The Emergence of a New International Order

Abstract

Republican victory in the election of 1900 allowed Neo-Hamiltonian Republican ideas to flourish. Hay and Root continued to control the State and War Departments. Theodore Roosevelt, a supporter of strong central government and overseas expansion, was the new vice-president. In the Senate, Lodge, Proctor, Joseph R. Hawley, Albert J. Beveridge, and Joseph B. Foraker ensured staunch support for imperialism and military reform. These men were determined to expand American trade and secure America’s position in the world by creating strong central government managed and advised by professionals. They dismissed the idea of the amateur in government who governed a locally controlled, semi-agrarian republic as irrelevant in the modern world. In his early speeches Roosevelt demanded the application of business methods to government and the military, larger armed forces, a subsidised merchant navy and increased American exports. Such reforms would guarantee American economic growth and security in the modern age. To the new vice-president, Jefferson, who endorsed the principle of the amateur exercising local political control, was simply ‘the most incompetent chief executive we ever had.’¹