1. Beecroft, 1
Travis Beecroft
HIST 790
Postel
May 18 2015
Ideology, Interest, and U.S. Foreign Policy During the Progressive Era: A Historiography
The United States has conducted its foreign policy in a multitude of manners and
its malleability was a force in enabling the development of a world empire during the 19th
and early 20th centuries. The major driving forces behind American foreign policy
decisions then and now are ideology and interest, but for many historians, however, the
task of establishing a relationship between these and foreign policy has been difficult.
Despite that being the case, some have taken it upon themselves to study these facets of
foreign policy and have succeeded in explaining those relationships. In their analysis,
these diplomatic, cultural, and economic historians have explained how ideology and
interest have impacted foreign policy from the middle of the 19th century to the 1920s.
By providing ideological constructs for the foreign policies that molded the United States
into a world empire, the following historians explain how American beliefs were used as
justification for acquiring the assets they needed during this transformation. Moreover,
the historiographical material presented herein will show that while at times ideology
features at the forefront of the façade of American policy, identifying, acquiring, and
securing interests abroad are what drove the American imperial machine to heights it had
never reached before.
To best reflect the historiography on the subject, the discussion that immediately
follows will be organized chronologically to show how historians have discussed the
impact ideology had on U.S. foreign policy in different parts of the world during before
and during the Progressive Era. This allows one to see how various ideologies transfer

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from one issue to the next and how historians address those ideological applications in
different contexts. Furthermore, it enables one to draw on similar scholarship from
multiple historians at once rather than focusing on one writer before moving to another.
Following that will be a discussion of the ways cultural and economic interest determined
policy during the same time period, both in Latin America and Asia. Rounding out the
discussion will be a brief analysis of efforts to quantify the relationship between
ideology, interest, and foreign policy in an attempt to identify which plays a greater role.
By focusing on ideology and then interest, one can gain an understanding of how
Americans viewed their place in the world, their motivations for acquiring and securing
those interests, and how historians wrote about the beliefs that steered the nation’s
foreign policy in different directions.
Before delving into a historiographical discussion of American ideology, perhaps
it is best to start off with a working definition, one that can easily stand in for the many
variants there are. As such, we can use Michael H. Hunt’s definition, which states that
ideology is an “interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the
complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests
appropriate ways of dealing with that reality.”1 He subsequently defines foreign policy
ideologies as “sets of beliefs and values, sometimes only poorly and partially articulated,
that make international relations intelligible and decision making possible.”2 As it will be
shown, these convictions, assumptions, beliefs and values manifest within different
contexts, whether one is discussing slavery, treatment of Native Americans, intervention
1 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987), xi.
2 Michael H. Hunt, “Ideology,” The Journal of American History 77.1 (June 1990): 108.

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in Cuba, or imperialization of the Philippines, among others. Despite these events taking
place at different times and hemispheres, the rhetoric or ideology guiding the United
States’ maneuvering of these domestic and foreign affairs built upon itself and can be
tracked from one decade to the next. As such, we should briefly enter within the context
of slavery, as it is from there that we can lay the foundation for American ideology from
the mid-19th century until the 1920s.
The impact slavery had on determining U.S. foreign policy was such that it gave
the American government an opportunity to promote and establish a racial hierarchy that
was used as ideological justification for later international endeavors. According to
Michael H. Hunt in Ideology and U.S.-Foreign Policy, an ideology predicated on a racial
hierarchy “proved particularly attractive because it offered a ready and useful conceptual
handle on the world” by “reducing other peoples and nations to readily comprehensible
and familiar terms,” something that was much easier for policymakers to do.3 Moreover,
Hunt explains that because this ideology developed in America it was incorporated into
their foreign policy “without fear that the concept itself would arouse domestic
controversy.”4 Consequently, a “conception of race, defined by the poles of black and
white” carried over into American foreign policy.5 Odd Arne Westad also discusses the
impact slavery had on American foreign policy in his book The Global Cold War,
contending that, in agreement with Hunt, it was through “the institution of slavery that
much of American foreign policy ideology took shape.”6 Specifically, Westad contends
3 Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 52.
4 Hunt, Ideology, 52.
5 Ibid, 52.
6 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making Of
Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 21.

