Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:53:47.327Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rome, Race, and the Republic: Progressive America and the Fall of the Roman Empire, 1890-1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Kristofer Allerfeldt
Kristofer Allerfeldt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ancient Rome is a powerful metaphor in the western imagination. It is very much alive today. The Roman Republic inspires images of democracy and the empire is the very epitome of decadence. The collapse of this, the greatest of empires, is a parable. The Progressive Era opened with overt imperial ambitions and ended with the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's plans for a Pax Americana. Throughout this period, the symbol of Rome was explicitly used to justify or condemn expansion, warn of the dangers of immigration and commercialization, attack America's enemies, and praise the nation's allies. To figures as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, Rome was both a model and a warning. Politicians, historians and other commentators saw America as heir to the Roman legacy. Race theorizers claimed that Americans were either the modern Romans or the descendants of the Barbarians—promoters of ordered modernity or champions of individual democracy.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 297 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Dunne, Finley Peter, Observations by Mr. Dooley (New York, 1906), 271.Google Scholar

2 Demandt, Alexander, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflosung des romischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich, 1984).Google Scholar

3 For a good, if now outdated, survey of the historiography of the period, see Heather, Peter, “Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Bentley, Michael (London, 1997), 69–87Google Scholar. The “re-periodization” of Rome's collapse was put forward by Brown, Peter R. L. in his groundbreaking The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London, 1971)Google Scholar and in essays such as “The World of Late Antiquity Revisited,” Symbolae Osloenses 72 (1997): 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; for a critique of Brown's interpretation, which has greatly influenced the current historiography of Late Antiquity, see Ward-Perkins, Bryan, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar.

4 For a passionate evaluation of the importance of a classical education at the end of the Progressive Era, see Kenyon, Frederik, “The Classics and Modern Life,” The Classical journal 18 (May 1923): 491–501Google Scholar.

5 James, Harold, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton, 2006).Google Scholar

6 Maier, Charles S., Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Berman, Morris, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (New York, 2006).Google Scholar

8 Adams, Brooks, The Law of Civilisation and Decay (New York, 1896), 2.Google Scholar

9 Two of the most extreme American examples of this thinking are Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (New York, 1920)Google Scholar and Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race (New-York, 1916)Google Scholar ; A contemporary attack on this thesis can be found in Barnes, Harry Elmer, “Some Contributions of Anthropology to History,” Journal of Social Forces 2 (March 1924): 362–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For a contemporary discussion of the shift of power northward, see Gilfillan, S. C., “The Coldward Course of Progress,” Political Science Quarterly 35 (Sept. 1920): 393–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For an account of the continuing influence of Modey and Prescott on Progressive Era thought, see Simonds, Edward, A Student's History of American Literature (Boston, 1902)Google Scholar.

12 House cited in Mead, Walter Russell, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and Mow It Changed the World (New York, 2003), 126Google Scholar.

13 See Friedberg, Aaron L., The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton, 1988)Google Scholar . For a comparison with present-day America, see Ash, Timothy Garton, “Stagger On, Weary Titan,” The Guardian, Aug. 25, 2005Google Scholar ; , James, The Roman PredicamentGoogle Scholar.

14 The semi-secret, so-called Rhodes-Milner Groups, and their connections with the “Round Table” and the “Kindergarten,” have given rise to a host of conspiracy theories; see May, Alex, “The Round Table, 1910-66” (PhD thesis, Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar ; Potter, Simon J., “Richard Jebb, John S. Ewart and the Round Table, 1898-1926,” English Historical Review 122 (Feb. 2007): 105–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See Tilchin, William N., Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York, 1997).Google Scholar

16 Hay cited in Okihiro, Gary Y., Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle, 1994), 27–28Google Scholar.

17 On Hay, see, for example, Clymer, Kenton J., John Hay: The Gentleman as Diplomat (Ann Arbor, 1975), 105–12Google Scholar . Wilson's comment to Cecil quoted in Walworth, Arthur, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference (New York, 1986), 313Google Scholar.

