Was American Imperialism Justified?

Taralyn Gutierrez
Block 3
US History
Mrs. Vierra
American Imperialism…Justified? The United States was justified in expanding its territory, influence, and power in the Westward Expansion because the country saw an opportunity and took it. In this expansion of the United States, the foreign policy of Manifest Destiny is present. Manifest Destiny is the widely held belief that American settlers were destined to expand across the continent. One of the firs things that happen during the expansion to help prove that America was justified was that President Theodore Roosevelt thought he had a good idea of how he could persuade the Natives. American President Theodore Roosevelt justified westward expansion by arguing that the land should not remain the way it always was. This meant that Indian societies and Indian lives stood in the way of American progress. Roosevelt 's attitude about the tradeoff between Indian lives and American progress was clear and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He believed that the Natives should update their way of life in order to be able to keep up with the new American way of life that would soon emerge.
Many of the men that traveled to the western areas believed that the Native Americans were misusing the land. They thought that the Indians should either be moved or destroyed in order to make way for the up and coming business environment that was soon to be present in the near future. The Americans from the East had an ideal mind set of how it didn 't matter who they had to go to war with or how many Indians they killed; they all thought that they were doing it for a good cause. In the end, they conquered the land, but not in the most heartfelt