate, capture and eliminate the PRTC guerrillas. On August 4, 1983, the Honduran Army’s Patuca Task Force arrived in Nueva Palestina, Olancho, to set up its headquarters and to launch the counter-insurgency mission. The very next day, U.S. Army Rangers from Fort Lewis, Washington, were parachuted into Olancho. They remained there until August 16, participating in what the Pentagon called a “simulated counterinsurgency operation” with Honduran forces.7 This was all part of larger U.S.-Honduran military exercises which were described as follows in a declassified trip report of the Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives: Big Pine II (Ahuas Tara II) lasted from August 1983 to February 1984. This exercise, in which approximately 6,000 U.S. Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force personnel participated, included an amphibious landing by a marine amphibious unit on the north coast, a combined field training exercise of Honduran units and U.S. Army Special Forces in a counterinsurgency exercise in a remote area of Honduras, and a combined artillery exercise of the division artillery from the 101st Airborne Division and the Honduran army.8 Thus, a significant numbers of U.S. forces were present in Honduras for the duration of the Patuca Operation….

Notes 1. “GOH Allegedly Deports Jesuit Priest,” Unclassified telegram #06554 from the U.S. Embassy in Honduras to the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., DOS Carney Declassification (Case ID: 9527970 7, 1/31/96), November 20, 1979, Document C1I, one page. 2. “Welfare and Whereabouts Case of Father James Francis Carney AKA Padre Guadalupe,” Unclassified Telegram #10766 from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa to the U.S. Secretary of State in Washington, D.C., Document given to Dr. Leo Valladares by Mr. John Hamilton on September 15, 1995, September 30, 1983, p. 4. 3. Alternative spellings of Mata and Matta are found in U.S. government documents. 4. Foreign Broadcast Information Service translation to English of guerrilla diary, CIA Carney Declassification, 3/97, Document H1–23, date unknown, p. 18. 5. CIA Honduras Declassification (8/97), Document H2–93, Memorandum to the CIA Inspector General on “Investigation of New York Times Article’s Allegations of CIA Involvement with Honduran Officials Accused of Human Rights Abuses,” August 24, 1988, p. 7. 6. “Welfare and Whereabouts Case: Father James Francis Carney AKA Padre Guadalupe,” Unclassified Telegram #12515 from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa to the U.S. Secretary of State in Washington, D.C., Document given to Dr. Leo Valladares by Mr. John Hamilton on September 15, 1995, November 14, 1983, p. 7. 7. “The U.S. in Honduras: Mysterious Death of Fr. Carney,” by George Black and Anne Nelson, The Nation, p. 83. 8. Central America Trip Report of the Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, El Salvador—Gilman Declassification (8/94), 1984, p. 11. Source: Leo Valladares Lanza and Susan C. Peacock. In Search of Hidden Truths: An Interim Report on Declassification by the National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras. Honduras: National Commission for Human Rights, 1998;

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/honduras/hidden_truths/hidden.htm.

Excerpts from a Report to Congress on Congressional Concerns Regarding the School of the Americas (April 16, 2001) This previously classified report, prepared in 2001 by researchers at the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Research Service, shed light on much of the history and operations of the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S. Army facility founded in 1946 in Fort Benning, Georgia, largely for training Latin American military officers. Critics of U.S. Cold War policy in Latin America had long argued that SOA graduates included many of the worst offenders of human rights crimes throughout Latin America, including rape, assassination, torture, and other forms of extrajudicial persecution of opponents of U.S.-supported governments in the region. Although secret and intended to remain so, this report was the first official effort by the U.S. government to confront and document the controversial history of the SOA. Summary The School of the Americas was a U.S. Army training facility founded in 1946 largely for Spanishspeaking cadets and officers from Latin American nations. The School was located at Fort Benning, Georgia. Controversies developed in recent years concerning human rights abuses committed by School graduates, and there were several legislative attempts since 1993 to cut funding for the School. The School was charged by P.L. 100–180 (10 USC 4415) with the mission of developing and conducting instruction for the armed forces of Latin America. The law stipulated that the School would promote military professionalism, foster cooperation among the multinational military forces in Latin America, and expand Latin American armed forces’ knowledge of U.S. customs and traditions. According to critics, the School had abusive graduates who violated human rights. They maintained that soldiers who were chosen to attend were not properly screened, with the result that some students and instructors attended the School even after being implicated in human rights violations. In September 1996, concerns over the School intensified when DOD made available excerpts from seven Spanish language training manuals used at the School from 1982 until 1991. The manuals discussed forms of coercion against insurgents, including execution and torture. Supporters of the School contended that it had the potential to help bring about greater respect for human rights in Latin America by providing human rights training to thousands of Latin American military officials. Supporters maintained that those graduates who committed human rights violations did not commit the violence because of their training at Fort Benning, but rather in spite of it. They argued that only a small number out of a total of over 60,000 School graduates have been accused of human rights violations. Supporters also argued that most Latin American militaries now support civilian democratic rule. Congressional oversight of the School of the Americas increased since 1993, essentially focusing on human rights issues. Four House attempts to cut funding for the School were rejected in 1993, 1994, 1997, and 1998. In 1999, the House voted to cut funding for the School during consideration of the FY2000 foreign aid appropriations bill, H.R. 2606. Ultimately, however, the conferees on the bill rejected the House position and continued funding for the School. In November 1999, Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera proposed a plan to restructure and rename the school, making it more academic and recruiting civilians from Latin American governments as well as military students from the region. In October 2000, the FY2001 defense authorization bill, (H.R. 5408), contained language that was incorporated into the H.R. 4205 conference report (H. Rept. 106–945), which repealed the legislative authority for the School

of the Americas and replaced it with new authority for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation along the lines of Secretary Caldera’s 1999 proposal. Through enactment of H.R. 4205 into law on October 30, 2000, (P.L. 106–398), the U.S. Army School of the Americas ceased to exist. This report provides background on the former School and issues related to it…. Background The School of the Americas was originally established in 1946 in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone as the Latin American Center—Ground Division. In July 1963, it became the U.S. Army School of the Americas, and Spanish became its official language. On September 21, 1984, the School suspended operations in compliance with the terms of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty. In December 1984, the School reopened at Fort Benning, Georgia, as part of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. All elements of the School of the Americas were located at Fort Benning, until the School’s disestablishment in late 2000, with the exception of the Helicopter School Battalion which is located at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Since 1946, over 60,000 officers, cadets, and non-commissioned officers from Latin America and the United States were trained at the School of the Americas. The School’s staff and faculty— comprised of about 202 civilian and multi-service military personnel—prepared, supported, and presented various courses in Spanish to an average of 1,000 students annually. The School of the Americas taught a variety of courses from 1 to 47 weeks relating to U.S. Army doctrine, from basic patrolling techniques to the Command and General Staff Course (CGSOC). The School of the Americas was charged by P.L. 100–180 (10 USC 4415) with the mission of developing and conducting instruction for the armed forces of Latin America, using the most doctrinally sound, relevant, and cost-effective training programs possible. The law stipulated that the School would promote military professionalism, foster cooperation among the multinational military forces in Latin America, and expand Latin American armed forces’ knowledge of United States customs and traditions. The School was organized to provide principal training elements—joint and combined operations, special operations and civil military operations, noncommissioned officer professional development, and resource management. Two academic departments presented all instruction, except the Instructor Training Course. The Helicopter School Battalion (HSB) at Fort Rucker, Alabama provided initial and advanced helicopter flight instruction in Spanish. Additional helicopter maintenance instruction was provided at Fort Eustis, Virginia. The Department of Joint and Combined Operations taught the Command and General Staff Course to students from Latin American countries. Since 1955, over 1,100 students graduated from the CGSOC. Training programs to deal with insurgency threats were developed for students in the 1960s. In the 1980s programs aimed at contending with narcoterrorism were developed. In the 1990s, new courses were developed focusing on Democratic Sustainment of emerging democracies, Peacekeeping Operations, and Border Operations. Human rights training was part of the program of the School of the Americas, although critics have questioned the extent and effectiveness of such instruction (see “Human Rights Training” below). Prior to 1989, the School notes that it provided human rights training both formally—in classroom instruction on the Laws of Land Warfare—and informally—through exposure to American institutions. Since 1989, the School established a policy on human rights training and revised its curriculum to integrate human rights training into every course taught. According to the School, the basic block of human rights instruction was 8 hours long, but almost all students received substantially more than 8 hours, with additional training woven into the classroom instruction and into field training exercises. According to the Department of the Army, the School of the Americas budget for FY2000 was estimated to total $4.455 million from two principal sources. The School’s fixed budget came principally

from Operations and Maintenance, Army (OMA) which was provided through the Defense Department’s authorization and appropriations legislation. For FY2000, the School’s OMA funding level was estimated to be $3.117 million. The OMA funding paid for all of the School’s overhead costs, including civilian pay, guest instructor program costs, supplies and equipment, certain travel expenses, and contracts. About 90% of OMA funds were spent on civilian pay and the guest instructor program. Additional DoD funding for FY2000 was estimated to total $88,000. The other major funding source for the School was reimbursable funds granted to Latin American countries under the United States Foreign Military Sales (FMS), International Military Education and Training (IMET), and International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) programs. These funds paid for the actual costs of student training. In FY2000 the total funds the School was estimated to use from these sources was $1.250 million. In FY1999, the total final budget for the School was $4.115 million. Congressional Concerns Regarding Human Rights As reflected in congressional legislative and oversight debates, most concerns about the School centered on graduates who were implicated in—or are alleged to have been responsible for—human rights violations in their countries. In recent years, congressional oversight focused on the adequacy of the selection and screening process for the School’s students and on the adequacy of human rights training at the School. Human Rights Violations. According to critics, the School had a history and tradition of abusive graduates who violated human rights. Observers pointed out that School alumni included 48 out of 69 Salvadoran military members cited in the U.N. Truth Commission’s report on El Salvador for involvement in human rights violations (including 19 of 27 military members implicated in the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests), and more than 100 Colombian military officers alleged to have been responsible for human rights violations by a 1992 report issued by several human rights organizations. School graduates have also included several Peruvian military officers linked to the July 1992 killings of nine students and a professor from La Cantuta University; other graduates included several Honduran officers linked to a clandestine military force known as Battalion 316, responsible for disappearances in the early 1980s. Critics maintained that soldiers who were chosen to attend were not properly screened, with the result that some students and instructors have attended the School after being implicated in human rights violations. For example, in 1995, concerns over the School were heightened when it was reported that Guatemalan Army Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, implicated in human rights violations, had been trained at the School in 1989. Colonel Alpirez was implicated in March 1995 press allegations for involvement in the 1990 murder of U.S. citizen Michael Devine and the 1992 killing of Guatemalan guerilla leader Efrain Bamarca Velasquez, married to U.S. citizen Jennifer Harbury. In September 1996, concerns over the School intensified when DOD made available excerpts from seven Spanish-language training manuals used periodically at the School of the Americas from 1982 until 1991. The manuals discussed forms of coercion against insurgents, including execution, torture, and blackmail. Subsequently, in February 1997, a DOD Inspector General concluded that repeated mistakes were made that resulted in objectionable material being included in the manuals, but that there was no deliberate attempt to violate DOD or U.S. Army policies and that no further investigation was necessary to assess individual responsibility. Concerns about the School’s graduates were again raised in January 2000 when retired Guatemala Col. Byron Disrael Lima Estrada, who attended the School of the Americas in the 1960s, was arrested for

involvement in the death of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi in 1998. Bishop Gerardi was murdered in April 1998 just two days after he released a report accusing the Guatemalan military for most of the human rights abuses committed during the country’s civil conflict. Some critics labeled the School of the Americas a “school for dictators” because of the high number of former Latin American dictators who attended the school. Among the ten former Latin American heads of state who attended the School of the Americas, two were Panamanian military rulers: General Manuel Antonio Noriega, de facto ruler from 1983 until his ouster from power by U.S. forces in December 1989; and General Omar Torrijos who emerged as Panama’s political leader after the National Guard overthrew the elected civilian government in 1968. Torrijos ruled either as official head of government or de facto political leader until his death in a plane crash in 1981. Two additional School alumni who were military rulers are Ecuadorian Major General Guillermo Rodriguez (1972–76) and Peruvian Major General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975), both of whom overthrew elected governments. Breaking with the pattern of previous military leaders in these two countries, Rodriguez and Alvarado initiated extensive periods of direct military rule, seven years in Ecuador and twelve years in Peru. The six remaining Latin American military rulers who attended the School of the Americas consist of two each from Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras, all of whom succeeded military rulers. In Argentina, Lieutenant General Roberto Viola led a short-lived military government from March to December 1981. After Argentina’s return to democracy, Viola was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for criminal responsibility for human rights violations during Argentina’s so-called “dirty war against subversion” in the 1970s. Viola was succeeded by Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieri, another School graduate, who ruled from December 1981 until June 1982. Galtieri led Argentina during the unsuccessful war with Britain over the Falkland Islands. In Bolivia, General Hugo Banzer Suarez led a bloody coup in 1971. According to many observers, Banzer’s rule until 1978 was repressive, with labor leaders and leftist politicians exiled, jailed, and killed. In contrast, another School graduate from Bolivia, Major General Guido Vildoso Calderon who ruled from July to October 1982, was chosen by the military to return the country to civilian rule. In Honduras, Brigadier General Juan Melgar Castro became president in 1975 when the military command ousted another military leader from power. Melgar Castro in turn was ousted in 1978 and was replaced by School of the Americas alum Policarpo Paz Garcia who returned Honduras to civilian democratic rule. Supporters of the School pointed out that in many Latin American countries, military service is traditionally an avenue to political and economic leadership. They contended that the opportunity to train thousands of Latin American military officials at the School on U.S. human rights processes and international human rights has a significant potential for bringing about greater respect for human rights in Latin America. Supporters of the School maintained that only a small number out of a total of over 60,000 School graduates have been accused of human rights violations. They argued that those graduates who have committed human rights violations did not commit the violence because of their training at Fort Benning, but rather in spite of it. Acknowledging the past abuses of some graduates, some School supporters recommended a stricter set of criteria for student selection along with restrictions for countries with a high percentage of students later convicted of human rights violations. The Department of the Army maintained that the United States—through the Department of State—actively and continuously screened potential candidates for training for any record of human rights abuse, criminal activity, or corruption…. Human Rights Training. Critics of the School maintained that it only paid lip service to human rights training for its students. They asserted that a few hours of human rights training will not make a difference,

and that there is a hostile attitude among the students regarding the mandatory human rights training. A former School logistics instructor, retired Army Major Joseph Blair, maintained that the human rights message was not taken seriously by the Latin American students and contended that the soldiers associate human rights with subversives. A guest human rights lecturer at the School believed that the School’s changes in its human rights curriculum was nothing more than a facelift and said that “much of the training at the School was done by officers from Latin American militaries, which had strongly resisted increased civilian control and accountability.” Critics of the School maintained that although some courses for civilian participation were offered at the School, actually most students were from Latin American militaries and police. According to a 1996 General Accounting Office report, less than 1% of the School’s students were civilians. Supporters of the School pointed out that since 1989 it began to emphasize human rights training throughout its curriculum making it unique among U.S. Army schools. They indicated that the School also began to meet “expanded IMET” objectives by including courses for civilian officials on the creation and maintenance of effective military judicial systems and military codes of conduct. School supporters maintained that, for many Latin American soldiers, the School was the only training they would receive in human rights, and that the School provided a unique setting to influence Latin American militaries on the importance of respecting human rights. According to Major Michael Travaglione, a former chaplain for the School who took part in many of the “practical exercises” involving human rights training, the human rights message was getting across to the students. Supporters also pointed to efforts by the School to improve its promotion of human rights, including the addition of a class in December 1994 to show students how to develop a human rights training program in their own country; the formation of an internal Human Rights Advisory Committee to oversee the human rights content of coursework at the School; and the formation of a Board of Visitors in 1996, which included noted human rights advocates…. Legislative Action Congressional oversight of the School of the Americas increased since 1993, essentially focusing on concerns over human rights issues. In 1993–1994, the House voted twice on measures to cut funding for the School, but these were rejected. However, legislative action in 1994 did require a report on the School’s promotion of respect for human rights and civilian authority. In 1995 and 1996, there were no congressional votes to restrict funding for the School in Defense or Foreign Operations measures, although the House Appropriations Committee did include language on the School regarding human rights training in its reports accompanying foreign operations bills for those two years. In 1996, the Committee requested a report on the School’s selection process and monitoring of the human rights practices of its graduates. In 1997, the House rejected an amendment to eliminate funding for the School during September consideration of the FY1998 Foreign Operations Appropriations bill, H.R. 2159. But that same bill contained a House provision, prohibiting IMET funding for the School unless specific actions were taken related to human rights and the selection and screening process for the School’s students…. Source: Richard F. Grimmett and Mark P. Sullivan. U.S. Army School of the Americas: Background and Congressional Concerns. April 16, 2001. Congressional Research Service report for Congress. Available online at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30532.pdf.

Profile of Antiapartheid Activist Jennifer Davis (2007) The American Committee on Africa (ACOA) was founded in 1953, just five years after the establishment of a racist apartheid state in South Africa. A national citizens organization committed to the anti-imperial liberation struggles of all African peoples, ACOA centered much of its educational

and political work on the campaign to end apartheid. Given the geostrategic relationship of South Africa with the U.S. government, the antiapartheid movement in the United States was critical to a movement that would take nearly four decades to realize victory. Jennifer Davis (b. 1933), a white South African who came to New York City in 1967, played a central role in that history, serving as ACOA’s executive director from 1981 to 2000. Jennifer Davis never planned to go into exile from South Africa. But by 1966, organizing inside the country had become very difficult. Most major organizations were banned, and an increasing number of the individuals she worked with, at both the grassroots and leadership levels, were in detention or under house arrest. Exile was never simple, she says. Activists had to grapple both with their conscience about “leaving the struggle” and with the authorities, who used the issuing of passports as a means of control. Leaving South Africa happened quite suddenly, in a traumatic few weeks. It started by my husband [lawyer Mike Davis] leaving to visit my brother, traveling on a valid passport. That was followed by several calls from the police indicating that they believed he had left illegally and that I would soon be subjected to some form of house arrest order, as would he if he returned. Mike had done many political cases in South Africa, including several where he was instructed by the Tambo-Mandela law firm. In New York, Mike Davis made contact with people connected to the American Committee on Africa, and over time they helped him reestablish his legal career. Jennifer Davis arrived with their two small children and began her adjustment to life in the United States. An early experience stands out in her mind as particularly instructive. She was invited to dinner by friends of her parents who lived on Manhattan’s East Side. They had an absolutely beautiful house with lots of original artwork, an El Greco in their dining room. One of the guests said to me—I think we were already sitting down after dinner—you must see great differences between South Africa and here. And I said, well, there are some differences, but there’s not such a lot of difference. I see a tremendous number of very poor black people, and a lot of very rich white people. And she pulled herself up to her rather portly height and said, there are no poor people in America. Davis had been speaking her mind since high school, when she dared to argue with her Afrikaans teacher about the 1948 elections. The daughter of a South African father and a German mother who left Germany in the early 1930s, she came to understand the meaning of the Holocaust from her parents and maternal grandmother. For Davis, “never again” meant that every Jew should be an activist, resisting religious and racial oppression wherever it occurred. A member of the Unity Movement in South Africa, Davis describes herself as a very serious young woman. By the time I got to the University of the Witwatersrand in the early fifties, the Communist Party had already been banned. On the Wits campus much of the left debate was carried out in the Student Liberal Association, which provided the public home for many who had formerly been open party members. Unity Movement members who were functioning in something called the Progressive Forum were in hot opposition to the Communist Party, and drew their ideological framework from the Trotskyist tradition. Thus there was a lot of debate, mainly about the nature, structure, and possible

transformation of South African society, but also about international issues and about broader ideas, the role of art and science, the nature of capitalism and imperialism. In the United States Davis found a place at ACOA, where she became the research director. She established extensive files that were a resource for activists and journalists and provided the information for ACOA’s and The Africa Fund’s numerous presentations before U.N. and U.S. government committees. During the burgeoning divestment campaign, items like “Fact Sheet on South Africa” and “Questions and Answers on Divestment” were used in virtually every state and local campaign. Davis’s home became a temporary landing place for countless people—Africans, Europeans, and North Americans—who had been recently expelled from their countries of origin or were in New York temporarily to carry out a U.N. assignment or use ACOA’s resources. One such guest was activist poet Dennis Brutus. In 1966 Brutus had just been released from the Robben Island prison in South Africa and went on tour in the United States for ACOA. Davis remembers that he used to wander around her apartment in the middle of the night, muttering poetry; her kids were fascinated by him. He later settled in the United States and spearheaded work on the international sports boycott. Over more than three decades, Davis continued to host delegations and individuals from liberation, protest, human rights, and trade union movements throughout Southern Africa, providing the opportunity for them to inform and update activist Americans on the progress of their work. In 1981, on the retirement of George Houser, Jennifer Davis took over the leadership of the American Committee on Africa and The Africa Fund, a position she would hold until her retirement in 2000. At the time, ACOA’s board was chaired by William Booth, a black lawyer and district court judge who was a former New York City commissioner. Announcing Davis’s appointment in ACOA Action News (spring 1981), Booth said, “She has gained a reputation as an authority with few peers in analyzing political and economic developments in Southern Africa…. She brings the same commitment and integrity that are characteristic of George Houser. What was so well begun will be well continued under her leadership.” It was not quite that simple. This was, after all, the American Committee on Africa, and according to board member Bob Browne, some people thought it was crazy to appoint a South African to head it. And not only a South African, but a white Jew. Browne went on to say that it did not remain a problem because Davis quickly won over any skeptics. But that is also an oversimplification. While serving as director, Davis traveled around the country speaking in a wide variety of venues. She had to deal with sensitive questions regarding her credibility. Although he says they didn’t talk about it at the time, Dumisani Kumalo, ACOA’s project director and a fellow South African, was well aware of the challenges she faced. “We were involved in a political struggle and she was a white Jewish woman in this struggle against racism. So she was up against it in the U.S., with its racism.” Davis recalls her debates on U.S. television with South African homeland leader Gatsha Buthelezi, who worked with the South African government to lobby against sanctions. “He attacked me as the ‘white lady.’ He’s black; I’m white. What do I know? He was arguing that we should have more investment.” Davis learned the value of speaking, whenever she could, in joint appearances with a black colleague. “I developed, I think, a fair amount of credibility, but to have David Ndaba from the ANC or Dumisani Kumalo meant that me being a ‘white lady’ didn’t matter.” Davis remained a strong advocate for strengthening sanctions and keeping them in place until there was a genuine transfer of power in South Africa. In 1989 Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen admitted, “Sanctions have had a substantial impact on persuading white South Africans of the need for a negotiated settlement” (Wall Street Journal, June 30, 1989). Then he argued that now was the time to lift sanctions, to reward the changes that had been made.

Davis was quick to reply. “What has changed,” she said, “is the white power structure’s sense of permanence and invulnerability…. The economy is badly shaken…. [n]o growth, unemployment for whites, inflation” (1989). She called for the imposition of comprehensive sanctions. From the beginning of her involvement with ACOA, one of Jennifer Davis’s key contributions was to insist on an anti-imperialist focus for the American anti-apartheid work and for the work in support of liberation movements in the rest of Southern Africa. While affirming the importance of human rights and political prisoner campaigns, Davis insisted that ACOA concentrate on exposing and weakening the support that American institutions were giving to the white minority regimes. Beginning in the 1970s, Davis began making trips to Africa. In August 1974 she traveled to Tanzania to spend time with Frelimo, visiting, among other places, the Mozambican movement’s hospital in Mtwara. We were supporting, through the Rubin Foundation, the hospital in Mtwara. It wasn’t a hospital, it was a small house, and they’d bring people across the border from Cabo Delgado. The staff greeted me as I came up to the building, and then they held me in the door, and they said to the respective people in the beds, this visitor is coming from the United States and she would like to come and talk with you, and is it all right? And everybody said yes, and then I went inside. I went to a hospital in Zambia where the doctors took me around and nobody ever told the patients what was happening. Davis was enormously impressed by Frelimo. She understood them to be seriously attempting to engage the people not as victims but as participants. When Mozambique’s president Samora Machel and 33 others died in a plane crash on October 19, 1986, Davis flew to Maputo to attend the funerals. ACOA’s relationships with Frelimo were too enduring not to express solidarity in person. She recalls: Perhaps the most memorable minutes of my stay in Mozambique were 15 minutes spent with Grata Machel an hour before leaving. She had borne herself with great dignity throughout the public ceremonies. Now, face to face, she embraced me, listened to my messages of sympathy and solidarity and said, “We have always known that we had many friends, but it is good that you are here, so we can touch.” Then she went on to talk about tasks ahead. In January 1990, just before the elections that would bring SWAPO to power in Namibia, Davis traveled to Windhoek. She wanted, she says, to reconnect with individuals and groups throughout the country, to understand what might happen in the next few weeks and the ways that solidarity could continue after the elections. She went north to Oshikati, where SWAPO had strong support. She talked to a wide range of people, from Toivo ya Toivo and other SWAPO leaders to women’s groups and Lutheran church activists. Finally, in 1994, Davis returned to South Africa to serve as an official observer for the South African election. She had traveled a long distance in the three decades she had been away. A Jewish secular intellectual, she had come to lead organizations whose constituencies were most often Christian, or black, or both. That the churches were major players in the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. was something that she had to get used to. She came to win the respect of those with whom she worked. At a party held in her honor in 2003, one of the speakers was Harlem minister Canon Fred Williams, a board member of ACOA and co-founder with Wyatt Tee Walker of ACOA’s Religious Action Network. The network was open to all religious traditions but was made up predominantly of black churches. They had answered a call from religious

leaders in South Africa to protest detentions, work for sanctions and send prayers and messages of solidarity. “Here was this Jewish woman,” Williams said, “and she is the one who made it possible for the Religious Action Network to do its work, this coalition of primarily black, male clergy and their churches. The public Jennifer, cold to some, aloof, hard to connect to, yes, but so reliable as the one to look more deeply, to insist on principle, to keep focused even in the face of terrible opposition.” Source: William Minter, Gail Hovey, and Charles Cobb, Jr. (eds). No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007, 169–172. Used by permission; available for order online at http://www.noeasyvictories.org and http://www.africaworldpressbooks.com.

4. The Lone Superpower, 1990–2014

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW In many ways, the most recent and continuing chapter of American imperialism is centered in Iraq. As of 2015, four successive American presidents—George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—had waged war in that Middle Eastern country. It began August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. President George H. W. Bush led the United Nations Security Council in condemning the invasion and demanding Iraq’s immediate withdrawal. The president spoke forcefully of the need to reverse Iraq president Saddam Hussein’s “naked aggression,” warning that Saudi Arabia and other nations in the region were also threatened. The six-week-long First Gulf War resulted in the withdrawal of Iraqi forces and an immediate victory for U.S. forces with minimal casualties. As General Colin Powell had argued, when American military personnel were given a clear, well-defined mission of limited scope—in contrast to Vietnam—they would succeed and make Americans proud again. President Bush declared that the Vietnam Syndrome had been “kicked once and for all” (Bush, “Remarks”). Nearly a quarter-century later, from June through November 2014 U.S. president Barack Obama deployed more than 3,100 American soldiers to northern Iraq to lead the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS), a regional terror organization that grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq and by 2014 had proclaimed a worldwide caliphate. Ostensibly invited by the government of Iraq, U.S. forces initially delivered humanitarian aid to besieged fighters and civilians in the mountains of northern Iraq. Well-publicized ISIL beheadings of Americans, coupled with the involvement of other countries in the anti-ISIL campaign, resulted in broad American support for military intervention. By year’s end the combination of more than $500 million worth of air strikes, Apache helicopter attacks, and ground force operations against ISIL forces had purportedly been effective in stemming their regional advance in Iraq and Syria. Unfolding between these two conflicts were, first, the contentious U.S.-Iraqi relations of the 1990s over Iraq’s alleged refusal to comply with UN disarmament resolutions that followed the First Gulf War, and ultimately the Second Gulf War. For more than a decade, American and British pilots flew more than 250,000 bombing sorties over Iraq, policing U.S.- and British-imposed “no-fly zones” in northern and southern Iraq. The two nations also won United Nations (UN) support for the most punishing sanctions regime in history—sanctions that cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, most of them children. In 1998 President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act that made it official U.S. policy to seek the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Although Clinton refused the appeal that came that year from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to authorize a U.S. military invasion and regime change, PNAC leaders soon had their chance to pursue the operation themselves. In the first weeks of the George W. Bush presidency, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other leading PNAC alumni now in

the Bush administration initiated early planning for an invasion of Iraq. When the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, by 19 Al Qaeda airline hijackers—15 of them from Saudi Arabia, none from Iraq—planning for regime change in Iraq accelerated. From late 2001 through March 2003, Bush officials mounted a concerted public relations campaign aimed at persuading the American people and Congress that Saddam Hussein and his alleged program of “weapons of mass destruction” posed an imminent threat to the United States, its allies, and its interests, and that there was credible evidence that Al Qaeda enjoyed a secret, shadowy relationship with Saddam’s regime. The underlying assumption in American political discourse in 2002 was that either of those offenses would justify a preemptive invasion of Iraq. What ensued from March 20, 2003, through 2011 was the U.S.-Iraq (Second Gulf) War. Before the conflict even began, it was opposed by governments and millions of people around the world as a violation of international law—specifically Article 2, Section 4 of the UN Charter prohibiting preemptive war. Though the United States accomplished its main objective, the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the consequences for both Iraqis and Americans were far more costly, severe, and complicated than ever envisioned by the war’s proponents. More than 4,400 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis died, and the sectarian violence unleashed by the war continued to exact a bloody toll more than a decade later. More comprehensive studies documented more than 500,000 deaths, including violent and nonviolent indirect casualties (e.g., degraded health care, sanitation, and infrastructure caused by the invasion). A parliamentary democracy slowly took hold in Baghdad, but was widely perceived as corrupt and inept. Pro-Shia militias tied to the regime were charged by human rights organizations with a wave of atrocities committed against the Sunni population. Nearly simultaneous with President George W. Bush declaring “Mission accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier in May 2003, U.S. forces faced the start of a violent insurgency and sectarian warfare that ensnared U.S. forces in a long and bloody conflict. It was precisely what the first President Bush had feared when he made the decision in 1991 to respect the limits of the UN mandate—to reverse the invasion of Kuwait—and not invade Baghdad to try to remove Saddam. Like the claim in 2002 of “weapons of mass destruction,” the First Gulf War was also more fraught with contradiction and nationally self-serving policy complications than has ever been appreciated by most Americans. U.S. policy regarding Iraq had long focused on ensuring that the country was a reliable anti-Soviet Middle East ally in the Cold War, and a stable partner in providing access to the country’s oil resource. These objectives provided the regional framework for the U.S. decision to support the rise of authoritarian leaders throughout the Middle East. They led the United States in the 1980s to sell weapons and provide training, intelligence, and support to Saddam Hussein’s government in its war with Iran— despite knowledge of chemical weapons being used against his own people. Evidence also emerged indicating that the top U.S. government official in Baghdad in 1990 had acquiesced in Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It is widely accepted among scholars of the region that the First Gulf War helped to sow the seeds for the 9/11 attacks. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Saudi native son Osama bin Laden requested of the Saudi royal family that he and his Islamic fighters, having driven the Soviets from Afghanistan, be authorized to go after Saddam. The Saudis rebuffed him, instead allowing the United States to station more than 500,000 American troops on military bases in Saudi territory, what bin Laden considered Islamic holy land. That deployment, coupled with the growing and increasingly active presence of U.S. troops throughout predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Eurasia throughout the 1990s (seen through the U.S.-NATO Balkans Wars of the Clinton era and the growing energy-related U.S. presence in the region), helped to stoke the seething anti-American, anti-Western ideology that was the basis of Al Qaeda’s formation and growing strength.

Similarly, events since the 9/11 attacks have created the political and security conditions in which ISIL, heavily armed in part by a flood of U.S. weapons in the country, has taken root: the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent destruction of a functioning, albeit authoritarian state; the continued heavy U.S. military footprint in the country even after the end of combat operations in 2011 (featuring the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad); military support for allied groups fighting to unseat the government of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria; and ongoing allegations of numerous crimes committed with impunity by U.S. and Iraqi military and private contractors. The attacks of September 11, 2001, by 19 Al Qaeda terrorists on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon took the lives of 2,996 people, caused more than $10 billion in property damage, and shook the U.S. and world economy. Though shocking, U.S. officials knew that such a catastrophic event was possible—particularly after a 1993 WTC bombing, masterminded in part by Al Qaeda–trained Ramzi Yousef. Letters mailed by Yousef to New York City newspapers explained that the attack was in response to U.S. support for Israel and its interventionist policies. Nevertheless, the scope of U.S. activities continued to expand through the mid-1990s. The United States, for example, supported forces in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea that were hostile to Sudan, where Osama bin Laden had temporarily moved his operations. When U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were struck with terrorist bombings in 1998, President Clinton attempted immediate retaliatory cruise missile strikes on bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. U.S. officials claimed bin Laden had been using it to build chemical weapons. Sudanese authorities denied that and demanded an apology. In the years that followed the September 11 attacks, it became commonplace in American parlance to say that “9/11 changed everything.” Although the statement was in some sense hyperbolic, 9/11 did bring immediate, enduring impacts on both the immediate priorities of U.S. foreign policy and on American society. On September 14, President George W. Bush stood on a pile of smoking WTC rubble and declared, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” “USA! USA! USA!” came the return chant from a viscerally patriotic crowd of New Yorkers and first responders from around the nation. When Afghanistan’s Taliban government refused to extradite Osama bin Laden, the United States and NATO launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan, whose mission was to capture or kill bin Laden and his top leadership, drive the Taliban from power, and render Afghanistan no longer a safe haven for Al Qaeda. Although Bush declared he would get bin Laden “DEAD OR ALIVE,” it was nearly 10 years before he was taken—dead, as it turned out—in neighboring Pakistan, where he and many followers had fled shortly after the U.S.-NATO operation began. Seemingly in tune with President Bush’s determination to “end tyranny in our world” through a global “War on Terror,” Congress passed a series of laws that strengthened and enlarged the U.S. national security establishment. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security—the largest expansion and reorganization of national defense since the 1947 National Security Act—led the list of legislatively authorized efforts that steeled the American people for seemingly interminable war. With relatively little resistance, Americans accepted an intensified national security state of increased surveillance of private communications and financial transactions. Few citizens, however, save high-level intelligence officers, had any idea of the true extent of surveillance operations for another decade. Incorporation of homeland into the American national defense vocabulary and the widespread adoption of the term in the culture constituted a kind of linguistic embrace of the United States as a global imperium. Also both new and familiar was the policy of preemptive war, stated in the Bush administration’s “National Security Strategy of the United States” of September 2002. The document formally articulated what a conservative columnist labeled the “Bush Doctrine,” a more muscular, and if necessary unilateral, use of military power to achieve a level of global dominance beyond the challenge of any nation. At the

heart of the doctrine was the unprecedented declaration that the United States would launch a preemptive military strike against “emerging threats before they are fully formed”—a threat already made real in Iraq. The document argued that there was for all nations in the world “a single, sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise” (Bush, “National Security”). The months prior to 9/11 had demonstrated the Bush administration’s unilateralism, as it formally withdrew the United States from a number of international treaties and conventions, including participation in the International Criminal Court. Photographic evidence of sadistic, abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military guards at the Abu Ghraib, Iraq, prison did not surprise many close observers of the War on Terror. Though treated by officials as the aberrant behavior of a few badly trained and supervised soldiers, the incidents appeared consonant with the Bush administration’s stated willingness to utilize the techniques of torture to extract information from Al Qaeda “noncombatants” captured in Afghanistan and being held at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo, Cuba, and at CIA “Black Site” prisons secretly located in countries from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Justice Department lawyers justified waterboarding and other practices that had long been defined as torture in international law as necessary “enhanced interrogation techniques” to defend American lives and national security. In late 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a summary of a classified report revealing that the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program from 2001 to 2006 was far more brutal and extensively applied than the agency had acknowledged. The report describes the abuses to which detainees were subjected, including waterboarding, rectal rehydration, feeding and abusive examinations, mock executions, and extended containment in coffin-sized boxes. Although the U.S. military had historically engaged in torture before, this was the first time that such practices became official U.S. policy. The Bush administration maintained that the 9/11 attacks necessitated that the United States utilize what it legally redefined as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” While most Americans supported the Bush administration, human rights organizations condemned the program as gross violations of the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention Against Torture to which the United States had long been a signatory, as well as the nation’s own commitment to universal human rights. When Barack Obama (1961–) ran for president in 2008, he pledged to restore the image of the United States internationally as a nation committed to the rule of law. Obama denounced the use of torture and upon becoming president outlawed its use. At the same time, candidate Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo stalled, and he refused calls to hold accountable those responsible for ordering, carrying out, or allegedly lying about the use of torture. Further, though he presided over the end of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama recommitted forces to Iraq in 2014. And despite the fact that the war in Afghanistan ended officially at the end of 2014 after more than $1 trillion spent and 2,224 American deaths, 10,000 soldiers remained in support of an Afghan army fighting a tenacious insurgency from Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. Many questions remained about both what had been achieved by the longest conflict in U.S. history, as well as whether the war is truly over for the United States. Recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Obama has been criticized for dramatically expanding the use of unmanned aerial drone flights that target terrorists and terror training camps and result in no U.S. casualties. The CIA’s drone warfare program has expanded from Iraq and Afghanistan into Yemen, Somalia, and especially Pakistan. Although more precise than conventional bombs, drone strikes, remotecontrolled by pilots in the United States, have taken a civilian toll. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 500 innocent civilians have died in Pakistan, where the high court has called the use of drones a human rights war crime.

The Obama administration has presided over a number of other episodes demonstrating the continued U.S. attempt to imperially manage other nations’ affairs. For example, in Latin America, following the Bush administration’s failed attempt to support a 2002 coup d’etat to unseat Hugo Chávez as Venezuela’s president, Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, in 2009 refused to denounce the successful coup of Honduras’s popularly elected Manuel Zelaya who had aligned himself with socialist Venezuela. U.S. officials then tried to manipulate the Organization of American States (OAS) into legitimizing the new military regime. That incident helped prompt the formation of the new hemispheric organization, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, to effectively supplant the OAS, long viewed as heavily U.S.-influenced. In terms of U.S.-Russian relations, Obama has continued to support NATO’s expansion to the east in order to advance America’s strategic interests. That decision has worsened U.S.-Russian relations and greatly heightened Russian sensitivity to U.S. and European Union efforts to move Ukraine into the Western orbit of neoliberal capitalism. It had long been the policy of both Democratic and Republican U.S. administrations since the end of the Cold War to make certain that Ukraine did not align itself with Russia again. Further, American military bases had been established throughout Central Asia on Russia’s border. Amid the Ukraine crisis in spring 2014, provoked by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s annexation and military fortification of Crimea, President Obama sent a guided missile destroyer to the Black Sea and deployed hundreds of U.S. paratroopers to nearby Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. Midway into the second decade of continuous post-9/11 warfare, most Americans greeted news of drone strikes and the redeployment of soldiers to Iraq with indifference. And yet many seemed stunned in 2014 at the sight of militarized police forces facing down their fellow citizens with armored vehicles and military weaponry. Some critics wondered whether the deployment of weapons of war to quell social discord at home was a sign of an imploding empire. Here, ultimately, was the larger paradox: the citizenry of the nation that had fought two long and costly wars, that was sending drones to attack people in several nations on two continents, spending (including the cumulative costs of past wars) more money on military defense than every nation on earth combined, selling more weapons and military hardware than any nation in the world, and stationing military personnel on more than 600 bases and installations in nearly 150 countries was a citizenry that had almost no experience with, nor memory of real war. Military combat appeared on a cinematic big screen that largely glamorized the new techno-combat of the U.S. military, and through high-tech video games. Even as retired generals on cable news channels analyzed the next military confrontation, athletic events and the culture at large became saturated with the veneration of soldiers and veterans and America’s national identity came to be defined increasingly by its global military prowess. Meanwhile, Americans lived in a surreal remove from the costs and consequences of both their immense global empire or the vast national security state that had emerged in the “homeland.” Meanwhile, the nation had made little progress on what the Pentagon described as the greatest national security threat facing the nation: climate change. The urgent need to transform the nation’s energy, transportation, and housing systems in ways that created a sustainable and more secure future was effectively ignored during the Bush era; the Obama administration, while maintaining a largely militarized energy strategy abroad, took a number of increasingly aggressive executive actions to address the challenge. “What a deformed monster is a standing army in a free nation,” American patriot and Revolutionary War hero Josiah Quincy declared in 1774. The same country formed from the crucible of war against imperial domination is now a global empire immersed in seemingly endless conflict.

Further Reading Bush, George H. W. “Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council.” March 1, 1991. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=19351. Accessed December 26, 2014. George W. Bush Presidential Administration. “The National Security Strategy of the United States.” September 17, 2002. http://nssarchive.us/?page_id=32. Accessed January 1, 2015.

Abu Ghraib Abu Ghraib, a campus-like penal colony located roughly 20 miles from Baghdad, Iraq, became an international issue soon after the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 when numerous reports of abuse against Iraqi prisoners by members of the U.S. military surfaced. Investigative reporting uncovered numerous human rights violations of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, reports of rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners. Rumors and reports of prisoner abuse, torture, and war crimes committed by Americans were prevalent throughout 2003. In June of that year, Amnesty International had called for an independent investigation of Abu Ghraib, then serving as an American detention center, criticizing the U.S. military for subjecting Iraqi prisoners to inhumane conditions. Ironically, the facility had decades-old Western involvement, as British engineers used American blueprints to construct the correctional facility in the 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s, inmates held at Abu Ghraib, primarily political prisoners under the Saddam Hussein regime, were subjected to various forms of abuse. Beatings, hangings, castration, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, and supposed mass executions were commonly used techniques against inmates. In October 2002, Saddam Hussein ordered all prisoners held at Abu Ghraib to be released in response to U.S. president George W. Bush’s threat to invade Iraq. Upon ousting the Hussein regime, the United States government remodeled certain aspects of the facility but chose to continue utilizing the prison, despite the awful reputation of Abu Ghraib. The alternative option would have been to wait for the construction of a brand-new facility, which would have taken two years to build. The United States chose not to wait. A banner reading “America is the friend of all Iraqi people” was placed in the spot where a large portrait of Saddam Hussein formerly hung. American troops began transporting large numbers of Iraqi prisoners to Abu Ghraib, which came to serve as a detention facility for the U.S.-led coalition occupying Iraq, eventually housing more than 5,000 prisoners. Throughout 2003, rumors and reports of prisoner abuse increased. In November, the Associated Press published a lengthy report detailing inhumane treatment, beatings, and deaths at Abu Ghraib based on interviews with released detainees. The article gained little attention. However, after Sergeant Joseph Darby, a U.S. military police officer, came forward and alerted the military command to cases of prisoner abuse in early 2004, the U.S. military acknowledged the alleged abuse and informed the media that an official investigation had begun. The internal criminal investigation conducted by U.S. Army major general Antonio Taguba was completed in February 2004 and became known as the Taguba Report. On April 28, 2004, America’s CBS broadcast a story about the abuse on the television show 60 Minutes II, after delaying the segment for two weeks at the request of the Department of Defense. The report featured interviews with high-ranking members of coalition operations in Iraq, as well as soldiers who participated in the abuse of prisoners. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour M. Hersh, who had first exposed the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, discussed the abuses in detail in a May 2004 article in The New Yorker. Following the publication, The New Yorker posted a Hersh-authored report to its website, which included a number of digital photographs of the torture by U.S. military prison guards.

The 53-page “Secret” Taguba Report concluded that U.S. soldiers had committed “egregious acts and grave breaches of international law” at Abu Ghraib (Taguba, 50). The report cited numerous examples of abuse against inmates, including punching, kicking, and jumping on detainees; photographing and videotaping naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions and photographing them; electric torture by positioning a naked detainee on an MRE (Meals, Ready-to-Eat) box, with a sandbag over his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and genitalia; the rape of a female detainee committed by a military police guard; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate while being photographed and/or videotaped; forcing detainees to remain naked for several days at a time; arranging naked detainees into a pile and then soldiers jumping on them; posing with deceased detainees while smiling and/or giving a “thumbs-up” sign; breaking chemical lights and pouring phosphoric liquid on detainees; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light; and other forms of physical, psychological, or sexual abuse. The report also cited numerous organizational and leadership failures at Abu Ghraib. As a result of the scandal, the Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty, and seven were charged and convicted of dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault, and battery; sentenced to federal prison time; and dishonorably discharged from service. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney publicly claimed that the acts committed at Abu Ghraib were in no way indicative of normal or acceptable practices in the U.S. Army. However, in June 2004, the Washington Post obtained a memo, dated August 2002, that showed that the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing Al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad “may be justified” and that international laws against torture “may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations” conducted in Bush’s War on Terror (Priest and Smith, A-1). Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that as a result of the scandal he made two offers to President Bush to resign and both were declined. In July 2004, a former detainee alleged that U.S. Army brigade general Janis L. Karpinski, commanding officer at the prison, witnessed abuses at Abu Ghraib, causing the media to question whether the abuse committed was, as American officials claimed, just a case of a “few bad apples.” Karpinski was later removed from command of all Iraqi prisons. The reaction from the U.S. administration characterizes the Abu Ghraib scandal as an isolated incident and not reflective of American actions abroad. This view is widely disputed in the international community, notably in Arab countries, but also by international organizations. Ellen Eckert-Neureiter See also: Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011); My Lai Massacre

Further Reading “Abuse at Abu Ghraib.” 60 Minutes II. Columbia Broadcasting System, April 28, 2004. Hersh, Seymour M. “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” New Yorker, May 10, 2004, 42–47. Priest, Dana, and R. Jeffrey Smith. “Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture; Justice Dept. Gave Advice in 2002.” Washington Post, June 8, 2004, A-1. Taguba, Antonio. The Taguba Report: Article 15–6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade. New York: Cosimo, 2004.

Afghanistan (1990–2014) The withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1989 and the toppling of the Communist Najibullah’s government in 1992 failed to end the decades-long conflicts in Afghanistan. Rather, a devastating civil war against the Northern Alliance gave rise to the Taliban movement that came to control two-thirds of the country by

1997. That same year, both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia recognized the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan, which was implementing a strict version of sharia law. Many Western human rights organizations expressed concerns over the diminishing human rights record, particularly with regard to the condition of women, who were banned from the workplace. However, a number of experts also believe that the Taliban actually secured popularity by ending the cycle of civil war and by providing a sense of security and order to the war-ridden society. In 1998, when terrorist bombings struck U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States launched missile strikes at suspected Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, the emir or commander of Al Qaeda, had returned to Afghanistan to seek refuge two years earlier, befriended the Taliban regime, and expanded his terrorist network. In 1999, the United Nations imposed an embargo and financial sanctions to force the Taliban regime to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial. On September 9, 2001, Ahmad Shah Masood, leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance resistance force, was assassinated. Two days later came the horrific attacks on the United States at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Immediately, Osama bin Laden was identified as the prime suspect. The United States demanded that Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban government, surrender bin Laden. When he refused, the U.S. military on October 7 launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” against the regime. In the first days of the bombing, reports surfaced that the Taliban had offered to surrender bin Laden to a third-party nation, demanding also that the United States provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt in the attacks. Bush administration officials dismissed the offer out of hand and the military campaign continued. In less than three months, the Taliban regime collapsed. On December 20, 2001, the UN authorized the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to provide military security to the Afghans. The stage had now been set for a protracted U.S. and NATO war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In March 2002 U.S. troops launched “Operation Anaconda” to clear Taliban and Al Qaeda forces from areas near eastern Afghanistan, but the emir bin Laden was still on the loose.

