Imperialism and the Rise of an American Oligarchy

Abstract

Of course, the United States has had an upper class, or classes, as long as it has existed, and before that in the colonial period. This was an evolving and changing upper class, and the evolution and changes that took place in the late 1800s and early 1900s produced something that was new for the United States. What emerged in that period was a national upper class that was socially cohesive, politically organized, in command of great wealth and large economic institutions, and increasingly international in its orientation. In important ways, that international orientation came to resemble England’s colonial and imperial policies. There was some irony in this since the United States was created in the midst of a struggle against those English policies. The extent of the irony is, however, reduced by at least two factors. First, much of the colonial upper strata did not want a revolution. There was at the upper levels an indifference to revolution or a loyalty to England and its rulers. This Anglophile tendency would survive to the 1919 Paris meeting and beyond. Second, neither the United States as a nation nor the upper class had the capacity to be an imperial power in its early history; that changed by the late 1800s.