{"id":86859,"date":"2017-02-20T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=86859"},"modified":"2017-02-13T17:01:29","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T17:01:29","slug":"how-the-us-began-its-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/how-the-us-began-its-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"How the US Began Its Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>by Stephen Kinzer, Henry Holt & Co, Jan 2017<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>

\u2018The Great Naval Battle Off Cavite (Manila Bay),\u2019 in which the US squadron led by Commodore George Dewey defeated the Spanish fleet in the first major engagement of the Spanish-American War, May 1, 1898. Kurz & Allison\/Library of Congress<\/p><\/div>\n

1.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The election of Donald Trump will no doubt have many calamitous consequences, but one of the most insidious is likely to be its impact on foreign policy. During the campaign, Trump voiced misgivings about the recent string of unwinnable wars that have followed military interventions abroad\u2014exercises in regime change and nation-building, conducted in the name of humanitarian democracy\u2014and he suggested that his administration would be reluctant to embark on similar projects. Yet Trump enveloped this sane skepticism (rarely if ever articulated in American presidential campaigns) in a cloud of racist bombast, bellicose posturing, and xenophobic nationalism.<\/p>\n

What has emerged from Trump\u2019s rants is a self-contradictory vision of a Fortress America with tightly controlled borders that invites foreign conflict by maintaining a provocative, overextended presence abroad. This is hardly a recipe for international stability. What might have been an overdue debate on the limits of interventionist overreach has not materialized, while Trump has been dismissed as a dangerous isolationist. A debate on American intervention is as necessary as ever.<\/p>\n

Since the 1930s, the word \u201cisolationist\u201d has been used pejoratively by those who reject any tendency toward restraint in the use of American power abroad. Yet the objections to open-ended military interventionism cannot be reduced to isolationism. They have a rich and complex history\u2014rooted in the classical republican mistrust of empire and articulated by thinkers as diverse as William James, Mark Twain, Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, and William Fulbright, none of whom was a xenophobic nationalist. Stephen Kinzer\u2019s The True Flag<\/em> locates the origins of this anti-imperial tradition in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and argues for its continued relevance to public life today.<\/p>\n

One could not ask for a timelier argument. For decades, anti-imperial thought has been largely absent from public discourse. So has the word \u201cimperialism.\u201d The chief substitute for it has been \u201cinternationalism.\u201d This word evokes a vision of global cooperation, with examples ranging from the Allied war against fascism to contemporary grapplings with climate change. No one can deny the necessity of the United States engaging constructively with the rest of the world; the problem is that engagement has so often involved imperial aims and military methods. The rhetorical shift from imperialism to internationalism suggests a sanitizing process at work during the twentieth century, as the United States moved away from a formal empire based on the occupation of foreign territory to an informal empire based on proxy governments backed by occasional US invasions.<\/p>\n

Kinzer shows how that sanitizing process got started, carefully reconstructing both sides of the debate over the acquisition of an overseas empire during the years around 1900. Andrew Carnegie and William Jennings Bryan joined William James and Mark Twain in facing off against Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, and other imperialists. Kinzer\u2019s abundant quotations reveal two contrasting styles of thought, which have persisted to the present.<\/p>\n

The anti-imperialists\u2019 arguments were rooted in the immediate experiences they cited as historical examples. Whether or not they considered themselves pragmatists, as William James did, they remained true to the fundamental philosophical meaning of pragmatism: a concern to evaluate principles with respect to their consequences. Anti-imperialists shared a pragmatic tendency to judge ideas and policy proposals by their likely impact on both the empire and its subjects, an impact that could be inferred from historical as well as contemporary evidence. They were worried about what happened to fundamental values\u2014the separation of powers, the consent of the governed\u2014when a republic became an empire. And since imperial expansion depended on violence, anti-imperialists were equally pragmatic in their concern for the consequences of war, perhaps the least predictable of human enterprises.<\/p>\n