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that two images arose during Reconstruction that would influence American policy, that
of emancipation and guidance. He explains that after Reconstruction, “emancipation
came to symbolize the removal of the causes of slavery,” which, in the eyes of
Americans, was the “ignorance, poverty, and vice of those societies which the slaves had
originated.”7 Furthermore, Westad notes that “former slaves were seen as being
incapable of controlling themselves” and their “intense struggles for equality and justice
proved to many Americans that they were in need of guidance.”8 Because this racial
hierarchy and the concepts of emancipation and guidance were so prevalent in
contemporary American culture, each served as main ideological foundations for
American policy after Reconstruction with other minorities as well.
Another minority group impacted by American foreign policy ideology during the
years leading up to the 1890s was the Native Americans. Westad contends that the
American government “attempted to control and in some cases exterminate all the
nations” that settled in what would become the United States prior to the 17th century,
specifically those Native American tribes still present around the end of the century.9 It
was during the subsequent relations with the Native Americans that the United States
government juxtaposed the racial hierarchy once again, this time through use of control.
Westad claims that “in the name of rationality and progress, […] control,” in the form of
forced assimilation and imposed ideological rhetoric, “became the favored method for
extending America’s aims beyond the seas, to where liberty was not yet an option.”10.
The control Americans exerted over the Native American population was systematic and
7 Westad, 22.
8 Ibid, 22.
9 Ibid, 12-13
10 Ibid, 12-13.

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extensive, and required an ideology to support what amounts to genocide by today’s
terms. According to Westad, one of the ideologies used as justification was in the name
of science and progress, with Americans believing their identity was “connected with the
very concept of modernity, closely linking technology with the existing social order in
the United States,” and that “the only way of becoming modern would be to emulate the
American example to ‘liberate’ productivity and innovation from ‘ancient’ cultures and
ideologies.”11 In an attempt to control and modernize the Native Americans, ideology
focusing on a policy of assimilation was also thrust upon them with the hope of
transforming—even redeeming, their culture by making it more “American.” Ideally,
“assimilation had the substantial virtue of saving the national honor and preserving the
existence of an otherwise doomed primitive people while also ensuring that large tracts of
wasteland would be put to better use.”12 Under this ideology, Indians would cultivate
part of the wilderness for themselves while allowing whites to purchase their product.
When this failed, however, Americans adapted their ideology to justify the relocation the
Native Americans so white Americans could better develop and cultivate the land.
By 1887 and The Dawes Act, Native American assimilation had resulted in the
sacrifice of thousands of Native Americans in the name of American progress and the
reduction of Indians to second class citizens, albeit still comfortably above African
Americans. Citing a school text from 1813, Hunt explains that the contemporary view of
the Native American was that their “sacrifice had been necessary…‘for the increase of
11 Westad, 11-12.
12 Hunt, Ideology, 53.

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mankind, and for the promotion of the world’s glory and happiness.13 In his own words,
Hunt wrote of the Native American as:
A child of the wilderness—simple, brave, enduring, and dignified—[who] had
proven constitutionally deficient in those qualities of industry and self-discipline
essential to getting on in a world being rapidly transformed by the forces of
civilization.14
As such, Americans saw their actions towards the Native Americans as justified due to
the ideology that placed them higher within the racial hierarchy. Moreover, along with
the shift to nationalist foreign policy ideology by the 1890s, “a policy devoted to both
liberty and greatness” that “would glorify liberty at home” if spread abroad, “control
became the favored method for extending America’s aims beyond the seas to where
liberty as yet was not an option.”15 16 What follows next is historiographical discussion
of the ways these various ideologies transfer into the context of American intervention
during the Cuban Revolution against Spain, where liberty was being fought for and the
ideologies at play began to take hold internationally.
The decade of the 1890s is considered by many historians of the era as a period of
great transformation for the American Empire due to foreign policy ideology involving
nationalism and expansionism. Not only had nationalism taken root during the decades
leading up to 1900, but “Manifest Destiny” rhetoric had already flooded American
foreign policy ideology during Westward Expansion as well. Moreover, because of “the
willingness of the American federal state under McKinley and Roosevelt to take political
responsibility for the overseas peoples under its control,” not only could the United States
maintain its presence as the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere through
13 Ibid, 55.
14 Ibid, 57-58.
15 Ibid, 42.
16 Westad, 13.

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implementation of Monroe Doctrine ideology, it could expand even further, wherever
liberty and democratic ideals were being fought for.17 Westad even contends that “by the
final decades of the century […] an increasingly strong argument was being put forward
that the United States had a duty to assist in the ‘freedom and independence’ of others”
outside its borders.18 This ideology, which Westad refers to as “‘welfare colonialism,’
combined with the authoritarian power inherent in colonial rule, encouraged ambitious
schemes to remake Third World societies, both through grand projects and through
general policies of resettlement.”19 As such, American intervention at the end of the
Cuban Revolution against Spain in 1898 represented a perfect opportunity for the United
States to combine the ideologies developed through slavery, the interactions with Native
Americans, and those associated with “Manifest Destiny” and the Monroe Doctrine into a
practical application. According to F.S.C. Northrop, this represents American foreign
policy in its classic form, requiring that the nation’s forces “must be dedicated to the task
of protecting a foreign native people in their right to run their own affairs” and they must
be partaking in a “morally based, legally sanctioned peace-making police action rather
than in a war” while abroad.20
However, William Appleman Williams considers American involvement in Cuba
after the revolution as “the tragedy of American diplomacy” due to the contradictory
truths in our policy that were exposed by our actions there. Some of the contradictory
truths that American diplomatic ideology exemplified during the relationship with Cuba
17 Ibid, 15.
18 Ibid, 14.
19 Ibid, 79.
20 F.S.C. Northrop, “Neutralism and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 312, The Future of the Western Alliance (July
1957): 65-66.

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between 1898 and 1961 were the notions that: “the United States had (and has)
preponderant power in relation to Cuba, a power it has exercised vigorously and
persistently;” that the power generated by the United States created a system that was
neither “analogous to the American political economy nor a society modeled on
fundamental Cuban ideals and aspirations;” and that the deployment of American power
in Cuba spurred the foundation of “a coalition of groups committed to important changes
in their society” and “significant modifications in Cuba’s relations with the United
States.”21 These truths, combined with soon-to-be mentioned economic factors and the
American stereotypes of Latinos that were established at the turn of the century as a
“half-breed brute,” the “feminized Latin,” and “an infantile,” produced conditions that
brought about a lot of unrest in Cuban society.22 Williams explains that rather than a
beneficial transformation of Cuban society, “American power and policy produced
instead a Cuban and an American crisis that characterized and symbolized the underlying
tragedy of all American diplomacy” in the 20th century.23 Moreover, because American
ideology placed the United States in the role of “natural leader and policeman of an
American system of states,” it continued to spread its influence around the world to other
places that were fighting for independence, particularly the Philippines.
The ideologies developed through the 19th century thus far can also be found in
the relationship between the United States and the Philippines. For instance, the racial
hierarchy previously established allows Americans to look down upon Filipinos as
inferior and in need of American assistance. Michael Hunt explains that Alfred Thayer
21 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell
Publishing, 1962): 3.
22 Hunt, Ideology, 62.
23 Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 3.

9. Beecroft, 9
Mahan classified the Filipinos as children, and President McKinley argued that even
though “the Filipino carried all those unpleasant traits that had made other peoples
difficult to deal with,” such as black ignorance, the impracticality and infantilism
associated with Latinos, the savagery of the Indian, and the impassivity of Orientals, “the
United States has a clear duty […] to redeem the Filipinos ‘from savage indolence and
habits,’ and ‘set them in the pathway of the world’s best civilization.”24 This mindset,
along with the ideology of Progressivism that Theodore Roosevelt adopted during his
presidency, an ideology that combined nationalism, moralism, racism, and social
Darwinism, resulted in his belief that “the projection of American power abroad [ought]
to be part of ‘the essential manliness of the American character.’”25 In fact, Emily
Rosenberg notes that Roosevelt simultaneously embodied two contradictory models of
manhood: “civilized manliness (representing duty and self-mastery) and primitive
masculinity (representing primitive urge toward assertiveness, spontaneity, and battle).”26
Both Robert D. Schulzinger and Gail Bederman discuss this topic of the race and gender
and their respective impacts on determining foreign policy ideology in regards to the
Philippines. Regarding race, Schulzinger quotes Roosevelt who stated that:
It is our duty to people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their
chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself…Exactly as it is
the duty of the civilized power scrupulously to respect the rights of weaker
civilized powers…so it is its duty to put down savagery and barbarism.27
This is rhetoric also applied to American involvement in Latin America and was used to
justify American interventions on behalf of Latin American revolutions against European
24 Hunt, Ideology, 81.
25 Robert D. Schulzinger, U.S. Diplomacy Since 1900 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008): 25.
26 Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of
Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999): 39.
27 Schulzinger, U.S. Diplomacy Since 1900, 26.