A U.S. Marine Corps corporal guards a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter in preparation for a mission in support of Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, March 2002. At this moment the United States was less than six months into what would become the longest military engagement in its history. (U.S. Department of Defense)

In accordance with a deal brokered in December 2001 in Bonn, Germany, by U.S., European, and Afghan leaders, the Grand Council or Loya Jirga elected a Pashtun leader, Hamid Karzai, to a two-year presidential term as interim head of state in June 2002, later adopting a new constitution allowing a strong

presidency. In the presidential elections of October–November 2004, Hamid Karzai won and in September 2005, Afghanistan witnessed the first parliamentary elections in more than 30 years. While these were important steps in bringing back political stability in Afghanistan, the outcome proved less than satisfactory. Allegations of corruption, scandalous abuses of power, and overall poor governance surfaced and the security situation faced repeated setbacks. By 2009, when the second presidential election was held, the Taliban forces reemerged amid a severely compromised security climate. Although Hamid Karzai was sworn in for a second term as president, it became clear that newly elected U.S. president Barack Obama was less enthusiastic about him than the previous administration of George W. Bush. Furthermore, along with holdover Taliban, the more formidable Hezb-e Islami, led by the veteran anti-Western politician Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the “Haqqani network” related to former mujahideen commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Serajuddin were responsible for the rise of renewed insurgency and terrorist attacks against the Karzai government and the occupied forces. All of these groups were allegedly receiving support from Pakistani intelligence agencies, and the United States became increasingly skeptical about Pakistan’s commitment toward the antiterror coalition they had put together after 9/11. However, it is now also widely accepted that the United States was also less keen about deepening its commitment, pushing instead for NATO and non-NATO allies to take more responsibility in Afghanistan. After almost 13 years of fighting that cost billions of dollars and the death of about 20,000 Afghan civilians, the U.S. announcement of opening up negotiations with the Taliban in 2013 demonstrated for many the complications of the consequences of modern-day military invasions. In September 2014, following a two-month audit of disputed election results, Ashraf Ghani was sworn in as the new president and by the end of that year, the United States, United Kingdom, and NATO officially ended their combat mission. However, in accordance with the strategic partnership agreement of 2012, the U.S. support for Afghanistan will continue for 10 years after this withdrawal. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Bin Laden, Osama; Central Asia; Pakistan; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Gall, Carlotta. The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Rashid, Ahmed. Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

Al Qaeda Al Qaeda is a terrorist network with global reach, widely recognized for its alleged involvement in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. In 2014 the emir or commander of Al Qaeda was Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician. He attained this position after the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Special Forces on May 1, 2011, at a compound near Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden was Al Qaeda’s first commander and senior operations chief. Aside from the 9/11 assault, major Al Qaeda terror campaigns include the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; the 1998 suicide bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; the suicide attack in 2000 on an American warship, the USS Cole, anchored in Aden, Yemen; the Bali bombings of 2002 in

Indonesia; the 2004 Madrid train bombings; and the 2005 London bombings. Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal is to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate throughout the Muslim world. The Arabic word al Qaeda denotes a base, center, or foundation. Moreover, the word also implies principle, rule, method, guide, or pattern. It has been suggested that in 1987, Abdullah Azzam, an early spiritual mentor of bin Laden, used this word (al-qaeda al-sulbah) in one of his writings to elucidate the future role of the most loyal and devoted militants in a post-Afghan-Soviet War world. In 1988, after a series of meetings, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and 14 other associates founded Al Qaeda in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. The founders’ aim was to unite disparate militant groups fighting in Afghanistan. From its inception Al Qaeda preferred a flexible and nonhierarchical approach regarding its composition and leadership. In late 1989, Abdullah Azzam was assassinated in a mysterious bomb blast and bin Laden went back to Saudi Arabia. In August 1990, when Iraq annexed Kuwait, bin Laden offered to raise an army of mujahideen to fight the “secular” Saddam. The Saudi royal family declined his proposition and sought U.S. military support instead. By January 1991, about 300,000 foreign troops were stationed on Saudi territory. Bin Laden accused the Americans of “desecrating holy Arab soil” and also criticized senior clerics, including the Saudi grand mufti Abdul Aziz bin Baz, for approving the decision. Bin Laden was placed under house arrest but soon managed to escape Saudi Arabia, reaching the Sudanese capital of Khartoum where the prominent Islamist ideologue Hassan Turabi had recently taken power. Bin Laden remained in Sudan until 1996 and expanded the Al Qaeda network in Africa. In April 1994, the Saudi authority revoked bin Laden’s citizenship and in 1996, the Sudanese authority expelled its notorious guest under U.S. pressure. Bin Laden then moved to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where he accepted an offer of protection from three Afghan warlords who were in fact known as anti-Taliban. Over the next five years, the Al Qaeda network became more sophisticated and attracted highly experienced militants and extremist groups from throughout the Muslim world. In February 1998, bin Laden announced an alliance between Al Qaeda and four other groups from Bangladesh, Egypt, and Pakistan called “The World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders” and issued the infamous fatwa that called on all Muslims to kill U.S. citizens—civilian or military—and their allies everywhere. After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan weakened the core base of Al Qaeda and by the end of 2002, a third of its top leadership had been either assassinated or captured. However, recent developments suggest that Al Qaeda has evolved over the years and adapted to the new strategic environment. The proliferation of groups declaring affiliation with Al Qaeda, the Benghazi attack, and renewed threats against the United States and its allies across the broader Middle East imply that the terror network is much more resilient than before. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have become quite successful in expanding their operational capabilities by developing relationships with local militant Islamist groups. Furthermore, the political chaos that followed the “Arab Spring” helped these groups to gain new supporters, build stronger networks, and begin jihadist operations in fresh arenas. Although many experts deemed the death of Osama bin Laden a death blow to Al Qaeda, the Salafi-jihadist ideology of this terror network, cleverly propagated through online media, continues to inspire radical Islamists all around the Muslim world, and after more than a decade of the so-called “War on Terror,” Al Qaeda remains a formidable force. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990– 1991); September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Burke, Jason. Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Gerges, Fawaz A. The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Balkans, U.S. Interests and Intervention in The Balkans region of Europe has long been both a puzzle and problem for European stability. Its complexity in terms of ethnic rivalries compelled the first German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to suggest that a fence be placed around it. The same ethnic tensions were among the chief causes of the First World War. Various attempts were made to create composite entities including the various complex ethnic groups that would provide much-needed stability to this south-central corner of Europe. Most notably, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, encompassing the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, was established after the war in 1918. The state proved vital for providing a protective buffer against both Serbian and Croat claims to Bosnia while diminishing Albanian-Slav rivalry in Macedonia and Kosovo. U.S. policy on this seemed at odds—it was, after all, the policy of President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) that self-determination be acknowledged as an inherent right of nationalities. Yugoslavia ceased to exist with the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941. In the aftermath of World War II, a socialist state under the Communist Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) emerged. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was a complex, juggled entity that involved colonization, settlement, and redistribution. Nationalisms were quelled and brought to order. A common southern Slav sentiment under a Socialist direction was encouraged. The entity was seen by U.S. strategists as a useful buffer against Soviet designs in Europe. The 1990s brought with it revived tensions. Nationalist elements within the federation asserted themselves in a post–Cold War climate. The ties that had bound the entity together under the SFRY began to rupture. Western powers took the lead, encouraging nationalities within the federation to secede, citing the right to self-determination. Slovenia was first, then Croatia, supported by America’s ally Germany. By the time Bosnia-Herzegovina followed, U.S. officials had staked out a clear position, encouraging its Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to declare independence on April 5, 1992. The outcome of those decisions proved bloody. Bosnian Serbs retaliated, refusing to recognize the decision. Massacres and retributions followed, enraging public opinion in the United States. Sanctions, initiated through the United Nations Security Council, were backed and implemented. But Washington persisted in avoiding a military solution, driven partly by the disastrous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia. Efforts to solve the Bosnian conflict were made in 1993 with the peace proposal termed the Vance Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) brokered by Lord David Owen and Cyrus Vance. In the main, the Bosnian Croats, Croatia’s Franco Tudjman, and Serbia’s Milosevic were supportive. The United States, the Bosnian Serbs, and the Bosnian Muslims were not—the division of the region into 10 cantons would undermine goals of a unified state. The proposed use of ground troops to police the plan, of which roughly half would be staffed by the United States, made it unattractive to Washington. U.S. efforts met resistance by what has been termed “conservative pessimism,” a suspicion that reform was possible and nationalist change conceivable in the Balkans. The Clinton administration pushed for lifting the arms embargo while suggesting the use of strategic bombing in a “lift and strike” policy. British politicians were not moved. The disagreements between traditional allies on European security could not have been greater.

The Markale incident of February 5, 1994, which saw bombings of Sarajevo’s marketplace and the deaths of 68 people, compelled the United States to call an emergency NATO meeting. Although the source of the attack was disputed, blame fell on the besieging Bosnian Serbs. Tension was defused, largely by Russian efforts, and Serbian and Bosnian government forces began handing in weapons. During the hiatus, U.S. and German officials pressed Tudjman and Izetbegovic to form a federation. The Federation Agreement paved the way for the Dayton Accords 18 months later that brought the effective partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A convoy of NATO soldiers drives through the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during a patrol, October 1, 1997. United States–led military intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was justified on the grounds of preventing further gross violations of human rights and the spread of a costly war. The deployment of U.S. military force overlapped well with the protection of American interests in the region. (AP Photo/Hidajet Delic)

U.S. policy, spearheaded by Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, became one of persuasion through division. It proceeded to divide the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic, and Yugoslavia’s President Milosevic. The deal, dubbed the FrasureMilosevic plan, centered on sanctions. It was ultimately rejected in Washington, and reenergized conflict followed. The Bosnian government sought to break out of Sarajevo. Bosnian Serbs under General Ratko Mladic attacked the safe Muslim haven of Srebrenica, perpetrating the most notorious massacre of the war—8,000 unarmed Muslim men on July 11, 1995. In May, the Croatians commenced removing more than 150,000 Serbs from within Croatian territory. The displacement was approved by the Clinton administration. U.S. policy in the region had come full circle. While Milosevic wished to reach a settlement, Mladic and Karadzic’s recalcitrance brought continued fighting. Another mortar strike on Markele in Sarajevo on August 28, 1995, saw the launch of 13 Tomahawk cruise missiles on Bosnian Serb positions in Banja Luka. Serb resistance in Bosnia collapsed. On November 21, 1995, the Dayton Agreement was signed. The conflict did not end there. The next area of secessionist conflict was the contentious Kosovo area, spiritual region for Serbian identity though heavily populated by Albanians. In 1999, the Clinton administration conducted, with NATO allies, a military intervention against Serbian targets on the pretext of stopping acts of ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces against Kosovar residents. The bombings by NATO started on March 24, 1999, and lasted for 78 days: 2,300 missiles and 14,000 bombs were used on as many as 990 targets across Serbia, killing more than 2,000 civilians and displacing a million people. The

geopolitical end result was the creation of the state of Kosovo—administered by the United Nations until 2008—along with the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro. Clinton defended the action by noting U.S. strategic interests in keeping Europe secure from a broadened conflict. In pursuing this policy, the United States effectively led the application of an awkward doctrine of humanitarian military intervention. It was thereby encouraged as a sui generis case, a new norm in response to massive violations of human rights on the ground. Its vagueness proved to be its strength, enabling U.S. power to be projected on the premise of protecting rights. Critics of the entire U.S.-led NATO intervention argue that the breakup of the former Yugoslavia is a classic case of what Naomi Klein calls “Shock Doctrine”: the cynical exploitation of an internal national crisis to compel states or regions to accept neoliberal capitalist policies. In the case of the Balkans, U.S.NATO military intervention, say critics, came amid heightening ethnic tensions and economic chaos that had emerged in the early 1990s. The war and subsequent breakup of the former Yugoslavia compelled the new states to adopt certain economic measures such as the loss of state-provided services and the privatization of certain sectors of the economy by transnational corporations. In addition, amid the NATO intervention, the U.S. military established Camp Bondsteel in southern Kosovo to house U.S. peacekeeping forces. The largest new U.S. military base constructed anywhere in the world since the Vietnam War, Bondsteel is situated close to strategically important energy pipelines, including the TransBalkan oil line that was built by major U.S. contractors. Binoy Kampmark See also: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Post–Cold War Expansion of

Further Reading Gibbs, David N. First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2012. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2012.

Bin Laden, Osama (1957–2011) Osama bin Laden, the first commander of the Al Qaeda terror network, was born March 10, 1957, to a wealthy Yemeni father and a Syrian mother. He was the 17th of the 54 children of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. Osama’s father had a close relationship with the royal Saud family that won him lucrative contracts to build palaces in Riyadh. The family firm, the Saudi Binladen Group, also reconstructed Islam’s holiest mosque in Mecca. When Osama was 11 years old, his father was killed in a helicopter crash. Osama was known as being polite and pious from an early age. In 1974, he married the 14-year-old Najwa Ghanem, his mother’s niece. He would later marry three more times. Osama had 19 children in total. He attended the business management school at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, but eventually graduated in civil engineering and spent some time in his father’s company. While he was in Jeddah, Osama was taught by Mohammad Qutb, the younger brother of Sayyid Qutb, a key ideologue of modern Islamism. His other mentor, Abdullah Azzam, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. During his university days, Osama closely observed the ideological struggles between the secularists and the Islamists in the universities across the Arab world. When he graduated in 1979, three gigantic events greatly influenced bin Laden’s political thinking. The Iranian revolution, the siege of the holiest mosque in

Mecca, and finally, the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union set the stage for Osama’s future activism. Osama went to Afghanistan in early 1981 to join the mujahideen’s war against the Soviets. However, his military involvement was quite negligible and, during the first half of the 1980s, he mainly served as a fundraiser and ran charities that cared for refugees or wounded Afghan soldiers. He used his specialized knowledge and royal money to build roads, bunkers, and encampments for the jihadis. He also set up an office with his mentor, Azzam, in Peshawar called Makhtab al Khadamat or Services Bureau to provide logistics to the volunteers coming from the Arab world. He maintained close contacts with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) who were responsible for the disbursement of Saudi and American money to the seven mujahideen groups as well as for providing training to the Afghan militants. By 1987, bin Laden had established himself as a key broker between the competing Afghan and Arab factions within the mujahideen. During this period, a former Egyptian doctor and militant, Ayman al Zawahiri, joined Osama in Afghanistan. In August 1988, after a series of meetings, Osama, along with Zawahiri and 14 other associates, set up Al Qaeda in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Their aim was to mobilize and radicalize Muslims through violent actions that would eventually provoke mass uprisings in support of the creation of a caliphate throughout the Muslim world. In 1989, after the mysterious death of Azzam in a bomb blast, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia. He proposed that the Saudi royal family authorize him to lead a jihad against the regime of Aden, Yemen—the only Communist government in the Arab world, one that Saudi Arabia had been trying to undermine for a long time. The Saudi leadership, however, warned bin Laden to stay out. Later, in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, he again proposed to Saudi officials that he would raise an Islamic army to defend the kingdom from the “godless” Saddam. The Saudi regime again dismissed his idea and sought U.S. military help instead. By 1991, about 300,000 foreign troops were stationed in the “Holy Land” of Saudi Arabia. Osama was furious and criticized the Saudi authorities along with the senior clerics for endorsing the decision. He later fled to Sudan where a leading Islamist ideologue, Hassan Turabi, had recently taken power. But under U.S. pressure in 1996 the Sudanese government expelled him. Two years earlier, in 1994, the Saudi authority also had stripped his citizenship. Bin Laden became a severe critic of the Saudi royal family, thereafter establishing the “Advice and Reform Committee” in London, which functioned as the nerve center for anti-Saud propaganda. In May 1996, Osama went to a new sanctuary in Afghanistan and expanded the Al Qaeda network. Two years later, he was appointed emir or commander by the Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Council) of Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is alleged to have played a central role in planning the 9/11 attacks on the United States. After years of chase, he was killed on May 1, 2011, at the age of 54 by the U.S. Special Operations Forces in a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Saudi Arabia; September 11, 2001 (9/11); Somalia

Further Reading Coll, Steve. The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Scheuer, Michael. Osama Bin Laden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Bolton, John (1948–)

John R. Bolton is an American lawyer, diplomat, and outspoken conservative freelance political analyst who has served several Republican administrations in various capacities. Though he disavows the label “neoconservative,” Bolton was one of a number of influential conservative thinkers who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to advocate for a more muscular, unilateralist U.S. foreign and military policy that is generally described as neoconservative, whose ideas came to fruition in the administration of George W. Bush in 2001. He was brought up in Yale Heights, Maryland, and attended McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland. From his early school days, Bolton was politically active in conservative causes. He graduated from Yale University in 1970 and went on to receive his JD. During his Yale days he developed a close association with the future conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Unlike many of his classmates, he stood in support of the U.S. war in Vietnam. John Bolton began his legal career with Covington & Burling and has been associated off and on with a number of powerful law firms for the past four decades. He served in the Justice Department during the second term of the Reagan administration and in the State Department’s Bureau for International Organization Affairs in the George H. W. Bush administration, where among other initiatives he spearheaded the effort to rescind the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. By the late 1990s Bolton was working as a senior vice president for public policy research at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. More significantly, Bolton became associated with a number of key initiatives of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), including an unsuccessful PNAC effort advocating for regime change in Iraq late in the Clinton administration. During the George W. Bush administration, Bolton served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international affairs, where he worked to successfully blunt American participation in the International Criminal Court, scuttled an international effort to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and orchestrated the resignation of the widely supported head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, José Bustani. All three measures, Bolton argued, threatened to undermine American sovereignty and national security interests, but his efforts drew widespread condemnation. He was among the neoconservative members of the Bush administration who advocated for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Like his colleagues, Bolton was later accused by critics of exaggerating and even falsifying the evidence alleging that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction that threatened the United States—the central argument that galvanized the nation’s support for the invasion. Despite the discrediting of Bolton’s (and others’) declaration on that issue, and despite the fact that his abrasive manner and repeated statements condemning the United Nations had alarmed many in the international community, Bolton on August 1, 2005, was given a recess appointment by President Bush to serve as UN ambassador. Bolton served in that position until December 2006, after which time he left government service and began to criticize the Bush administration for having, according to Bolton, abandoned many of its original positions that aimed at advancing unchallengeable and unequalled American military supremacy, what is generally referred to as the Bush Doctrine. Aparna Singh Ram Manohar Lohiya See also: Bush Doctrine; Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011)

Further Reading Bolton, John. Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations. New York: Simon and Schuster, Threshold, 2007.

Dalder, Ivo H., and James Lindsay. America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. New York: Wiley and Sons, 2003.

Bush Doctrine The “Bush Doctrine” refers to the global principles and policies of the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush. Though it consisted of various ideas and approaches, the Bush Doctrine, broadly understood, was the response of a new, brash school of Republican and conservative U.S. foreign policy elites to one major global reality: America’s status as the sole global superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. Though its proponents and critics vehemently disagreed on its merits and achievements, the Bush Doctrine centered on the assertive belief in, and use of, American power as a positive economic, political, and military force throughout the world. These beliefs and practices began emerging even before the September 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attack on the World Trade Center that provoked the Bush Doctrine’s creation as government policy. In June 2001, prominent conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer coined the term “Bush Doctrine.” In a widely read article in Weekly Standard magazine, Krauthammer noted that the newly inaugurated Bush administration’s rejection of the Kyoto environmental accords on greenhouse gases, its promotion of antiballistic missile defense, and other initiatives signaled a “Bush Doctrine” that broke radically with recent U.S. policies. The rationale and pattern of the administration’s actions, Krauthammer and others observed, viewed its Democratic and Republican predecessors as overly driven by considerations of public image, global cooperation, socioeconomic development, and, above all, mistrust of U.S. global military and political power in the aftermath of perceived U.S. failures such as the Vietnam War. “[O]verwhelming American power is good not just for the United States but for the world,” Krauthammer summarized administration sentiment driving such change in mid-2001. “The Bush administration is the first administration of the post–Cold War era to share that premise and act accordingly” (Krauthammer, 25). Such concerns, Bush Doctrine proponents claimed, hindered the very goals of spreading democracy and development sought by the United States and other nations. In the eyes of Bush and his chief advisors in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon, multilateralism, environmentalism, arms control, and other established tenets of international relations were desirable but not inviolable goals. In an age of unprecedented U.S. global influence, reduced superpower tensions between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and a host of new, unpredictable threats from terrorists and authoritarian regimes, U.S. global policies needed drastic reform to meet these new threats and opportunities. On September 11, 2001, three U.S. civilian airplanes hijacked by terrorists from the militant Islamic group Al Qaeda flew into downtown New York City’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane, also intended for Washington, D.C., crashed in a field in southwest Pennsylvania. Better known as “9/11,” it was the most disastrous terrorist incident on U.S. territory. Though known deaths numbered about 3,000, estimates of total civilian and rescue worker deaths in the ensuing years ran as high as 50,000. The Pentagon’s west wing and New York’s landmark 110-floor Twin Towers were destroyed or incapacitated. In response to 9/11 the Bush administration formulated a detailed, wide-ranging approach to U.S. national security policy—publicly released in a 2002 statement titled The National Security Strategy of the United States of America—that elevated the administration’s previous tendencies into a full-scale government program.

PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative, Washington, D.C.–based think tank that existed from 1997 to 2006. With intellectual roots in the presidency of George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), the Project for the New American Century argued for an unprecedented level of U.S. military buildup and international military dominance in the post– Cold War era. From its inception, the PNAC was keenly focused on regime change in Iraq, arguing in a letter to President Bill Clinton in 1998 for “regime change” and the removal of Saddam Hussein. Upon the disputed election of George W. Bush in 2000, many among its leadership assumed positions in the administration and argued forcefully, and ultimately successfully, for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The PNAC’s leadership had bitterly resented having let Saddam Hussein survive at the end of the first Gulf War, and asserted through the news media in the late 1990s that Saddam Hussein represented an increasingly grave threat to U.S. interests. PNAC officials were instrumental in the drafting of the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act, a call for regime change in Iraq, and then called for President Clinton to take military action. Despite jointly prosecuting with Great Britain the air war over Iraq, an enforcement of “no-fly zones,” and supporting a brutally punishing sanctions regime against Iraq, Clinton resisted PNAC appeals for a U.S. invasion. The PNAC argued that in a more dangerous post–Cold War world, new threats coming from “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue” states required the United States to deemphasize its historic commitment to the United Nations and reliance on multilateral and international agreements in order to secure its interests. In September 2000, it published Rebuilding America’s Defenses, a blueprint for global U.S. militarily enforced hegemony. Many of the ideas in the document were woven into the George W. Bush Doctrine.

In a 21st century of transnational terrorist networks like Al Qaeda, lawless “rogue” states that aided them, and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) more accessible and deliverable than in the past, The National Security Strategy argued, the United States and its allies had to adopt an innovative, assertive global campaign to ensure their collective security. This included “counterproliferation” (meaning, beyond traditional “nonproliferation,” disarmament through forcible military, not diplomatic, means); preemptive strikes on “rogue” state or nonstate terrorist actors; stronger foreign intelligence and homeland defense; new antiterror military technology (such as “bunker buster” bombs capable of penetrating hardened or deep underground targets); and greater willingness to deploy U.S. power without complete international sanction. Administration planners emphasized a range of strategies aimed at confronting and defeating terrorists and “rogue” states seemingly bent on destroying not only the United States, but Westernized societies across the world. “The characteristics we most cherish—our freedom, our cities, our systems of movement, and modern life,” The National Security Strategy concluded, “are vulnerable to terrorism … long after we bring to justice those responsible for the September 11 attacks. As time passes, individuals may gain access to means of destruction that until now could be wielded only by armies.… This is a new condition of life. We will adjust to it and thrive—in spite of it” (National Security Strategy, 31). From 2002 to 2008, the Bush Doctrine shaped many major global developments. These included the invasion and occupation of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (which sheltered Al Qaeda’s command); the 2003–2008 invasion and occupation of Iraq; and the rise of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security and congressional Patriot Act strengthening domestic national security laws and institutions. Above all, the Bush administration adopted, in both heightened rhetoric and concrete military and diplomatic measures, an emboldened, assertive global military posture aimed at terrorism and “rogue” states across the globe. In 2003, the United States invaded and began a controversial, eight-year occupation of Iraq. The invasion was justified on the Bush administration’s claims that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, in alleged violation of its nuclear disarmament agreement with the United Nations, was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program. After renewed but inconclusive UN inspections of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, the Bush administration and a global “coalition of the willing”—

including 48 nations, three of which provided invasion forces—invaded Iraq and toppled the Hussein regime. Done without UN sanction and in the face of widespread international opposition, unable to find the alleged WMDs, based on faulty U.S. intelligence, and resulting in a costly U.S. occupation far beyond what administration planners predicted, the Iraq intervention embodied many of the strengths and flaws of the Bush Doctrine.

During his first State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, U.S. president George W. Bush characterized Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” His administration’s foreign policy, known as the “Bush Doctrine,” was characterized by the declaration of the right to preemptive military strike against a perceived threat to the United States, an assertion realized in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Bush Doctrine’s most significant episode, is widely regarded as among the nation’s greatest foreign policy failures. However, the merits of the Bush Doctrine itself remain highly disputed. At its inception, the Bush administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq was strongly supported by Congress, the public, and leading national media. More than critics acknowledged, the doctrine shared features with its predecessors and successors: multilateralism, an emphasis on military intelligence and technology, curtailment of civil liberties, and “counterproliferation.” The Obama administration beginning in 2009 continued to debate, reform, and use strategies, policies, and resources developed under the Bush Doctrine. The shadow of Iraq substantially influenced U.S. policy in the post9/11 climate, particularly regarding U.S. relations with two other major “rogue” states, Iran and North Korea. U.S. relations with many allies, particularly nations critical of the Bush Doctrine, also greatly suffered. Regardless of the Bush Doctrine’s merits, widespread anger and disillusionment with its achievements remains one of its most significant, enduring legacies. Kevin Y. Kim

See also: Cheney, Richard B. “Dick”; Guantánamo Bay; Homeland Security/Intelligence Establishment; Rumsfeld, Donald; September 11, 2001 (9/11); Wolfowitz, Paul

Further Reading Krauthammer, Charles. “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism.” Weekly Standard, June 4, 2001, 21–25. National Security Strategy of the United States of America. September 2002. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf. Accessed May 27, 2014. Schell, Jonathan. “The Iraq Invasion, Ten Years Later.” The Nation, April 1, 2013. Woodward, Bob. Plan of Attack. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004.

Cable News In a manner evocative in some ways of the “yellow journalism” of the Spanish-American War era, the television cable news networks of the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century—especially though not exclusively Fox News—have become instrumental in consolidating unquestioning popular support for U.S. military operations overseas. Cable news coverage of the first Gulf War in 1990–1991 did not necessarily predict this turn of events. In January 1991, CNN was the only cable news network. Its coverage of that conflict featured Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Peter Arnett’s reporting on massive civilian deaths from Iraq—in direct conflict with repeated statements by U.S. civilian and military officials asserting the pinpoint accuracy of so-called “smart” bombs on Baghdad. To be sure, CNN also was part of the generally uncritical overall media coverage of the Bush administration’s successful effort to build support for “Operation Desert Shield” that summer, including repeating what turned out to be falsified or greatly exaggerated reports of Iraq’s threat to Saudi Arabia. There was also very little if any context provided regarding the long-standing cozy relationship of the United States with Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931), the founder and chair of the global media conglomerate News Corporation, established the Fox News Channel as a competitor to CNN. Though CNN was seen by most independent media watchdog organizations as “centrist” or slightly left of center politically, Murdoch and Roger Ailes (b. 1940), president of Fox News, saw their operation as a necessary conservative counterweight to the news and opinions offered at CNN. Media watchdogs have pointed out that not only does Fox offer a sharply and unapologetically conservative political point of view, but the information the channel puts forward on everything from climate change to national security is often either inaccurate or highly misleading. That proved to be the case as the second Bush administration put forward its case for war against Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002. Day after day, Fox News featured national security officials asserting what proved to be fallacious claims about the Iraqi regime’s weapons program and its ties to terrorists. Nevertheless, in the fear-driven context of post-9/11 America, ratings for Fox News soared as misinformed Americans looked to “support [their] troops” and rally around their president and his request for an invasion of Iraq. Also established in 1996 but always chasing Fox in the ratings war, MSNBC—though it had tried to position itself as a slightly center-left alternative to both Fox and CNN—soon followed in lockstep in beating the drums for the Iraq war. When the well-established liberal talk show host Phil Donahue began challenging some of the prowar orthodoxy on his program, he was fired. Other liberal voices on the network like Chris Matthews either softened their questioning or enthusiastically joined the national consensus that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to U.S. national security and supported the March 2003 invasion. Even outspoken progressive critics like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, though they

frequently, often sardonically challenged the Bush administration and its original claims about the Iraq War, stopped short of raising fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the U.S. global military establishment. Independent media watchdogs pointed out that MSNBC was owned by General Electric (a longtime major defense contractor), and that liberals on the network had gone as far as they could. In general, the “echo chamber” of the cable news networks—increasingly the predominant source for Americans to receive their news—provided the fundamental framework within which to understand the war. Retired generals (many with undisclosed deep connections to the defense industry) provided the main source of expertise in discussing how both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were being fought. Any questions that were raised on the networks and in the media generally were about tactics and management of the war, not whether the war should have been fought in the first place. Even on the supposedly liberal National Public Radio, any questions regarding the search for “weapons of mass destruction”—the casus belli—centered always on process, not on whether that issue was justification for launching a preemptive war against a nation that had not attacked the United States. In sum, cable news and the mainstream national media generally played an important role in building support in the United States for what millions of people around the world saw as an illegal war in violation of international law. Chris J. Magoc See also: September 11, 2001 (9/11); Yellow Journalism

Further Reading Brewer, Susan A. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Brock, David. The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine. New York: Anchor Books, 2012.

Central Asia Bordered by Russia on the north and Afghanistan to the south and stretching from China in the east to the Caspian Sea, Central Asia became strategically important to the United States following the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. The region is also called Middle Asia and contains the states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Prior to the U.S. “War on Terror” and the region’s growing importance as contested ground in the global battle for energy security, Central Asia’s most notable role in history came during the era of the Silk Road that commenced about 220 BCE and served as a crucial linkage of peoples and cultures between Asia and Europe. The region largely remained for centuries conquered and fragmented by external forces from Huns and Mongols to British imperialists and western Asian powers. Internal fracturing and resistance to modern ideas of national statehood left the states vulnerable to conquest by the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Each of the states attained its independence amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, though in the second decade of the 21st century the region remained overwhelmingly populated by Russians and Ukrainians. For the United States, the region began to take on greater significance in the 1990s. Concerns mounted about the rise of the Al Qaeda terrorist network in the region. Simultaneously, U.S. oil companies sought a foothold in the development of oil and natural gas coming from the Caspian Sea region, an interest that paralleled the U.S. government’s interest in breaking essential Russian control of energy resources in the region. The Central Asian states assumed immediate strategic and military importance following the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Because of the Taliban’s role

in providing a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the United States invaded Afghanistan and established a large military footprint in the country. Critics of the U.S. War on Terror pointed out that Hamid Karzai, elected president of Afghanistan in 2004, had formerly advised Texas-based Unocal and had ties to several members of the Bush administration closely associated with the oil industry. The United States also built military bases in neighboring Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and secured overflight and refueling agreements for U.S. military aircraft with all Central Asian states, and authorized increases in counterterrorism training for security forces in a number of countries. In Kyrgyzstan, two corrupt and highly authoritarian regimes in the first decade of the century, coupled with charges of shadowy and corrupt dealings involving the U.S. contractors who supplied fuel to the base, led to a damaged U.S. reputation in the country and calls to remove the base. Also hurting the U.S. image was the fact that several of these nations—Uzbekistan, in particular—boasted some of the worst human rights records in the world. For many critics, U.S. dependency on these nations for military base deployment, combined with mixed signals on human rights and the exploitation by several regimes of the “War on Terror” rhetoric in committing widespread violations and a repressive crackdown on political opponents added up to what appeared at best to be a contradictory U.S. policy. More notably, U.S. relations with nearby Pakistan grew increasingly strained as the war in Afghanistan went on. By 2006–2007, cross-border drone attacks and deaths of civilians at the hands of U.S.-led NATO forces led to mounting anger among Pakistanis and government resistance to support for the U.S. use of its nation as a staging ground for attacks against suspected terrorists—and equally critically, for moving supplies to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Thus by 2011 the United States had constructed an alternative, costlier transportation route called the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). The NDN has several different routes, most of which pass through some portion of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. In a project less militarily driven, the U.S. State Department by 2013 had conceived “The New Silk Road”—an economic development strategy for Central Asia centered on improving its energy supply, communications capabilities, and therefore its attractiveness as a site for outside economic investment. At the close of 2013, CASA-1000—a long-distance electricity transmission line aimed at bringing electricity from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan—stood as the center of the effort, one that has been fraught with geopolitical challenges, including attacks from many in the region who see it not as economic development, but economic imperialism. The New Silk Road lies at the center of the larger U.S. strategy to contest for access to the region’s rich energy resources in the face of considerable opposition: the rising power of China to the east, the historic and formidable role of Russia, and the peripheral but growing interest in Central Asia by Iran. Chris J. Magoc See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Al Qaeda; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Cooley, Alexander. Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1992. Levine, Steve. The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea. New York: Random House, 2007.

Cheney, Richard B. “Dick” (1941–)

Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney is a business entrepreneur and former vice president of the United States. Born January 31, 1941, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was raised in Casper, Wyoming. Enrolled at the University of Wyoming, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s degree in political science in 1967. After Cheney served as a White House staff assistant and as the assistant director of the Cost of Living Council during the early 1970s, President Gerald Ford appointed him White House chief of staff (1975–1977). In 1978, Cheney was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving a total of six terms. As President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense (1989–1993), Cheney was in charge of reducing military spending and downsizing both weapons programs and the global American military presence in the aftermath of the Cold War. Simultaneously, Cheney oversaw a number of major American military interventions, including the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, the Persian Gulf War (Desert Storm) in 1991, and the United Nations Operation in Somalia in 1992. During the Clinton administration, Cheney became president and CEO of Halliburton Energy Services, one of the world’s largest oil field services companies. Cheney later became chair of Halliburton’s board in 2000. In this same year, Cheney campaigned with George W. Bush as the vice presidential candidate. Bush and Cheney won the election over Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman, but only after multiple ballot recounts and a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision. As vice president under President George W. Bush (2001–2009), Cheney was instrumental in urging the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as in coordinating the War on Terror in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Often referred to as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, Cheney strongly supported the American invasion of Iraq through claims based on a considerably inaccurate CIA report that Saddam Hussein had resumed nuclear weapons programs and enhanced capabilities of chemical and biological weapons. Along with fellow neoconservatives at the Project for the New American Century who championed a forceful projection of unequaled U.S. military power, Cheney had in fact been urging a strike on Iraq for several years. When no traces of “weapons of mass destruction” were ever found and when the Iraqi insurgency began to grow much stronger in 2004, Cheney became an increasingly unpopular figure. He subsequently came under significant criticism for his connections to Halliburton in light of the corporation’s success in landing multiple contracts with the American government during the effort to rebuild Iraq. In 2007, Democratic representatives filed an impeachment resolution against Cheney on grounds that the vice president had fabricated the threat of Iraqi weapons programs and the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda as well as jeopardized national security in hawkish threats made toward the Iranian government. The impeachment resolution, however, never made it past committee and expired in 2008. Since his time in office, Cheney has been openly critical of the Obama administration’s foreign policies and has published a memoir, In My Time (2011). Chris Vanderwees See also: Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Iraq, Gulf War II (2003– 2011); Panama Invasion; Private Military Contractors

Further Reading Gellman, Barton. The Cheney Vice Presidency. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Hayes, Stephen F. Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Montgomery, Bruce P. Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009. Warshaw, Shirley Anne. The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Climate Change Climate change is the lasting and meaningful change of the earth’s average atmospheric conditions as measured over a long period of time. It includes things such as changes in average temperatures, rainfall, ocean currents, extreme storms, and droughts. Climate change can happen because of natural processes such as changes in volcanoes and orbital variations. It also occurs because of human activity, especially the release of greenhouse gases (GHG) by burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, as has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the recognized authority on climate change and represents the work of thousands of scientists from 120 countries. The IPCC has long declared a consensus in the scientific community about climate change—that it is predominantly caused by human GHG production. Evidence includes direct temperature measurements and historical records seen in tree rings and ice core samples. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) concurs with IPCC conclusions and cites carbon dioxide levels, rising ocean levels, rising global temperatures, warming seas, shrinking ice sheets, melting glaciers, declining Arctic sea ice, and ocean acidification as direct evidence of climate change. Greenhouse gases are at their highest concentrations in 800,000 years. According to NASA the effects of climate change include intensified droughts, frequent and more intense wildfires, extended heat waves, increases in global mean temperatures, decreasing snow pack, biodiversity loss and species extinction, coastal flooding, inland flash floods, and reductions in crop productivity. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says climate change intensifies asthma, allergies, food- and water-borne illnesses, and tropical diseases such as malaria. The best-known American scientist warning about climate change is James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981 to 2013. His dramatic testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1988 made clear that climate change was both real and very dangerous. Hansen and other scientists say that climate change could be cataclysmic and bring an end to life on earth and human civilization as we know it. Hansen warns that horrific and devastating impacts of climate change are coming without dramatic reductions in greenhouse gases. At current rates one can expect to see two million species extinct by the end of the century, producing severe damage to the entire web of life. He has become so frustrated by the lack of a U.S. political response to curtail climate change that he has joined increasing numbers of American citizens in acts of civil disobedience and has been arrested several times. In 2006 Hansen went on the television show 60 Minutes and described how the George W. Bush White House distorted his work with dishonest editing. In Hansen’s 2009 book he writes that when he was the director of the Goddard Institute, NASA’s political appointees repeatedly tried to silence him, censor his work, and distort his warnings about climate change. Subsequently NASA’s inspector general did find that government officials mischaracterized Hansen’s work intended to educate the public. Hansen argues that “the biggest obstacle to solving global warming is the role of money in politics, the undue sway of special interests” (Hansen, x). He says politicians are complicit in “greenwashing” the public instead of telling them the truth: we are in a deadly, dangerous situation. Good policy has been prevented, he argues, because special-interest groups have been distorting the truth and buying favor with elected officials. Despite overwhelming evidence of climate change from around the world and within the most prestigious scientific groups of the United States, a system of propaganda in the form of climate change denial has become dominant. In Merchants of Doubt (2010), investigators Oreskes and Conway document how a small number of people have worked with private corporations and conservative think

tanks to raise doubts about the scientific consensus on climate change. Small numbers of people with access to power can have large impacts on public opinion and paralyze policy initiatives. Science and its ethic of due process with honest skepticism have been derailed by distortions and misinformation. Agents working for American fossil fuel companies and who have their own ideological persuasions abused and misrepresented normal scientific doubt to confuse the public and policymakers. The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented how ExxonMobil spent millions of dollars to fund 43 front organizations designed to create doubt about climate change as earlier organizations had done with tobacco dangers. One public relations firm wrote, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public” (Oreskes and Conway, 34). When ExxonMobil’s investors became concerned about financial responsibilities that might eventually come with denial about the corporation’s harmful products, its executives were summoned before Congress. ExxonMobil promised to stop funding misinformation organizations. Despite the United States being the largest emitter per capita of greenhouse gases, the nation has failed to take adequate responsibility for reducing GHG and instead gives billions of dollars in subsidies to oil and coal corporations. The Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 United Nations treaty that set limits on greenhouse gases and was signed by most nations of the world, did not receive U.S. participation. President Clinton signed the protocol, but the U.S. Senate did not ratify it, and in 2001 President Bush said he would not support the protocol because it would be bad for the American economy. Like his father George H. W. Bush, who famously declared at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that the “American way of life is not negotiable,” the George W. Bush administration espoused an imperious policy on environmental issues, obstructing any possibility for international cooperation on climate change. Indeed, for more than a generation, the U.S. position on the worsening climate crisis has frequently been at odds with that of the international community, including the United States’ European allies. In green political circles the United States is described as a “rogue state.” It was hoped that the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (Copenhagen Summit) would be another venue for world leaders to limit GHG. Despite his stated intentions to reassert U.S. leadership, President Barack Obama’s unwillingness or inability to move the U.S. Congress on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions restrained his voice at Copenhagen, further stalling possible progress on the climate front, a bitter disappointment for many activists around the world. Since at least the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the United States has projected the principle of a globalization of the American dream, commonly understood as unlimited materialism and consumption of goods, belief in laissez-faire corporate capitalism, and—especially since the 1980s—an absence or reduction of government regulation. Government regulations anywhere and everywhere are derogatorily accused by the forces of corporate globalization of being “socialist.” The ideology of “free market fundamentalism” as practiced in the American system of globalized corporatism—one increasingly backed by the strongest global military force in human history—has little regard for anything interfering with its economic markets. This fundamentalism projected by powerful economic forces is thought by scholars to be the single most important variable behind America’s resistance to acknowledging that climate change is occurring and likely would require strong government regulation to cease. A vice president of the World Bank has called climate change “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen” (Oreskes and Conway, 254). Fundamentalists, however, believe the market knows best. John O’Sullivan See also: Sustainable Development

Further Reading Hansen, James. Storm of My Grandchildren. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). http://climate.nasa.gov/. Accessed January 15, 2014. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Fifth Assessment Report. AR5. 2013. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/#.Un7fgKXXe0s. Accessed January 15, 2014.

Colombia The Republic of Colombia borders contemporary Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, and Panama. It has had generally good relations with the United States since the United States emerged as the major power in Central America and the Caribbean in the wake of the Spanish-American War, or the Cuban-SpanishAmerican War (1898–1902). Despite the role the United States played in the secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903 and its centrality in the building of the Panama Canal (completed in 1914), along with its control of the Canal Zone down to the late 20th century and its dominance of Panama more generally, Colombia has been and continues to be a major ally of the United States. The Panama issue was redressed to a certain degree fairly early. In 1921 the United States paid Colombia $25,000,000 to compensate for President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in the Panamanian secession, and Colombia formally recognized Panama via the Thomson-Urrutia Treaty. From this point onward the United States has viewed Colombia (its third largest supplier of petroleum in South America) as a key nation-state and an important ally in its wider geopolitical posture in the region and beyond. The United States is clearly still a hegemonic power in the Americas in general, and this is manifested very clearly in relation to Colombia. In the 21st century Colombia has not only strengthened its ties to the United States, but has also emerged as a far more stable nation-state than in the past. In fact, its history has been one of an often profoundly weak or fragmented nation-state. Colombia was one of a number of unstable states that emerged out of the turn toward independence from Spain that took place in the Americas from the 1770s to the 1820s. The emergence of the Republic of Colombia, like many other new polities in this era, was often represented as the victory of republican modernity (in the form of the modern nation-state) over the monarchical and semifeudal Spanish colonial order. Colombia was one of the first post-Spanish-American polities to form a constitutional and republican government modeled on the United States of America in the early 19th century. From the outset, however, independent Colombia was plagued by violent political unrest centered on the elite-led Liberal and Conservative Parties. Despite Colombia’s chronic instability, which only worsened with the coming of the Cold War, it became a key supporter of the United States in the foundation of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948. The year 1948 also marked the start of a particularly brutal period of political violence known as La Violencia during which the tension between the Liberals and Conservatives broke out into widespread and ongoing violence following the assassination on April 9, 1948, of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal presidential candidate. The fighting, which began in Bogotá, rapidly engulfed the country as a whole and did not officially end until 1958. Despite its political instability, Colombia was the only country in Latin America to play a direct military role in the Korean War (1950–1953) as part of the United Nations coalition led by the United States. Starting in the late 1950s political violence between the Liberals and Conservatives (in contrast to— and/or response to—the growing significance of rural guerrillas) went into relative decline, particularly when General Gabriel París Gordillo took power at the head of a military junta from May 1957 to August

1958. In this period the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party formed a National Front (Frente Nacional) from 1958 to 1974: basically, they established a coalition that governed the country with the essentials of the deal including the alternation of the presidency between the two parties every 4 years for 16 years, at the same time that the Liberals and Conservatives were to hold an equal number of all the other elected positions in the country. In the 1960s the National Front even attempted to carry out social and economic reforms in cooperation with the U.S.-backed Alliance for Progress (1961–1973). However, as elsewhere in the region no real progress was made on this front as successive Conservative and Liberal administrations both resisted changes that might affect their social and economic power. In 1973 the OAS officially disbanded the permanent committee that had been formed to lead the Alliance for Progress over a decade earlier. While some progressive social change occurred in Colombia in the 1960s, this period also saw the emergence of a number of radical guerrilla groups, the most well-known and powerful of which was the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas—Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army: FARC-EP), which remained a potent guerrilla force well into the second decade of the post–Cold War era. Against the wider backdrop of its support for anticommunist regimes throughout Latin America and beyond during the Cold War, the United States was directly engaged in the struggle against the FARC and other guerrilla groups from the 1960s onward. The guerrilla threat and the degree of U.S. involvement waxed and waned during the Cold War and then lost its relevance when the Cold War ended in 1989–1991. In Colombia, however, the FARC not only survived, but thrived. By the end of the 1990s, the FARC was in control of territory across Colombia, having even been given a piece of sovereign territory by the Colombian government as part of what proved to be failed peace talks. The breakdown of the peace talks had many causes, but the main response to the resurgence of the FARC in the 1990s came in the form of Plan Colombia (2000–2006). It was a U.S.-backed effort at building a more effective military and police to go after the “narco-terrorists” (the FARC acquired the official label of “terrorists” after 9/11). Colombia, with U.S. advice and support, quickly advanced its efforts at defeating the FARC. A key figure in this trend was President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who came to power in 2002 and served two terms as president. The combination of a strong and legitimate president, keeping the U.S. presence light, and strengthening the counterinsurgency capacity of the Colombian military—along with problems internal to the FARC, their growing disconnect with their popular base of support, and the increasing openness of Colombian politics—all ensured that by the second decade of the 21st century the FARC had been both militarily and politically defeated. The organization’s remaining fighters had been pushed into the remote jungle or mountainous border areas Colombia shares with Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador. Meanwhile, the military defeat of the FARC has been accompanied by a strong, popular, and legitimate central government and a general opening of the Colombian political system, creating the political space in which many of the grievances that underpinned the origins of the FARC can now be aired with greater hope for their resolution. While the battle against the FARC was often funded and framed as part of the U.S. War on Drugs and bringing down the FARC was often publicly conflated with reducing the growing, processing, and transporting of cocaine to its main market in the United States, the connection between the cocaine trade and the FARC was never straightforward; in fact, the cocaine trade touches virtually all parts of Colombian society indirectly if not directly. With the military marginalization of the FARC, peace negotiations between it and the Colombian government have continued in an effort to strengthen the political solution to violent conflict. The leadership of the rebel groups meets with representatives of the Colombian government in Cuba. By 2014, modest progress was being made alongside Colombian efforts to provide support and assistance for the large number of people negatively

affected by decades of conflict. President Uribe remained popular among Colombian people to the end of his second term. He was succeeded as president on August 7, 2010, by Juan Manuel Santos, his former minister of defense, furthering bolstering the strength and legitimacy of the political system. Meanwhile, Colombia has also recently taken up one of the temporary seats on the Security Council of the United Nations. Throughout the Cold War and post–Cold War era it is safe to say that Colombia was and remains of major strategic importance to the United States’ posture in the region. The Colombian government has been and remains a willing client-ally of the United States, a relationship that clearly reflects a high level of dominance on the part of the United States and a significant degree of subordination on the part of Colombia, a relationship that was characterized above as hegemonic. Meanwhile, the dominantsubordinate dynamic has encouraged many commentators over the years to regard U.S.-Colombian relations as “imperial” or “neo-imperial.” Marcos (Mark T.) Berger

Rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) patrol in the Cundimarca mountains during the presidential elections on May 26, 2002. The battle against the FARC has often been funded and framed as part of the U.S. War on Drugs. (Reuters/Corbis)

See also: Panama/Panama Canal; Primary Documents: An Interview with Colombian Guerrilla Movement ELN (National Liberation Army) Commander Antonio García (October 2000)

Further Reading Bushnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. New York: University of California Press, 1993. LaRosa, Michael J. Colombia: A Concise Contemporary History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. Randall, Stephen J. Colombia and the United States: Hegemony and Interdependence. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Safford, Frank, and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Drone Attacks One of the most significant features of the American “War on Terror” has been the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. Although the use of military drones has only recently become the subject of substantial public debate regarding its legality and effectiveness, they are not entirely new weapons and their origins can be traced at least to the First World War. In mid-November 2001, the United States launched the first ever armed drone attack in Afghanistan in which the military commander of Al Qaeda, Mohammed Atef, was killed. In 2002, the United States had only 167 predator drones. By 2013, it had amassed more than 7,000 drones in its arsenal. The MQ-1B Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper are the two types of lethal drones that the United States has been using in its counterterrorism campaign. There is significant evidence that the United States is now using drone strikes in at least four states: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. When the Bush administration sought to eliminate top leaders of Al Qaeda through “targeted killings,” the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) started its own drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal regions in the latter half of 2008. During his two terms in office, President Bush authorized 48 strikes in Pakistan. President Obama, on the other hand, has vastly accelerated the drone attacks and by early June 2013, he had authorized 309 strikes in Pakistan alone. One of the most debated issues of Obama’s drone war is the use of so-called “signature strikes”—drone strikes based merely on patterns of suspicious activities by a group of individuals, rather than specific militants. In such strikes, the identity of the target is unknown and the strikes are authorized solely on the basis of behavior, such as gathering at a known Al Qaeda hideout or even loading a truck that may appear suspicious. The principal argument in support of the killer drones is that they are highly effective at killing militants operating in inaccessible regions without the risk of significant civilian casualties. It has also been argued that drone attacks have been efficient in killing what are termed “high-value targets,” in degrading the organizational capacity of terror networks, and in limiting terrorists’ ability to counterstrike. Furthermore, proponents indicate that the drone campaign is far cheaper than other military options, such as deployment of ground troops. Critics, however, have pointed out that drone warfare undermines international laws of state sovereignty. Questions have also been raised regarding the legality of the drone campaign in countries with which the United States is not at war. Some analysts argue that the collateral damage associated with drone attacks is quite high because it is almost impossible to verify the figures as most of the drone campaigns are concentrated in ungoverned areas of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia where investigating the death toll and measuring the effects of drone attacks is extremely challenging. The U.S. authority has classified almost all the details of drone campaign and has never provided complete records on the number of strikes or the casualties from these strikes. However, a number of independent organizations have conducted studies and produced data on drone strikes based mostly on newspaper reports and intelligence sources. For example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has compiled data showing that during the period 2004–2014, there have been 386 drone strikes in Pakistan with a death toll of 2,310–3,743 deaths in which 416 to 957 were civilians. There were 168–202 children among the dead, and injured people numbered between 1,091 and 1,647. TBIJ also reports that between 2002 and 2014, 65 to 67 confirmed drone strikes have been carried out in Yemen in which 339 to 494 people were killed. Recent evidence suggests that most of the drone attacks have actually been directed against lower-ranking operatives, rather than top terrorists. One of the most important strategic consequences of the U.S. drone campaign is that it has created an arms race among nations seeking this new technology. At least 76 countries have acquired UAV technology, including Russia, China, Pakistan, and India. Moreover, by using lethal drones on foreign soil,

the United States has set an alarming precedent that a country may simply assassinate foreign citizens considered a threat without declaring war. While drone attacks may have been successful in limiting the operational capabilities of terror networks, they have not been able to neutralize potential terrorists. Rather, some analysts have argued that increased drone attacks have in fact fueled anti-American sentiment and encouraged new recruits for Islamist militant movements. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Pakistan; Somalia

Further Reading Ahmed, Akbar S. The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013.

Egypt (1990–2013) Egypt has played a vital role in American foreign policy since the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979, becoming the first Arab state to recognize the sovereignty of Israel. Washington recognized Egypt as a strong partner and a moderate Arab nation in the Middle East. The partnership that blossomed was based on a military link between the two nations, exemplified by a vast majority of aid to Egypt coming in the form of military rather than economic aid. Egypt is the second largest benefactor of American aid, behind only Israel. The era spanning 1990–2013 featured fluctuating relations between the two nations. This era witnessed Egyptian armed forces playing a role in the American liberation of Kuwait and invasion of Iraq during the 1990–1991 Gulf War. However, a decade later relations hit a sour note as the Egyptian army, despite supporting America’s “War on Terror,” refused to join the American coalition in Afghanistan or Iraq beginning in 2001 and 2003 respectively. In 2011, Egypt was swept along on the rising tide of the Arab Spring, overthrowing the U.S.-backed autocratic president, Hosni Mubarak. Despite democratic elections in 2012, the Egyptian people once again rose to overthrow a president, Mohamed Morsi, in the people’s revolution of 2013. These revolutions have pushed American-Egyptian relations onto shaky ground. The outbreak of war in 1991 between the United States and Iraq, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, proved the value of a relationship between America and Egypt. The involvement of Egyptian forces was critical for the success of the coalition. As a powerful and respected Arab state, Egypt joined Saudi Arabia in providing forces and logistics to the U.S.-led United Nations coalition. Egyptian support indicated that Saddam Hussein’s invasion was condemned not only by the West, but also by many in the Arab world. In exchange for the use of the Suez Canal and Egyptian bases for refueling and repairs, in addition to 35,000 soldiers already provided to the coalition by Egypt, the United States, Europe, and other Gulf states erased $20 billion of debt owed by Egypt. The combination of U.S. aid as well as the forgiveness of debt after the war played a key role in stabilizing the Egyptian economy throughout the 1990s. Events that unfolded in the early 2000s laid the seeds for unrest in Egypt a decade later. After the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, Egypt joined the United States in a global pursuit of those responsible. President Mubarak’s government had historically suppressed many Islamist groups in Egypt, notably the Muslim Brotherhood, and actively sought to dismantle other Islamist groups outside of Egypt as well. Despite their fervor in suppressing these groups, Egypt refused to join

the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and later opted not to join the Iraq War either in 2003. Although Mubarak withheld direct military support to the United States, given Egypt’s peaceful and important relationship with Israel since 1979 and its larger role in securing the U.S. goal of “stability” in the Middle East, military aid of more than one billion dollars a year from Washington continued to flow. Domestically, the move did little to change the perception that the Mubarak regime was little more than a pawn of the United States. Protesters in Cairo after the American-led invasion of Iraq voiced their opinion for a strong and independent Egypt able to stand up against U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East. These public feelings hardened in 2006 when Egypt came out in favor of Israel during their Lebanese War of that year in addition to its ongoing support of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The Mubarak regime, which had inherited rule in a direct lineage from Nasser in the 1950s, began to groom Hosni Mubarak’s son, Gamal Mubarak, in the middle part of the decade, to follow his father as leader of Egypt. This move further aggravated the Egyptian populace who grew tired of living under direct lineage dictatorship. Small-scale protests began in 2008–2009 and blossomed at the turn of the decade. Starting in Tunisia on December 18, 2010, mass antigovernment protests began in what would become known as the “Arab Spring.” These protests spread throughout the Arab world with varying degrees of success. Having ignored American calls for reform within Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was overthrown on February 11, 2011, after weeks of mass demonstrations. This presented a difficult situation for the United States. For so long the Americans had propped up authoritarian Egyptian regimes, and now Egyptian people were calling for their right to have a democratic government. With the disposing of President Mubarak, the United States called for free and fair elections in Egypt as soon as possible. On June 18, 2012, Mohamed Morsi of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, was declared the first democratically elected president in Egyptian history. For the United States, the chief concern was maintaining a status quo in terms of Middle East peace and stability, a near impossibility without the compliance of Egypt. To the relief of American interests, and despite his occasional anti-Israeli rhetoric, Morsi sought to continue Egypt’s peaceful relations with Israel. Following a curious political move on November 22, 2012, in which President Morsi granted himself unlimited power and began discussing the implementation of Islamic law in the new Egyptian constitution, protests once more sprang up. Internal and foreign pressures forced him to back away from the previous moves, declaring them invalid in December. Despite the invalidation of his November decree mass demonstrations for the removal of Morsi took place in late June 2013.

