The late nineteenth century witnessed other results of America's surge toward industrialism: the nation became an exporting rather than an importing system, a creditor rather than a debtor. From colonial times through the Civil War, Americans had bought most of their manufactured goods abroad. Now, however, the products not only of America's farms but also of its factories began to descend upon Europe, Latin America, even Asia. Foreign markets, and the need to sustain them, played an increased role in the thinking of American business leaders as the factories poured out more goods than most U.S. citizens could afford to buy. This was accompanied by a revival of expansionist thinking reminiscent of the manifest destiny era. By the 1890s, Americans were looking west beyond the Pacific and south to Latin America for potential markets. And some argued for an expanded navy with which to protect American commerce abroad. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the most visible result of the new US interest in expansion. The United States wound up in possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. In a separate action, Hawaii was annexed in l898. The United States thus entered the twentieth century as the newest of the imperial powers.

But the new imperialism did not come without challenge. Just as Americans had once prided themselves on the absence of slums and paupers, so too had they distanced themselves from Old World colonialism, against which in 1776 the nation had rebelled. To anti-imperialists such as Mark Twain and labor leader Samuel Gompers, the nation was turning its back on its heritage. Others scoffed at such notions. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, thrilled listeners with his oration "The March of the Flag," an updated version of manifest destiny with more than a tinge of racism:

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vague and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the worid to establish a system where chaos reigns. . . . He has made us adept in government that we may adminster government among savage and senile peoples. . . . We are the trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace.

Looking to the future, Beveridge later added, "the twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious."

However, the United States seemed hesitant to go beyond the acquisitions of 1898. With the exception of the Panama Canal zone (created in 1903 by a treaty with the new nation of Panama after its U.S.-encouraged rebellion from Colombia), no further colonies were acquired. Instead, in Central and South America, the United States practiced a form of non-colonial imperialism, or informal empire, in which nations nominally independent nonetheless were actually dominated by U.S. mining, agricultural, and commercial corporations. Thus, both sides of the imperialism debate were satisfied. No more colonies were established, but U.S. economic and political interests, occasionally with the help of the Marine Corps, prevailed throughout Central and parts of South America.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917 on the side of Britain and France, it took another step away from the isolationism that had characterized its nineteenth-century foreign policy. President James Monroe, in his famous doctrine of 1823, had proclaimed the essential separateness of the Old and New Worlds, pledging noninterference in Europe's quarrels in exchange for Europe's isolation from the Americas. When President Woodrow Wilson threw the weight of the industrial might of the United States on the side of the Allies in World War I, clearly a break had been made with the past.

The United States, having already established its economic leadership, now assumed a diplomatic and political role equal to that of the other great powers of the day. Critics of Woodrow Wilson's diplomacy maintained that the United States had no vital interest in the power struggle in Europe, and that by taking sides the nation had lost its claim to separateness and moral leadership. Wilsonians, however, believed that entry into World War I had made it possible for the United States to assert its moral leadership and bring a breath of fresh air to the corrupt world of European diplomacy. Announcing an idealistic set of "Fourteen Points" at the war's end, Wilson sailed for Europe, intending to rewrite the rules of diplomacy and redraw the map of Europe.

Although Wilson was received with near-religious fervor by the masses in Italy, France, and Britain, his hopes were blasted, first by the cynical-or realist-Allied leaders with whom he dealt, and second, by his own country's unwillingness to join the new League of Nations, through which he had hoped his ideas would be established. The Treaty of Versailles proved unsuccessful in preventing a recurrence of war in Europe and the world. Wilson left office in 1921 a broken man, but his conviction that the United States, because of its uniqueness and its power, had a mission to lead the rest of the world to a new level of order and stability, lived on in subsequent generations of American leaders.

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