The imperialists, in contrast, embraced a style of thought that claimed to be pragmatic but was in fact abstract and teleological, untethered to the actualities of experience. Apologists for empire acknowledged the importance of foreign investment opportunities, raw materials, and markets, but more commonly they traded in euphemisms masquerading as concepts\u2014destiny, responsibility, civilization, progress\u2014the ancestors of such contemporary banalities as \u201cglobalization.\u201d This habit of mind arose from a faith in a providentially decreed American mission to regenerate the world, accompanied by an equally fervent belief that the rest of the world desired regeneration.<\/p>\n

The core of this imperial creed was the exceptionalist equation of America with God\u2019s New Israel, articulated in various forms by orators from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. For centuries this belief had merely called for the US to serve as an example to the rest of the world; but when applied to foreign affairs it created problems. The chosen nation could hardly acknowledge that other nations might choose other ways of life, might create a multipolar world. Whether in its earlier, providentialist form or its later, more secular versions, exceptionalism has encouraged an international double standard, an inability among American policymakers to hold the United States to the same rules of conduct they demand of other nations\u2014a failure (for example) to understand why the Japanese might be less than enthusiastic about American demands for an \u201cOpen Door\u201d to Asian markets in the early 1900s, when Americans would have deemed Japanese intrusion into the Western Hemisphere an outrageous violation of the Monroe Doctrine.<\/p>\n

The exceptionalist double standard was reinforced by racial hierarchies and intensified by preoccupations with gender. Filipinos and Cubans, despite their desires for independence, were alleged to be unready for self-government\u2014a racist argument that has survived in muted form down to the present. Another long-standing exceptionalist theme has been the virtue of reinvigorated masculinity in imperial discourse. These enduring preoccupations in American foreign affairs stem at least in part from educated men\u2019s desire to vindicate their manhood in a society suspicious of thought, from Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Strenuous Life to John Kennedy\u2019s New Frontier to George W. Bush\u2019s Mission Accomplished.<\/p>\n

In each case there was celebration of unthinking activism, preferably military, as a source of renewed vitality; the refusal of reflection as effeminacy; an obsession with toughness as an end in itself. At its most extreme, this longing for revitalized manhood led to a veneration of war as \u201ca purifying, invigorating, unifying force,\u201d in Kinzer\u2019s words. In recent years, some women in Washington have also felt compelled to embrace a reified masculinity\u2014a bias toward action rather than reflection. This sounds benign enough until one realizes that the action in question, as in Iraq, is usually military, often mistaken, and rarely reversible.<\/p>\n

As imperialism became interpreted as internationalism, nearly all the major imperial themes survived and flourished, though sometimes in subtler forms. During much of the twentieth century, the belief in regenerative war lost legitimacy, except in fascist circles, but resurfaced in the Kennedy years and with renewed virulence after September 11. Kinzer is right: the first debate over American empire at the end of the nineteenth century speaks to our own time.<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By the 1880s, Americans had created a continental settlers\u2019 empire. The next move was toward an overseas empire, at least in the minds of the young patricians Theodore Roosevelt and his mentor, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Roosevelt was an asthmatic, nearsighted boy who by the age of twelve had committed himself to a lifelong project of building physical strength and courage. With Lodge\u2019s help, as Kinzer writes, Roo- sevelt transformed his personal project into a parable of revitalization for his entire class\u2014which in the view of many needed to reclaim \u201cthe stern and manly qualities which are essential to the well-being of a masterful race.\u201d Manliness and mastery required regeneration through violence, and by the 1890s, Roosevelt was spoiling for a fight: \u201cI should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,\u201d he wrote. Any opponent would do, but \u201cthe most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon an opportunity arose. Lodge secured Roosevelt an appointment as assistant secretary of the navy, and the younger man used the position to push for involvement in the Cubans\u2019 war for independence against Spain. Roosevelt was helped by William Randolph Hearst, whose New York Journal<\/em> reported falsely that American citizens had been assaulted by Spaniards. Worried that unsettled conditions on the island threatened American plantations and mines, President McKinley dispatched the armored cruiser Maine<\/em> to Cuba in January 1898. On February 15, the Maine<\/em> exploded. Though later investigation showed it was an accident, Hearst claimed the explosion was caused by a Spanish torpedo.<\/p>\n

