Progressivism, Imperialism, and World War I

Many Reforms, Unequal Citizenship

From the 1890s, reform movements challenged urban poverty, corporate power, and political corruption. Collectively called Progressivism, they pursued different goals. Investigative journalists exposed abuses, settlement workers such as Jane Addams provided neighborhood services, and workers and women demanded safety and political influence. They did not assume that economic growth alone would solve social problems.

Theodore Roosevelt supported selected antitrust actions, consumer protection, and conservation. State and local reforms addressed health, working conditions, and elections. The Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 prohibited denying voting rights on account of sex. This major achievement did not remove racial barriers: poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence still excluded many Black women. Some reformers themselves supported segregation and eugenics.

Where Reformers Found Their Answers

Factory fires, unsafe food, and urban disease made risks visible that individual effort could not manage. Reformers used investigation and statistics to make public claims. Settlement houses offered services while documenting neighborhood conditions. Exposure attracted attention, but organization, legislation, and enforcement produced durable change. Businesses themselves differed: some resisted regulation, while others supported common standards for competition.¹

Reform ideas also crossed the Atlantic. Americans studied European municipal government, social insurance, and labor protection, then adapted proposals to federalism, courts, and racial politics at home. Exchange did not mean simple copying. Local experiments and demands by women and workers interacted with international learning, complicating an image of the United States as always developing in complete isolation from Europe.

Overseas Expansion and Colonial Rule

Reform at home coincided with imperial expansion abroad. After the Spanish–American War of 1898, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; it separately annexed Hawaii. Cuba escaped annexation but faced extensive American interference. Philippine independence fighters resisted American rule in a war beginning in 1899. Washington declared the war over in 1902, although resistance continued. Strategic and commercial ambitions, reinforced by racism, fueled expansion, while anti-imperialists challenged it.

An Anticolonial Republic Acquires an Empire

War in 1898 grew from Cuba's independence struggle, American interests and opinion, and expanding naval ambitions. Washington invoked Cuban freedom but retained powerful influence afterward. In the Philippines, independence forces led by Emilio Aguinaldo faced a new war against American rule. Anti-imperialists disputed whether a republic could govern unwilling overseas populations. Racial hierarchies and claims of civilization joined strategic and economic arguments for expansion.²

Overseas rule did not grant inhabitants rights identical to those on the mainland. Disputes over territorial status and constitutional protections made empire an internal legal issue as well as a foreign policy. Intervention around the Panama Canal and the Caribbean connected shipping, finance, and military power. Domestic regulation and overseas domination could be pursued simultaneously by the same government and political coalition.

Mobilization and the Contradictions of Peace

The United States initially remained neutral when World War I began in 1914. Trade and finance tied it increasingly to the Allies. Germany's renewed unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram intensified pressure for intervention. In 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Mobilization expanded federal power and accelerated Black migration northward. The Espionage and Sedition Acts also enabled repression of antiwar speech.

After the 1918 armistice, Wilson promoted a League of Nations, but the Senate rejected the Versailles treaty and the United States never joined. Self-determination was not extended equally to colonized peoples. Strikes, racial violence, and political repression marked the postwar crisis. Reform widened participation and government responsibility without eliminating imperial domination or exclusion. Its direction depended on political struggles, not an inevitable march toward progress.

Victory and Unequal Promises

World War I mobilized soldiers, workers, and resources from colonial empires as well as Europe. American entry added production and troops, while wartime government reached into daily life through finance and mobilization. Punishment of dissent exposed limits on criticism. Women's work and suffrage campaigns continued, and Black migration opened opportunities alongside new racial tensions. Participation in a national war did not guarantee equal civic treatment.

Self-determination sounded universal at the peace conference but was applied selectively. Activists in Korea, China, India, and Egypt adapted the language to their own demands. They were not passive recipients of Western promises. Erez Manela examines how existing movements used international opportunities; disappointment encouraged reconsideration of reliance on imperial powers and helped shape further anticolonial action.³

A Historian's Question · What Happens When Words Travel?

Manela's international approach asks how political language was translated and used in different settings. It connects American influence with local agency instead of making a president's statements sufficient causes of other nations' histories. A history of relationships asks what each society wanted and chose, not only what the United States did.³