Think of themselves in the world, in a very different way. If you want to understand the 20th century, if you want to understand the role that the United States plays, the 1890s is the place to start because the transformation that you see among the people and their attitudes in the 1890s is little short of amazing. Remember this. Remember that as far back as you want to go in American History, the idea has been that the United States and before that, the american colonies we are over here and the rest of the world is the rest of the world. There is this purposeful sense that we are us, and the rest of the world can do whatever it wants. Whatever it is going to do, it is not going to affect us. I am dancing around the word isolation because that has a lot of baggage around it. But that is part of it. We were an isolated country. Or it is not isolated, if you dont want to use isolation. We can pick and choose however much involvement we wanted, and we usually did not want any involvement. But then all of a sudden in the 1890s, one after the other, all of these things start infringing on american society. It is not just the government changes. It is my opinions, your opinions, everyone in the publics vision of what the United States is going to be starts to evolve. And there is a bunch of Different Reasons for it. I cannot think of anybody who is going to be affected by all the reasons. There are a bunch of Different Reasons, and one person, you are not going to be affected by all of them. But i guarantee you will be affected by one of them. So what i want to do is run down these reasons, and one by one show you what they are. Almost by the end of the decade, we wind up fighting a war in large part that is informed by all these changes. Does that make sense . All right. I think the place to start is probably the fact that in 1893, we wind up with a really big economic crash. It is the biggest one in a very long time. It triggers a depression that lasts for years, that probably would be known as the great depression. The panic of 1893 was a huge stock market sell, and it triggers some soulsearching among businesses. And the question has got to be, why is this happening . What has caused this . Why suddenly are all the factories having to lay off workers . Why is it the case that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and the southern pacific and all the big railroads, why are they all having to declare bankruptcy . Something has gone wrong. There is one idea that starts creeping to the forefront of people who think about business. If you dont think about business, this is not going to affect you. But if you do, if you are a leader of the business community, you will think, why is this happening and how do we fix it . And gradually, all of the focus begins to settle on one particular word, and that word is overproduction. Overproduction. What it means is that you remember how efficient american factories had become . They had produced and produced and produced, they made more and more and more stuff, no matter what it was. They made more of it. Finally they reached the point this is the way this is being brought out, right . We have hit the point where the American Market cannot absorb all the stuff we are producing. That is what overproduction means. The American Market is only so big. In the end, you have sears catalogs going out to the four corners of the country and you have farmers buying multiple shirts, remember . At some point, people are going to say, i dont need any more shirts. At some point, they are going to say, i bought all there is to buy. And that becomes a problem because you got all these factories churning out stuff left and right as fast as they can. And what winds up happening is surpluses Start Building up. And then surpluses build up, prices begin to drop, profits begins to drop, and youve got a recession. Well, the question would be, how do you fix that . What do you do if you have got a warehouse full of stuff that the american productive capacity has no place to put . Well, companies today have to deal with this, too. What do you do if you are a cell phone company, what do you do if everybody buys a cell phone . From where i am sitting, everybody has a cell phone. What do they do . Well, today what they have got to do is they have got to convince you that your cell phone is now crummy and outdated and you have to buy the new one. They didnt do that back then. It is a little bit too modern. We have got to find other places to sell our stuff. We have got to find other markets to get into. We have got to find places that dont have the domestic productive capacity that we have here and then unload our stuff there. That is the way to do it. Find new markets. If there is overproduction, find new markets. Listen, the United States has always been an exporter. The United States has exported since the beginning. But almost all of the stuff the u. S. Used to export was agricultural product like cotton and grain and dairy and whatever. All the corn farmers of the midwest, all the wheat farmers of the ohio valley. There is a lot of exports. But and i guess you probably saw this coming, right . With the productivity of american factories, you start to think exporting manufactured goods might be the future. And it is true that over the course of the 1890s American Manufacturing exports are going to go to the roof all of a sudden. And the United States becomes a very aggressive exporter of manufactured goods, but that is almost the midpoint of the story i am telling. Right now, in 1890 to 1893, we have to open some new markets. The markets that everybody thought of, the utopian market, was china. Just like it had been in the days of columbus. If we