THE GREATER AMERICA by Frederic Emory

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 5, 1901

THE GREATER AMERICA.

By Frederic Emory

What Our Growth as a Nation Means — Commercial Absorption of the Western Hemisphere — Will It Involve Further Acquisitions of Territory? — Conditions That May Reconcile Latin America to Our Supremacy.

FREDERIC EMORY, Chief of the Bureau of Foreign Commerce, Department of State.

It is becoming more and more difficult to write in terms of soberness of the growth of the United States as a world-power. Nor is this difficulty one peculiar to ourselves. In the least friendly of foreign commentaries upon our progress, there is a tendency toward the use of superlatives which argues a similar embarrassment, even on the part of those who would naturally wish to minimize the facts. The truth is that our performance in almost every branch of material effort has been on so great a scale that the barest recital seems to savor of magniloquence. The United States is more conspicuously than ever a country of “big things,” and it is drifting steadily toward a bigness which alarms the world. Our most hostile critics no longer sneer at us as a nation of boosters. All of them admit the solidity, the aggressiveness, the crushing weight of our competition, and but few of them will deny that, springing from this industrial superiority, there are potentialities of intellectual and social influence which, in the end, may profoundly affect the whole human race.

American supremacy, in fact, is admittedly formidable not only in the realm of industry and commerce, but in the far wider realm of social progress and evolution of human thought, and it is thus formidable solely because it rests upon an industrial efficiency such as the world at large concedes has never before been seen. As Prof. W. G. Sumner remarks, in a recent article, “The Economies of Trusts,” “all the so-called ‘higher interests’ (science, education, religion, charity, reform, etc.) are dependent on wealth production;” and the United States, to-day being the largest, most economical producer of wealth, and in a greater variety of forms than any other nation, may be said to be the largest contributor to the intellectual and moral forces of the world. The quality of these influences may be disputed, but their magnitude and potency are recognized of all.

We may, therefore, preserve a reasonably decorous modesty, with no risk of serious wounds to our national self-esteem, if we rely almost wholly upon what others say of us in painting a picture of our present position in the world. Let us take but a few of the more striking expressions. The London Financial News of April 13, 1901, admits that present conditions point to the shifting of the center of not only industrial, but commercial, activity and the money-power of the world to the United States. The supremacy in commerce, says the Revue du Commerce Extérieur of Paris of May 4, 1901, “is passing from Great Britain, which held it throughout the nineteenth century, to the great American Republic.” “No competent observer can doubt,” remarks Frederic Harrison, “that in wealth, manufactures, material progress of all kinds, the United States, in a very few years, must hold the first place in the world without dispute.” In January last, Lord Rosebery pointed out to a British Chamber of Commerce that “the alertness of the Americans, their incalculable natural resources, their acuteness, their vast population,” were making them “very formidable competitors.” “The industries, trade, agriculture, railroads, and finances of the Union,” says the Hamburger Fremdenblatt, “have each and all climbed, one upon another, through and by each other, steadily upward. And to what a height have they climbed!” “Like a storm,” exclaims Dr. Alexander von Peez, in the Allgemeine Zeitung of Munich, “is the forward movement of the United States.” Thus, the best opinion in Great Britain, France, and Germany, our chief industrial rivals, is substantially in accord in assigning us the foremost place.

A UNIQUE FORM OF EXPANSION.

There is no parallel to our growth among modern nations, for the reason that the only countries which approach us in territorial expansion — Great Britain and Russia — have extended their sovereignty under wholly different conditions. Both of those countries have pursued a career of conquest and absorption of alien peoples with wide differences of race, of language, of religion, of social instincts and habits. England’s energies have been diffused all over the globe. Russia’s efforts, though restricted to territory always contiguous to her advancing frontier, have been even less assimilative. In each instance, the absorption is largely artificial, and dependent for its continuance upon the exercise of force. In the case of Russia, the force is almost wholly military; in that of England,—as in India, the Malay peninsula, Egypt, and elsewhere,—it is a mixture of military restraint and efficiency of civil administration. With the

exception of its recent insular acquisitions, the United States, in extending its boundaries, has taken up vast areas which could hardly be said to be populated. The nomadic Indians retreated swiftly beneath the submerging waves of our advancing civilization, and the remnants of French and Spanish occupancy were swallowed up with scarcely a ripple. As we moved forward, we fully occupied the land, and our development was continuous, well-ordered, and thoroughly permeative. The result has been to create a nation with a clearly defined and substantially homogeneous individuality. To all intents and purposes, we are a unit in our distinctive Americanism, and it is this which gives us a large part of our power in the world.

WHAT THE GREATER AMERICA MAY MEAN.