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powers. Gail Bederman, when discussion gender, states that “just as manliness was the
highest form of manhood, so civilization was the highest form of humanity.”28 Placing
this ideological rhetoric in the context of the American annexation of the Philippines,
Bederman argues that “between 1890 and 1917, as white middle-class men actively
worked to reinforce male power, their race became a factor which was crucial to their
gender,” and that they looked to “develop new explanations of why they, as men, ought
to wield power and authority.”29 For Roosevelt, this rhetoric, combined with the
Progressive ideology he advocated, was all the justification he needed in attempting
colonize the Philippines. Not only was he helping those struggling with barbarism and
savagery, but he displayed American authority and masculinity domestically and
internationally though use of American ideology.
Economic ideology also played an important role in determining U.S. foreign
policy before and during the Progressive Era. After reaching the limits of Westward
Expansion and Manifest Destiny in the United States, much of U.S. foreign policy was
directed at fostering and promoting free market and capitalist ideology elsewhere. For
instance, Westad explains that “the free market had become a part of American foreign
policy ideology—as an idea, a logical extension of the virtues of capitalism and universal
liberty.”30 As such, it is only natural that the United States would try to impose this
ideology throughout as much of the world as possible after acquiring the status of a world
imperial power. One way of imposing this ideology was through successful
implementation of the “open-door” policy which “theoretically allowed American goods
28 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
The United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 27.
29 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 5.
30 Westad, 12.

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to enter Asian markets on the same basis as goods from the stronger European powers.”31
This policy was aided by the acquisition of the Philippines as a strategic location in
proximity to those markets, making the markets easier to access and protect.
Additionally, standardization of an world economic system is an ideology that
Emily Rosenberg discusses in her book Financial Missionaries to the World. Here she
contends that after the passage of the Gold Standard Act of 1900, the Bureau of Insular
Affairs (BIA) “placed a high priority on changing the colonies’ currencies to gold in
order to bind them economically” to the U.S.32 Contemporary McKinley Republicans
“pointed out that rationalizing systems of exchange on the basis of gold would expand
markets, attract investment, and bring material progress.”33 By rationalizing systems of
exchange, Rosenberg identifies three changes in the political economy of the United
States that are related to dollar diplomacy: “the development of investment baking and a
bond market; the trend toward ‘managerial capitalism;’ and government’s reliance on the
mobilization of capital by private financiers.”34 Each of these helped capital markets
become centralized, allowing financial markets in the United States to grow rapidly
during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as “the demand for credit burgeoned
regardless of business conditions.”35 This also allowed New York to establish itself as
“an international as well as domestic money power,” a role it maintains today.36
31 Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860-
1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963): 44.
32 Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World, 12.
33 Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 12.
34 Ibid, 47.
35 Ibid, 47.
36 Ibid, 48.

