was a U.S. senator who celebrated America’s victory in the Spanish-American War and welcomed the opportunity for imperialism. He claimed that Americans were an “elect people of God” and had a “mission to perform” and “duty to discharge” around the world. He favored American expansion in the Pacific and viewed anti-imperialism as being anti-American.

During the Reconstruction period, many southern state governments, such as Mississippi and South Carolina, passed laws known as that sought to regulate African American behavior and impose social and economic control over them. These laws effectively criminalized black people’s leisure, limited their mobility, and locked many into exploitative farming contracts. President Andrew Johnson supported the states’ rights to impose these laws.

Like European imperial powers before them, the United States justified its imperial expansion by claiming a commitment to . Proponents of empire argued that it was America’s duty to spread its culture (including language, religion, education, railways, hygiene, legal principles, etc.) to less advanced areas.

Companies employed the use of private detective agencies, such as , to break strikes. These groups were essentially armed thugs and would try to provoke strikers into violence so local, state, and federal authorities could be called in on the side of capital. This group accomplished just such a feat when coal companies used them to stoke violence in the West Virginia Coal Wars.

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Conservationist Theodore Roosevelt was an environmentalist who sought to preserve nature for the enjoyment and recreation of future generations. He greatly expanded and dedicated more land for conservation than any president in history.

During WWI Woodrow Wilson signed into law, which provided an equitable and locally administered system to draft men for the military. It avoided previously unpopular systems of bonuses and substitutes that had caused a lot of domestic strife during the Civil War.

In , Robert and Helen Lynd’s 1929 sociological study of Muncie, Indiana, the husband-and-wife team concluded that new leisure activities, forms of entertainment, and America’s increased emphasis on consumption had taken its toll on America’s democracy. These authors determined that the American public was largely uninformed and uninterested in political matters, preferring entertainment and consumer comforts to politics as a public focus. Democracy (requiring an informed public to succeed) was being undermined by American apathy and stupidity.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, a New Scientific Revolution was underway that challenged the traditional model of Newtonian Physics and the understanding of life and the universe that had dominated scientific understanding for centuries. The new developments fundamentally shook the foundation of scientists’ knowledge about the universe. A German-born scientist named developed his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 which proved that time is relative to the speed of the observer and his General Theory of Relativity ten years later which proved that time is also relative to the gravitational force exerted on the observer. It also proved spacetime is four-dimensional and the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever is present. In short, time is not constant – it is relative to the speed at which an object is traveling and the gravitational pull exerted upon that object. This fundamentally redefined Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and changed the nature of physics. Scientific discoveries such as these contributed to the Age of Anxiety, as life, the universe, and everything became increasingly complicated and long-held beliefs were shattered.

During WWI, Americans viewed immigrants, particularly German immigrants, with deep suspicion. A group of private citizens called worked directly with the U.S. government to identify suspected German sympathizers and to eradicate all antiwar and politically radical activities through surveillance, public shaming, and government raids.