PARTISAN REVIEW
513
reason for imperialism through history, I believe, lies in the disparity of
power between the political and technological dynamism of an advanced
country and the weakness and stagnation of an underdeveloped country.
And the immediate reason for American adventures in empire has al–
most always been, not at all a quest for overseas markets (the vast
markets of Hawaii? Samoa? Guam? Puerto Rico? the Philippines?
Latin America? Vietnam? - we have always disposed of most of our
export
surplus in
Europe
and Canada) but the preemptive impulse–
that is, the determination to control some bit of foreign land before
another great power could get to it. Our expansio:J., from the Louisiana
Territory through Texas, Oregon and California, Hawaii, Samoa and
the Philippines, to Indochina, has been primarily a product of the in–
ternational power competition.
Henry Cabot Lodge exposed the grounds of the turn-of-the-century
imperialism with cogency in his famous
Forum
article in 1895. Here he
condemned
the doctrine that there is no higher aim or purpose for men or for
nations than to buy and sell, to trade jack-knives and make every–
thing cheap. No one underrates the importance of the tariffs or the
still greater importance of a sound currency. But of late years we
have been so absorbed in these economic questions that we have
grown unmindful of others. vVe have had something too much of
the disciples of the Manchester school who think the price of calico
more important than a nation's honor, the duties on pig iron of
more moment than the advance of a race.
What created the imperial outburst at the end of the nineteenth century
were the ideas of a small dite for whom foreig:J. markets mattered only as
one component in the quest for national security, power and prestige.
Professor Williams writes that, in the view of Theodore Roosevelt, "the
new frontiers would be supplied by the continued overseas expansion of
the American marketplace." This is fanciful in the extreme. Theodore
Roosevelt could hardly have cared less about overseas markets
per se.
He had contempt for the prospects of a "gold-ridden, capitalist-bestrid–
den, usurer-mastered future." As for "the typical big moneyed men of
my country, I do not regard them as furnishing sound opinion as regards
either foreign or domestic policies." Even Lodge could write, "The busi–
nessman dealing with a large political question is really a painful sight."
Roosevelt's cult of the "strenuous life" set forth the real motives
behind his imperial dream:
"If
we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and
ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win
at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then