Egyptians protest in front of an army tank in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 29, 2011. Tens of thousands of people flooded into the heart of Cairo, filling the city’s main square, as a call for a million protesters was answered by the largest demonstration up to that time demanding President Hosni Mubarak leave after nearly 30 years in power. (AP Photo/Ahmed Ali)

The United States once again faced a politically difficult situation in Egypt. A democratically elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, was challenged by demonstrations. For the Obama administration, it was a question of whom to back, the democratically elected president who committed, in the eyes of some Egyptians, undemocratic rulings, or the people who took to the streets to defend their supposed liberties? Washington, and the rest of the Western world, called for calm but on July 3, the Egyptian army removed President Morsi and appointed Abdul Fatah al-Sisi as interim president of Egypt. Critically for Egypt, the United States did not classify the overthrow of Morsi as a military coup. Doing so would, by American law, result in the suspension of aid, both military and economic. As things stand, the Obama administration has chosen to remain largely unattached, calling simply for prompt elections and a quick return to democracy in Egypt. Marc Sanko See also: Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Aswany, Alaa Al. On the State of Egypt: What Made the Revolution Inevitable. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Cook, Steven A. The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kotschwar, Barbara, and Jeffrey J. Schott. Reengaging Egypt: Options for US–Egypt Economic Relations. Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010.

Georgia, Republic of The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union saw the emergence of 15 new states, which included the Republic of Georgia. The new state’s former Soviet minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, soon became its first president. The United States and the Western world viewed the emergence of the new Republic of Georgia with optimism, believing that it possessed the necessary foundations for lasting economic and democratic reform. Western conclusions stood upon reasonable grounds, considering that more than 60 percent of Georgians believed that their country’s future belonged “with the West” following its independence from the Soviet Union (Jones, 251). Instead Georgia experienced chaos in the form of two secessionist wars, a civil war, and a war in 2008 with its nemesis, Russia. Its multinational/multiethnic character and divided loyalties to external states continue to threaten the fledging republic’s stability. From the early 1990s forward, the West, including the United States, the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), would see the new republic’s affairs as important to their own strategic interests. The multiethnic/multinational makeup of Georgia has impeded the young republic’s ability to maintain its cohesion and stability. Despite the Shevardnadze government’s work to promote and protect legal, constitutional, and civil rights of all of its citizens irrespective of their religious and ethnic affiliations, Georgia’s first president failed to make his new laws a reality, leading to the “bloodless” Rose Revolution in November 2003. Mikheil Saakashvili, the leader of the United National Movement, and his political allies took control of the Georgian government with the special goal of regaining Georgia’s pride, and the secondary goal of encouraging economic, Europeanization, and democratic reform.

Saakashvili faced the same challenges as his predecessor, but approached his country’s multinational nature by arguing that “Georgia was home not only for all Georgians, but for all ethnic minorities,” who saw their homeland as Georgia irrespective of their varying ethnic identities, whether Ossetian, Abkhazian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Jewish, Greek, Ukrainian, Kurd, or Russian (Jones, 226). Yet, minorities feared the strengthening of Saakashvili’s Georgian state and rightly so, since even in 2006 nonGeorgians were practically nonexistent in the new state’s government. In this same year out of 261 judges, only six were non-Georgian. Saakashvili’s aim to reassert and strengthen government authority excluded the very minorities that his political slogans sought to include. The multiethnic and multinational nature of Georgia continued to challenge its government. Only with the collapse of its Soviet overseers did Georgia enter the European community and interact in a meaningful way with the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the United States. Through a variety of programs, such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), the EU has offered Georgia technical, institution building, and humanitarian aid. Indeed, between 1992 and 2007, Georgia received substantial economic aid from the EU; and again after its 2008 war with Russia, the fledging democracy received a similar amount for damage the war caused to its tenuous infrastructure. The EU remains one of Georgia’s most loyal advocates. In 2002, Georgia applied for membership in NATO, a status that seemed to promise Georgia’s security association with the West and assist the young republic in revamping its state institutions and creating a modern army. For instance, Saakashvili’s government created the National Security Concept (NSC, 2005), the National Military Strategy (NMS, 2006), and the Strategic Defense Review (SDR, 2007) with the aim of guiding military strategies and goals, and identifying threats (Jones, 266). Georgian leaders recognized such associations as fundamental to the maintenance of its separation from Russia and the creation of a genuinely sovereign nation. Georgia continues under its new president, Giorgi Mazniashvili (2013), to seek NATO membership in an effort to stabilize the threat of its northern neighbor, Russia. Indeed, the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia only highlights the internal and external struggles that continue to face the young republic. Russia remains an external threat, whereas the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia emphasize the continued internal multinational/ethnic issues that the young state confronts. Russia supports both Abkhazia and South Ossetia in their bid for independence from Georgia, and until the Georgian government finds some way to solve its multinational/ethnic issues, the young state’s national security will remain tenuous. Georgia’s bid for NATO membership was bolstered by its ongoing participation in the U.S.-led NATO war in Afghanistan. With 1,600 soldiers still fighting in 2012, more than a decade after the conflict began, Georgia was contributing more troops per capita than any other nation to the effort. Several hundred Georgian forces also joined the decade-long U.S. war in Iraq. The Georgian military participates in ongoing military training exercises with U.S. forces. The U.S.-Georgia relationship extends beyond the military. As its largest external source of bilateral foreign aid, the United States invests in a range of initiatives in the country, including promoting democratic reform, fighting human trafficking, and strategic energy development. It also deploys significant Peace Corps volunteers to Georgia and counts on significant cooperation from the country in fighting terrorism. Despite all of the difficulties that Georgia has confronted since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, a 2009 poll showed that more than 50 percent of Georgians still see their future tied directly to Europe. The Georgian government is not alone in its quest for acceptance into the European community. Much of its population appears to possess similar leanings. Students no longer study the once

enforced Russian language, but instead seek to perfect their English and the Romance languages. Young Georgians aspire to attend Western institutions of higher education. The early Western predictions of success for a democratic Georgia might yet find solid ground. Kristin Collins-Breyfogle See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Post–Cold War Expansion of

Further Reading Jones, Stephen. Georgia: A Political History Since Independence. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. Reyfield, Donald. Edge of Empire: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.

Guantánamo Bay Guantánamo Bay refers to a 45-square-mile American naval base in southeast Cuba, near the Windward Passage. It contains an anchorage large enough to protect an entire fleet. The U.S. Navy seized and occupied it during the Spanish-American War, and it remains there today. Guantánamo served American security interests in the Caribbean just as Gibraltar served British interests in the Mediterranean. Critics argue that the base has functioned as an imperialist outpost enabling the United States to control Latin America. Guantánamo became even more controversial after the George W. Bush administration began using it to imprison, interrogate, and in some cases torture those it designated “enemy combatants” after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt administrations, along with Senator Orville Platt and the U.S. Congress, conditioned the American withdrawal from Cuba on Cubans’ incorporating the Platt Amendment into their constitution from 1898 to 1902. This granted the American government the right to supervise Cuban politics, and Cubans’ leasing Guantánamo to the United States as well. The U.S.-Cuban treaty codified this in 1903. The Franklin Roosevelt administration renegotiated this treaty 30 years later as part of its Good Neighbor policy. It nullified the Platt Amendment but clarified that the United States would occupy Guantánamo indefinitely. Americans had long recognized Cuba’s geostrategic importance, regarding it vital to national security well before the Spanish-American War. The island lies just off the Florida coast, occupying a central position in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, straddling sea lines that led to and from the Mississippi and the Atlantic. It became part of an even greater whole by the late 19th century. When the United States occupied Guantánamo, it also occupied the Philippines and began constructing the Panama Canal. This created new trade and communications routes through the Caribbean, easing transportation between America’s west and east coasts, and linking China, the United States, and Western Europe at the same time. Britain and other Western European powers long recognized Cuba and the entire Caribbean’s importance as well. They had repeatedly intervened in the region, seizing and trading possessions with one another. British influence extended from Belize to Guyana. This interventionism continued into the late 19th century, until the United States asserted its preeminence in the Caribbean, easing the British out and preempting further European intervention while advancing its own interests there from 1895 forward. The United States did not exploit Guantánamo’s full potential as a naval base until it constructed a system for hemispheric defense during the Second World War. Guantánamo occupied a vital position,

supporting merchant convoys and antisubmarine patrols from the Panama Canal through the Caribbean and the western Atlantic to ports in New York and New Jersey. The U.S. Navy designated Guantánamo a fleet training center from 1943 to 1995. Cuban nationalists had resented the American presence at Guantánamo from the beginning. This resentment reached its zenith with Fidel Castro, who alleged that the base was supporting dictator Fulgencio Batista’s air campaigns against his guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra in the late 1950s. According to Castro, Guantánamo served Yankee imperialism in Latin America. He attempted and failed to eject the United States from the base several times after he seized power, unsuccessfully attempting to link American withdrawal from Guantánamo to the Cuban Missile Crisis’s resolution in 1962. Castro tried again in 1964. Castro, knowing Guantánamo drew water from the Yateras, an off-base river, interrupted the river’s flow to the base. Rather than surrender the position, the Lyndon Johnson administration constructed a desalinization facility and transformed the base into a self-sufficient garrison. Guantánamo had long housed dependent families and employed Cuban workers. The Navy evacuated the remaining dependents and dismissed the Cuban workers, importing Jamaican workers thereafter. Meanwhile, Guantánamo became strategically obsolete. The American navy’s steam-powered cruisers and smaller warships had depended on coaling stations when the United States seized the base in the late 19th century. The U.S. Navy embraced nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the decades following the Second World War, and thus no longer required coaling stations. Further, European colonial power had collapsed following the two world wars. The Soviets’ limited position in post–Missile Crisis Cuba notwithstanding, no European rival challenged the United States in the region. The United States recognized Panamanian sovereignty in the canal in 1978, subsequently withdrawing. None of the United States’ strategic justifications for occupying Guantánamo remained by the late 20th century. But Guantánamo became politically useful as its military importance declined. Presidents from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton exploited the base’s unique legal status, arguing that it remained sovereign Cuban territory, falling outside American borders and the Constitution’s authority, even if the U.S. Navy exercised sole jurisdiction there. The Pentagon could operate unilaterally there, without consulting the Department of State or any other department or agency. It became particularly useful when denying Haitian refugees and asylum seekers due process before returning them, usually against their wishes, to Haiti during crises in the late 1970s and early 1990s. The George W. Bush administration expanded these arguments after 9/11. The administration also argued that the War on Terror presented new paradigms, requiring new approaches to warfare. It created a new class of detainees, “enemy combatants,” who, it argued, fell outside the Constitution’s authority and America’s international agreements governing prisoners of war as well. It claimed that the several hundred enemy combatants it was holding and interrogating without trial represented the most dangerous terrorists in the world, possessing time-sensitive tactical intelligence. This, the administration argued, required unprecedented harsh methods.

U.S. military police escort a detainee to his cell at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on January 11, 2002. Critics have long argued that the base serves as an imperialist outpost that helps to facilitate U.S. hemispheric control of Latin America. That criticism was sharpened after the George W. Bush administration began using Guantánamo to imprison, interrogate, and in some cases torture, those it designated “enemy combatants” after the attacks of September 11, 2001. (U.S. Department of Defense)

The detainees’ representatives and the administration’s critics challenged this, alleging that most, if not all, were innocent, and they possessed no relevant information. The Supreme Court ruled that federal courts had jurisdiction in these cases in 2004, but the federal government could hear and evaluate the detainees’ cases first. The Pentagon established military tribunals on the base, and soon began releasing prisoners. However, 166 remained as of 2013. James Lockhart See also: Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis; Cuban War of Independence and U.S. Intervention; Platt Amendment; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Hansen, Jonathan. Guantánamo: An American History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. Pastor, Robert. Exiting the Whirlpool: US Foreign Policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001. Strauss, Michael. The Leasing of Guantánamo Bay. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2009.

Haiti (1990–2014) When Haiti successfully overthrew French rule in 1804, it became the second colony after the United States to declare its independence in the Western hemisphere. Despite its geographic proximity, however, the United States paid little attention to this politically unstable and poverty-stricken country until the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, when Haiti’s strategic position in relation to the Panama Canal became important for the emerging new American empire. Subsequently, Haiti’s unstable financial situation at the start of World War I aroused fears of possible German intervention and led to an invasion and occupation by American forces in 1915. The occupation, which lasted until 1934, failed to stabilize Haiti’s political and financial situation and left behind a legacy of resentment of American interference along with a U.S.-trained military establishment that would dominate Haitian government for decades to come.

After many years of political chaos, the 1957 presidential elections brought François “Papa Doc” Duvalier to power. Duvalier, succeeded by his son Jean-Claude in 1971, brought some stability by imposing an oppressive dictatorship, its secret police brutally suppressing all opposition. Despite the dictatorship’s blatant human rights violations and abject poverty that led growing numbers of Haitian “boat people” to flee and seek asylum in the United States, Washington fostered an uneasy relationship with the Duvalier regime, largely because it brought political stability and provided a reliable anticommunist ally to counterbalance the growing regional influence of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. But in 1986, with the Cold War ending and the flight of poverty-stricken “boat people” escalating, when Jean-Claude Duvalier responded violently to antigovernment riots, the Reagan administration finally withdrew U.S. support and forced him into exile, reigniting the political turmoil of the past. In 1990 elections, judged free and fair by international observers, Jean-Bertrand Aristide—a populist ex-priest and outspoken critic of America’s close ties with the Duvalier regime—became president, promising reforms that threatened the powerful elite and the military establishment. After only seven months, however, hope for needed change was dashed when a bloody coup led by General Raoul Cédras forced Aristide into exile and ushered in another brutal military regime. A United Nations Security Council resolution called for the end to military rule and the restoration of Haiti’s constitutionally elected government. When an embargo and blockade failed to dislodge Cédras, the Clinton administration mobilized a military force and prepared for another occupation. But a last-minute diplomatic intervention led by former president Jimmy Carter averted the invasion and restored Aristide to power. The restoration of constitutional rule and a peaceful 1996 transition as Aristide’s term came to an end, however, did little to improve Haiti’s situation. Aristide was reelected president again in 2000, only to be toppled by another coup in 2004, leading to continued political instability and economic hardship. A devastating earthquake in January 2010 added to Haiti’s problems. Despite massive relief aid from the United States and the international community, Haiti remained one of the poorest and most unstable states in the Western Hemisphere and continued to challenge and frustrate American foreign policy. T. Michael Ruddy

Further Reading Ballard, John R. Upholding Democracy: The United States Military Campaign in Haiti, 1994–1997. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998. Maingot, Anthony P. The United States and the Caribbean: Challenges of an Asymmetrical Relationship. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Palmer, David S. U.S. Relations with Latin America during the Clinton Years: Opportunities Lost or Opportunities Squandered? Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Randall, Steven J., and Graeme S. Mount. The Caribbean Basin: An International History. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Homeland Security/Intelligence Establishment “Homeland Security” (HS) is the structural and thus permanent rearranging of physical, political, social, and legal landscapes with the goal of abating attacks by foreign powers (and to a far lesser degree natural disasters) such as terrorist and criminal organizations. Conceptually, HS emerged following the attacks of 9/11 and was emboldened by the 2005 devastation of Hurricane Katrina. HS runs counter to the desire for a free and open society of transparent governance and is thus the subject of increasing critical concern. Many argue that HS is an explicitly American concept. While other nations have counterterrorism and disaster recovery programs, the United States is unique in its conception of the HS enterprise encompassing military, intelligence, legislative, policing, and civilian components.

While related to national security (sometimes called homeland defense), homeland security is conceptually different. National security occupies the highest echelon of a securitized hierarchy, with ultimate authority, international jurisdiction, and a military basis. HS is a subservient level of securitization with high (not ultimate) authority, national jurisdiction, and both military and civilian components. National security is thus concerned with protecting territory from invasion and external violations of sovereignty, while HS is concerned with domestic threats to life and property. In the national security context, one utilizes a select toolset, diplomatic, economic, and military, to ensure the advancement of the nation-state. HS is far more fractured, basing its strength on a variety of fields including critical infrastructure protection, information technology, and emergency response. HS is an attempt to coalesce these areas of expertise into a national-level strategy. It is a policy framework used to direct governmental and nongovernmental organizations toward a shared goal of detecting, deterring, and preventing attacks on the nation. If these policies fail, HS becomes the manager of postattack periods and aims to develop subsequent safeguards for prevention. Nine months after 9/11, President George W. Bush proposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), calling it “the most extensive reorganization of the federal government since the 1940s.” The DHS began in March 2003 combining 22 federal agencies and more than 200,000 employees. By 2012, the DHS had an annual budget of $47 billion. When these 22 agencies fell under DHS command, they maintained their original mandates yet gained additional priorities within the wider HS project. Along with the post-9/11 creation of the DHS was the development of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) five weeks after 9/11. Though the TSA’s mandate is to protect the variety of national transportation systems from an assortment of threats, it also functions to protect the nation’s airports and airspace from acts of terrorism. In its first year of operation, the TSA spent $4.5 billion of its $4.8 billion budget on aviation security, following the 9/11 attackers’ usage of American airplanes as weapons. Despite the DHS’s coalescing of distinct agencies into a single department, the federal intelligence agencies—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), and various agencies under the Department of Defense—remained independent. Therefore, while the concept of HS is inextricably linked to the DHS, the idea extends far beyond it and is integrally linked to the “intelligence establishment.” In the formation of HS strategy, the intelligence establishment is focused on the collection and dissemination of communications and other data. The intelligence establishment seeks to learn about threats to national interests through an unending variety of sources. Broadly, the goals of these efforts are to observe hostile actors, collect evidence for disruption and prosecution, and generate counterintelligence. To generate such intelligence, the agencies monitor both foreign and domestic communications. In total, intelligence is collected through a host of sources from local police departments and individual citizens, to highly classified signal intercepts and CIA-managed confidential informants. The scope of the intelligence establishment is a matter of debate, but according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, some details have surfaced. According to the leaks, the so-called “black budget” of U.S. covert intelligence is $52.6 billion annually and includes at least 12 agencies and four million people with “top secret” clearance (including 500,000 private contractors). The largest recipients of these funds include well-known agencies like the FBI and NSA, but also lesserknown entities such as the National Reconnaissance Office (manages satellite intelligence), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Program (provides imagery and map-based intelligence), and the General Defense Intelligence program (provides intelligence concerning foreign militaries). Alone, these three lesser-known agencies have budgets that totaled $19.6 billion in 2013. It was also revealed that between

9/11 and mid-2013, the United States spent $500 billion on the collection of intelligence. While the release of such budgetary figures was groundbreaking, the global citizenry still knows surprisingly little about the scale of the American intelligence establishment.

“HOMELAND” “Homeland” entered the American lexicon following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. No American president, even those who presided over U.S. participation in major world wars, had ever referred to the federal republic of the United States or its domestic geographic territory as the “homeland” until President George W. Bush (2001–2009) began using the word in the weeks and months following 9/11 and the launch of what he called a global “War on Terror.” In the fall of 2002, President Bush signed the Homeland Security Act, creating the Department of Homeland Security and firmly embedding the term within the structure of the U.S. national security establishment. Deployment of the term “homeland” constitutes a somewhat jarring departure in terms of America’s image of itself. Historically, the word has long referred either to a native country or place of national origin, one held together by common ethnicity, culture, or racial characteristics; most notable in this regard are historic references to the “Fatherland” of Germanic peoples. Thus the word implicitly contradicts one of the pillars of American identity: e pluribus unum—one nation from many peoples. Further, in the historic, global context of imperialism, “homeland” also signified the well-garrisoned base of an empire, as distinguished from the distant, far-flung territories occupied or controlled by a military, economic imperium. In that way, the incorporation of homeland into the American national defense vocabulary may be read as an inadvertent, unwitting acceptance that the United States had indeed become an empire. One reflection of that development is the Showtime cable TV network’s critically acclaimed show, Homeland. Premiering in 2011, the series is a political thriller focused on the activities of CIA counterterrorism agents. Like the earlier show 24, Homeland reinforces the image of an America perpetually vulnerable to terrorist attack from within and without, but does so in a more culturally sensitive, less militarized manner. The show appeared to reflect the normalization of the post-9/11 national security state.

Through these leaks it was revealed that the NSA, against its mandate, is involved in massive domestic spying operations. It systematically spies on foreign countries, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the United Nations, and has “bugged” at least 80 embassies and consulates through its Special Collection Service. Such intelligence findings, including raw data, are regularly shared with other nations including Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Israel. NSA surveillance programs, such as PRISM (a clandestine data-mining program operated since 2007), began under President Bush through the powers afforded under the Protect America Act of 2007 that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA had previously removed the requirement of a warrant for the surveillance of targets thought to be foreign (i.e., non-American). What cannot be overlooked is the role of the private sector (and thus economic interests) in the national HS strategy and intelligence establishment. Not only are a multitude of security services contracted to external, for-profit corporations, but a large number of companies have been exposed as being complicit with the massive surveillance effort undertaken by the NSA. For example, PRISM relied on the sharing of data between a host of corporations and U.S. spy agencies including Google, Apple, Facebook, Dropbox, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL, Yahoo, and Verizon. Michael Loadenthal See also: Military-Industrial Complex; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Booth, Ken, ed. Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005. Guardian UK. “Edward Snowden. World News.” The Guardian. June 9, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/world/edward-snowden. Accessed October 20, 2014.

Schneier, Bruce. “Schneier on Security.” Blog. Schneier on Security. https://www.schneier.com/. Accessed October 20, 2014. Washington Post. “The Black Budget: Explore Top Secret U.S. Intelligence Funding.” Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/special/national/black-budget/. Accessed October 20, 2014.

Honduras (1990–2014) Honduras in this period only received significant attention in the U.S. media during the 2009 military coup and a subsequent refugee crisis that peaked in 2014, the historical and broader regional context of which was largely overlooked. Over the course of decades, U.S. Cold War policies toward Central America had helped push hundreds of thousands of refugees into the United States. Sending money home as remittances, refugees worked in the informal economy with little security or stability, facilitating the recruitment of many Honduran youths into U.S. gangs, as in California. Arrested and deported, such youths linked transnationally U.S. and Honduran gangs. Additionally, soldiers with U.S. Cold War counterinsurgency training joined and professionalized Central American gangs or maras. U.S. policy made U.S. economic and military aid contingent on the Honduran government’s imprisoning violent criminals and offenders, inadvertently providing new gang members. More devastating was U.S. demand for South American drugs, most notably cocaine, transported through Central America by cartels working with Honduran gangs. Manuel Zelaya’s presidential term strained U.S.-Honduran relations. Since his 2006 election, Zelaya worked with Venezuela’s Socialist president and U.S. nemesis, Hugo Chávez. Receiving Venezuelan oil subsidies and assistance to convert the U.S. Soto Cano military base into a civilian airport, Zelaya brought Honduras into the Venezuelan-sponsored Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas. These actions, alongside Zelaya’s domestic policies (including government-provided education and electricity and a dramatic increase in the minimum wage), upset conservatives who then staged a coup d’etat of his government in June 2009. Leaders of the coup included graduates of the U.S. School of the Americas, generals Romeo Vásquez Velásquez and Luis Javier Prince Suazo, and U.S. assistant secretary of state Thomas Shannon met with coup participants before the actual coup. The Obama administration refused to immediately classify events in Honduras as a military coup, which could have jeopardized trade and counterterrorism agreements. However, many State Department and leading congressional officials identified the new government as pro-United States and anti-Venezuela. Ultimately, the Obama administration gave de facto recognition to the newly installed government. The new government claimed to provide stability, but the country boasted the highest levels of political violence and human rights abuses while regions such as San Pedro Sula remained the most dangerous in the Western Hemisphere with increasing violence by the maras. From 2009 to 2011, unemployment and poverty escalated as U.S.-sponsored free trade agreements helped U.S. taxpayersubsidized agribusinesses push Central American farmers out of the market and off their lands. These factors sent almost 40,000 Honduran refugees into the United States between 2011 and 2013. In the summer of 2014, the U.S. media gave widespread attention to Honduran refugees when as many as 80,000 to 90,000 Central Americans, predominantly women and children, arrived at the U.S.-Mexican border. Tens of thousands unaccompanied children sought to find family members who arrived during the previous decades’ turbulent events. As protesters blocked buses of children, U.S. officials failed to provide comprehensive immigration policies addressing Honduras’s lack of opportunity or the historical impact of U.S. policy toward Honduras. Aaron Coy Moulton

See also: El Salvador; Honduras (1976–1989); Venezuela

Further Reading Bruneau, Thomas, Lucía Dammert, and Elizabeth Skinner, eds. Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Loveman, Brian. No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Iran (1990–2014) Mistrust and antagonism characterize contemporary U.S.-Iranian relations. The legacy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (d. 1989) made it difficult for Iranian leaders to engage the United States, Iran’s human rights record left it isolated, and Tehran’s support for hostage-taking and terrorism violated international law. While Iran’s theocratic government and foreign policy appeared to threaten the United States, the Iranians resented U.S. support for the Islamic Republic’s undemocratic predecessor, the U.S. role in the 1953 coup d’etat that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government, Washington’s tilt toward Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, and the projection of American military power in the Persian Gulf. U.S.-Iranian relations deteriorated during the first half of the 1990s before improving slightly later in the decade. Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, adhered to his predecessor’s principlism. President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatist, and the George H. W. Bush administration failed to establish a new relationship. Bill Clinton pursued a strategy of “dual containment” to cripple Iraq, check Iran’s regional ambitions, and facilitate the Middle East peace process. In 1995 Clinton approved comprehensive sanctions on Iran, and one year later he considered responding militarily to the Iraniansupported Khobar Towers bombing. A reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was elected in 1997 and initiated a “dialogue among civilizations.” Clinton’s team increased nonofficial contacts with Iran and promoted cultural exchanges, but no demonstrable policy shift occurred. Iran’s conservatives reasserted their domestic authority in summer 1999, and Khamenei was unreceptive to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s apology in March 2000 for the American-backed coup of 1953. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the U.S.-Iranian relationship in the 2000s. Iran backed the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in Afghanistan and shared intelligence during the United Nations’ six-plus-two talks. After September 11, 2001, the United States and Iran were part of the Geneva Contact Group, and in November the two countries helped broker the Bonn Agreement on Afghanistan’s reconstruction. Nevertheless, President George W. Bush included Iran as part of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. In spring 2003 his administration shelved Iran’s “grand bargain” proposal. While Saddam Hussein’s ouster and the empowerment of Iraqi Shias benefited Iran, the Islamic Republic was suspicious of the U.S. military presence on its borders and worked to avoid regime change in Tehran. Iran’s nuclear program currently dominates its relationship with the United States. While Iran correctly claims that it has the right, as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, the dual-use nature of nuclear power allows the United States to contend that Iran’s goal is weaponization. In August 2002 the exiled Mojahedin-e Khalq revealed evidence of nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak. In 2003 the EU-3 persuaded Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and facilitate the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. Iran resumed enrichment in 2005 and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed Iran’s right to master the nuclear fuel cycle. The 2009 election violence in Iran, the stalled P5+1 negotiations, and renewed talks of a military strike by the

United States and Israel made it difficult for Barack Obama to reset the U.S.-Iranian relationship. In 2015 five-nation talks brought a potentially historic breakthrough: a severe curtailment of Iran’s nuclear program coupled with the end of U.S.- and Western-imposed economic sanctions on the country. Resistance to the deal in the U.S. Congress, however, left the status of the agreement and the possibility of a new relationship with Iran very much in doubt. Matthew Shannon See also: Iran, Coup d’etat; Iran-Contra Scandal; Iran Hostage Crisis

Further Reading Ansari, Ali M. Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Ehteshami, Anoushiravan, and Mahjoob Zweiri, eds. Iran’s Foreign Policy from Khatami to Ahmadinejad. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2008. Parsi, Trita. Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pollack, Kenneth M. The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. New York: Random House, 2005.

Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991) On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded the neighboring nation of Kuwait, capturing Kuwait’s capital, Kuwaiti City. The invasion involved the Iraqi Republican Guard, helicopters, and commando units, who seized key oil fields in Kuwait including Ali al Salem, Al Jaber, and Kuwait City. In the days that followed, at the urging of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting resulting in the passage of Resolution 660 condemning the invasion and demanding Iraq’s immediate and unconditional withdrawal. To most Americans, it seemed an outright unwarranted and unexpected invasion of an independent nation. On August 5, 1990, President Bush declared that the invasion would not stand; in subsequent speeches, the American president spoke in stark terms of “good and evil” regarding the need to oppose Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein’s “naked aggression” in Kuwait. The president and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher frequently compared Hussein to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Bush quickly put an international coalition together that included Arab nations and even the then-disintegrating Soviet Union, the United States’ enemy during the Cold War. Initially dubbed Operation Desert Shield, the coalition effort secured the passage of 12 UN resolutions on Iraq and demanded the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and the defense of the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia and other regional neighbors. The history of U.S. relations with Iraq and Kuwait preceding the summer of 1990–1991 is complex and fraught with shifting alliances and multiple contradictions that belie the seemingly clear-cut geopolitical terms of these events. Oil-rich Kuwait, formerly part of the post–World War I British protectorate in the Middle East, had—like the United States—sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War that broke out in 1979. When Iraq made the fateful decision to invade Kuwait, it justified the invasion by arguing that Kuwaitis were slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields—the latest episode in a long-simmering dispute over the border between Iraq and Kuwait that stems from the imperial partitioning of the entire region by European powers after World War I. The issue of access to, and control over Persian Gulf oil had of course been central to European and U.S. interest in the region for nearly a century.

U.S. policy regarding Iraq had long focused on two essential strategic goals: ensuring that the country was both a reliable anti-Soviet Middle East ally in the Cold War, and a partner in providing open Western access to the development of its rich oil resource. From the 1950s onward, these objectives provided the framework for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency decision to support the rise to power not only of Saddam Hussein in Iraq but authoritarian leaders throughout the region. The United States had in fact sold weapons (chemical and biological) and provided training, intelligence, and logistical support to Saddam Hussein’s government throughout the 1980s, despite knowledge of chemical weapons being used against his own people. Historians have also argued that the U.S. government had previously—if only tacitly— acquiesced to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait as a matter of policy since the 1960s, but extending all the way through meetings in the summer of 1990. At any rate, from August 6, 1990, to the UN authorization on November 29, 1990, to use “all means necessary” to eject Iraq from Kuwait, a steady sequence of Security Council meetings, U.S. congressional debates, and high-level meetings involving White House and Pentagon officials led inexorably to preparations for military force to reverse Iraq’s invasion. During those critical weeks, the United States won the increased critical support from Saudi Arabia for the deployment of American troops from which to launch the attack on Saddam’s forces. Last-minute diplomatic efforts in early January 1991 between U.S. Ssecretary of Sstate James Baker and Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz failed to solve the crisis peacefully. On January 12, the U.S. Congress authorized President Bush to use force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. The deadline of January 15 for the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait passed, and U.S.-led coalition forces launched their assault on January 17. Dubbed in some quarters as a “CNN war” or “video-game war,” the conflict featured night-time televised images of highly technologically sophisticated “smart” U.S. weapons like Patriot missiles ostensibly hitting their military targets with deadly precision—avoiding, according to media reports, civilian casualties. The war was over in less than two months, resulting in the withdrawal of Iraqi forces and a clear-cut victory for U.S. forces with minimal casualties. This was the heart of what later became known as the “Powell Doctrine” of General Colin Powell, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Seeking to avoid at all costs a costly and long-drawn-out war like Vietnam (where he had served), Powell argued that military action should be taken only when U.S. interests were threatened, where diplomatic efforts had failed to achieve a peaceful resolution, and most importantly, where American military personnel were given a clear and attainable mission that would not become unpredictably protracted and costly. In the aftermath of the war, as the United States and Great Britain led an effort to contain Saddam Hussein through a restrictive “no-fly zone” air space and severe economic sanctions, a drumbeat of criticism was directed toward the former Bush administration for not having gone into Baghdad and removed the Iraqi leader when they had him “cornered” in Baghdad in February 1991. Bush administration officials—including the former president himself—defended their decision to leave the dictator in power, asserting that the UN had only authorized the removal of the Iraqi leader from Kuwait and that the United States had been trying to establish what the president called a “new world order” of U.S.-led cooperation and respect for international law. Further, as Bush asserted in his memoir in 1998, going into Baghdad would likely have involved the United States in a long and brutal sectarian war—a warning that proved prophetic. Umeme Sababu and Chris J. Magoc

U.S. Army helicopters take off from an undisclosed location during the United States–led Operation Desert Shield, August 1990. In the aftermath of what became the decisive and quick Operation Desert Storm, a drumbeat of criticism was directed toward the former Bush administration for not having gone into Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein when they had him “cornered” in February 1991. Former president Bush argued that going into Baghdad would likely have involved the United States in a long and brutal sectarian war. (U.S. Department of Defense)

See also: Primary Documents: Project for the New American Century, Letter to President Bill Clinton Regarding Iraq (January 26, 1998)

Further Reading Atkinson, Rick. Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War. New York: Mariner Books, 1994. Friedman, Alan. Spider’s Web: The Secret History of How the White House Armed Iraq. New York: Bantam, 1993. Smith, Jean Edward. George Bush’s War. New York: Henry Holt, 1992.

Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011) Immediately following the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States, President George W. Bush ordered military preparations for an attack on Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban who allowed a safe haven for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization. Simultaneously, the Bush administration began making plans for an attack on Iraq, though Saddam Hussein’s government had had nothing to do with the terrorist attack and had maintained an antagonistic relationship toward Al Qaeda. In combination with the shocking events of 9/11 and the fear generated among the American people about another possible attack, a steady drumbeat of speeches and policy statements from Bush administration officials warning about the danger of Saddam’s regime prepared Americans over the next several months for what by the winter of 2002–2003 seemed inevitable: a military invasion that would lead to the overthrow of the Iraqi government. Claimed by the Bush administration to be the central battle in its “War on Terror,” the Iraq War commenced on March 19, 2003, with a ferocious “shock and awe” launch of U.S. airstrikes, but proved far more difficult to bring to a successful conclusion. It did not officially end for U.S. forces until 2011. By then U.S. casualties had surpassed 4,100; estimates of Iraqi deaths are wideranging, but conservative estimates run well in excess of 100,000. One of the most controversial wars in U.S. history, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as it was dubbed by the U.S. military, was widely condemned

around the world as a violation of international law, and for many people confirmed more than any other single event the imperial intentions of the United States in the post–Cold War era. The roots of the conflict reside in the decade between the end of the First Gulf War and 9/11. Indeed, the U.S.–led attack on Iraq was a continuation of Gulf War I. Several important turning points laid the groundwork for the conflict. After the First Gulf War, comprehensive and severe U.S.- and British-led economic sanctions were authorized by the United Nations in an attempt to ensure that Saddam Hussein’s government was stripped of its biological and chemical weapons program and that it ended all support for regional terrorism. The sanctions proved devastating for Iraq’s ability to even feed its people; independent studies estimated that nearly 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result. The combination of sanctions and a U.S.- and British-enforced “no-fly” zone south of the 32nd parallel (33rd after 1996) served to effectively “contain” Saddam’s regime. Nevertheless, in October 1998, the U.S. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act that explicitly called for regime change in Iraq. Leaders of the newly organized Project for the New American Century (PNAC), many of them former members of the first Bush administration, pressed Clinton for an invasion. The PNAC, along with a growing number of neoconservative congressmen, senators, and foreign policy experts in the late 1990s, envisioned U.S. military dominance throughout the Middle East, beginning with Iraq but extending to Iran, Syria, and beyond. Among them was Texas governor George W. Bush who in the December 2, 1999, presidential debate with Al Gore stated that if elected, he would authorize a military attack against Iraq if the regime were in violation of the UN prohibition on “weapons of mass destruction.” After Bush’s election and the 9/11 attacks came months of warnings from Bush administration officials about a possible chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons attack on the United States from Iraq. And then in his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush declared that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq constituted an “axis of evil” that had to be eliminated. Like his vice president, Dick Cheney, the president charged Iraq with supporting “terror” and claimed to have evidence that the regime was operating in violation of the UN Special Commission (charged with the post–Gulf War I disarmament of Iraq) by developing weapons of mass destruction. From that moment, Iraq became publicly the central target in the global “War on Terror.” In truth, the campaign to invade Iraq had begun long before the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. The declaration of the U.S. right to preemptively attack any nation deemed a threat to the United States was at the heart of the so-called “Bush Doctrine” of 2002. Attempts by UN weapons inspectors and diplomatic officials in Iraq and across Europe to avoid war from the fall of 2002 through the winter were of no avail in the end. UN Security Council Resolution 1441 in November 2002 authorized the return of weapons inspectors and warned of severe consequences for Saddam’s failure to comply. On February 5, 2003, the widely respected U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell testified to the UN General Assembly about an Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratory— testimony that, unbeknownst to Powell at the time, proved to be entirely fabricated. He also insisted, as had Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the national security adviser and other officials, that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda—another assertion that was highly suspect. Despite misgivings from some members of Congress and by foreign nations including Germany, France, and Russia, the war began in March 19, 2003, under the banner of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States cobbled together what it called a “coalition of the willing,” but the overwhelming majority of troops who fought in Iraq were Americans, with support from the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Australia, and several other nations. Although the U.S. Congress had authorized the war in October 2002, the United Nations never approved the use of force.

Although the American people supported the operation by anywhere from 65 to 75 percent (believing wrongly in many of those same polls that Saddam had been behind the 9/11 attacks or sponsored Al Qaeda), the Bush administration faced widespread American and international opposition to the war in Iraq. Protests began in the summer of 2002 and continued through the first stages of the war. One estimate puts the figure at 36 million people around the world engaged in some 3,000 separate demonstrations. The antiwar movement was given further credence after no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and the war began to go badly for the United States. Following the initial taking of Baghdad in the first days of the war and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, President Bush infamously declared “Mission accomplished” in May 2003. This turned out to be more than premature, as the war descended into a protracted counterinsurgency war and sectarian chaos, from which there would be no quick exit for the United States. The United States spent well in excess of $1 trillion over the course of eight years in a conflict that severely damaged its international reputation. Independent sources assert that notwithstanding the toppling of a dictator from power, almost every aspect of life in Iraq, from basic services and electricity to safety on the streets, was worse in 2014 than before the U.S. invasion. Further, the violence in Iraq had far from ended with the 2011 withdrawal of the last U.S. combat forces. The country remained bitterly divided and engulfed in bloody, sectarian strife between Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish forces. By the summer of 2014, Iraq was facing a new threat in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL), an extremist band of Sunni jihadi warriors intent on establishing a severely repressive regional Islamic state centered in Iraq and Syria. Formerly known as

Al Qaeda in Iraq (which did not exist prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion), ISIS takes much of its recruitment strength from continued intervention by the United States and European nations into the region. Chris J. Magoc and Umeme Sababu See also: Bush Doctrine; Cheney, Richard B. “Dick”; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Rumsfeld, Donald; Primary Documents: International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705, “Resolution Against the War” (October 18, 2002)

Further Reading Isikoff, Michael, and David Corn. Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. New York: Broadway Books, 2007. Risen, James. State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Israel (1990–2014) Since its creation in 1948 as the Jewish homeland, Israeli history has been marked by seven major wars and countless armed conflicts with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. Israel has transformed itself from a rural agricultural nation to a regional superpower. It is also the single most important ally of the United States in the Middle East. It was the United States that first recognized Israel as a state, one with which it has shared broad democratic values. American officials have steadfastly maintained U.S. support for Israel, even in the face of periodic growing criticism from the Arab and Muslim worlds and beyond due to Israeli military actions—for example, its military incursions into Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008– 2009, 2014). Since 1985, Israel has annually received approximately $3 billion in foreign military financing from the United States, far and away the largest recipient of American military assistance of any nation in the world. The United States is also Israel’s largest single trading partner. Israel also maintains relations with Egypt and Jordan, two of the four bordering Arab states with whom the United States also maintains generally positive relations in order to advance its own overlapping security interests. Israel’s population is about 7.8 million (2011), of whom 75 percent are Jews and 20.5 percent Arabs. Since 1967, Palestinians in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem have been living under Israeli occupation. This occupation is regarded as illegal within the international legal framework. In December 1987, a series of widespread demonstrations and violence known collectively as the intifada broke out, signaling the frustrations of the Palestinians due to decades-long Israeli rule and Jewish settlement in the Occupied Territories. During this period, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been fighting for the Palestinian cause for decades, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Resistance movement appeared in the already volatile political scenario. Building on the 1978 Camp David Accords, the Oslo peace process (1993–2000) ushered in new hopes through the creation of the Palestinian National Authority and limited Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank town of Jericho. However, over the last few decades, border conflicts, terrorist attacks by various Islamist and Palestinian groups, and Israel’s often unstable party politics and use of force against unarmed Palestinians have repeatedly blockaded both internal and external efforts toward making sustainable peace. The strategic importance of U.S. support for Israel both in the region and in the international community has been continually reaffirmed since the end of the Cold War. For example, in 1991 during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, the United States insisted that United Nations Resolution 3379, passed in 1975, which had called Zionism a form of racism, be revoked. The United States stood by Israel in calling the resolution a verbal threat to Israel’s right to exist and an unnecessary roadblock to restarting the Middle East peace process. More notably, the United States has exercised its veto in the UN Security Council 41 times over the four decades since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began, nearly 20 of them since 1990. These include resolutions condemning a range of Israeli military actions resulting in the deaths of civilians; suspension of the building of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories; the killing of United Nations relief workers; and the building of a security fence through the Occupied West Bank. Despite the fact that U.S. administrations have generally voiced disapproval of the continued building of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, no American president has threatened a cutoff in aid to Israel for any of its actions. On the contrary, despite a chilly relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. president Barack Obama, the strategic partnership between the United States and Israel has been quite

strong since the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the Bush administration’s declared “War on Terror.” The U.S. and Israeli governments have shared technologies on missile defense, homeland security, and armored vehicle protection; engaged in joint military and intelligence training; and cooperate closely on a range of counterterrorism measures. In most recent presidential administrations, the U.S. national security establishment generally enjoys a very close working relationship with the Israeli government in Middle East policy planning and execution that advances both Israeli security and U.S. strategic interests in the region. Israel expressed concerns over the consequences of the 2010–2011 Arab Spring, particularly the empowerment of various Islamist groups across the Middle East as a result of the movement. It also worried about Iran’s potential development of weapons-grade nuclear material and the ways the United States has handled Iran. Much pressure has been applied from the Netanyahu government toward the Obama administration to strike a harder line against any possible deal over nuclear technology with the Iranian government. The rise of the Islamic State organization (or IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL) in Syria and Iraq is also considered a threat to Israel’s security. However, the disproportionate response on the part of Israel to the violent conflicts of 2012 and 2014 has arguably increased the possibility that Israel could become more isolated internationally. A number of European as well as Latin American countries have become increasingly critical of recent Israeli actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians and have formally recognized Palestinian statehood. Although the Obama administration criticized the notion of statehood resolutions in the United Nations, it also has been more willing to distance itself from Israeli actions than at any other time in recent history. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Israel (1946–1954); September 11, 2001 (9/11); Primary Documents: “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a Report by the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000 of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (1996)

Further Reading Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

Mexican-U.S. Border Relations Rooted in a deep history of U.S. imperialist actions and policies toward Mexico, the relationship between the United States and its neighbor to the south since the 1980s has been fraught with economic complexity and internal political tensions coming from both sides of the border. Indeed, although other seemingly intractable issues like the drug trade continue to affect Mexican-U.S. diplomacy, it has been largely issues in the borderlands of the American Southwest and Mexico’s maquiladora border region that have in many ways continued to define this historically challenging, often tense relationship. Many of the problems confronting U.S.-Mexican relations center on the continued flow of immigrants coming across the border, both legal and illegal, real and perceived. Since the late 1970s, Mexicans have constituted the largest number of immigrants in the United States; the number has risen from 2.2 million in 1980 to more than 11.6 million in 2014. However, even though by the end of the period the number of immigrants crossing the border undocumented was the lowest it had been since the 1970s, the eruption of an intense anti-

immigration movement in the United States had helped to produce a 1,951-mile border fence and a sharp rise in the number of deportations. Historically, immigration from Mexico into the United States was relatively unchecked until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when economic insecurity heightened anti-Mexican prejudice and more than 350,000 Mexicans were repatriated to their home country. The Bracero Program (1942–1964) brought millions of male Mexican laborers to the United States for agricultural labor. Overlapping Bracero was the short-lived Operation Wetback in the mid-1950s that resulted in the deportation by the Border Patrol of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants back to Mexico, often resulting in violent abuses of human rights. When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, the Mexican government established the maquiladora initiative, an effort to address severe unemployment along the border and stem the flow of illegal border crossing into the United States. Maquiladora manufacturing facilities operate in a designated “free trade zone” where they can import duty-free, tariff-free materials for assembly, manufacture, and profitable export. With the ratification of the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 that liberalized trade among the United States, Canada, and Mexico, U.S. manufacturing firms deepened their investment in maquiladoras, where they took advantage of cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. Undoubtedly, other devastating issues confronting this North American border region are the flow of automatic assault weapons (from the United States to Mexico) and an unlimited supply of young men for gang and drug cartel recruitment. Scholars have examined the impact of U.S. gun policy on the increase of violence in Mexico (Dube, Dube, and Garcia-Ponce). By specifically focusing on the expiration of the U.S. federal assault weapon ban in 2004 (FAWB), their research proved that homicides immediately and significantly increased in areas that border Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. All of these states, after the expiration of the FAWB, held no state bans on assault weapons, which more easily facilitated weapon smuggling into Mexico. Incidents involving gun and assault weapons seized by the Mexican military showed an increase as well. Not surprisingly, their findings supported the hypothesis that the change in U.S. gun policy negatively affected Mexico’s crime rates. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States, calls for stepped-up border security heightened further. Despite widespread criticisms that it was driven more by politics and profiteering than by its promised efficacy, construction of the 1,951-mile border fence went forward. The border wall was never completed and what was constructed is now rusting away. Charging that the U.S. government’s border control efforts have failed, some southern states—Arizona, most notably, but certainly not alone—have criminalized inappropriate immigration over the past decade. Hence, it is now a state crime to come to the United States without proper documentation. Being in the United States without proper documentation is no longer a civil matter to be heard in a civil court, but a crime to be heard in a criminal court. In addition, legitimate and exaggerated claims about the ineffectiveness of U.S. border control inspired a group of fervent anti-immigration activists in 2005 to organize the “Minutemen Project,” a self-described “citizens’ neighborhood watch organization” to help stop the flow of illegal crossing of the border. The presidents of both the United States and Mexico condemned the Minutemen as a vigilante-style organization whose activities were only inflaming tensions on the border. Human rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out that the group had attracted a raft of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. Frank Anthony Rodriguez and Chris J. Magoc

U.S. soldiers construct the steel fence at the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona on June 6, 2007. After years of illegal immigration and the movement of drugs into the United States, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States triggered calls for stepped-up border security and led to calls for the construction of several barriers along the border. (USAF Photo/Senior Master Sgt. David H. Lipp)

Further Reading Dube, A., O. Dube, and O. García-Ponce. “Cross-Border Spillover: US Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico.” American Political Science Review 107, no. 3 (2013): 397–417. Eichstaedt, Peter. Dangerous Divide: Peril and Promise on the US-Mexico Border. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014. Payan, Tony. Three US-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, Homeland Security. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.

Militarization of American Culture Militarization of American culture or society refers to the growing infusion and ubiquitous prevalence of military ideals, values, and symbols in American culture since the 1970s, and the simultaneous deep penetration of the U.S. national security establishment into the U.S. economy. Historians of America’s militarized culture argue that the meaning and nature of American patriotism has changed rather dramatically over the past century, beginning with the World War I era when one’s love of country shifted from identification with and affection for American ideals and values of liberty and equality, or connections to one’s local community or the land, to a much more martial culture where support for military service and compliant obedience to a militarized central government increasingly became the central determinant of one’s patriotism. By the time President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex” in American life in his 1961 farewell address, America was well on its way to becoming what he and others termed a “garrison state” where civil institutions and democracy itself might be endangered by the overwhelming presence of the military in the social order. Since the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War and the national affliction of what defense hawks and neoconservatives called the Vietnam Syndrome, the Pentagon and the U.S. military establishment have worked assiduously to restore the formerly positive image of the soldier in American life. In the second decade of the 21st century, it seems to many observers that a thoroughly militarized American culture marks the unequivocal success of that project.

