The Rise and Fall of John Watson Foster

John Watson Foster was a career diplomat and lawyer from Indiana. The highlight of his career was as Secretary of State at the end of the 1880s. He worked to keep the global frontier alive, especially in the Pacific with its potential for new natural resources and indigenous labor so cheap it might as well have been free. In 1898, just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, imperial sentiment was in vogue inside the United States.