Download American Imperialism and the Philippine War

Wesleyan University
The Honors College
American Imperialism and the Philippine War
by
Daniel Wertz
Class of 2008
A thesis submitted to the
faculty of Wesleyan University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Departmental Honors in History
Middletown, Connecticut
April, 2008
Daniel Wertz
American Imperialism
and the
Philippine War
Wertz
iii
Contents
Acknowledgements
iv
Illustrations and Maps
v
Introduction
1
1. No Mere Wild Freak of Spread-Eaglism
• American Imperialism, 1865–1898
7
2. Fighting Just One Tribe Out of Sixty
• The Unexpected Colonial War
34
3. Empire as Carpetbag Government
• Domestic Opposition to Imperialism
61
4. From Benevolent Assimilation to Benevolent Supervision
87
• The United States in China, Latin America, and the Philippines
Conclusion
119
Bibliography
121
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Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the dedicated support of
several people and institutions. I would like to thank the Public Affairs Center at
Wesleyan University for providing the Davenport Grant that let me begin my research
in the summer of 2007. Furthermore, I would like to thank Suzanne Sturm and John
Dunkle for providing me a place to stay in Boston that summer, and Lisa Trovato and
Dan Espinoza for doing the same in Washington.
All displayed an incredible
generosity that I deeply appreciate. I am also grateful to the helpful staff at the
Massachusetts Historical Society and the Library of Congress, where I did my
research.
Professors Ron Schatz and Kirk Swinehart have both been excellent
advisors, and the quality and direction of this work would have fared for the worse
without them.
Jessica Eber, Hannah Freece, and Brendan Larkin also provided
helpful editorial suggestions for some of the chapters. Most of all, I would like to
thank my parents: without their unyielding support, this project would not have been
at all possible.
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Theodore Roosevelt
William McKinley
Henry Cabot Lodge
John Hay
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Emilio Aguinaldo
Ben Tillman
William Jennings Bryan
George Boutwell
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The Dewey Arch, 1899
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From Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relations,
Volume 1: To 1920, Fourth Edition (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 456.
 1998 D.C. Heath and Company.
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From Paterson and Merrill, 499.  1998 D.C. Heath and Company.
x
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Introduction
On January 22, 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, the young, energetic new
Governor of New York who had catapulted to national fame leading his Rough
Riders brigade in the Spanish-American War, wrote to his dear friend Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Roosevelt expressed his wholehearted desire that
“the thing I should really like to do would be to be the first civil Governor General of
the Philippines,” the Southeast Asian archipelago that the United States had
purchased from Spain in the aftermath of the war.1 Lodge quickly conveyed the
request to President William McKinley, who was slightly cool to the idea; Roosevelt
would have to settle for the Vice Presidency, which he wasn’t nearly as keen on.2
Roosevelt and Lodge, along with a handful of other politicians and intellectuals,
formed a powerful and influential clique that pushed for a stronger military, a
bellicose foreign policy, and political and economic expansion abroad. To Roosevelt,
governing the largest of the United States’ new possessions would be a capstone to
his years of imperialist agitation, as he would directly shape the colonial policies of
the world’s newest global power.
Flash forward to 1919.
The years of intense guerrilla warfare in the
Philippines had become a distant memory, and Henry Cabot Lodge was quickly
1
Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, January 22, 1900, from Henry Cabot Lodge, ed.,
Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, Vol.
I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 437.
2
Henry Cabot Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt, January 27, 1900, from Selections from the
Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Vol. I, 439–440.
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becoming America’s foremost isolationist, the leader in the fight to keep the United
States out of the League of Nations. Theodore Roosevelt died before the debate
could run its course, but wrote early on that the United States ought not “undertake
the task of policing Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa,” and advocated keeping to the
“ring fence” of the Monroe Doctrine.3 Lodge’s biggest personal objection to the
League of Nations involved Article X, which called upon each member state of the
League to protect the territorial integrity and independence of every other member.
But he also objected to the League’s mandate system, which would be used in the
interwar period as a type of de facto colonialism by the other Allied victors of World
War I.
Lodge noted, “It has been suggested that we should take charge of
Constantinople; that we should take charge of Armenia and Mesopotamia and Syria,”
but he rejected the notion of the “tutelage” of “weak or backward people.”4
Why did Roosevelt and Lodge change during those intervening years from
jingoistic imperialists to fervent isolationists?