can get into the china markets with our sewing machines or our railroad locomotives or whatever it is, that would be the end of the depression and it would be rosy times from now on. The china market is huge. China was a very, very commercial society. A lot of buying, a lot of selling. But it was not industrialized. If we could get into the china market. But there is always a but, right . The problem with that is china is kind of in a mess in the 1890s. China is really at risk of being carved up among european powers and russia and japan. China, the Central Government of china was weak, and the british and the french and the germans and the italians and the japanese and the russians all started to carve out spheres of interest along the chinese coast. And set up basically you know, it is probably not a stretch almost to call them colonies within china. And in 1893, 1894, there is no guarantee, honestly, that china is going to make it. The continent of africa, the continent of africa is being carved up at the exact same time amongst all these different european powers into very, very exclusionary zones of economics. The germans want to trade in the german zone, the british want to trade in the british zone, the french want to trade in the french zone, and they dont want anyone else in their zone. So where this goes very naturally, if you are a Business Leader thinking about the china market, we need to open up china and keep it open. We need the state department to do something about this, to circulate notes between the other countries and make them keep china open for us. This happens without you even realizing it, but think about that a second. If you are Andrew Carnegie and you are worried about your steel business and you are thinking about the state Department Opening china, you now have a radically different idea for what they ought to be doing in the world. And it happens that easily. It happens that effortlessly. Suddenly you are thinking, wow, the state Department Needs to fix this. And the state department hasnt had to do that before. You have just stumbled into imagining a fundamentally different role for the United States to play within the community of nations. Does that make sense . This doesnt affect a whole lot of people. People in waco, texas, in 1893 are probably not sitting around thinking, we need to open up new markets. But the people who are thinking about this are pretty important, pretty powerful, pretty influential. It is curious because you have got a handful you have a couple impulses that will influence a small group, but a really influential group. Then you have a couple impulses that come along that will influence a whole bunch of people, anonymous, noninfluential people. This is the first source. The economic impulse to look outward. Find new markets. Be energetic with your foreign policy. That is what it is going to take. Because the world is being carved up, and it is happening as we watch, and this is the point at which americans start to think, we are going to be left out of this unless we are a little more i hate this word proactive. I just want to say active. Proactive. So far, so good . This is going to sort of blend pretty easily into the writing of this guy, Alfred Thayer mahan. Alfred thayer mahan is an officer. He came out of the Naval Academy late in the 1850s. And he served in the civil war. He found that he hated to be on a ship, which is not what you want in a naval officer. He got seasick easily. He was much more bookish than the normal naval officer. He wanted to teach. He wanted to write books. He wanted to lecture. He had ideas. He winds up getting brought up to newport, rhode island, at a new School Called the Naval War College. The purpose of the Naval War College was to Train Navy Officers in a more strategic way, to think about something other than just sailing and moving ships. How do you move fleets . What do you do with ships . And he really thrived at that. And he taught there for a while, and then he started to realize that he could actually do more. He could reach bigger audiences if he tried to. He writes this book called the influence of sea power upon history. And it comes out of his lectures. It comes out of his vision of what the world is today and how the previous centuries inform what has happened over the course of the millennium, make us what we are today. Specifically, the influence of sea power on history. He says, you go back to the days of the romans, and what made the romans great . What made the roman empire feasible . It was not the legions, it was not the trade routes, it was not the gladius. It was the fact that the romans controlled the mediterranean. It was the fact that the romans could use the mediterranean anyway they wanted to. They could move troops and they could move goods, and that is what made the roman empire great. He said, if you look through times since the times of the romans, there has always been one nation, it seems, that was the leader in sea power. And that one nation that commanded the sea was always able to be economically powerful and influential. He brings this all the way up to the 1700s and Great Britain, and he says, look at Great Britain. Great britain is a little tiny island. It is small. It has a small population compared to russia or to france or anyplace like that, but they have got the biggest empire in the world. The sun never sets on the British Empire because it is all over the place. Why . Because they have commanded the sea. And if the United States now, he does not flat out say this, but this is sort of what he is getting to. If the United States wants to be great and influential, it is going to need a navy. It is going to need a navy better than what weve