From the standpoint of the economy itself, as scholars such as Nick Turse and Roberto Gonzalez have written, the penetration of the military-industrial complex has gone well beyond Eisenhower’s worst fears. The number of military contractors and subcontractors has increased exponentially to the point where it is virtually impossible to purchase a civilian consumer product that is not made by a defense contractor. U.S. weapons makers control some 80 percent of the global arms trade. Critics of the militarization of the culture, however, argue that more troubling are the wide array of means by which martial ideals and military symbols and institutions have infused the civilian social order. Some of this transformation has happened so imperceptibly or incrementally over the past decades that few have noticed, while many other developments occurred in the years since the attacks on the nation’s “homeland” on September 11, 2001, a time when America was fighting two major wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) and engaged in targeted military action in at least three other nations (Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia). In this new era of patriotism framed by what is often acknowledged as a global American empire, citizens became so inured to constant war and “supporting the troops” that relatively few questioned any of what has transpired. In the years after 9/11, “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbons and other patriotic ephemera adorned American automobiles and filled retail stores. In that context, there was little outcry at the use of what the Bush administration termed “enhanced interrogation techniques” in its “War on Terror,” but which was widely characterized as torture. Similarly, little real opposition emerged to claims by the Bush and Obama administrations of the right to use drones in nations with which the United States is technically not at war, nor the right to kill U.S. citizens on the “battlefield” of the War on Terror without due process. Scholars point out that the ground for such deference to unprecedented claims of military action has been tilled for decades in the much deeper infusion of the U.S. military and its ethos into the culture. Since the early 1990s, the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps has had a steadily growing presence in American public schools. Beginning with the escalating “war on drugs” in the 1970s and 1980s, the military battlefield mentality has increasingly permeated America’s police forces—including the use by specialized forces of semiautomatic rifles and M-16s from the U.S. military and Department of Defense (DOD) grants to local police forces for the purchase of items like Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Trucks (BearCats). The heavy militarization of SWAT teams has resulted in numerous incidents of violent shootings of unarmed citizens. The U.S. Border Patrol is of course heavily militarized. Militarization of the culture also includes the increasingly entwined relationship (often described as “partnerships”) of major civil institutions with the U.S. military, from major professional sports leagues, particularly the National Football League and Major League Baseball. To cite just one example, even on patriotic holidays that have nothing to do with veterans (Independence Day), one sees baseball players wearing special “camo” hats and shirts to “honor our troops,” the day often featuring military tributes like on-field ceremonies for wounded warriors of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. Hollywood’s cozy relationship with the DOD, allegedly necessary for the production of war films, has been well documented. As Eisenhower noted, good portions of the research agendas of institutions of higher education have long been captives of the military establishment. The National Academy of Sciences now boasts a DOD “partnership,” as well. In the early 1990s combat video games became an increasingly important subgenre of the gaming industry, one the Pentagon encouraged, supported, and incorporated into military training. The last few decades have also witnessed the phenomenal growth of paintball as a sport, played on “battlefields,” including in San Diego where practitioners can play for a fee on Camp Pendleton Marine Base. After 9/11, one could read “Where U.S. Troops Are” local forecasts in many local newspapers around the

country—though normally only Iraq and Afghanistan were included, not the dozens of other nations where soldiers are stationed on U.S. military bases. In sum, military symbols and references had become so naturalized in the culture that most citizens would not recognize the country any other way. Chris J. Magoc

AMERICA’S ARMY (2002) Released on the Fourth of July, 2002, America’s Army is a highly successful “first-person-shooter” (FPS) video game conceived and first developed by the Department of Defense (DOD) and used as an effective recruitment tool by the U.S. military. Financed by U.S. taxpayers and available as a free download, in 2004 the game was transmitted to private companies for mass production, playable on a variety of consoles and mobile phones. America’s Army underwent 40 updates in its first 13 years of production, with millions of young “gamers” finding the experience, as its developer at the U.S. Military Academy had envisioned, an “engaging, informative and entertaining” simulation of military experience. From the outset, players could enjoy a cyber version of the basic military training experience, followed by technologically simulated and “realistic” combat experiences in which players begin to track their number of “kills” and their accuracy rating versus other players. As the War on Terror unfolded, subsequent iterations of America’s Army tested such skills as shooting aim, reload time, and breath control during military confrontations based on actual battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. One version of the game, America’s Army: Special Forces, aimed specifically to redouble the army’s recruitment of soldiers needed in those conflicts. The U.S. Army touts the game’s “realism,” with background imagery inspired by Middle East cities and landscapes pocked by oil rigs, and real American soldier heroes from the War on Terror spotlighted during game play. Many military veterans and other critics of America’s Army and other FPS military-inspired video games (which date to the early 1990s after the First Persian Gulf War) decry the ways in which violence is both minimized and sanitized. Regardless, the popularity and profitability of the games have become a salient measure of the deep penetration of militarism into contemporary, technologically driven American culture.

See also: Military-Industrial Complex; September 11, 2001 (9/11); Vietnam Syndrome

Further Reading Gonzalez, Roberto J. Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. Mundey, Lisa M. Militarism and Anti-Militarism in Popular Media, 1945–1970. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2012. Turse, Nick. The Complex: How the Military Invades our Daily Lives. New York: Macmillan/Metropolitan Books, 2009.

National Missile Defense National Missile Defense (NMD) is the U.S. system used to defend the United States and its allies and global interests with highly sophisticated weapons capable of shooting down incoming intercontinental nuclear missiles. The program is the latest incarnation of a 50-year-long U.S. effort to build such a system, employing the technological genius of its aerospace industry and massive defense establishment to protect both the American population and its military installations from nuclear attack. During the Cold War, the system was strategically aimed at defending the United States from Soviet attack. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States asserts that missile defense is directed at “rogue” states like North Korea and Iran—though Russia and China fiercely dispute that. In the late 1960s, research and development of a missile defense system was proceeding on both sides of the Cold War. Those efforts were restricted, though not halted, by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed by President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. In 1983, at another nadir in U.S.-Soviet relations and at the risk of violating the ABM Treaty, U.S. President Ronald Reagan revived U.S. missile defense efforts by announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a

fantastic vision featuring ground-based and space-based interceptor weapons theoretically capable of shooting down incoming nuclear weapons. From 1983 to 1998, the U.S. Congress appropriated more than $50 billion for the program, pushing the total spent on missile defense since the early 1960s to more than $100 billion. Estimates in 2014 put the figure at more than $250 billion, the bulk of that coming since the mid-1990s, when the program was reconfigured to National Missile Defense. Critics have pointed out that despite the extraordinary outlay of federal spending, it is very unclear whether the technology—often described as akin to “hitting a bullet with a bullet”—will ever work with a degree of confidence commensurate with the investment. Whistleblowers from aerospace companies have pointed to falsification of failed antimissile tests that were then reported to Congress as successful. Not sufficiently confident in the technology, President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) passed the decision on whether or not to proceed with deployment to his successor, George W. Bush (2001–2009). Early in 2001, President Bush announced that the United States would abandon the ABM treaty and pursue fullscale development of missile defense. By 2014 elements of the system had been deployed in Alaska and on U.S., Japanese, and Australian naval ships, with plans for future installations in other nations, including Qatar and possibly Poland and the Czech Republic. These developments have met with much criticism internationally and in the United States. Some argue that research and development funds are better spent on more productive ends; others point out that even after 50 years, the Russians and Chinese and many experts assert that the system is porous and vulnerable to countermeasures; finally, many critics see missile defense as a means for the United States to project an imperialistic, global, first-strike nuclear capability, which arms control experts see as a dangerous new development of the nuclear age. Chris J. Magoc

Further Reading Fitzgerald, Frances. Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Yanarella, Ernest J. The Missile Defense Controversy. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Post–Cold War Expansion of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was formed in 1949 as a joint North American– Western European military alliance primarily to check the power of the Soviet Union in Europe. As such, questions arose as to what course of action NATO would take, and what its role would be, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. Rather than maintain its 1991 membership and a security force for post–Cold War Europe, or dissolve in light of this new state of affairs, the period since the fall of the Soviet Union has seen NATO undergo considerable expansion and transformation in a new, globalized world. At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, NATO had 16 member countries in North America and Western Europe. Since that time, it has added an additional 12 member countries, all in Eastern Europe, to its ranks to total 28 members. Those in favor of this expansion say that it is simply a natural process wherein new member countries desired to join and were admitted, forming a “coalition of the willing” to confront the problems of a new and ever-changing world in which globalization has required new methods of thought and action. Detractors, on the other hand, argue that NATO is an outdated relic of the Cold War and an instrument of U.S. and Western

imperialism, which has been kept alive simply to carry on and compound the suspicions and passive aggression of the Cold War, and has gone far beyond its written purpose and outlived its usefulness. NATO’s first round of major expansion occurred in 1999 (although the former East Germany became part of NATO after the official reunification of Germany in 1990). In that year, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—all former Soviet bloc countries and arguably the most important non-Russian members of the Warsaw Pact—were welcomed, following their formal invitation in 1997, into the NATO structure. This was followed in 2004 by the largest expansion in NATO’s history, when seven Eastern European and former Soviet bloc countries—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania—joined the alliance’s ranks. NATO grew still more in 2009 with the accession of Croatia and Albania, and desires to expand further, most notably through the possible accession of Georgia and Ukraine. This rapid growth of NATO to the east has likewise been accompanied by an evolution of its political and military roles as well. Throughout the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century, NATO transformed from a mainly military organization into a much more political entity. Since the Soviet Union fell, NATO has intervened directly in two armed conflicts in Europe, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994– 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, and has lent military aid in several other conflicts. Accompanied by this purely military action, however, the alliance has provided humanitarian aid and military training in a variety of situations around the world and well outside the European zone it was created to defend and serve. NATO has sent aid to earthquake victims in Pakistan, tsunami victims in Indonesia, victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Darfur and South Sudan, and hurricane victims in North America. It is also true, however, that NATO troops have lent military assistance or training in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central Africa. Proponents of this expansion outside NATO’s traditional geographic zone and historical role argue that it is a natural adjustment to and result of a continually globalizing world. Former U.S. president George W. Bush’s undersecretary of political affairs stated that “our entire agenda is pivoting from an inward focus on Europe to an outward focus […] US-European relations are increasingly a function of events in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia” (Daalder and Goldgeier). Others, however, argue that NATO’s actions in the past two decades reflect a Western desire to create a multi- (or extra-) regional or even global sphere of hegemonic influence. More pointedly, many critics argue that NATO’s expansion is a thinly veiled effort to oppose the Russian Federation in a fashion reminiscent of the Cold War.

The Russian Federation has been, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, one of the most vocal opponents of NATO expansion and military action. Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, upon agreeing to the treaty that formally approved the reunification of Germany in 1990 (Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, commonly known as the 2+4 Treaty), stipulated that the West agree not to expand NATO anywhere east of the former East Germany. Although this was not part of the language of the treaty, this “promise” has endured as a Russian argument against NATO expansion. Thus, after the Soviet Union dissolved and NATO consequently began expanding east and ever closer to the borders of the Russian Federation, significant tensions arose. Russian president Vladimir Putin has stated that Russians “view the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our borders, a bloc whose members are subject in part to Article 5 of the Washington Treaty [NATO’s provision for mutual defense, stating that an attack on one member is an attack on all members], as a distinct threat to the security of our country” (Blomfield and Smith). NATO’s attempts to include Ukraine and Georgia, which share borders with Russia, into its ranks, as well as continuing disagreement over the 1999 Kosovo War and Russia’s seizure of the Crimea, have been especially damaging to Western relations with Russia in the 21st century. When the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, NATO’s future was an uncertain one. Created to oppose the expansion and aggression of the Soviet Union in the Cold War, would it dissolve as well now that those threats no longer existed? NATO instead began a period of rapid expansion and transformation that saw its roles change, its zone of operations extend across the globe, and its member countries expand across Europe nearly to Eurasia. These events continue to have effects and raise significant geopolitical questions as NATO continues to operate further into the 21st century. Keven Gregg See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Balkans, U.S. Interests and Intervention in; Berlin Blockade/Airlift; Georgia, Republic of; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Primary Documents: United States Information Service, “State Department Fact Sheet on the Enlargement of NATO” (February 11, 1998)

Further Reading Blomfield, Adrian, and Mike Smith. “Gorbachev: US Could Start New Cold War.” The Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1933223/Gorbachev-US-could-start-new-Cold-War.html. Accessed May 16, 2014. Congressional Research Service, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division. CRS Report for Congress: Enlargement Issues at NATO’s Bucharest Summit. By Paul Gallis, et al. March 12, 2008. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34415.pdf. Accessed May 17, 2014. Daalder, Ivo, and James Goldgeier. “Global NATO.” Foreign Affairs 85 (September/October, 2006). http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61922/ivo-daalder-and-james-goldgeier/global-nato. Accessed May 16, 2014. Medcalf, Jennifer. NATO: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2005. Tsygankov, Andrei P. “Obstacles to U.S.-Russian Cooperation in the Caucasus and Ukraine.” Paper presented at the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, PA, March 6–7, 2008.

Pakistan (1990–2014) The second largest Muslim country in the world, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was born as a consequence of the violent partition of British India on August 14, 1947. It is a federation comprising four provinces: Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Additionally, the “Northern Areas” is semiautonomous and the possession of Azad (free) Kashmir is a major issue of dispute with India. The Punjabis, who make up about 48 percent of the population of Pakistan, dominate the military. The third biggest recipient of U.S. aid in 2011, the country is regarded as the front-line state in the U.S.-led “War on Terror.” In Urdu, Pakistan means “land of the pure.” Considered to be the only country in the world created in the name of Islam, the contemporary political history of Pakistan is riddled with paradox. While 97 percent of its 185.1 million (2014) population are Muslims, the “Muslim Zion” has witnessed increased sectarian unrest between its majority Sunni (80 percent) and minority Shia (20 percent) communities over the last few years. Ironically, the founder of the state, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, himself belonged to the Shia minority sect. Moreover, one of the founding fathers of the Pakistan movement, the main drafter of the Pakistan Resolution and the first foreign minister of the country, Chaudhry Sir Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, belonged to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community whose members were declared “non-Muslims” constitutionally in 1974 as a response to the violent anti-Ahmadiyya movement. Home to a rich Sufi tradition, Pakistan has witnessed a gradual rise of orthodox Islamic education and movements with extremist elements. In 1988, the number of madrassas (Muslim theological schools) in Pakistan was less than 3,000. Now, there are more than 25,000. It is widely accepted that the Islamization process was accelerated during the regime of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who came to power in 1977 by overthrowing Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. However, when General Zia died in a mysterious plane crash in 1988, a civilian government was installed headed by Benajir Bhutto, daughter of Bhutto and the first woman to become prime minister in a Muslim country. She was later assassinated in December 2007 during a political rally in Rawalpindi. Pakistan fought four major wars with India and lost East Pakistan in 1971, which came to be known as Bangladesh. The bitter experience of losing its eastern part is believed to be one of the key reasons why Pakistan initiated its nuclear weapons program in 1972. Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons in 1998, thus becoming the only Muslim country with nuclear capability. Pakistan continues to witness frequent ethnic and tribal dissent from the Muhajir, Pashtun, Baluchi, and Sindhi nationalities. Furthermore, the draconian blasphemy laws have become a major concern for the religious minorities. According to the National Commission for Justice and Peace (2014), a total of 633 Muslims, 494 Ahmedis, 187 Christians, and 21 Hindus have been accused under various clauses of the blasphemy law since 1987.

Pakistan became a key ally of the United States in the South Asian region during the Cold War period. With aid flowing from the United States and the Middle East, Pakistan actively supported the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s, which eventually contributed to the emergence of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan in 1994. The geostrategic calculations of Pakistan changed radically when the 9/11 attacks were carried out in the United States. The then-president Parvez Musharraf, who came to power through a bloodless coup in 1999, pledged to curtail support for the various Islamist militant groups operating within both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and helped to apprehend hundreds of operatives belonging to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Pakistan has been used by the United States as a major supply route for weapons, fuel, and material into Afghanistan. As of March 2014, about 3,000 people, including many civilians, have been killed in drone strikes carried out by the United States. Such overt and covert engagement in the War on Terror and the deaths of civilians have, however, given rise to local insurgents, and Pakistan is now fighting its own people in the northwestern region. According to one report, about 35,600 Pakistanis have been killed from 2004 to 2010 and more than 40,000 have been injured during that period by the various parties to the conflict. On December 16, 2014, a Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar left at least 141 people dead, 132 of them children. It is presumed that this attack has pushed both military and political leadership to rethink Pakistan’s duplicitous policy toward various shades of militant organizations for several decades. Many experts, however, are still skeptical regarding Pakistan’s willingness to discontinue its policy of distinguishing between the “good” and “bad” Taliban. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Al Qaeda; Bin Laden, Osama; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Haqqani, Husain. Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding. New York: Public Affairs, 2015. Jalal, Ayesha. The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Powell Doctrine Colin Luther Powell is a retired four-star U.S. Army general who, over his long career in the military and government, held prominent and historic positions under Republican presidents as they grappled with the complexities of military and foreign affairs in the wake of both the Vietnam War and Cold War. Powell’s life can be understood in several ways, including as a reflection of the aftereffects of the Vietnam War on U.S. foreign policy; as the pathbreaking rise of an African American to the center of American power a generation before Barack Obama’s historic election; and as an all-American story in which hard work and talent meet opportunities. Powell was born to Jamaican immigrants in Harlem on April 5, 1937, and raised in the South Bronx. After finding the military at City College of New York and graduating first in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) class in 1958, Powell began a career in the army and in Washington that would take him to the center of U.S. foreign policymaking. After formative experiences during the Vietnam War, Powell met mentors Frank Carlucci and Caspar Weinberger at the Office of Management and Budget in 1972, forging relationships that would open future opportunities. In addition, changing realities in American life aided his rise, as the armed forces, desegregated after World War II, expanded African American leadership opportunities. During the Carter administration, Secretary of the Army Clifford

Alexander, the first African American in that position, tripled the number of African American generals, and Powell, at 41, became the youngest general in the army in 1978. It would be under Republican presidents, from Ronald Reagan forward, that Powell, well positioned by experience, rank, and his connections, would take unprecedented roles for African Americans. Under Reagan, Powell served as national security adviser, the first African American in that position. President George H. W. Bush then appointed Powell chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the first African American and youngest JCS chair ever. When his term ended in 1993, Powell enjoyed remarkable public respect, published a best-selling memoir, and considered, but ultimately declined, the opportunity to run for president. From 2001 to 2005, Powell held his last prominent policy position, serving as George W. Bush’s secretary of state, another African American first. Powell’s experiences in Vietnam were crucial to his future approach to policymaking. During two tours there, Powell maintained his allegiance to the institution of the military, while also being struck by the sometimes absurd, ineffective ways in which the United States prosecuted the war. With the war lost and the military’s reputation at its nadir, Powell strove, as others did, to divine “the lessons of Vietnam” and to respond to the inhibiting influences of the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.” For Powell, these lessons were largely understood in military terms, rather than policy ones; he hoped that by learning them, the military might be rebuilt and utilized more wisely. Ultimately, Powell’s ideas about the proper use of force would be encapsulated in the “Powell Doctrine,” a set of guidelines made famous during the U.S. wars in Panama (1989) and the Persian Gulf (1991). Falling during Powell’s term as JCS chair, as well as during the surprising end to the Cold War, to which Powell had contributed as national security adviser during the height of Reagan-era diplomacy with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, these wars both responded to Powell’s ideas about post-Vietnam use of the military and rebuilt the reputation and morale of the military itself. Powell’s ideas, a variation of those announced by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in 1984, urged the use of the military only in situations in which public support was strong, objectives were clear and achievable, and the use of force was overwhelming and, thus, likely decisive. During both wars, the largest American troop commitments since Vietnam, Powell became a famous and reassuring presence on American television, presenting these carefully prosecuted wars as clear military successes. The effects of these wars on future policy, however, were complex. The Powell Doctrine had seemingly delivered easy victories, but these successes, coming as the Soviet Union disappeared as a counterweight to U.S. power, emboldened some to see the Powell Doctrine as too limiting and haunted by Vietnam to continue to apply in the post–Cold War world. Divisions over these questions, with Powell on one side and hawks and neoconservatives on the other, would reemerge in the George W. Bush administration, when preemptive wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq would be prominent responses to the attacks of 9/11. As secretary of state, Powell struggled and then failed to defend his ideas in the face of more ideological advisers, such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard Cheney, who discounted the Powell Doctrine and saw the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to project overwhelming U.S. power into the Middle East. Additionally, George W. Bush often saw the world in Manichean and unilateral terms that proved popular in the aftermath of 9/11. In this context, Powell’s State Department diplomacy was sidelined in favor of a military approach. Ultimately, despite his concerns and doctrine, Powell fell in line with the idea of invading Iraq. More troubling, Powell was deployed to sell the idea of the invasion in a crucial speech at the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003—despite his misgivings about the intelligence information, soon thoroughly discredited, that he was presenting. Thus, Powell ended up justifying a war in Iraq that violated the lessons he had derived from the Vietnam War

and his years of policymaking, a troubling and disappointing moment in his long career. After resigning in 2005, Powell distanced himself from the increasingly unpopular policies of the Bush administration. He endorsed Barack Obama for president twice, reinforcing his reputation as a pragmatic “political general” who transcended narrow partisanship. Rising from modest circumstances, Colin Powell built an impressive military and policymaking career that reached unprecedented heights for an African American and involved him in many crucial military and foreign policy debates of the post-Vietnam era. Despite his role in enabling the ultimately unpopular war in Iraq, he remains a well-respected elder statesman in contemporary American life. Derek N. Buckaloo See also: Afghanistan (1990–2014); Cheney, Richard B. “Dick”; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011); Panama Invasion; September 11, 2001 (9/11); Vietnam Syndrome; Vietnam War

Further Reading Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Viking, 2004. O’Sullivan, Christopher D. Colin Powell: A Political Biography. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Powell, Colin, with Joseph E. Persico. My American Journey. New York: Random House, 1995.

Private Military Contractors The modern life of the mercenary is at least as old as political thought about the state. Florentine philosopher (1469–1527) Niccolò Machiavelli, the founding father of realist thinking in international relations, warned of the dangers posed by condottieri in his early modern handbook of statecraft, The Prince. Mercenaries remained a significant presence in warfare for much of the 18th century before receding in importance with the rise of consolidated nation-states. The latter sought and retained near monopolies on violence for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, a period when mercenaries were small in number and tended to operate as minor players at the peripheries of global conflict. The United States, like other states, is known to have employed individual “soldiers of fortune” in Cold War conflicts, but this was mostly a secondary measure—reflected, for instance, in the bitter memoir of Congo mercenary Michael Hoare. In it Hoare brags about defeating forces commanded by Che Guevara at Baraka in 1965, but complains about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s reluctance to hire his services despite his antiMarxist credentials. The private mercenary company emerged as a major force in contemporary conflict during the latter years of the Cold War. Although prosecuting foreign conflicts with private military forces was never an exclusively American phenomenon, without question the global privatization of military security since the last decades of the 20th century has been led by the U.S. government and its closest transatlantic ally, Great Britain. With roots in the 1970s and 1980s when neoliberal predispositions toward governmental outsourcing took sway and unprecedented mobility of corporate capital was unleashed, the process gathered pace in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Small arms from Eastern Europe flooded Africa, turning fragile states like Sierra Leone into business opportunities for private individuals previously employed in public militaries that were downsizing due to the end of Cold War hostilities. British firms such as the (now defunct) London-based Sandline led the way in contexts like Papua New Guinea, subcontracting to a South African company with offices in London called Executive Outcomes (also now defunct). America’s traumatic experience of “peacekeeping” in Somalia in the early 1990s

increased the appeal of private contractors for the Clinton administration, allowing it to place distance between itself and unpredictable events on the ground. By 1997, for example, a British security firm was being used to guard the U.S. embassy in the former Zaire. American firms, for their part, had been profiting from foreign military engagements since at least the 1970s and, supported by their government, have played a key role in turning private security into a legitimate and profitable industry. The employment of Vinnel Corporation, a construction firm with military experience in Asia during World War II, was a harbinger during the Nixon years: Vinnel’s 5,000 personnel were contracted to conduct covert military operations when the United States found itself bogged down and short of manpower in Vietnam before going on to train the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) for a $77 million contract secured in 1975. The 1990s proved to be a boon for Vinnel and companies such as MPRI (Military Professional Resources Incorporated), a Virginia-based firm founded by former Special Forces personnel in 1986. By 1998 MPRI was drawing upon a database of 6,000 former servicemen to engage in 17 overseas conflicts including Angola and the Balkans. Braddock, Dunn and McDonald (BDM), also headquartered in Virginia, was perhaps the best-known U.S. beneficiary of the 1990s: by 1995 it employed 8,000 staff in more than 80 offices worldwide. It was not until after 2001, however, that George W. Bush’s administration made private security companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, DynCorp, and Blackwater household names by bringing them into the boardroom, stock market, and combat mainstream with unprecedented enthusiasm. With 48,000 mercenary security forces fighting in Iraq, the meteoric rise of the private military contractor in the Bush era is captured by a single statistic: a greater number of personnel from U.S. private security firms were engaged in Iraq than forces from Great Britain, the second largest national contributor of troops after the United States. In the new imperial era of Iraq and Afghanistan, private mercenary forces came to be seen as indispensable for waging war and providing security for governments, companies, and international organizations in hostile environments. Known variously as PMCs (private military contractors) and PMSCs (private military and security companies), this new generation of soldiers of fortune came to form a vast global industry. Operating across 50-odd countries at any one time, their work includes providing security to convoys, operational support, training, technical assistance, and intelligence gathering, thus blurring the line between combat and noncombat operations. And it is immensely profitable: according to some estimates, the PMC business was worth $100 billion by 2004. Despite the legitimatizing of PMC operations as an acceptable part of the U.S. military establishment —generally receiving very little media attention during the 1990s period of their growth—the trend toward respectability of PMCs was dealt a serious blow following an incident in the Iraq war in September 2007 when trigger-happy mercenaries working for an infamous firm went on a shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nissour Square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, women and children among them. The rise and fortunes of the company known variously as Blackwater Worldwide, Xe Services, and Academi at different points in its controversial existence—names now synonymous with anarchic violence and war profiteering for many critics—has been carefully documented by journalist Jeremy Scahill. Just before leaving Iraq, a decree was passed giving the U.S. occupation’s PMCs immunity from Iraqi law “with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a contract” (Scahill, 228). Together with the complicated question of where legal responsibility lies in cases of outsourcing, this immunity goes some way to explaining why efforts to prosecute the individuals responsible for Blackwater’s Nissour Square massacre will probably never succeed. Blackwater’s unaccountability in combat is just one aspect of the controversy that now surrounds PMCs; suspect corporate practices have also drawn much criticism. Founded in 1998 by right-wing millionaire Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy Seal backed by Washington lobbyists, Blackwater USA (its

original name) scored millions in government contracts after the Al Qaeda attacks of September 2001, often in dubious circumstances. In 2002, for example, Blackwater was awarded a $5.4 million contract to provide guards for a CIA station in Kabul (Scahill, 109). Leaving aside the high rates charged ($270,000 of taxpayers’ money for each of 20 guards hired for six months), the fact that no other company was offered the chance to bid highlights market distortions stemming from the “revolving door” long associated with what Dwight D. Eisenhower famously called the “military-industrial complex: employment of former state officials and servicemen by companies giving them privileged access to highlevel staff in the Pentagon. The problem predates and is not specific to Blackwater: MPRI started up with some 22 former high-ranking military officials; Braddock, Dunn and McDonald (BDM), perhaps the bestknown U.S. beneficiary of the 1990s, had directors, chairs, chief executives, and consultants including former U.S. defense secretary Frank Carlucci and former secretary of state James Baker. For all its sordid details, Blackwater’s controversial role in Iraq has perhaps detracted from broader, equally serious dimensions of private military contracting—above all, far-reaching revelations that the U.S. government is now outsourcing 70 percent of its intelligence budget to an army of corporations participating in covert operations. Journalist Tim Shorrock has tracked the path of $42 billion in taxpayers’ money circulating through the “intelligence-industrial complex”—a new alliance between private-sector contractors and the state exemplified in the activities of companies like San Diego–based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). As with PMCs, a pattern of corruption has come to light—epitomized by the case of former Republican congressman Randy Cunningham, convicted of pocketing $2.4 million in bribes as a fee for directing government business to a contractor. There is also evidence of a revolving door: so many National Security Agency officials are employed by the SAIC that insiders call it “NSA West”; the firm of Booz Allen employs former CIA director R. James Woolsey and a host of former U.S. intelligence officials. And almost without exception, intelligence company employees at all levels are paid far more than their counterparts inside U.S. intelligence agencies. Finally, there is the Edward Snowden affair: revelations by the NSA whistleblower that technology companies like Microsoft connived with U.S. intelligence agencies to devise ways of circumventing their own encryption mechanisms provide evidence that the intelligence-industrial complex has made a mockery of civil liberties. Critics argue that in turning espionage into a corporate activity driven by profiteering elites, the new regime of intelligence gathering has compromised the privacy and security of millions of people around the world, including friendly nations, heads of state, and America’s own citizens in ways that have only just begun to be understood. Ali Nobil Ahmad See also: Homeland Security/Intelligence Establishment; Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011); MilitaryIndustrial Complex

Further Reading Cooling, Benjamin F. “The Military-Industrial Complex.” In James C. Bradford, ed. A Companion to American Military History. Malden, MA: Blackwell Malden, 2010, pp. 966–989. Hoare, Michael. Congo Warriors. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 2008. Mathieu, Fabien, and Nick Dearden. “Corporate Mercenaries: The Threat of Private Military and Security Companies.” Review of African Political Economy 34, no. 114 (December 2007): 744–55. Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. New York: Nation Books, 2007. Shorrock, Tim. Spires for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.

Rumsfeld, Donald (1932–) Donald Henry Rumsfeld is one of the most influential and controversial American statesmen and foreign policy figures of the era extending from the last quarter of the 20th century through the presidential administration of George W. Bush (2001–2009). Serving as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford (1975–1977) and President George W. Bush (2001–2006), Rumsfeld is both the youngest and oldest person to have held this position (as well as the only person to serve nonconsecutive terms). He is best remembered as a major figure in the rise of neoconservative foreign policy “hawks” in the late 20th century who argued unabashedly for a muscular U.S. foreign policy that relies primarily on the projection and use of global military power—unilaterally exercised, if necessary—to protect and advance American strategic and economic interests. A graduate of Princeton University, a naval aviator, and native of Evanston, Illinois, Rumsfeld began his career in politics serving as an administrative assistant to David S. Dennison, Jr., an Ohio congressman. In 1962 he was elected to the House of Representatives at age 30 to represent Illinois’ Thirteenth District. He resigned amid his fourth term to serve as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration where he was praised by the president for his toughness and willingness to make hard decisions. After a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Rumsfeld was recalled to Washington to chair the transition team of president-elect Gerald Ford. During Ford’s reorganization of the White House staff (known also as the “Halloween Massacre”), he became U.S. secretary of defense and appointed his friend George H. W. Bush director of the CIA. During his tenure as secretary of defense Rumsfeld sought to increase the defense budget and build up U.S. strategic (nuclear) and conventional forces. Furthermore, he oversaw the transition to the allvolunteer military and the development of the B-1 bomber and cruise missiles despite being opposed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in most of his goals during this time. Rumsfeld left office with Jimmy Carter’s defeat of Ford in the 1976 election. Deciding not to run for president after Carter’s election, Rumsfeld elected to move into the private sector where he assumed executive positions, first in the pharmaceutical industry (G. D. Searle & Company, 1975–1986), and then in broadband technologies (General Instrument Corporation, 1990– 1993), before returning to the pharmaceutical field. Although not serving in the cabinet, Rumsfeld did take on a number of special appointments in the Reagan and Clinton administrations including service as special envoy to the Middle East where he helped arrange the sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein in Iraq for use in that nation’s war with Iran. In the late 1990s, Rumsfeld was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank. In January 1998, Rumsfeld co-signed a PNAC letter urging President Bill Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, citing Saddam’s alleged unwillingness to cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. Clinton refused. When President George W. Bush appointed him secretary of defense in 2001 at age 68, Rumsfeld became the oldest person to hold the office. Returning to his old position, he announced plans to reorganize the military and appropriate funding from maintaining weapons to developing new ones, which he believed would better allow the military to deal with new threats in a changing world. The changes brought him widespread criticism from both military leaders and legislators who claimed he was overreaching his power. After the events of September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld was given the political momentum necessary to push through with his Unified Command Plan, which was designed to streamline command of American

military forces to better prepare them to deal with contemporary threats to U.S. national security interests. Leading the military planning of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld received numerous accolades for the relatively quick tactical victories on both fronts, including the invasion of Baghdad. However, as the war continued and opposition grew, Rumsfeld found himself at the center of much criticism. He was specifically attacked due to the destruction and looting of historical and cultural landmarks as well as power plants during the first phase of the invasion. When the search for the alleged “weapons of mass destruction” that were used to justify the preemptive attack on Iraq failed to produce any such weapons, Rumsfeld, like other members of the Bush national security team, was criticized for statements he made in the run-up to the war, including his echoing the administration’s allegations of an Al Qaeda presence in Iraq.

Donald Rumsfeld served in a number of positions under most Republican presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 2001, he became secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration. Rumsfeld was one of the chief neoconservative architects of the Bush Doctrine and a strong proponent of the invasion of Iraq after the September 11 attacks. (Department of Defense)

As the war in Iraq continued, Rumsfeld worked to deliberately craft a public image that would provide the maximum support for the troops and the war, approving a “roadmap” for Pentagon public relations operations. In these documents he emphasized the use of the word “sacrifice,” claiming that Americans would continue to rally around the troops if the conflict were framed in those terms. Perhaps the greatest trial of Rumsfeld’s career came with the Abu Ghraib (Baghdad Correctional Facility) scandal of 2004. Large numbers of enemy personnel surrendering early in the invasion and

occupation of Iraq were housed in various correctional facilities without the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. During this period it was alleged—with substantial testimonial and photographic documentation—that a number of Iraqis were tortured and humiliated by American soldiers. The Abu Ghraib revelations cast dark aspersions on the behavior of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, sparked a series of investigations of Pentagon decisions that led to the scandal, and led to calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation. Rumsfeld acknowledged his accountability for what had happened and offered President Bush his resignation. However, the president refused the offer and Rumsfeld remained secretary of defense until November 2006. In 2005 the ACLU and Human Rights First filed suit against Rumsfeld for his handling of Abu Ghraib, but a federal judge later dismissed the suit. Following his resignation, Rumsfeld published his memoirs and established the Rumsfeld Foundation, an educational foundation that provides fellowships to talented individuals with an interest in public service. Edward Schmalz See also: Abu Ghraib; Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011); September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Decter, Midge. Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait. New York: Harper, 2004. Graham, Bradley. By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. New York: Public Affairs, 2010. Rumsfeld, Donald. Known and Unknown. New York: Sentinel, 2011. Rumsfeld, Donald. Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War and Life. New York: Broadside Books, 2013.

Saudi Arabia The birthplace of the Muslim faith, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is known for its vast oil resources, conservative religious practices, and royal dictatorship. Established in 1932 by King Abd-al-Aziz, the country has transformed itself from a desert kingdom to one of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East. Over the years, the ruling Al-Saud family has developed and maintained a special relationship with the United States and has played an instrumental role in shaping regional politics. Saudi Arabia is a founding member of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), and it has more than 25 percent of the world’s known oil reserves. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as of the end of January 2014, Saudi Arabia was the second-largest source of U.S. crude oil imports, providing more than 1.3 million barrels per day (mpd) of the 6.89 mpd in gross U.S. crude imports. In recent years, the kingdom has been facing several challenges from sources both internal and external. It is particularly concerned about regional ambitions of Shia-majority Iran allegedly developing nuclear capabilities. While the United States considers the nuclear politics of Iran primarily as a proliferation issue and secondarily as a threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia perceives Iran as a subversive regional rival that wants to empower the Shia Muslim community across the region at the expense of the Sunnis. Saudi Arabia itself has a sizable minority of Shia Muslims concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province, and the periodic clashes in that area have become a major concern for the authorities. These security fears of Saudi Arabia have made it one of the highest military spenders in the world. According to the CIA World Fact Book (2013), Saudi Arabia ranked fifth in the world in the percentage of GDP invested in defense, at 9.1 percent. Since October 2010, the U.S. Congress has been notified of proposed

sales of various military equipment and services to Saudi Arabia with a potential value of more than $86 billion. However, the sizable military budgets and arms imports have not ensured internal security because of the rising tide of radicalism. It is often said that one of the foreign policy objectives of Saudi Arabia is to promote Wahhabism, an orthodox interpretation of Islam, in the Muslim world. The country actively supported the mujahideen who fought against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. The royal family faced serious criticism from Osama bin Laden and other Islamists for allowing U.S. troops to be stationed in the “holy land” during the Gulf War of 1991. Since the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out mostly by Saudi nationals, the kingdom itself is struggling to curb terrorism and radicalism within its borders. In 2003, suicide bombers allegedly involved with the Al Qaeda network killed 35 people—including a number of foreigners—in the capital, Riyadh. Saudi Arabia also considers Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen and led by Saudi nationals, as the leading terrorist threat to the kingdom. In March 2014, Saudi Arabia formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. However, in December 2010, when diplomatic cables were exposed by whistleblowing website Wikileaks, it was revealed that U.S. officials expressed concerns that Saudi Arabia was the “most significant” source of funding for Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. The Saudi regime is also seriously concerned about the consequences of the 2010–2011 “Arab Spring” that unfolded throughout the Middle East. The regime was dismayed by the demise of a long-time ally, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Saudi troops participated in a crackdown on unrest in Bahrain in support of the Sunni monarch. Since 2011, the government has launched large-scale social spending programs in an attempt to manage the increasing public demands for greater economic and political rights. Although the current king, Abdullah, is known as being a reform-minded person who recognized women’s right to vote and stand as candidates in 2015 municipal council elections and expanded the size of the national Shura Council to include 30 women in the 2013 session for the first time ever, certain gender rights issues have remained unresolved. Saudi women still cannot drive cars and are not permitted to go outside the home without a male escort. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has no elected parliament, and political parties and public dissent are banned. Saudi officials have recently expressed frustration with current U.S. policy decisions regarding Syria. In October 2013, Saudi Arabia turned down a nonpermanent seat on the UN Security Council, accusing the world body of failing to take action against the Assad regime. The kingdom has been actively supporting the rebels in Syria. It has also been reported that in September 2014, Saudi Arabia and four other Arab states took part together with the United States in air strikes against Islamic State militant sanctuaries in Syria. For more than 50 years, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab neighbors have been living under the umbrella of a sizable U.S. military presence. Therefore, recent U.S. announcements of a strategic shift and possible rebalancing of forces away from the Middle East to the Asia Pacific theater has caused discomfort in the kingdom. Furthermore, Saudi officials are also concerned about the future market for oil as the United States has become at least temporarily more energy self-sufficient due to the natural gas boom. However, none of these concerns or complaints signal the end to the special relationship that has endured such challenges as the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the awkward period after the 9/11 attacks. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Egypt; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Middle East; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Bronson, Rachel. Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hegghammer, Thomas. Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

September 11, 2001 (9/11) Also known as 9/11, this day, September 11, 2001, witnessed by far the deadliest terrorist assault ever on American soil, and, in terms of lives lost to a foreign attack on U.S. territory, the number of lives lost on this day exceeded the losses incurred in the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Between 8:46 and 10:03 that morning, two hijacked planes were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Some 2,750 people were killed in New York, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania. The site of the World Trade Center became known as “Ground Zero”— a phrase appropriated from the site of the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. It is alleged that the key operational planner of the attacks was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Egyptian). A total of 19 Islamist militants collaborated in the strikes against the “far enemy”—the United States. The terrorists were purportedly acting in retaliation for the U.S. support of Israel, its involvement in the Persian Gulf War, and its continued military presence in the Middle East. Of the 19 terrorists, 15 were identified as citizens of U.S.-allied Saudi Arabia. It is estimated that the amount of money spent to plan and execute the 9/11 attacks was $500,000. Soon after the attacks, it was alleged that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network was responsible for the attacks. It was later revealed by U.S. and German intelligence agencies that members of the Hamburg terror cell, an Islamist radical group based in Germany and associated with Al Qaeda, played the critical role in carrying out the attacks. The key members included Mohamed Atta, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Marwan al-Shehhi. On September 20, 2001, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and declared: Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. In response to the September 11 attacks, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invoked Article 5, allowing its member states to act collectively in self-defense. On October 7 the United States and allied military forces launched an attack against Afghanistan, home to the Taliban that had provided safe haven to Al Qaeda. Thousands of Islamist militants were killed or captured and top leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were forced into hiding. However, political stability in Afghanistan has not been normalized since then and even after the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the Taliban and Al Qaeda members have remained relevant in the current geopolitical settings of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States also took legal measures to combat and prosecute terrorism domestically. The USA Patriot Act was passed in October 26, 2001, which enabled law enforcement and intelligence agencies to

initiate major surveillance programs. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) was formed in November 2002 to prepare a complete account of the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks, including the preparedness for and the immediate response to the event. The commission reviewed 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewed 1,200 people in 10 countries, and heard testimony from 160 witnesses over a period of 19 days. They produced a final report of nearly 600 pages, which included recommendations designed to guard against future attacks. The U.S. government also initiated a series of unprecedented institutional reforms and expansion programs within the administration. The Department of Homeland Security was created, merging 22 governmental agencies into one; the position of the director of National Intelligence was created and the National Counterterrorism Center was established; the FBI National Security Branch and the military’s Cyber Command were also created in an attempt to reorganize security resources. Following the attacks, a number of conspiracy theories proliferated. According to an opinion poll carried out by Gfk NOP for the BBC’s The Conspiracy Files in 2011, 15 percent of the 1,000 people interviewed in the United States did not believe the official explanation that Al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks, and instead believed the government staged the tragedy. Numerous films and documentaries have also been based on or depicted the attacks. The September 11 attacks ushered in the era of the U.S.-led “War on Terror,” comprised of seemingly endless conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. According to one estimate, after 9/11, about three trillion dollars have been spent by the United States alone to combat terrorism. However, after more than a decade, the prosecution of that war has clearly not been able to win the majority of the “hearts and minds” of much of the Muslim world; indeed, although many terrorists have been killed or captured, the level of seething anti-Americanism has arguably grown worse in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and northern Africa. Meanwhile, the annual commemoration of 9/11 in the United States honors the victims of the attacks but says little or nothing about the historical context or the motivations of those who attacked the United States in this suicide mission—notwithstanding ill-informed declarations of “Islamic extremists” who “hate America.” A National September 11 Museum and memorial plaza were opened in 2011 to memorialize the national tragedy and a similar commemorative memorial was dedicated in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In November 2006, construction of One World Trade Center began at the site of the World Trade Center and it was officially opened in November 2014. Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman See also: Afghanistan (1976–1989); Afghanistan (1990–2014); Al Qaeda; Bin Laden, Osama; Pakistan; Primary Documents: Memories of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks: Narrative of Henrietta McKee Carter (September 11, 2001)

Further Reading Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Soft Power

“Soft power” is a phrase coined by the American thinker Joseph Nye in a 1990 book called Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. He further developed the concept in his 2004 book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. As defined by Nye, soft power is the ability to obtain what one wants through cooption and attraction, and it relies on persuading people to believe in certain cultural and social values and policies. It can be contrasted with “hard power,” which involves the use of coercion (often using military force) or payment. Classic examples of soft power are the “hearts and minds” campaigns that began in the Vietnam War and are often closely associated with (failed) reconstruction efforts such as France’s efforts in Algiers and contemporary efforts in Afghanistan. They often include tactics such as the dropping of leaflets aimed at winning the support of insurgents and civilians in populations divided in their sentiments toward the external military in question. Nye was one of many liberal thinkers whose work gained popularity after the Second World War. These thinkers began to challenge the ideas of the realist thinkers who had dominated prior to the war. They argued that it is not military power that dominates political outcomes as the realists had maintained, but rather strategic relations based on the interdependence between nation-states and nonstate actors, such as multinational corporations. They also maintained that it is state preferences for how to behave, rather than state capabilities, that determine what a state does. So, preferences will be based on various factors including culture, economy, and politics, rather than only security issues. Unlike realists, liberals do not see that limited resources in the world will necessarily create a “security dilemma” as a result of the fight for survival. Nor do they see quarrels between states as inevitable if those states do not intervene to manage the security struggle. Nevertheless, both realists and liberalists are rationalists at heart, believing that actors are basically self-interested and attempt to survive within the context of the resources available to them. Critiques of the soft power liberal perspective come from both sides of the political spectrum. The neorealist (right-wing) thinker Niall Ferguson asserts that only economic incentives and military force can change states’ actions in international relations (Ferguson). Meanwhile, left-of-center theorist Paul Cammack argues that liberal ideas of using cultural elements rather than force still insist upon the necessity of American supremacy (Cammack, 46–48). He sees soft power as a form of cultural imperialism, used to gain what a specific nation state strategically wants while promoting its own values. It is undeniable that soft power has become a key element of 21st-century warfare, whether used on its own or alongside military force. Gaining the support of civilian populations is increasingly seen as a crucial part of any military campaign, and invariably this is manifested in the communication, on the part of the invading force, of cultural values important to it. However, soft power has now become a far wider concept too, often used outside discussion of warfare in a literal sense. For example, China is described as using soft power when it helps build African cities without making any political demands in return. Soft power has almost become a synonym for any type of strategic behavior that appears “friendly” or is nonmilitary. Alison Hulme

Further Reading Cammack, Paul. “Smart Power and US Leadership: A Critique of Joseph Nye.” 49th Parallel 22 (Fall 2008): 5–20. Ferguson, Niall. Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2004. Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Steans, J., and Pettiford, L. Introduction to International Relations: Perspectives and Themes. London: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005.

Somalia The Federal Republic of Somalia is situated on the Horn of Africa and is bordered by Ethiopia on the west, Djibouti in the northwest, the Gulf of Eden in the north, and the Indian Ocean to the east. Its history is fraught with conquest, colonialism, and chaos. In the seventh century the Arabs and Persians set up trading posts along the Gulf of Eden, but before too long Somali nomads had spread throughout the Horn of Africa and hence the country’s name is derived from this nomadic group. By the late 19th century, the area known as Aden was colonized by Great Britain to protect British trade routes. Over the next 60 years, native revolts and various intertribal conflicts helped pave the way for fascist Italy to take Somalia and render it part of the three-state colonial possession of Italian East Africa. Early in World War II, the three states—Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia—were liberated from Axis power control, a development that proved useful to U.S. troops based in the Middle East. At war’s end, negotiations between the so-called Big Four powers and the newly formed United Nations led to the joining of British and Italian Somalilands, and ultimately, independence for Somalia in July 1960. Intertribal conflict did not disappear after independence, but more significant in the 1960s and 1970s was that Somalia effectively became a pawn in the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. After a military coup in 1969, Mohammad Said Barre (1919–1995) rose to power. Although it is popularly accepted that Mohammad Said Barre and his “scientific socialism” regime was aligned with the Soviet Union, a closer examination reveals that his tenure was marked first and foremost by nationalism and a desire to unite all Somali peoples. This, however, put him squarely at odds with U.S. ally Ethiopia whose majority population was Somali. Soviet weapons poured into Somalia and by the mid-1970s, U.S.-built F-5 Ethiopian fighter planes were engaged in combat in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia with Somalis using Mig 16s from the USSR. After the 1977 Ogaden War and a pro-Soviet military coup in Ethiopia, the Soviet Union supported Ethiopia and tried to ally the two Marxist states. Somali nationalism resisted such efforts, but did welcome significantly increased U.S. support that came in response to both the growing Soviet presence and to the heightened significance Somalia had assumed for the United States. In the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the loss of American bases in Iran that followed the overthrow of the U.S.supported shah, Somalia’s strategic geopolitical position on the Horn of Africa not far removed from the shipping lanes of Persian Gulf oil was never more important. In 1980 the United States assumed control of former Soviet military bases in the port of Berbera and made investments to upgrade facilities. The enlarged U.S. presence in Somalia, symbolized by growing military assets and an expansive U.S. embassy, came despite sharp criticism from human rights organizations voicing outrage over Barre’s authoritarian regime that brutally suppressed the Somali people. In 1989 the U.S. Congress agreed and cut off military aid (though other assistance continued). By 1990 competing clans were arming themselves heavily and the country was descending into civil war, with Barre’s military in retreat. Throughout the period, even as American officials publicly criticized the human rights abuses of the government, the U.S. administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, recognizing the essential need to maintain the U.S. military bases at Berera, maintained relations with the Somali government. (Ironically, they proved less important in the 1991 Gulf War as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait brought an invitation from Saudi Arabia to base U.S. military operations there.) Barre was finally overthrown in 1991 and violent lawlessness and anarchy engulfed the capital of Mogadishu. The U.S. embassy was sacked and American officials escaped via aircraft sent from the nearby Gulf War. The civil war among competing clans headed by warlords devastated the country and brought starvation, death, and an enormous refugee population. The humanitarian crisis triggered calls for

a United Nations peacekeeping mission, which the United States initially rejected, as military officials feared its forces would get caught in combat operations and be unable to complete their mission. However, with images of starving Somalis appearing nightly on American television (5,000 per week were dying of starvation), calls for U.S. intervention spiked throughout 1992, a presidential election year.

AFRICOM Formally established in 2008, the United States African Command (AFRICOM) is the U.S. military command structure for the continent of Africa. One of nine “Unified Combatant Commands” of the Department of Defense superimposed across the globe, AFRICOM coordinates all U.S. military activities on the continent. Africa assumed heightened significance following the growth of the Al Qaeda terror network in places like Sudan, and then the September 11, 2001, attacks. In 2014, more than 2,000 U.S. military personnel, private contractors, and Africans were carrying out the AFRICOM mission, which is focused on a range of U.S.-African cooperative security activities—in particular counterterrorism, drug and weapons trafficking, and U.S. energy security. AFRICOM has largely Americanized the military operations of many African nations, integrating U.S. training, military bases, weapons programs, drone fields, intelligence gathering, and financing mechanisms into their operational defense structures. Further, statements by U.S. military officials upon the launch of AFRICOM strongly suggested an integration of African operations with those of NATO and the European Union, which evoked fears in many corners of African recolonization. The U.S. presence on the continent has thus far in the 21st century been focused on military operations. For example, a 2011 AFRICOM-NATO strike took down Libyan strongman and longtime American nemesis Muammar Qaddafi, and in 2012 a military coup in the West African nation of Mali received U.S. training. Although U.S. presidents have declared that AFRICOM’s mission is to advance peace and security for African peoples, U.S. military leaders candidly admit that ensuring the free flow of oil and other natural resources from Africa is fundamental to its purpose. This is especially true in hot spots like Nigeria, where indigenous, increasingly militant resistance groups have been struggling against U.S. and Western oil company depredations on human rights and environmental despoliations.

In December, following his loss to Bill Clinton, President George H. W. Bush initiated Operation Restore Hope, a U.S.-led military operation to provide food relief that received ancillary support from African and other nations, approval from the UN Security Council, and an agreement that the UN take over the operation after six months. U.S. forces produced dramatic success almost immediately, with deaths and starvation rates falling rapidly, and the operation appeared successful. By mid-1993, however, as the operation turned to restoring civil order and nation building, a few warlords—Mohammed Aideed, most notably—felt threatened and determined to force the evacuation of foreign troops. Twenty-five Pakistani peacekeepers were killed. On October 3, 1993, the UN operation commander, U.S. admiral Jonathan Howe, ordered a U.S. Ranger assault on Aideed’s compound. The “Battle of Mogadishu” resulted most famously (in the form of a subsequent Hollywood film) in the shooting down of an American Blackhawk helicopter and the deaths of 18 U.S. military personnel and hundreds of Somalis. President Bill Clinton pulled all U.S. forces out of Somalia and in an attempt to deflect U.S. responsibility, cast blame for the operation on the UN command structure—doing permanent damage to American attitudes toward the international body. In 2006, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (al Shabaab) formed to wage a militant terror campaign against the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (2006–2012) and the African Union Mission of Somalia (AMISOM)—both of which they saw as constructs of the UN, the United States, and all imperial “enemies of Islam.” The United States, with strategic interests in the country dating to World War II and continuing through the Cold War and into the contemporary era of counterterrorism that is entwined with concerns over access to oil and other regional resources, is certainly counted among those enemies likely to remain so.