The Great War certainly had
something to do with this remarkable shift in thinking, but their intellectual
transformation began shortly after the United States conquest of the Philippines.
Even though the two were enchanted with the prospect of spreading the Stars and
Stripes across the globe, they came to realize that other methods of spreading
American influence and commerce were much more effective than the direct control
of foreign territories.
Immediately following the war with Spain, the United States had both the
political will to pursue imperial policies and the geopolitical circumstances conducive
3
Quoted in Henry Cabot Lodge and A. Lawrence Lowell, The Lodge-Lowell Debate on the Proposed
League of Nations (Boston: Old Colony Trust Company, 1919), 9.
4
Lodge and Lowell, 18–19.
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to doing so. But the way in which these policies would manifest was an open
question; the impulse to actively remake the world in America’s Anglo-Saxon image,
and blanket the oceans with the American navy, as Roosevelt and Lodge would do,
was counterbalanced by the impulse to simply extend and protect the commercial
interests of the United States.
Thus, there were several models of American
imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. In the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto
Rico, and Samoa, the United States asserted direct political control. In Cuba, and
later throughout most of the Caribbean basin, the economic and political domination
of nominally sovereign regimes became the policy. In China, the United States
insisted, to both other powers and the Chinese people, on the freedom of commerce,
and exerted its influence through economic leverage and the rhetoric of friendship
and benevolence.
The latter two models, albeit in slightly different forms, became the
foundations of American foreign policy in the twentieth century, which could be
generalized as a combination of forcefully influencing the politics of geopolitically
important states and an insistence on global liberalization of trade. The model of
formal imperialism, however, went by the wayside, as neither the public nor the
political elite had much of an appetite for acquiring significant new territories after
the Philippine War. In this study, I will examine the rise and fall of formal
imperialism—the direct political control of a “weak or backward people”—as an
instrument of American foreign policy.
As I shall demonstrate in the first chapter, the racial, economic, and
ideological concepts that justified an American Empire were not conceived in the fit
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of some nationalistic spell. Nor were these concepts quickly aborted because of some
sense of repentance over wrongdoing. Rather, the policy of colonial expansion was
dropped chiefly because the war in the Philippines was both unexpected and imposed
a large military burden on the United States, and because non-colonial imperialism
did not entail the vocal domestic political disputes that the Philippine policy did; I
will expand on these arguments in the second and third chapters, respectively. In the
final chapter, I will look at the ramifications of formal imperialism in the context of
world politics, and will also examine the Open Door policy in China and Roosevelt’s
actions in Latin America, demonstrating why these latter two models became the
dominant ones in the foreign relations of the United States.
A word must be said about the language I will use in this study.
To
paraphrase George Orwell, the word “imperialism” as used in so many vocabularies
has been stretched to simply mean something evil or undesirable. But to intentionally
avoid this word in a discussion of American foreign policy in this particular period
would be a difficult and unnecessary circumscription. By “imperialism,” I mean the
economic or political domination of a weak nation by a stronger, foreign one, with the
primary purpose of improving the status of the latter. “Formal imperialism” refers to
the direct political control of a colony by a metropolitan state. In the context of the
Philippines, formal imperialism took the form of administrative colonialism, under
which local indigenous elites collaborated with a small class of dominant Americans;
settler-based colonialism also falls under the rubric of formal imperialism, but is not
relevant to this discussion, except in relation to antebellum expansion and perhaps in
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Hawaii. “Informal imperialism” similarly covers a fairly wide range of policies, from
economically undermining the self-determination of other nations in order to create
markets, to more directly controlling the affairs of nominally independent states in a
manner approaching suzerainty.
Advocates of formal imperialism occasionally denied that they supported
“imperialism” as such. For example, Albert Beveridge, a close associate of Lodge
and Roosevelt, told a crowd that “imperialism is not the word for our vast work”
because imperialism entailed “oppression” and “monarchy,” concepts which were
alien to “the mighty movement and mission of our race.”5 Despite their verbal
dodges, the actions and beliefs of Beveridge and like-minded thinkers made them
unmistakably supporters of imperialism. Conversely, opponents of the Philippine
policy actively applied the label “anti-imperialist” to their cause. Many of these
individuals, while averse to formal imperialism, did not object to informal imperial
arrangements.
