At the turn of the Twentieth century, the western frontier was gone. According to Turner's Frontier thesis, the root of American strife was the vanishing frontier. To quench America's ever-thirsting desire for land, the government began looking to other places. While we conquered small lands in the Pacific and Latin America, a stirring of dissent grew among some of the American people. It posed a difficult question: could a nation who held liberty and self-government as its top ideals rightfully take over other nations?

The Imperialist response to this question was if not wholly sincere very clever. A man named Rudyard Kipling was famous for assigning a name to the idea known as "White Man's Burden." It meant that it was the duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to teach the natives Christianity and impart white culture upon the savage non-white natives of conquered lands. The United States, for...