got. It is going to need a navy that is built to and here is the phrase i want you to file away because this is a phrase that the 20th century is going to be filled with. We need a navy that can project power. We need to think of our navy as not being something that just sits at our shore and waits to be attacked. We need a navy that can go out and champion our interests, right . Away from the coasts of north america, because that is where our interests will ultimately lie. What i want you to be able to do right now, what i want you to be able to do is start to see, wait a minute, i see the connection between this and overproduction. Because if we are going to make markets open, right, we are going to have to project power. I mean, we are not going to be able in a world of power politics, you are not going to be able to go up to Great Britain and say, will you open your market for us . Especially if you do not have anything behind that. We have a navy who can project power, we will be able excuse me, we will be able to project influence, and we will be able to get done what we want to do. A lot of influential people read this book. A whole lot of influential people. Especially people in the senate, people in the government, people in the Naval Department ate it up because they have been waiting for years for somebody to Say Something like this. Future president Theodore Roosevelt reads this and sort of goes nuts for it and becomes one of mahans champions. Now, mahan also decides, i want to write for the public as well. This is the point at which he becomes even more important. He starts writing essays for public magazines like the atlantic. I can think of one article he wrote in the atlantic in december of 1890, and the atlantic, you can go to barnes noble and get the atlantic today. He wrote this article called the United States looking outward. And that was an eyeopener to a lot of people. And the title is perfectly chosen. The United States looking outward. We have been focused here, right . We have been focused domestically since the declaration of independence. We have had this challenge and that challenge when we have done this and we have done that and we have done a bunch of different history stuff, but it has always been here, it has always been us, right . And mahan says, the world is a big place and we need to be a player in it, ok . Let me mention this word real quick. Imperialism. Because this is an era of imperialism, and that concept, that term is behind a lot of stuff. And there were a lot of people in the United States who watched other great powers carve up the world in imperialist fashion. You can have one of two reactions to it. I dont know if you can be neutral to this. I dont know, maybe you could. People can be neutral about all sorts of things. But in general, your reaction would be, we need to get in on this. Or this is bad and we need to know why this is bad and we need to speak out against it, ok . The thing about that is both of those options, both of those impulses, are going to make you look outward. Whether you are a wannabe imperialist or whether you think it is a terrible thing and people should know how terrible it is, both of those things will make you Pay Attention to something other than your backyard, right . And thats you know, when we have a bunch of stuff, right, when you have the world in your cell phone pocket. You have the world in your cell phone and your cell phone is in your pocket, which is where it should stay during class. You can get in the bubble. And nobody went out talking like this in the 1890s, i dont think. Maybe we should get out of the bubble. Maybe we should Pay Attention to what is happening in the world. Maybe we should be aware of the plight of china. Maybe we should be aware that africa is being carved up by imperial powers. Maybe we should be upset by that. Maybe we should get in on it, right . It doesnt matter. You are suddenly looking outward. That is something that everybody can do. Any questions so far . So i think if you are looking for a neat way neat as in tidy, not neat as in, wow, neat maybe a military impulse to look outward, although i am not really happy with describing it that way. Clearly this is an economic impulse. When the 1890s start, the United States it depends on how you count the United States has some thing like the 13th largest navy in the world, which means there is 12 above us. And i will spot you the first five, but then i am willing to bet you would have trouble thinking about who else. The chilean navy was bigger than ours. So far, so good. So you get this fleet built up in the 1890s that can project power, that can project power to do things like keep china open, right . Make sure that the state department entreaties to other countries. So far, so good . Ok, look, shift gears. This guy, Frederick Jackson turner. Frederick Jackson Turner is a historian, a historic historian. He taught, i think, at the university of wisconsin, but i am not 100 sure. I think so. He was an american historian. He looked for big trends. By the way, remember darwin . Remember the implications behind the way darwin looked at the world . The big, story that unfolds. Turner is going to be all of this stuff sort of fits in with darwin. All these people think like darwin. We are at the tip of a big, long story that is going to continue forward, and we have a long history behind us. That is darwinistic in that it takes the whole sweep of history. Frederick Jackson Turner thinks that way, too. Let me tell you what he says in this gangbusters article called the significance of the frontier on history. I will describe this and tell you why this fires people up, then what i want you to do is cook up some