For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to these two camps as
“imperialists” and “anti-imperialists,” even though the reality was more complex than
these labels suggest.
One contemporary formulation that I have chosen to avoid is that of the
“Philippine Insurrection.” I have been careful to label the conflict in the Philippines
as the war that it was, rather than refer to it as was typical at the time and for decades
afterward. The term “insurrection” carries far too much political baggage, falsely
implying that the United States had an entirely legitimate claim to the archipelago
after capturing Manila and purchasing its sovereignty from Spain. While the Treaty
5
Albert Beveridge, For the Greater Republic, not for Imperialism (Unpublished pamphlet: Address at
the Union League of Philadelphia, February 15, 1899), 16–17, 13.
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of Paris that officially ended the Spanish-American War was being composed, Spain
had control of virtually no part of the Philippines. The anti-colonial movement led by
Emilio Aguinaldo, which proclaimed the first Philippine Republic, had defeated
Spain in every part of the Philippines save for Manila by the time of the conference.
The Philippine Republic thus had a much greater claim to legitimacy than did the
United States at the outbreak of the war, making the label of “insurrection” patently
false.
The fighting in the Philippines was not simply an addendum to the SpanishAmerican War, something the term “insurrection” also hints at, but rather a conflict
that actively shaped the course of American foreign policy. Examining it in the
greater context of American expansionism and diplomacy provides a new perspective
on the rise of the United States to its status as a great power. As such a study is
lacking in the relatively slim American historiography of the Philippine War, I hope
that I can do the topic justice.
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No Me re Wild Fre ak of Spre ad-Eaglism
American Imperialism, 1865–1898
Dr. José Rizal had spent several months living in and touring the United
States, but it was a train ride across Europe, sharing a seating compartment with an
obnoxious and boorish New Yorker, that solidified his opinion of the country that
would posthumously remold him as the acceptable national hero of the colonial
Philippines. Rizal, the reform-minded, nationalist writer and after 1896, martyr of the
Philippine rebellion against Spanish rule, had experienced the turmoil of being a
racial outsider while he traveled through the United States in 1888, and his seatmate
seemed to embody all that Rizal disliked about America. “I was beginning to be
annoyed by the fury of the traveler and I was going to join the conversation to tell
him what I have seen and endured in America, in New York itself, how many
troubles and what torture the customs in the United States made us suffer… I was
tempted to believe that my man’s verbosity, being a good Yankee, came from the
steam of a boiler inside his body, and I even imagine seeing in him a robot created
and hurled to the world by the Americans.”1
Rizal saw the United States as a powerful and technologically adept country
that failed to live up to its ideals of liberty. In an essay predicting the future of the
Philippines, he identified America as the nation most likely to usurp Spain’s role as
metropole.
“Perhaps the great American Republic, whose interests lie in the
Pacific… may some day dream of foreign possession. This is not impossible, for the
1
Quoted in Ambeth R. Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat, Expanded Edition (Pasig City,
Philippines: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2000), 4–7.
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example is contagious, [and] covetousness and ambition are among the strongest
vices.” This was a cunningly accurate prediction on Rizal’s part, but he hedged his
bets by also focusing on the impediments to an American Empire. Not only would
imperialism be “contrary to her traditions,” but “in case she should openly attempt it
the European powers would not allow her to proceed, for they know very well that the
appetite is sharpened by the first bites.”2
José Martí, the Cuban poet and revolutionary whose life paralleled Rizal’s in
several ways, also had spent time living in “the brutal and turbulent North,” and took
a more dire view of the possibility of Yankee imperialism in his country. “I am in
daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I understand that duty and
have the courage to carry it out—the duty of preventing the United States from
spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence.”3 Although both
Martí and Rizal were writing before the United States carried out a surge of territorial
expansion in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, they observed and
understood that America was on a long-term trajectory that would transform it into an
imperial power with global reach.
During the three decades after the Civil War, the United States undertook
relatively little of the territorial expansion that had defined its antebellum history, and
Americans did not assert themselves as central players in world politics as they would
throughout the twentieth century. The postbellum years were a period in which the
internal dynamics of the United States were of paramount importance: powerful
2
José Rizal, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” from Austin Craig, Rizal’s Life and Minor Writings
(Manila: Philippine Education Co., Inc., 1927), 261.
