Sometime in the late 19th century…
AMERICANS: Woohoo! We’re awesome! And we’re coming to take you over, Latin America!!
LATIN AMERICANS: Oh great.
AMERICANS: Oh, by the way, you British should pay for our civil war, in which we fought amongst ourselves. Because it was your fault, you know.
BRITISH: We wish you would stop placing blame on us for everything.
AMERICANS: ARGH! We stubbed our toe! It’s the British’s fault!!
BRITISH: Bastards.
So the British paid $15.5 million because of a war the Southern Americans started. Wow, that makes so much sense. Meanwhile, the French had placed Archduck Maximilian of Austria in charge of Mexico. Yes, he was a duck.
MAXIMILIAN: Quack!
WILLIAM SEWARD (Secretary of State): Oi! Get that duck out of Mexico! (Marches in with troops and executes the duck. He later makes some tasty duck soup out of it.) Hm. Now what? I know! Let’s surround those Canadian bastards! (Buys Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million.)
AMERICANS: What you doing, Seward? Thou hast committed a grave folly!
And this became known as Seward’s Folly. Which wasn’t really a folly.
RANDOM ALASKAN: Whoa, check it out. Oil.
SEWARD: Haha! Who’s the follied one now, b*tch?? (Goes on to acquire the Midway Islands and Hawaii and Cuba and Jupiter)
Because of this sudden expansion, American trade shot up like crazy. John Fiske was a Darwinist historian.
FISKE: It is our destiny to spread peacefully across the whole world! And put legs on everything!!
MISSIONARY: And spread the word of God!
Meanwhile, Alfred T. Mahan—
MAHAN: Captain Alfred T. Mahan.
…Meanwhile, Captain Alfred T. Mahan came up with a splendiferous idea. …Why does my spellcheck recognize “splendiferous” as a word??
MAHAN: Let’s build a kickass navy!
LODGE, TRACY, and TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Hey, what a splendiferous idea!
Then, in 1844, the Treaty of Wanghia let the Americans trade with the Chinese. The Hawaiians, meanwhile, grew lots of sugar.
HAWAIIANS: OMFGsugarisgreatwegrowlotsandlotsofsugar!Weonlyhave14lettersinouralphabetDoyoulikesugardoyoudoyouwelldoyou? WANNABUYSOMESUGAR??? biggrin
AMERICANS: …Uh. Okay?
MCKINLEY: No. I’m putting a tariff on sugar; otherwise our country will end up full of crazed sugar-high people.
QUEEN LILIUOKALANI: Hey, I want to be a monarch.
Liliuokalani is overthrown and joins Burr in his emo I-failed-at-being-a-ruler corner. America tries to annex Hawaii, but President Cleveland withdrew the agreement because he didn’t think Hawaiians wanted to be annexed. Congress annexes them anyway in 1898.
Meanwhile, remember that thing that Monroe made, telling Europe they could suck it?
FRENCH: Let’s build a canal in Latin America.
PRESIDENT HAYES: GTFO of our hemisphere!
At a Pan-American conference, the Pan-American Union was established. It promoted the exchange of pans in the Americas.
LATIN AMERICANS: Ohohohoho, your pans are just so nice.
AMERICANS: (Hand flap) Oh no, your pans are so much better.
LATIN AMERICANS: Oh, you. *^^*
Then in 1891…
CHILE: Viva la revolucion!! (No idea if I spelled that right…) Oh yeah, we hate Americans.
AMERICAN SAILOR: Hey, I have an idea! Let’s go on vacation in Chile!
The sailors are pwned by a Chilean mob with pitchforks.
PRESIDENT HARRISON: WTF. I want reparations or else we’ll go to WAR!!
CHILEANS: Oh. Okay. We’re mucho sorry.
Then in 1895, President Cleveland became involved in a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. Why do we keep switching back and forth between presidents? Because Garaty is stupid, that’s why.
GARATY: I’m not stupid. You just don’t understand me. (Is shoved into the emo corner with Burr and Liliuokalani.)
CLEVELAND: (To Brits) America is the Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere! Get out of our territory or we’ll go to WAR!
And the British back down, and the US and British are buddies again. Then there was a revolution in Cuba. I swear, the Latin Americans are always having revolutions. If they didn’t have revolutions, the Earth would probably stop revolving and half the planet would die from lack of sunlight. Erm. But anyway.
GENERAL VALERIANO WEYLER: I have come from Spain to Havana! But you know, I never wanted to be a general. All my life, I’ve wanted to be a cowboy. Like Roosevelt. Hey, here’s my chance! (He lassoes up the rural population of Cuba and herds them into concentration camps.)
AMERICANS: OMG! Look what he did to those poor Cubans! He herded them like they were cows!
