Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [133]
THE TRANSFORMATION FROM REGIONAL
TO GLOBAL POWER
At the approach of the twentieth century, for all its explosive economic growth and territorial expansion, the United States was still only a regional power. Militarily, it was a pygmy compared to the great powers of Europe. Its navy in the 1880s ranked twelfth in the world by number of ships, outclassed even by Sweden. Its army was “insignificant compared with that of even a middle-sized European country like Serbia or Bulgaria.” Although its armed forces were sufficient to defend its borders and maintain dominance in the Caribbean and the Americas, the United States in 1900 barely registered as a significant power on the global scene.18
Within just a few decades, all of this would change. World War I gave the United States its first taste of global power. The American intervention in 1917 shifted the balance in favor of the Allies and, according to President Woodrow Wilson, thrust on the United States the role of showing “the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”
But the United States was not yet ready to follow Wilson's vision. Instead of projecting its power outward, the United States took an “isolationist” turn, with the Senate refusing to ratify the treaty for the League of Nations that Wilson had poured his heart into creating.19 At the same time, the nationalist passions inflamed by the war triggered a surge of xenophobia and nativism. In 1917, 1921, and 1924, Congress passed a series of immigration acts radically changing U.S. policy.
For the first time, these laws imposed numerical limits on immigration. More fundamentally, they created a national-origin quota system with an undeniable ethnic and racial bias.
The goal of the 1924 act, in the words of Congressman Albert Johnson, its principal author, was the achievement of a “homogeneous citizenry,” putting an end to the “indiscriminate acceptance of all races.” Johnson railed against the “dilution” of America's “cherished institutions” by “a stream of alien blood,” specifically warning against “filthy, un-American” and “unassimilable” Jews. Accordingly, the number of immigrants allowed from a given country under the 1924 quotas was based on the number of natives from that country living in the United States in 1890. The result was a severe restriction on the admission of southern and eastern Europeans, not to mention an almost complete ban on Asians, Africans, and other nonwhites.
The Great Depression gave nativist politicians further opportunity to scapegoat the “hordes of penniless Europeans”—“mongrels” and “illiterates,” many of them “dangerous radicals”—who were “lining up to come to America.” President Hoover called for a tightening of immigration restrictions. Between 1931 and 1935, the United States experienced negative net immigration for the first time ever.
As World War II began, the first reaction of many Americans was to keep the United States out of the war—and to keep foreigners out of the United States. In 1939, in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, a few members of Congress drafted a bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the United States in excess of the normal German quota. Nativist organizations vehemently fought the bill, a majority of Americans opposed it, and it never came up for a vote in either house. Laura Delano, President Roosevelt's cousin and the wife of the commissioner of immigration, famously warned that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”
The negative immigration rates of the 1930s proved short-lived and completely exceptional in U.S. history. Ironically, the anti-immigration attitudes of the interwar years may have been a boon to the tens of millions