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Rome, Race, and the Republic: Progressive America and the Fall of the Roman Empire, 1890–1920
By Kristofer Allerfeldt, University of Exeter
Ancient Rome is a powerful metaphor in the western imagination. It is very much alive today. The Roman Republic inspires images of democracy and the empire is the very epitome of decadence. The collapse of this, the greatest of empires, is a parable. The Progressive Era opened with overt imperial ambitions and ended with the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's plans for a Pax Americana. Throughout this period, the symbol of Rome was explicitly used to justify or condemn expansion, warn of the dangers of immigration and commercialization, attack America's enemies, and praise the nation's allies. To figures as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, Rome was both a model and a warning. Politicians, historians and other commentators saw America as heir to the Roman legacy. Race theorizers claimed that Americans were either the modern Romans or the descendants of the Barbarians—promoters of ordered modernity or champions of individual democracy.
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I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnessy, because it ain't like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll show me th' people fightin', getting' dhrunk, makin' love, getting' married, owin' th' grocery man an' bein' without hard-coal, I'll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure ... histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I'd like to know what it lived iv.—Mr. Dooley1
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Not everyone agreed with irrepressible Chicago barroom sage Mr. Dooley's condemnation. It seems that the Fall of Rome was at the turn of the twentieth century, and is now, a lesson from the past for everything from the results of hubristic overreaching to the consequences of decadent immorality. The "decline and fall" of history's most influential empire has for generations and all across the globe served as a parable—voiced by countless and varied public figures from St. Augustine to U.S. President George W. Bush. One modern German scholar lists 210 separate causes for the collapse of Rome's western empire, ranging from climatic change to lead poisoning and most conceivable reasons in between.2 Other scholars deny that there was a breakdown, seeing instead a slow transition, a mutation into early Christian Europe rather than a descent into a truly Dark Age.3 |
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Whichever interpretation is used, the image of Rome's eclipse has a historical pedigree, a universality, and a poignancy that is difficult to resist. Idealists, imperialists, demagogues, and opportunists have drawn on it through the centuries from before Charlemagne to Hitler. The full investigation of these themes is too great for one article, and this essay will concentrate on the interpretation of one particular period and one geographical area of this historiography: the United States from the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 to the Great War. |
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If that seems unnecessarily narrow, it should be considered that during this time, with relation only to America, a wide range of commentators used the idea of Rome to support or condemn ideas as diverse and all-encompassing as modernity and republicanism and to illuminate questions of the roots and continuity of civilization. The very essence of America was in these debates. Could, and should, a republic have an empire? Would foreign adventures inevitably lead to the collapse of America? What was America's world mission? Was American civilization founded in a cabin on the Mayflower or in the dark forest homes of the "democratic" Germanic tribes that brought the "downfall" of Rome? |
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