President McKinley's Expansionist Practices

This essay will examine, from a historiographical perspective, the role, intentions, and motivations of President William McKinley in the expansionist practices and policies of the United States government at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The essay will consider specifically whether McKinley was an opportunist of a representative of the vanguard of American liberty. While McKinley's motivations and intentions may have been mixed, the consensus of the sources consulted for this essay is that McKinley was an opportunist taking advantage of the popular view that the United States had the right, if not the duty, to exercise its power in other nations to impose its will for economic and strategic purposes rather than save foreign peoples in the name of liberty and/or democracy.

Historiography is concerned with the perspectives taken by historians as they observe and analyze history. In the current case, this involves specifically an analysis of why and how McKinley pressed the policy of expansionism. Was he acting out of a genuine desire of the American people to do good in foreign lands? If so, was he pursuing expansionism to do such good, or was he seeking to advance the economic and strategic needs of the United States and its corporate and political self-interests?

In other words, there are many different ways to determine how history was created in the era under study. Historiography does not see this era or any other as a seri

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ines without weakening that principle here. Bryan's words have proven prophetic. The same economic and strategic expansionism at work in McKinley's administration was at work in Vietnam, for example, with Cold War ideology thrown in, and that war was another step in the exposure of the fraudulent, destructive, and self-destructive nature of American expansionism. George F. Hoar argues along with other sources that there is no doubt that economics was at the heart of McKinley's expansionism. He writes of this expansionism as a given, and asks what the next President will do to right the situation insofar as such righting is any longer possible, considering the degree of involvement of the United States in 1900: Now, some things have happened in the past which . . . cannot be helped now. The treaty with Spain has been ratified. We have had eighteen months of war in the Philippine Islands. Instead of another Japan, taking its high rank among the powers of the earth; instead of Cuba, sending its youth to our shores, grateful to us as their liberators from centuries of oppression, to sit docile learners at our feet, we have a sullen, angry and shattered people. . . . It is not whether we should instantly withdraw from the P

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