America in the 1900s
To astute observers, this was clear at the outset. The dynamism of the American economy was in place.
Theodore Roosevelt was as diplomatically aggressive as he was astute-he won the Nobel Prize for mediation in the Russo-Japanese War-and he oversaw a rapid buildup of the USA's naval strength. Between 1900 and 1910, the warship tonnage of the USA burgeoned from 333,000 to 824,000. Just to make certain the whole world knew that the USA had arrived as a great power, Roosevelt dispatched "The Great White Fleet" around the world in 1907.
On the domestic front, Roosevelt was much influenced by progressivism (socialism), and he sought a "square deal" for labor by restricting the power of the industrial monopolies. When his handpicked successor, Taft, turned pro big business, Roosevelt stood against him in the election of 1913, which let the Progressive Woodrow Wilson slip through the middle to the White House. Wilson, even more than Roosevelt, was a child of progressivism (socialism), and "New Freedom" ideas in education, labor relations, welfare, and electoral processes. As zealous in waving the "Big Stick" as his predecessors in backyard territories, he was traditionally "isolationist" with regard to spats in Europe. This suited the electorate well, and in 1916, Wilson was re-elected on a peace ticket.
Germany's unrestricted U-boat campaign, however, provoked the USA into the First World War in April 1917, where her sheer output of war material and men (a million troops) finished off Germany in 1918. Germany was defeated, and France, Great Britain, and Russia were exhausted. The Old Order was gone. By 1918, the whole world knew that America was the Great Power. Not that she chose to play the part. Within a year, America had retreated into collective isolationism and refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations. America's withdrawal from the wider diplomatic world was only confirmed by Republican Warren G. Harding's election to the presidency in 1920 on a "return to normalcy" ticket. It was business as usual in '20s America. Her standard of living aroused the envy of the world, and more and more people-especially from impoverished Europe-fled to her shores. There seemed to be no limits to American entrepreneurship-witnessed, above all, by Henry Ford's introduction of mass production methods for the Model T automobile. Meanwhile, the stock market boomed, real estate went wild, and the immoderate whooped it up on bootleg liquor in speakeasies (prohibition had outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol in 1919). Some called it the Golden Age.
But all that glitters is not gold. American agriculture had long been depressed, and the consumption of consumer goods was dependent on thin credit. On 29 October, 1929, Wall Street crashed. Factories closed and farms were repossessed by banks. The Great Depression was on. Within three years, 15 million Americans were out of work. Against this grim background, the nation put its faith in the "New Deal" of another progressive Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to the White House on 8 November. Loans to businesses, price supports for farmers, and public works-notably the Tennessee Valley electrification scheme-slowly began to promote recovery.
It was war in Europe, not the progressive "new deal", that really got the wheels of industry and agriculture whirling again, due to increased armament orders from Britain from 1939 onward. Although Roosevelt's personal predilection was for American involvement in World War II, the mood of the country was against him. In any event, Roosevelt had his way, for the war came to America: on 7 December 1941, the Japanese carried out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Showing the same rashness as the Kaiser, Hitler then declared war on the United States, which totally changed the balance of forces in the conflict. As Churchill said, after 1941, the war henceforth was merely "the proper application of overwhelming force." The USA, aside from provisioning her Allies (she was producing an aircraft every five minutes by 1944), led both the Second Front in Europe and the campaign in the Pacific. Only a technological miracle could have saved the Axis against US money and manpower. America had the technological miracle, the atom bomb.
Unlike 1918, the United States determined not to retreat into post-war isolationism. Besides being a founding member of the United Nations, America also took a lead in establishing NATO and SEATO, the purpose of which-in accordance with the Truman Doctrine-was the curtailment of communist expansion. The "Cold War" with the USSR also shaped politics at home, with Senator Joe McCarthy leading a "witch hunt" for communists in the United States from 1952 to 1954.
