American History Hit - What Made America? Birth Of A Superpower

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

At the start of the 20th century after victory in the Spanish-American War, the US found itself as a colonial power. How did it decide NOT to follow down the same road as the imperial powers of Europe afterwards? Today Professor Christopher Nichols of the Ohio State University talks to Don Wildman about how the US defined a new world order at the start of the 20th century.Edited by Tim Arstall, produced by Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 1901 and we're at Faniel Hall in Boston. Back in the halcyon days of the American Revolution,

this was home-based to radicals like Sam Adams and John Hancock. Here, in 1773, the first ever meeting over Boston's tea crisis was held before the rabble steeped in patriotic fervor, famously boiled over and dunked that tea in the harbor. But today, it's a brand new age, the dawn of the 20th century, and Americans are confronting a new crisis filled with irony. Just two years earlier in 1890, the Treaty of Paris had ended the Spanish-American War and granted to the United States what it never planned to possess, far-flung territories in the Pacific and beyond.

Colonies, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, a nation that had once struggled so mightily to shed its own colonial skin had now molted into an imperial power. For the crowd crammed into this historic hall, this is a gross betrayal of the principles upon which American blood had been shed. From the rostrum, the speaker thunders. The political philosophy that Jefferson embodied

in the Declaration of Independence, is it true? Is it still an ideal for 20th century America, freer and more prosperous than in the days of her youth? War as plutocracy bred tyrants, and we must give up our ancient faith. How that question is answered will redefine America's place in this new century, and in the process profoundly alter the course of global history. I'm Don Wildman. This is American History Hit.

Our guest today is Christopher McKnight Nichols, Professor of History and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at the Ohio University. Please to say this, this is Chris's fourth appearance on the podcast. Check out previous episodes on the Spanish-American War, President Eisenhower, and the Monroe Doctrine. Chris, nice to see you back. Happy 250. Happy 250 to you, Don, and nice to be back. Let's first go back to the early republic. What did early presidents think of America's relationship with the rest of the world?

What it should be like? Was everyone in lockstep with George Washington and his negative feelings of entangled and alliances? So, long story short, they had just as much disagreement as we do today in many ways. So going back to this is perfect question for the 250th. From the origins of the U.S. Republic, figures like John Adams, Ben Franklin, and others wanted to have a kind of model vision, a so-called model treaty in 1775 and 1776 for how the U.S. should interact with other countries. What they began to chart was a vision of something like cautious, realistic engagement through commerce and a real set of profound worries about entangling alliances. But what shape those should take,

what shape the sorts of security alliances or other kinds of treaties and relations to other nations should take was totally up in the air. And so you see over the first couple decades of the early republic an unfolding relationship towards especially the major powers of Europe. First, antagonism with the British, of course, but then the alliance with France to win the war. And then a set of questions about how neutral the nation should be in the 1790s, thinking about the Napoleonic War. And if maybe the U.S. should have more of a rapprochement with the British or stick with the French who had helped. And then there's all sorts of other secondary questions about Catholicism and popery and the relationship of the U.S. as a sort of Protestant nation state to other nation states,

including the Barbary Coast Pirates, which you've also had a great podcast on. So in thinking this through, you can begin to see that there's a real disagreement. It starts with commerce, but the question of what that relationship to other states should be is up in the air. One more thing to think about is threats. What were the main threats to the Republic in that period? And you had to think internally as well as externally. And internal would have been both the possibility of slave revolt and slave people were an enormous and restive population within the colonies. And then, of course, indigenous nations, which still had a whole lot of power in the 1770s and 1780s. And so that played an important role they did in the waging and winning of the Revolutionary War, but also in

thinking about what the peace should look like. Yeah, I mean, Thomas Jefferson sees the USA as an empire of liberty where yeoman farmers can vote and true freedom and all that sort of thing. But entangling alliances, it's not as simple as isolationism, right? No, it's not. I mean, isolationism also isn't simple. The way that we tend to think of it today is sort of as a caricature. The question is about the degree and type of U.S. engagement with the world. And that's where the no entangling alliances and neutrality come in. But for someone like Jefferson, he wanted trade with the world, it's a sort of specious view or a set of assumptions and caricatures about him

that he didn't want the U.S. to trade. Rather, he didn't want the U.S. to be predominantly a sort of capital-intensive industrial economy. He saw that the potential of those yeoman farmers was as individual sort of Democrats in the nation state owning a stake in the country because they owned some property, they owned farms that were productive. And this actually gets to the next level question here. Productive. Who's productive in the American society and who isn't?

