Roosevelt’s policy justified police actions in “dysfunctional” Caribbean and Latin American countries by U.S. Marines and naval forces that included the founding of a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Roosevelt’s emphasis on developing the American navy and on Latin America as a key strategic area of U.S. foreign policy had long-term consequences.

John Bull (Great Britain) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) bear “The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)”, by delivering the non-white peoples of the world to civilization.

In the Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East, the United States expanded on a long history of what proponents called exploration, trade, and cultural exchange but critics called annexation, invasion, and occupation.

Populists believed these efforts would help shift economic and political power back toward the nation’s producing classes.

Farmers met in Lampasas, Texas in 1877 and organized the first Farmers’ Alliance to try to regain some economic power as they negotiated with railroads, merchants, and bankers. Farmers reasoned that if they banded together, they might gain economic leverage similar to that of big business.

Farmers found their financial security depended on a national economic system subject to rapid price swings, rampant speculation, and limited regulation. Many came to believe the system enriched “parasitic” bankers and industrial monopolists at the expense of the many laboring farmers who fed the nation by producing its many crops and farm goods.

“Wall Street owns the country,” the Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease told dispossessed farmers around 1890. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.”

In July, President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of American soldiers to break the strike, and a federal court issued a preemptive injunction against Debs and the union’s leadership. Debs was arrested and imprisoned, and the strike evaporated without its leadership.

Eight Chicago anarchists were arrested and, although no direct evidence implicating them in the bombing, were charged and found guilty of conspiracy. Four were hanged and one committed suicide before he could be executed.

By the 1870s, Darwin’s theory had gained widespread traction among biologists, naturalists, and other scientists in the United States and had begun to challenge the social, political, and religious beliefs of many Americans.

Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was federal troops that finally defeated them. When Pennsylvania and West Virginia militiamen were unable to contain the strikes, federal troops stepped in. On the orders of President Hayes, American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines.