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Epilogue Rapprochement, Paris, and a Free State Grover Cleveland’s astringent politics offered little to Irish nationalists . Even an apparently fierce dispute over Venezuelan territory—perhaps the episode most conducive to a full-scale crisis in Anglo-American relations in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century—resulted in peaceful arbitration.1 In both his domestic and his foreign politics, Cleveland was a conservative, and his administration sought to limit the power of the central government and avoid American entanglement overseas. Though attempts to establish an international agreement on arbitration failed, the amicable settlement of the Venezuela crisis in October 1899 serves as a valuable gauge of British-U.S. relations, which became ever closer during the first decade of the twentieth century.2 These diplomatic developments did not occur in a cultural vacuum.3 During the final years of the century,U.S.statesmen offered a notably more positive interpretation of the British Empire, often in the context of an assumed Anglo-Saxon kinship. Unsurprisingly, journalists, intellectuals, authors , and politicians espoused Anglo-Saxonist ideas in the context of U.S. imperial ambitions. Proponents of U.S. intervention in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Central America spoke the language of imperial duty, all in the service of the amorphous concept of “civilization.”4 For Theodore 176 Epilogue Roosevelt, “the spread of the English-speaking peoples” was “the most striking feature of world history.”5 “It was a good thing for Egypt and the Sudan, and for the world, when England took Egypt and the Sudan,” he noted in 1904,“and so it is a good thing, a very good thing, for Cuba and for Panama and for the world that the United States has acted as it has actually done.”6 And even those who were more skeptical about the wisdom and morality of exuberant intervention elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere could subscribe to these notions of Anglo-American fraternity . Richard Olney, a secretary of state under Cleveland and a leading anti-imperialist, felt quite comfortable asserting that “the American people . . . feel themselves to be not merely in name but in fact, part of one great English-speaking family whose proud destiny is to lead and control the world.”7 Anglo-Saxon theorizing, wrote one Irish American critic, was “humbug,” yet its brief popularity in the late nineteenth century is illustrative of strengthening Anglo-American ties.8 Roosevelt’s “very good things” were aided by a recalibration of British geopolitics.At the end of the nineteenth century,British statesmen began to feel themselves isolated in an increasingly troubling world and, where feasible , they sought out international alliances. Few saw a formal alliance with the United States as a possibility.Instead,British officials focused on reducing their entanglements in theWestern Hemisphere.9 In December 1904, Roosevelt announced his famous corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, suggesting that that the United States might act as an “international police power” in response to “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence that results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society” among Latin American states.10 Even before this, however, British statesmen and intellectuals had encouraged the United States to take a leading role in policing theWestern Hemisphere , as much to limit the imperial ambitions of other European powers as to maintain order in the states concerned.11 As one recent historian has noted,“No power applauded the Roosevelt Corollary more than did Britain .”12 And British plans to remove sources of contention in the Western Hemisphere appeared successful. At the conclusion of Roosevelt’s term of office in 1909,the London Review wrote that“pretty nearly every issue of any moment of contentiousness has been wiped off theAnglo-American slate.”13 For Irish American nationalists,Anglo-American congeniality was unsettling . John Hay, who served as ambassador to Britain and later as Roosevelt ’s first secretary of state, griped about the influence of Irish (and German) Americans on the conduct of U.S. diplomacy, but in truth Irish nationalists had very limited political influence in the United States.14 Rapprochement, Paris, and a Free State 177 Opposition to the Boer War offered an opportunity to vent anti-British sentiments with some slight receptivity in American public life at large, but it would be hard to ascribe any broader significance to Irish American activities.15 More intriguing and of greater importance in the long term were shaky but novel alliances forged with German American groups and the campaign launched by John Devoy’s Gaelic American that...

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