And for them thinking about foreign relations, the founders and framers, a huge challenge and something foreign to ours today is the problem of a standing army and the ways that it would be paid for. And so the worry for founders, and this is pretty uniform, is that a large standing army would create a large group beholden to the government and not productive, like the yeoman farmers. And therefore, this would be a huge problem moving forward. And you see this rise in the debates later in the 19th century as the U.S. begins to rise to commercial and military power and seems to require, you know, more military force to project power, protect trade, that sort of thing. Yeah, and to hold the gold. You've got to have a very safe government and a very safe nation to have that much gold inside of it. The bottom line is stay out of European endless conflicts and corruptions, which sounds very familiar to us today. The simple fact is our own continental.

geography and the inherent challenges that this made, you know, but this was our own contiguous empire, you know, of states, not nations. It's really important to keep that in mind, even for those early folks. Yeah, so the Jeffersonian sort of Empire of Liberty was one extending across the continent. Of course, that had an internal and external dimension. The Louisiana purchase of 1803 on his watch was one of the biggest, you know, moves towards land acquisition in U.S. history, it both foreclosed certain kinds of threats, gaining that land from France, but it also opened up new sorts of threats as the U.S. makes claims now all the way to the Pacific, Russia is making claims, the British want pieces of British Canada to be involved there.

So you're exactly right, in that Empire of Liberty expanding, then the question becomes, as the 19th century moves on in the sort of old parlance of Frederick Jackson-Turner, when westward expansion ends, what next? Right? Where does the U.S. go? And that, not non-contiguous dimension is the piece of the debate that the sort of founders and framers never quite got to. They didn't really have a set of views that were well-formed that we can excavate on whether or not the ocean expand to the Pacific or very far down south as opposed to having, quote, sister republics in central and South America. And how could they ever predict, of course, that communication would become what it is and the world would become so small and all the rest of

that that happens in the 19th into the 20th century? So the question becomes how does a country built on avoiding foreign problems somehow emerge as a global empire. The very thing Washington had warned about in his farewell address. Well, it was a splendid little war, the Spanish-American War of 1898, when America becomes, by some definitions, an empire. The Spanish-American War, oddly, has its roots in isolationism, doesn't it? The Monroe Doctrine. For sure. Yes.

So the increasing articulation of a U.S. dominant position in the hemisphere that was simultaneously to rising capability of project power in the 1890s meant that the U.S. actually got into this war in 1898. And before that, it was quite bellicose in terms of Chile and some affronts to American seamen in the 1780s and 1790s. You saw a boundary crisis with Venezuela, where the U.S. was projecting the Monroe Doctrine into Venezuela's boundaries, very eerily like our present moment in some way, saying the U.S. gets to help decide what goes on within republic's borders within the hemisphere. And then in 1898, the U.S., you know, there's a whole lot of reasons why the U.S. gets involved in the Spanish-American War. But one is for humanitarian reasons in Cuba, that the

Spanish were treating people so poorly there. Others were because of longstanding commercial ties to places like Hawaii, where there wasn't a war, of course, but thinking about annexing that territory. And the Philippines, which is an area in which the U.S. could then have at least a harbor in Manila and more access towards China. Meanwhile, Europe is spreading out all over the place. You've got the 1800s is the age of colonel. And everywhere there is imperialistic power being expressed. And we're watching this from afar. I'm wondering about jealousy that was happening then.

Are we part of that game? For sure. And so if you read the periodicals of the late 19th century, you find a North American Review and in the nation and in a host of other kinds of papers in commercial and trade papers of American manufacturers, you find a jealousy, a set of worries about the U.S. being left behind in the scramble for Africa, that the U.S. has a rise. power should be right there with Germany and acquiring territories and producing steel in high amounts and having a navy that was at least a peer of many of the European powers. So it could

project its power throughout the hemisphere and perhaps beyond. There's a real also sort of insecurity crisis of the period. Is the U.S. culturally, commercially, militarily, producing enough? Can it continue this rise, right? We tend to think back and project back that it's an era of sort of unalloyed optimism about moving forward. But of course, this is also the era of cyclic downturns and depressions 1773, 1793, you know, there's significant labor unrest, right? The question of what capitalism and democracy will look like are really live questions then. And so Americans are looking to the other empires and they're saying, hey, we could be like you. What would that look like? Should we do that, you know, or should we eschew that entirely? Should Americans think

back to their colonial origins, think back to the Declaration and the Constitution and say, no, This is not for us. We are a republic. We are not an empire. And that's literally the question that American anti-imperialists start to ask with deep, sort of profound angst about what the republic might become if it acquires colonies. Yeah. I mean, there's so many new pressures. You have the industrialization of the world and all the minerals that are needed for that and all the supplies that are required that are beyond your shores. I mean, what we find so much discussed even today in Africa and so forth. And how are we going to get those in those days and the idea of a colony. was really the good idea. But all of this was a rupture from what had previously been the definition of America. And that's important also to keep in mind because we've so far wandered from this in our times that this was really precious, this idea that this was based on the fact that we had been a colony and we're not going to be making other people colonies of ours. This was central to our idea of democracy, wasn't it? It was. You know, it's like we've talked

about this before. It's the aspirational dimensions of the revolution, the declaration are so present in this rupture moment in the late 19th and early 20th century. At the same time, we can't ignore the fact that there's blinders within that, right? And so the U.S. expansion across the continent, of course, involved pushing out indigenous people, involved military policy, literally involved territories and territory making, so a kind of colonial project. But what was so different was going abroad and fighting a European power to do so. Right. So if all the other elements seem somewhat present in in westward expansion and manifest destiny, the rupture piece is this piece that, okay,

now the U.S. will acquire colonies across the Pacific, down near the hopeful Ismian Canal, right, to project power in a whole new sort of way. That's the change, right? So even if you want to argue for some continuity, this change is really massive. And it is very much with us today as a set of assumptions. There's almost no coming back, no matter what retrenchment, any sort of arch right or left-wing person in U.S. politics thinks of in the near past. Yeah, this is the precedent. It really is. Chris and I had a big conversation about the Spanish and American War. Let's skip to the end of that war and say when we sign what's called the Treaty of Paris and the Senate ratifies it on February 6, 1899, the U.S. begins to look a lot like an overseas empire. Or does it? I mean, there's not that many colonies. I mean, Puerto Rico and the Philippines are definitely there, as well as Guam, which always confuses me. The Filipinos immediately revolt against American rule. February. 1899, the U.S. has to suppress them in a bloody, ruthless guerrilla war. I mean, this is old-fashioned colonial behavior. Yes, it is. Exactly that. And so the U.S. begins to haltingly set up a sort of

inset of insular policies. Is this department, is this a department of the interior policy? Is this a state department foreign policy? They're trying to figure out in real time, because there hadn't been a plan for this, what colonies outside of the sort of contiguous states would look like, or even if you include the purchase of Alaska in 1867, what it would look like outside of just the broadly the continent. And it's halting, and it moves all the way up till 1917 in this thing called the Jones Act to think about what citizenship, the citizenship process should look like for those. There's a series of famous constitutional law cases, the insular cases. And I don't mean to get about these questions of how should citizens relate when they're outside

of the formal territory process in the U.S. to the nation state. But I don't want to get into too many those details. The key and what you're hitting on here is that the U.S. now does have colonies, bottom line, and has an empire of some sort. And in having an empire the question in that moment, really starting in the midst of the war was what shape should it be? And how did an empire and its organization accord with a sort of declaration and constitutional era values about the nation's place in the world and its relationship to its own citizens? Yeah, but there's going to be big pushback. The problem is now we're an empire of a certain scale. And he's storm is brewing at home. And we'll talk all about that after the break.

We're back with Professor Chris Nichols of Ohio State University. Chris, there is a serious backlash within America to the new idea of the United States maintaining colonized territories abroad. It's called the Anti-Imperialist League. Where did this group come from? Did it just sprout right up after the Spanish-American War? Well, the longer organizational structure and core ideas come from abolitionist Republicans out of the Civil War. The Old Guard abolitionist Republicans, who are sometimes then referred to as mugwumps, a kind of iconoclastic group of Republicans for whom principal often was more important than some of the potential benefits for the state, they continue to hold on. So this group is the central force, mostly located in New England,

and then there's a real heterogeneous set of others involved. It's arguably the largest and most heterogeneous foreign policy lobby group in U.S. political history. It's a really inspiring and fascinating kind of group. It ranges from Mark Twain to Andrew Carnegie to in a small role, Jane Adams, racial reformer, W.B. Du Bois, amazing American philosopher, William James, one of the founders of the Republican Party, George Boutwell, senators, congressmen, former presidents like Grover Cleveland. I mean, it's really something. It starts in Boston in summer 1898. It's formally incorporated in the fall right before the Paris peace process ending the war of 1898 and really takes off in some ways