3
José Martí to Manuel Mercado, 1895, from Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major
Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume 1: To 1920, Fourth Edition (Lexington,
Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 387.
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corporations centralized and reshaped the nation’s economy as railroads shrunk the
vast expanse between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and a new form of racial
hierarchy was instituted in the wake of the Civil War and a failed Reconstruction.
But it was not by accident that the United States suddenly expanded its territory at the
turn of the twentieth century, nor was it a momentary surge of ultra-nationalism that
led to a formal empire in the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere as well
as an informal empire that spanned the Caribbean Basin. The consolidation of a
continental empire in the nineteenth century set the stage—economically,
intellectually, and socially—for the acquisition of a global empire at the beginning of
the twentieth. This acquisition occurred in a brief span of time, but the preparation
for it had been long in the making.
Territorial expansion across the North American continent—and perhaps even
beyond it—had been a bipartisan political goal, at least in an abstract sense, from the
earliest decades of the Republic. Although the immediate political consequences of
territorial gain sometimes led to hesitancy about specific instances of imperialism—
for example, during the Mexican War—expansion as a vague but inevitable destiny
was accepted and supported by a broad spectrum of Americans. The debate over
imperialism in antebellum America, and the debate over imperialism after the
Spanish-American War, hinged on what form expansion and hegemony should take,
not on whether it should exist at all; specifically, the intersection between race and
empire determined which part of the political class would or would not support a
specific form of imperialism.
John Quincy Adams, for example, had expressed
confidence that Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and perhaps other states would voluntarily
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enter the Union, like “ripe apples” falling into a lap, despite his standing as a
prominent opponent of slavery and its expansion.4 Before the Civil War, territorial
expansion was inextricably intertwined with the expansion of slavery, and the dream
of an empire bound by racial unity had to be deferred.
Antebellum American expansionism had been led primarily by the interests of
Southern slave-owners who wanted to expand their institution across the continent.
The drive to annex Texas, and to take the vast territories gained by the Mexican War,
was led by Southerners, as were periodic Filibustering missions to Central America
and the Caribbean. Many Southerners kept an eye on Cuba and the Dominican
Republic, viewing them as potential grounds to expand their peculiar institution, and
many slaveholders supported the American Colonization Society, which had helped
establish a private colony in Liberia to be populated by free African Americans. But
with the collapse of slavery and Southern political influence in the wake of the Civil
War, the support and logic of American expansionism fundamentally shifted.
Although a broad segment of the politically dominant Republican Party could be
characterized as expansionist in the Reconstruction years, it took a generation for a
consensus to emerge on how American power should be applied abroad.
William Henry Seward, Secretary of State under Presidents Lincoln and
Johnson, believed that the United States had emerged from the Civil War with the
potential to become a great world power, and he put enormous effort into his attempt
to forge an American empire predicated on the expansion of commerce and global
influence, rather than slavery. Seward saw territorial expansion as the linchpin of
4
Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume II: The
American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 61.
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American greatness. “Empire moves far more rapidly than it did in ancient times…
mankind shall come to recognize in [the United States] the successor of the few great
states, which have alternately born commanding sway of the world.”5 Seward had
some reason to be optimistic about achieving his goals: his party held large majorities
in both houses of Congress, slavery no longer stood as an issue to block Republican
support of expansion, and the United States military was large and battle-hardened in
the wake of the Civil War.
Seward harbored nearly boundless ambitions for spreading American power
and political control. Although some of his imperial aspirations were less serious
than others, Seward took at least some official steps toward placing Alaska, Midway
Island, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, the Darien Islands, Hawaii, the Danish
West Indies, Santo Domingo, Haiti, Culebra, French Guiana, Tiger Island, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and St. Bartholomew under the flag of the United States.6 Only Alaska
and Midway were actually acquired during Seward’s tenure, but the general scope of
his strategic ambitions—to establish American hegemony in the Caribbean and to
gain footholds in the Pacific to reach the fabled China market—remained the
cornerstone of American imperialism until the First World War.
