The basis of U.S. global power in the early twentieth century was economic. From the 1890s on, the nation had emerged as the world’s greatest and most competitive player in the marketplace. Fearful Europeans warned of an “American invasion” (an overwhelming offensive of U.S.-made goods and multinationals), long before they worried about the challenge of U.S. military, political, or cultural power. The invasion, moreover, proved deadly not only because of its magnitude but also because it was fueled by a growing crisis inside the United States, which was, ironically, caused by that very economic success. The crisis’s depth and disorder marked a historic turning point in the development of both American capitalism and the American empire. The imperial visions of Seward and others who followed the New Yorker were primarily made real not by “large-policy” officials, bureaucratic processes, public opinion, or frustrated Progressive reformers. Those visions were realized by the architects of the Second Industrial Revolution, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cyrus McCormick, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman, who redesigned the productive system.

The first Industrial Revolution occurred in late eighteenth-century England, depended on coal, and remained dependent on the old craft system in many respects. The Second Industrial Revolution emerged from new technology produced by inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Edison. Certainly electricity profoundly changed the economy’s structure. Until the immediate pre–Civil War years, U.S. producers had only three alternatives for turning out more goods: adding more laborers (difficult because of labor scarcity), redistributing work into area homes (difficult over long distances because of primitive communications), or producing more power by finding more water, wood, animal, coal, or wind sources.