from late 1898 through 1890 into the election of 1900, gaining offices, major offices in significant cities, New York, Boston, Chicago, all the way west to Portland, Oregon and San Francisco. I don't want to overblow how massive the group was, but it had lots of elites who were writing and speaking regularly in major cities across the U.S. and therefore garnered lots of public coverage. Yeah, what were they framing this idea as? I mean, we just won a war that we were very proud of. I mean, this was a big deal. And suddenly these guys just sound like they're throwing a wet blanket on the whole thing. They absolutely were. Full wet blanket. Yes, for very different reasons. So historians have emphasized lots of different pieces of their reasoning. And there's many coalition political groups. There's no simple way to put it. But the first set of animating principles was the U.S. should not rule alien peoples against their will. If the U.S. is going to have colonies, like the territory making process in the U.S., they should have a say in it and they should be part of it from the start. So the acquisition, the purchase of the Philippines, is a bridge too far. Cubans also, though many American imperialists like Henry Cabot Lodge, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, wanted Cuba. Cubans actually continue to voice concern about becoming a colony, and that's partly why it becomes a protectorate.

The second level challenge that they see is that the U.S. should focus at home. They disagree on what the U.S. should focus on, but they argue in classic sort of progressive era ideas that there's a lot to reform, a lot to change in American society, live up to those declaration and constitutional founding values, and it would take the eye off the ball, so to speak, to have colonies abroad. Another set of ways that they debate this is the question of whether or not colonies are actually profitable. So in the British sense, that India is very profitable. Most other colonies in colonial systems that American elites were aware of were more for extractive kinds of neo-colonial processes, like you mentioned, rare earths and that sort of thing, which is common to us to thinking today. But they actually are quite costly to administer. You have to have armies. You

to have diplomats, you have to have naval structures, commerce, et cetera, probably tax breaks, all that kind of stuff. So there's a big worry, especially from industrialists and business leaders, that this will be very costly. That's Andrew Carnegie's made critique. Then there's one more that we have to get on the table. There's a real debate amongst anti-imperialists and imperialists about race and capacity to self-govern. This will not be surprising to anyone listening to this podcast. Some thinking about the U.S. gaining territories think that the U.S. can be a tutor to, quote, little brown brothers in places like Hawaii in the Philippines so that they can eventually acquire an ability to self-govern. Others argue that they will never have that capacity,

that people's in the racial hierarchy lower than Anglo-Saxons aren't capable of it. And therefore, the U.S. either should or shouldn't rule those places. There's a real debate there. Should rule it because of Rudyard-Kippling ask white man's burden or shouldn't rule it because they'd never have that capacity and it's a fool's errand to even try to administer those kinds of places. The Philippines is the archetype of this, 7,000 islands, tons of different languages, right? How can, how could the U.S. do that effectively to help those people rule themselves? So these are some of the critical dimensions here. And as I mentioned before, the question of militarism, standing armies, and those costs is another piece of this. Is that un-American? On the pro side of this,

the McKinley side, I guess, I always assumed that this was about expanding markets, that the age of sale had developed such a degree that that was a sophistication. Now you have rail delivering stuff. Like, we were already at basically what we have today, which is using the Pacific as a highway system, you know, towards Asia. I assume that that was, you know, front and center. And you're not wrong. The major arguments of the so-called large policy advocates like McKinley and Roosevelt were to gain market access in places like China. They're also thinking about and negotiating treaties in Korea, Japan, and then market access throughout the hemisphere, Cuba as a sugar producer, but also now getting that out of Spanish hands would allow the

U.S. to import and export more of that and have a larger role in Cuba and Central and South America. Part of that, too, in terms of trade, was building a canal, and it's being canal that the U.S. would control, not the British, or abrogating a treaty. But, you know, we really can't discount a couple other elements here. McKinley famously says that now that the U.S. has acquired the Philippines, the U.S. has a moral obligation to uplift and Christianize them, kind of very much conveniently omitting or outright rejecting the Catholicism of many of the inhabitants there. And then also this question of the humanitarian dimensions of the U.S.'s role in the hemisphere, I think while we can look at it with skeptical eyes,