Midway Island, a tiny atoll west of Hawaii, was annexed without debate for
the simple reason that it was uninhabited and unclaimed. The purchase of Russia’s
American territory was thus the only significant realization of Seward’s expansionist
aims, and his difficulty in securing this purchase reveals many of the reasons why the
rest of his agenda went unfulfilled. Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska in
5
Quoted in Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 57.
6
Zakaria, 58–59.
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1867 for the price of $7.2 million; Russia, indebted after the Crimean War and fearful
of having to defend this territory in the case of another clash with Britain, was eager
to get rid of the land. Russian-American relationships at this period were quite
amiable, as the entrance of Russian fleets to New York and San Francisco in 1863
had been interpreted as a warning to other European powers to stay out of the Civil
War.
Furthermore, Alaska was located in a geopolitically important spot: its
purchase, Seward believed, would squeeze British Columbia between two territories
of the United States, and perhaps lead to eventual control of western Canada.7 The
Alaskan purchase would simultaneously cement the United States’ standing as the
dominant North American nation and provide a foothold to the continent beyond: one
of the treaty’s most influential Congressional supporters called Alaska’s Aleutian
Islands “a drawbridge between America and Asia.”8 But even with these catalysts to
its passage, the purchase of Alaska barely overcame Congressional opposition.
Charles Sumner, the powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, was initially hesitant about supporting the treaty, not because of his
opposition to continental expansion, but simply because he loathed Andrew
Johnson’s administration. Sumner held a deep desire for the United States to control
the entire North American continent; in 1869-70 he even quixotically proposed that
the British should compensate the U.S. for their actions during the Civil War by
handing over Canada immediately.9 Only with this kind of enormous ambition was
Sumner able to overcome his distaste for the executive branch. Seward’s plan met
7
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), 28–29.
8
Quoted in LaFeber, The New Empire, 29.
9
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 61.
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opposition in the Senate, with opponents of the treaty famously calling Alaska
“Seward’s ice-box” or “Seward’s folly,” but with Sumner’s support it was able to
pass.10
However, even after it met with the Senate’s approval, the House of
Representatives was hesitant to fund the purchase. It languished for a year before it
won the support of Thaddeus Stevens, the influential Speaker of the House; even with
his backing, the funds were approved only grudgingly, with the belief that Congress
had an obligation to pay for a treaty that it had agreed to. With great difficulty,
William Seward had realized a small but significant part of his expansionist goals.
However, the combination of legislative supremacy, the belief that the United States
still had enough open frontier to settle, and the pressing domestic concerns of
Reconstruction in general, foiled Seward’s incredibly ambitious foreign policy.11
The Grant administration’s failed attempt to annex the Dominican Republic
in 1870 is further evidence that domestic political concerns precluded empirebuilding during the Reconstruction years. Grant had much more leverage than his
predecessor in getting Congress to agree to his agenda: enjoying enormous
popularity, he had explicitly repudiated Seward’s expansionist program upon taking
office. But after Dominican President Buenaventura Baez, threatened by internal
political opponents, the possibility of a Haitian invasion, and European creditors,
offered to sell his country’s sovereignty for $1.5 million and the assumption of its
public debt, Grant seized the opportunity to expand the United States into the
10
11
Zakaria, 65.
Zakaria, 65–67.
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Caribbean. He stressed the voluntary nature of the annexation and gave strategic,
humanitarian, and abolitionist reasons to support it.12
Grant’s military background likely influenced his decision-making: a military
presence in the Caribbean would have enhanced the security of the United States,
allowing the projection of American naval power and helping protect the Gulf Coast
in the case of a future war with Europe. Territorial expansion into the Caribbean, the
former general said, would also be “a step toward [clearing] Europe [and] all
European flags from this Continent.”13 Grant also believed that annexation would
solve the twofold problem of slavery outside of the United States and the future of
free African Americans within. A Dominican economy guided by the United States
was to somehow outcompete the slave-made exports of Brazil and Cuba, making
“that hated system of enforced labor” unprofitable and eventually a thing of the
past.14 Grant also made the case for African-American emigration to the Dominican
Republic, careful to frame this concept in terms of voluntarism and benevolence.
