Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [960]
The notion that Empire would revive the sterner virtues of the Founding Fathers appealed to upper-class males who felt cooped up in enervating offices by day and confined in stifling parlors by night, who feared that, deprived of opportunities for manly heroism, they were growing effete, even effeminate—a dangerous development, surrounded as they were by anarchists, ruffians, immigrants, strikers, and criminals. Literary fashions reflected these fears, first the 1880s cult of the cowboy (of which TR had been an early disciple), then the 1890s fancy for medieval knights, the new rough riders on the plains of bourgeois fantasy. Bookstores and genteel magazines like Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Century were flooded with historical romances about Saxon warriors and chivalric aristocrats.
Armchair activism was complemented by a vogue of physical vigor, as TR counseled his enfeebled upper-class-mates to adopt a more strenuous life. Sports—the “modern chivalry”—would toughen up a “delicate, indoor genteel race” by providing a “saving touch of honest, old-fashioned barbarism.” Others urged youth to enlist in the proliferating Protestant boys’ groups, which drilled martial virtues into the next generation.
But the best antidote to civilization was imperialism. Jingoistic New Yorkers craved the psychic satisfactions of Empire, reveling in the potential glory of conquering exotic territories and ruling over dusky races with pomp and panoply. Imperialism would allow simultaneously for the exercise of a restorative barbarism and the refurbishment of republican virtue. America had moral responsibilities abroad, said Josiah Strong, secretary of the Congregational Home Missionary Society. The American Anglo-Saxon had an inherited genius for imperial exploits; he was “divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper”; it was the duty of the fittest “race” to bring civilization, Christianity, and the rule of law to backward peoples.
In prior generations, such values had been given expression in the course of exercising the country’s Manifest Destiny to govern the continent—a saga Roosevelt limned in his Winning of the West (1889)—but with the trans-Mississippi frontier closing down, the rejuvenating benefits of conquest could only be achieved overseas. Expansionists, accordingly, applauded each step in this direction, particularly the thrilling actions of President Cleveland in 1895, when he confronted Britain over Venezuela and put some muscle back in the Monroe Doctrine.
The Venezuelan crisis did, however, foreshadow serious divisions within New York’s upper classes over imperialism. Where Roosevelt was ecstatic and hoped the confrontation with Britain might lead farther—perhaps to the conquest of Canada—Joseph Pulitzer organized a “peace crusade” against “jingoes” (Roosevelt itched to put him in jail). Some Wall Streeters, too, deprecated war with Britain, leading the New York Times to snarl at such “patriots of the ticker.” “If they were heeded,” the Times said, “American civilization would degenerate to the level of the Digger Indians, who eat dirt all their lives and appear to like it.”
There were those on Wall Street who argued that a selfless pursuit of Anglo-Saxon duty could be combined with the restoration of sagging profit margins. Many believed “overproduction” responsible for the great slump. U.S. capitalism’s ability to supply goods seemed to have outraced the American market’s ability to consume them, leading some to look overseas for adequate outlets for their products. Several New York City companies had demonstrated a correlation between economic health and foreign sales: Standard Oil of New York supplied over 70 percent of the world’s kerosene, Duke’s Tobacco Trust rolled cigarettes for the global millions, and Singer sent sewing machines to factories and sweatshops