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Presidential Address
The acquisition of an economic, political, and colonial empire that stretched across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific world transformed the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The dynamics so central to "domestic" U.S. history at the turn of the century--hothouse industrialization, rapid economic growth, rising inequality, energetic social reform, and contestations over the role and breadth of the federal government--were intertwined in complex ways with the remaking of the relationship between the United States and the world. While scholars have examined many aspects of U.S. expansionism, a key yet neglected issue involved the imperial labor migrations it required. From across North America, the Caribbean, southern Europe, and Asia, men and women were recruited to labor in the service of building U.S. global power at the turn of the twentieth century. They built roads and canals; cooked, washed, and cleaned homes; they served in the military to assist in colonization and the pacification of foreign populations; they nursed the wounded; and they harvested bananas and sugar cane to build profits for corporate capitalism. Their labor built the empire from the bottom up; their movability was essential to the empire's strategy, and hence became central to working people's experiences throughout these decades. 1
U.S. expansionism embraced and exploited mobility and migration in multiple ways: it was indeed a "Movable Empire." First, the empire itself was changeable, fluid, and profoundly movable. It exerted its power in different ways in different places. Expansion across the North American continent relied upon wars against indigenous people as well as settler colonialism; victory in the War of 1898 against Spain led to acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and effective control over Cuba in return for paying $20 million to Spain. Seizing the moment, the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898. The decision to colonize the Philippines required a lengthy war against the Filipinos' independence campaign and, although victory was declared in 1902, in fact warfare continued for another decade. Victory ultimately came at a high human cost, particularly for Filipinos--approximately 4,000 U.S. soldiers were dead, roughly 50,000 Filipino soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians. 2With these wars, the United States acquired an empire that stretched half way...