Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination. By Susan M. Matarese. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 164p. $28.95.

Extract

The last decade of the nineteenth century was a traumatic time for many Americans. The federal constitution was a hundred years old, and it no longer fit the nation so neatly as it once had. A new class of economic warlords, commonly called robber barons, made a mockery of some hallowed democratic principles; from behind the walls of their well-defended monopolies they laughed at notions that business should serve the public. “The public be damned!” jeered William Vanderbilt. Meanwhile, millions of immigrants flooded American shores; to many of the native born (or merely earlier arrived), the newcomers appeared an alien horde that would drive down wages, depress the standard of living, and change the character of America even as they were already changing its face. In the West, the frontier was disappearing—in fact, had already disappeared, in the statistical judgment of the director of the 1890 census—depriving the country of the demographic and psychic safety valve that had long bled off the worst of American discontent. As if all this were not enough, the 1890s witnessed the worst depression in American history to that point, closing hundreds of banks and factories and throwing hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and onto the streets and highways.