Imperialism Dbq Essay

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Practice what you preach! The Unites States preaches democracy, freedom, liberty and justice by all. Our ancestors fled England to gain these basic rights and establish a land of liberty and justice for all. As I study history, I have come to question whether we, as a country, really live by these principles. By the late 1800s the United States had become a world power with the ability to influence other countries and expand to new lands by using it military and economic powers; America was divided on how to use this power and influence. Expansion or isolation seemed to be the most argued political themes of the early 1900s. Europeans had drawn satisfaction from fulfilling a self-imposed “civilizing” mission to spread Western culture and
Mark Twain points out that while our country has an army powerful enough to “capture the savages” in the Philippines, our great army has a very savage taste and killed all of the 600 Moro men, women and children who “fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater” (Doc 6). If something gets in the way of imperialism, it must be silenced! This hardly sounds like God’s will! Anti-Imperialists urged the government to remember our founding principles and to stop “the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods” and urged the US to remember that we protested international laws allowing the strong to rule the weak (Doc 3). Anti-imperialist see the hypocrisy of
When millions of Jews were perishing in the holocaust in the early 1940s, we stood by and did nothing. All of sudden, we couldn’t afford to go out and do humanitarian works. We couldn’t even let refugees from the Holocaust enter the US. God’s will seems to follow the economy of our country; we couldn’t afford a war while we were coming out of the Great Depression even though the Nazi’s were committing one of the greatest crimes against humanity of all times. As George Norris notes that even when two countries did the same thing in 1914, the US did not react justly. Both England and Germany declared illegal war zones; the US protested Germany yet submitted to England (Doc 10). The US has policies and philosophies but applies them as it is most profitable to our county. Norris goes on to explain how war brings prosperity to the wealthy saying: “war brings prosperity to the stock gambler on Wall Street-to those already in possession of more wealth than can be realized or enjoyed” (Doc 10). Of course when the Jews needed our country, we were more concerned with our economy and their land served no purpose for our country. President William McKinley, while claiming humanitarian justification for the Cuban invasion, clearly shows that American economics were the real priority; his campaign poster shows that the US prospers and banks prosper after the

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