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The Conundrum of American Power in the Age of World War I

Part of: The Soapbox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2019

Katherine C. Epstein
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Extract

Reports of the rise of the United States to a lead role on the global stage in the early twentieth century have been greatly exaggerated. As many Americans at the time recognized, the United States continued to have less capacity for overseas power projection and remained far more dependent on the world's reigning hegemon, Great Britain, than is generally now realized. The United States, it is true, acquired an overseas empire in 1898. But it lacked the basic attributes of a great power, such as economic sovereignty, naval power, and domestic consensus on the desirability of global great-power status. Even after World War I, which was a better candidate than the Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States became a leading global power, both the material and the cultural basis of that power remained fragile.

Keywords

Politics and GovernmentTrade and CommerceForeign RelationsWorld War IBusiness and Capitalism
Type
The Soapbox
Information
Modern American History , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , November 2019 , pp. 345 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I have accrued many debts in the preparation of this article. Two anonymous readers provided helpful suggestions for revision. Daniel Immerwahr organized the panel on which I first presented some of the ideas herein and supplied helpful comments on a near-final version of the manuscript. Dustin Walcher served as an early sounding board. Richard Franklin Bensel, Richard John, and Daniel Sargent provided valuable feedback on an early version, while Lloyd Ambrosius, Christopher Capozzola, Ira Katznelson, and Jay Sexton soldiered through a much longer later version. My MA students at Rutgers–Camden helped me to refine my ideas. John Krige arranged for me to present an early version of the article at Georgia Tech, and I am grateful to both him and his colleagues for their questions and suggestions. I am similarly indebted to the participants at a workshop on a new Cambridge History of America in the World volume for their advice. I am especially obliged to John A. Thompson, who, despite disagreeing with my arguments in some respects, graciously supplied line edits and comments in an effort to help me to improve the piece. Above all, I thank Brooke Blower for her exceptionally valuable editorial guidance. Any errors that remain are my own.

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61 Noyes, The War Period of American Finance, 61.

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69 I speak of “legalistic” rather than “legal” historians because it is not only legal historians who tend to approach the neutrality issue from a legalistic perspective.

70 Lambert, Planning Armageddon, 81–101, 133–7, 166–9, 210–6. This was the same right that the United States would invoke when it instituted its own trade controls following its entry into the war; see Bailey, Thomas A., The Policy of the United States Toward the Neutrals, 1917–1918 (Gloucester, MA, 1966; first ed. 1942), 57–62, 74–7, 340, 349–57, 376–8, 432–7Google Scholar.

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74 Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 131. See also Lambert, Planning Armageddon, 260–7.

75 See Table 30, “Exports of Domestic Cotton and Lintners—Value and Quantity, With Distribution of Quantity, by Countries to Which Exported: 1821 to 1916,” in Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Bulletin 134, Cotton Production and Distribution, Season of 1915–16 (Washington, DC, 1916), 47Google Scholar.

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88 Named after Joshua Alexander (D-MO) and James Clarke (D-AK).

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96 Quoted in Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 190.

97 Quoted in David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart: The Relationship between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988), 67. See also Mary Klachko, “Anglo-American Naval Competition, 1918–1922” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1962), 105–6.

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105 Kaufman, Efficiency and Expansion, 228–48.

106 This is one of the principal arguments of Kaufman's, Safford's, and Parrini's books.

107 Winkler, Nexus.

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129 Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 196.

130 Ibid., 159–60, 170 (quotation on latter). See also Tooze, The Deluge, 203.

131 Kennedy, The Will to Believe, 102.

132 Tooze, The Deluge, 54.