Umeme Sababu and Chris J. Magoc See also: Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm)

Further Reading Cohen, Herman J. “Somalia and the United States: A Long and Troubled History.” All Africa: http://allafrica.com/stories/200201210455.html. Accessed October 1, 2014. Fergusson, James. The World’s Most Dangerous Place. New York: Bantam Press, 2013. Lewis, I. M. A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa. London: Longman, 1980. Njoku, Raphael Chijoke. The History of Somalia. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2013.

Sustainable Development From governments to green NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and ecologically conscious electorates in advanced capitalist countries, few ideas are more widely embraced than sustainable development. However, the range of definitions with which sustainable development is associated has become so broad that it has no singular meaning. Most scholars see a proliferation of different “discourses” and practices, the meaning of which varies according to the specific contexts in which they are invoked (Redclift, 275). This sense of caution in approaching the term sustainable development is further underscored by the broadly diverse span of its proponents, from the late conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher to American ecological economist Herman Daly. The malleability of “sustainable development”—together with its invocation by many critics of U.S. foreign policy and corporations—is key to understanding its effective functioning as a tool of U.S. imperialism. At the ideological level, the mantra of sustainable development has effectively obfuscated and sometimes deliberately “greenwashed,” as many critics argue, the actual interests and policies advanced in its name. These are overwhelmingly tied to the Washington Consensus, a parcel of neoliberal reforms pushed by the Bretton Woods institutions, themselves central to the international architecture of U.S. hegemony and financial control of the world system. In this respect, sustainable development is not a strategic conspiracy hatched in the White House or even a singular policy that always benefits U.S. national-imperial interests exclusively and directly. It is, rather, one plank in an array of ideological tools that coopt and neutralize any serious critique of U.S.-led economic domination and prescriptions for development. Given that at the turn of the millennium, industrial countries represented 22 percent of the world’s population but consumed 70 percent of its energy and owned 92 percent of its cars, this critique has centered around North-South inequalities and poverty in developing countries, where 80 percent of agricultural land is held by 3 percent of all landowners and most people struggle to access clean drinking water. Neoliberal policies advanced by the United States, either directly or through organizations that embrace the rhetoric of sustainable development, do not address these systemic, fundamental issues, and instead focus on maximizing growth-oriented industrial production, consumption, and profits for TNCs (transnational companies). Far from solving the earth’s ecological crises, many observers view these very policies as root causes of environmental degradation in the South, where most of humanity resides (Haque, 201–202). The dominant sustainable development discourse is derived from the 1987 Brundtland Report, a document produced by the Brundtland Commission headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway respected for her background in sciences and public health. Known formally as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), the Brundtland Commission was

appointed by the United Nations to address growing concerns about environmental degradation within an international framework of cooperation. Our Common Future, as the report was called, advocated “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 8). The manipulability of this formulation lies in its nonspecificity: neither “development” nor “needs” are defined clearly. The title of the report is also conveniently vague, the word “our” cloaking inequalities in power between nations and regions.

Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, chairwoman of the World Commission on Development and the Environment, presents an environmental report entitled “Our Common Future” at a press conference in London, April 27, 1987. The report was the result of a three-year study by a 21-member panel drawn from poor countries as well as the West and the former Soviet bloc, and was a foundational document for the emerging field of sustainable development. (AP Photo/Gill Allen)

These elisions were in stark contrast to international declarations that since the 1960s and 1970s had raised awareness of environmental degradation as a global problem in the first place. Indeed, the backdrop to the Brundtland Commission’s appointment in the early 1980s was a decade of debates and calls for action that were quite specific about the role of structural inequalities between rich and developing nations in causing ecological problems. At the 1972 Stockholm Conference, for instance, India declared “poverty as the greatest polluter” and, along with China and even moderate nations such as the Philippines, was heavily critical of the advanced industrial nations for having plundered the natural resources of other countries to reach their present state of wealth (Nayar, 1327). So too the Cocoyoc Declaration of 1974. Forged at a conference in Mexico organized by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and its Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), it declared that “the problem today is not one primarily of absolute physical shortage but of economic and social maldistribution and usage” (UNEP/UNCTAD, 1974). In the context of such potentially transformative ideas gaining currency, the Brundtland Commission’s generic commitments to the “needs” of “future generations” formulated in the 1980s were hardly

revolutionary; nor was it surprising that they have been embraced and disseminated by technocrats through international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, which could over time absorb the rhetoric of ecologists while diluting the substance of their demands. “Sustainability” by the 1990s came to serve as a comforting distraction from systemic issues, such as rich countries’ toxic dumping in the South. In the years since its adoption, critics have charged that U.S.-led capitalism has deployed sustainability to beat opponents at their own game by “appear[ing] greener than green” (Doyle, 772). Moreover, technocratic notions of sustainable development have actually facilitated a more extensive commodification of the earth’s natural resources than was previously considered possible. Before sustainability gained currency, the idea that profits and growth might be constrained by the environment’s physical limits were being made in a number of influential circles, most notably by the global think tank, the Club of Rome, a cosmopolitan organization of concerned scientists, economists, businessmen, civil servants, and former heads of state. Although the club’s 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, was concerned predominantly with population growth as a cause of environmental degradation, its emphasis on biophysical restrictions on development contrasts starkly with the sustainable development line summed up in the remarks of then U.S. president George Bush who declared at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro: “Twenty years ago some spoke of limits to growth. But today we now know that growth is the engine of change. Growth is the friend of the environment” (Doyle, 773). His successor Bill Clinton urged Americans to reject “the false choice” between environmental responsibility and the economy, and went even further than this, identifying market-oriented growth as a solution to environmental problems: “Adam Smith’s invisible hand can have a green thumb,” Clinton proclaimed in a speech that helped pave the way for market-based trading in carbon emissions (Doyle, 777). In that spirit, Agenda 21, a nonbinding action plan forged at Rio, dubbed by some the “Sustainable Development Bible,” represents ecological crises such as global warming and species extinction in apolitical, scientific terms that can be addressed with technocratic solutions. As such, its bureaucratic proponents are completely at one with the Washington Consensus imposed on many of even the most autonomous of Southern nations. The wording of the current Ramsar Convention on Wetlands makes no reference to developmental limits, emphasizing instead that “management and wise use” are its priority (Doyle, 775). The United Nations Panel on Water declared in 1998 that “water should be paid for as a commodity rather than treated as an essential staple to be provided free of cost” (Bond, 7). The World Bank, by its own admission, played an “instrumental” role in “facilitating a radical revision in South Africa’s approach to water management” in 1995 when Water Minister Kader Asmal accepted its advice not to supply South Africans with free water a year after the first democratic election (Bond, 13). Beyond the bureaucrats, sustainable development has spawned a powerful “green business” elite evidenced in the fashioning of networks such as the Business Council on Sustainable Development, Greening of Industry, Cleaner Production, Roundtable, and Natural Step, all of which, according to their critics, propagate the idea that there is no contradiction between linear growth models, corporate profits, and preservation of the earth (Bond, 10–11). The green business elite speak of the global poor in economistic terms as suffering from a “lack [of] capital to invest in environmental protection,” and preach the virtues of green growth through increased trade via devices such as GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) and the WTO (World Trade Organization), all part of the U.S.-led imperial edifice. The developing world, they argue, must diversify and expand entrepreneurial market activity; TNCs that profit from privatizations of resource and energy sectors are the best agents of this change. Their profits have skyrocketed under Washington Consensus–led globalization, which, based on U.S.-style pluralistcorporatist models of governance, has weakened the capacity of Third World countries to regulate the

environmental damage caused by TNCs and reduced resistance to the tame lobbying of NGOs for piecemeal improvements in individual sectors to address individual problems (Doyle, Haque).

MONSANTO Founded in 1901 and headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Monsanto is an American transnational corporation that boasts more than a century of industry leadership in the fields of plastics engineering and innovation, agrochemical herbicides and insecticides, and agricultural biotechnology. Monsanto’s association with the U.S. military is most noted for the company’s production of Agent Orange, the carcinogenic defoliant that received widespread use in the Vietnam War. In the 1970s and 1980s Monsanto was at the forefront of the burgeoning agrochemical industry’s efforts to genetically modify plant cells, and by 1990 it had successfully proven in field trials the viability of large-scale genetically modified food production. By the turn of the century, Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide had gained unrivaled supremacy in the agrochemical industry. Engineered to kill all plants except those genetically engineered to resist it, Roundup was sold to farmers around the world as an effective weed killer, but the herbicide’s toxins accumulate in the soil over time and render the plant incapable of reproducing. Farmers—and nations’ agricultural ministries—then have often been compelled to turn to Monsanto’s line of Roundup-Ready Seed, which are Roundup-resistant seeds for the production of corn, soy, wheat, and other crops. This transformational development in global agriculture has led to Monsanto’s overwhelming dominance in genetically modified foods (GMOs, genetically modified organisms). Roundup, GMOs, the patenting and selling of RoundupReady Seed, and Monsanto’s related aggressive purchase of seed varieties in the United States and all around the world— for the purpose of Monsanto’s subsequent patenting of them—have inspired grassroots protest and legal resistance to Monsanto. The corporation has come to symbolize the globalized, industrialized production of food that millions see as being closely associated with U.S. hegemonic domination. As of 2014, at least 26 nations had banned GMO foods from sale.

In short, despite its origins in the environmental movement “sustainability” in the realm of international geopolitics has been deployed to advance neoliberal policies and privatization of natural resources in the Third World. According to a growing consensus of critics, its ideological promise contrasts starkly with its reality: limitless, untrammeled commodification of the environment by the United States and its associated protagonists in imperial domination—other rich nations, multinational corporations, and Third World elites. Ali Nobil Ahmad See also: Bretton Woods Conference/System

Further Reading Bond, P. “Something for Nothing in the Discourses of Sustainable Development.” Paper presented to the Eighth Critical Methods Conference, Unisa Sunnyside Campus, Pretoria, September 5, 2002. Club of Rome. The Limits to Growth, A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. London: Earth Island Limited, 1972. Doyle, T. “Sustainable Development and Agenda 21.” Third World Quarterly 19, no. 4 (1998): 771–786. Haque, M. H. “The Fate of Sustainable Development under Neo-liberal Regimes in Developing Countries.” International Political Science Review 20, no. 2 (1999): 197–218. Nayar, K. R. “Politics of ‘Sustainable Development.’” Economic and Political Weekly (May 28, 1994): 1327–1329. Redclift, M. “Sustainable Development (1987–2005)—An Oxymoron Comes of Age.” Horizontes Antropológicos, Porto Alegre 12, no. 25 (January/June 2006): 65–84. Stockholm Declaration (Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment), 1972. Published by UNEP (United Nations Environment Program). http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=97&ArticleID=1503. Accessed October 20, 2014. UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program)/UNCTAD (Commission on Trade and Development), 1974. Published by UNEP. http://www.unep.org/geo/geo3/English/045.htm. Accessed October 20, 2014. World Commission on Environment and Development (WECD). Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

True Lies (James Cameron) (1994) Directed and co-produced by James Cameron, True Lies is an action-comedy motion picture starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Tia Carrere, Art Malik, and Charlton Heston. The film was released on July 15, 1994, and grossed more than $25 million its opening weekend, the start of a total U.S. box office revenue of $146 million. At the time of its release, True Lies was the most expensive movie ever filmed, requiring a production budget of $115 million. Schwarzenegger plays the role of Harry Tasker, an undercover agent for the U.S. government’s counterterrorism taskforce known as the “Omega Sector.” Gib (Arnold) is Tasker’s partner. Tasker has kept his true occupation a secret from his wife Helen (Curtis) and their daughter, Dana, by claiming that he is a computer salesman for Tektel, a fictitious corporation. Tasker and Gib discover in Switzerland that a radical Palestinian terrorist organization, Crimson Jihad, is plotting to smuggle loose nuclear warheads from the former Soviet Union into the United States. To pull this off, the weapons were to be imported into the country by Juno Skinner (Carrere), a bogus fine art collector and dealer, who has a working and sympathetic relationship with Crimson Jihad’s leader, Salim Abu Aziz (Malik). After successfully smuggling the first few nuclear weapons, Crimson Jihad delivers an ominous televised message that they will continue to detonate a bomb in a major U.S. city until the federal government accepts the group’s terroristic demands. The first city Crimson Jihad has chosen to target is Miami; the climax of True Lies follows Tasker’s and Gib’s efforts to thwart this attack and rescue Dana, whom the terrorists have taken hostage after learning that she is Harry’s and Helen’s daughter. Much like previous freedom-fighting motion pictures, such as Commando (1985), First Blood (1982), Invasion USA (1985), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), True Lies delivers plenty of excessive shoot-’em-up action sequences and over-the-top explosions. Some critics condemned the film on the grounds that the zealotry displayed by Salim Abu Aziz and Crimson Jihad—as in many other films before it—reinforced negative stereotypes and ethnic prejudices toward Muslims and persons of Arab and Middle Eastern descent, and misrepresented as nothing more than violently irrational the legitimate geopolitical demands of Palestinians. However, True Lies does mark an important shift in the history of Hollywood’s geopolitical agenda. Whereas previous action films primarily centered around American heroes confronting Communists, by the mid-1990s, concern over terrorism on the silver screen increasingly focused on Middle Eastern and North African Islamic extremists. This reflected real-life events, particularly the Soviet Union’s collapse, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Concern over terrorist accessibility to nuclear weapons from former Soviet republics emerged as a national security concern immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Justin D. García See also: Invasion USA; “Rambo” Films; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Flynn, John L. The Films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. New York: Citadel Press, 2000. Saunders, Dave. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Movies. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Venezuela

The relationship of the United States toward the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (Venezuela) since the 1990s is one marked by two radically different periods. From 1958 when dictator Perez Jimenez was overthrown as president of Venezuela and continuing for four decades into the late 1990s, the relationship was marked by one of indirect imperial control. A succession of presidents supported Washington’s Cold War policies throughout the hemisphere and beyond, going so far as to back U.S. invasions in the Dominican Republic (1965) and the U.S. CIA’s role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile (1973)—events otherwise widely condemned throughout Latin America. From 1976 to 1998, U.S. oil companies received very generous terms for the extraction of Venezuelan petroleum. The relationship changed dramatically in 1998 with the election of President Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), continuing under President Nicolás Maduro (b. 1962). Coming to power amid a wave of other Latin American leaders denouncing neoliberal policies that were increasingly causing widespread economic pain and social disruption, Chávez’s socialist policies challenged the dominant economic orthodoxy of corporate globalization. More significantly, Chávez condemned U.S. foreign policy past and present throughout Latin America and beyond. He was a fierce, acerbic critic of President George W. Bush and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as the increased deployment of U.S. surveillance and the larger “War on Terror” that commenced following the attacks of September 11, 2001. What brought Chávez to power was a surge of anger building over the course of two decades of neoliberal economic policies (e.g., privatized natural resources and public services, austerity programs) imposed by the International Monetary Fund and other U.S.-led external forces in which the Venezuelan government proved quite complicit. By the early 1990s, the country was in turmoil with rising unemployment and a poverty rate of nearly 50 percent. Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez (1916–2009), who had previously served the country as president in the 1970s, presided over this period of growing unrest. One of his acts was to pardon Hugo Chávez, who had led a coup against the previous regime in 1992 and been imprisoned. Chávez then was free to form a Socialist Party, campaign against Venezuela’s current policies, and push for an end to the nation’s longstanding subservient position vis-à-vis the United States. Chávez immediately allied his government with those of other Socialists in the region, including Fidel and Raul Castro in Cuba, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. Intending to avoid the fate of other left-leaning leaders of Latin America who fell victim to U.S. intervention, Chávez fortified his support among enough political and economic elites and Venezuelan military officials to ensure his survival in the face of what he expected would be an American effort to overthrow his government. Indeed, in April 2002, the George W. Bush administration—though it denied the charges—attempted to engineer a failed coup d’etat that was roundly condemned throughout Latin America. As conservativeneoliberal regimes that had long been compliant with U.S. wishes continued to fold in the face of a rising Socialist “pink tide” in the region, Chávez won a massive following, becoming the most popular Latin American leader since the rise of Castro in the 1950s and 1960s. His popularity grew even stronger following his condemnation of the Colombian-based U.S. military’s drug war and the internationally condemned U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. After his critique of American foreign policies sharpened, U.S. oil concessions in the country were nationalized, and oil and other corporate officials attempted an economic “lockout” in another failed effort to topple the Chávez government. The response was a further radicalization of Chávez’s policies, a heightening of his anti-imperialist rhetoric, and—helped by generous social programs funded by the largesse of a nationalized oil industry—reinforced support among most sectors of the Venezuelan population for Chávez. Despite repeated assertions by U.S. officials even in the administration of Barack Obama of a lack of democratic rule and bona fide charges of corruption in

the Venezuelan government, its anti-imperialist posture and Socialist policies have been ratified in repeated referenda and elections that have largely been internationally sanctioned as legitimate. Chris J. Magoc

Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez waves after his speech to the nation upon his return to the presidential palace on April 14, 2002, two days after being ousted in a failed coup d’etat. Chávez alleged the coup was engineered by the U.S. administration of George W. Bush. (Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)

See also: Bretton Woods Conference/System; Castro Ruz, Fidel; Chile; Colombia; September 11, 2001 (9/11)

Further Reading Ciccariello-Maher, George. We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Kozloff, Nikolas. Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the United States. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

Wolfowitz, Paul (1943–) Paul Dundes Wolfowitz is a former U.S. deputy secretary of defense and former president of the World Bank Group. Born December 22, 1943, to Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes, Wolfowitz grew up in Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. In 1961, Wolfowitz graduated from Cornell with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and chemistry. In 1972, he earned a PhD from the University of Chicago, his doctoral dissertation focusing on nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Throughout the 1970s, Wolfowitz worked as an aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson, served under Fred Iklé as part of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and served as a member of Team B, a Central Intelligence Agency committee responsible for analyzing Soviet threats to the United States. In 1977, Wolfowitz became the U.S. deputy assistant secretary for Defense Regional Programs under President Carter’s secretary of defense, Harold Brown. Under President Reagan, he would become director of policy planning in 1981 and a year later was appointed assistant secretary of state for East

Asian and Pacific affairs. In 1986, Wolfowitz served as the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia until 1989 when he became George H. W. Bush’s undersecretary of defense for policy until 1993. During his tenure as undersecretary of defense for policy, Wolfowitz and his deputy, Scooter Libby, wrote the “Defense Planning Guidance for Years 1994–1999,” which was not intended for public release, but was leaked to the New York Times on March 7, 1992. The “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” as this document came to be known, outlined policies for unilateral and preemptive military interventions that would quash supposed international threats to the United States and actively prevent other nations from achieving superpower status. Due to public outcry, the document was significantly revised under the supervision of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney prior to its official release on April 16, 1992. During the Clinton administration, Wolfowitz worked as a professor of international relations and dean of the Paul N. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. In 2000, Wolfowitz was hired as George W. Bush’s foreign policy adviser, later serving during the Bush administration as deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld. Although the initial “Wolfowitz Doctrine” was met with much controversy, many of its imperialistic principles would reemerge in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” becoming the basis for foreign policy and military defense strategies collectively known as the Bush Doctrine—most notably the preemptive military invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on an assumption (later proved false) that Saddam Hussein harbored “weapons of mass destruction.” In 2005, Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank through nomination by President George W. Bush. Two years later, Wolfowitz would resign as a result of controversy over his leadership, which partially manifested as a result of his attempts to change World Bank policies regarding family planning and climate change and from a conflict of interest involving a pay raise and promotion given to his romantic partner, Shaha Riza, a World Bank employee. Chris Vanderwees See also: Bretton Woods Conference/System; Bush Doctrine; Cheney, Richard B. “Dick”; Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) (1990–1991); Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011)

Further Reading Immerman, Richard H. Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Soloman, Lewis. Paul D. Wolfowitz: Visionary Intellectual, Policymaker, and Strategist. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.

World Trade Organization (WTO) The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international governing organization that seeks to facilitate neoliberal economic globalization through the creation and management of international free trade treaties and serves as the venue for dispute resolution. At its most basic, the WTO has three goals: (1) the establishment of international coordination for the “liberalization” of trade, (2) the fostering of a forum where nation-states can negotiate trade agreements, and (3) the management of a governing body that can hear disputes and generate rulings. The WTO functions through a basic logic: to encourage trade among nations one must reduce trade barriers (e.g., customs duties, tariffs, import bans, quotas) and other forms of protectionism. As of August 2013, the WTO had 159 member states and 25 observer governments. The WTO was created in 1995 as the successor to the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT was the outgrowth of post-WWII efforts to structure trade through the United Nations,

first through the International Trade Organization. Between 1947 and 1995 the GATT sought to regulate international trade through the regulation of tariff-based barriers. GATT successfully served to increase merchandise exports—raising levels 6 percent in 1948–1997—and like its descendant the WTO, when disagreements arose, they were mediated through the international body. For the GATT architects, this nearly 50-year period was one of economic growth and prosperity as multilateral trade agreements sought to lower “barriers to trade.” Following an eight-year period (1986–1994) known as the Uruguay Round, the WTO was created. Quickly the WTO became a focus of criticism not only for its expanded mandate, but also its actionoriented enforcement powers. In 1995 when the GATT became the WTO, this change was the result of not only a huge increase in the size of the organization, but also its scope. The GATT was comprised of 10 separate agreements summed up in 80 pages of text, while the WTO was made up of 28 rounds of talks and more than 60 subentities, comprising nearly 30,000 pages of text. The main differences are that while the GATT handed only international trade in (manufactured) goods, the WTO handed this as well as more generalized trade policy, the trade of services and finance, and the governing of international intellectual property, a key field in the 21st century. Despite the WTO’s formation 48 years after the GATT, not for another four years did the WTO become a household name. On November 30, 1999, the WTO launched its third ministerial round, termed “The Millennial Round,” hosted in Seattle, Washington. The meetings were designed to be a three-day conference of world leaders tasked with resolving nascent conflicts within the organization, many of which related to the importing and exporting of agriculture. Despite these intents, the meetings were cut abruptly short when 50,000–75,000 demonstrators forced the events to preemptively end. While the protestors represented a diverse array of critiques, largely focused around issues of the environment, human rights, labor rights, and Third World poverty, they shared a generalized rejection of the economic development the WTO advocated, namely capitalism driven by multinational corporate interests and a reduction in human-centric safeguards in order to increase profits. On the first day of the Seattle meetings, demonstrators engaged in permitted marches and nonviolent civil disobedience designed to disrupt key areas and roads. Simultaneously, other demonstrators moved through downtown Seattle destroying private property— targeting multinational storefronts such as Starbucks, Nike, and various banks—as an outward expression of dissent against “business as usual,” “profits over people,” and “free trade not fair trade.” The protests were marked by a provocative and violent response from police, who were seen by an international audience firing on demonstrators with pepper spray, tear gas, concussion grenades, and (less than lethal) rubber-coated bullets. After the first day of protests more than 600 demonstrators were arrested, scores were injured, and the opening talks of the WTO were postponed as police and city managers developed a plan of continuity. When the talks resumed, they quickly collapsed, as WTO member nations were unable to reach agreements over agricultural and labor standards. The WTO hosted talks two years later in Doha, Qatar, yet this round of negotiations broke down in 2008, again over agricultural issues and accusations of First World bullying. Throughout subsequent rounds of talks, the WTO became mired in a series of collapsed summits and negotiation deadlocks. Since the 1999 “Battle of Seattle,” the portrayal of the WTO as a tentacle of neoliberalism has become commonplace. While those who oppose the WTO have a variety of criticisms, they generally fall into the following categories: (1) the WTO violates national sovereignty and the autonomy of underdeveloped and developing nations, benefiting economies of size over those of smaller nations, (2) the WTO furthers the global wealth gap, the perpetuation of Third World poverty and food insecurity, and (3) the WTO agreements ignore issues of human/labor rights, fail to take into account issues of safety, and contribute to further environmental degradation in the name of increasing corporate profits. Meetings are

said to privilege the industrial realities of the institution’s founding members, and fail to account for asymmetric North/South power relations. The WTO is seen as closed, opaque, and antidemocratic, unaccountable to the global citizenry. Since the WTO is negotiated between member states and business representatives, it fails to adequately integrate the democratic process and solicit participation from citizens. Furthermore, the rulings of the WTO trump national law. This means that a citizenry can campaign for a law—say, for example, one that bans the importing of genetically modified foods—at the national level, yet if this law is understood to violate a trade ruling of a WTO member state, the country must overturn the law and allow the WTO’s international agreement to function. The lack of public input into WTO decision making is a recurrent and structural critique that remains salient. Fundamentally, the WTO’s existence remains controversial, chiefly because it continually fails to address key concerns that it functions to advance trade at the cost of environmental, public health, human rights, and social agendas. Michael Loadenthal

Further Reading Danaher, Kevin, and Roger Burbach, eds. Globalize This!: The Battle Against the World Trade Organization and Corporate Rule. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000. Haerens, Margaret, ed. The World Trade Organization: Opposing Viewpoints. Detroit: Greenhaven Press/Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. Wallach, Lori, and Patrick Woodall. Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO. New York: New Press, 2004.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTS “Defense Planning Guidance,” a Policy Statement on America’s Mission in the Post–Cold War World (1992) Documents called Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) are prepared at the Pentagon on a regular basis, providing direction and guiding principles for U.S. defense policy. The 1992 DPG, the first such document since the end of the Cold War, was prepared by Defense Department officials Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad. The document put forward the first clear articulation of the vision of neoconservative foreign policy, arguing for unchallengeable U.S. military dominance, the abandonment of post–World War II multilaterialism when necessary, and a willingness to take unilateral action—most significantly to take preemptive military action when U.S. interests were threatened. When the draft was publicly leaked, controversy erupted, causing the administration of George H. W. Bush to withdraw it. However, in 2001 with its drafters back in positions of power in the George W. Bush administration, the 1992 DPG would provide the essential framework for U.S. national security policy. The number one objective of U.S. post–Cold War political and military strategy should be preventing the emergence of a rival superpower. “Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

“There are three additional aspects to this objective: First the U.S must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Another major U.S. objective should be to safeguard U.S. interests and promote American values. According to the draft document, the [United States] should aim “to address sources of regional conflict and instability in such a way as to promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems.” The draft outlines several scenarios in which U.S. interests could be threatened by regional conflict: “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict, and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking.” The draft relies on seven scenarios in potential trouble spots to make its argument—with the primary case studies being Iraq and North Korea. If necessary, the United States must be prepared to take unilateral action. There is no mention in the draft document of taking collective action through the United Nations. The document states that coalitions “hold considerable promise for promoting collective action,” but it also states the U.S. “should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies” formed to deal with a particular crisis and which may not outlive the resolution of the crisis. The document states that what is most important is “the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.” and that “the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated” or in a crisis that calls for quick response. Source: National Security Archive. Available online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/doc03_extract_nytedit.pdf.

“A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a Report by the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000 of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (1996) The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, founded in 1984, is an Israel-based think tank with close connections to Washington, D.C., particularly the national security establishment. This document, prepared for then Israeli prime minister–elect Benjamin Netanyahu, called for effectively the abandonment of what had become the cornerstone of the Israeli-Paltestinian peace process: lands and a permanent state for Palestine in exchange for peace and security for Israel. Supplanting that formula would essentially be a unilateral imposition of “peace for peace” on Israeli terms. Its recommendation of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a long-standing goal of Israel, would be pursued by the United States in 2003. The authors included Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, staunch American neoconservatives and hardline supporters of Israel, and insiders in Republican administrations from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. The report is remarkable in laying bare what critics have long argued is a kind of indivisibility between U.S. and Israeli geostrategic interests.

Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions—which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, “New Middle East”—undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous government’s “peace process.” That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass—including a palpable sense of national exhaustion—and forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israel’s efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nation’s streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can: •

•

•

Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, “comprehensive peace” to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power. Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society. Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.

This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages. A New Approach to Peace Early adoption of a bold, new perspective on peace and security is imperative for the new prime minister. While the previous government, and many abroad, may emphasize “land for peace”—which placed Israel in the position of cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat—the new government can promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach, which will be well received in the United States, includes “peace for peace,” “peace through strength” and self reliance: the balance of power. A new strategy to seize the initiative can be introduced: TEXT: We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East. We in Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes. We live in a dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries. Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading “land

for peace” will not secure “peace now.” Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble. It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally. Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, “peace for peace,” is a solid basis for the future. Israel’s quest for peace emerges from, and does not replace, the pursuit of its ideals. The Jewish people’s hunger for human rights—burned into their identity by a 2000-year old dream to live free in their own land—informs the concept of peace and reflects continuity of values with Western and Jewish tradition. Israel can now embrace negotiations, but as means, not ends, to pursue those ideals and demonstrate national steadfastness. It can challenge police states; enforce compliance of agreements; and insist on minimal standards of accountability. Securing the Northern Border Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah [sic], Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by: • • •

striking Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan. paralleling Syria’s behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces. striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.

Israel also can take this opportunity to remind the world of the nature of the Syrian regime. Syria repeatedly breaks its word. It violated numerous agreements with the Turks, and has betrayed the United States by continuing to occupy Lebanon in violation of the Taef agreement in 1989. Instead, Syria staged a sham election, installed a quisling regime, and forced Lebanon to sign a “Brotherhood Agreement” in 1991, that terminated Lebanese sovereignty. And Syria has begun colonizing Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while killing tens of thousands of its own citizens at a time, as it did in only three days in 1983 in Hama. Under Syrian tutelage, the Lebanese drug trade, for which local Syrian military officers receive protection payments, flourishes. Syria’s regime supports the terrorist groups operationally and financially in Lebanon and on its soil. Indeed, the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has become for terror what the Silicon Valley has become for computers. The Bekaa Valley has become one of the main distribution sources, if not production points, of the “supernote”—counterfeit US currency so well done that it is impossible to detect. TEXT: Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syria’s require cautious realism. One cannot sensibly assume the other side’s good faith. It is dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its own people, openly aggressive toward its neighbors, criminally involved with international drug traffickers and counterfeiters, and supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations. Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan “comprehensive peace” and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction

program, and rejecting “land for peace” deals on the Golan Heights. Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy TEXT: We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship. Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Assad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam. But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the ‘natural axis’ with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity. Since Iraq’s future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging—through influence in the U.S. business community—investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon. Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah [sic], Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which— and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows—is King Hussein. Changing the Nature of Relations with the Palestinians Israel has a chance to forge a new relationship between itself and the Palestinians. First and foremost, Israel’s efforts to secure its streets may require hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas, a justifiable practice with which Americans can sympathize. A key element of peace is compliance with agreements already signed. Therefore, Israel has the right to insist on compliance, including closing Orient House and disbanding Jibril Rujoub’s operatives in Jerusalem. Moreover, Israel and the United States can establish a Joint Compliance Monitoring

Committee to study periodically whether the PLO meets minimum standards of compliance, authority and responsibility, human rights, and judicial and fiduciary accountability. TEXT: We believe that the Palestinian Authority must be held to the same minimal standards of accountability as other recipients of U.S. foreign aid. A firm peace cannot tolerate repression and injustice. A regime that cannot fulfill the most rudimentary obligations to its own people cannot be counted upon to fulfill its obligations to its neighbors. Israel has no obligations under the Oslo agreements if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations. If the PLO cannot comply with these minimal standards, then it can be neither a hope for the future nor a proper interlocutor for [the] present. To prepare for this, Israel may want to cultivate alternatives to Arafat’s base of power. Jordan has ideas on this. To emphasize the point that Israel regards the actions of the PLO problematic, but not the Arab people, Israel might want to consider making a special effort to reward friends and advance human rights among Arabs. Many Arabs are willing to work with Israel; identifying and helping them are important. Israel may also find that many of her neighbors, such as Jordan, have problems with Arafat and may want to cooperate. Israel may also want to better integrate its own Arabs. Forging [a] New U.S.-Israeli Relationship In recent years, Israel invited active U.S. intervention in Israel’s domestic and foreign policy for two reasons: to overcome domestic opposition to “land for peace” concessions the Israeli public could not digest, and to lure Arabs—through money, forgiveness of past sins, and access to U.S. weapons—to negotiate. This strategy, which required funneling American money to repressive and aggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the U.S. and Israel, and placed the United States in roles i[t] should neither have nor want. Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality—not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy—based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength—reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past. To reinforce this point, the Prime Minister can use his forthcoming visit to announce that Israel is now mature enough to cut itself free immediately from at least U.S. economic aid and loan guarantees at least, which prevent economic reform. (Military aid is separated for the moment until adequate arrangements can be made to ensure that Israel will not encounter supply problems in the means to defend itself). As outlined in another Institute report, Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, relegislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises—moves which will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders, including Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Israel can under these conditions better cooperate with the U.S. to counter real threats to the region and the West’s security. Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s base of support among many in the

United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense. Such broad support could be helpful in the effort to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel. If Israel wants to test certain propositions that require a benign American reaction, then the best time to do so is before November, 1996. Conclusions: Transcending the Arab-Israeli Conflict TEXT: Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them. Notable Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their perception of Israel’s floundering and loss of national identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel from achieving true peace, and offered hope for those who would destroy Israel. The previous strategy, therefore, was leading the Middle East toward another Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response. Israel’s new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to refocus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel’s socialist foundations with a more sound footing; and to overcome its “exhaustion,” which threatens the survival of the nation. Ultimately, Israel can do more than simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict though war. No amount of weapons or victories will grant Israel the peace it seeks. When Israel is on a sound economic footing, and is free, powerful, and healthy internally, it will no longer simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict; it will transcend it. As a senior Iraqi opposition leader said recently: “Israel must rejuvenate and revitalize its moral and intellectual leadership. It is an important—if not the most important—element in the history of the Middle East.” Israel—proud, wealthy, solid, and strong—would be the basis of a truly new and peaceful Middle East. Participants in the Study Group on “A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000”: Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University Source: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, July 2006. Available online at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm.

Project for the New American Century, Letter to President Bill Clinton Regarding Iraq (January 26, 1998) The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative Washington, D.C.–based think tank that existed from 1997 to 2006. Emerging from the determination of a cadre of military establishment officials to confront the Vietnam Syndrome during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, the PNAC argued for an unprecedented level of U.S. military buildup and international military dominance in the post–Cold War era. In this 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, who had signed the Iraq Liberation Act making support for the internal overthrow of Saddam Hussein official U.S. policy, the PNAC urged the president to forcibly execute the policy. Upon the disputed election of George W. Bush in 2000, many among its leadership assumed positions in the administration and led the administration’s argument for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Honorable William J. Clinton President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor. The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons. Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat. Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously

inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council. We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk. Sincerely, Elliott Abrams Richard L. Armitage William J. Bennett Jeffrey Bergner John Bolton Paula Dobriansky Francis Fukuyama Robert Kagan Zalmay Khalilzad William Kristol Richard Perle Peter W. Rodman Donald Rumsfeld William Schneider, Jr. Vin Weber Paul Wolfowitz R. James Woolsey Robert B. Zoellick Source: Project for the New American Century. Available online at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5527.htm.

United States Information Service, “State Department Fact Sheet on the Enlargement of NATO” (February 11, 1998) It remains a matter of some historical debate precisely what commitment was made by the United States to the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War to not expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the east in exchange for the reunification of Germany and the liberation of former Communist-bloc states. Whether the reported U.S. assertion that NATO would enlarge “not one inch” was official policy or not, there is no doubt that Soviet-Russian leadership understood it as such. As Bill Clinton took office, it was widely assumed that a positive U.S.-Western relationship with a new Russia was predicated on no NATO expansion. Clinton, however, always on the defensive with the U.S. military establishment because of his personal history as an alleged “draft dodger” of the Vietnam War, continually sought to assure critics that he was a reliable defender of U.S. strategic interests. Beyond a demonstrated willingness to use military force, another expression of Clinton’s credentials as commander in chief and defender of U.S. strategic interests—particularly in Eurasia—was his determination to push ahead with the expansion of NATO, despite the end of the Cold War and against the increasingly vehement objections of Russia, which continued to see it as a threat to its own regional interests and security. This State Department fact sheet is a clear testament to that fact. Two of the document’s striking assertions are that NATO expansion was purely defensive, and that it would “erase the Cold War dividing line.” Two decades on, it is fairly clear not only that NATO has become a far more offensive force than it was in the darkest days of the Cold War, but that its expansion has inflamed Russian–U.S. antagonism and helped to incite and justify Russian aggression.

The Enlargement of NATO Why Adding Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO Strengthens American National Security Released by the Office of the Secretary, Office of NATO Enlargement Ratification February 1998 “The bottom line is clear: Expanding NATO will enhance our security. It is the right thing to do.” “We must not fail history’s challenge at this moment to build a Europe peaceful, democratic, and undivided, allied with us to face new security threats of the new century—a Europe that will avoid repeating the darkest moments of the 20th century and fulfill the brilliant possibilities of the 21st.” President Clinton May 31, 1997 “A larger NATO will make us safer by expanding the area in Europe where wars simply do not happen.” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright October 7, 1997 Why Is NATO Enlargement Good for the United States? NATO enlargement will make America safer. Europe remains vital to American interests, and NATO is the most effective institution for protecting the security of the transatlantic area. Adding Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to the Alliance will extend NATO’s stabilizing influence to more of Europe and reduce the chances of aggression or conflict in Central Europe—a region that helped spawn both of this century’s World Wars and the Cold War. NATO enlargement will make NATO stronger. The three new members will add approximately 200,000 troops to NATO’s ranks that can help NATO carry out its missions; indeed, these three states already are contributing over 1,000 troops to the NATO-led mission in Bosnia. NATO has added new members three times since its founding in 1949; now, as then, enlargement will make NATO stronger. NATO enlargement will help consolidate democracy and stability in Central Europe. To join NATO, states must be solid market democracies and have good relations with their neighbors. Just the prospect of NATO enlargement has encouraged states in the region to conclude nearly a dozen major agreements to settle border and ethnic disputes; Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have settled all border issues with their neighbors. Enlargement will help erase the Cold War dividing line. It would be wrong to exclude qualified Central European democracies from Western institutions simply because they were held behind the Iron Curtain against their will. By admitting these three states, and holding the door open to other new members in the future, NATO enlargement will help to erase the outdated and illegitimate Cold War dividing line. Preface

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the most successful alliance in history. For almost 50 years, it has been the primary shield for protecting peace in Europe and the principal institution uniting America and Europe in defense of our common interests. Now, in order to make Europe even more stable and our own country more secure, the United States and its NATO allies have decided to invite three additional states to join the Alliance—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. This proposal requires ratification by the United States, including a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, which is expected to vote on the measure in early 1998. The decision is one of great consequence and demands careful and bipartisan consideration by the Congress and the American public. The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, upon which NATO is based, involves solemn security guarantees. The inclusion of additional states will entail additional costs to all of the Alliance’s members—current and new. The enlargement of NATO will benefit American security in a number of ways but has a range of implications for many aspects of U.S. foreign policy that merit attention. This pamphlet is designed to explain what NATO is, how it plans to add these new members, and why this step, combined with other current policies, will advance the security interests of the United States and all of Europe. NATO Members Belgium Germany Luxembourg Spain Canada Greece The Netherlands Turkey Denmark Iceland Norway United Kingdom France Italy Portugal United States Introduction: Changes in Europe; Challenges for NATO The end of the Cold War transformed Europe and the context in which NATO operates. The Berlin Wall has fallen. New democracies with thriving market economies have emerged across Central Europe. Germany has been reunited. The Soviet Union has dissolved; a democratic Russia and more than a dozen other independent states have taken its place. Such changes in Europe were unimaginable less than a decade ago. These changes hold great promise for the United States. The dangerous nuclear-armed superpower standoff of the Cold War is over. The imminent threat of massive land invasion in Europe is gone. The subjugation of European states has ended. The end of bloc-to-bloc confrontation creates opportunities for nuclear and conventional arms control, as well as for improved cooperation on a host of common challenges from trade, to international crime, to the environment. The rise of free market democracies in the place of the former Soviet bloc also serves our interests. Democratic countries are less likely to attack us and other democracies, and the blossoming of free market economies creates opportunities for U.S. businesses and workers. The interest of the United States lies in consolidating these trends and helping to build an undivided, democratic, peaceful Europe for the first time in its history. Both the current and preceding administrations have relied on a variety of means —bilateral relations, arms control accords, and a number of multilateral institutions—to work toward that goal. Even with the end of the Cold War, NATO remains the vital link in our security relations across the Atlantic. The 16-member Alliance is helping to build a new Europe. It has streamlined its command structure and reduced its force levels, with U.S. troop strength in Europe down from more than 300,000 during the Cold War to about 100,000 today. NATO has taken on new missions, such as the one in Bosnia, where troops from the U.S. and other NATO countries are working side by side with those from Russia,

Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other non-NATO countries. They have succeeded in stopping the killing in Europe’s worst conflict since World War II. NATO also has reached out to other nations. In 1994 NATO launched the Partnership for Peace. This program, which now includes 27 non-NATO states, is open to all the countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union and enables peaceful military-to-military cooperation, such as joint training exercises and the exchange of information. In May 1997, President Clinton and the other NATO leaders signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act, reflecting the desire to build a new and constructive relationship with a democratic, peaceful Russia. NATO also has established a charter with Ukraine and formed the EuroAtlantic Partnership Council to enhance political discussion between NATO and its partner states. The most important change NATO has undertaken is the addition of new members. At the Madrid summit in July 1997, President Clinton and the other NATO leaders unanimously decided to invite Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to begin the process of joining NATO. NATO also declared that the Alliance would keep its door open to other candidate states as well. Meeting in Brussels on December 16, 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her NATO counterparts signed the documents to add the three new members to the Alliance. This addition of new members requires ratification by all 16 current NATO members, including the approval of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. The Senate is expected to vote on the addition of these first three states in the coming months. Members of both parties and both chambers in Congress already have examined questions regarding NATO enlargement in great depth. The Senate alone held 10 hearings on this issue before four different committees in 1997, and more hearings are anticipated in early 1998. NATO’s goal is that all member nations ratify the Alliance’s enlargement by April 1999, the date of the next NATO summit. Why Is Europe Important to the United States? Why should we consider Europe’s security to be “vital” to the United States? What interests do we have there? These are fundamental questions. In the early days of our nation, George Washington warned against entangling alliances, and as a relatively new and weak state we steered clear of being tied to an alliance with any of Europe’s quarreling powers. But with the rise of the United States as a major economic, political, and military power in this century, it became clear that standing aloof from Europe’s problems was neither possible nor desirable. After being drawn into World War I, the U.S. tried to retreat into isolation, rejecting the League of Nations and undermining the Treaty of Versailles. But bitter experience demonstrated that Europe’s problems soon become our own. Adolf Hitler proved that an aggressor bent on European domination also would threaten U.S. interests and shores. American involvement in World War II produced combat losses of nearly 300,000 of our own people and tens of millions more worldwide. After World War II, the United States took a better course. The U.S. made a decision to remain engaged in Europe’s security. In 1947 President Truman launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and prevent its postwar poverty from becoming a breeding ground for new instability. The U.S. and European states also launched a series of economic, political, and security institutions—including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—designed to help pull European countries closer together, to remove the sources of conflict, and to deter future aggression. The establishment of these institutions and America’s new commitments to Europe reflected the unique nature of our transatlantic bonds—bonds of history, heritage, culture, commerce, shared security interests, and shared values. A half-century later, these bonds remain strong. Europe, taken as a whole, is

America’s largest economic partner, accounting for $250 billion in annual two-way trade, and another $250 billion in investment. Our commerce with Europe accounts for millions of American jobs. Similarly, Europe’s states have worked with us in worldwide security efforts, from the Gulf war, to the sanctions that helped end apartheid in South Africa, to today’s NATO-led mission in Bosnia, where almost three-quarters of the troops are European. It is inconceivable for the U.S. to approach the security challenges or commercial opportunities of the next century without European states as our core partners and allies.… Why Is NATO Enlargement Good for U.S. Security? As the U.S. considers ratifying the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO, the most fundamental question is: Why is this in our own national security interest? There are four principal reasons. First, NATO enlargement will make America safer by helping to prevent future conflicts in Europe. Both World Wars and the Cold War had their roots, in part, in Central Europe. It is in our own interest to prevent and deter conflicts in the region that ultimately could draw in American forces. Even though Europe is now relatively peaceful, all danger has not disappeared, as Bosnia proved. A larger NATO can bring more states into the cooperative process of security planning that has built confidence and stability among NATO members. It also can help deter a variety of real and potential threats, including regional conflicts, threats from rogue regimes, such as those with weapons of mass destruction, and the unlikely possibility that Russia’s democratic transition might falter and give way to the patterns of behavior demonstrated during the Soviet period. While enlarging NATO requires that we extend security commitments to the region, doing so actually reduces the chances that our forces will ever have to fight again in Europe. As Secretary of State Albright has noted: “This is the productive paradox at NATO’s heart—by imposing a price on aggression, the Alliance deters aggression.” Second, NATO enlargement will make the Alliance stronger and better able to address future security challenges. The inclusion of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in NATO will add approximately 200,000 troops to the Alliance, along with a proven commitment to European security. The three countries already are contributing more than 1,000 troops to the NATO-led operation in Bosnia, and Hungary has provided the military base at Taszar that has enabled U.S. forces to deploy safely and effectively. Similarly, the Czechs and Poles served with us in the Gulf war, and all three states have been active participants in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. Having so recently regained their own freedom, these three democracies are likely to be energetic allies in helping us to defend freedom in the future. All three states also have made clear commitments concerning their willingness to bear the costs of modernizing their own military forces, so that they can be “security producers” and not simply “security consumers.” NATO has enlarged three times in the past—adding Greece and Turkey in 1952, Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982—and there is no reason to believe that adding these three states will diminish the ability of the Alliance to continue reaching consensus on its plans and actions. Third, NATO enlargement will help consolidate democracy and stability in Central Europe. NATO established in 1995 that states wishing to join the Alliance would need to be stable market democracies, and would need to have resolved outstanding disputes with their neighbors. These requirements were essential to ensure that enlargement strengthens the Alliance rather than weakening it. Because many Central European states are eager to join the Alliance—12 in all have indicated such an interest—just the prospect of the Alliance’s enlargement has encouraged many to strengthen their recent reforms and conclude agreements with neighboring states. For example, in recent years states such as Poland have

deepened civilian control over the military, while states such as Romania have increased protections for ethnic minorities. Similarly, there have been 10 major agreements among states in the region during this decade settling border and ethnic disputes; the prospect of NATO’s enlargement helped encourage negotiations on many of these agreements. All these actions removed seeds of possible future conflicts that might otherwise have affected U.S. security and economic interests. “A larger NATO will make America safer, NATO stronger, and Europe more peaceful and united. That is the strategic rationale. But … I see a moral imperative as well. For this is a policy that should appeal to our hearts as well as our heads.…” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright October 7, 1997 Fourth, NATO enlargement will help erase the Cold War dividing line. With the Cold War over, there is no justifiable reason for permanently excluding from Western institutions the countries that were held behind the Iron Curtain against their will. One reason the U.S. waged the Cold War was the belief that Central European states should be free to choose their own governments and security arrangements. Now that these states have regained their freedom and established market democracies, we should welcome the opportunity to reintegrate them into the transatlantic community. One way we can continue to erase the outdated and illegitimate Cold War dividing line is to bring states from Central Europe into the Alliance, as they prove their readiness to assume the burdens of NATO membership and to contribute to the security of the transatlantic area. The Alliance’s commitment to keep an “open door” for other states interested in joining NATO membership and prepared to shoulder the responsibilities of membership, and its range of efforts to reach out to non-NATO states, will help ensure that the process of enlargement does not create a new dividing line in Europe.… What Will Enlargement Cost? Security is not free, and NATO enlargement, like every other aspect of America’s security, will carry costs. Adding members to NATO will require the United States and its allies to extend solemn security commitments to additional nations, and NATO members must provide the capability to back them up. The President and his advisers are confident, however, that the costs of NATO enlargement will be affordable, equitably shared with our current and new allies, and well worth the investment.… Our current and new allies will pay their fair share. At the Madrid summit in July 1997, the NATO allies agreed that the costs of enlargement would be manageable. At the North Atlantic Council Defense Ministers’ meeting in December 1997, all 16 allies reaffirmed this view, stating that [C]osts associated with the accession of the three invitees will be manageable, and that the resources necessary to meet these costs will be provided in accordance with our agreed procedures under which each ally bears its fair share. Moreover, both our current allies and the three proposed new allies are investing in the modernization of their militaries, at their own expense, in ways that will better enable them to contribute to NATO’s missions. There would be greater costs and risks to not enlarging NATO. If the U.S. and its allies fail to help integrate and stabilize Central and Eastern Europe, it could lead to far higher costs later. Polish, Hungarian, and Czech officials have all stressed that it would cost more to pay for their defense outside NATO than inside. Not only would they feel more insecure and thus want to spend more on their own

defense outside the Alliance, they would not have the benefit of being able to pool their defense resources with those of other like-minded states. The United States also benefits from having Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the Alliance. Bringing new states into NATO will help prevent conflicts that could cost the U.S. more in the future, and will add new allies that are ready and willing to share the costs of security.… What Will Be the Impact of Enlargement on Relations with Russia? The goal that motivates NATO enlargement is the creation of an undivided, democratic, and peaceful Europe. That goal cannot be fully realized unless our efforts also include Russia. The continued development of a democratic Russia, satisfied within its borders and at peace with its neighbors, offers one of the most important improvements in the security environment of the entire transatlantic area, and especially for the states of Central Europe.… The reasons [for expansion] are straightforward. NATO, a purely defensive alliance, does not threaten Russia. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War, NATO greatly reduced troop levels and declared that it does not view Russia as an adversary. NATO also has stated that in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defense and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces. NATO also has stated that it has no intention, no plan, and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members. U.S. interests are served by both NATO enlargement and a more cooperative relationship with Russia, and there are strong signs that the U.S. and its European partners can successfully pursue both. Even so, there are some in the United States who worry that the new arrangements with Russia—the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Permanent Joint Council—might weaken NATO by giving Russia too much influence in the Alliance or relegate the new members to second-class status. Yet the Founding Act and Permanent Joint Council were carefully designed to enable a constructive relationship with Russia without undermining NATO’s strength or effectiveness.… In all these ways, the enlargement of NATO will advance American interests, prevent future conflicts, deter future threats, and help consolidate the gains of democracy and stability that have come with the end of the Cold War. It will help build a Europe that is undivided, democratic, and at peace—and by doing so, create a more secure foundation for the United States in the 21st century. Source: United States Information Service, Washington File, February 11, 1998. Available online at http://www.bu.edu/globalbeat/nato/sdfacts021198.html.

An Interview with Colombian Guerilla Movement ELN (National Liberation Army) Commander Antonio García (October 2000) This interview with a leader of the rebel force fighting the U.S.-supported government of Colombia makes clear that the U.S.-conceived and very controversial “Plan Colombia” that aimed to fight drug cartels and the left-wing insurgency then raging in the country was perceived by that movement to have been solely the creation of the United States. Plan Colombia Q. What is your opinion of Plan Colombia?

