Barbarian Virtues

Matthew Frye Jacobson. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. Hill and Wang, 2000.

Matthew Frye Jacobson proposes a close relationship/parallel between American expansionist foreign policy and immigration policy domestically during the Progressive era. In his telling, there was not only a strong relation between the two but in some ways they were part of the same process. Fundamentally, the rise of industrial capitalism and the accompanying fear of over-production prodded both the search for new overseas markets (particularly in Asia) and created the need for a steady and ample supply of low-skill, low-wage labor. Thus, even as Americans were being driven to annex or obtain de facto control over distant territories—and negotiating how to incorporate these “non-white “peoples into the American polity in some way—they were also confronting the influx of enormous numbers of non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant immigrants who simultaneously served the economic needs of the new economy while providing a scapegoat for its excesses and civic and social shortcomings.

Jacobson makes the connection between the then-mainstream phenomenon of scientific racism and both foreign policy and the developing immigration regime developing during the era. He also makes it clear that the time period covered represented an era of continuity between nineteenth century Manifest Destiny and twentieth century expansionism and globalized foreign policy. This is a facet of American history which has been ignored too often; this amnesia helps feed a false dichotomy between an earlier, allegedly less tumultuous period of mass immigration versus contemporary controversies.