18 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), 91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See the New York Times, Oct. 21, 1900.Google Scholar

20 For a basic overview of the influence of classical thought and antiquity on the early American republic, see Flower, Harriet I., ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (Cambridge, 2004), 347–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; more detail can be gathered in Richard, Carl J., The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994)Google Scholar ; Miles, Edwin, “The Young American Nation and the Classical World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (Apr-June, 1974): 259–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Commager, Henry Steele, “The American Enlightenment and the Ancient World: A Study in Paradox,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Jan. 1971): 3–15Google Scholar ; and Burstein, Stanley M., “The Classics and the American Republic,” History Teacher 30 (Nov. 1996): 29–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; the influence of antiquity on nineteenth-century America is explored in Meyer, Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984)Google Scholar , among many others.

21 For a contemporary view of the role of the two empires, see Bryce, James, The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India and the Diffusion of Roman and English Law throughout the World: Two Historical Studies (London, 1914)Google Scholar ; for a concise modern interpretation of the British imperial mission, see Black, Jeremy, The British Seaborne Empire (London, 2004), esp. 180–84Google Scholar , 209; and Doyle, Michael W, Empires (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 235–74Google Scholar.

22 Winterer, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002), 143Google Scholar ; other discussions of the imagery of the White City include Rydell, Robert, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1982), 38–71Google Scholar ; an Rosenbaum, Alvin, “Rediscovering America at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition,” Blueprints: The journal of the National Building Museum 11 (Winter 1993): 2–7Google Scholar.

23 For a personal view of the first years of the American Academy in Rome, see McDaniel, Walton Brooks, “The American Classical Schools in Rome and Athens,” Classical journal 19 (Apr. 1924): 438–41Google Scholar.

24 Brody, David, “Building Empire: Architecture and American Imperialism in the Philippines,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4 (June 2001): 123–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 New York Times, Mar. 30, 1898.Google Scholar

26 See, for example, Leech, Margaret, In the Days of McKinley (New York, 1959), 168–70Google Scholar ; Traxel, David, 1898: The Birth of the American Century (New York, 1998), 112–15Google Scholar.

27 See Rauchway, Eric, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York, 2003), 7.Google Scholar

28 Henry Adams to Brooks Adams, Nov. 3, 1901, cited in Rowe, John Carlos, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to WWII (Oxford, 2000), 176Google Scholar.

29 Adams, Henry, A Dynamic Theory of History (New York, 1904), 9.Google Scholar

30 Stephen Bonsai, interview with Leo Tolstoy in the New York Times, July 7, 1907Google Scholar.

31 To Norton, the last Censor and notorious lickspitde Lucius Munatius Plancus characterized the decadent politics of Rome in the final years of the Republic and the early years of the Empire. Plancus, in Norton's view, was a “political survivor” who adopted a chameleon-like, obsequious persona to live through and hold office in the regimes of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Augustus, and Nero. Norton feared similar unprincipled kowtowing would enable the stranglehold of “bastard imperialism” on the democratic institutions of the American Republic; see Norton, Charles Eliot, The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1913), 201Google Scholar.

32 Bryan, William Jennings, “The Issue in the Presidential Campaign,” North American Review 170 (June 1900): 770–71Google Scholar (all three quotations).

33 Taken from Theodore Roosevelt's Romanes Lecture, Oxford, June 7, 1910, published in Roosevelt, Theodore, History as Literature (New York, 1913), 82Google Scholar.

34 Roosevelt to Reid, Sept. 11,1905, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 5, ed. Morrison, Elting E. (Cambridge, MA, 1952), 19Google Scholar.

35 See editorials, New York Times, Feb 15, 1898Google Scholar , and Nov 28, 1898.

36 Editorial, New York Times, Sept. 17, 1900Google Scholar.

31 Verdict, Nov. 6, 1899.Google Scholar

38 New York Times, July 14, 1898.Google Scholar

39 Letter to the Editor, New York Times, Sept. 6, 1900Google Scholar.

40 See Olcott, Charles S., William McKinley, vol. 2 (Boston, 1916), 110–11Google Scholar ; and Roosevelt, Theodore, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 14 (New York, 1926), 352–59Google Scholar ; for other examples of the arguments raised in the 1900 campaign, see New York Times, Sept. 16, 25, Oct. 2, 3, 21, 1900Google Scholar.