The Maine<\/em> disaster intensified the clamor for war with Spain. On February 25, Secretary of the Navy John Long reported he was ill, and Roosevelt took charge, putting Admiral George Dewey on alert in Hong Kong to be ready to sail for Manila, where most of the Spanish fleet was moored. Meanwhile imperialists in Congress orchestrated an argument for humanitarian intervention. Their main assumption was that Spain was on the wrong side of history. We must intervene in Cuba, Lodge said,<\/p>\n

because we represent the spirit of liberty and the spirit of the new time, and Spain is over against us because she is medieval, cruel, dying\u2026.<\/p>\n

The two nations were at war by April 24.<\/p>\n

It quickly became apparent that this war was not just about Cuba. A week after the declaration of war, Dewey smashed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Like the Cubans, the Filipinos were struggling for their independence. Dewey met with the insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo and promised Filipino independence in exchange for helping the Americans defeat the Spanish, according to Aguinaldo; Dewey later denied this.<\/p>\n

Closer to home, Roosevelt could hardly wait to get into the Cuban war. \u201cI know now that I would have turned from my wife\u2019s deathbed to have answered the call, \u201d Roosevelt later said. He formed a cavalry regiment he called the Rough Riders and led a charge up Kettle Hill, where four hundred Americans dislodged one hundred Spaniards. \u201cOh, but we have had a bully fight!\u201d Roosevelt said. \u201cI feel as big and strong as a bull moose!\u201d He had fulfilled his boyhood dream.<\/p>\n

He had also acquired a wealth of political capital. Lodge was ecstatic. \u201cOrdinary rules do not apply to you,\u201d he told TR, who quickly demonstrated this by running for governor of New York on a platform of overseas expansion. Like most imperialists, he struck the pose of reluctance, deployed the rhetoric of inevitability, and personified the nation as a creature with moral will: \u201cThere comes a time in the life of a nation, as in the life of an individual, when it must face great responsibilities, whether it will or not\u2026. We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage,\u201d he announced.<\/p>\n

This sort of rhetoric appealed to an electorate that was entirely male as well as largely white and well-off. It carried TR to Albany and eventually to Washington, as McKinley\u2019s vice-president and then president in 1901, when McKinley was assassinated. \u201cOur nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes,\u201d Roosevelt told the Republican Convention in 1900. The imperialists claimed to be the party of youthful dreams and energy, the party of the future.<\/p>\n

But their triumph was by no means a foregone conclusion. Part of their problem stemmed from the discrepancy between war aims and outcomes. What began as a war of liberation ended as an imperial land grab. In fifty-five days, the United States gained control over five island territories with over eleven million inhabitants, including the Philippine and Hawaiian archipelagoes as well as Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Terms of surrender were drawn up between the Americans and the Spanish; local insurgent forces were conspicuous by their absence. Such was the birth of the American empire. As Kinzer shows, its advocates created a foreign policy at odds with national political tradition and with the supposed sanctity of such ideals as the consent of the governed. No wonder Lodge inaugurated a long euphemistic tradition by calling imperialism \u201cthe large policy.\u201d And no wonder the acquisitions of 1898 provoked a protracted and ferocious debate.<\/p>\n

3.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the crushing American military victory over Spain, what were we to do with the \u201clittle brown brothers\u201d placed under our care? Since the doctrine of consent of the governed \u201capplies only to those who are capable of self-government,\u201d said Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, we must continue to occupy the Philippines while we civilize the natives. We could not fly from a duty ordained by God, who \u201chas marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.\u201d This was the exceptionalist position in its purest form.<\/p>\n

McKinley\u2019s anguished indecision culminated in what Kinzer calls \u201cthe most influential divine visitation in recorded presidential history.\u201d The president entered a trance state, during which God counseled him to deny independence to the Philippines. By a \u201chappy coincidence,\u201d Kinzer observes wryly, \u201cGod sounded remarkably like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.\u201d Ultimately, McKinley embraced what his Secretary of State John Hay called \u201cthe responsibility of duty which we cannot escape.\u201d The result was the suppression of Filipino freedom fighters in a bloody mess of a war.<\/p>\n

