The Cultural Transformation of America’s Civilizing Mission in the Twentieth Century

Long before the United States of America became an independent nation, the civilizing mission was a conspicuous feature of how Americans sought to deal with indigenous peoples thought to be savage or barbaric. In the aftermath of the SpanishAmerican War of 1898, the longstanding focus on reshaping native Americans shifted overseas when political leaders promised to modernize the nation’s newly acquired colonial possessions. That commitment lasted only a halfcentury before policymakers renounced colonial governance for the US, chided other colonizers for perpetuating their rule, and switched to an updated version of the civilizing mission by urging newly independent nations to embrace marketfriendly development policies. This trajectory coincided with the global upheaval of decolonization in which the family of nations more than quintupled between 1920 and 2000 to its current membership of about 195 sovereign states. So in less than half a century, the US flirtation with traditional territorial empire or colonialism passed away (for the most part), while its dirigiste civilizing mission was succeeded by unimposed modernization whose object was to persuade the socalled third world countries to embrace liberal developmental precepts.1 How does one account for this transformation in US policy? A comprehensive answer would need to take into account a long but obvious list of causal factors: the rise of cultural anthropology and cultural relativism, accompanied by the demolition of scientific racism by modern science; the development of modernization theory in sociology and political science; the explosion of political consciousness and formidable liberation movements in India, China, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria and elsewhere; the disappointing failure of