there is a real set of arguments and a real pathos that comes out of how the Cubans were being treated by the Spanish after they rebel for the sixth time, I think, in the 19th century, starting in 1895, and given that Americans are sympathetic to trying to help them. And you could see in the political cartoons of the era, kind of feminized Cuban image, needing Uncle Sam to come help them, lift them up, build homes, you know, provide food, provide education. And so these are all all intermingled. What they aren't is democratic or mixed with a kind of declaration, all people created equal, kind of self-government piece. Did it get out on the streets? I mean, were there protests? So it didn't get out on the streets, and that's an interesting piece of this. Many of the speakers here really are speaking only to other elites trying to shape the contours of American Empire, if not outright, reject them. However, it does get on the streets in the sense that William Jennings Bryan, the famous populist, fuses with the Democratic Party, is very much anti-imperialist in 1896 and then especially in 1900 election. And in that election, anti-imperialism features prominently as a core foreign policy principle. There's another way that

this gets out on the streets and it's through the troops. And it's fascinating thing. I think we talked about a little bit when we did a podcast on the Spanish-American War. But the war in the Philippines and the counterinsurgency is very brutal and it's highly racialized. And though sort of systemic American atrocities are overstated by some, what does happen is the racialized component has a backlash against black American soldiers. And you have black American soldiers writing back to the American presses, especially the black press, saying you're treating Philippines. like you treat us in segregated units or using the N-word, some pretty harsh stuff. And the Filipino revolutionaries actually convert a few mutineer American black soldiers to their cause and publicize

that significantly. So that's another piece of the puzzle here. And it's no coincidence, of course, that much of this energy and some of these issues find their way into the progressive era discussions, right? I mean, this is a big gasoline on that fire. For sure, for sure. And one of the things I like to emphasize here in my thinking is that William James argues that the forces of patriotism were so like burning white hot, to paraphrase him, that it was like blowing cold air on the hot fire of patriotism. And he argued that some of these ideas like manifest destiny and even sort of imperialist expansionism are these empty vessels. They're really attractive to people. They're good rhetoric from presidents. But in fact, when you look within them, you don't find anything there.

And that's precisely what people like William James and Mark Twain were skewering when they were writing essays. Twain, I highly recommend to folks listening his essay to the person sitting in darkness, which is really about this deep, dark satire about how American mission and American empire go hand in hand to undercut the autonomy of Filipinos in really fundamentally un-American ways. Wow. He would have come back from his worldwide trip, I bet, at that point, right? he would have probably visited these places. He had indeed. He'd visited a whole lot. And he just really started, Twain had really started writing about the problems of British Empire in this period, the governing of Rhodesia, for instance.

So he's primed in, in 1897, and then in 1998 when the American War happens. And he comes over, he actually stays in the same house in New York that Teddy Roosevelt had and hosts all these salons. And famously, in the end of 1898 and 1890, 1900, he's holding these salons. And at the end of them, after he'd sort of captured the essence of the people who came with his amazing sparkling wit, he'd have a diatribe about anti-imperialism. He would cap the evening with his core politics. We've talked a lot about Cuban. I don't want to get off but too much on it. But this is why such things are weird with Puerto Rico these days. I mean, we so take it for granted because of basically the migration that happened and so many Puerto Ricans coming to the United

States as a result of annexation. But it was never a settled issue where that island country sat in the United States, just like Cuba, but a different story unfolded from there. This is a huge story in 1898-99. What happens to the Anti-Imperialist League? Yeah, so it's a mixed bag story. My argument would be that when the war in the Philippines largely reaches its conclusion in 1902, there's less of the front-page news, the sensational news, to keep the anti-imperialists really rolling, that many of these individuals we've talked about continue their advocacy. They write these Syrian kinds of essays. But they, they, get less traction. But the other piece of that is that's really essential to keep in mind is after

1890, the U.S. never annexes territories again. And the persuasiveness of their arguments, particularly their arguments hearkening back to Washington and Jefferson, is one that resounds through the next several decades. It keeps in mind no entangling alliances. It gets us back to perhaps the U.S. should have a role in the world, but a less militarized one, a less expansionist one, a more commercially and culturally engaged role. That makes more sense. And so I'd argue that though the anti-imperialist in some ways fail on their own terms, the election of 1900 goes quickly to McKinley. On the longer term horizon, they've kind of won the logical debates. Ruling people against their will is un-American, right? Who's going to say it's not? But then you have to reshape that relationship to the world in

some way. Yeah. So if they can't have formal colonies, they have to have something else. Enter Woodrow Wilson. We'll talk about him after the break. Chris, when we're World War I breaks out. The United States and its President Woodrow Wilson is faced with a huge question. What should they do here? How do we react to this kind of global conflict? It's probably the most profound question in U.S. foreign policy history since the war of 1812. It's enormously significant. How should the U.S. be oriented to European powers at war? What should the U.S.'s role be? And now the U.S. has commercial and cultural power. The U.S. has significant military power. The U.S. could be a big player in this conflict. What role should it be? Like the anti-imperialists, like those a century before, they go back to Washington and Jefferson, and they argue the U.S.'s essential role in European power conflicts is neutrality. Yeah. We're going to maintain neutrality like we're always meant to do, like George Washington told us. It's quite popular, especially when we understand the horrors of the trenches. Americans are very much put off by the whole project. A total mess the Europeans created. Why should we be a part of that?