label for this. I usually call this philosophical, but i am not happy with that. It is not really philosophical, i dont think. But it is eaten up with darwinism and social darwinism, too. But what turner says is if you look back through American History from the very beginning, from the puritan age, if you look back throughout American History and you sort of look at a map where people live, there has always been a frontier line between what people thought of as civilization and what people thought of as the wilds of the world. There has always been a line of demarcation between civilization boston, philly, pittsburgh, whatever and the frontier. And people knew it. People knew where it was. It was always there. And the thing about it was it represented something formative in the american character, ok . The presence of a frontier, the presence of the frontier determined american character throughout time because the frontier did sort of two things. The frontier was where you could go to start over again. If everything went wrong, if everything just fell apart, right, you could go to the frontier and remake yourself. And there is a bunch of stories sort of wrapped up Andrew Jackson is replete with this. Born in North Carolina and winds up going to tennessee and making his fortune. Same thing with andrew johnson, born in raleigh and he runs off to tennessee and becomes a political figure in tennessee. The frontier was this ever present place where if you screwed everything up royally, you could go out there. And start over. It doesnt matter if i think this is right or not. It made us more willing to take risks. The other thing i have mentioned this a couple of times. The presence of the frontier made us rugged and tough. The frontier was where you could go to prove yourself. The front tier was where you could go to get away from the luxuries of life in 1824. You could go to the front and chop out trees, no one would do it for you. If you went to the frontier you better take care of yourself or you will be in a world of trouble. You have to go out there and chop out trees and build a log cabin. You have to be tough or you will be destroyed on the frontier. Remember the bit about rugged individualism . Turner says this is where we learned as a society to value our individualism. You dont learn to be tough and rugged in a drawing room in philadelphia. That is not tough. Daniel boone, davey crockett, these frontier people. Give them that. This is good. Given that turner begins looking at census data he says that every 10 years the u. S. Does the census. Every 10 years they could plot on a map where people live. Every 10 years you could see just as clear as day probably on a map that is bigger than this, you could see a frontier line. The frontier is on a map. You go to here and say if i take one step over i am crossing the frontier. It goes west every year. River novel remembered novels and westerns . This plays into that. Then, the census of 1890 happens. I will talk about two different years in the census when we are in your together. Not today. This is 1890. The other bigshot census is 1920. This is the first one. Turner says the census of 1890 shows there is not a frontier line anymore. This is a really big deal. There is not a frontier line anymore. You could now get on the train in boston and you could go all the way across the continent and you could get off the train in San Francisco and you have never crossed the frontier. It will be telegraph lines the whole way. It will be steel rails the whole way. It will be General Stores the whole way. He says the frontier has closed. It is gone, it has disappeared. It cannot come back. Listen to this. With the closing of the frontier, a chapter of the American History has ended. Then you think ok, what next . Then turner says i dont know. What i do know is this, this is when the angst starts to build up if you are listening to him talk. Are you listening . That made us what we are. It is gone. That which made us tough, rugged individuals, that is gone. What do we do . That is for you to worry about. He goes im a historian, not a prophet. All i know is what i could see from history. I will tell you what. If you are a social darwinist, you will sort of be upset by this. If you are somebody who has been looking for a chance to kick back and put your feet up then you are ok. If you are one who says send me a bag of potato chips. Put your feet up, if there is not a frontier line it absolves you from doing a bunch of stuff. I would go to the frontier, but there is not one anymore. Too bad. This is when somebody like Theodore Roosevelt comes into the picture. Theodore roosevelt would read turners idea. He would say weve got to find a new frontier. We have to find a new frontier. We cant kick it back and be lazy now. If you remember the competitive nature of social darwinism. The world works that way, too. Nations are socially darwinistic. There was a speech he gave in 1899. It is like he read turner and went to give this speech. The 20th century looms large. If we stand idly by, speak for ourselves and merely floss for leave and noble peace. The more energetic of the worlds nation will pass us by and sees for themselves the mantle of true greatness. There is a long sort of story in here about luxury and selfgovernment and the strenuous life. You could go back in history. You could read people like james madison, a little bit of thomas jefferson. Every once in a while you pick up worries about luxury and selfgovernment not being compatible with each other. Luxuriousness, luxury bred laziness which bred complacency. You cease to be interested in the way the world works. You cease to be interested in how things are happening. I know you