2 - Different Path to War: A Comparative Study of Militarism and Imperialism in the United States and Imperial Germany, 1871-1914

Summary

German national unification in 1871 met with the unreserved applause of the government of the United States. As the noted historian George Bancroft, then American envoy in Berlin, commented, “our foreign political interests almost always run parallel with those of Germany.” Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. president and Civil War hero, confirmed the United States' friendship to the newly united Germany in his annual messages to Congress when he stressed the mutuality of friendly feelings between the two countries. At this stage, at least, the “German Revolution,” as former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once characterized Germany's national unification and the subsequent dramatic change in the balance of power in Europe, was obviously of little concern to the United States. But during the last decade of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's “reign,” the friendly feelings that had characterized relations between the United States and the new German Reich increasingly gave way to overt hostility. The skirmishes between German, American, and British consuls on the tiny South Sea island of Samoa in 1884-9, a trifle in itself, marked the beginning of a new era of rivalry and suspicion. By 1897 future president Theodore Roosevelt expressed the view that war with Germany was not only likely but also perhaps desirable.5 Kaiser Wilhelm II was, at times, equally bellicose; although, paradoxically, he also toyed on occasion with the idea of a German-American alliance.