Imperialists were equally reluctant to grant Cuban independence. American fruit and sugar companies feared that a truly free Cuba might mean a push for agrarian reform. Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut worked with leading imperialists to calm agribusiness fears. The Platt Amendment (to an army appropriations bill) set the terms of Cuban independence in what would become a common pattern of proxy empire\u2014in Kinzer\u2019s words, \u201cformal independence, rule by natives who cooperated with American businessmen, and military intervention as necessary.\u201d This Plattismo<\/em>, as Latin Americans called it, became the characteristic structure of American empire throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Theodore Roosevelt; drawing by David Levine<\/p><\/div>\n

But the decision to annex the Philippines had the more immediate impact, provoking anti-imperialist fervor and a fierce guerrilla resistance. Imperialists\u2019 effort to justify the war required more than pronouncements about duty. The race card was also in play. To Roosevelt, the \u201csavage tribes\u201d who populated the Philippines were little more than \u201cwild beasts.\u201d The fundamental fact was that the US had planted its flag on these new possessions and had to finish what it started: \u201cThere must be control! There must be mastery!\u201d he insisted.<\/p>\n

The quest for mastery provoked prolonged debate in the US Senate when the Treaty of Paris between the US and Spain was introduced. The treaty sanctioned the US occupation of the Philippine Islands, ignored the Filipino independence movement, and foretold the decisive transition from republic to empire. For Mark Twain, who had supported the war for Cuban liberation, the annexation of the Philippines changed everything, leaving the United States with a \u201cstained flag.\u201d To keep the Philippines would make the stain permanent. Fear that an imperial America would never be the same animated anti-imperialist efforts to defeat the treaty in the Senate. Ultimately they fell one vote short, but the arguments against US imperialism remain powerful and deserve scrutiny.<\/p>\n

4.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Imperialists charged that the anti-imperialists\u2019 lament for lost innocence was delusory, that the national enterprise had been one big land grab from the beginning (as the history of the conflict with Native Americans showed). But if the anti-imperialists were sentimental about the American past, they were clearheaded about the stakes in the shift toward overseas empire. They were intensely aware of the corrupting effects of concentrated power on representative institutions and what republican tradition called \u201ccivic virtue\u201d\u2014commitment to a common good that transcends private gain. As the Unitarian minister Charles Ames warned, imperialism threatened \u201cto put us into a permanent attitude of arrogance, testiness, and defiance towards other nations\u2026. We shall be one more bully among bullies.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Mark Twain and William James, the bullying mentality was epitomized in Theodore Roosevelt. Twain called him \u201cclearly insane\u201d and \u201cthe most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War.\u201d James marveled that TR<\/p>\n

gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in grey twilight and heedless of the higher life.<\/p>\n

Both Twain and James rejected Roosevelt\u2019s conflation of moral and physical courage\u2014the confusion at the core of imperialist thought.<\/p>\n

But Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cdeepest ideological enemy,\u201d according to Kinzer, was Carl Schurz, a German \u00e9migr\u00e9, Union Army general, and former Republican senator from Missouri. Like other anti-imperialists, Schurz had been an abolitionist: apparently there was a link, in some minds, between keeping people as slaves and ruling nations against their will. Against the rhetoric of \u201cnew responsibilities,\u201d Schurz demanded fidelity to the originally professed aim of Cuban liberation. Dismissing \u201chigh-sounding cant about destiny and duty,\u201d he reaffirmed his commitment to \u201cthe flag of our country\u2014not as an emblem of reckless adventure and greedy conquest\u2026but the old, the true flag\u2026of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the flag of the government of, for, and by the people\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