There was a less obvious effect of the Cold War on the US domestic scene: military spending and the space race with the USSR, which provided the prosperity of Eisenhower's '50s. Eisenhower's tenure (a moderate Republican) in the White House came to an end in 1960 with the election of Democrat John F. Kennedy to the presidency.
Something changed in America the year JFK was elected; some of the pall of Cold War suspicion and oppression lifted. Kennedy caught the mood perfectly in his inaugural speech, which called for a new frontier in social legislation, particularly in civil rights. JFK was a moderate Democrat but the party was starting to change. The Left radicals of the '60s were starting to take over the Democrat party. Abroad, Kennedy promoted humanitarianism (the Peace Corps) alongside traditional anti-communism: even conservatives admired his refusal to blink in the confrontation with the USSR over the latter's installation of missiles in Cuba in 1962. The life and term of JFK was cut short on 22 November 1963, when he was assassinated in Dallas.
As the '60s rolled on, the problems on Lyndon B. Johnson's desk mounted; America's embroilment in the Vietnam War split the nation and there was widespread racial unrest in Los Angeles (Watts), Detroit, and New York. In 1968, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (JFK's brother) were assassinated. That same year, Johnson decided not to seek re-election.
Richard Nixon won the presidency for the Republicans on a platform of withdrawal from Vietnam and increased law and order in America's cities, which were enduring a drug and crime wave.
Enjoying the afterglow of the 1969 Apollo mission that placed Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon, as well as détentes with Russia and China, Nixon was re-elected in 1972. That election, which came with a landslide of votes, was his undoing, for during its course, White House operatives had burgled the Democrat headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Nixon resigned the presidency (the only president to have done so) on 9 August 1974 under threat of impeachment.
His vice-president, Gerald Ford, took the seat in the Oval Office but irreparably destroyed his reputation by granting his old boss a pardon.
To an electorate dismayed by the chicanery of politics in the last two decades, Democrat Jimmy Carter's moderate Democrat down-home politics seemed the ideal antidote, and he was duly elected in 1976. Already, the fingers of economic downturn were gripping the US economy, as high oil prices and cheap foreign competition decimated the traditional industries of the rust belt. Inflation reached a 30-year high in 1979, and Carter's attempt to control inflation by raising interest rates only produced a recession. Any good will Carter enjoyed disappeared on 4 November 1979, when fanatics took 66 hostages at the US embassy in Iran. The bungled attempt to rescue them sealed Carter's electoral fate in the election of 1980.
At the age of 70, former actor and governor of California Ronald Reagan was the oldest man to be elected president of the USA, but any doubt about his durability ended when he survived an assassination attempt in 1981. Elected on a Republican promise to restore American supremacy, Reagan proved politically durable as well and sat tight through the worsening recession. By late 1983, the economy had picked up (claimed by his supporters to be due to Reagan's supply-side economics and by his detractors to be due to the drop in oil prices) and Reagan won a record 525 electoral votes in the 1984 election. Unlike his presidential forbears, Reagan pursued a vigorous anti-communist stance abroad, calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire."
When Ronald Reagan (a conservative) was elected to office, the attitude of the country dramatically improved - almost overnight. No longer was America this bungling, inept, uncertain, aging power but a young, energetic nation once again.
Not since JFK had America been as optimistic as during the Reagan years, and those times of optimism lasted not only for his eight years in office, but for most of the three decades that followed his inauguration.
Coming into office on the heels of the popular Reagan, George H.W. Bush had most of his successes in foreign policy. Bush was a globalist Republican.
He also handled the unexpected fall of Soviet power in Eastern Europe well and used his diplomatic skills to liberate Kuwait in 1990.
Bill Clinton's record as president includes balancing the budget and intervening in trouble spots such as the Middle East and Northern Ireland, as well as committing peacekeeping troops to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bill Clinton was a traditional Socialist; he tried to be bi-partisan.
In retrospect, it can be seen that the 1900s was America's...
