Foreign policy is an important feature that can change the outlook a country has on the world. This very topic was a particularly controversial issue during the late 19th century and early 20th century in the United States. The public was divided and it aroused great debate among the American people. It was a question of whether to uphold imperialist ideas or to sustain an isolationist agenda. Looking back on that time, one can see the shift from expansionism to isolationism in American foreign policy over a 20 year period. The Gilded Age was not called such a phrase because of its honesty and pure intentions; it was called such because it masked the social problems with fancy material items and overpowering wealth. Thus, when rich, powerful
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Euguene V. Debs summarized the problem in his “Canton Speech”; he shed light to the fact that men were concealing their real intents with the concepts of patriotism and religion, “No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people” (“Canton Speech”, debfoundation.org). Americans, especially isolationists, were feeling like imperialism didn’t match up with the founding democratic principles of America. In the political cartoon “The Public”, Uncle Sam is be forced to drink from a barrel on “Roosevelt’s Platform” that has words like “Repeal of the Declaration of Independence” and “Military Despotism” and surrounded by little creature that look similar to devils, with a caption “The water-cure method of extorting from Uncle Sam the confession that an Empire is better than a Republic”. It is a harsh criticism of expansionism, but reflects how anti-imperialists felt. As the American people begun to realize the problems of expansionism, they shifted to wanting an isolationist
Euguene V. Debs summarized the problem in his “Canton Speech”; he shed light to the fact that men were concealing their real intents with the concepts of patriotism and religion, “No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people” (“Canton Speech”, debfoundation.org). Americans, especially isolationists, were feeling like imperialism didn’t match up with the founding democratic principles of America. In the political cartoon “The Public”, Uncle Sam is be forced to drink from a barrel on “Roosevelt’s Platform” that has words like “Repeal of the Declaration of Independence” and “Military Despotism” and surrounded by little creature that look similar to devils, with a caption “The water-cure method of extorting from Uncle Sam the confession that an Empire is better than a Republic”. It is a harsh criticism of expansionism, but reflects how anti-imperialists felt. As the American people begun to realize the problems of expansionism, they shifted to wanting an isolationist