What does this Greater America of the twentieth century mean? To what does it tend? Is it a triumph for democracy, a final and indisputable vindication of the principles upon which the republic was founded, or does it represent, as some contend, a drift toward imperialistic ideas—the concentration of power in the hands of a privileged few, and a career of conquest and aggrandizement, which will gradually corrode and finally destroy the individual liberties we have always held most dear? The answer to this question is to be found not in speculation as to what may or may not result, as indicated merely by departure from tradition. The “example of the fathers” is a safe rule to steer by only so long as we are sailing upon the waters they explored. Once launched upon seas unknown to them, we must make a new chart, retaining their soundings of familiar depths, and adding others from our own experience. The conditions we have to face are so widely different from those they dealt with that it were obviously absurd to assume that they would have acted otherwise than we are acting, or that the democracy they had in mind is necessarily hastening to its doom. On the contrary, a close analysis of the situation in which we find ourselves may reveal the fact that it is really a development of their conception of democracy, and the adaptation of it to far broader and more beneficent ends than even those of which they dreamed.

As to one thing, it seems to me, we cannot be in any doubt. Our rapid growth in industrial power has brought with it a vast increase of national influence and prestige, and a temptation such as we never felt before to play an important part in the world’s affairs. One has not to look far to see that the success of our commercial invasion of the Old World implies our ultimate domination of the New. If Europe cannot check our progress within its own territory, it cannot hope to overcome us in the still more unequal competition in the countries of the Western Hemisphere. And in the wake of industrial and trade enterprise will follow the characteristic influences which give a peculiar cast to our social and political development. The important question, not less for ourselves than for the countries upon which we shall encroach, is whether this domination shall take the form of absorption into our own political system or content itself with the indirect upbuilding of them on American lines of development, but as separate political entities, with elements of stability and progress which they can hardly hope to evolve for themselves.

INDUSTRIAL ABSORPTION PROBABLE.

The Greater America of the future, if not of to-day, means assuredly this: That the United States will be the energizing, potential force of the Latin as well as of the Anglo-Saxon countries of this hemisphere. Whether joined to us by political ties or not, Canada no less than Mexico will feel more and more sensibly as time goes on her necessary dependence upon the Union in commerce, in industry, in all the sources of wealth, and consequently in the determination of the form which her social and political evolution must take. Both Canada and Mexico already give evidence of this result. The West Indies share in the same process of transformation to a lesser degree, and Central America begins to respond to the gradual inflow of American enterprise. The process is a purely mechanical one, and for that reason it is possible to make a fairly accurate forecast. We have to deal not with theoretical or sentimental conditions, but with concrete facts, or, in other words, the automatic, machine-like expansion of our industrial forces propelled by a national energy which seems irresistible.

POLITICAL INFLUENCE FOLLOWING TRADE EXPANSION.

As our goods have swept over Europe, in spite of hostile tariffs, of national prejudices, of jealousy and alarm on the part of European manufacturers, so our enterprise and industry, when the times are ripe, will spread to the farthest confines of America. And wherever “Yankee” industry pitches, a swarm of “Yankee” ideas and impulses will be sure to settle. In time these will percolate through the most unyielding strata of race prejudices, and our interests will become so thoroughly commingled with those of our sister commonwealths that a substantial unification, over-riding differences of language, of race temperament, and even of climatic conditions, may be found to have resulted.

AFFILIATION WITH SOUTH AMERICA.

That such a condition, born of purely industrial forces, is neither fanciful nor very remote is made clear by the marked changes going on in the countries nearest to us, as the result of increasing intercourse with the United States. For example, Mexico is a much less favorable field for the spread of our influence than Canada, because of more stubborn prejudices and race antipathies, yet Mexico is rapidly drawing closer to us. At the first glance it may seem that the contrary tendency exhibits itself in South America. We have made but little progress during the past decade in trade with that continent, and since our war with Spain there have been symptoms of reawakened prejudice and anxiety among some of the South American countries as to the ultimate intentions of the “Colossus of the North,” which more than ever dwarfs their power. If even before our sudden rise to our present eminence we spoke to Europe with the voice of authority for the whole of America, and Europe hearkened, it is but natural that the South American republics should view with apprehension an increase of our ascendancy so great that we would have but to give free rein to the spirit of expansion to absorb them one by one with little risk of effective protest from any quarter. But, as has been shown in a previous article in the World’s Work, we are stationary in South America only because we choose to be so, and for the present are more profitably employed elsewhere. Whether we would ever wish to take over the South American countries as part of our political system is very doubtful, but it may be assumed that, if our present industrial expansion continues without serious check or disturbance, they will certainly become tributary to us in an economic sense, and will gradually be affiliated in their social and political institutions.

In other words, as the markets now more profitable are either curtailed to us or are fully occupied by our wares, South America will begin to offer strong inducements, and then for the first time we shall really exert ourselves to win its trade. By that time American capital will probably have embarked, as it now shows signs of doing, in ocean-carrying traffic, and the great desideratum of larger intercourse with South America, viz., direct steamship facilities fostered by liberal tariff agreements, will have been provided. As the successful competition of our goods with those now imported from Europe may be regarded as a foregone conclusion, commercial absorption is sure to follow, and commercial absorption means the gradual assimilation of the most alien of peoples to our ideas, our habits, our standards of Americanism.

(Concluded next week.)