A. The main objective of the Plan is to give the Colombian Army the necessary infrastructure to develop its counter-insurgency war. The idea is to create specially trained army battalions with helicopter gunships that can be deployed at very short notice. Plan Colombia disguises the battalions as ‘anti-drugs,’ but their true purpose is in the counter-insurgency campaign. Plan Colombia basically justifies further U.S. intervention by pretending it is a war on drugs, but the truth is that it is an anti-guerrilla war. The policy is designed for the south of the country [large guerrilla presence] while in the north [large paramilitary presence] there is no policy to fight drugs. This policy allows them more flexibility—they are able to support initiatives and operations carried out by the paramilitaries with money earned from the drugs trade. Q. Where did Plan Colombia come from, who thought it up, designed it? A. Plan Colombia was thought up in English and written in English. It is impossible that Plan Colombia originated in Colombia or was written in Colombia. The Colombian Congress asked their government for a copy of the Plan in Spanish and found that one didn’t exist; this was three months after the first draft of the Plan was produced in the United States. Plan Colombia was never discussed in the Colombian Congress or by the Colombian people. It was devised in the U.S. to be applied in Colombia. Q. Are you sure that when the Colombian Congress asked for a copy of the Plan in Spanish, it didn’t exist? A. Absolutely. You can ask anyone. There are three versions of Plan Colombia; one in English; another in Spanish that is different from the one in English; and another produced especially for Europe that is designed to obtain the money to be invested in social development. The version of Plan Colombia that was written for Europe was designed to make Europe pay for the peace while the U.S. paid for the war. Q. When the U.S. military aid arrives in Colombia do you think that it will hurt the guerrillas? A. The aim of Plan Colombia is to provide the army with a capacity for rapid operations; fast movements to surround sites and deny the guerrillas the chance to retreat and regroup. The U.S. wants to strike at the main fronts of the guerrilla movements. Q. Do you think that the U.S. is considering an invasion of Colombia? A. We believe that the order for direct military action was given long ago. For many years the U.S. has been intervening in Colombia. There are more than 360 U.S. military experts in Colombia. There are troops on standby in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Venezuela. We are not talking about something that is going to happen in the future, we are talking about something that is already taking place. The U.S. is sending an average of three high-ranking military officers to Colombia every week. It seems that they come to supervise the use of the aid that they are giving. Q. I believe that the ELN has no contact with the U.S. government. If they made an approach would you be interested in talking to them, is there any sort of U.S. involvement that you would welcome? A. You are right, we have no contact with them whatsoever. The best contribution that the U.S. can make is not to interfere in our internal conflict. They must allow the Colombian people to resolve their own conflicts without their intervention. However, we have always been open to listen to and talk with any person or government with good will and especially with those interested in supporting the positive development of Colombian society. Source: Liam Craig, An Interview with ELN Commander Antonio Garcia, October 2000. Available online at http://colombiajournal.org/colombia25.htm.

Memories of the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks: Narrative of Henrietta McKee Carter (September 11, 2001) Memories of the attack on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, speak profoundly of the unspeakable sense of horror, depth of loss and grief, and undeniable personal pain felt and experienced by all Americans on that day. This reflection by Henrietta McKee Carter does that, but like many others that were not well reflected in the news media at the time in the years afterward, also raises thoughtful, probing questions other Americans were asking about the possible links between the terrorists who orchestrated the attacks and U.S. foreign policy. I awakened at my usual 6am time that morning, using my radio as an alarm clock. The first news item I heard, as I was getting ready for my 7am aquatics class was about two planes having deliberately flown into the World Trade Towers. I ran down the hallway in my nightgown to check the TV news, which I rarely watch, and had the worst confirmed by the bizarre, unspeakable images on every channel. The scope of the attack broadened with stories coming in from other geographical points, some of which turned out to be inaccurate. One of my first thoughts was of friends living in New York City, one of whom worked very close to the World Trade Towers. I awoke my son who was not up yet to inform him of the events, and told my other son and my daughter-in-law as they were bringing their two sons downstairs for the morning. My 5-year-old grandson was preparing for school. I felt guilty and irresponsible for having had to tell his parents in his presence about the events, and having the TV on. Thankfully my grandson could understand only that two planes had crashed. (Prior to this event, as a family we routinely were avoiding most news telecasts in his presence because they have become too graphic, and at other times because they are too trivial. This was very graphic and far from trivial.) One of the things that struck me as we conversed about the tragedies was this: we all suddenly stopped talking and looked at our newest family member, my other grandson, only 12 days old, sleeping peacefully in his mother’s arms. I think the same thought must have passed through all of our minds simultaneously: in what kind of world will he grow up? Even though he was unusually large for a newborn, having been born at 11 pounds 4 ounces and 23 inches long, and so strong that the obstetrics nurses commented on his strength, he was and still is very tender and innocent. One wishes that children everywhere could have that luxury. I have been told that the 21st century will be a scary time in which to live. Is this the beginning of a century-long nightmare? As a nation, we have been as innocent as babies ourselves about much that has gone on in the world. It is distressing to learn that certain of our governmental and corporate entities have joined in terrorizing and oppressing peoples of the world when it suited their purposes, whether the intentions were well-meaning or not. It is frightening to know that we as a nation are partially responsible for some of the hate that is coming at us. There is far more at stake here than an “assault on our freedoms”, and other notions that get pulled out whenever someone out there attacks us. Why have we been so insular that we have allowed our press (and media) to lose its role as the fourth estate, failing to report the grievances worldwide that have arisen from actions of our governmental and corporate entities? Why do we send abroad as entertainment the most distasteful images of ourselves that are an affront to the sensibilities of others and portray us in the worst possible light? Why do so few of our young people not know where to find Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a map? Why have we failed to educate ourselves about what matters to

others in the world? What makes us think we are bulletproof? Some of my colleagues have said repeatedly that many of our students don’t know their own history. As the saying goes, those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. This is clearly an unacceptable state of affairs. This situation reminds me a bit of a science fiction film the title of which, I believe, was “The Forbidden Planet”. If I remember correctly, invisible “monsters” were threatening inhabitants of a community on a distant planet, discovered by explorers from Earth. Great invisible barriers were erected using all of the technology the inhabitants could muster. It turned out that the monsters were the products of the minds of the inhabitants, arising from frightening, unacceptable thoughts and emotions that these people had refused to acknowledge. It seems that we need to do more soul-searching in many areas, personal, communal and national, because there is much that we need to acknowledge and understand about ourselves, our communities, our nation, and how we interact with the rest of the world. Of course we are not entirely to blame for what has happened, but we do bear some responsibility for the creation of the monster that has turned on us. Our responsibility now is to not remain ignorant about the rest of the world and our impact on it, and not to engage in knee-jerk blind reactions to hostility directed at us. Of course we should defend ourselves. I pray that in our fear, anger and grief we don’t create another monster in a backlash as we attempt to destroy this one. And, yes, we did learn that our friend whose office was destroyed by the explosion at the second World Trade Center Tower made it home safely; for that my family and his are eternally grateful. Source: Henrietta McKee Carter. 9/11 Documentary Project narrative. October 2001. Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Culture. Available online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afc2001015.t003.

President George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address (January 29, 2002) Less than five months after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address, reporting to the Congress and the American people on the progress achieved thus far in his administration’s declared “War on Terror,” most notably the fall of the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan, and the capture and imprisonment of what U.S. officials labeled “enemy combatants” in the detention facility at Guantánamo. Drawing on his national security team’s pre-9/11 vision for U.S. global supremacy but also drawing on the visceral pain of a nation still grieving the attacks, Bush went further: declaring that any nation acting “timidly” in the face of terror would find the United States going after alleged terrorists in their country; asserting clearly that any nation with “weapons of mass destruction” would constitute a threat to the United States; and naming specifically North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as an “axis of evil” that needed to be confronted by force, unilaterally if necessary. THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow citizens: As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger. (Applause.) We last met in an hour of shock and suffering. In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression. (Applause.) The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantánamo Bay. (Applause.) And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice

their lives are running for their own. (Applause.) America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror. We’ll be partners in rebuilding that country. And this evening we welcome the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan: Chairman Hamid Karzai. (Applause.) The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan’s new government. And we welcome the new Minister of Women’s Affairs, Doctor Sima Samar. (Applause.) Our progress is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military. (Applause.) When I called our troops into action, I did so with complete confidence in their courage and skill. And tonight, thanks to them, we are winning the war on terror. (Applause.) The men and women of our Armed Forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: Even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountaintops and in caves—you will not escape the justice of this nation. (Applause.) For many Americans, these four months have brought sorrow, and pain that will never completely go away. Every day a retired firefighter returns to Ground Zero, to feel closer to his two sons who died there. At a memorial in New York, a little boy left his football with a note for his lost father: Dear Daddy, please take this to heaven. I don’t want to play football until I can play with you again some day. Last month, at the grave of her husband, Michael, a CIA officer and Marine who died in Mazur-eSharif, Shannon Spann said these words of farewell: “Semper Fi, my love.” Shannon is with us tonight. (Applause.) Shannon, I assure you and all who have lost a loved one that our cause is just, and our country will never forget the debt we owe Michael and all who gave their lives for freedom. Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and showed us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies’ hatred in videos, where they laugh about the loss of innocent life. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world. What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning. Most of the 19 men who hijacked planes on September the 11th were trained in Afghanistan’s camps, and so were tens of thousands of others. Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning. Thanks to the work of our law enforcement officials and coalition partners, hundreds of terrorists have been arrested. Yet, tens of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large. These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are. (Applause.) So long as training camps operate, so long as nations harbor terrorists, freedom is at risk. And America and our allies must not, and will not, allow it. (Applause.) Our nation will continue to be steadfast and patient and persistent in the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world. (Applause.) Our military has put the terror training camps of Afghanistan out of business, yet camps still exist in at least a dozen countries. A terrorist underworld—including groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad,

Jaish-i-Mohammed—operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities. While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting elsewhere. We now have troops in the Philippines, helping to train that country’s armed forces to go after terrorist cells that have executed an American, and still hold hostages. Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia. My hope is that all nations will heed our call, and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own. Many nations are acting forcefully. Pakistan is now cracking down on terror, and I admire the strong leadership of President Musharraf. (Applause.) But some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will. (Applause.) Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. (Applause.) And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security. We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons. (Applause.) Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch —yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch. We can’t stop short. If we stop now—leaving terror camps intact and terror states unchecked—our sense of security would be false and temporary. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight. (Applause.) Our first priority must always be the security of our nation, and that will be reflected in the budget I send to Congress. My budget supports three great goals for America: We will win this war; we’ll protect our homeland; and we will revive our economy. September the 11th brought out the best in America, and the best in this Congress. And I join the American people in applauding your unity and resolve. (Applause.) Now Americans deserve to have this same spirit directed toward addressing problems here at home. I’m a proud member of my party—yet as

we act to win the war, protect our people, and create jobs in America, we must act, first and foremost, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans. (Applause.) It costs a lot to fight this war. We have spent more than a billion dollars a month—over $30 million a day—and we must be prepared for future operations. Afghanistan proved that expensive precision weapons defeat the enemy and spare innocent lives, and we need more of them. We need to replace aging aircraft and make our military more agile, to put our troops anywhere in the world quickly and safely. Our men and women in uniform deserve the best weapons, the best equipment, the best training—and they also deserve another pay raise. (Applause.) My budget includes the largest increase in defense spending in two decades—because while the price of freedom and security is high, it is never too high. Whatever it costs to defend our country, we will pay. (Applause.) The next priority of my budget is to do everything possible to protect our citizens and strengthen our nation against the ongoing threat of another attack. Time and distance from the events of September the 11th will not make us safer unless we act on its lessons. America is no longer protected by vast oceans. We are protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home. My budget nearly doubles funding for a sustained strategy of homeland security, focused on four key areas: bioterrorism, emergency response, airport and border security, and improved intelligence. We will develop vaccines to fight anthrax and other deadly diseases. We’ll increase funding to help states and communities train and equip our heroic police and firefighters. (Applause.) We will improve intelligence collection and sharing, expand patrols at our borders, strengthen the security of air travel, and use technology to track the arrivals and departures of visitors to the United States. (Applause.) Homeland security will make America not only stronger, but, in many ways, better. Knowledge gained from bioterrorism research will improve public health. Stronger police and fire departments will mean safer neighborhoods. Stricter border enforcement will help combat illegal drugs. (Applause.) And as government works to better secure our homeland, America will continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens. A few days before Christmas, an airline flight attendant spotted a passenger lighting a match. The crew and passengers quickly subdued the man, who had been trained by Al Qaeda and was armed with explosives. The people on that plane were alert and, as a result, likely saved nearly 200 lives. And tonight we welcome and thank flight attendants Hermis Moutardier and Christina Jones. (Applause.) Once we have funded our national security and our homeland security, the final great priority of my budget is economic security for the American people. (Applause.) To achieve these great national objectives—to win the war, protect the homeland, and revitalize our economy—our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term, so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible manner. (Applause.) We have clear priorities and we must act at home with the same purpose and resolve we have shown overseas: We’ll prevail in the war, and we will defeat this recession. (Applause.) Americans who have lost their jobs need our help and I support extending unemployment benefits and direct assistance for health care coverage. (Applause.) Yet, American workers want more than unemployment checks—they want a steady paycheck. (Applause.) When America works, America prospers, so my economic security plan can be summed up in one word: jobs. (Applause.) Good jobs begin with good schools, and here we’ve made a fine start. (Applause.) Republicans and Democrats worked together to achieve historic education reform so that no child is left behind. I was proud to work with members of both parties: Chairman John Boehner and Congressman George Miller. (Applause.) Senator Judd Gregg. (Applause.) And I was so proud of our work, I even had nice things to

say about my friend, Ted Kennedy. (Laughter and applause.) I know the folks at the Crawford coffee shop couldn’t believe I’d say such a thing—(laughter)—but our work on this bill shows what is possible if we set aside posturing and focus on results. (Applause.) There is more to do. We need to prepare our children to read and succeed in school with improved Head Start and early childhood development programs. (Applause.) We must upgrade our teacher colleges and teacher training and launch a major recruiting drive with a great goal for America: a quality teacher in every classroom. (Applause.) Good jobs also depend on reliable and affordable energy. This Congress must act to encourage conservation, promote technology, build infrastructure, and it must act to increase energy production at home so America is less dependent on foreign oil. (Applause.) Good jobs depend on expanded trade. Selling into new markets creates new jobs, so I ask Congress to finally approve trade promotion authority. (Applause.) On these two key issues, trade and energy, the House of Representatives has acted to create jobs, and I urge the Senate to pass this legislation. (Applause.) Good jobs depend on sound tax policy. (Applause.) Last year, some in this hall thought my tax relief plan was too small; some thought it was too big. (Applause.) But when the checks arrived in the mail, most Americans thought tax relief was just about right. (Applause.) Congress listened to the people and responded by reducing tax rates, doubling the child credit, and ending the death tax. For the sake of longterm growth and to help Americans plan for the future, let’s make these tax cuts permanent. (Applause.) The way out of this recession, the way to create jobs, is to grow the economy by encouraging investment in factories and equipment, and by speeding up tax relief so people have more money to spend. For the sake of American workers, let’s pass a stimulus package. (Applause.) Good jobs must be the aim of welfare reform. As we reauthorize these important reforms, we must always remember the goal is to reduce dependency on government and offer every American the dignity of a job. (Applause.) Americans know economic security can vanish in an instant without health security. I ask Congress to join me this year to enact a patients’ bill of rights—(applause)—to give uninsured workers credits to help buy health coverage—(applause)—to approve an historic increase in the spending for veterans’ health— (applause)—and to give seniors a sound and modern Medicare system that includes coverage for prescription drugs. (Applause.) A good job should lead to security in retirement. I ask Congress to enact new safeguards for 401K and pension plans. (Applause.) Employees who have worked hard and saved all their lives should not have to risk losing everything if their company fails. (Applause.) Through stricter accounting standards and tougher disclosure requirements, corporate America must be made more accountable to employees and shareholders and held to the highest standards of conduct. (Applause.) Retirement security also depends upon keeping the commitments of Social Security, and we will. We must make Social Security financially stable and allow personal retirement accounts for younger workers who choose them. (Applause.) Members, you and I will work together in the months ahead on other issues: productive farm policy— (applause)—a cleaner environment—(applause)—broader home ownership, especially among minorities —(applause)—and ways to encourage the good work of charities and faith-based groups. (Applause.) I ask you to join me on these important domestic issues in the same spirit of cooperation we’ve applied to our war against terrorism. (Applause.) During these last few months, I’ve been humbled and privileged to see the true character of this country in a time of testing. Our enemies believed America was weak and materialistic, that we would

splinter in fear and selfishness. They were as wrong as they are evil. (Applause.) The American people have responded magnificently, with courage and compassion, strength and resolve. As I have met the heroes, hugged the families, and looked into the tired faces of rescuers, I have stood in awe of the American people. And I hope you will join me—I hope you will join me in expressing thanks to one American for the strength and calm and comfort she brings to our nation in crisis, our First Lady, Laura Bush. (Applause.) None of us would ever wish the evil that was done on September the 11th. Yet after America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves. We were reminded that we are citizens, with obligations to each other, to our country, and to history. We began to think less of the goods we can accumulate, and more about the good we can do. For too long our culture has said, “If it feels good, do it.” Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: “Let’s roll.” (Applause.) In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self. We’ve been offered a unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass. (Applause.) My call tonight is for every American to commit at least two years—4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime—to the service of your neighbors and your nation. (Applause.) Many are already serving, and I thank you. If you aren’t sure how to help, I’ve got a good place to start. To sustain and extend the best that has emerged in America, I invite you to join the new USA Freedom Corps. The Freedom Corps will focus on three areas of need: responding in case of crisis at home; rebuilding our communities; and extending American compassion throughout the world. One purpose of the USA Freedom Corps will be homeland security. America needs retired doctors and nurses who can be mobilized in major emergencies; volunteers to help police and fire departments; transportation and utility workers well-trained in spotting danger. Our country also needs citizens working to rebuild our communities. We need mentors to love children, especially children whose parents are in prison. And we need more talented teachers in troubled schools. USA Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers. And America needs citizens to extend the compassion of our country to every part of the world. So we will renew the promise of the Peace Corps, double its volunteers over the next five years—(applause)— and ask it to join a new effort to encourage development and education and opportunity in the Islamic world. (Applause.) This time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity—a moment we must seize to change our culture. Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can overcome evil with greater good. (Applause.) And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the values that will bring lasting peace. All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated, and live free from poverty and violence. No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police. If anyone doubts this, let them look to Afghanistan, where the Islamic “street” greeted the fall of tyranny with song and celebration. Let the skeptics look to Islam’s own rich history, with its centuries of learning, and tolerance and progress. America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere. (Applause.) No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human

dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance. (Applause.) America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror. In this moment of opportunity, a common danger is erasing old rivalries. America is working with Russia and China and India, in ways we have never before, to achieve peace and prosperity. In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives. Together with friends and allies from Europe to Asia, and Africa to Latin America, we will demonstrate that the forces of terror cannot stop the momentum of freedom. (Applause.) The last time I spoke here, I expressed the hope that life would return to normal. In some ways, it has. In others, it never will. Those of us who have lived through these challenging times have been changed by them. We’ve come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed. (Applause.) Beyond all differences of race or creed, we are one country, mourning together and facing danger together. Deep in the American character, there is honor, and it is stronger than cynicism. And many have discovered again that even in tragedy—especially in tragedy—God is near. (Applause.) In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we’ve been called to a unique role in human events. Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential. Our enemies send other people’s children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life. (Applause.) Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on. We have known freedom’s price. We have shown freedom’s power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom’s victory. Thank you all. May God bless. (Applause.) Source: George H. W. Bush. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 2002. Book I, 129–136. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2002.

George W. Bush Administration, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (September 2002) In June 2002, eight months following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the graduating class of West Point Academy and declared that in the new age of the global “War on Terror,” the strategies of containment and nuclear weapons deterrence had effectively been rendered relics of the Cold War. He called for the American people to embrace a “forward-looking” defense posture that was ready for “preemptive action” against threats to the nation before they “fully [materialized].” That address, along with the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance document that had envisioned global, unchallengeable U.S. military dominance, provided the framework for the National Security Strategy of September 2002. The president’s call for the use of preemptive action was the centerpiece of a strategy that first assumed the American political and economic system constituted “a single sustainable model for national success,” and then called for the vigorous, offensive use of the U.S. military to defend U.S. interests and advance a vision of global hegemony. What came to be widely known as the “Bush Doctrine” served as a cornerstone of the administration’s concerted campaign to persuade Americans and the world of the justification for an invasion of Iraq.

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages. Today, the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions in which all nations and all societies can choose for themselves the rewards and challenges of political and economic liberty. In a world that is safe, people will be able to make their own lives better. We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent. Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government. Today, that task has changed dramatically. Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us. To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal—military power, better homeland defenses, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist financing. The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain duration. America will help nations that need our assistance in combating terror. And America will hold to account nations that are compromised by terror, including those who harbor terrorists—because the allies of terror are the enemies of civilization. The United States and countries cooperating with us must not allow the terrorists to develop new home bases. Together, we will seek to deny them sanctuary at every turn. The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed. We will build defenses against ballistic missiles and other means of delivery. We will cooperate with other nations to deny, contain, and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies. And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action. As we defend the peace, we will also take advantage of an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. Today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security. We are also increasingly united by common values. Russia is in the midst of a hopeful transition, reaching

for its democratic future and a partner in the war on terror. Chinese leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only source of national wealth. In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only source of national greatness. America will encourage the advancement of democracy and economic openness in both nations, because these are the best foundations for domestic stability and international order. We will strongly resist aggression from other great powers—even as we welcome their peaceful pursuit of prosperity, trade, and cultural advancement. Finally, the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world. The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.… The security environment confronting the United States today is radically different from what we have faced before. Yet the first duty of the United States Government remains what it always has been: to protect the American people and American interests. It is an enduring American principle that this duty obligates the government to anticipate and counter threats, using all elements of national power, before the threats can do grave damage. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. There are few greater threats than a terrorist attack with WMD. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense. The United States will not resort to force in all cases to preempt emerging threats. Our preference is that nonmilitary actions succeed. And no country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Source: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. September 2002. Available online at http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/2002.pdf.

International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705, “Resolution Against the War” (October 18, 2002) According to one estimate, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, some 36 million people around the world participated in nearly 3,000 individual protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq that began March 19, 2003. On one level, the resolution by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters— historically a fairly conservative union and stalwart supporter of U.S. military action—reveals how far-flung was the opposition to a war that was widely condemned as illegal and unjustified. That opposition, however, stood in sharp relief against the overwhelming support for the war that came from the U.S. media, Congress, and the American people. Whereas, we value the lives of our sons and daughters, of our brothers and sisters more than Bush’s control of Middle East oil profits; Whereas, we have no quarrel with the ordinary working-class men, women, and children of lraq who will suffer the most in any war; Whereas, the billions of dollars being spent to stage and execute this invasion, means billions taken away from our schools, hospitals, housing, and social security;

Whereas, Bush’s drive for war serves as a cover and a distraction for the sinking economy, corporate corruption, lay-offs, Taft-Hartley (used against the locked out ILWU [International Longshore Workers’ Union] longshoremen); Whereas, Teamsters Local 705 is known far and wide as fighters for justice; Be It Resolved that Teamsters Local 705 stands firmly against Bush’s drive for war; Further Resolved that the Teamsters Local 705 Executive Board publicize this statement, and seek out other unions, labor and community activists, interested in promoting anti-war activity in the labor movement and community. Source: International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 705, “Resolution Against the War” (October 18, 2002). Press Release, Teamsters Local 705, Chicago, Illinois.

Remarks by President Barack Obama in an Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 24, 2013) Honored recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, U.S. President Barack Obama carried with him to the White House the hopes of millions of people in the United States and around the world that he would be able to forge a clean break with the Bush Doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive war. By 2013, critical appraisals of the Obama foreign policy generally offered a decidedly mixed, and not surprisingly more realistic, assessment of the record—praising him, for example, for presiding over an end to U.S. combat operations in the Iraq War, but raising deep questions about the wisdom and efficacy of the “surge” of troops in Afghanistan and the morality of dramatically increased drone strikes that many said were only fueling terrorism in places like Yemen. In this speech to the United Nations, the president himself sounds a muted and seemingly paradoxical tone about the purpose and role of the United States in the Middle East and the world: even as Obama acknowledges a somewhat chastened America in the wake of Iraq and eschews the mere notion of U.S. empire, he simultaneously reaffirms an internationalist, Wilsonian vision of unapologetic, if ostensibly benign global hegemony. United Nations, New York, New York Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen: Each year we come together to reaffirm the founding vision of this institution. For most of recorded history, individual aspirations were subject to the whims of tyrants and empires. Divisions of race and religion and tribe were settled through the sword and the clash of armies. The idea that nations and peoples could come together in peace to solve their disputes and advance a common prosperity seemed unimaginable. It took the awful carnage of two world wars to shift our thinking. The leaders who built the United Nations were not naïve; they did not think this body could eradicate all wars. But in the wake of millions dead and continents in rubble, and with the development of nuclear weapons that could annihilate a planet, they understood that humanity could not survive the course it was on. And so they gave us this institution, believing that it could allow us to resolve conflicts, enforce rules of behavior, and build habits of cooperation that would grow stronger over time.… For the United States, these new circumstances have also meant shifting away from a perpetual war footing. Beyond bringing our troops home, we have limited the use of drones so they target only those who pose a continuing, imminent threat to the United States where capture is not feasible, and there is a near

certainty of no civilian casualties. We’re transferring detainees to other countries and trying terrorists in courts of law, while working diligently to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And just as we reviewed how we deploy our extraordinary military capabilities in a way that lives up to our ideals, we’ve begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share. As a result of this work, and cooperation with allies and partners, the world is more stable than it was five years ago. But even a glance at today’s headlines indicates that dangers remain. In Kenya, we’ve seen terrorists target innocent civilians in a crowded shopping mall, and our hearts go out to the families of those who have been affected. In Pakistan, nearly 100 people were recently killed by suicide bombers outside a church. In Iraq, killings and car bombs continue to be a terrible part of life. And meanwhile, Al Qaeda has splintered into regional networks and militias, which doesn’t give them the capacity at this point to carry out attacks like 9/11, but does pose serious threats to governments and diplomats, businesses and civilians all across the globe. Just as significantly, the convulsions in the Middle East and North Africa have laid bare deep divisions within societies, as an old order is upended and people grapple with what comes next. Peaceful movements have too often been answered by violence—from those resisting change and from extremists trying to hijack change. Sectarian conflict has reemerged. And the potential spread of weapons of mass destruction continues to cast a shadow over the pursuit of peace.… When peaceful transitions began in Tunisia and Egypt, the entire world was filled with hope. And although the United States—like others—was struck by the speed of transition, and although we did not— and in fact could not—dictate events, we chose to support those who called for change. And we did so based on the belief that while these transitions will be hard and take time, societies based upon democracy and openness and the dignity of the individual will ultimately be more stable, more prosperous, and more peaceful. Over the last few years, particularly in Egypt, we’ve seen just how hard this transition will be. Mohamed Morsi was democratically elected, but proved unwilling or unable to govern in a way that was fully inclusive. The interim government that replaced him responded to the desires of millions of Egyptians who believed the revolution had taken a wrong turn, but it, too, has made decisions inconsistent with inclusive democracy—through an emergency law, and restrictions on the press and civil society and opposition parties. Of course, America has been attacked by all sides of this internal conflict, simultaneously accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, and engineering their removal of power. In fact, the United States has purposely avoided choosing sides. Our overriding interest throughout these past few years has been to encourage a government that legitimately reflects the will of the Egyptian people, and recognizes true democracy as requiring a respect for minority rights and the rule of law, freedom of speech and assembly, and a strong civil society. That remains our interest today. And so, going forward, the United States will maintain a constructive relationship with the interim government that promotes core interests like the Camp David Accords and counterterrorism. We’ll continue support in areas like education that directly benefit the Egyptian people. But we have not proceeded with the delivery of certain military systems, and our support will depend upon Egypt’s progress in pursuing a more democratic path. And our approach to Egypt reflects a larger point: The United States will at times work with governments that do not meet, at least in our view, the highest international expectations, but who work with us on our core interests. Nevertheless, we will not stop asserting principles that are consistent with

our ideals, whether that means opposing the use of violence as a means of suppressing dissent, or supporting the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will reject the notion that these principles are simply Western exports, incompatible with Islam or the Arab World. We believe they are the birthright of every person. And while we recognize that our influence will at times be limited, although we will be wary of efforts to impose democracy through military force, and although we will at times be accused of hypocrisy and inconsistency, we will be engaged in the region for the long haul. For the hard work of forging freedom and democracy is the task of a generation. And this includes efforts to resolve sectarian tensions that continue to surface in places like Iraq, Bahrain and Syria. We understand such long-standing issues cannot be solved by outsiders; they must be addressed by Muslim communities themselves. But we’ve seen grinding conflicts come to an end before —most recently in Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants finally recognized that an endless cycle of conflict was causing both communities to fall behind a fast-moving world. And so we believe those same sectarian conflicts can be overcome in the Middle East and North Africa. To summarize, the United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries. The notion of American empire may be useful propaganda, but it isn’t borne out by America’s current policy or by public opinion. Indeed, as recent debates within the United States over Syria clearly show, the danger for the world is not an America that is too eager to immerse itself in the affairs of other countries or to take on every problem in the region as its own. The danger for the world is that the United States, after a decade of war—rightly concerned about issues back home, aware of the hostility that our engagement in the region has engendered throughout the Muslim world—may disengage, creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation is ready to fill. I believe such disengagement would be a mistake. I believe America must remain engaged for our own security. But I also believe the world is better for it. Some may disagree, but I believe America is exceptional—in part because we have shown a willingness through the sacrifice of blood and treasure to stand up not only for our own narrow self-interests, but for the interests of all. Source: The White House. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/24/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nationsgeneral-assembly.

Russian President Vladimir Putin Addresses the Russian Annexation of Crimea (March 18, 2014) This address by Russian president Vladimir Putin came in the wake of the referendum in the Crimea, the former Black Sea peninsula territory of Ukraine, to rejoin Russia after a half-century of separation. U.S. politicians, foreign policy experts, and American media outlets condemnded the speech, interpreting it not only for its arguably inventive interpretation of some of the history of Ukraine and Crimea, but moreover as a bellicose expression of Putin’s desire to revive the old SovietRussian empire. Putin’s defenders argued that while Russia’s aggressive policy in the region was certainly a matter of legitimate debate, it was true that the history of the entire region was far more complex than many in the United States or the West would acknowledge. Further, Putin declared that the United States, boasting a global military empire extending into Russia’s backyard and having presided over a half century or more of intervention in the affairs of nations around the world, was hardly in a position to critique Russian actions. Address by President of the Russian Federation

Vladimir Putin addressed State Duma deputies, Federation Council members, heads of Russian regions and civil society representatives in the Kremlin. PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Federation Council members, State Duma deputies, good afternoon. Representatives of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol are here among us, citizens of Russia, residents of Crimea and Sevastopol! Dear friends, we have gathered here today in connection with an issue that is of vital, historic significance to all of us. A referendum was held in Crimea on March 16 in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms. More than 82 percent of the electorate took part in the vote. Over 96 percent of them spoke out in favour of reuniting with Russia. These numbers speak for themselves. To understand the reason behind such a choice it is enough to know the history of Crimea and what Russia and Crimea have always meant for each other. Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride. This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptised. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The graves of Russian soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian empire are also in Crimea. This is also Sevastopol—a legendary city with an outstanding history, a fortress that serves as the birthplace of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is Balaklava and Kerch, Malakhov Kurgan and Sapun Ridge. Each one of these places is dear to our hearts, symbolising Russian military glory and outstanding valour. Crimea is a unique blend of different peoples’ cultures and traditions. This makes it similar to Russia as a whole, where not a single ethnic group has been lost over the centuries. Russians and Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and people of other ethnic groups have lived side by side in Crimea, retaining their own identity, traditions, languages and faith. Incidentally, the total population of the Crimean Peninsula today is 2.2 million people, of whom almost 1.5 million are Russians, 350,000 are Ukrainians who predominantly consider Russian their native language, and about 290,000–300,000 are Crimean Tatars, who, as the referendum has shown, also lean towards Russia. True, there was a time when Crimean Tatars were treated unfairly, just as a number of other peoples in the USSR. There is only one thing I can say here: millions of people of various ethnicities suffered during those repressions, and primarily Russians. Crimean Tatars returned to their homeland. I believe we should make all the necessary political and legislative decisions to finalise the rehabilitation of Crimean Tatars, restore them in their rights and clear their good name. We have great respect for people of all the ethnic groups living in Crimea. This is their common home, their motherland, and it would be right—I know the local population supports this—for Crimea to have three equal national languages: Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar. Colleagues, In people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. This firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation, over time, under any circumstances, despite all the dramatic changes our country went through during the entire 20th century. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons—may God judge them—added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration

for the ethnic make-up of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine. Then, in 1954, a decision was made to transfer Crimean Region to Ukraine, along with Sevastopol, despite the fact that it was a federal city. This was the personal initiative of the Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev. What stood behind this decision of his—a desire to win the support of the Ukrainian political establishment or to atone for the mass repressions of the 1930’s in Ukraine—is for historians to figure out. What matters now is that this decision was made in clear violation of the constitutional norms that were in place even then. The decision was made behind the scenes. Naturally, in a totalitarian state nobody bothered to ask the citizens of Crimea and Sevastopol. They were faced with the fact. People, of course, wondered why all of a sudden Crimea became part of Ukraine. But on the whole—and we must state this clearly, we all know it—this decision was treated as a formality of sorts because the territory was transferred within the boundaries of a single state. Back then, it was impossible to imagine that Ukraine and Russia may split up and become two separate states. However, this has happened. Unfortunately, what seemed impossible became a reality. The USSR fell apart. Things developed so swiftly that few people realised how truly dramatic those events and their consequences would be. Many people both in Russia and in Ukraine, as well as in other republics hoped that the Commonwealth of Independent States that was created at the time would become the new common form of statehood. They were told that there would be a single currency, a single economic space, joint armed forces; however, all this remained empty promises, while the big country was gone. It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered. At the same time, we have to admit that by launching the sovereignty parade Russia itself aided in the collapse of the Soviet Union. And as this collapse was legalised, everyone forgot about Crimea and Sevastopol—the main base of the Black Sea Fleet. Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders. Now, many years later, I heard residents of Crimea say that back in 1991 they were handed over like a sack of potatoes. This is hard to disagree with. And what about the Russian state? What about Russia? It humbly accepted the situation. This country was going through such hard times then that realistically it was incapable of protecting its interests. However, the people could not reconcile themselves to this outrageous historical injustice. All these years, citizens and many public figures came back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city. Yes, we all knew this in our hearts and minds, but we had to proceed from the existing reality and build our good-neighbourly relations with independent Ukraine on a new basis. Meanwhile, our relations with Ukraine, with the fraternal Ukrainian people have always been and will remain of foremost importance for us.… First, we had to help create conditions so that the residents of Crimea for the first time in history were able to peacefully express their free will regarding their own future. However, what do we hear from our colleagues in Western Europe and North America? They say we are violating norms of international law. Firstly, it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law— better late than never. Secondly, and most importantly—what exactly are we violating? True, the President of the Russian Federation received permission from the Upper House of Parliament to use the Armed Forces in Ukraine. However, strictly speaking, nobody has acted on this permission yet. Russia’s Armed Forces never entered Crimea; they were there already in line with an international agreement. True, we did enhance our forces there; however—this is something I would like everyone to hear and know—we did not exceed the

personnel limit of our Armed Forces in Crimea, which is set at 25,000, because there was no need to do so. Next. As it declared independence and decided to hold a referendum, the Supreme Council of Crimea referred to the United Nations Charter, which speaks of the right of nations to self-determination. Incidentally, I would like to remind you that when Ukraine seceded from the USSR it did exactly the same thing, almost word for word. Ukraine used this right, yet the residents of Crimea are denied it. Why is that? Moreover, the Crimean authorities referred to the well-known Kosovo precedent—a precedent our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities. Pursuant to Article 2, Chapter 1 of the United Nations Charter, the UN International Court agreed with this approach and made the following comment in its ruling of July 22, 2010, and I quote: “No general prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council with regard to declarations of independence,” and “General international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence.” Crystal clear, as they say. I do not like to resort to quotes, but in this case, I cannot help it. Here is a quote from another official document: the Written Statement of the United States [of] America of April 17, 2009, submitted to the same UN International Court in connection with the hearings on Kosovo. Again, I quote: “Declarations of independence may, and often do, violate domestic legislation. However, this does not make them violations of international law.” End of quote. They wrote this, disseminated it all over the world, had everyone agree and now they are outraged. Over what? The actions of [the] Crimean people completely fit in with these instructions, as it were. For some reason, things that Kosovo Albanians (and we have full respect for them) were permitted to do, Russians, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars in Crimea are not allowed. Again, one wonders why. We keep hearing from the United States and Western Europe that Kosovo is some special case. What makes it so special in the eyes of our colleagues? It turns out that it is the fact that the conflict in Kosovo resulted in so many human casualties. Is this a legal argument? The ruling of the International Court says nothing about this. This is not even double standards; this is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism. One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow. According to this logic, we have to make sure every conflict leads to human losses.… Colleagues, Like a mirror, the situation in Ukraine reflects what is going on and what has been happening in the world over the past several decades. After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability. Key international institutions are not getting any stronger; on the contrary, in many cases, they are sadly degrading. Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle “If you are not with us, you are against us.” To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organisations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall. This happened in Yugoslavia; we remember 1999 very well. It was hard to believe, even seeing it with my own eyes, that at the end of the 20th century, one of Europe’s capitals, Belgrade, was under missile attack for several weeks, and then came the real intervention. Was there a UN Security Council resolution on this matter, allowing for these actions? Nothing of the sort. And then, they hit Afghanistan,

Iraq, and frankly violated the UN Security Council resolution on Libya, when instead of imposing the socalled no-fly zone over it they started bombing it too. There was a whole series of controlled “colour” revolutions. Clearly, the people in those nations, where these events took place, were sick of tyranny and poverty, of their lack of prospects; but these feelings were taken advantage of cynically. Standards were imposed on these nations that did not in any way correspond to their way of life, traditions, or these peoples’ cultures. As a result, instead of democracy and freedom, there were chaos, outbreaks in violence and a series of upheavals. The Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter. A similar situation unfolded in Ukraine. In 2004, to push the necessary candidate through at the presidential elections, they thought up some sort of third round that was not stipulated by the law. It was absurd and a mockery of the constitution. And now, they have thrown in an organised and well-equipped army of militants. We understand what is happening; we understand that these actions were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration. And all this while Russia strived to engage in dialogue with our colleagues in the West. We are constantly proposing cooperation on all key issues; we want to strengthen our level of trust and for our relations to be equal, open and fair. But we saw no reciprocal steps. On the contrary, they have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They kept telling us the same thing: “Well, this does not concern you.” That’s easy to say. It happened with the deployment of a missile defence system. In spite of all our apprehensions, the project is working and moving forward. It happened with the endless foot-dragging in the talks on visa issues, promises of fair competition and free access to global markets. Today, we are being threatened with sanctions, but we already experience many limitations, ones that are quite significant for us, our economy and our nation. For example, still during the times of the Cold War, the US and subsequently other nations restricted a large list of technologies and equipment from being sold to the USSR, creating the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls list. Today, they have formally been eliminated, but only formally; and in reality, many limitations are still in effect. In short, we have every reason to assume that the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, continues today. They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner because we have an independent position, because we maintain it and because we call things like they are and do not engage in hypocrisy. But there is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line, playing the bear and acting irresponsibly and unprofessionally. After all, they were fully aware that there are millions of Russians living in Ukraine and in Crimea. They must have really lacked political instinct and common sense not to foresee all the consequences of their actions. Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this. Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria, to refute the rhetoric of the cold war and to accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs; like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected. At the same time, we are grateful to all those who understood our actions in Crimea; we are grateful to the people of China, whose leaders have always considered the situation in Ukraine and Crimea taking into account the full historical and political context, and greatly appreciate India’s reserve and objectivity. Today, I would like to address the people of the United States of America, the people who, since the foundation of their nation and adoption of the Declaration of Independence, have been proud to hold

freedom above all else. Isn’t the desire of Crimea’s residents to freely choose their fate such a value? Please understand us. I believe that the Europeans, first and foremost, the Germans, will also understand me. Let me remind you that in the course of political consultations on the unification of East and West Germany, at the expert, though very high level, some nations that were then and are now Germany’s allies did not support the idea of unification. Our nation, however, unequivocally supported the sincere, unstoppable desire of the Germans for national unity. I am confident that you have not forgotten this, and I expect that the citizens of Germany will also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity. I also want to address the people of Ukraine. I sincerely want you to understand us: we do not want to harm you in any way, or to hurt your national feelings. We have always respected the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state, incidentally, unlike those who sacrificed Ukraine’s unity for their political ambitions. They flaunt slogans about Ukraine’s greatness, but they are the ones who did everything to divide the nation. Today’s civil standoff is entirely on their conscience. I want you to hear me, my dear friends. Do not believe those who want you to fear Russia, shouting that other regions will follow Crimea. We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that. As for Crimea, it was and remains a Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean-Tatar land. I repeat, just as it has been for centuries, it will be a home to all the peoples living there. What it will never be and do is follow in Bandera’s footsteps! Crimea is our common historical legacy and a very important factor in regional stability. And this strategic territory should be part of a strong and stable sovereignty, which today can only be Russian. Otherwise, dear friends (I am addressing both Ukraine and Russia), you and we—the Russians and the Ukrainians—could lose Crimea completely, and that could happen in the near historical perspective. Please think about it.… But let me say too that we are not opposed to cooperation with NATO, for this is certainly not the case. For all the internal processes within the organisation, NATO remains a military alliance, and we are against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our backyard or in our historic territory. I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors. Of course, most of them are wonderful guys, but it would be better to have them come and visit us, be our guests, rather than the other way round.… Source: Address by the President of the Russian Federation. March 18, 2014. Available online at http://nic.rs.gov.ru/es/node/958.

Glossary

Armada: a fleet or squadron of warships such as destroyers or battleships. Autarky: the condition of economic self-sufficiency attained by a state. Autocratic: a leader who acts with iron-fisted authoritarian control over a people; an autocracy is a system of government ruled by such a leader or a similarly centralized autocratic group. Bipolar Conflict or Alliance: an arrangement of international relations defined by two dominant sides or camps in which nations are compelled or pressured to choose one or the other to defend or advance their own interests (as in the Cold War). Blacklisting: putting persons on a list for suspicion of activity deemed dangerous or threatening by those creating the list, as during the Cold War and the compilation by employers of names suspected of communism or “subversion” who were not to be hired. Black Nationalist Movement: political-social movement of African Americans that has roots in the 1920s and advocates for black unity and group empowerment. Most black nationalists are anti-imperialist and separatist (in contrast to the civil rights movement’s emphasis on integration), while many have historically sought solidarity between African Americans and Africans on the African continent and around the world. Caliphate: a sovereign Islamic state ruled by a caliph, a supreme political or religious leader who is believed to be a successor to Muhammad. Most broadly conceived, a caliphate can also be the entire Muslim world ruled by the Constitution of Medina that was written by Muhammad in the seventh century CE. Cartel: a group of businesses, nations, or other parties that work in common cause usually pertaining to the production, distribution, and pricing of a particular good for the mutual benefit of its participants. Casus belli: an action or reason that serves as justification, or alleged rationale for going to war between states. Caudillismo: Spanish term for an autocratic system of government led by a caudillo, usually a charismatic leader of the people. Centrist: a person holding moderate views that are neither strongly conservative nor liberal.

Civil Disobedience: the practice of nonviolently breaking through a variety of strategies and tactics (e.g., boycotts, sit-ins) what one believes to be an unjust or immoral law with the intention of overturning that law or the system that enforces it. Coercive Bloc (of nations): normally refers to a group of nations who are under at least indirect, largely involuntary control of a large power, as in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Cold War: a state of intense political antagonism and competition between two nations or groups of nations that never comes to an outright shooting war, as in the U.S.-led “free world” versus the Soviet Union–led “Communist world,” ca. 1947–1991. Colonialism: control of an occupying, governing large power of lands and peoples beyond its own border, normally for the purpose of economically exploiting its resources and labor supply. Condottiere: dating to 14th-century Europe, refers to a mercenary or leader of a band of mercenaries. Corporatism: economic system arising out of 19th-century Europe wherein the major sectors of a state are organized into representative interest groups that negotiate reasoned solutions to problems for the good of the society; arose as an alternative to socialism. Counterinsurgency: a military and political campaign mounted by an incumbent government aimed at suppressing or destroying a rebellion or supposed revolution of insurgents trying to topple it. Coup d’etat: the overthrow of an existing government, engineered either internally or externally through a variety of means, including assassination. Cult of Personality: an expression of national hero worship, usually engineered through propaganda and state media, showered upon a charismatic, often dictatorial authority figure, serving to fortify the person’s hold on power. Decolonization: the process of a colony or group of colonies struggling to break free of colonial domination and win their sovereign independence. Demagogue(ry): a political leader who plays on the fears and other emotions of a people, rather than using facts and reason, to win and retain their support (or the practice of doing so). Deterrence: strategy or actions taken by a state intended to prevent another state from taking threatening or destructive action, as in nuclear arms buildup during the Cold War aimed at preventing the other side from launching a nuclear attack (“nuclear deterrence” theory). Divestment (or Disinvestment) Campaign: organizing practice of withdrawing economic investment or employing an economic boycott against nations or corporations to induce behavior change in the regime or corporation. Domino Effect/Theory: from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 explanation of U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia, suggesting that if Vietnam were to fall to communism, other nations throughout that region could also collapse like “falling dominoes,” ultimately threatening the United States itself. Doomsday: throughout the Cold War, referred to the destruction of the world through a massive launch of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union and the United States.

Embargo: official ban on the sale of a particular class of goods to a nation or group of nations, usually to exact economic retribution or punishment for a particular policy or action and to seek a redirection in policy. Émigré: a person who flees his or her nation for another, usually for reasons of political persecution or for the political freedom in the nation where the person finds refuge. Enhanced Interrogation Techniques: the term employed by the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush (2001–2009) to characterize tactics used by the U.S. military and CIA against suspected terrorists in its “War on Terror”; the majority of observers internationally and in the United States saw the phrase as little more than legal semantics to obscure what were in fact practices of torture (e.g., waterboarding). Extrajudicial: an action or judgment reached outside of legal court procedures. Free Market: economic system where prices are arrived at entirely through competition for customers among businesses producing the same product with no interference from the government. Free Trade: an international system of economic exchange of goods and services not subject to any tariffs or other protectionist barriers. The terms “free trade” and “free market” have also been deployed by some nations and multinational corporations as tropes to advance other strategies such as the elimination of labor rights or environmental restrictions. Front Organization: a publicly known organization established covertly by a government agency, corporation, or religious, political, or other organization to advance its goals and objectives in a way that hides or obscures the sponsoring group’s connections and its interests. Genocidal: actions that reflect a policy or intention of genocide, that is, the willful and utter destruction of a particular ethnic, racial, religious, or national group by a government’s military or other armed organization. Geostrategic: the foreign policy strategizing of a state that is shaped by the interconnected relationship of economic and political systems, economic interests, and the geography of other states bearing on the security and welfare of that state. Globalization: ongoing development of an internationally integrated economy that is driven largely by industrialized nations’ and transnational corporations’ desire for access to natural resources, cheap labor, and foreign markets. Greenhouse Gases: atmospheric gaseous compounds such as carbon dioxide and methane that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, thereby contributing to the greenhouse effect of life on earth. Scientists have concluded that since the dawn of the industrial age, a buildup of those gases from the burning of fossil fuels is producing a rapidly warming planet. Guerrilla Warfare: unregimented, irregular military actions (e.g., hit-and-run sniper attacks, land mines) waged by small, mobile, and aggressive bands of fighters, supported by the civilian population, against a government they are seeking to overthrow. Hawks and Doves: term used to describe those advocating for intensified military actions in the U.S. war in Vietnam (“hawks”) versus those seeking an end to the war (“doves”).

Hearts and Minds: refers to the crucial need to win the political support of the civilian population in a nation engulfed in a counterinsurgency conflict. The phrase dates to the Vietnam War and the ultimately failed effort of the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments to win the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese people. Hegemony/Hegemonic: economic or political dominance or broad and deep influence exercised by one power over other states either within a region or globally. Indigenous: a people (or other living phenomena such as plants) native to a particular region or place. Intelligence: information that is gathered, usually covertly, by a state because it is thought to be of military or political value for the security of that nation. Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM): developed during the Cold War by both the United States and Soviet Union, an ICBM is a supersonic missile with a minimum range of 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) designed to carry nuclear bombs. Jihad: a war waged by Muslim fighters in defense of Islam, its beliefs, associated holy lands, or related Muslim interests. Junta: a small cadre of military or political officials who take power upon the overthrow of a previous government. Laissez-faire: an economic system or policy that espouses little or no government regulation or interference of any kind in economic affairs. Left- and Right-wing Politics: dating to the seating of the national assembly during the French Revolution of 1789, this is an essential classification of the liberal, reform, movement-oriented (“Left”) position in politics, versus the conservative (“Right”) standpoint advocating order and individual selfreliance above all. Legation(s): an initial diplomatic mission by one nation to another, usually the first step toward establishing an embassy and full diplomatic relations. Marxist: a person who subscribes (or is accused of adhering) to the economic and political theories of Karl Marx (1818–1883), emphasizing the preeminent value of a society’s laboring classes and the need for class struggle to achieve a classless society in which wealth is widely distributed. Mercenary: a paid professional soldier hired to wage war on behalf of his or another nation in a foreign land. Most Favored Nation (MFN): in international trade relations, a nation receiving MFN status receives all the advantages (e.g., high import quotas on exported products, low tariffs) of all other MFN states. Mujahideen (or variously, Mujahedeen): a band of Muslim fighters engaged in jihad against designated invaders or infidels they see as a threat to Islamic beliefs, associated Muslim lands, or interests, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Nasserism: Pan-Arab nationalist-Socialist ideological movement that spread across the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the key leaders of the Egyptian revolution of the early 1950s.