“The colored man cannot be spared until his place is supplied, but with a refuge like
Santo Domingo his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive
such recognition as to induce him to stay: or if Providence designed that the two races
should not live together he would find a home in the Antilles.”15
The annexation treaty failed by a sizeable margin in the Senate, delivering
Grant a significant political setback in his first year in office. Racial anxieties were
12
Eric T.L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism & U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 35–43.
13
Quoted in Love, 44.
14
Quoted in Love, 45.
15
Quoted in Love, 45.
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one of the primary reasons why the treaty was defeated.16 Carl Schurz, a leading
Senatorial opponent of Dominican annexation and later a prominent opponent of the
Philippine War, was unwilling to renounce either the principles of republicanism or
of white supremacy. He told President Grant that he was “happy to act with [the]
administration whenever and wherever [he] conscientiously could,” but that
annexation “would be against the best interests of the Republic.”17
The same
reasoning and rhetoric that lay behind Schurz’s argument would be deployed decades
later by the anti-imperialist movement against Philippine annexation.
In short, acquisition and possession of such tropical countries with indigestible,
unassimilable populations would be highly obnoxious to the nature of our republican
system of government; it would greatly aggravate the racial problems we had already
to contend with; those tropical islands would, owing to their climatic conditions,
never be predominantly settled by people of Germanic blood.… This federative
republic could not without dangerously vitiating its principles, undertake to govern
them by force, while the populations inhabiting them could not be trusted with a
share of governing our country.18
Despite the imperial ambitions of Seward and Grant, territorial expansion during the
Reconstruction years was largely foiled. The executive branch simply did not have
enough authority to conduct foreign relations on its own terms, and Congress as a
whole was not particularly concerned with the issue of expansion. The central racial
issue arising from an imperialist policy—whether people of color in new territories
would be treated as equal citizens or as marginalized subjects—was not a topic that
politicians were eager to embrace. This issue returned during the burst of imperial
16
Love, 50–72.
Quoted in Love, 53.
18
Quoted in Love, 53–54.
17
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expansion in the late nineteenth century, but the acceptance of Jim Crow as a system
of institutionalized racial hierarchy within the United States made the subjugation of
people of color abroad a more natural extension of American foreign policy by that
point.
Congressional Republicans were generally wary of expanding the American
empire throughout the rest of North America or beyond its shores in the decades after
the Civil War, but the consolidation of the preexisting continental empire—that vast
land spreading from the Atlantic to the Pacific—was a paramount concern. While
this process was underway, the dream of an American empire with global reach was
deferred, but not abandoned. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the U.S.
economy became the world’s largest, propelled to no small extent by measured taken
by a Republican-controlled Congress during and after the Civil War. These measures
included a centralization of banking, protective tariffs for developing industries, the
Homestead Act encouraging speculation on and settlement in Western lands,
generous subsidies and loans to railways, the creation of agricultural colleges, and a
contract labor law which allowed employers to cheaply hire foreign laborers.19
The powerful corporations that arose in this era precipitated the rapid
economic growth of the United States by centralizing the nation’s economy while
increasing commerce abroad. Strong economic growth was punctuated, however, by
sharp periods of recession, and businessmen looked to integration with the world
economy as a means of stability.
The deep connection of North American
corporations to the economies of Cuba and Hawaii presaged and eventually
contributed to the political domination of those islands. The United States was so
19
LaFeber, The New Empire, 6–7.
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thoroughly entrenched in their economies by the 1890s that changes in North
American tariff schedules led to economic chaos and helped precipitate revolution.20
Furthermore, the widespread belief among the business elite that the United States
needed to open up more markets—particularly in China—to compensate for the
domestic overproduction of goods also had a profound influence in shaping
America’s rise as an imperial power.
After the Civil War, building the internal empire was given priority over
acquiring an external one; it should come as no surprise, therefore, that policymakers
began turning to the latter when the former task was believed to be completed.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis, which pronounced the end of “the
first period of American history,” cogently articulated this belief.21 As Theodore
Roosevelt told Turner in 1894, “I think you… have put into definite shape a good
deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.”22 Turner believed
that the settlement of Western lands had been the defining aspect of the history of the
United States, that “the frontier is the line of the most rapid and effective
Americanization,” providing a “perennial rebirth” of social institutions.
