American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

2. 1898 and the Making of a Practical Man

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a watershed in the historical geography of U.S. expansionism. The national and state boundaries of the United States were effectively in place, even though several territories had yet to consummate statehood, and the geographical claims that resulted from the war were less about national consolidation than international colonization .These were, of course, closely intertwined pursuits, but their geographical consequences were very different. Unlike earlier territorial acquisitions , such as northern Mexico,Alaska, and the Louisiana Purchase, all of the territories wrested from Spain after 1898 were held in some form of colonial possession, never to be incorporated fully into the nation-state.This marked the first and last serious foray by the United States into extraterritorial colonization.Thereafter, U.S. expansionism took an increasingly geoeconomic rather than colonial form. The Spanish-American War therefore represents an anomaly, but it also marks the cusp of a radically different globalism. The symbolic dawn of the American Century, it just as vitally gave way to the first contours of a new global geography. The year 1898 was also a watershed for the nineteen-year-old schoolteacher Isaiah Bowman. He made two important decisions. In the autumn he took his first independent political initiative. Enthused by the war frenzy, Bowman organized young men from three rural Michigan school districts, including his own, into a militia company of one hundred. He was promptly elected captain and arranged for a local carpenter to make “wooden guns, 2 1898 AND THE MAKING OF A PRACTICAL MAN real rifles not being available from the National Guard.” For two years, Bowman ’s militia carried out military training, studied the manual of arms, and performed simple maneuvers and field exercises.They attracted a lot of local interest, but as the fervor for “the splendid little war” receded, he transferred his interest from the militia to the organization of a debating club.1 Now as later, Bowman’s life was led at the intersection of geography and politics; intellectual and political initiatives were always closely connected. No doubt influenced by adventurous reports from the war’s various outposts , Bowman also made his “first definite plan to follow geography” as a career,2 his second decision, which ultimately freed him from the spartan, isolated, harsh, often oppressive rural upbringing of his early years and introduced him to a more worldly life of science and academia, politics and foreign policy. A child of the recently settled frontier, geography for Bowman represented freedom, and rewriting this equation of geography and freedom on a global scale became his life’s work. brown city Isaiah Bowman was born on 26 December 1878 in Berlin, Ontario.3 His paternal ancestors were Swiss Mennonites, his grandfather was a teacher turned preacher, and his great-grandmother inspired his biblical name. Both sets of Canadian grandparents were “well-to-do,” but their legacies were divided “rather finely” among large families. His father, Samuel Cressman Bowman, turned from teaching to farming in order to make a better living for his own growing family. In the depths of a particularly inclement winter but spurred by the needs of a spring sowing, the elder Bowman moved an eight-week-old Isaiah and his two sisters, aged two and four, by horsedrawn sleigh, along with all the family belongings, to a 140-acre farm and log cabin in Brown City, sixty miles north of Detroit.4 Isaiah spent the next seventeen years of his life on and around the farm, where the daily rhythm was determined by the seasonality of work. The family grew to eight children, and the living was rough. The “downright necessity of infinite and incessant toil was a condition of even mean living,” he later recalled of his boyhood. “There were cows to milk, and fields to tend,” and by the age of ten he was fully capable of plowing the stony drift soil with a horse-drawn steel plow and helping to raise barns. The family “had almost no money,” and eggs, which usually went to town to pay for groceries, were a luxury eaten only once a year—at Easter—when the family allowed themselves all they wanted. He collected fruit and berries in the surrounding woods and thickets, caught eels in the creek, built a raft with 32 / 1898 and the making of a practical man the earnest intention of exploring the distant Mississippi...