Charles Ramsdell Lingley

"The guns of Admiral Dewey did something more than destroy a Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila. Their echo came back to us in a question new in the history of our government." The new problem was Imperialism - was it wise policy and was it constitutional to annex and govern territories outside the limits of continental North America?

With the close of Grant's administration, the main immediate problems connected with political reconstruction came to an end. During the war, however, important economic and social developments had been taking place throughout the United States which were destined to take on greater and greater significance. The reconstruction problem looked backward to the war; the new developments looked forward to a new America. Reconstruction affected fewer and fewer people as time went on; the later changes ultimately transformed the daily life of every individual in the nation.

Most of the tendencies which characterized the growth of population, the expansion of the West, the concentration of the people in cities, the development of manufacturing and agriculture, and the extension of the railway system, from 1870 to 1890, were equally significant during the two decades following the latter year. Nevertheless there were important differences of detail in the tendencies of the later period; and about the year 1900 in particular there occurred changes that were far-reaching.

Powerful as economic forces were from 1865 to 1890, they did not alone determine the direction of American progress during those years.

Seldom, in times of peace, is the personality of a single individual so important as that of Theodore Roosevelt during the early years of the twentieth century. At the time of his accession to the presidency, he lacked a month of being forty-three years old, but the range of his experience in politics had been far beyond his age. In his early twenties, soon after leaving Harvard, he had entered the Assembly of the state of New York.

Out of the economic and political circumstances which have just been described, there were emerging between 1865 and 1875 a wide variety of national problems. Such questions were those concerning the proper relation between the government and the railroads and industrial enterprises; the welfare of the agricultural and wage-earning classes; the assimilation of the hordes of immigrants; the conservation of the resources of the nation in lumber, minerals and oil; the tariff, the financial obligations of the government, the reform of the civil service, and a host of lesser matters.

By 1908, the year of the presidential election, an influential portion of the Republican members of Congress, particularly in the Senate, were bitterly opposed to President Roosevelt. His attitude on the trusts and the railroads was offensive to many, and on several occasions he had gained the upper hand over Congress by means which were coming to be known as "big-stick" methods. The so-called "constructive recess" of 1903 was an example.