But sidebar, interestingly, Woodrow Wilson's first Secretary of State is William Jennings Bryant, the presidential candidate from the Anti-Imperialist League. Exactly. Yeah. And Brian's arguments as Secretary of State, and one of the reasons he actually resigns as Secretary of State, is the U.S. needs to be a authentic, legitimate, and 100 percent neutral power. But how can that happen in an interconnected world where the U.S. is a major financier of the war effort and a potential trading partner of all the belligerents? Yeah, exactly. The world has completely. fundamentally changed in 20 years or whatever. It can't really be neutral anymore. It's too far and too large and entangled. It's a huge commercial power now in the world. Wilson joins the war, finally, with the idealistic vision of America as a peacemaker, a global mediator. He sets out his vision in what is called the 14-point plan. Can you take us through the 14 points?

For sure. First thing to know, it originates in the middle of 1916. So before the U.S. is even in the war, You can find in Wilson's writing that he's thinking about a League of Nations. He's thinking that if the U.S. helps mediate the European conflict, the U.S. can be part of the solution and a guarantor of peace moving forward. He then later in 1917 talks about peace without victory. This is what he hopes the Allies will pursue as opposed to something vindictive. January 1918, he issues the 14 points in part because it looks like the other allies are going to pursue that kind of vindictive peace. and he's hoping to foreclose that. And so the first of these, it's a list of five general claims to start it out.

They're popular among liberals in this era. There are things like open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, freer and fairer trade conditions, reduction of national armaments, adjustment of colonial claims. Then there's something like eight points, which I won't go through entirely, which are critical components of the fighting of the war itself and how they could be resolved, areas that have been taken and where they should be sent back to. But the final point, the most of the most of the war. important point. The point we're leading up to here in terms of his idealism and a new shape for the

U.S.'s role in the world is the 14th, the League of Nations. And it's the prism of the League of Nations through which he views all of the other ones. It's why he's willing to compromise in the Paris peace that follows World War I on so much, because he believes that if the U.S. joins the league, through the league, the U.S. can help to shape and reorient a peace so that the other kinds of claims and questions will come into being, that there can be free trade, that there can be free trade, that there can be disarmament. This becomes its own conversation we will now have about the League of Nations and the evolution of that idea.

But I don't want to let go of the anti-imperialist. Like, so much of what he is creating this list for is the pressure that came from that resistance, isn't it? He could not be that president if it hadn't been for all those elites he was probably listening to back in the day saying, we're not this kind of country. Yes, exactly right. Yeah, he comes out of a kind of anti-imperialist tradition, even though he was reluctantly, actually in favor of the war with Spain, or somewhat reluctantly, ambivalently in favor of it, because his view was that the internecine rivalries between European imperial powers or why

the world gets into the World War I. And so for him, this argument about colonies, although one of the big challenges of the 14 points and the U.S.'s role in moving forward with a peace process is that he's quite vague about it. For him, anti-colonialism and self-determination are crucial. The issue is who gets self-determination? And he never spells that out quite as clearly as he might want or as those listening to him might want. But the arguments here about peace through an international organization are vital. And I would add also this gets to an element of those anti-imperialist debates that we didn't engage, which is about democracy promotion. For Wilson, the League of Nations is really something, he would call it an association, something akin to democracy.

All these member nations would have greater or lesser powers, would all have pretty similar powers within. the league structure. And therefore, you'd have a more democratic process moving forward and they would sanction any nation state that used force to coerce peoples and groups to do things that they wanted to colonize, to start wars, et cetera. This is also why his opponents argue that that's fundamentally un-American, that this kind of entangling alliance would lead the U.S. possibly to more wars and not fewer ones. Yeah, and you'll find this all echoing through the Native alliance and all kinds of military agreements that come out of World War II later on. Wilson delivers his plan. to the Senate January 1918. One of the most important speeches he ever made as a president,

or any president, really. He states the U.S. should stop territorial expansionism. The problems of World War I are created by empires trying to hold themselves to these colonized things. It's an unnatural practice to do that. And it's the idea of self-determination, which becomes his vision and foreign policy theme. This is so 20th century. This is everything we're hearing about. I was a kid, you know, the big vision of America promoting democracy around the world, which we don't hear so much about these days, which is interesting. This is articulated by Wilson. Democracy is the solution.