Neoconservative: refers primarily to a conservative political leader or strategist who believes the United States should maintain unmatched military superiority internationally and be willing to advance its values and interests globally, by force if necessary. The origins of neoconservatism are found in the 1970s era of the Vietnam Syndrome. Neoliberalism: emerging out of the perceived death of the old liberal Democratic Party in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism emphasizes the fusion of social justice principles (at least rhetorically) with an emphasis on globalized free trade and free markets. Neutralize: in the context of U.S. imperialism, denotes the CIA’s tactic of nullifying or eliminating the effectiveness of local political leadership deemed an enemy of the United States through a range of tactics including torture and targeted assassination of civil officials (as in the Nicaraguan Contra War of the 1980s). NGO (Nongovernmental Organization): an organization that is not part of any government and receives all of its funding privately through voluntary contributions, foundations, and the like. Payload: during the nuclear age, refers to the nuclear bombs or warheads that are carried by a missile. Preemptive/Preventive Attack: refers to a military assault taken by one state against another, allegedly to disable the military capacities of, and preempt a presumed attack by the targeted country. Protocol: an arrangement or system of rules governing affairs or setting standards of behavior among nations around a particular issue (e.g., Kyoto Protocol on global warming). Provisional Government: a temporary governing authority established by an invading and occupying power. Psychological Warfare or Operations (“Psy Ops”): the practice of using psychological tactics such as intimidation and threats to deceive, intimidate, demoralize, or otherwise change the thinking, value and belief system, or behavior of the target. Realist Cinema: less a genre or movement in filmmaking than a stylistic approach, realist cinema attempts to represent raw, difficult truths of human existence with as much objectivity as possible. It found expression particularly in postwar Italian and French cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Reeducation Camps: an instrument of repressive states (e.g., Greece in the late 1940s) in which members of the population resistant to the authority of government are held in captivity where they are subjected to a variety of “reeducation” measures, including psychological warfare aimed at crushing the resistance. Rogue State: a nation or state whose behavior is regarded by either international organizations or by individual countries (sometimes arbitrarily with its own geostrategic objectives in mind) as operating outside the bounds of international law, norms, and conventions. Subversion: the act or charge of deliberately trying to undermine or cause the overthrow of a government, an allegation often made during times of war against those working in opposition to the conflict in order to discredit their position and portray them as unpatriotic. Sui generis: Latin phrasing to denote “one of a kind” uniqueness.

Technocracy: finding particular resonance in the 1960s and 1970s era of rebellion, this is a 20th-century theory of society that asserts that key decision making and government itself have been turned over to a constellation of scientists, technological engineers, and other experts. Terrorism: variously defined as the use of violence or violent intimidation against either civilian persons or property in pursuit of political aims otherwise not achievable through legitimate means. Theravadan: associated with Theravada Buddhism, the oldest enduring form of Buddhist spiritual practice. Thermonuclear Bomb: more commonly known as the hydrogen (or “H”) bomb, this weapon’s unprecedented explosive power results from the uncontrolled sustained chain reaction of hydrogen isotopes combined under extraordinarily high temperatures. Having destructive power 1,000 times more powerful than the first atomic weapons, the H-bomb was developed by the United States and then the Soviet Union and elevated fears in the nuclear age to new and terrifying heights. Third World: originating in the Cold War, the term referred to nations not in the supposed First (U.S.– Western European) World, nor the Second World of the Soviet Union and allied Communist nations, but the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other “undeveloped” or underdeveloped regions of the world. Unilateralist: one who believes decisions involving a nation’s security should be made without undue consultation or collaboration with other nations and that the consideration of the nation’s own interests must be primary; a school of foreign policy thinking most associated with the U.S. administration of George W. Bush.

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Editors and Contributors

EDITORS David Bernstein is visiting professor of history at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. His most recent work, How the West Was Drawn: Indians, Maps, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in the Early American Places Series. He received his PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Chris J. Magoc is Professor of History at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in American history and directs the Mercyhurst public history program. Among his publications are Chronology of Americans and the Environment (ABC-CLIO, 2011), Environmental Issues in American History (Scholarly Resources, 2007), and Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape, 1870–1903 (University of New Mexico Press, 1999). He and Mary Ellen, his wife of 29 years, are very proud parents of Ethan and Caroline.

CONTRIBUTORS Ali Nobil Ahmad Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin Łukasz Albański Pedagogical University of Cracow Alan M. Anderson King’s College, London Kristin Apeck Mercyhurst University Andrew Scott Barbero Southern Illinois University John T. “Jack” Becker Texas Tech University

Benjamin R. Beede Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Marcos (Mark T.) Berger Naval Postgraduate School Kevin M. Brady Tidewater Community College Michael Brenes Hunter College, City University of New York Kristen Brill University of York Kevin Brown Kansas State University Mathew Brundage Kent State University Debra Buchholtz California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Derek N. Buckaloo Coe College John R. Burch Jr. Campbellsville University Adam D. Burns University of Leicester Geoff Burrows CUNY Graduate Center Patrick Callaway University of Maine John Cappucci University of Windsor David M. Carletta Marist College Ken Coates University of Saskatchewan

Kristin Collins-Breyfogle Mercyhurst University Carl Creason University of Louisville Gregory S. Crider Winthrop University Jennifer Daley King’s College, London LuElla D’Amico Whitworth University Jennifer Nez Denetdale Independent Scholar Andy DeRoche Front Range Community College S. Matthew DeSpain University of Oklahoma Michael Dove Western University, Canada Shannon E. Duffy Texas State University Ellen Eckert-Neureiter Eastern Illinois University Niels Eichhorn Middle Georgia James Erwin Independent Scholar Tyler P. Esno Ohio University Jeff Ewen Drew University Peter S. Field University of Canterbury

Richard M. Filipink Jr. Western Illinois University Jonathan Foster Great Basin College Michael Edward Franczak Boston College Gregg French University of Western Ontario Justin D. García Millersville University of Pennsylvania Dustin Garlitz University of South Florida Karen S. Garvin Independent Scholar Brent M. Geary Ohio University Daniel R. Gibbs Independent Scholar Henry H. Goldman Independent Scholar Joseph J. Gonzalez Appalachian State University Olivia Stauffer Good Independent Scholar Larry A. Grant Independent Scholar David Grantham Texas Christian University Keven Gregg Mercyhurst University Stephen Griffin Independent Scholar

Luke Griffith Ohio University Kathleen Gronnerud Independent Historian/Writer Michael R. Hall Armstrong Atlantic State University Jay T. Harrison Fort Lewis College Donald E. Heidenreich Jr. Lindenwood University Traci Heitschmidt Coram Deo Academy Karl Hele Concordia University Jacob Hicks Florida State University Alison Hulme Royal Holloway, University of London John Huntington University of Houston Frank Jacob City University of New York Matthew D. Jacobs Ohio University Jacob C. Jurss Michigan State University Hideaki Kami Ohio State University Binoy Kampmark RMIT University Jeffrey G. Karam Brandeis University

Pamela Karimi University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Michael J. Kelly Creighton University School of Law Joyce Ann Kievit Independent Scholar Kevin Y. Kim Vanderbilt University Patrick Kirkwood Central Michigan University Grove Koger Independent Scholar Rebecca Kohn San Jose State University Onur M. Koprulu Independent Scholar Chris Kostov Schiller International University, Madrid Jenna L. Kubly Independent Scholar Andrea Kwon Independent Scholar Zeb Larson Ohio State University Law Yuk-fun Hong Kong University Open Learning Institute Nathan V. Lentfer University of Northwestern–St. Paul Michael Loadenthal Independent Scholar James Lockhart Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Jonathan Z. Ludwig Rice University Philip J. MacFarlane Independent Scholar Martin J. Manning Independent Scholar Ry Marcattilio-McCracken Oklahoma State University Abigail Markwyn Carroll University Cory C. Martin Binghamton University Ignacio Martinez The University of Texas at El Paso Guy Massie Carleton University Donald W. Maxwell Indiana State University Stephen McCullough Lincoln University of Pennsylvania Matthew D. McDonough Coastal Carolina University Matthew McMurray City University of New York John Miglietta Tennessee State University Aragorn Storm Miller University of Texas at Austin Patit Paban Mishra Sambalpur University Michelle M. K. Morgan Missouri State University

Bill Morrison University of Northern British Columbia (Emeritus) Aaron Coy Moulton University of Arkansas Brian S. Mueller University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Todd Eric Myers Grossmont College Paul Nelson Independent Scholar Denese M. Neu Independent Scholar F. Evan Nooe Independent Scholar Dael A. Norwood Binghamton University William Noseworthy University of Wisconsin–Madison Jonathan W. Olson Florida State University Jessica Lynn O’Neill Independent Scholar John O’Sullivan University of North Georgia Chad H. Parker University of Louisiana, Lafayette R. Joseph Parrott University of Texas at Austin Eric L. Payseur University of New Mexico Roger Peace Independent Scholar

Craig J. Perrier Northeastern University and Fairfax County Public Schools Margaret Power Illinois Institute of Technology James Pruitt Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Zachary Quaratella Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Mohammad Sajjadur Rahman University of Chittagong Kasper Grotle Rasmussen University of Southern Denmark Caroline Reeves Harvard University Fairbank Center Christina L. Reitz Western Carolina University Adam C. Richards Millersville University Kim Richardson University of South Carolina, Lancaster Gwenola Ricordeau Université Lille 1 Allison L. Robinson University of Houston Frank Anthony Rodriguez Independent Scholar Gregory Rosenthal State University of New York at Stony Brook Molly Rosner Rutgers University–Newark T. Michael Ruddy Saint Louis University

Umeme Sababu Edinboro University Jesús E. Sanabria Bronx Community College, CUNY Marc Sanko West Virginia University Edward Schmalz Creighton University Rahima Schwenkbeck The George Washington University Matthew Shannon Emory & Henry College Cameron Shriver Ohio State University Geoffrey Simmonds Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Aparna Singh Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow, India Taylor Spence Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Laura Steckman University of Wisconsin–Madison Stephen K. Stein University of Memphis Sarah Steinbock-Pratt University of Alabama Lora Stone University of New Mexico–Gallup Jake Sudderth CTC Urban Studies Ken B. Taylor New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

William A. Taylor Angelo State University Nina Teresi Marquette University Rodney G. Thomas Independent Scholar Jasper M. Trautsch Free University of Berlin Stephen Tuffnell University of Oxford Jessie D. Turner University of Southern Florida Chris Vanderwees George Brown College Eugene Van Sickle University of North Georgia James Varn Mississippi Valley State University Miriam Elizabeth Villanueva Texas Christian University Matthias Voigt Goethe University Frankfurt Andrew J. Waskey Dalton State College Linda S. Watts University of Washington, Bothell Tim Watts Independent Scholar Jennifer Way University of North Texas Seth A. Weitz Dalton State College

Ken Whalen Universiti Brunei Darussalam Christopher Wilkins William Jewell College Corbin Williamson Ohio State University Mathew Wilson Independent Scholar Micah Wright Texas A&M University Nathan Wuertenberg George Washington University Ben Wynne University of North Georgia Michael S. Yonchak Otterbein University

Index

A Abdulaziz, 1006 Abolition of slavery, 46, 157, 162, 195, 203, 244–245, 270, 281, 289–290 Abraham Lincoln Brigade, 1025 Absolute poverty, 994 Abu Ghraib, 1424, 1425–1427 Acheson, Dean, 1068, 1071–1072 speech excerpts, 1149–1152 “Speech on Far East,” 1149–1152 telegram on Hanoi threat (1949), 1289–1290 Adams, John (1735–1826), 46, 60, 83, 94, 303, 405, 412, 911 Adams, John Quincy (1787–1848), 3, 5–6, 22, 71, 104, 117–118, 158, 168, 283, 288, 296, 330, 364, 374, 421, 443, 491, 611, 635, 712, 760 Adams-Onis Treaty (1819), 4, 6, 115, 117–118, 140, 168, 189, 441, 491, 522, 635 Addams, Jane, 801, 887, 889–891, 918, 920–921 “Address to Congress,” Wilson, Woodrow, (1913), 873–875 Adventures of Captain Bonneville (Irving, Washington), 679–682 Afghanistan, 820, 911, 1007 Afghanistan (1976–1989), 1315–1318 Afghanistan (1990–2014), 1427–1429 Africa Belgium, 1031 new nations in, 1031 Somalia, 1031 U.S. Interests in, 891–894 African Americans dominance over, 815 soldiers, 796–798 Afrikan American Military Units, 728–730 Aggressor nations, 976 Agricultural allotment, 541 Aguinaldo, Emilo, 726, 730–732, 800 Al Qaeda, 1007, 1429–1430 Alamo, Battle of (1836), 118–120, 148, 178, 180, 183, 188, 199, 229–232 Alaska, purchase of, 52, 176–177, 203, 481–482 Alaska Defense Projects Map, 1047–1048 Alaska-Canada highway (ALCAN), 1012 Alcoa, 999 Algonquians, 6–8, 85, 425, 428, 432 All Volunteer Force (AVF), 931 Allied invasion, 982 Allied powers, 985 Allotments, 593–597 Alsop, Charles F., 788 Alta California, 115, 120–124, 130–132, 135, 151, 167, 183, 190, 200–201, 221–222, 225 America and the World War (1915) (Roosevelt, T.), 921

America First Committee (AFC), 976, 979–981 American Anti-Imperialist League, 727, 732–734, 737, 794, 801–802, 824, 833 American Armies of Occupation (World War II), 981–983 American artists, 900 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 595–597 American Board of Foreign Missions, 4, 18, 48–49, 78, 92, 167, 286, 595 American Century/American Exceptionalism, 976, 983–984 American Civil Liberties Union, 929 American Civil War, 379, 408–409, 439, 478, 483, 485, 493, 502, 504–505, 508, 511, 519, 521, 525, 533–536, 591, 606, 612, 617–618, 639, 643, 649, 654, 656, 662, 667–668, 670, 929 American Colonization Society, 244–246 American Exceptionalism, 246–247, 976, 983–984 American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), 921 American imperialism, 789, 823 American Indians, dominance over, 815 American influence, 832 “American Interest in the Cuban Revolution” Cleveland, Grover, 781–785 American isolationism, 912, 976, 986 American League to Limit Armaments, 894–895 American Liberty League, 999 American naval strategists, 933 American North Russia Expeditionary Force, 925 American politicians’ sympathy, 772 American Proclamation of Neutrality (1793), 101–102 American Protective League (API), 928 American Railway Union (ARU), 902 American Red Cross as U.S. expansion agent, 895–897 American Revolution (Paris Treaty of 1775–1783), 8–11, 21, 28, 42, 55, 58–60, 63, 67, 69–70, 74, 76, 187, 246, 303, 359, 368–369, 372–373, 378, 388–390, 392–394, 402, 415, 431–432, 436, 450, 480, 483, 788 American Samoa, 810 American socialism, 902 American socialists, 910 American System, 46, 363–365, 404, 413, 575, 1033, 1071, 1102, 1443 American Thoreau, 552, 553 American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), 919–920 American veto, 992 Amity and Commerce, Treaty of (1858), 248–249 Ammunition, 985, 999 Andrew Sherburne’s experience as an American Privateer during Revolutionary War (1828), 106–109 Anglo-American relationship, 986–987 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), 1007 Anglo-Saxonism, 480, 482–484, 576 Angola, 1318–1320 Annan, Kofii, 1031 Annexing the Pacific, 242–243 Anthropological exhibits, 814 Antiapartheid Activist Profile, Davis, Jennifer (2007), 1417–1420 Antiapartheid Movement, 1320–1322 Anti-Bolshevik(s), 901, 925–926 Anti-Imperialist League, 762 Antimilitarist tradition, 921 Anti-Semitic ideas, 998 Antiwar Movement, 1183–1185 Antiwar Protest Songs, 1185–1187 Antiwar publications, 1012 Antiwar sentiment, 1015 Anza, Juan Batista de (1736–1788), 123–124 “Apocalypse Now,” Coppola, Francis Ford (1979), 1322–1323 Apollo Space Program (1963–1972), 1187–1188 Arab states, 1007

Architects of the Columbian Exposition, 814 Argentina, 1018, 1189–1190 Arkhangelsk, 925 Armas, Desidero, 818 Arms trading, 903 Armstrong, Richard, 820 Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, 820 Arsenal of Democracy, 976, 985–986 Articles of Confederation, 9, 11–13, 28, 46, 61, 252–253, 346, 390, 398, 401–402, 424, 427, 432, 453, 456 Artists, Western, 484–489 ASEAN, 1022, 1023–1024, 1268 Ashley, Williams Henry, 489–490, 538 Assimilation, 365–367, 378, 382, 387, 391, 400, 436, 447, 593, 597, 607–608, 633, 639, 652, 658–660, 665, 673–674, 704 Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN), 1022, 1023–1024, 1028 Association of Southeast Asia (SA), 1022 Astor, John Jacob, 13–14, 297, 538 Astoria, 14 fur trade, 13, 32 Jefferson and, 134 Pacific Fur Company, 4 Astoria, 14–16, 30, 297, 538, 680 Aswan Dam, 1007 “The Atlantic Charter,” Churchill, Winston (1941), 975, 986–988, 1003, 1020, 1046–1047 Atlantic Conference, 975, 1047 Atlee, Clement, 1017, 1051 Atomic bomb projects, 989 Atomic bomb/nuclear weapons (1946–1954), 1072–1074 Atomic bombs, 988–990, 1033, 1070, 1072–1074, 1077, 1116, 1118, 1127, 1154, 1161, 1268, 1292, 1481. See also nuclear bombs Japanese struggle to end the war, 1053–1055 in New Mexico, 1018 primary targets, 990 Atomic fission, 989 Atomic weapons, 979 Atrocities Americans and Haitians, 824 Belgians and the Congo, 932 Cuban Forces, 725 Fascists, 1025 Filipinos-Americans, 727 film representation, 1343 Germans, 866, 1707 Guernica, 1025 Honduras, 1403 Iraq, 1340 Japanese military, 1112 Mexican America, 150 My Lai Massacre (1968), 1248–1250, 1426 Nicaragua Contras, 1358 Pacific islands, 330 Rambo movies, 1343, 1369 Salvadoran military, 1334 Sunni population, 1422 U.S. Indian policies, 494 Austin, Moses (1761–1821), 124–125 Austin, Stephen (1793–1836), 125–126, 140–142, 147, 166–167, 187, 196–199, 208–217 Australia, 1003 Australia coup d’état (1975), 1190–1191 Authoritarianism, 919 Autonomy, 906 Axis Japan, 988

Axis Powers, 975 Axson, Ellen Louis, 937 Azerbaijan, 1006, 1106 B Bacevich, Andrew, 913 Bad Axe, Battle of, 367 Baker, Newton D., 930 Bakumatsu period (bakufu), 249–251, 299–300, 308 Balch, Emily Greene, 920 Bald eagle, 793–794 Baldwin, Roger, 920 Balkans, U.S. interests and intervention, 1430–1432 Ballou, Mary B., “This Muddy Place (1854), 581–583 Banking holiday, 1020 Banks, foreign central, 994 Barbary War (first) (1801–1805), 241, 252–255 Barbary War (second) (1815), 241, 253–255, 266, 301 Barboncito, 591 Barceló, Maria Gertrudis (“Las Tules”) (1800–1852), 127 Baring, Alexander, 16 Barley, 828 Barritt, Leon, 786–787 Baruch, Bernard, 898 Bascom Affair, 614 Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorve) (1966), 1191–1192 Battle of Beiping-Tianjin, 995 Battle of Sand Creek, 517 “Battle of Santiago” lyrics, 788–789 Battle of Shanghai, 995 “Bay of Pigs/Cuban Missile Crisis,” (1961, 1962), 1093, 1105, 1192–1196, 1204, 1217, 1230, 1232, 1384 Bayo, Alberto, 1025 Bayonet Constitution (1887), 255–256, 268, 271, 305 Bear Flag Revolt (1846), 116, 120, 123, 128, 134, 164, 201–202, 220 Beard, Charles, 920 Beax Arts White City, 724, 814 Becknell, William (1787–1856), 129–130, 184–185 “The Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation,” McKinley, William, 793 Bent, William, 490–491 Benton, Jessie, 507 Benton, Thomas Hart, 134, 186, 387, 478, 491–492, 507, 546, 576, 636 “The Destiny of a Race” (1846), 576–577 Berlin Blockade/Airlift (1948–1949), 1074–1077 Berlin Crisis of 1948–1949, 1069, 1072, 1075, 1077, 1127, 1147, 1154, 1196–1197, 1231 Berlin Crisis of 1961–1962, 1196–1197 Bessemer, 828 Bettrich, Marguerite, 902 Beveridge, Albert L., 483, 727, 734–736 “Beyond Vietnam Speech 1967,” King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1233–1234 Big Foot, 597–598 Big Three, 1017 “The Big Type War of the Yellow Kids” comic, 785–786 Bill of Rights, 929 Bin Laden, Osama, 1316, 1422, 1423, 1427, 1429, 1430, 1433–1434 Black Hawk (1767–1838), 362, 367–368, 407–408, 470–473, 620, 637 Black Hawk on village life along the Mississippi Hawk, 470–472 Black Hills, 598–599 Black Hoof (d. 1853), 368–369 Black Kettle, 591 Black Panther for Self-Defense, 1197–1199

Black ships, 241, 250, 257–259, 272, 274, 299, 302, 309 Blacks, exclusion at fair, 815 Blankenhorn, Heber, 900 Blockade of confederate ports, 17–18 Blue Jacket (ca.1740-ca. 1810), 359–360, 369, 373, 395, 429, 433, 442, 445, 450 Board of Indian Commissioners, 592 Bohr, Niels, 990 Bolshevik Decree on Peace in 1917, 916 Bolshevik(s), 887, 910, 916, 925 Bolton, John (1948), 1434–1435 Bonneville Treaty, 591 Bonus Expeditionary Force, 813 The Book of Mormon, 531–532, 536, 554 Boone, Daniel (1734–1820), 370–371 “Born on the 4th of July,” Stone, Oliver (1989), 1323–1324 Borrowing countries, 994 Bosque Redondo (1863–1868), 493, 591, 600–601, 647–648 Boudinot, Elias (ca. 1802–1830), 362, 371–372, 438–439, 449, 541 Bourne, Randolph (1938), 920, 957–963 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 1031 Boxer Protocol, 811 Boxer Rebellion, 810–811, 834 Brain Trust, 1002 Brant, Joseph (1743–1807), 98–99, 372–373 Brazil (1954–1975), 1199–1200 Bretton Woods Conference/System, 978, 988, 993–994 Briand, Aristide, 913, 915 Bridger, Jim, 538–539 Bridgman, Elijah Coleman, 810 British Empire, 827 British Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 921 British Guiana, 1200 British Navy, 932, 940 British Security Coordination (BSC), 980 Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (BLF), 902 Bryan, Alfred (singer), 909 Bryan, William Jennings, 736–737, 937, 941 Bucareli Agreements (1923), 831 Buchanan, James (1791–1868), 57, 72, 134, 203, 205, 292, 296–297, 318, 504, 508, 520, 534–535, 565–566 Buffalo Bill, 815 Buffalo Cultures, 602–605 Buffalo Soldiers, 605–606 Bulgaria, 1028 Bull Moose Party, 1019 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 606–609, 659 Burlend Family and American System for populating West Illinois (1831), 468–470 Burlingame-Seward Treaty (1868), 259–260 Burnham, Daniel, 814 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 931 Bush, George H. W. (1924–), 1315, 1332, 1339, 1342, 1346, 1359, 1367, 1378, 1421, 1436, 1442, 1458, 1474, 1477, 1484–1485, 1500 Operation Desert Storm, 1332 Bush, George H. W. administration, 1129, 1227, 1339, 1376, 1434, 1442, 1457, 1464, 1494 Bush, George W. (1946–), 1134, 1238, 1330–1332, 1341–1342, 1421–1423, 1426, 1435–1437, 1440–1442, 1454–1455, 1458, 1460–1461, 1469– 1470, 1474, 1477–1478, 1490, 1492, 1495, 1500, 1510–1515 Bush, George W. administration, 1134, 1247, 1442, 1451–1452, 1464, 1474, 1478, 1490, 1494, 1515 on National Security Strategy, 1515–1517 Bush Doctrine, 1435–1437 Butler, Smedley Darlington (1881–1940), 811–813, 824, 832, 999 “War Is a Racket” (1933), 876–879 Butler, Thomas, 812

By Alsop, Charles F., 788–789 Byran, William Jennings, 736–737 Byrnes, James F., 1017, 1077–1078 C Cable from Iran, Wells, C. Edward, on Pro-Soviet Film, 1167–1168 Cable from U.S. Egyptian Embassy Iran, on American Aid to Saudi Arabia, 1168 Cable news, 1438–1439 Cáceres, Ramón, 817 Caco politics, 823–824 Calhoun, John Caldwell (1782–1850), 3, 5, 7, 86, 89, 195, 284, 363–364, 374, 417, 419, 497, 571, 606–607 California missions, 130–133 California Republic (1846), 116, 128–129, 133–135, 223 Californios, 135–136 Cambodia, 1200–1203 Cameron, James, 1489 Camp David. See also Treaty of Versailles Camp David Accords (1978), 1324–1326 Canada, 1011 Canada Rebellions, lower and upper, 44–45 Canadian troops, 981 Cannon, Frank, 772 Caperton, William B., 823 Capitalism, 915, 916 Cárdenas, Lazaro, 831 Carhart, Tom on Vietnam Wall Memorial (1981), 1390–1394 Carib peoples, 936 Carleton, James H., 591 Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 663, 820 Carlisle Indian School, 592, 609–611 Carnegie, Andrew, 794–796, 801 Carnegie Foundation/Institute, 998, 1104 Carranza, Venustiano, 809, 830, 938, 940, 941 Carson, Kit, 492–493, 539, 591 Cartels, 915 Carter, Jimmy (1924–), 1125, 1235, 1237, 1281, 1312–1314, 1316–1317, 1324–1325, 1346–1348, 1356, 1372, 1376, 1379–1390, 1399, 1452, 1454, 1478. See also Iran Hostage Crisis (1979–1981); Panama Canal (1980) Carter Doctrine, 1380–1390 Panama Canal, 1380–1384 Carter administration, 1130, 1314, 1330, 1332–1334, 1336, 1338, 1356, 1372, 1379, 1473, 1492 Carter Doctrine (1980), 1317, 1326–1327, 1380–1390 Cash-and-carry basis, 1009, 1011 Cash-and-carry policy, 1020 Cass, Lewis (1872–1866), 374–375 Casta system, 160 Castle Bravo Nuclear Test (1954), 1078–1079 Castro Ruz, Fidel (1926–), 1086, 1193, 1194, 1196, 1203–1205 Second Declaration of Havana (1962), 1023, 1303–1307 Casus belli, 933 Catlin, George, 480, 486–487, 493–494, 539, 634 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 918, 1015 Cayuse, 596 Cayuse War, 5, 18–19, 25, 37, 79, 93 Central America (1983), 1398–1399 Central Asia, 1439–1440 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1023, 1028, 1069, 1079–1080, 1084–1085, 1093, 1104, 1107–1108, 1126, 1132, 1161, 1171, 1191, 1193, 1199– 1200, 1208–1211, 1213–1215, 1218, 1220, 1222, 1225, 1229, 1261, 1275–1276, 1311, 1315, 1318, 1328, 1333, 1340, 1344, 1346, 1356, 1373, 1376, 1406, 1408, 1455, 1459, 1474, 1492 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 558–560 “A Century of Dishonor” Jackson, Helen Hunt, 702–704

Chadwick, James, 989 Chain reaction, 989 Chamberlain, George E., 930 Chamberlain, Samuel, Mexican War recollections (1846), 226–229 Cheney, Richard B. “Dick” (1951–), 1440–1441 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), 362, 413–414, 438, 466–467 Cherokee Outlet and Cherokee Strip, 611–612 Cherokees, 361–362, 371–372, 375–378, 383, 397–401, 404, 413–414, 416, 421–422, 437–440, 443, 446–449, 464, 466–467, 472, 607, 611, 636– 638 Chevron, 1006 Chiang Kai-shek, 996 Chicago Columbian Exposition, 813–816 Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 863–864 Chickasaws, 64, 364–365, 378–379, 397, 400, 443, 445–447, 461, 474, 593, 603, 637–638, 707 Chief Joseph (Young Joseph), 612–613 Children’s toys, 1327–1329 Chile (1954–1975), 1205–1207 Chilean Coup Orchestration memorandum, 1308–1309 China, 812, 983 U.S trade with, 816 China (World War II), 995–996 China, Early Cold War (1946–1954), 1081–1082 Chinese influence, 1022 Chinese railroad workers, 559–560 Chivington, John M., 591 Chouteau family, 387, 444, 494–496, 538 Christianity, conversion of American Indians, 592 Church Committee Hearings/Reports (1975–1976), 1328–1330 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), 530, 532, 554, 566 Churchill, Winston, 975, 980, 985, 1003–1004, 1017, 1046–1047 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). See Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) CIA coup in Guatemala (1986), 1178 CIA Document on the Arbenz Government in Guatemala, 1171–1175 CIA Propaganda Document on Mosaddeg of Iran, 1175–1177 Circulation increases, 775 Citizen Genêt affair, 19–21 Civil Liberties Bureau, 920 “Civil wars,” 1011 Civilization policy, 360, 361, 379–381, 410 “Civilization” to removal in the South, from, 361–363 Cixi, 811 Clark, George Rogers (1752–1818), 381–382 Clark, William, 496–497 Clarke, Jonathan, 912 Class warfare, 910 Clemenceau, Georges, 935 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, 768 Cleveland, Grover (1837–1908), 426, 725, 733, 760, 774, 781, 810, 828, 857 Climate change, 1441–1443 Clinton, Bill (1946–), 1227, 1282, 1408–1409, 1421–1423, 1432, 1436, 1457, 1461, 1469, 1478, 1485, 1487, 1492, 1500–1502, 1504 Clinton, Hillary, 1424 Clinton administration, 1405, 1408, 1431–1434, 1440, 1453, 1475, 1478, 1492 Coaling stations at Pago Pago, 810 “Coca colonization,” 979, 997 Coca-Cola, 997 Cochise (1804–1874), 613–614 Cody, Bill, 763–764 Cold War, 983, 1006 Cold War Cultural Imperialism, 1082–1084 Colombia, 74, 261, 267, 289–290, 835–836, 841, 854–856, 1020, 1041, 1344, 1359, 1365, 1367, 1414, 1443–1445

Colombia Guerilla Antonio Garcia Interview, 1507–1509 Colonial empire, 1023 Colonial schools, 819 Colonization, 820 Colony to state, 1–2 “Colored People’s Day,” 815 Columbian Exposition, 813–814, 816 “Columbia’s Easter Bonnet,” 803–804 Columbus, New Mexico, 938 Comancheria, 136–137 Committee on Nothing At All, 920 Committee on Public Information (Propaganda) (CPI), 898–901, 948 Committee on Uranium, 989 Commonwealth of Nations troops, 981 Communism, 916 containment of, 1006 spread of, 925 Communist bloc, 992 Communist controlled government, 1017 Communist state, 983 Communists in Asia, 996 vs. Nationalists, 996 propaganda against, 1008 Compromise of 1850, 496–498 Concentration camps, 999 Confederate ports, blockade of, 17–18, 81, 408–409 Congo Crisis (1960–1961), 1207–1209, 1298 Congo Crisis, Dulles, Allen’s cable on (1960), 1298 “Congressional Government: A Study of American Politics,” Wilson, W., 937 Congressional Medal of Honor, 279, 605, 744, 812, 1120 Conscientious objectors (COs), 920–921 Conscription, 927, 930, 959 Continental Divide, 544 Contraband commanders, 932 Contras Honduras, 1338–1339 Martinez, Alvarey, 1339 Sandinistas, 1314, 1339 U.S. support for, 1314, 1339 Controlling the Indians (1835–1903), 585–588 Convention of 1818, 3, 13, 15, 21–23, 73 Conviction of Kate Richards O’Hare (1918), 963–968 Convoys, 981 Cook, James (1728–1779), 23–24, 52, 54, 83, 264, 280, 286, 330 Coolidge, Calvin (1872–1933), 767, 807, 821, 914–915, 1026 Coolidge administration, 812, 914 Core principles, 980 Corps of Discovery, 81, 173, 477, 498–500, 654, 1804 Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army, 500–502 Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno (1824–1894), 137–138 Corve’e labor system, 823 Country Western Music (1970’s–2014), 1330–1331 Cox, James Middleton, 1019 Crazy Horse, 615 Crédit Mobilier of America (scandal) (1872), 500–503, 559 Creek Wars, 379, 382–384 Creelman, James, 829 Crimera Declaration, 1021 Cripple Creek, 517

Croly, Herbert, 920 Crow Dog, 615–616 Crowder, Enoch H., 930 Cuba, U.S. Economic Interests in, 737–738 Cuba, War of Independence and U.S. Intervention, 738–741 Cuban nationalists, 767 Cuban revolutionaries, 772 Cuban War of Independence, 724, 738–742, 748, 770, 838 Currency devaluation, 994 Curricula, 820 Cushing, Caleb (1800–1879), 260–262, 294, 320, 325–326 Custer, George Armstrong, 591, 616–617 “Custer’s Last Stand,” 591 Cyclotron, 989 Czech Legion, 925, 926 D Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty of (1830), 362, 384–386 Daniels, Josephus, 1019 Danish West Indies, 936 Dartiguenave, Philippe Sudre, 823 Dawes, Henry, 593 Dawes Act (1887), 595, 704–707. See also General Allotment Act of 1887 Dawes Severalty Act (1887), 593, 608, 618–619 De Smet, Pierre-Jean, 619–620 De Tocqueville, Alexi, 984 Debs, Daniel (Eugene’s father), 902 Debs, Eugene, “Espionage Act Speech ” (1938), 956 Debs, Eugene V., 901–903 Debt-servicing, 993 Declaration of Independence of Democratic Republic Vietnam, 1287–1289 “Defense Planning Guidance” for Post War World, 1494–1495 Dellums, Ronald V. (1935–), 1331–1332 Democratic Republic Vietnam Independence (1945), 1287–1289 Democratization, 819 Deng Xiao Ping, 834 Deseret, 480, 533, 565, 634, 566 “The Destiny of a Race,” Benton, Thomas Hart, 576–577 Detained merchant ship, 932 Detzer, Dorothy, 1011, 1015 Dewey, John, 920, 956 Diaz, Porfirio, 829, 938 Dictated peace, 935 Dictators, 824 Diem, Ngo Dinh (1901–1963), 1097, 1181, 1209–1211 Diné (Navajos), 591 Diseases, 590 Dissenters, 903 “Distant Possessions: The Parting of Ways” Carnegie, Andrew, 794–796 “Do Your Bit for America” Wilson, Woodrow (1917), 950–951 Doctrine of Containment, 1068, 1138–1139, 1398 Doctrine(s). See also Carter Doctrine (1980); Eisenhower Doctrine; Monroe Doctrine Catholic, 70, 132–133 English legal, 69 of International Law (L.C.), 801 Lodge for Corollary (1912), 825–826 Manifest Destiny, 564 Mormonism, 530, 554 Olney, 857 Reagan Corollary to Carter Doctrine, 1326

Roosevelt Corollary, 807, 816–817, 822, 843–845, 858, 866, 1023 Tyler of 1842, 287 Dodd, William, 998, 1008 Dodge, Grenville, 559 Dodge, Henry, 620–621 Dog Soldiers, 621–622 Doha Development Round, 1001 Dollar convertibility, 993 Dollar Diplomacy, 816–817, 821, 823, 851 Dollar Hegemony, 994 Dominican National Union (UND), 818 Dominican Republic, 817–819, 938, 1017, 1093, 1102, 1182, 1203, 1211–1212, 1329, 1490 Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, 24–25 Donner Party, 543 Donovan, William, 980 Douglas, Stephen A., 478, 497, 503–504 Douglass Frederic, 815 Dowager Cixi, 811, 834 “Dr. Strangelove of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” Kubrick, Stanley (1954) (movie), 1212–1213 Draft riot, 930 Drone attacks, 1007, 1446–1447 Drum beating, 918 Dulles, Allen, 1070, 1084–1086, 1104, 1107, 1125, 1132, 1175, 1178, 1209, 1298 Dulles, John Foster, 1086–1088, 1091, 1096, 1103, 1111, 1113, 1125, 1281, 1293–1296 DuPonts, 998 Durant, Thomas, 502, 539, 560 E Earle, Ralph T., 829 Eastman, Crystal, 919 Eckard, Heinrich von, 940 Economic advancement, 819 Economic crisis, 990 Economic imperialism, 992 Ecuador (1954–1975), 1213–1214 Edmunds-Tucker Act, 533 Education, 819–821 Educational efforts, 820 Edward Gould Buffum Pans for Gold in California (1848), 577–581 Egypt (1990–2013), 1447–1449 Eichelberger, Clark, 1016 Einstein, Albert, 989 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1890–1969), 852, 856, 986, 1007, 1033, 1070, 1084–1092, 1094–1095, 1104–1105, 1107, 1111, 1118, 1125, 1175, 1178, 1180, 1186, 1188, 1193, 1209, 1228, 1240–1241, 1245–1248, 1253, 1259, 1268–1269, 1273, 1276, 1290, 1294, 1298, 1307, 1380, 1467–1468 Doctrine (1957), 1007–1009, 1088–1090 farewell address on Military-Industry Complex (1961), 1299–1300 on Indochina future, 1290–1291 “New Look Policy,” 1090–1092 Eisenhower administration, 856, 1085–1086, 1090–1091, 1102–1103, 1105, 1178, 1180, 1208, 1217, 1221, 1241, 1269 Eisenhower Doctrine, 1007, 1088–1090, 1180, 1241, 1296 Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, 1299–1301 El Salvador (1976–1989), 1332–1334 Electricity, 815 Embargo Act (1807), 3, 26–27 Emergency Banking Relief Act, 1020 Emergency Peace Campaign (EPC), 1016 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–553), 366, 552–553 Emory, William H., 501, 546 Empire of Japan, 975 Empresarios, 140–141

Engelbrecht, Helmuth, 1015 Enola Gay, 990 Enslaved American James Riley encounters an Arab Trader (1815), 331–334 Ernesto Che Guevara’s Speech to workers, 1301–1302 Espionage Act (1917), 903–904, 910, 920, 927–928, 939 Ethiopia, 976, 1009, 1011, 1015 Ethnocentric racism, 976 Eugenists, 765–766, 998 “Europe and Elsewhere,” Clemens, S. L., 770 European pathogens, 590 European romanticism, 552 Evarts. Jeremiah, 595 Evolutionary biologists, 766 Evolutionary progress, 766 Exceptionalists, 984 Exodusters, 504–506 Exotic dancing, 815 Expansionists, 820 F Factory System, 386–387 Fairs, 815 Falaba (steamer), 942 Fall, Albert K., 1012 “A Farewell to Arms,” Hemmingway, Ernest (1929), 905–906 Fascism, 976, 997–998, 1003 and Nazism and United States Corporations before WW II, 1055–1056 support in the United States and economic ties to, 997–1000 Fascist governments, 1024 Federal Reserve, 985 Federalist Papers, 46, 396, 412 Female sexuality, 815 Fiallo, Fabio, 818 Fidel Castro Havana Declaration, 1303–1307 Figueres Ferrer, José, 1092–1093 Filibustering in Latin America and the Caribbean, 243–244 Filibusters, 242–244, 262–263, 296 López, Narciso, 244 pirates, 244 Filipino independence, 825 Filisola, Vincente Account of Battle of Alamo (1849), 229–231 Fillmore, Millard (1800–1874), 24–25, 248, 250, 265, 267, 272, 300, 302, 566 Fillmore administration, 565–566 Film industry, 900 Fireman’s Magazine, 902 First Amendment, 927 First Battle of Bud Dajo, 774 Fitzpatrick, Thomas (1795–1854), 539 Fixed exchange rate, 993 Fletcher, Alice C., 622–624 Florida, East and West, 139–140 “Following the Equator,” Clemens, S. L., 769–770 “For Oregon” settlers from Illinois describe the Oregon Territory (1847), 109–112 “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” Hemingway, Ernest, 1025 Ford, Gerald (1913–2006), 1226–1227, 1234, 1245, 1282, 1312, 1319, 1329, 1440, 1477 Ford, Henry, 976 Ford administration, 1130, 1206, 1244–1245, 1311 Ford Foundation, 1088, 1100–1101, 1104 Foreign currency, 993 Foreign policy, 816, 911

Foreign Policy Association, 920 Foreign Section, 900 “A Foreigner in My Own Land,” Seguin, Juan, (1842), 217–220 Forgotten man program, 1019 Fort Laramie Treaties (1851, 1868), 516, 592, 598, 599, 615, 616, 622, 624–625 Fort McIntosh, Treaty of (1785), 388–389, 394, 429, 457 Fort Stanwix, Treaty of 1784, 28–29, 42, 67, 389–390 Fort Sumner, 591 Fort Wayne, Treaties of (1803, 1809), 368, 390–392, 397, 412, 522 “Forty niners,” 527 Forward bases, 983 Four Freedoms, 1020 Four Lights magazine, 921 Fourteen Points, 825, 888, 893, 906–908, 916–918, 925, 934–935, 939, 954–955, 1003 France deployment, 812 Francisco, Franco, 1024–1025 Franco, Generalisimo Francisco, 976 Franklin, Benjamin, 9, 22, 60, 62, 76, 92, 203, 431, 606 Fredonian Rebellion (1826–1827), 141–142 Free lunch, 994 Free seas and free trade, 932 Free-Soil Movement, 506–507 Frément, John Charles (1813–1890), 123, 128–129, 134, 150, 155, 160, 164, 202, 205, 220–221, 224–225, 478, 486, 491–493, 501, 507–508, 512, 546–547, 790 French War in Indochina (1946–1954), 1071, 1093–1095, 1233, 1277 Frisch, Otto, 989 Fromkin, David, 911 Frontier, 508–510 Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick) (1987), 1334–1335 Fullbright Institute of International Education, 821 Fur trade, 4, 13–15, 25, 34–35, 37–39, 52–53, 55, 57, 80–81, 122, 159, 264–265, 386–387, 432, 434, 481, 489–490, 494–496, 499, 538–539, 542, 544, 602–606, 624, 631–632, 640–641, 651–652, 667, 681 G Gadsen Purchase (1854), 143–144 Gale, Leonard D., 555 “Garcia Letter” from Generals Calixto to Shafter, 785–786 Garner, John N., 1012 Garrison, Lindley, 921 Garrison, William Lloyd, 918 Gavilleros (guerillas), 818 Gendarmerie, 824 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 978, 988, 992, 1000–1001 General Allotment Act of 1887, 593, 608, 618, 642, 664–665 General Land Office, 478, 479, 510–512 General land survey, 551 Geneva Accords (1954), 1095, 1096–1097 “Gentleman’s Agreement,” 846 Geological Survey, 562–564 Georgia, Republic, 1449–1451, 1470–1471 German American Bund, 977, 1008, 1009 German Navy, 932 German resurgence, 934 German Samoa, 810 German submarine warfare. See also unrestricted submarine warfare German Navy, 927, 932, 943 German U-Boats, 920 U-boat attacks, 941 The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, 901 Germany economy, 935

Geronimo, 625–626 G.I. Joe, 1214–1215 Gilpin, William (1813–1894), 512–513 Global hegemony, 992 Globalization and the Washington Consensus, 993–995 GM Opel factory, 999 Goebbels, Joseph, 998 “Gold Buffum Pans” (1848), Gould, Edward, 577–581 Gold mines, 527–529 Gold Rush, California (1848), 135, 186, 247, 260, 293, 316, 479, 513–515, 527–533, 539, 548, 581–583 Gold Rush, Colorado (1858), 515–517, 591, 617, 625, 637, 642, 644 Gold Rush, Klondike (1897–1899), 517–519 Gold standard, 993 Gold value, 991 “Golden Spike,” 478, 545, 560 Good Neighbor Policy, 819, 821–822, 1002, 1019 “Good Neighbor Policy in Cuba” Roosevelt, Franklin on (1933), 879–880 Goschochking (Ohio) massacre of 1782, 392–393 Grant, Ulysses S. (1822–1885), 259, 290, 310, 503, 592, 607, 650, 658, 661, 701 Grattan, John, 590, 626–627 Graves, William, 926 Gray, Robert (1775–1806), 36, 84, 264, 330 Gray William, 596 Greasy Grass Battle, 643–645 Great America Desert, 443, 515, 519–520, 634, 636 Great Depression (1937), 822, 832, 987 Great Peace of 1840, 627–629 Great Sioux uprising, 629–630 Great War, 939 Great White Fleet, 742, 827 “Greater America” map (1899), 865–866 Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS, 1024 Greece, military coup d’etat and junta (1967–1974), 1215–1216 Greek Civil War (1946–1949), 1097–1099 The Green Berets (1968), 1216–1217 Green Revolution, 1100–1101 Greenville, Treaty of (1795), 360, 368, 391, 393–395, 411–412, 423, 425, 429, 433, 445, 451, 457 Gregg, Josiah (1806–1850), 145 Grenada (1976–1989), 1335–1338 Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, 6, 116, 123, 135, 143–147, 151, 161, 164, 167, 186, 197, 200, 202, 205, 220, 478, 497–498, 564–565, 607, 940, 1273– 1274 Guam, 743, 793, 1004–1005 Guano Islands Act (1856), 265–266 Guantanamo Bay, 1451–1453 Guatemala, 1070, 1085, 1093, 1101–1105, 1134, 1171–1175, 1178, 1217–1218, 1312, 1314, 1338, 1357, 1369, 1378, 1384–1385, 1401, 1406, 1415 Guerilla warfare, 832 “Guernica” (Picasso, Pablo), 1025, 1026 Guevara de la Serna, Ernesto “Che” (1928–1967), 1023, 1218–1219, 1301–1302 Gulf of Tonkin Incident/Resolution (1964), 1219–1221 Gulf war of 1991, 1007 Gunboat diplomacy, 241–242, 250, 266–267, 271, 279, 291, 299, 805, 811, 823 H Haiti, 812, 823–824, 938, 1221–1222, 1453–1454 Hamilton, Alexander (1757–1804), 41, 46, 95, 395–396, 405, 412, 451 Hampton Institute, 820 Hanoi-Haiphong bombing (1966–1972), 1222–1224 Hard Labor, Treaty of, 29–30 Harding, Warren G. (1865–1923), 774, 807, 821, 824, 846, 851, 859, 903, 927 prison commuted of Debs, 903

Harmar, Josiah, 359, 369, 395, 429, 433, 450, 483 Harney, William, 590 Harper’s Bazaar, 769–770 Harper’s Magazine, 1027 Harrison, Benjamin (1833–1901), 267–268, 306, 396–397, 541, 827, 850, 852 Harrison, William Henry (1773–1841), 320, 361, 390–392, 396–397, 445–446 Hart, Eliza, 78–79 Hawai‘i attack on, 1005 missionaries, 286–287 Pearl Harbor, 995 Hawai‘ian annexation, 268–270 Hawai‘ian League, 243, 270–271, 305–307 Hay, John, 743–744, 834, 936 Hayden, Ferdinand V., 562 Hayden, Sophia, 815 Hayes, Rutherford B. (1822–1893), 260 Haymarket Massacre, 814 Haywood, William D. “Big Bill,” 910 Hearst, William Randolph, 762, 770, 775, 786, 998 Hearst newspapers, 825–826 Hemingway, Ernest, 889, 905 Hemispheric alliance, 822 Henry, Patrick, 43, 606, 966 Herrera, José Joaquin de (1792–1854), 147 Hess, Rudolf, 1008 Hiene-Geldern, Robert, 1022 High Forehead, 590 Hindenburg, Paul von, 1008 Hiroshima, 988, 990, 1018 Historical geography, 1141 Hitler, Adolf, 976, 998, 1008 Fascists in, 1009 and followers criminal actions, 981 in Nazi Germany, 1027 Ho Chi Minh, 1023, 1224–1226, 1286–1287 Hoge, William, 1012 Hohenzollern, Wilhelm, 1017 Homeland Security/Intelligence Establishment, 1423, 1436, 1454–1456 Homestead Act of 1862, 520–521, 541, 583–585 Homesteader writes home, 585–588 Honduras, 1338–1339, 1456–1457 Hoover, Herbert (1874–1964), 807, 813, 821–822, 973–974, 976–977, 1010, 1016, 1026–1027, 1039, 1120 Hoover administration, 813 Hopewell, Treaty of (1785), 189, 397–399 Horse, gun and disease (historical overview), 589–590 Horseshoe Bend, Battle of (1814), 361, 383–384, 399–400, 403, 436–437 Houston, Sam (1793–1863), 119–120, 137–138, 148–149, 162, 178–180, 183, 188, 194, 199, 229, 533 “How We Advertised America,” Creel, George (1920), 901, 970–972 Hudson River School of art, 486, 487, 552 Hudson’s Bay Company, 30–32 Huerta, Victoriano, 829, 938 Hughes, Charles Evans, 908–909, 914 Hukbalahap (Huk) Rebellion, 1023 Hull, Cordell, 809, 979, 1001–1003, 1008, 1010 Hull note to Japan, 1002 Hussein, Saddam (1939–2006), 1007, 1340–1343 on meeting Rumsfeld, 1403–1404 I

“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” (1914) Bryan and Piantadosi, 909–910, 944 Iceland/United States Defense of Iceland Agreement, 1169–1170 Ickes, Harold, 999 Impact and Resistance, 1141–1143 Imperial expansion, 821 Imperial German government, 942 Imperial German Navy, 943 Imperial preference, 987–988, 992, 1001, 1004 Imperialism, 821, 916 Imperialism and welfare, 915 Imperialism Speech, Kennedy, J. F. (1957), 1296–1298 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin), 951–953 Imperialists, 931 In Search of Human Rights, National Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras, report, 1404–1412 “The Incident in the Philippines,” Clemens, S. L., 769 Income disparity, 994 Income tax, 937 Indian peace medals, 32–33 Indian Removal Act of 1830, 172, 363, 371, 379, 384, 400–401, 430, 437–438, 464, 595, 637 Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 594, 618–619, 633 Indian Territory, 2, 5, 172, 187, 362–363, 376–377, 384–385, 401, 417, 421–422, 440–441, 443–445, 447, 449, 457, 472, 506, 519, 539, 541–542, 595, 611–612, 615, 632–633, 635–639, 648, 658, 662, 696, 702, 706–707 Indian Trade, 386–387, 606 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790, 359, 401–402 Indians of California, 149–151 Indians of the Eastern Plains, 631–633 Indians of the Great Basin, 633–635 Indians of the Middle Missouri river, 33–36 Indians of the Pacific Northwest, 36–37 Indians of the Southwest, 152–155 Indochina, Dulles, John Foster on, 1293–1296 Indochina, Foster Dulle’s Statement, 1291–1296 Indonesia/East Timor, 1226–1228 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 910 The Influence of Sea Power Upon History; 1660–1783 (Mahan, Alfred Thayer), 826–827, 862–863 Influenza, 1013 “Innocents Abroad,” (1869) Clemens, S. L., 768 Integration difficulties in, 1021 in Southeast Asia, 1021 Inter-American alliances, 822 Internal security organization (SAVAK), 1007 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 978 International Congress of Women, 919 “The International Jew,” Hitler, Adolf, 998 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 817, 978, 991, 994, 1001 packages, 994 quotas, 991 style development, 993 International Trade Organization (ITO), 1001, 1004 International Workers of the World (IWW), 903–904 Internationalism, 723, 736, 912, 969, 986, 987, 1015 Internationalists, 984, 1016 Interventionism, 911, 912 Interwar protectionism, 991 “Invasion USA (1985),” Zito, Joseph, 1343–1344 Investment, 823 IOUs (government bonds), 994 Iran, 1028, 1070, 1085, 1100, 1105, 1108, 1134–1135, 1139, 1167, 1175–1177, 1313–1314, 1316–1317, 1326, 1330, 1338, 1341, 1344–1347, 1351– 1352, 1359, 1376, 1385, 1389, 1406, 1422, 1437, 1440, 1457–1459, 1461, 1464, 1469, 1478–1479, 1488, 1497–1498, 1509–1511