Turner
expected American politics and society to be fundamentally changed by the closing of
the frontier. Commenting on the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, he was not
at all surprised that this change came in the form of acquiring an overseas empire:
A cycle of American development has been completed…. [After the War of 1812
Americans] began the settlement and improvement of the vast interior of the country.
20
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 129.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” from The Turner
Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in America, George Rogers Taylor, ed. (Boston: D.C.
Heath and Company, 1956), 18.
22
Quoted in LaFeber, The New Empire, 64.
21
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Here was the field of our colonization, here the field of our political activity. This
process being completed, it is not strange that we find the United States again
involved in world-politics…. The insular wreckage of the Spanish War, Porto Rico
and the Philippines, with the problems presented by the Hawaiian Islands, Cuba, the
Isthmian Canal, and China, all are indications of the new direction of the ship of
state.… Having completed the conquest of the wilderness, and having consolidated
our interests, we are beginning to consider the relations of democracy and empire.23
The Reverend Josiah Strong shared Turner’s fascination with the frontier as the cradle
of the American character.
Strong’s Our Country, a tract which predicted a
Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, and global American empire and excoriated foreigners and
their supposed vices, resonated with the white Protestants to which it preached,
selling over 175,000 copies after it was first published in 1885. Individual chapters
were also republished in innumerable newspapers and pamphlets.24 Strong believed
that the West would soon become the dominant region in the United States, and soon
thereafter would become the seat of the most powerful empire in the world. “With
more than twice the room and resources of the East, the West will have probably
twice the population and wealth of the East, together with the superior power and
influence which… will direct the policy of the government.”25 Reflecting a common
contemporary belief that the seat of world power had perennially traveled west,
Strong predicted that the American West would become the final and permanent base
of a global empire:
The world’s scepter passed from Persia to Greece, from Greece to Italy, from Italy to
Great Britain, and from Great Britain the scepter is to-day departing. It is passing on
23
Frederick Jackson Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” from Taylor, 20.
Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and its Present Crisis, Revised Edition (Cambridge,
Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963, originally published 1891), ix.
25
Strong, 39.
24
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19
to “Greater Britain,” to our Mighty West, there to remain, for there is no further
West; beyond is the Orient. Like the star in the East which guided the three kings
with their treasures westward until at length it stood still over the cradle of the young
Christ, so the star of empire, rising in the East, has ever beckoned the wealth and
power of the nations westward, until to-day it stands still over the cradle of the
young empire of the West, to which the nations are bringing their offsprings.26
Strong described America as fundamentally Anglo-Saxon: nonwhites and immigrants
he considered as essentially only threats to his vision of the American character. Ever
the missionary, however, he saw the Anglo-Saxon as less an ethnicity and more a set
of beliefs and practices which could potentially be adopted by white outsiders. “The
marked superiority of this race is due, in large measure, to its highly mixed origin,”
he wrote. Because of America’s mixed ethnic origins, “there is abundant reason to
believe that the Anglo-Saxon race is to be, is, indeed, already becoming, more
effective here than in the mother country.”27
Strong saw Anglo-Saxons, and American Anglo-Saxons in particular, as
racially destined to control the world. “God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is
training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the world’s future.… If I
read not amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central
and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.”28
After the emergence of an American empire in 1898, the concept of American
“Anglo-Saxonism” came very much into vogue as a historical and cultural pretext for
26
Strong, 40.
Strong, 210.
28
Strong, 213.
27
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20
colonialism, with white Americans portrayed as ethnically destined to control other
races.29
Concurrent with this widespread belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority in the late
nineteenth century was the thorough entrenchment of white supremacist politics
throughout the country. In the South, the last decade of the nineteenth century saw
Jim Crow rise to its peak: African Americans were systematically excluded from
voting booths, the Supreme Court had affirmed the legality of segregation with Plessy
v. Ferguson, and white Americans lynched African Americans at a rate of one every
two and a half days.30 Chinese immigrants in California often faced brutal and
violent racism from nativists during this period, and starting in 1882 Chinese
immigration was severely restricted even as Americans were demanding more trading
rights in China.31 In the West, systematic wars against Native Americans who
resisted Manifest Destiny set social and legal precedents for the subsequent conquest
of the Philippines.32 Intolerance for people of color in the United States and the
desire to control and exploit such people abroad were two sides of the same coin.