41 Nevada senator William Morris Stewart, a Silver Republican, cited in New York Times, Feb. 17, 1900Google Scholar ; for the positioning of the “imperialist” arguments in a “progressive” context, see Leuchenburg, William E., “Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (Dec. 1952): 483–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 See Hingley, Richard, Koman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology (London, 2000).Google Scholar

43 New York Times, July 1, 1905Google Scholar ; Richard Jebb was the Morning Posfs Empire correspondent who wrote the influential Studies in Colonial Nationalism (London, 1905)Google Scholar , which advocated increased national autonomy in a federated system that in many ways resembled the American example.

44 Perhaps the best of the large number of books on this subject is Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad 1876-1917 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

45 See Love, Eric T., Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 2004).Google Scholar

46 See Allerfeldt, Kristofer, Beyond the Huddled Masses: American Immigration and the Treaty of Versailles (London, 2006), 141–45.Google Scholar

47 Roosevelt at Arlington on Memorial Day, May 30, 1902, cited in Kramer, Paul A., “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the US Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War,” Diplomatic History 30 (Apr. 2006): 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Taken from “The Native Peoples of the Philippines,” Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, January 31, 1900, vol. 1 (Washington, 1901), 11–12Google Scholar.

49 On imperialism's threat to racial distinction, see Christopher Lasch, “The And Imperialists, the Philippines and the Inequality of Man,” journal of Southern History 24 (Aug. 1958): 319–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Merriam, Allen H., “Racism in the Expansionist Controversy of 1898-1900,” Phyon 39 (Dec. 1978): 369–80Google Scholar ; and more recendy Ngozi-Brown, Scot, “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow, and Social Relations,” The Journal of Negro History 82 (Winter 1997): 42–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Hamilton, Alexander in New York Evening Post, Jan. 7, 1802Google Scholar , in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 25, ed. Syrett, Harold C. (New York, 1987), 494Google Scholar.

51 Bancroft, George, Literary and Historical Miscellanies (New York, 1855), 317.Google Scholar

52 See Speidel, Michael P., “The Rise of the Ethnic Units in the Roman Imperial Army,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 11 (Sept. 1975): 202–31Google Scholar ; for a more general overview of the development of the legions from the Republic to the fall of Rome, see: Southern, Pat and Dixon, Karen R., The Late Roman Army (London, 2000)Google Scholar ; Santosuosso, Antonio, Storming the Heavens: Soldiers, Emperors and Civilians in the Roman Empire (Boulder, CO, 2001)Google Scholar.

53 In the Great War, “parade ground naturalization” raised similar worries; see , Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses, 32–33Google Scholar.

54 For the composition of the Rough Riders, see , Traxel, 1898, 148–49Google Scholar ; for the general history of the war, see Smith, Joseph, The Spanish American War: Conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific (New York, 1994)Google Scholar ; for the battle(s) of San Juan Hill from the American perspective, see Golay, Michael, The Spanish-American War (New York, 1995), 59–63Google Scholar ; and from a more Spanish perspective, Tone, John Lawrence, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (Chapel Hill, 2006), 277–78Google Scholar.

55 Theodore Roosevelt to Florence Lockwood La Farge, Sept. 25, 1905, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 5, 35.

56 New York Times, Apr. 12, 1914.Google Scholar

57 “WL” in letter to New York Times, Mar. 3, 1900Google Scholar ; for an in-depth analysis of this theory, see Josey, Charles C., Race and National Solidarity (New York, 1923)Google Scholar.

58 Gobineau, Arthur de, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Collins, Adrian (New York, 1915), 30.Google Scholar

59 Roosevelt, Theodore, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 13 (New York, 1926), 259–60Google Scholar ; for Roosevelt's view of the “composite American,” see Roosevelt, Theodore, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, vol. 2 (New York, 1924), 450Google Scholar.

60 Anderson, Margo, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, 1988), 107–15.Google Scholar

61 Roosevelt to Whitelaw Reid, Sept. 11, 1905, in Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 5, 19; the most thorough analysis of TR and race can be found in Dyer, Thomas G., Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, 1980)Google Scholar ; an erudite, readable and concise account can be found in , Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 142–49Google Scholar.

