Remember a time when America, fresh from its founding, looked inward? Our early leaders dreamed of building a strong nation, a “city on a hill,” far removed from the complex politics of the Old World. For generations, the vast Atlantic and Pacific oceans acted as natural shields, keeping us focused on our own continental destiny. This week on Our American Stories, we explore how this vision, famously championed by George Washington in his Farewell Address, became a defining principle for early American foreign policy, shaping the very soul of our young republic.
But as America grew, so did its ambitions and responsibilities. What happens when a “startup nation” becomes a global force? Join us as Professor Bill McLay from Hillsdale College, author of Land of Hope, guides us through this pivotal shift. From John Quincy Adams’ eloquent calls for liberty and independence to the bold declarations of the Monroe Doctrine, we’ll uncover how the dream of avoiding “foreign entanglements” evolved, inevitably pushing America towards a new role as a preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere and on the world stage. Discover how America’s story transformed from internal focus to global impact.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. The show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West
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Speaker 2: begins: Fort Worth, Texas. Up next,
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Speaker 1: to another installment of “The Story of Us, The Story of America” series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McLay. For most of its existence, America’s aspirations and concerns had been confined to the mass of land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In other words, continentally; in other words, internally. All of that is about to change. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill.
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Speaker 3: All of that being said, it was a time marked by an absence of any real dispute or involvements in any kind of foreign war, or even deep or not-so-deep controversies. Some even came to believe that this was the natural state of affairs. America was a massive country spanning a great continent, with two great and natural buffers between us and the rest of the
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Speaker 4: world: the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
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Speaker 3: This view of ourselves goes back to our very founding: the idea of being a city on a hill, the idea of steering clear of foreign entanglements. Both were a fundamental part of our cultural DNA, so to speak. One need only look back to America’s indispensable man, George Washington, and his farewell address.
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Speaker 4: So far as we’ve already formed
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Speaker 3: engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith.
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Speaker 4: But here let us stop.
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Speaker 3: Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation.
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Speaker 4: Hence, therefore, it
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Speaker 3: must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics. It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion
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Speaker 4: of the foreign world.
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Speaker 3: An even more profound take on Washington’s worldview was articulated by John Quincy Adams, James Monroe’s Secretary of State, in an address delivered to Congress on July 4th, 1821, in celebration of America’s independence. Adams made the case for America as the torch of liberty for all the world to emulate. Here are Adams’ words, which start by asking a rhetorical question about the nation that his father
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Speaker 4: helped to birth.
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Speaker 3: “And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, ‘What has America done for the benefit of mankind?’ let our answer be this: ‘America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature and the only lawful foundations of government. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She’s abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings as to the last vital
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Speaker 4: drop that visits the heart.’”
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Speaker 3: “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will
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Speaker 4: her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be.”
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Speaker 3: “But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Her America’s glory is not dominion but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield, but the motto upon her shield is ‘Freedom, Independence, Peace’.” Though the speech was elegant and beautiful,
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Speaker 4: there was the real world we still had to deal with.
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Speaker 3: A mere two years later, Adams would pen what the world would come to know as the Monroe Doctrine, and in it his position shifted a bit. The doctrine declared that America would not tolerate or accept any further colonization of the Western Hemisphere by the old powers of Europe, and further, that America now saw our country as the preeminent power of our hemisphere.
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Speaker 4: This seemed to be an abrupt turn.
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Speaker 3: If we were to be the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, how could we do it without foreign entanglements? How could we not do so without challenging foreign powers or “monsters” as Adams had written? How was any of this newly announced American position compatible, let alone consistent, with our Founding Fathers’ guiding principle of self-rule? The fact is, this small window of relative distance from world affairs would have to come to an end.
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Speaker 4: We were no longer a startup nation.
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Speaker 3: We were a nation of scale, scope, and consequence, with an economy and with dynamic businesses looking for markets
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Speaker 4: all over the world to sell to, markets to conquer.
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Speaker 3: Inevitably, it was America’s destiny because free markets, rule of law, property rights, and the development of the modern corporation made it all but inevitable that America would become the world’s
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Speaker 4: most powerful country.
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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Professor Bill McLay tell the story of America at a time when all of its focus was on itself. Washington’s desire to steer clear of foreign entanglements and foreign wars was made, well, absolutely clear in his farewell address, and Adams picked up that mantle. America should be concerned for, first and foremost and only with America.
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Speaker 2: When we come back, what comes next?
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Speaker 1: The changes everything here on Our American Stories. Our “Story of Us” series continues after these messages. Lee Habib here, as we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories and “The Story of Us, The Story of America” series with Dr. Bill McLay, author of Land of Hope. When we last left off, Dr. McLay was explaining America’s evolving vision of its place on the world stage.
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Speaker 2: Let’s return to the story.
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Speaker 3: Ambition for world dominance traces back as far as time itself, to the empires of ancient Greece and Persia. But what made Rome’s fall inevitable and imperialism itself difficult to maintain by any power were the many governing and administrative issues that revolved around empire. It was a problem even for the British as it related to America: all that distance and all the problems of logistics before the Industrial Revolution. But with that revolution came major breakthroughs in communications and transportation, and those distances closed. Empire building was not a uniquely American desire. Great Britain, Italy, Germany, and Spain, among others, were all actively seeking to encroach and carve out more space for themselves. Power also accompanied such ambitions. Tragically, these ambitions of Western powers put us on a crash course with the very notions of liberty and equality. Some imperial nations simply ignored these principles. Some even managed to convince themselves that certain races were simply not capable of exercising self-rule. It was insidious; it was wrong. But the thinking that some races were meant to lead and rule and others to follow and be ruled was pervasive. One idea approach tried to thread the needle culturally and work through the inherent contradictions of such thinking about racial superiority, and that was the idea that empire and imperial rule was a mission to civilize the locals, to lift them up once it could be established that these uncivilized societies were capable of self-governance. One of the leading thinkers of the day promoting the new brand of imperialism was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Navy officer who believed deeply in the connection between
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Speaker 4: power in the world with power on the high seas.