Iran (1990–2014), 1457–1458 Iran, Coup d’état (1953), 1105–1109 Iran Hostage Crisis (1979–1981), 1227, 1313, 1346–1349 Iran-Contra Scandal (1985–1987), 1344–1346 Iraq, Gulf War II (2003–2011), 1460–1463 Iraq, Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Shield/Storm) 1990–1991, 1458–1460 Iroquois Confederacy, 1, 28–29, 38–40, 67, 77, 98, 372–373, 381, 671 Isolation policy, 1024 Isolationism, 911–913, 980, 1003, 1343–1344 Isolationist posture, 976 Isolationists, 907, 976 Israel, and Egypt, 1007 Israel (1946–1954), 1109–1111 Israel (1976–1989), 1348–1350 Israel (1990–2014), 1463–1465 Italy, 1111–1112 IWW Leaders, 921 J Jackson, Andrew (1767–1845), 3, 6, 49–51, 118, 134, 140, 149, 186, 188–189, 194, 266, 281, 308, 361–362, 364, 374, 377–379, 383–385, 402– 404, 407, 414, 416–418, 421–422, 430, 437–438, 443–444, 447–448, 464, 491, 547, 607, 611, 620, 636–637, 791 Jackson, Charles T., 555 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 639 James, William, 801 Japan atomic bombing of, 990 empire of, 976 Hull note to, 1002 opening of (1853–1860), 271–274 postwar occupation of, 1112–1113 U.S. Declaration of war, 996 Japanese, racist sentiment against, 826 Japanese attack of Manchuria, 834, 976–977, 986, 990, 995, 1010, 1015, 1020, 1027, 1032, 1034, 1207 Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. See Pearl Harbor “Japan’s Struggle to End of War” (1946), 1053–1055 Jay, John (1745–1829), 41, 46, 60, 181, 396, 412 Jay’s Treaty, 13, 40–42, 191, 395, 460, 651 Jazz, 1228–1229 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 2, 5, 21, 46, 82, 95, 134, 168, 173, 177, 205, 241, 246, 252–253, 263, 304, 360, 365, 378, 380, 387, 391, 396–397, 400, 404–407, 412, 419, 423–425, 432, 447, 453, 477, 484, 498, 522, 526, 547, 567, 611, 635, 1161, 1288 Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 530, 554, 564 “Jew Deal,” 1008 Jewish State, 1006 Jews, propaganda against, 1008 Jimens, Juan Isidro, 818 Johnson, Andrew (1808–1875), 259, 261, 482, 630, 650, 936 Johnson, James Weldon, 824 Johnson, Lyndon B. (LBJ) (1908–1973), 1072, 1088, 1115, 1125, 1184–1185, 1194, 1200, 1212, 1220–1221, 1223–1224, 1230–1231, 1233, 1243, 1259, 1266, 1269, 1271–1272, 1278, 1282, 1307, 1365, 1371, 1380 on Tonkin Incident, 1307–1308 Johnson, Lyndon B. (LBJ) administration, 1182–1186, 1199, 1212, 1216, 1218, 1222, 1235–1236, 1243–1244, 1254–1255, 1452 Johnson Affair, 614 Jones Act (Philippine Autonomy Law of 1916), 824–825, 851 Jones bill (1916), 937 Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917, 824–825 Joplin, Scott, 815 José Martí’s “Our America” (1891), 777–781 Journal of Occurrences of Emigrating Creek Indians (1837), 472–475 Junipero’s Serra’s report on Missions, 206–208. See also Serra, Junipero

K Kahehameha (ca. 1758–1819), 275–276 Kahn, Julius, 930 Kanghwa, Battle of (1871), 276–278 Kasser, Garmal Abdel, 1007 Kautsky, Karl, 915 Kearney, Stephan Watts (1794–1848), 155–156 163, 508 Kelley, Hall Jackson, 544 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 913–915, 972–974, 1027 Kellogg, Frank B., 913–915 Kendall, Amos, 556 Kennan, George (1904–2005), 1068, 1088, 1113–1115 Kennedy, John F. (1917–1963), 980, 1085, 1092, 1180, 1187, 1193, 1195, 1211, 1229–1231, 1257–1258, 1269, 1274, 1293–1296, 1323, 1365 Kennedy, John F. (1917–1963) “Peach” Speech (1963), 1231–1232 Kennedy administration, 1086, 1130, 1197, 1199–1200, 1211, 1218, 1222, 1242, 1258–1259 Kennedy speech on Imperialism, 1296–1298 Keokuk (ca. 1783–1848), 362, 367, 407–408, 470 Keynes, John Maynard, 991 Khmer Rouge, 1023, 1182 “Killing the Indian, saving the Man,” 592–593 King, Clarence, 562–563 King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. (1929–1968), 1182, 1198, 1233–1234, 1273, 1329, 1378–1379 “Beyond Vietnam Speech (1967), 1233 King Cotton, 362, 408–410 Kirker, James (1793–1852), 156–157 Kissinger, Henry (1923–), 1091, 1121, 1182–1183, 1190, 1202, 1206–1207, 1226–1227, 1234–1238, 1244, 1255–1256, 1259, 1278, 1282, 1285– 1286, 1309, 1319, 1354, 1381, 1478 Kitchen Debate (1959), 1083, 1238–1240, 1328 Knox, Henry (1750–1806), 410–411, 1343–1344 Knox, Philander C., 816 Korea, 1055–1056, 1116–1119 Korean expedition of 1871, 278–279 Koszta Affair (1853), 280–281 Kuhn, Fritz, 1008 L La Amistad Schooner (1839–1841), 157–158 Labor leaders, radical De Leon, Daniel, 910 Debs, Eugene, 910 Lady Managers, 815 Laissez-faire approach, 1002 Lakotas or Western Sioux, 34–35, 152, 172, 519, 525, 544, 590–592, 597–599, 602, 604–605, 615–616, 622–627, 632–633, 640–643, 655–658, 660–661, 664, 668–670, 675–677, 707 Land allotment, 382, 385 Land Run, 541–542, 612 Lane, Henry, 976 Las Gorras Blancas, 158–159 Latin America and Caribbean filibustering, 243–244 Latin American dictators, 819 Lawrence, Ernest, 989 League of Nations, 810, 908, 913, 917, 939, 968–970, 987, 1010, 1015–1016 Lease-Lease Act, 1020 Lebanon (1976–1989), 1350–1351 Lebanon, U.S. Interventions on, 1240–1242 Lee, John D., 536, 566 LeMay, Curtis (1906–1990), 1242–1243 Lend Lease Bill, 1015 Lend-Lease (1940–1941), 986, 988, 1003–1004 Lend-Lease Act of March 1914, 985, 1009, 1011

Lend-Lease aid, 978 Lend-Lease legislation, 976 Lenin, Illyich Vladimir, 915–917 aim of at capital nations, 916 Anti-Imperialist Critique of, 915–916 “Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline,” 951–952 on imperialism, 951–952 Liberal internationalists, 920 Liberia, 244–245, 281–283, 314, 893, 911 Liberty Loan Act of 1917, 925 Liberty Poems, Clemens, S. L., 762, 769 Libya (1976–1989), 1352 Life (magazine), 983 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–1865), 17, 205, 245, 259, 281, 481, 484, 502–504, 507–508, 512, 520, 534, 539, 545, 556, 558, 606, 630, 735–736, 744, 802, 899, 952 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 128 Lindbergh, Charles, 979, 981 “Address to the America First Committee (AFC) (NY, 1941),” 1044–1046 Hitler supporter, 998 Lippman, Walter, 984 Lisa, Manuel (1772–1820), 159 Literary Digest, 762 Little Big Horn battle, 643–645 Little Turtle (ca. 1750–1812), 359–360, 369, 373, 391, 394–395, 411–412, 429, 433, 442, 450, 457–459 “The Print of My Ancestor’s Houses,” 457–460 Locarno Pact (1925), 913 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 825–826, 905, 907, 913, 917, 968–970 Lodge Corollary, 825–826 London Naval Treaty Article 22, 933 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903), 593, 645–647, 662 “Long Walk,” of Díne, 591 Long walk of the Navajos, 647–648 López, Elfido, recall of rural Mexican-American life in 19th Century, 236–240 López, Narciso (1797–1841), 244, 283–284 Lord Dunmore’s War, 42–44 Los Alamos, 990 Los Angeles Examining, 826 “Lost Generation,” Hemingway, Ernest, 905 Louisiana Purchase (1803), 5, 16, 32, 46, 65, 117–118, 125, 140, 162, 168, 171, 173, 178, 182, 204, 312, 371, 387, 405–406, 412, 447, 477, 484, 495–496, 498, 511, 521–525, 530, 544, 567–569, 611, 860, 1382 Luce, Henry Robinson, 983 Ludlow Amendment, 1016 Lusitania, 923, 933, 939, 941–942 Lyrics for the Song “Over There” (1917), 953 M MacArthur, Arthur, Jr., 744–745, 755 MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964), 745, 813, 1057, 1112, 1116, 1118, 1120–1121, 1162–1164, 1166, 1170 Macleish, Archibald, 984 Madero, Francisco I., 829, 938 Madison, James (1751–1836), 3, 6, 15, 27, 46–47, 71, 86–89, 102–103, 140, 177, 193, 253, 281, 396, 405–406, 412–413, 417 war message (1812), 102–103 Madman Theory, 1243 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 826–827 Mail delivery (Pony Express), 188 Mammoth Oil Company, 1014 Manchu Qing Dynasty, 811 Manchuria, 834, 1015 Japanese attack of, 976, 1010, 1027 Manhattan Project, 979, 989–990, 1027

Manifest Destiny, 480–482, 484, 492, 498, 507, 512, 525–527, 537, 542, 544, 553, 564–565, 569–574, 576, 637, 673, 724, 750, 765–766, 827, 860, 863, 886, 912 Manifest Destiny ideology, 750, 912 “Manifest Destiny,” O’Sullivan, John L., (1845), 569–574 “Manifesto” by Aguinaldo, Emilo, 800–801 Manila Bay, Battle of (1898), 745–748 Manuelito, 591, 648–650 Mao Zedong, 811, 834, 996 Map of U.S. Defense Projects in Alaska, 1047–1048 “March of the Flag” Beveridge, Albert, 789–792 Marco Polo Bridge incident, 995 Marcos, Ferdinand (1917–1989) and the Philippines, 1352–1355 Marianas, colonization, 1004 Marine Corps, 813 Marriner, J. Theodore, 915 Marshall, George, 1001 Marshall, (John) Court Decisions (1823, 1831, 1832), 413–414, 439, 448 Marshall Plan (1948–1952), 986, 988, 1068–1069, 1073, 1076, 1112, 1115, 1119, 1121–1123, 1125, 1129–1130, 1139, 1149, 1258, 1504 Marshallese Petition on Trust Territory, 1291–1293 Marti, José, 748–749 Martial law, 823 Marxist ideology, 812 Master race ideology, 997–998 Mather, Stephen, 540 Matthew Perry’s Account of His Landing in Japan (1853), 334–338 Maxwell, Lucien Bonaparte (1818–1875), 160 Mayaguez Incident (1975), 1244–1245 Mayo, Henry T., 829 McCarthy, Joseph, “Enemies from Within” speech, 1152–1154 McCarthyism, 1055–1056, 1124–1125, 1152, 1269 McCormick Committee, 824 McGillivray, Alexander (ca. 1750–1793), 415–416 McIntosh, William (1778–1825), 416–417 McKenny, Thomas, L. (1785–1859), 368, 387, 417–418, 606 McKinley, William (1843–1901), 268–270, 725–727, 736–737, 739–740, 744–745, 749–750, 767–768, 772, 776, 793, 796, 800, 806–807, 811, 821, 827, 845, 850, 860 McKinley Tariff Act (1890), 827–828 Measles epidemic at Waiilatpu, 596 Media, 761 Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty (1867), 592, 650–651 “Mein Kamp” (Hitler, Adolf), 998 Memorial Day Speech, 876–879 Merchantmen, 943 Merchants of Death thesis, 889, 1013–1015 “Message to Congress on Indian Removal,” Jackson, Andrew (1829), 464–466 Mestizos, 160–161 Métis, 651–653 Mexican Air Force Squadron, 831 Mexican Colonization Law of 1824, 164–166 Mexican Land Grants, 166–167 Mexican Revolution, 830 Mexican Supreme Court, 831 Mexican-American War (1846–1848), 6, 10, 116, 119, 123, 127, 133–134, 138, 143, 147, 150, 153–156, 158, 161–164, 167, 180, 186, 196–197, 200, 204–205, 244, 247, 263, 284, 290, 296–297, 299, 301–302, 478, 497, 512, 520, 530, 533, 539, 554, 559, 607, 647, 668, 830–831, 911, 938, 1273 Mexican-U.S. Border relations, 1465–1467 Mexico, 829–831 Meyer, George von Lengkeke, 826 Micronesia, 1004–1005 Middle East, 1006–1008

Peace (1994–1998), 1394–1398 and U.S. Interests (1944, 1948), 1050–1051 Midway Atoll, 243, 269, 284–285 Miles, Nelson, 613 Militarism, 919, 976 Militarization of American Culture, 1467–1469 Military conquest, 590–591 Military industry complex, 986 Military personnel, 982 Military service, 921 Military spending, 919 Military training, 921 Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), 1245–1248 Milius, John, 1370–1371 Millis, Walter (1935), 924 Mining Camps, 527–529 Mining industry, 828 “Missing,” Gavras, Konstantine Costa (1982), 1355–1356 Missionaries, 286–287, 596 Missions, 47–48 Missouri Compromise (1820), 478, 497, 504, 529–530 Molina, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, 817 Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggresion pact, 1034 Monroe, James (1758–1831), 22, 27, 71, 86, 104, 117, 177, 188, 203, 266, 281, 288, 327, 374, 400, 432, 491, 523, 567, 607 Monroe Doctrine, 57, 104–105, 140, 177, 267, 288–291, 310–311, 321, 327, 574–576, 724, 760, 767, 795, 807, 816–817, 822, 825–826, 832, 843, 845, 857–858, 866–868, 870, 907, 913, 917, 936, 1045 Mooney, James, 999 Moral imperialism, 939 Moral standards, 990 Morgenthau, Henry, 1025, 1027 Mormonism, 530–534, 564–565 Mormons, 554, 564–565 Moro Rebellion, 727, 750–752 Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), 534–535 Morse, Jedidiah (1761–1826), 418–419 Morse, Samuel F., 555–557 Morse code, 556 Mosaddeq, Mohammad, 1007 Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857), 535–537, 566 Mountain men, 489, 537–539 Muir, John, 539–540 Mushotsky, Joseph, 921 Mussolini, Benito, 813, 889, 976 “My Husband Was Seized with the Mania,” Noble, L., 460–463 My Lai Massacre (1968), 1217, 1248–1250, 1426 “The Mysterious Stranger, a Romance,” Clemens, S. L., 770 N Nacionalista efforts, 825 Nagasaki, 988, 989–990, 996, 1018 Nanjing, 834 Napoleon wars, 3 American trade with Dutch, 272, 299 British actions, 26, 87, 101 French Army, 89 French results, 49, 71, 122, 139 Jay’s Treaty, 40 Jefferson and, 27 Louisiana purchase treaty, 89, 178 United States Navy, 87

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 1031 National Advisory Council (NAG), 991 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 824 National Council for the Prevention of War (NCPW), 1011, 1016 National Defense Act of 1916, 923 National Liberation Front (NLF), 1249, 1250–1252 National Missile Defense (NMD), 1469–1470 National Origins Act of 1924, 908 National Parks, 539–541 National Road, 419–421 National Security Act (1947), 1069, 1070, 1080, 1125–1127 National Security Council Paper NSC-68, 1017, 1117–1118, 1127–1128, 1154–1162 National Social Party (Nazis) fascism, 997 master race ideology, 997–998 National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party, 976 Nationalists, vs. Communists, 996 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Nature of, 1377–1378 Nauvoo, Illinois, 564 The Nauvoo Expositor, 532 Naval arms race, 914 Naval leaders, 827 Navarro, José Antonio, letter to editor (1853), 231–236 Nazi crimes, 980 Nazi Germany, 939, 976, 979, 981, 1008–1010, 1021, 1027 Chinese agreement with, 995 Nazi military victories, 975 Neoliberal capitalism, 994 Neolin, 48–49, 65, 432, 446 Neutral Ground (Louisiana) Sabine Free State, 168 Neutrality activists (1930s), 1010–1011 Neutrality Acts, 976, 981, 1011–1012, 1014, 1020 New Echota, Treaty of (1835), 362, 371, 376–377, 414, 421–422, 438, 448–449, 611, 637–638 New institute economics (NIE), 994 “New Look Policy,” Eisenhower, Dwight D., 1087, 1090–1092, 1180 New Neutrality Act, 1020 New Orleans Battle, 49–51 The New Republic, 920 New Spain, 115, 120, 130–132, 147, 160, 168–170, 173, 1990–1991 “New world order,” 906 New World Symphony (Dvorak), 815 New York Herald, 769 New York Herald Tribune, 924 New York Journal, 761–762, 775–776, 786 New York Press, 775 New York Times, 984 New York World, 762, 775, 786 New Zealand, 1003 The Newer Ideals of Peace (Addams, Jane), 918 Newfoundland, 982 Newspaper propaganda, 772 Newspapers, 761 Nez Perce, 596, 612, 613, 653–655 Nez Perce War, 612 Nicaragua (1893–1945), 816, 831–833, 938, 1027 canal in, 832 Nicaragua, Contra War (1981–1990), 1356–1360 Nicaragua, Republic of (1856–1857), 291–292 Nicaragua Constitutional War, 832

Niccolò, Machiavelli (1469–1527), 1235 Nicholas II, Czar, 847, 925 1973 Arab-Israeli War, 1007 1932 campaign, 1019 Nitroglycerin, 560 Nitze, Paul, 1129–1130 Nixon, Richard Milhous (1913–1994), 1082, 1083, 1124, 1129, 1182–1183, 1185, 1188, 1191, 1201–1202, 1206–1207, 1210, 1216, 1222, 1224, 1234–1240, 1243, 1255–1256, 1259, 1278, 1282, 1285, 1304, 1311, 1328–1329, 1354, 1469, 1475 Nixon administration, 1130, 1202, 1222, 1224, 1237, 1255–1256, 1259, 1272, 1477 Nixon and Kissinger, on Allende of Chile, 1308–1310 Non-Aligned Movement, 1252–1254 Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 994–995 Nonintervention, 821 Nootka Sound Convention, 51–53 Noriega, Antonio Manuel, 1315, 1344, 1366–1367, 1415 Norris, George W., 1011 North American Review, 769, 794 North Atlantic, 1055–1056 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 1006, 1017, 1055–1056, 1067, 1069, 1072, 1074, 1087, 1091, 1112, 1127, 1131–1132, 1139, 1141, 1147–1149, 1169–1170, 1215, 1253, 1267, 1294, 1370, 1449–1450, 1470–1472, 1481, 1501–1503, 1505–1506 enlargement, 1501–1507 Northwest Defense Projects, 982, 1012, 1013 Northwest Land Ordinance (1785), 422–424 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 424–425, 453–457 Northwest Passage, 52, 53–54 Northwest Staging Route, 1013 Northwest Territory, 359–361, 380, 388, 391, 394–395, 397, 425–426, 429, 442, 457 Nuclear Freeze Movement, 1313, 1360–1363 Nuclear weapons, 1071–1074, 1078, 1081, 1087, 1090–1091, 1118, 1121, 1129–1130, 1138, 1180, 1194, 1196–1197, 1232, 1242–1243, 1259, 1276, 1291, 1313, 1342, 1360–1363, 1437, 1441, 1461, 1469, 1472, 1489, 1491, 1507, 1511, 1515 Nuremberg Trials, 1027 Nye, Gerald P., 1011 “The Nye Commission Report” (1936), 1036–1043 Nye Committee and Merchants of Death Thesis, 1013–1015 O Obama, Barack (1961–), 1247, 1421, 1424–1425, 1428, 1443, 1446, 1458, 1464, 1473–1474, 1490, 1518 Obama, Barack addresses United Nation, 1518–1520 Obama administration, 1437, 1441, 1449, 1456–1457, 1464, 1467 Oblinger, Mattie V., “Letter to Home” (1873), 585–587 Occupation, 983 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 1023 Ohio Company, 381, 427–428 Ohio Indian Confederation, 428–430 Oil. See petroleum Oil coming from Middle East, 978 Oil concession, 1028 Oil industry in the Middle East, 1363–1364 “Oil Leases on expropriation,” Standard Oil (1940), 882–883 Oil pipelines, 1012–1013 Oil reserves, 1006 Oil suppliers, 978 Oil-producing state, 1007 Oklahoma Land Run (1889), 541–542 One Hundred Slain Battle, 655–656 “Open Door Note” (1899) (Hays, John), 864–865 “Open Door” of U.S., 1027 Open Door Policy, 833–835, 976 Open Door principle, 834 “Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People,” 796–800

Open treaties, 906 “Opening” the Far East, 241–242 Operation Rolling Thunder (1965–1968), 1254–1255 Operation Splinter Factor (1948–1956), 1132–1133 Opium Wars, 242, 249, 260–261, 271, 273, 276, 292–295, 318–320, 811 Orchestration of Chilean Coup, 1308–1309 Oregon Boundary dispute, 54–56 Oregon Territory, 544 Oregon Trail, 542–545 Oregon Treaty, 56–57 Organization of American States (OAS), 1133–1134 Origins and historical development of the military-industrial complex, 1246–1248 Ortiz on Vieques, Puerto Rico (1979), 1384–1386 Osages, 171–172 Osceola (ca. 1802–1838), 430–431, 441 Ostend Manifesto (1854), 296–297, 338–342 O’Sullivan, John L., 569–574 Otis, Elwell, 800 Outcault, Richard F., 775 “Over There” (1917) song lyrics, 952–953 Overland mail, 555 Oxford Pledge, 1016 P Pacific Mail Steamship Company, 297–298 Pacific Railroad Act (1862), 545–546 Pacific Railroad Reports (1853–1855), 546–547 Pacific War, 996 Pacific Water, 976 Pacifists, 1016 Page, Kirby, 1016 Pago Pago, 810 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), 431–432 Pakistan (1990–2014), 1472–1473 Palestine, 1030, 1035, 1036, 1051, 1109, 1324, 1349 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 1240, 1394, 1464, 1495 Palmer, A. Witchell, 910 Panama Canal, 805, 816, 817, 826, 832, 1365–1366, 1380–1384 “The Panama Canal a Sound Business Proposition” (1908), 872–873 Panama Canal (Torrijos-Carter) Treaties (1977), 1365 Panama Invasion (1989), 1366–1367 Panama Tolls Act, 937 Panama/Panama Canal, 835–839 Panay (gunboat), 976 Paris Peace, 905 Paris Peace Accords (1973), 1255–1257 Paris Peace Conference, 939 Paris Treaty of 1763, 57–59 Paris Treaty of 1783, 59–61 Paris Treaty of 1898, 752–754 Parker, Samuel, 595–596 Patriotic films, 762 Patriotic songs, 788 Pawnee scouts, 656–658 Paxton Boys (1763), 2, 58, 62–63 Payments deficit, 993 Peace, 919 Peace and Amity, Treaty of Kanagawa, treaty of (1854), 241–242, 250, 259, 273, 299–300, 302 Peace Commission in 1867, 592 Peace Corps, 821, 1257–1258

“Peace loving“ nations, 906 Peace Movement (1930s), 1015–1017 World War I, 918–921 Peace policy, 658–660 Peace societies, 1011 Peace time act, 1015 Peacetime draft, 1020 “Peach Speech,” (1963) Kennedy, John F., 1231–1232 Peale, Charles Willson, 539 Pearl Harbor, 908, 933, 976, 985–986, 1012, 1020 Peasant mercenaries, 823 Peierls, Rudolf, 989 Pelley, William Dudley, 1008 Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg (1931–), 1259–1260 Permanent Court of International Justice, 1368 Permanent Reciprocity Treaty (1903), 768 Perry, Matthew Calbraith (1794–1858), 271, 299, 301–302, 976 Pershing, John J., 774, 830, 939–940 Petroleum, 809, 889, 977, 1006, 1011, 1183, 1204, 1326, 1366–1367, 1390, 1399, 1943 Philadelphia Press, 793 Philippine citizenship, 825 Philippine Commissions, 754–756, 825 Philippine Organic Act (1902), 756–757, 824 Philippine Revolution, 726, 730–731, 745–748, 751, 757–759 Philippine-American War, 762 Philippines, 793 attack on, 1005 Phoenix Program (1968–1972), 1023, 1217, 1221, 1261 Piantadosi, Al, 909 Pierce, Franklin (1804–1869), 80, 143–144, 263, 273, 296, 338 Pierce, Franklin administration, 144, 244, 261, 263, 296–297 Pike, Zebulon (1779–1813), 173, 185, 204 Pinckney’s Treaty (1796), 63–65 Pirates, 244 Platt, Orville, 767 Platt Amendment (1901), 727, 735, 741, 750, 753, 759–761, 768, 772, 774, 802–803, 809, 822, 844–846, 867, 870, 880, 1020 Primary Documents, American Anti-Imperialist League platform, 801–802 Pledge of America, 816 Plural marriage (polygamy), 565 Point IV Program (U.S. Home Economics Education in Iran), 1100, 1134–1135 Point Program (U.S. Home Economics in Iran), 1134–1135 Poland, invasion of, 976 Polar Bear Expedition, 925 Police forces, 824 Polio, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882–1945), 1019 Polk, James Knox (1795–1849), 4, 55, 57, 123, 134, 146–147, 162–164, 180, 193, 195–196, 200, 203, 205, 247, 284, 289–290, 321–322, 480, 483, 506, 508, 526–527, 547–549, 574, 715 Polo, Marco, 1022 Polygamy, 535 Pontecorvo, Gillo, “The Battle of Algiers” (1966), 1191–1192 Pontiac (1714/1720–1769), 2, 48–49, 58, 62, 65–67 Pontiac’s speech, 96 Pony Express, 555 Popular entertainment, 815 Portuguese trading empire, 1022 Postwar world, 976 “Post-Washington Consensus” (PWC), 994–995 Post-White House years of Kissinger, 1237–1238 Potawatomis, 360, 390, 391, 429, 432–433, 435, 445, 619

Potsdam Conference (1945), 1017–1018 Potsdam Declaration, 1017–1018, 1075 Powell, John Wesley, 549–550, 562–564 Powell Doctrine, 1473–1475 Prager, Robert, 928 Prairie du Chien, Treaties of (1825, 1829, 1830), 417, 434–435 Pratt, Richard H., 592 Preemptive war, 979 Preemption Act, 550–551 Prentiss, Narcissa, 92–94 Preparedness movement, 774, 887, 922–924 President Carranza staff and the Zimmermann Telegram, 940 Presidios, 174–175 Presumption Act of 1841, 550–551 Prewar training, 921 “The Prince,” Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1235 “The Print of My Ancestor’s Houses,” Little Turtle, 457–460 Private military contractors, 1475–1477 Proclamation of 1763, 29, 42, 67–69, 359, 377, 402, 413, 425 Progressive politics, 998 Progressive reforms, 937 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), 1422, 1434, 1436, 1460, 1478, 1500–1501 Promontory Point, Utah, 478, 557, 558, 560 Propaganda, Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 761–762 Propaganda Section, 900 Protest by Women of Palacagüina, Nicaragua, Against Destruction of Their Church by U.S. Marines (1929), 875 Public opinion, change in, 1020 Puerto Rico, 793, 824, 839–842 Pulitzer, Joseph, 775–776, 786 Putin, Vladamir addresses Crimera Annexation, 1425, 1520–1524 Q Quakers, 919 Quasi-War, 95, 241, 303–304 Quebec Act (1774), 69–70 Quebec Agreement, 989 Queen Lilíuokalani (1838–1917), 305–306 Quezon, 825 Quitman, John A. (1799–1858), 306–307 R Racial hierarchy, 815 Racist sentiment, against Japanese, 826 Radical labor leaders, 910 Radio Free Europe (RFE), 1135–1136 Rail companies, 829 Railroad routes, 546–547 “Rambo” Films (1982, 1985, 1988, 2008), 1368–1370 Reader’s Digest, 984 Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004), 1125, 1130, 1178, 1231, 1235, 1240, 1282, 1313, 1319, 1321, 1326, 1330, 1333, 1336, 1339, 1344, 1347, 1351, 1354, 1356, 1358, 1363, 1367, 1369–1370, 1377–1378, 1403, 1469, 1474, 1484, 1495, 1500 Realpolitik, 1235–1236 Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934, 1002 Reciprocity provision, 828 “Reconcentración,” Weyler y Nicolau, Valerian, 772 Red Armies, 925–926 Red Cloud, 615, 624, 625, 642, 655, 660–661 Red Cloud’s Speech at Cooper Union, New York (1870), 701–702 “Red Down,” (1984) Milius, John, 1370–1371 Red menace, 1006

Red Napoleon, 613 Red Power movement, 1262–1263 Red River War, 661–663 Red Scare, 904, 910 Red Sticks, 361, 382, 383, 384, 399, 436–437 Reformers of Indians, 592–593 Religious pacifist organization, 921 Reparations payments, 935 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, 1879 (Powell), 549 Reservation System, 593, 595, 663–665, 668 Reserve Officers Training Corps, 923 Reyes, Benardo, 829 Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 1371–1373 Rickover, Hyman, 770–771 Ridge, John (1803–1839), 362, 371, 421, 437–438 Riefenstahl, Leni, 1032 Righteous Harmony Society Yihet uan, 806, 810 RMS Lusitania. See Lusitania “Road to War: America, 1914–1917” Millis, Walter (1935), 924–925 Roberts, Edmond (1784–1836), 307–308 Rockefeller Foundation, 998 Romantic Thinkers, 551–553 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882–1945), 809, 821–822, 824, 852, 879–880, 898, 975, 980, 985–987, 1002–1003, 1006, 1009–1010, 1012, 1017– 1019, 1027, 1032, 1034, 1046–1047, 1071, 1134, 1138, 1172, 1326 Roosevelt, Theodore (1858–1919), 285, 482, 540–541, 723–724, 726, 729, 733, 735–736, 740–742, 744, 749, 751–752, 755, 759, 761, 763–765, 773–774, 788, 807, 825, 842–844, 907, 917. See also Rough Riders Roosevelt, Theodore administration, 540, 812 Roosevelt Corollary, 807, 816–817, 822, 842–845, 858, 866–868 Root, Elihu, 740–741, 774, 843, 845–846, 922, 946–947 Ross, John (1790–1866), 438–440 Rough Riders, 726, 763–765, 774, 843 Rubber and fuels (synthetic), 999 Rubber plantations, 1023 Rules of engagement, 932 Rumsfeld, Donald (1932–), 1477–1479 Rush-Bagot Pact (1817), 71–72 Russian Civil War, U.S.-Allied Intervention, 925–927 Russian-American Company, 176–177 Russian(s), 1061, 1068–1069, 1114–1115, 1123, 1131, 1150–1151, 1155, 1158, 1167, 1228, 1268–1269, 1382, 1425, 1439, 1450, 1469, 1471, 1520, 1524 Russo-Japanese War, 846–847 S Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (1975), 1264 Sakoku, 241, 248–250, 257, 272, 302, 308–310 Sam, Vilbrun Guillaume, 823 San Francisco Examiner, 775, 826 San Ildefonso, Treaty (versions), 522 San Jacinto, Battle of (1836), 120, 148–149, 162, 178–180, 183, 188, 194, 324 San Juan Islands, 4, 72–73 San Lorenzo,Treaty of (Pinckney Treaty (1795), 180–182 Sand Creek Massacre, 650, 665–666 Sandinista Liberation Front, 832 Sandino, Augusto César, 832 Santa Anna, Antonio López de (1794–1876), 116, 119–120, 126, 143–144, 147–149, 162–164, 178–180, 182–184, 187–188, 194, 199, 211, 213– 214, 218, 222, 229 Santa Fe Trail, 184–187 Santo Domingo, Annexation of (1869–1871), 310–311 Santo Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC), 817 Saudi Arabia, 978, 1006, 1479–1482

Schenck (Charles) v. United States (1919), 927–928 School of the Americas, 1373–1374 Schoolcraft, Henry, 667 School of the Americas, Congress reports, 1412–1416 Scott, Winfield, 17, 163–164, 262, 362, 438, 441, 448, 637 Second Great Awakening (ABCFM), 595 Second Sino-Japanese War, 995 Secret Service Act of 1917, 929 Security Treaty between United States and Japan, 1170–1171 Sedition Act (1918), 904, 928–929, 939 Segregated treatment of soldiers, 982 Seguin, Juan (1806–1890), 187–188 Selective Draft Law Cases, 930 Selective Service Act, 930 Selective Service System, 888, 929–931 Selective Training and Service Act, 1015 Self-government, 906 Self-sufficiency, 993 Seminole War (First) (1817–1818), 118, 188–189, 430, 437 Seminole War (Second) (1835–1842), 189, 326, 362, 382, 384, 399, 401, 403, 430, 437, 440–442 September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorists attacks, 1508–1510 Serra, Junipero (1713–1784), 120–121, 131, 149, 190–191, 206–208 Seven Year’s War (1754–1763), 1, 8, 44, 57, 59, 62, 65, 67, 69, 74–78, 178, 359, 377, 425, 450, 522, 651 Seward, William H., 936 Shandong, 811 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 667–668 Shimonseki Straits, Battle of (1863), 312–314 “Shock Therapy,” 994 Shufield, Robert W. (1822–1895), 314–315 Sierra Club, 540 “The Significance of Sections in American History,” Turner, F.J., 561 Silver Legion of Americans, 1008 Silver Shirts, 1008 Sinclair, Upton, 920 Sioux, western tribes of, 590 “A Sioux Story of the War,” Big Eagle, Jerome, 682–691 Sitting Bull, 591, 598, 617, 620, 642, 645, 669–670 Six-Day (Arab-Israel) War (1967), 1265–1266 Six-Day War (1967), 1007 Six Months in the Gold Mines (Buffon, Edward Gould), 577–581 Slave escape/revolt, 20, 74, 117, 139, 157–158, 186. See also abolition of slavery Slave states, 83, 116, 134, 196, 205 Slave trade, 16, 92, 157, 281, 301, 339 Slaves, 16, 92, 157, 281, 301, 326–327, 339 Smallpox and measles, 590, 628, 641 Smith, Jedediah Strong (1799–1831), 191–192, 538–539 Smith, Joseph (1805–1844), 531–533, 536, 554 Smith, Joseph, Jr., 566 Smith v. Townsend, 542 Social Darwinism, 765–766, 860, 998 Social Party of America (SPA), 901 Social reform, 775 Social relations, 982 Socialist Party, 904, 927, 929 Socialists, 904 Soft power, 1482–1483 Soldiers, segregated treatment of, 982 Solidifying the state, 2–3 Somalia, 1483–1485 Somoza, GarcÍa Anastasio, 819, 822, 832, 847–849

Sousa, John Philip, 776, 815 South African apartheid, 1136–1137 Southeast Asia, 1021–1024 integration in, 1021 Southeast Asian Command (SEAC), 1022 Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1022, 1267–1268 Soviet communism, 1004 Soviet Revolution, 1020. See also Russian(s) Soviet Union, 1007 Spain Civil War, 1009 Fascists in, 1009 Spalding, Eliza, Hart, 544, 596 Spalding, Henry, 78–79, 596 Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), 976, 1024–1026 Spanish horses, 589 Spanish-American War (1898), 763 Spanknóbel, Heinz, 1008 Speculative capital, 994 Spice islands, 1022 Sputnik (1957), 1188, 1238, 1268–1269 St. Clair, Arthur (1734–1818), 360, 368–369, 388–389, 395, 411, 425–427, 429, 433, 442–443, 450 Stalin, Joseph, 1003, 1018 Standard Fruit Company, 849–850 Standard Oil, 999 Standing army, 921 Stanford, Leland, 558–559 “Star Spangled Banner” (1814), 103–104 “Stars and Stripes Forever,” Sousa, Philip, 776 The State (Wilson, W.), 937 State Department, 987–988 State to empire, 4–5 Steinberg, Albert, 810 Stephenson, William, 980 Steven F, Austin’s Address Supporting Texas Independence (1836), 208–217 Stevens, Isaac Ingalls, 546 Stimson, Henry L., 990, 1026–1027 Stimson Doctrine, 1027 Stokes Commission (1832–1837), 443–445 Strategy changed for securing the realm, 1495–1500 “Strike Against War,” Keller, Helen (1916), 944–946 Strong, Josiah (1847–1916), 315–316 Stuart, R. Douglas, 979 Student movement, 1016 Submarines. See also unrestricted submarine warfare fleets, 933 using, 943 Suer, Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, 832 Suez Canal, 1006–1007 Sugar plantations, Hawai‘i, 316–317 Sugar producer interests, 767, 828 Sukarno, 1023 Superimperialism, 993 Sustainable development, 1485–1488 Sutter’s Mill, 527 T Taft, William Howard (1857–1930), 739, 744, 755–756, 759, 807, 812, 816, 821, 826, 832, 846, 850–851, 980, 984, 1026, 1124 Taft administration, 812, 816 Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905), 807, 868–869

Taino (Arawak), 936 Taiwan Strait Crisis, Second, 1269–1270 Taliban, 820, 1318, 1423, 1424, 1427, 1428, 1429 Tariff Act of 1890, 828 Tariff question, 828 Tariffs. See also Treaty of Versailles Atlantic Charter (1941), 987–988 Beveridge and, 736 British, 61 Business and, 724 with China, 325, 965 on commerce, 260, 363–364 during the Depression, 987 DOHA development round, 1001 exports, 806 Federal, 374 fixed, 320, 325 Free Trade Zone, 1465 Free-Soil Movement, 506 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 978, 988, 992, 1004, 1487, 1493 high, 404, 736 “Hull note,” 1002 import, 261, 792, 851 import toys, 1327 on imports, 827 Japanese opening, 274 Lend-Lease, 1004 McKinley of 1890, 243, 305, 317, 827–828 NAFTA, 1465 patents protection, 1038 Pearl Harbor, 1002 Permanent Reciprocity Treaty, 768 preferential, 891 protective, 203 Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934, 1002 reform, 736 revenue from, 252 Walker, 203 war efforts, 985 Wilson-Gorman, 243, 317 World Trade Organization (WTO), 1001, 1492 Tart, Robert, 984 Tarzan, 931–932 Taylor, Zachary (1784–1850), 146, 162–164, 192–193, 197, 200, 226, 310, 441, 449, 548 Teacher-training, 820 Teamsters Union Resolution against the War,” 1517–1518 Tecumseh (1768–1813), 360–361, 367–368, 378–379, 382–383, 390–392, 395, 397, 429, 433, 435, 445–447 Tehran Conference (1943), 1021 Josef Tito, 1028 Operation Bagration, 1028 Operation Overlord, 1028 Telegraph, 484, 545, 554–565, 703, 707 Teller Amendment (1898), 741, 750, 767–768, 772, 802 “Ten Thousand Miles from Tip to Tip,” 793 Tenskwatawa (1775–1832), 360–361, 363, 383, 391, 395, 397, 429, 436, 446–447 Tet Offensive (1968), 1270–1272 Texaco, 978, 999 Texas, annexation of (1845), 193–196 Texas, Republic of (1836–1845), 198–200 Texas Rangers, 196–198

Thatcher, Margaret, 994 Themonuclear weapons, 1074, 1127, 1129, 1161. See also nuclear weapons Third World debt crisis, 994 “This Man is Your Friend” Propaganda Series, 1048 “This Muddy Place”: Mary Ballou, a Boardinghouse Keeper in the California Gold Rush (1854), 581–583 Thomas, Evan, 921 Thomas, Norman, 920 Thompson, David, 80–81 Thoreau, Henry David, 553 Thrasher, Leon C., 942 Tianjin, Treaty of (1854), 260, 295, 318–320, 353 Tijerina, Reis Lopez (1926–2015), 1272–1274 Tillman, Benjamin, 767 Tito, Josef, and Tehran Conference, 1028 Top Gun (Scott, Tony) (1986), 1374–1375 Torpedoing, 942 Torrijos-Carter (Panama Canal) Treaties, 1365–1367 Torture and murder, 799, 824, 841 Tracy, Benjamin Franklin, 827, 851–852 Trade barriers, 1004 Trail of Tears, 371, 375, 398, 401, 414, 422, 438–439, 447–449, 464, 607, 612, 637 “A Tramp Abroad,” Clemens, S. L., 768 Transcendentalism, 552, 553 Transcontinental Railroad, 478, 492, 500, 502, 504, 528, 545–547, 557–560, 605, 678 Trans-Siberian Railroad, 925 Treaty of Berlin, 810 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 925 Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), 590, 692–700 Treaty of Fort Wise, 516 Treaty of Paris (1898), 768, 793 Treaty of Versailles, 907–908, 917, 939, 1003, 1008–1009 Treaty system, 651, 670–673 Trent Affair (1861), 81–83 Trimurti worship, 1022 Tripartite Convention, 810 Triple Entente, 924, 940 “True Lies,” Cameron, James, (1994), 1489 “A True Picture of Emigration,” Burlend, Rebecca, 551 Trujillo, Rafael, 819, 822 Truk, 1005 Truman, Henry S. (1884–1972), 730, 841, 978, 990, 996, 1017–1018, 1021, 1036, 1051, 1138–1139, 1143, 1152, 1162, 1254 “Address on Korea Situation,” 1162–1167 diary, Potsdam Conference (1945), 1051–1053 Doctrine, 986, 1006 Doctrine of Containment, 1138–1139 excerpt from dairy (1945), 1051–1053 radio and television address on Korea, 1162–1167 Truman Doctrine, 1143–1147 Truman White House, 1001 Truman, Henry S. administration, 848, 1001, 1004 Truman Doctrine, 1006 address, 1143–1147 pledges, 986 Turkey, 1006, 1028 Turner, Frederick Jackson (1861–1932), 561–562, 815, 827 Tuskegee Institute, 820 Twain, Mark, 768–770, 801. See also Clemens, Samuel Langhorne Two letters, describing U.S Interest in Middle East, 1050–1051 Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, 824, 852–853, 880–881 Tyler, John (1790–1862), 92, 116, 162, 195–196, 199, 290, 320–321, 364, 483, 550

U U-2 Spy Incident (1969), 1268, 1276–1277 U-boat attacks, 887, 920, 923, 941–943 “The Ugly American,” Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, 1274 “Uncle Sam,” 900 Unequal Treaties, 811 Union activities, 910 Union Pacific Railroad, 557, 558, 559 Union Patrioque d’Haiti, 824 United Fruit Company, 849, 853–856 United Nations Charter, 1003 United Nations (UN) Annan, Kofii, 1031 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 1031 China’s permanent seat, 1030 decolonization, 1030 El Salvador (1976–1989), 1031 election monitors, 1031 Emergency Force (UNEF), 1031 establishment, 1029 Jewish and Arab States, 1030 Ki-moon, Ban, 1032 Korean unification, 1030 Korean War (1959–1953), 1030 membership, 1029 peacekeeping efforts, 1031 permanent seats, 1030 Security Council, 1030 Suez Crisis of July 1956, 1031 Taiwan Strait Crisis, 1030 United States Central America Peace Movement, 1375–1377 Universal Military Training (UMT), 930–931 Unrestricted submarine warfare, 923–924, 927, 932–933, 939–944 Upshur, Abel Parker (1790–1844), 321–323 Uruguay, 1275 U.S. Army engineers, 500–502 U.S. Bureau, 827 U.S. Geological Survey, 562–564 U.S. hegemony, 992 U.S. intervention, 781 U.S. Marines, 818–819, 821, 824, 830, 832 U.S. military bases, 1141–1143, 1215, 1468, 1484 U.S. military intervention, 911 U.S. Mission Petition from Marshallese People, 1290–1293 U.S Naval base, 816 U.S. naval power, 827 U.S. Navy, 810, 826, 830, 981 U.S. press, 762 U.S. sanctions, 976 U.S Saudi partnership, 978 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report (June 30, 1946) on “Japan’s Struggle to End the War,” 1053–1055 U.S-British relationship, 975 USS Augusta, 975 USS Dolphin, 829 USS Indianapolis, 1018 USS Maine, 761, 763, 767, 770–772, 776, 786–788 USS Panay, 1020 USS Quincy, 978 Utah Expedition (Utah War) (1857–1858), 564–566 Utah Territory, 566

“The Utah War,” 535 V Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe (1808–1890), 200–202 imprisonment account (1846) Guadalupe (1808–1899), 220–225 Van Buren, Martin (1782–1862), 45, 92, 158, 162, 195, 506, 548, 555, 621 Vancouver, George, 36, 52, 54, 83–84, 264, 275, 331 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 813 Vanishing Indian, 673–674 Vasquez, Horacio, 819 Venezuela, 857–858, 1490–1491 Versailles Treaty (1919), 736, 834, 846, 885, 888–889, 906–908, 917, 919–920, 934–936, 939, 968, 1003, 1008–1009, 1039 Verschuer, Otmar, 998 Victoria, Eladio, 818 Vietnam War (1955–1975), 984, 996, 1084, 1179, 1181–1187, 1201–1202, 1214, 1216–1217, 1220–1222, 1225–1226, 1233, 1237, 1242–1244, 1249–1250, 1252, 1254, 1258, 1261, 1268, 1270, 1272, 1277–1282, 1311, 1315, 1319, 1323–1324, 1328, 1334–1336, 1343–1344, 1356, 1359, 1375, 1377–1378, 1390, 1426, 1432, 1435, 1467, 1473–1474, 1482, 1488, 1502, 1904 Villa, Francisco “Poncho,” 830, 938, 940 Villard, Fanny Garrison, 918 Virgin Islands, 936–937 Virgin soil epidemics, 675–676 Vocational programs, 820 Vote for women, 918 W Wake Island, attack on, 1005 Walds, Lillian, 920 Walker, Robert J. (1801–1869), 202–203 Walker, William (1824–1869), 143, 323–324, 342–344 Wallace, Henry, 984 Wampum, 84–86 Wanghia (Wangxia) Treaty of 1844, 324–326, 811, 834 War Guilt Clause, 935 War crime proceedings, 935 declared against Germany (1917), 947–948 War brides, 982 War Hawks, 3, 86–88, 413 The War in Nicaragua 1860 (Walker, William), 342–344 War of 1812, 3, 6, 22–23, 32, 55, 71, 83, 87–91, 102–103, 116–117, 125, 129, 139–140, 148, 155–156, 159, 173, 188, 193, 204, 253–254, 266, 275, 301, 320, 327, 361, 363, 367–369, 375, 384, 391, 399, 402–403, 417, 433, 436–437, 441, 445–447, 470, 489, 491, 496, 538, 620, 726, 871 “War on Terror,” 1007 War Powers Act (1973), 1282 “The War Prayer,” Clemens, S. L., 768 Wardman, Erwin, 775 Warfare and “civilization” in Northeast Territory, 359–361 Washington, George (1732–1799), 1, 2, 9, 12, 20, 60, 76, 99–102, 203, 241, 292, 303, 369, 377, 380, 382, 386, 395, 398, 401, 405, 410, 419, 433, 449–450, 500, 877, 911, 966, 1504 Washington Consensus, 994 Washington Naval Conference, 845–846, 858–859, 908–909, 917–918 Washington Post, 984 Watergate Scandal, 1130, 1260, 1312, 1328 Wayne, Anthony (1745–1796), 450–451 “We are All Equally Free” broadside, 97–98 Weapons shipment, 938 Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1843), 16, 45, 91–92, 301, 492, 1343–1344 Wells, Ida B., 815 West Indies Squadron, 326–328 Westerns, 1283

Weyler y Nicolau, Valerian, 771–772 Whaling industry, 177, 258, 267, 272, 299, 328–330 Wheeler, George Montague, 562 Whiskey Rebellion (1794), 451–453 White Armies, 925 White City, 815 White House, Kissinger in, 1236–1238 Whitehouse, Vira Boarman, 901 Whitman, Marcus, 92–94, 544, 596 Whitman, Narcissa, 596 Whitman Massacre, 596, 678 Whitney, Asa, 557–558 “Why We Fight,” Capra, Frank, 1032–1033 Marshall, George C., 1032 movies supporting, 1032–1033 Pearl Harbor, 1032 Signal Corps, 1032 Wild West Show, 764, 815 Wilkes Expedition (1838–1842), 329–331 Willkie, Wendell, 984 Wilkinson, James (1757–1825), 203–204, 382 Williams, William Appleman, 912 Wilmot, David (1814–1868), 204–205 Wilson, Henry Lane, 829 Wilson, Janet “Jessie,” 937 Wilson, Joseph Ruggles, 937 Wilson, Woodrow (1856–1924), 736–737, 751–752, 774, 807, 809, 812, 818, 821, 825, 829–830, 846, 851, 873–875, 885–889, 891–895, 898–899, 903–904, 907–909, 917, 919–921, 923–927, 930, 932–935, 937–940, 946–948, 951, 953, 956, 968, 970, 984, 1003, 1010, 1015, 1019, 1029, 1036 “Fourteen Points” (1918, 1919), 906–908, 954–956 Wilson administration, 812, 818, 898, 903, 927, 1014 “The Winning of the West,” Roosevelt, T., 763 Wobblies, 910 Wolfensohn, James, 994 Wolfowitz, Paul (1943–), 1491–1492 Woman’s Building, 815 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 919–920, 1015–1016 Women’s Peace Party (WPP), 918, 920 Wood, Leonard, 773–774, 921 Wood, Robert E., 979 Woodruff, Robert, 997 “Work of an Enemy” (on USS Maine), 787–788 World Bank, 817, 993–995 loans, 993 membership, 991 World Trade Organization (WTO), 1001, 1492–1494 World War I, 1008 preparedness, 774 U.S. involvement in, 903 World War ideological conflict, 975 World War II, 1067–1068, 1070–1072, 1074–1079, 1081–1085, 1088–1091, 1093, 1098–1100, 1102, 1105, 1109, 1111–1112, 1116, 1118–1120, 1122, 1126, 1131–1132, 1134–1135, 1138–1141, 1146, 1162, 1167 World’s Congress of Representative Women, 815 World’s Fairs, 813, 860–862 Wounded Knee Massacre, 591, 676–678 Sioux Testimony, 707–710 X XYZ Affair (1797–1798), 94–95

Y Yakima War, 678–679 Yalta Conference (1945), 978, 1017, 1021 atomic bomb, 1033 Baltic countries, 1035 issues, 1034 Japan, 1034 participants, 1034 Poland, 1034 Polish government, 1035 postwar world, 1034 territorial concessions, 1034 A Year as a Government Agent (1920) (Whitehouse V. B.), 901 Yellow journalism, 725, 770, 775–776, 786–787, 825 “The Yellow Kid,” Barritt, Leon, 786 Yellow press, 762 Yellowstone National Park, 540 Yom Kippur War (1973), 1179, 1183, 1191, 1237, 1284–1286 Young, Andrew (1932–), 1372, 1378–1379 Young, Brigham (1801–1877), 532, 554, 565–567 Z Zapata, Emiliano, 830 Zelaya, José Santos, 816, 831–832 Zimmermann, Arthur, 830, 940 Zimmermann Telegram (1917), 830, 924, 927, 940–941, 946 Zionism agendas, 1035–1036 anti-Semitism, 1035 Balfour declaration, 1035–1036 Herzl, Theodor, 1035 Holocaust, 1036 Palestine, 1035–1036 rebuilding, 1496 Truman, 1036 “War on Terror,” 1036