ABSTRACT
During the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States, becoming truly united following upon the Civil War, gathered itself into the critical mass that made it even then the world's greatest economic power. According to the law of lag effect, neither the nation nor the world quite recognized it. James Buchanan Duke developed a mass distribution network placing the cigarette packages into consumer hands as conveniently and lethally as possible. Society and economy in the United States were fluid; Americans moved much more easily from occupation to occupation and class to class. Except militarily, the United States was considered a world power or, indeed a superpower. In December 1907, Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed American power more bluntly by sending a fleet of sixteen battleships on a fifteen-month world voyage. Roosevelt had established America's presence in Asia and international affairs.
