The anatomy of United States imperialism: Cultural perspectives on American interventionism in the Western Hemisphere, 1895-1907

American imperialism between 1895 and 1907 derived its momentum and rationale from within a new cultural hegemony. Empire building captured the imagination of a majority of Americans by allaying widespread middle class anxieties about the country's future with the transformation of the nation's dominant myths and symbols into a usable past.;Imperialism offered opportunities in collective therapy; in a web of psychological subterfuge it promised a means of coping with the forces of modernity--the mechanization of work and leisure, the standardization of production and consumption, the fear of a banal, "weightless" existence, for example. The rhetoric of national expansion also urged economic and political solidarity across the social spectrum in the United States. The language of "the White Man's burden" and "the strenuous life" sought to furnish an idiom for a cultural hegemony organized around the principles of shared destiny and the virtue of self-denial. Many Americans felt an unconscious attraction to the "burden" as "weight" in their lives and as a symbol of tribal belonging, expressed in terms of race.;American Protestants expressed in imperialism their longing for a pre-millennial utopia. Constructing a comfortable eschatology of empire building, they could not recognize their desire for secular salvation as corrupt. Melville in Moby-Dick had already explored the catastrophe of pre-millennial pursuits. Imperialism seemed to promise salvation not destruction, but the confrontation with the wilderness in landscapes real and imagined only accentuated the need for spiritual and social regeneration. Like earlier generations on the frontier, Americans found that building an overseas empire contained opportunities for moral and social renewal. In the global wilderness of uncivilized nations the hunter-empire builder could rescue the captives of his own mind. The suppression of the wild was good therapy for a tormented soul, but its price a path of destruction.