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While ideology plays an important role in determining foreign policy, so too does
interest. Some historians argue that interests lay at the heart of any foreign policy
decision, whether they are economic or cultural in their nature, and that ideology is used
as a justification for the actions that secure, maintain, and protect the production of those
interests. However, the topic of economics is where determining the relationship
between ideology, interests, and foreign policy can become hazy. For instance, while the
“open-door” policy to Asia is ideological in its nature, the reasons for needing an “open-
door” policy are based strictly on interests. Thomas Knock claims that “the basic tactics
and strategy the United States has employed ever since [the Spanish-American War]” are
designed “to achieve its primary goal in foreign policy—‘the enlargement of American
trade.’”37 This became necessary due to the completion of Westward Expansion and the
Industrial Revolution, which created a surplus of product they needed to export. Also,
various financial crises that erupted during the later decades of the 19th century prompted
the need for change. Michael Hunt explains that Americans were “discovering that they
needed new spiritual and commercial frontiers abroad to replace an exhausted continental
frontier and a saturated home market,” and that “foreign markets seem[ed], at least to
some, indispensible to the nation’s future prosperity.”38 Additionally, Walter LaFeber
contends that “expansion in the form of trade instead of land settlement” was the best
way to solve those issues, because “the open-door philosophy of American foreign
policy, ameliorated the economic stagnation, […] but it did not pile new colonial areas on
37 Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World
Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 43.
38 Hunt, Ideology, 37.

13. Beecroft, 13
an already overburdened governmental structure.”39 In essence, “it provided the perfect
answer to the problems of the 1890s.”40 In this context, ideology was used to justify
American economic expansion into Asia, but the markets themselves and the goods they
provided represent interests that the United States needed in order to relieve social
tensions. These tensions, Michael Hunt explains, arose from “industrialization,
urbanization, and the arrival of millions of immigrants” into the United States and “were
ultimately vented in overseas adventures.”41 Without access to new markets, the
American economy would have had a gigantic surplus and nothing to do with it—a recipe
for economic disaster.
The importance of economic interest can further be seen in the book The Business
of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America by Jason M.
Colby. Colby contends that plantation labor system established in the Caribbean by
American business “represented not a ‘unique American creation for a unique
enterprise,” but instead “a U.S. government expansion upon a model developed by
business interests, including progenitors of United Fruit.”42 According to Colby, the
decision to use United Fruit Co. as an example of economic ideology justifying the
acquisition of Caribbean and Central American countries as plantation economies for
American businesses alters the view of the American Empire in three ways: it provides
“recognition that transnational American firms […] were cultural as well as institutional
constructs influenced by both the domestic U.S. racial context and the global framework
39 LaFeber, The New Empire, 69.
40 LaFeber, 69.
41 Hunt, Ideology, 37.
42 Jason M. Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion into
Central America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011): 7.

14. Beecroft, 14
of imperialism;” it “opens the way for an exploration of the connections between U.S.
government and corporate colonialism;” and it “allows for the examination of nations that
may have avoided Washington’s intervention but experienced U.S. imperialism
nonetheless.”43 Also, because of the amount of influence United Fruit had in Central
America, Colby contends that “the company and its predecessors did not merely
contribute to the expansion of U.S. power: they made much of the empire Washington
would inherit and seek to manage.”44 In this way, the economic interests arising from
plantation production was the driving force in promoting American imperialism in
Central America after the turn of the 20th century, and not ideology itself.
Cultural ideologies and interests also play a significant role in determining U.S.
foreign policy. In fact, F.S.C. Northrop states that “an effective national foreign policy
must come to terms with ideological and cultural pluralism which includes factors in
common as well as those which differentiate.”45 For instance, in Emily Rosenberg’s first
book, Spreading the American Dream, she contends that American cultural and economic
expansion “was dominated by an ideology of ‘liberal-developmentalism’ that used the
rhetoric of peace, prosperity, and democracy to promote ‘Americanizing’ the world in the
name of modernization.’”46 Rosenberg also breaks liberal-developmentalism into five
major features: “the belief that other nations could and should replicate America’s own
developmental experience;” “faith in private free enterprise;” “support for free or open
access for trade and investment;” “promotion of free flow of information and culture;”
43 Colby, The Business of Empire, 13.
44 Colby, 15.
45 F.S.C. Northrop, “Neutralism and U.S. Foreign Policy,” 57.
46 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and
Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: HarperCollins Publishing LLC., 1982): 20.