62 , Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 65.Google Scholar

63 Ibid., 129-30.

64 Paraphrase of Babington, William Dalton, The Fallacies of Race Theories as Applied to National Characteristics (London, 1895)Google Scholar , reviewed in the New York Times Jan. 12, 1896Google Scholar.

65 For a good analysis of this nationalist phenomenon, see Wells, Peter S., The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest (New York, 2003), 30–36Google Scholar.

66 The “Hermann” statue measures some 102 feet and is a loose copy of the monument in Detmold in northern Germany, completed in 1875. For details of the activities of Der Orden Der Hermann's , Sohne, New York Times May 19, 1895Google Scholar.

67 See Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London, 1890).Google Scholar

68 Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3 (London, 1791), 356.Google Scholar

69 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Koosevelt and Henry Cabot Udge, 1884-1918, vol. 2 (New York, 1925), 432.Google Scholar

70 Gibbon cited in Windschutde, Keith, “Edward Gibbon and the Enlightenment,” New Criterion 15 (June 1997)Google Scholar , available online at <http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/ jun97/gibbon.htm>; although Gibbon had converted to Catholicism in his youth, he was by the time of his writing of the Decline an apostate.

71 Most of the Teutonic/Nordic/Ayran supremacists included some form of eulogy to the German origins of the Reformation; see Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (London, 1912), 513Google Scholar.

72 , Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 46–50.Google Scholar

73 The Menace 76 (Sept. 28, 1912): 115.Google Scholar

74 See Anbinder, Tyler, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

75 See Allerfeldt, Kristofer, Race, Radicalism, Religion, and Restriction (Westport, CT, 2002), 31–93.Google Scholar

76 New York Times, Mar. 29, 1917.Google Scholar

77 For example, see Ohlinger, Gustavus, Their True Faith and Allegiance (New York, 1916), 63–66.Google Scholar

78 For details on the idea of the Great War as a “Crusade” from a British, French, Russian, and German perspective-see Frantzen, Allen J., Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar.

79 For an example of the argument that Germany's war effort was in part the preservation of white supremacy, see Miinsterberg, Hugo, The War and America (New York, 1914)Google Scholar . Most biographies of Wilhelm discuss this topic along with the Kaiser's relationship with Chamberlain, and one of the best analyses of this relationship can be found in Cecil, Lamar, Wilhelm II: Emperor and Exile, 1900-1941 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 55–58Google Scholar ; for a discussion of the background to this Volk Militancy, see Mosse, George L., The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1974), 73–90Google Scholar.

80 New York Times, June 28, 1915, Apr. 9, 1916.Google Scholar

81 The History Circle, British-American Discords and Concords (New York, 1918), 63Google Scholar.

82 See Duncan, Peter J. S., Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Holy Revolution, Communism and After (London, 2000), 52–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83 Although written by a refugee from Bolshevism, probably the most influential interwar Marxist analysis of the fall of Rome can be found in Rostovzeff, Michael Ivanovitch, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1926)Google Scholar.

84 For examples, see New York Times, Jan. 16, June 23, 1920Google Scholar ; Nov. 14, 1921; Jan., 28, 1924.

85 See Stoddard, Lothrop, The Revolt against Civilisation: The Menace of the Underman (London, 1922), 206–10.Google Scholar

86 New York Times, Aug. 31, 1919.Google Scholar

87 Mills, David, “Which Shall Dominate-Saxon or Slav?” North American Review 166 (June 1898): 729–40.Google Scholar

88 See Sinkler, George, The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents from Abraham Uncoln to Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1971), 323–24.Google Scholar

89 See Wilson, Woodrow, A History of the American People (Princeton, 1902), 5: 212–14.Google Scholar

90 See , Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses, 123–24Google Scholar; Mayer, Arno J., The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

91 Freedland, Jonathan, “Rome, AD…Rome, DC?” Guardian, Sept. 18, 2002.Google Scholar

92 See Nye, Joseph, “The New Rome Meets the New Barbarians: How America Should Wield Its Power,” Economist, Mar. 23, 2002.Google Scholar

93 For example, see Wolfram, Herwig, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic People (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar.

94 Behreandt, Dennis, “How Immigration Destroyed Rome,” New American, Feb. 6, 2006, 33-34.Google Scholar

95 Murphy, Cullen, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (New York, 2007), 206.Google Scholar