The grand finale, which you talked about, which is point 14, the creation of the League of Nations, a world organization to collectively guarantee every country's independence. Pretty ambitious, isn't it? Right out of the gate, were people skeptical of this? You know, what's fascinating is the European audiences are really excited by it. By the time he gets the Paris peace, now this is jumping slightly ahead, but, you know, the Germans have sued for peace on the terms of the 14 points, not on the terms offered by the French or the British. And he's greeted in Paris by millions of people, the largest, arguably the largest foreign reception of any U.S. president ever in U.S. Certainly per capita, you have to assume it was.

So it's widely popular and wildly popular globally. Within the U.S., it doesn't have as much traction. There's not as much worry about the 14 points until the resident. of the conflict. The U.S. famously had a really hard time mobilizing for the war. And so you're not really seeing significant amounts of American troops fighting until the end of 1917 and early 1918, around when the speech comes out. So it takes a while for the U.S. to really be engaged. And that's much more in the front of mind for the American population. But what is important to think about in this by the end of 1918 into 191919, Wilson also is only bringing his sort of

closer confidants to Paris. What he doesn't do is bring sort of a team. team of rivals group. And this is what diplomatic historians and people at the time recognized as a real problem. He doesn't bring someone like Henry Cabot Lodge back to 1898, who's an opponent, a Republican opponent, who had been this expansionist and who is really worried about what a League of Nations might do to infringe on congressional or presidential or U.S. power. He's only looking into his own mirror with his people, isn't he? That's the difference of a Lincoln versus a Wilson. Or an FDR for that matter. So the U.S. Senate rejects the plan, mostly because the League of Nations has this entanglements written all over it. I mean, they're looking at this

very simply. There's probably electoral politics involved in this at that time, I imagine. It just couldn't have been very popular to say, after World War, we've done all this stuff for World War I. Oh, and we're going to now manage the world through this great plan. The League of Nations would be abandoned at that time, and the Treaty of Versailles later on would become the only tool for settling the peace, which eventually opens the door to all kinds of problems down the road, which is the rise of fascism, Hitler and the Nazi party and all the rest of this. Chris, it would take World War II to re-articulate this idea, wouldn't it? The United Nations is an outgrowth, obviously, the League of Nations, but confronting whole other challenges.

It would, yes. Arguably, with the U.S. not joining the League of Nations, though it is stood up, has lots of operating committees, it works quite well through the interwar years in its own way. It does not have the U.S. there as a backstop, particularly as the world crisis unfolds in the 1930s. It's hard to know the counterfactual answer to that. But arguably, yes, the lack of a robust international organization to try to keep the peace is part of why we wind up with World War II. And it does take the Second World War to move the ball forward. But I would note that Atlantic Charter in 1941, that FDR signs with Winston Churchill, argues for self-determination, argues for colonial peoples and groups getting some level of their own autonomy. This is very consciously modeled on Wilsonian kinds of arguments and ideas.

And this goes back to kind of anti-imperialist claims, which themselves are founded in the Revolutionary era and the Declaration, founded in a view that no nation-state should rule other peoples against their will and certainly not democracies. Another piece of what we're thinking about in the Second World War moment is that FDR's folks, as one historian has argued, had the ghost of Wilson hanging over them. And they start policy planning for the post-war order even before the U.S. gets involved in the conflict. They're starting to plan the U.N. They're starting to think about what would come to be an IMF, a world trade organization,

the Bretton Wood system for economics. All of these are founded on the first five of those 14 points, things like free trade, open seas, open covenants, right? That people can, peoples and groups can have a guarantor of a kind of international system that while it may be unequal will be more or less similar for most. groups and not kind of dominated by hegemonic powers that force them against their will to do certain things. Right. And so I would argue that we see this through line. This is why it's so fascinating through the lens of the 250th to move from the late 19th century in the first real debates