cannot imagine this all. We need a new frontier because that is why we are who we are. If you know cultural history that phrase, a new frontier rings through American History like a bell. John kennedy said this at some point and got a lot of traction, we need a new frontier. You dont have to be specific what it is. We need a frontier, where . I dont know, alaska maybe. No one has been to alaska yet, the frontier. Space, the final frontier. The human heart, the depths of the ocean, we need a frontier, why . That is what shapes us. That is what he is saying. This sort of forces our hand, right . If im right about this says turner, the future has to be out there. He is in the background saying you are going to need the navy. [laughter] then you have Andrew Carnegie saying we could sell things on the new frontier. So far, so good . Going back to the navy, would that help the economy at all because they have something to produce . Professor smith absolutely, it will especially help the steel industry. They are very different. The kinds of ships we are going to build for this new navy, they are very different. There werent any steel factories that could make the steel the navy needed for armored ships. The first few ships of the new navy were steel but they were not armored. We cant do this until we are sure the u. S. Steel industry could keep up with what we want. The u. S. Steel industries sent you order the ships and we will keep up with it. That is such a good question. That is such a good way of tying these things together. The construction of the navy was an economic boom for a lot of places. Does that affect the stock market crash, is that helping that were hurting that . The stock market moved a little bit more slowly back then. The moves werent as big as they have been recently. Ultimately, it will. Ultimately it will help the Steel Companies be more secure and be a better investment and people will invest in the stock market. By the end of the decade the depression is over and it has rebounded in the economy is growing for a couple of reasons we could talk about later. So far, so good . Anything else . Shift gears entirely. The people we have been talking about, chances are would not have read the book by Josiah Strong called our country. A lot of people did. He wrote this doozy in 1885. Theres a lot in this book that you would read today and think jesus. It is a diagnosis of what is wrong. Theres too much money, too much greed, too much labor unions. Hes against a lot of stuff. I cant think of a book that is more different than mahan. Our country is this panic about the country is falling apart. Tied up in it, if you could manage to get to the end of it and read one of the last chapters, he talks about the sort of christianity in the world. If you read it you think i know where he is going with this. Basically his penultimate chapter says that if you look back over history, there has always been one people that carried the christian gospel to the world. Now, it has fallen to the americans. Kind of a big deal. The british did it for a while. This is the torches being passed to a new carrier kind of thing. Strong, who is convinced that it is behind a lot of the troubles says americans need to become more of what would the world be . Americans need to go and spread the gospel now. The british have done all that they could do. A little bit of a darwinistic trajectory. This coincides with a flowering of missionary work in american churches. Especially American Protestant churches like baptist and methodist. They go all into missionary work in the 1890s. One of the things that has happened, i am not a medical person so i cant get into the way this evolved. One of the things that has happened is they are getting close to a cure, treatment, not a cure for some pretty ravaging diseases that were considered tropical. Yellow fever, malaria, they are getting close to figuring out how to treat it so going to the tropics is no longer seen as a death sentence to people who are from the tropics. The notion is you could go to places like africa, south asia, south america and the caribbean and hope to live to tell the tale. Then came christian mission. This is probably the movement that influenced the greatest number of people. You know i think that . It is because you could go you can go to almost any Little Church and any midsize house that was around in the 1890s and you could dig and find pictures of visionaries that looked just like you. You could be looking through the old scrapbook and pull out the back and white photograph, edgar williams, minister. Missionary to rhodesia. I have been waiting for you for 20 years. 1970, is that right . He was a descendent of these people. Im glad you told me that. I have been using that for decades as an example and no one has ever said anything about it. I could hang it up now. Maybe i will pick a new country. Imagine you are sitting in a pew and you are there every sunday and you sit in the same place because that is the way you do it. Then you notice that nice young couple, you havent seen them for a while. You wonder what happened to them. You work up the nerve of what happened to those nice people that sat at the end of the road at the end of the rope . They became missionaries . Really, where . Rhodesia. Then you think what was his name, edgar . Edgar and betty, rhodesia. When you are told that after the closing hymn on sunday morning, you think about where youre going to go to lunch. You answer it, rhodesia. What you do after lunch, you run home what was it . Rhodesia. Good god, it is in africa. They are in africa . Guess what . You now know somebody in africa. They become best friends, i have best friends in africa. Then, from sunday