15. Beecroft, 15
and “growing acceptance of governmental activity to protect private enterprise and to
stimulate and regulate American participation in international economic and cultural
change.”47 Moreover, Rosenberg explains that those spreading American cultural
diplomacy were non-state actors, such as industrialists (as was the case with United
Fruit), bankers, philanthropists, and missionaries. LaFeber contends that the control of
policy making by these people, specifically industrialists and financiers, “was a
prerequisite to the creation of a new commercial empire,” across the globe.48
Among those people listed by Rosenberg are the protagonists in Thomas Zeiler’s
book Ambassadors in Pinstripes, which focuses on the use of a world baseball tour as a
means of spreading American imperialism throughout the world from 1888-1889. These
baseball players, particularly Albert Goodwill Spalding, “Cap” Anson, Mark Baldwin,
George Van Haltren, and Jimmy Ryan, among others, helped Spalding “advertise his
sporting goods empire and market the popular national pastime as a global game.”49 By
putting the game of baseball on display in other parts of the world, the baseball tour
“revealed roots of the future American empire, which involved the introduction and
infusion of American culture in numerous locations around the world.”50 Zeiler explains
that the importance of the baseball tour was that in addition to promoting the game as a
worldwide sport:
Baseball adventurers, could also promote American culture and explain their
expression of empire through globalization’s instruments of free enterprise, webs
of modern communications and transport, cultural ordering of races and
47 Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 7.
48 LaFeber, 7.
49 Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and
The Birth of the American Empire (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.,
2006): x.
50 Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes, xi.

16. Beecroft, 16
societies, and nationalistic views that galvanized elites to think of their country as
exceptional.51
These entrepreneurs helped promote cultural imperialism much like those in Latin
America and speak to the prevalence of non-state agents securing interests and spreading
ideologies around the globe for the United States.
In order to quantify the relationship between ideology, interest, and foreign policy
to determine which plays a greater role in determining foreign policy, we must analyze
the work of Werner Levi. He explains that “as a human product, foreign policy is the
resultant of many homogenized factors, including interests and ideology,” and that “the
influence of an one cannot be determined with any degree of precision.”52 However, for
the sake of argument he contends that “ideology plays a subordinate and minor role in
deciding the state’s objectives and plan for action to reach them, and a more important
role in justifying the decision once it has been made.”53 Even so, the interaction between
ideology and interests is inevitable “by the very fact alone that a sediment of both has
become…an integral part of the fabric of human institutions or is often unrecognizably
reflected by them.”54 Given the inevitability, their relationship to foreign policy should
be more thoroughly researched and discussed because although times change, the desire
for interests, in any form, and the accompanying ideology that supports it, will always
impact U.S. foreign policy.
In the end, what can be said about interest and ideology in determining U.S.
foreign policy? While interests are self-explanatory and must always be acquired,
51 Zeiler, ix.
52 Werner Levi, “Ideology, Interests, and Foreign Policy,” International Studies
Quarterly 14.1 (March 1970): 4.
53 Werner Levi, “Ideology, Interests, and Foreign Policy,” 5.
54 Levi, “Ideology,” 5.

17. Beecroft, 17
ideology is more complex in its nature. First, “ideology forces us, as no other approach
does, to focus on the consciousness of policy makers and the cultural values and patterns
of privilege that shape that consciousness.”55 It can also be said that “ideology has
figured prominently in virtually all attempts to account […] for American entry into the
thicket of international politics and to explain the conduct of policymakers.”56 Moreover,
the ideological rhetoric of the 1890s that developed before and during the Progressive Era
can “be seen as a particularly intense moment in a continuous creation of a distinct
American ideology, a process that extends back to the eighteenth century and forward to
the twenty-first.”57 Lastly, because “ideologies may become institutionalized and hold
sway even after they have ceased to serve any obvious functional role or advance any
clearly identifiable class or group interest,” ideology may “survive as a form of ‘folk
wisdom,’ thanks to those carriers and repositories of culture”—particularly churches and
schools.58 59 If it were not for them, the spread of American ideology and culture and the
acquisition of their desired interests may not have been as successful as history
remembers them being.
55 Hunt, “Ideology,” 114.
56 Hunt, Ideology, 4-5.
57 Westad, 8-9.
58 Hunt, Ideology, 13.
59 Ibid, 13.

18. Beecroft, 18
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