Existing comment:
Various signs:
Promoting the Empire:
-- "Speak softly and carry and big stick." -- President Theodore Roosevelt, September 2, 1901
New Empire thinkers equated American prosperity with possession of overseas colonial territories. The key to national power and security, according to Alfred Thayer Mahan, a leading imperialist theoretician, was a strong Navy. Mahan argued eloquently for the construction of a vast fleet of the most heavily armed and armored vessels, which soon became known as battleships.
The United States authorized the construction of its first battleship in 1890. To popularize naval expansion, the huge ships were named after states including Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Within twenty years, the United States had a sleet of twenty-five battleships and some called upon the nation to built forty-eight.
To demonstrate the arrival of the United States as a world power, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered sixteen battleships on an historic 46,000-mile around-the-world cruise in 1907. Roosevelt was particularly interested in impressing Japan, since the American colony in the Philippines lay very close to the Island Empire and diplomatic relations with Japan were at that moment strained. The ships were known as the Fleet because of the heat-reflecting white paint applied to their hulls, and their voyage was immensely successful. Clearly, America's New Empire would be defended by its New Navy, including the 11,000-ton battleship Wisconsin (BB-9).
Fearful New Weapons: Harnessing the Industrial Revolution:
The United States had few modern weapons when war broke out in Europe. It had only twenty-one military aircraft in 1915 and fewer than 100 trucks. The entire American Army possessed a mere 1,500 machine guns, with each regiment of infantry having only four! By 1918, however, each American regiment had 250 machine guns. In fact, automatic weapons production boomed in the United States, to the point that American factories were producing more of such weapons each day than existed in the entire Army before the war.
But it was not only U.S. resources that were harnessed during World War I. All the major participants in the conflict came to control and regulate the industrial outputs of their societies to further the war effort. And as a result, the intensity of combat and its casualties dwarfed all previous conflicts.
Machine guns, for example, enabled belligerents to mow down their opponents on a scale never witnessed before. Other fearful new weapons included mass-produced artillery, tanks, poison gas, submarines, and military aircraft. It was the deadly power of these new weapons that contributed to the gruesome stalemate on the Western Front. |