United States and the Origins of Power

From the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the present, the United States has become the most powerful country in the world for a variety of reasons. First, the United States has massive natural resources and a large productive population that helps to provide the capacity for economic development and growth that many other countries lack. Second, the United States, by the end of the 1970s, had adopted a system of civil rights legal equality for all its citizens that contributed to the social stability and success of the nation. Thirdly, the aftermath of the Second World War had devastated all of Europe and a large portion of Asia yet left the United States effectively unharmed and standing with the single most powerful economy in the world. Internally, the United States experienced a massive urbanization and industrialization during the period of 1865 to present, as well as a potent civil rights movement and immigration of minority groups, particularly from Asia. 

The power of the United States is clearly found in its economic potential and power. With enough money, power comes naturally and easily. The United States currently has a gross domestic product (GDP) of nearly $15 trillion, an amount that is shockingly high compared to other countries. However, this massive economy is a product of an earlier time. The United States economy grew to outpace Great Britain’s in the period following the Civil War, initially due to steel and coal production and later due to larger industrial production overall. This massive American economy, then, took off especially strongly in the period after the American Civil War, when industrialization and urbanization of the United States spurred economic development in major cities. The United States itself has a wealth of natural resources ranging from oil and natural gas to expansive forests of timber and minerals. Only a few areas of the country suffer from a lack of fresh water and thus the American population is not limited in its major centers by access to fresh water. 

This incredible amount of natural wealth, moreover, had been exploited and used by American industry to drive massive growth of national industries. Companies like U.S. Steel founded by Andrew Carnegie and other large industrial organizations became, within a few decades of the end of the 19th century, some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, with the net worth of some of these huge companies making their owners the first billionaires. With the growth of American industry providing a strong foundation for the American economy, the United States quickly caught up to and outpaced the former world economic power, Great Britain.  

Domestically, the United States always experienced strong amounts of division and racial tension between its ethnic groups. Slavery, abolished in the aftermath of the Civil War, was replaced by a system of legal codes and state-based discrimination against African Americans known as the “Jim Crow” laws. These codes kept African Americans legally inferior and subject to public displays of racism and discrimination, such as the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine found in Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark Supreme Court case in 1896 which legally allowed the existence of separate but equal in private and public settings. Under this doctrine, for example, African Americans could be barred from attending universities and institutions of learning, as well as being denied the right to vote as a function of Jim Crow laws and other related systems of oppression. However, the Civil Rights movement for equality for all American citizens regardless of color found its conclusion in the famous Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, which finally overturned the separate but equal doctrine and led to federal enforcement of desegregation policies in the United States.

By the time Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington in 1963, the United States had begun a massive shift towards accepting and embracing legal equality for all. Brown was decided in 1954 and helped to lay the legal foundation for ensuring the end of segregation in schools and the March on Washington itself showed a renewed sense of national spirit aimed at ending overtly public displays of segregation and racism. These changes in American society and culture helped to establish the United States as the world’s most powerful nation, as the healing of the divide between the two races in the South and, indeed, over most of the United States helped to spur a communal sense of nationalism and spirit in American values. For Americans looking abroad, they no longer had to be ashamed that the United States had such a strong sense of hypocrisy when promoting its values abroad. Before the Civil Rights Movement, the United States faced a serious difficulty in the contradiction between promoting freedom and democracy abroad while at the same time oppressing a large minority at home. Thus, the United States benefited dramatically from the addition of the Civil Rights Movement to the list of cultural achievements found in American history. Without this incredible domestic change, the United States would not be as powerful as it could have been. 

Lastly, the United States, at the end of World War II, stood as the sole remaining world power that had been untouched by the war. Unlike Europe, Asia, and other developed parts of the world, the United States had been almost entirely unharmed during the war and retained all of its domestic production and economic capabilities. Though the war itself claimed many lives and was expensive, the root cause of American economic wealth and productivity was unharmed and not subject to any sort of attack or destruction during the war. In Europe, Germany and Britain were completely exhausted and spent from years of fighting, the Soviet Union had taken tremendous losses, and Italy and France were in shambles. Japan, too, was occupied by American forces and had been almost completely unindustrialized due to the huge bombing campaigns launched by the Allied forces during the preparation for the theoretical invasion of the Japanese homelands. Thus, I argue that the root cause of why the United States reached such a high level of power and status in the post-war period was that the devastation of World War II completely crushed the capacity of other states to compete with the United States economically for years to come. That, coupled with the United States’ vast economy, meant that it was the only state in the world capable of taking a leading role in world affairs, at least until its allies had recovered and the Soviet Union stabilized following the end of the war. 

The United States, in the period from 1865 to the present, had become the world’s most powerful nation due to its abundance of natural resources, the reconciliation of the Civil Rights movement, and the prosperity that followed the end of the World War II coupled with the relative destruction of every other state that could have competed with the American economy internationally. These factors all combine to form a world in which American economic dominance provides, or provided, the fundamental origin of American superiority and the means by which the United States became the most powerful nation in the world.