school we have to pray for our missionaries in rhodesia. What were their names . We dont remember but they were that nice couple. We got a letter for them last week. This is all going down at a church in the middle of texas. Suddenly, everybody in this congregation knows somebody in southCentral Africa. The world get that much smaller. The little kids in sunday schools, they take up mission offerings. They take up offerings for our missionaries in rhodesia. They grow up thinking Central Africa is not that far away because people from our church go there. Like these years of the treatments to people who needed it . Professor smith i guess if we couldve equipped them with vials of malaria serum, that might be a little bit of our capability. They are sharing the gospel. Missionary work tended to be a little bit more gospel. We are going to get to humanitarian, it is a good question. Now you know somebody in rhodesia. What happens after it has been about a year or 18 months, if youre in a church you notice. They come by and have a bunch of stories to tell. You have dinner on wednesday night you listen to them. Then they have a Powerpoint Presentation or the 1890s version of a Powerpoint Presentation. Then, you could be a missionary, too. They still need help. This is going on all over the country. Suddenly you have i dont know the number, 100,000 . They are thinking about what americans can do in southCentral Africa. It is hard to get across the magnitude of this today. The thing is, if i ask how many of you have been to africa, i wouldnt be surprised if half of you raise your hands. If you ask that in the 1890s or 1880s, nobody wouldve. I could probably find it on a map. Maps make things alien. Being there or knowing somebody who has been there makes it real. The whole phrase makes a world smaller has been done to death. That is what it was like in the 1890s. If the world is smaller, you care about it more. You are more interested in it. You could imagine the role you could imagine the role you can play in it. That changes the way americans look at their place in the world. Then, you sort of hinted at this, what if you are not necessarily religious. What if you just want to do good . What if you just want to take the blessings of modern society to places that are without the blessings of modern society. You are reading that book about electricity, what about electricity . The light . We are always a little bit hesitant. We dont like to put things on that kind of spectrum. In the 1890s people didnt have any hesitation to do that. They talked about the obligation. I dont know if this exists. I know they meant it. The obligation that advanced societies have to help primitive societies. If weve got electricity and photographs, recorded sound, nickelodeon, we have an obligation see how easily it elides into that . We have this great stuff. We need to help people. We need to go forth like nonreligious missionary work. A lot of this went on. As you could imagine the Christian Missionary impulse really gets them fired up. This humanitarian impulse affects other people too. What about medicine . What about cocacola . You have this gazing upon the map. Imagining people you can help. Exploitation, sorrow, trouble that you could alleviate. If you are against this, im talking to you. Had the economy already gotten better . I imagine it is expensive. Professor smith thats a good question. If everybody at the church is unemployed, they will not send you to africa. All i know is a must not have been that big of a barrier. It wasnt the economy is rebounding to allow this to happen or whether or not the depression was i dont know how many people saw the depression of the 1890s. I know there was enough to send missionaries to places like that. If you want to help, if you want to do good, if you are looking for people that need american assistance, you dont have to look very far. You only have to look 90 miles off the coast of florida. You only have to look down to cuba in the caribbean to find people who are under the heel of an imperialist power. There has been a Cuban RevolutionaryIndependence Movement firing in cuba off and on for a while now. Cuba is part of spain. Part of the spanish empire. They used to go from Northern California all the way to sierra dell fuego. That is a lot of land. Over the centuries that has shrunk and shrunk until now it is cuba and puerto rico. The cuban revolution would flareup in the spot the spanish army would come through and crush it. A couple years later the spanish would crush it. They started to put into effect these relocation camps. They gathered up people from the countryside and put them in camps to isolate them from the rebels. Then the newspapers in america started covering this really diligently. In windup with a particular kind of journalism. That comes to be known as yellow journalism. The new york world it was one of the leading newspapers. The new york journal was another. One was owned by a guy name hearst, another owned by a man named pulitzer, and they were fierce rivals. They were the fox and the cnn of their day. They competed with coverage in cuba. Realized i dont even want to say it the more sensationalistic the story, the more sales you got. The moreier the story, copy you sold. Coverage of the events in cuba gets worse and worse and more learned. And more lurid. People read these things and they read these stories and they think why every american everywhere at all times has always said somebody ought to do something about this. I mean, it is like they are putting the ball on a t for it to be hit. This is not a hard pitch. Heres cuba. Go to town. We ought to do something in cuba. We cannot stop revolution. We were freed by revolution. We