ABSTRACT
In April 1899 Theodore Roosevelt exhorted his countrymen to meet the challenges and responsibilities of an imperial foreign policy: “If we are to be a really great people,” Roosevelt asserted, “we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.” His vision included building an isthmian canal, seizing the strategic bases necessary to decide the “destiny of the oceans of the East and the West,” and subduing and ruling the islands acquired from Spain. Three years later, Republican Senator George F.Hoar lamented the nation’s decision to follow TR’s advice. Hoar charged the United States with converting the Monroe Doctrine from a policy of “eternal righteousness and justice…to a doctrine of brutal selfishness looking only to our own advantage.” Even more tragically, by suppressing the Filipino revolution, “We crushed the only Republic in Asia…made war on the only Christian people in the East…[and] inflicted torture on unarmed men.”1
