One of the architectural glories of Washington, DC, is the National Cathedral, which was planned in the early 20th century as a material symbol of the nation’s Christian faith and intended to provide a splendid setting for the nation’s great religious celebrations. In the 1920s, the project required a major effort to raise the enormous sums needed to finalize construction of the national shrine. The designated head of the fundraising campaign was the nation’s most esteemed soldier: John Pershing, who had led US forces in the First World War. Pershing ardently supported the cathedral project because “to try to build a worthy nation without God is impossible.” Washington urgently needed an “adequate expression of the religious faith of the people.”
But at the time an observer might well have understood the story in terms that were imperial rather than merely national. When Pershing spoke, his “worthy nation” was an empire on an enormous scale, at least comparable to the European powers that then controlled much of Africa and Asia, and it was still expanding aggressively. The United States ruled the Philippines and Puerto Rico, as well as such lesser-known places as Guam, which enjoyed a disproportionate strategic significance. Also within that ambit were territories that we do not presently think of as imperial possessions because of their incorporation into the United States proper: Arizona and New Mexico had achieved their official recognition as states as recently as 1912, while Alaska and Hawaii wouldn’t become states until 1959. Meanwhile, in the 1920s the United States exercised control over multiple territories in its Gulf/Caribbean backyard, its “near abroad.” Throughout the early part of the century, the United States regularly invaded and occupied such notionally independent nations as Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and it thoroughly dominated Cuba. Even the prospect of (another) US invasion of Mexico was under active discussion.
Meanwhile, American cityscapes were increasingly marked by public monuments and statues vaunting recent imperial struggles: New York’s USS Maine National Monument (dedicated in 1913) is an impressive surviving example. The great cities actively looked ever more imperial, and that was especially true of the fast-rising centers of California. In 1915, the outward-looking America proclaimed its Pacific outreach through two great world expositions, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, held in San Francisco, and San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition. Both have left magnificent remains.