The costs of conquest became apparent when Filipinos began resisting the American occupation. The sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote: \u201cWe assume that what we like and practice, and what we think better, must come as a welcome blessing\u201d to subject peoples, but \u201cthey like their own ways, and if we appear amongst them as rulers, there will be social discord.\u201d As a soldier wrote home: while the \u201csassy niggers used to greet us daily with a pleasant smile and a Benhos Dias, Amigo, they now pass by with menacing looks.\u201d Soon the Filipinos were fighting their liberators, attacking by stealth and disappearing into darkness. Lodge had a racial explanation: \u201cAfter the fashion of Orientals, they have mistaken kindness for timidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the election of 1900, when McKinley defeated the anti-imperialist Bryan, his administration openly embraced what we now call counterinsurgency tactics\u2014burning native villages, cutting off food and medical supplies, torturing prisoners for information, and murdering suspected collaborators, including women and children. \u201cIt is not civilized warfare,\u201d wrote The Philadelphia Ledger<\/em>, \u201cbut we are not dealing with civilized people.\u201d Yet not even uncivilized warfare could end the insurgency. When TR appointed General Jake Smith to subdue the rebellious Samar province, Smith ordered his men to kill anyone capable of bearing arms\u2014a population he defined as anyone over ten.<\/p>\n

News of atrocities filtered back to the United States, outraging anti-imperialists but leaving the larger public unmoved. \u201cThe idea of overseas empire had taken root in the American soul,\u201d Kinzer writes. As the New York World<\/em> observed in early 1902, the Philippines war had become something Americans read about over breakfast, mildly disapproving such \u201cabuses\u201d as the \u201cwater cure\u201d (\u201cHow very unpleasant!\u201d).<\/p>\n

During subsequent decades, the American empire expanded in transmuted form. Imperialists restyled themselves as internationalists. Overt possession of territory gave way to Plattismo<\/em>, in Latin America and the Caribbean, in the Philippines and China.<\/p>\n

The pattern of informal empire surfaced clearly in the Philippines, which achieved formal independence in 1945 while it remained the host of US military bases and the home of governments friendly to American business. By then the indirect expression of American power was well established in both hemispheres. As early as 1931, the Marine General Smedley Butler surveyed his long career and concluded he had been a \u201cgangster for capitalism\u201d on three continents. The protection of foreign investments remained wrapped in the rhetoric of exceptionalism, which intensified after the United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful country on the planet.<\/p>\n

Throughout the cold war and its successor, the war on terror, the exceptionalist creed maintained the international double standard\u2014the willingness to pursue policies deemed intolerable elsewhere, the inability to imagine how Americans might react were other nations to behave as the United States does\u2014if the Chinese, for example, were to conduct naval exercises in the Caribbean. Manichaean moralism justified constant interventions, covert and overt, in other nations\u2019 affairs. Only occasionally did anti-imperial voices\u2014Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, William Fulbright\u2014raise the counsel of pragmatic restraint.<\/p>\n

The True Flag<\/em> captures the tragic impact of American hubris at home and abroad. The anti-imperialists had correctly feared the effects of empire on American political life\u2014the concentration of unchecked power in the executive branch, the corrosive impact of secrecy on public debate, the insulation of decision-making in unapproachable bureaucratic hierarchies. But interventionist foreign policy has had catastrophic consequences abroad as well, from the counterinsurgency campaigns in the Philippines and Vietnam to the chaos arising from \u201cregime change\u201d in Iraq and Libya.<\/p>\n

Kinzer concludes by returning to the republican tradition: \u201cNations lose their virtue when they repeatedly attack other nations,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

That loss, as Washington predicted, has cost the United States its felicity. We can regain it only by understanding our own national interests more clearly. It is late for the United States to change its course in the world\u2014but not too late.<\/p>\n

The recovery of civic virtue and the clarification of national interest are urgently necessary goals, and the only way we can hope to achieve them is by reviving the debate over American empire.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers and the Editor in Chief of <\/em>Raritan. He is the author of <\/em>Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America 1877\u20131920, among other books.<\/em><\/p>\n

February 23, 2017 Issue<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

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

The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire by Stephen Kinzer, Henry Holt & Co, Jan 2017 – The recovery of civic virtue and the clarification of national interest are urgently necessary goals, and the only way we can hope to achieve them is by reviving the debate over American empire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}