For someone to assume control over the destiny of another requires no small amount of confidence. This is true whether one is speaking of a parent raising a child, a teacher instructing a class full of students, or a government leader making decisions for his or her populace. The more this person in control feels that he or she is better suited to make decisions for others, the more license that person will feel to make those decisions without consulting the person (or people) in his or her care.

At the end of the nineteenth century, there were few nations on earth that matched the self-assured bravado held by that of the United States. In just over a century, the country had changed from being a cluster of colonies clinging to the Eastern seaboard to a power that spanned the whole of North America and was now challenging its former colonial master in the game of empire-building. Its armed forces had whipped the Mexican Army, taking almost half of its territory in the process, and had just cowed the Spanish into surrendering Cuba and its holdings in the Pacific Ocean.

These heady achievements were matched by heady American political rhetoric concerning the benefits that American dominion could bring to the uncivilized on the globe. In his essay “The March of the Flag,” Albert Beveridge wrote of the new world power as “a land that can feed and clothe the world…set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe, a greater England with a nobler destiny.” (Beveridge 1898). This destiny, according to Beveridge, was both missionary and mercenary, as the United States government had not only the duty to bring its civilizing influence to the savages around the world, but also to find markets for its exports among those same beneficiaries of the American way. Beveridge appeals to one’s philanthropic side by asking if divine power has not given the United States “gifts beyond [their] desserts and marked [them] as the people of His peculiar favor” only to watch Americans stand by and watch as other Western powers colonize the remainder of the world. He then shows his condescending side by pointing out that the idea that “government derives its authority from the consent of the governed applies only to those who are capable of self-government,” giving as examples the Native Americans and children among those who need government from a wiser source.

This same condescension pervaded other parts of the American government as the twentieth century dawned, as well. Policy thinkers as diverse as the welfare advocate Jacob Riis and the head Rough Rider, President Theodore Roosevelt, also asserted that the role of government was, in large part, to tell considerable segments of the populace, both rich and poor, what was good for it. In his introduction to The Battle of the Slum, Riis rails about the corrosive effects of slums on the psyche of a society. When he looks at the slums, he sees “ignorance, want, unfitness…mob-rule in the day of wrath.” He calls the greed that keeps such a wedge between rich and poor a basic part of nature; however, he also asserts that the general brotherhood of humanity is also intrinsic, and so he claims that “when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue.” In other words, a country is only as morally sound as its handling of the poor is. Riis answers those within the government who say that the problems of poverty are more due to socially based causes rather than greed by claiming that his opponents make a profit from “the depravity and helplessness of the slum” (Riis). He goes even further to highlight the importance of saving children from such a ruinous existence, writing that “children are our to-morrow, and as we mould them to-day so they will they deal with us them.” In other words, the social problems that are not solved now will only mushroom in the future, according to Riis. MORE…