Then there were some riots in Havana.
CUBANS: Let’s start a riot, a riot!
DUPEY DE LOME (Spanish minister): (Writes a letter)
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically.
Love,
Washington Irvine.
P.S. McKinley is a bidder for the admiration of the crowd.
Hearst (the guy who wrote stuff, remember?) got the letter and published it, and Americans were angry. Then Maine exploded.
MAINE: *BOOM*
Luckily, it was the battleship Maine, and not the state. Phew. The lobsters are saved.
AMERICANS: It was the Cubans! And not an internal explosion or anything. Come on, that’s just silly.
BRITISH: Hey, it’s not us for once.
MCKINLEY: I don’t really want to go to war, but Congress might declare war without me. So let’s go to war.
SPAIN: Oh, why not.
CUBANS: Hey, America, you’re not planning on annexing us, are you?
AMERICANS: …Why no. Of course not. >> << Look, we’ll even write the Teller Amendment saying we won’t annex you.
So there was a splendid little Spanish-American war. It was quite splendid. Dewey and his brothers Huey and Louie became heroes! Well, actually only Dewey became a hero. He was a big-shot general and all that. Then Teddy Roosevelt, who was handy with a gun and had the teddy bear named after him, surrounded Santiago. Yeah, I’m glad to know my cuddly little stuffed animal was named after a guy who was handy with a gun.
RANDOM AMERICAN: I’ve got a great idea! Let’s fight in parkas and wool uniforms in the summer of Cuba!
AMERICANS: W00t!
The Americans then stormed San Juan Hill and drove the Spanish out.
AMERICANS: Come on, get in the car. We’re driving you all back to Spain.
RANDOM SPANISH: I call shotgun!
OTHER SPANISH: No fair!!
YET ANOTHER SPANISH: Are we there yet?
AMERICANS: (Facepalm)
Oh yeah, the US also got Guam and Puerto Rico. But not Cuba, cuz of the Teller Amendment.
MCKINLEY: Aw, darn. We can’t have Cuba. Why don’t we take the Philippines instead?
FILIPINOS: Quoi??
AMERICANS: Yay expansion!
FILIPINOS: Wait! We didn’t agree to this!
AMERICANS: Shut up. No one cares.
…The Americans sure are jerks, aren’t they? Some of them were still good though. The Anti-Imperialists Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers, Mark Twain, Jane Addams, Lincoln Steffens, and educators Charles Eliot of Harvard and David Starr Jordan of Sanford were all important people and annexing the Philippines would be unconstitutional. Seriously, that’s everyone’s excuse for everything.
RANDOM WOMAN: Young man, go clean your room this instant.
SON: I can’t, mom. It’s unconstitutional.
CARNEGIE: We can’t annex the Philippines! It’s unconstitutional! Let’s annex Canada instead.
CANADIANS: Quoi??
MCKINLEY: Yeah, let’s annex the Philippines. They’re not advanced enough to govern themselves.
So there was yet another Treaty of Paris (189 cool in which the US got the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. The French, by this time, were getting rather ticked off that their country was invaded every time some other people had a war so the other people could write up a peace treaty. Then the Philippines started a revolution. Because the Philippines are on the other side of the planet from the Latin Americans, this revolution threw Earth out of its orbit for a while. There was mass chaos everywhere, and toilets in the northern hemisphere flushed in a clockwise direction. McKinley decided to do something to stop the strange orbit of the Earth before it crashed into Mars, so he put military governments into US’s new acquisitions. And Cuba was really messy and covered in the corpses of horses and dogs, so the US put some schools up and stuff and let them grow more sugar. So they could put it on the horses and dogs and eat them. Ew. And then the Platt Amendment was made, which pretty much said that Cuba was independent but the US would intervene if anything threatened its independence.
Meanwhile, the Caribbean nations were all screwed up. Germany and Britain blockaded Venezuela, who refused to pay debts. The Roosevelt Corollary made US the police power of the Western Hemisphere. Latin Americans weren’t very happy.
Then John Hay, who is not to be confused with John Jay, wrote some Open Door Notes to China.
HAY: We’re coming to trade with you guys!
CHINESE: No. Now our aristocrats are going to rebel.
CHINESE ARISTOCRATS: j00 roxx0r our boxx0rz!!
And thus it became known as the Boxer Rebellion. Hay sent some more notes, and the Boxer Rebellion magically resolved itself. Then there was a war between the Japanese and Russians, and America mediated things. The Japanese didn’t like it. Then Roosevelt stopped Japanese immigration with the Gentlemen’s Agreement. And built a canal in Panama. And wrote a book called “Exploiting Underdeveloped Countries for Fun and Profit!”
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