about the U.S.'s new and large role in the world through the Second World War to see how they take shape in the world's system that we now think about and many of us a lament falling apart in a rules-based order that's grounded in the logics of to some extent anti-imperialism. I don't want to get too far ahead of that story because it's not like out of World War II decolonization happens right away and these principles are enacted in the world system. But on the other hand, they don't come out of nowhere. They come out of these original moments of this contestation that harken to core precepts of the Declaration of the Constitution. Sure. It's also economically impractical to maintain a colonial system that's impossible, given how much you have to work to keep it running

and impress people who eventually are saying no, which is a natural thing to happen. We give Wilson, a lot of credit on this. Did the Europeans not have their own movement in this regard? I mean, hadn't there been a lot of people saying we don't want to do this anymore? There were, you know, that's another interesting piece. So the anti-imperialists who start founding this organization in Boston in 1898, they found it, I should note, at Faniel Hall with its revolutionary origins of where Samuel Adams and John Hancock and others hatched schemes like the Boston Tea Party. They were in touch with French and British anti-imperialists, in fact. And there is a transnational network of anti-imperialists, also grounded in transnational abolitionism and anti-slavery activities that does span through this period.

But what's a little bit different is that the great policymakers of the British, the French, coming out of World War I, even World War II, don't yet, aren't yet willing to acquiesce on empire. They still have a kind of British imperial sense of French, right? You can think about re-colonizing into China, Vietnam, and the war is there after World War II. Americans do. So American policymakers for all their hubris and arrogance and stamping on folks' necks aren't really interested in acquiring colonies after 1890. They see what you were describing as the kind of merits of interchange without empire or involvement without commitment, as one historian has put it.

And I think that's the key difference, though. That's why American politicians could push for a kind of anti-colonial world, even as the halting steps were happening in the international system. And the U.S. never is a full guarantor of that. get me wrong. But it's a fascinating piece of this puzzle to think back to the sort of origins, the U.S. casting off colonial shackles with the British. Therefore, over the long dray, Americans buy into that. And Europeans and others also make those claims. And so to culminate that, one thing that's interesting to note in 1890 and 19, it's historians called this a Wilsonian

moment. People around the world in China, in India, in Korea and elsewhere, think about Wilson's argument for self-determination, start printing his picture in all those various languages. And they harken to their own anti-colonial claims based on an American tradition that gets us to things that are well known to probably many listening to this, but are worth just mentioning. Ho Chi Minh drafting his own Declaration of Independence, right, trying to get there in 1918 to the Paris Peace because they're inspired by the American idea. Even if that idea is deeply imperfect and imperfectly maneuvered in the world system, it's really inspiring.

And you find David Armitage has written this book about global declarations of independence. Tons of them worldwide, especially in the 20th century, are modeled on the American ones. And these arguments for anti-colonialism and self-determination are integral to them. Yeah. And Cuba in the 1800s had been very much that way, too. They take an inspiration as well. Chris, as a podcast host, I often envy you historians as having this knowledge base to understand things with such perspective. Does it frustrate you in the present moment in current events to not be able to exercise that muscle so vigorously as you can with old events?

It does. There's a couple ways that that manifests itself. And boy, this would be the subject of another podcast we could do sometime. One is that I wish people could recognize some of this history that we're talking through to think about how these meaningful debates about principle and core values go back to the early American documents and founding precedents. but have really evolved over time. And that's a conversation that's hard to have in very brief. Another element of this that I think is so much that I wish that we could talk about in public discourse more is the deep commitments of Americans of very diverse political positions in the historical record that didn't succumb to this view that the other side is an enemy, that the other side is a polarized, partisan individual group or cause. that's fundamentally un-American. There's a long history of that, too. But in most of the debates,

even some of the most visciferous ones we're talking about now, war and peace is about as existential as it gets, right? Very often these peoples and groups could disagree, could debate core values and principles. We've lost some of that. And what's easier for me as a historian than it is for you as a podcast host is you need to wrap this together for your whole audience, whereas I can give people the historical documents and evidence and just say to students, you know, have at it, right? Right, right. It's interesting. Christopher McKnight Nichols occupies the Wayne Woodrow

Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at the Ohio State University, where he is a professor of history. He's one of our leading historians on America's greater role in the world. And you can find many books to his name. I'll mention just one closest to our subject today, Promise and Peril, America at the dawn of a global age published in 2015 by Harvard University Press.

I think a new edition is overdue, I'd say. Sounds good to me. Just tell my editor. Okay. Thank you, Chris. Much ground still to cover. I hope you'll be back with us soon. I'd love to be back. Happy 250th. Thank you, 250. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays.

From mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.