{"id":119733,"date":"2018-10-08T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=119733"},"modified":"2018-10-04T14:01:12","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T13:01:12","slug":"the-birth-of-american-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/10\/the-birth-of-american-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth of American Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire – <\/em>A book by Stephen Kinzer<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By the final decade of the 19th century, the American project sanctified as Manifest Destiny was complete. The western boundary of the United States now stretched to the Pacific Ocean, leaving in its wake the genocide of Native Americans, the purchase of Louisiana without<\/em> the consent of the governed<\/em>, and a war of aggression against Mexico. What next? Pursue the colonialist mandate beyond continental borders\u2014or not?<\/p>\n

Stephen Kinzer\u2019s \u201cThe True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the Empire\u201d is a compact, bracing history of the answer to What next?<\/em> It features the drama and decisions of four years\u20141898-1902\u2014that, in Kinzer\u2019s thesis, set the course of American wars, military expansion and the overthrow of governments throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, interrupted with brief, impermanent periods of \u201cisolationism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Click <\/em><\/strong>here<\/em><\/strong><\/a> to read long excerpts from \u201cThe True Flag\u201d at Google Books.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author collates the eloquent rhetoric and caustic debates between expansionist members of Congress, including alpha male Theodore Roosevelt, aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge, media giant William Randolph Hearst, and prominent anti-empire social critics and populist orators including Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan and steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to capture vividly the divided political passions and high stakes of the day.<\/p>\n

The empire builders used robust, positively coded terms like \u201cthe large policy\u201d to label their aspirations for America\u2019s pre-eminence among world powers and for the aggressive market ambitions of America\u2019s capitalists. The anti-imperialists warned of the erosion of democracy at home, the rise of plutocracy and the blowback from military subordination of other peoples against their will, forecasting what, a century later, Chalmers Johnson incisively named the \u201csorrows of empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the spark that inflamed the U.S. quest for overseas colonies. It began with Cuba and quickly stole Puerto Rico, then the Philippines, Guam (seized en route to the Philippines) and Hawaii\u2014all in nine months. In public, expansionists framed these takeovers as beneficent: rescuing oppressed and backward people to catechize and civilize them.<\/p>\n

Independence movements in Cuba, the Philippines and Hawaii were brutally suppressed. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, particularly in the Philippines, which waged guerrilla warfare until its defeat in 1902. While American soldiers tortured and assassinated prisoners, burned villages and killed farm animals (a precursor to the later American War in Vietnam), a pliant press followed military orders and carried no unfavorable coverage.<\/p>\n

The war in the Philippines was intensely terrorizing for women in particular. The Anti-Imperialist\u00a0Review\u00a0reported that \u201cAmerican soldiers had turned Manila into a world center of prostitution.\u201d Amplifying this too-brief reference to the extreme toll of U.S. militarism on women, Janice Raymond writes in \u201cNot a Choice, Not a Job,\u201d that \u201cU.S. prostitution colonialism, especially during the Philippine-American War, created the model for the U.S. military\u2013prostitution complex in all parts of the world.\u201d The system \u201cassured U.S. soldiers certified sexual access to Filipinas and \u2026 became an intrinsic part of colonial practice in Cuba and Puerto Rico.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Meanwhile, the empire seekers rubbed their covetous hands over the prospect of new customers for manufactured goods, and, in the case of the Philippines, a springboard to the Chinese and Japanese markets. Military bases in the Philippines and Guam would follow to protect and project U.S. economic and military power in East Asia.<\/p>\n

Kinzer\u2019s considerable talent joins meticulous research and engaging stories with a canine ability to sniff out the lies beneath the platitudes that sold the public on war. What he foregrounds so credibly are the oversize male egos of \u201clarge policy\u201d politicians with more morally grounded and prescient anti-imperialist crusaders. Among these are Booker T. Washington, who, in speaking against U.S. imperialism abroad, warned that the cancer in our midst\u2014racism, the legacy of slavery\u2014will prove to be as dangerous to the country\u2019s well-being as an attack from without. Many African-American anti-imperialist groups emerged and assailed U.S. imperialism for its intrinsic white racist arrogance.<\/p>\n

