In the last year of the nineteenth century the American people re-elected William McKinley as President. By doing so, they ratified the liberation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. Probably not knowing what they were doing, and certainly unwilling to accept the full implications of their new situation, the American people had moved out on to the world stage, little better prepared for their new role than the Japanese had been when Commodore Perry's ‘black ships’ broke the centuries-old, self-imposed blockade of the island empire.

William Jennings Bryan, who had fought for the economically unfortunate, above all for the angered and impoverished farmer, in 1896, had fought in 1900 against ‘imperialism’. But the sharp edge of discontent had been blunted by the flow of gold from South Africa and the Yukon, by a natural turn in the trade cycle, and the vague issue of ‘imperialism’ was not an adequate fighting theme. Flushed with an easy victory over an impotent Spain, and moving into a new boom period, the American people was convinced that it was living in the best of all possible republics, that it had nothing and no one to fear.

The politicians who felt this mood had no need to worry about re-electing the President and some of them took the chance to get out of the way an obstreperous hero of the brief Spanish-American war, Theodore Roosevelt, who had won the governorship of New York on the strength of his achievements with a regiment of irregular cavalry in Cuba.