ought to back the revolution. Hold on a second. What do you mean, exactly . I dont know what you mean, but we have to do something. Grover cleveland was the first president that had to cope with this. Grover cleveland was elected in 1892. This is about 1895 or so. You would think that, because of the economic depression, cleveland is looking for anything else to think about and talk about. What do you think we should do, mr. President . Mr. Cleveland . A levelheaded good guy. Cleveland, and not just because his name is grover. What should we do about it . And he sympathizes with the plight of the cuban rebels, of course. He wants us paint a layoff. Spain to layoff. Do you back cuban independence . Oh geez. Now im going to have to talk about cuban independence. I will tell you what cleveland thinks, but i dont want you to jump to a conclusion too much. Cleveland is worried about stability in the caribbean. He wants the caribbean to be a stable, quiet place. He does not want some big european scramble for influence in the caribbean like whats going on in china, ok . Almost 100 source, years earlier, of the monroe doctrine. Cleveland thinks it would be best for everybody if spain held on to cuba, but just treated it nicely. And look, if you are somebody who is fired up with righteousness, that is not going to fly with you. Cuba, right . , becomes something of a populist cause in the United States. Something called a cuba starts to percolate. Are reason or a way to not look at the civil rights issues americans were still dealing with . My answer would be, no, because they are not looking at anyway. We know that plessy versus ferguson is churning through the court system. There are people who are paying attention to that, but a lot of people in the United States are not paying attention to civil rights. If they were, may the answer would be yes. Maybe the answer would be yes. Whyfrom our standpoint, werent they paying attention to civil rights . They just words. They just werent. Americans are funny. So far so good . Isleveland is asked out. In 1896, William Mckinley comes in. Mckinley is a republican from ohio. He has been in congress a long time. We will meet mckinley several times, actually. He does a lot of stuff. And mckinley oh golly, mckinley, what a character. Mckinley has a hard time making up his mind. And it is not because he is slow or, you know, hes not stupid. But he thinks things through so much. To listen to other peoples opinions and other peoples opinions can sway him. If you are the last person to talk to mckinley, chances are he will do what you suggested. Was,f the jokes of the day how is mckinleys mind like a bed . To bee answer was, it has made up for him every time he uses it, which is a pretty good joke. You can use that with some of your rivals or something. It comes out that mckinley sort of favors the rebels. Thinks the way to solve the problem in cuba is for spain to just let it go. Ok, so what could we do . What could the United States do to prod that along . At one point, mckinley even thinks maybe we could pay spain to let cuba go. And one of his advisors says, lets not do that. We are notnot going to try to buy greenland. We are not going to try to buy off spain to let cuba go. And then he takes office in 1897. 97, the riots start flaring up in cuba again, the proindependence riots. In 1765. Mp act riots what happens then is that americans interest in have anna start and have anna start getting burned in h avana start getting burned. Sugar warehouses start getting torched. And that turns the heat up on mckinley. Then you have got people saying, this would not happen if spain could be driven out of the island. Maybe we should help the rebels in this thing. What you are seeing now is the United States getting pulled into the cuban revolution. Saying,imperialists are whoa, hold on, no. There have been people in this country for decades trying to get cuba. We are not in imperialist power and imperialist power. And then Congress Starts thinking, if we do have to go to forswear taking cuba. We will say upfront that we are not going to. That will prove ourselves innocent. January we will close with decides, on the send aof his advisors, battleship to cuba. Send a battleship. Sign, right,le that we are paying attention and we are not happy. Do not send flowers. Send a battleship. Different messages, rape . Right . The uss maine has been afloat since 1895 and it is pretty cutting edge. It is impressive looking. Havana inthe main to 1898. Y of 19 date the mainphotograph of afloat shows are coming into havana harbor with the ancient spanish castle in the background. It is a great picture. And it seems to work for a while. Havana quiets down. Of then on the night february 15, the captain of the main is in his cabin writing letters. A quiet night. If you are walking the deck, the only sound you hear would be the thump of the water against the whole. Hull. Suddenly there is this thunderous explosion and the maine goes down. 250 sailors and marines killed. The secretary of the navy is awakened at 2 00 a. M. With the news the main has exploded the maine has exploded. The next morning, the new york city newspapers have headlines blaming spain for it. That is where we will start on tuesday. This is thursday . I did not know what day it is. Remember the maine. Listen to lectures and history on the go by streaming our podcast anywhere, anytime. You are watching American History tv only on cspan3. 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Americas television company. Brought to you by your television provider. Mount vernon had to close on march 14 to all visitors. It was really a historic moment. For anyot been closed kind of extended period since