With much detail and nuance, Kinzer tracks the fatal flaws of the immensely talented and populist orator William Jennings Bryan who, for his contrarian vote that sealed the doom of the Philippines, helped determine the fate of our country\u2019s future as an empire. Likewise, the seemingly passive-aggressive William McKinley, elected in 1896 and again in 1900, is unmasked as the imperialist he grew to be over the course of his presidency.<\/p>\n

The final chapter, \u201cThe Deep Hurt,\u201d traces the arc of U.S. militarism across the 20th century and into the 21st\u2014a long and unfinished arc that is neither moral nor bends toward justice. At each end of this ongoing arc, the words of two military veterans of U.S. foreign wars distill and corroborate Kinzer\u2019s stateside expos\u00e9 in \u201cThe True Flag.\u201d Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler, born in 1881, began his career as a teenage Marine combat soldier assigned to Cuba and Puerto Rico during the U.S. invasion of those islands. He fought next in the U.S. war in the Philippines, ostensibly against Spanish imperialism but ultimately against the Philippine revolution for independence. Next he was assigned to fight against China during the Boxer Rebellion and was also stationed in Guam. He gained the highest rank and a host of medals during subsequent U.S. occupations and military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, popularly known as the Banana Wars.<\/p>\n

As Butler confessed in his iconoclastic book, \u201cWar Is a Racket,\u201d he was \u201ca bully boy for American corporations,\u201d making countries safe for U.S. capitalism. More isolationist than anti-war, he nonetheless nailed the war profiteers\u2014racketeers, in his unsparing lexicon\u2014or the blood on their hands, as bracingly as any pacifist. War is the oldest, most profitable racket, he wrote\u2014one in which billions of dollars are made for millions of lives destroyed.<\/p>\n

Making the world \u201csafe for democracy\u201d was, at its core, making the world safe for war profits. Of diplomacy Butler wrote, \u201cThe State Department \u2026 is always talking about peace but thinking about war.\u201d He proposed an \u201cAmendment for Peace\u201d: In essence, keep the military (Army, Navy, Air Force) on the continental U.S. for the purpose of defense against military invasions here.<\/p>\n

And in the 21st century, Maj. Danny Sjursen, who served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, proposes that the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of Offense. His reasons: American troops are deployed in 70 percent of the world\u2019s countries; American pilots are currently bombing seven countries; and the U.S., alone among nations, has divided the six inhabited continents into six military commands. Our military operations exceed U.S. national interests and are \u201cunmoored\u201d from reasoned strategy and our society\u2019s needs, Sjursen concludes.<\/p>\n

For all of this book\u2019s strengths, one glaring lacuna is the minimalist presence of women in Kinzer\u2019s depiction of the early anti-imperialist movement. \u201cThe True Flag\u201d is premised on history as made by \u201cgreat men\u201d\u2014good and bad. A \u201cgreat woman\u201d of this era, Jane Addams, elected vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League after a brilliant speech, has only a bit part. Addams was renowned not only for her settlement house work at Hull House in Chicago, but also for speaking out unceasingly against imperialism and war. The FBI kept a file on her, and she was labeled among the most dangerous women in America. The author overlooked her influence in this era.<\/p>\n

A second lacuna is omitting the original sins of imperial America: the genocide of Native Americans for their land, and the enslavement of Africans, which ultimately became the combustion engine of U.S. capitalism. Ironically, it was the pro-empire exhorters of 1898 who used the exploitative expansion within the early U.S. to defend extending Manifest Destiny to the Pacific region. \u201cIf we should not do this in the Philippines, why was it acceptable to do here?\u201d challenged Henry Cabot Lodge, the imperialist senator from Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

The Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran could have penned these words from 1933 for our national dilemma today:\u00a0Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. \u2026 <\/em><\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

H. Patricia (Pat) Hynes is a retired environmental engineer and professor of environmental health who worked on such issues as the low-income, multiracial urban environment; environmental justice; and feminism at Boston University School of Public Health. She is the author and editor of seven books, including <\/em>The Recurring Silent Spring, Taking Population Out of the Equation, Earth Right, and, most recently, <\/em>Urban Health: Readings in the Social, Built and Physical Environments of U.S. Cities. While at Boston University, she wrote and spoke extensively on the harm of war to women.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truthdig.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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