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Speaker 3: But it was the Indiana attorney Albert Beveridge who best summarized this movement in a Senate campaign speech he gave in 1898. The speech was called, appropriately, “The March of the Flag,” an exhaustive case for imperialism, American style. The speech started by laying down the terms of the argument in stark language: “The opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer, the rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent. We govern our children without their consent. In 1789, the flag of the Republic waved over four million souls in thirteen states. The timid minds of that day said that no new territory was needed, and for the hour they were right. But Jefferson, through his intellect, the centuries marched. Jefferson, the first imperialist of the Republic. Jefferson acquired that imperial territory, which swept from the Mississippi to the mountains, and the March of the Flag began. Today, we’re making more than we can use. There are more workers than there is work. There’s more capital than there is investment. We do not need more money; we need more circulation. Therefore, we must find new markets for our produce. The commercial empire of the Republic, that is the greatest fact of the future. The commercial supremacy of the Republic means that this nation is to be the sovereign factor in the peace of the world. Fellow Americans, we are God’s chosen people. Yonder at Bunker Hill in Yorktown, His providence was above us, and New Orleans, and ensanguine seas, His hand sustained us. Abraham Lincoln was His minister. His great purposes are revealed in the progress of the flag, which surpasses the intentions of congresses and cabinets, and leads us, like a holier pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, into situations unforeseen by finite wisdom, and duties unexpected by the unprophetic heart of selfishness. We cannot retreat from any soil where Providence has unfurled our banner. It is ours to save that soil for liberty and civilization. The flag must henceforth be the symbol and the sign to all mankind.” The deep cultural arrogance and even racist attitudes
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Speaker 4: of Beveridge that day were clear for all to see and hear.
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Speaker 3: With empire comes opportunity and problems, as history teaches anyone who follows the lessons of the past. And history and our own founding ideals set by Washington did not stop America from our expansion westward.
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Speaker 4: The first acquisition was the territory
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Speaker 3: of Alaska, which was acquired from Russia in 1867 thanks to President Johnson’s Secretary of War, William Seward, and for the bargain basement price of
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Speaker 4: $7.2 million.
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Speaker 3: There were many critics of the deal at the time, given the territory’s distance from mainland and its
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Speaker 4: harsh, long winters.
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Speaker 3: Mocked by the nickname “Seward’s Folly,” it would turn out to be a superb deal, one that became obvious fairly quickly. The next big move of Americans happens in Cuba, which was a Spanish colony extremely close to the shores of Florida. Always there had been the desire to simply acquire Cuba, but the biggest reason for our sympathies was Cuba’s deep desire for independence, much as we longed for the same from England a century or so earlier. In early 1895, an insurrection broke out in Cuba, and the Spanish government retaliated. Partly, this outraged the American public, with many Americans viewing the news in Cuba as a humanitarian crisis, and all because the mass medium of the day was experiencing the benefits of technological progress. Newspapers could print fixed daily editions a day and could be delivered and transmitted to the farthest reaches of the country. It’s hard for elected officials to ignore big stories. Even today, all of that public attention on Cuba would have political implications. When the Republican William McKinley was elected in 1896, the tone and tenor of American foreign policy was about to change. While negotiating with Spanish governing officials, he sent an American battleship, the Maine, to Havana Harbor as a symbol of America’s concern
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Speaker 4: for our interests.
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Speaker 3: In the late evening of February 15th, 1898, the Maine suddenly exploded, and the ship quickly sank
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Speaker 4: to the bottom of Havana Harbor.
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Speaker 3: Two hundred and sixty sailors would lose their lives, almost two-thirds of the ship’s crew, and many other survivors were severely injured.
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Speaker 4: So, who was really responsible for the explosion? There was an
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Speaker 3: inquiry at the time that credited a submarine mine, which would make the government of Spain responsible, but later looks at the evidence are less clear, even suggesting that the blast may indeed have been the product of an internal explosion started
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Speaker 4: by a fire.
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Speaker 3: No one knows for sure, but looking back dispassionately at the event, it would seem highly improbable the Spanish government would have perpetrated such an act. McKinley soon found himself in a bind. The American public was outraged. It didn’t help matters that rivals like Teddy Roosevelt were accusing McKinley of having no backbone. His own VP, Garrett Hobart, even warned McKinley that Congress just might declare war on Cuba on its own, without him. That would have been a disastrous turn of events for McKinley. He had little choice in the matter: go ahead with it or get run over by the events of the day. McKinley did what he had to do. On April 22nd, McKinley announced the blockade of Cuba. That act of war prompted a retaliatory act of war by the Spanish.
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Speaker 4: Spain had responded.
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Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, and you can go to OurAmericanStories.com to hear the entire “Story of America” series. Again, go to OurAmericanStories.com. A special thanks to Bill McLay and to the folks at Hillsdale College, “The Story of America” series.
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Speaker 2: Here on Our American Stories.
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