Unsurprisingly, as a leading spokesman for “Anglo-Saxonism,” Josiah Strong
believed that the only real threat to American dominance over foreigners was the
presence of foreigners inside the United States.
In Our Country, Strong devoted many of his words to denouncing the “perils”
of immigration, Catholicism, Mormons, liquor, socialism, and secularized cities; he
linked the first to all of the latter except Mormonism. Immigrants were the central
29
Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 89–90.
30
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 49.
31
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 52.
32
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 53–59.
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21
threat to Strong’s vision of an American empire. “During the last ten years we have
suffered a peaceful invasion by an army more than four times as vast as the estimated
number of Goths and Vandals that swept over Southern Europe and overwhelmed
Rome. During the past hundred years fifteen million foreigners have made their
homes in the United States”33 Although Strong believed immigrants could eventually
assimilate to Anglo-Saxon culture, those who did not quickly conform to AngloSaxonism earned his bitter wrath.
The tension between the desires to assert American power abroad while
keeping the United States racially and socially homogenous was one of the central
dichotomies of American imperialism.
These two attitudes were simultaneously
reinforcing and antagonistic: each was premised on the notion of Anglo-Saxon
superiority, but to carry out one agenda would tend to undermine the other. This
tension provides a partial explanation of why, after a brief period of collecting formal
colonies at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States consistently adhered to
a policy of controlling the politics of other nations indirectly. The peril of Filipino
immigration—or citizenship in the United States—was a central point of antiimperialist agitation in the early twentieth century.
While Strong and Turner helped convince the public that the United States
needed to reorient its relationship with the rest of the world, other prominent writers
were engaged on a similar mission closer to the corridors of power. Brooks Adams
and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan both enjoyed the close confidence of Theodore
Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and later Albert Beveridge.34 These latter three were
33
34
Strong, 42.
LaFeber, The New Empire, 93.
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22
all accomplished historians, all fairly young, and all secular missionaries of American
power. Beveridge was only thirty-six when he entered the Senate in 1899; Roosevelt
became governor of New York at forty. At half a century, Lodge was the old man of
the group. They all listened closely to the intellectual arguments for imperialism.
Mahan’s theories of the importance of naval power to creating and maintaining
empire inspired the naval buildup that would be logistically necessary for the United
States to create an insular empire; Adams’ grandiose theories of history provided an
intellectual impetus for the United States to become a colonial power, lest it wither
away from a lack of “martial energy.”
Adams, the scion of an incredibly influential American family, was in some
ways the odd man out in this circle. His obsession with finding scientific precision in
macrohistorical trends led to some beliefs, such as a contempt for the gold standard
and a prediction of a global and maximally efficient state socialism, that were quite
unlike those of his Republican comrades. His most influential book, The Law of
Civilization and Decay, posited that a nation’s wealth is accumulated by the “martial
energy” of conquest, and then slowly drained by the centralization of capital. “In this
last stage of consolidation, the economic, and, perhaps, the scientific intellect is
propagated, while the imagination fades, and the emotional, the martial, and the
artistic types of manhood decay,” leading to social collapse.35
The Law of
Civilization and Decay was thus simultaneously an attack on the banking system for
undermining American civilization and a call to create an empire to alleviate this
decay. Predictably, Adams’ colleagues tended to be enamored with his intellectual
35
Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1943, originally published 1895), 60–61.
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23
grounding for imperialism while shying away from his other ideas.
Theodore
Roosevelt, whose belief in “the strenuous life” mirrored Adams’ notion of “martial
energy,” had the “warmest admiration for the book,” but “emphatically dissented
from parts of his thesis.”36
While Adams provided a theoretical framework with which the United States
could justify imperialism, Alfred Mahan focused on the logistics of empire. Mahan’s
study of history led him to the conclusion that control of the seas was a prerequisite to
dominance in commerce and empire, and his classic The Influence of Sea Power upon
History, 1660–1783 provided a host of examples to back his point. Written in 1890,
Mahan’s work urged the expansion of the United States Navy to protect American
commercial interests. He reversed the assumption of the oceans as barriers between
the United States and the rest of the world, instead characterizing the sea as “a great
highway; or better, perhaps… a wide common, over which men may pass in all
directions.”37 Mahan also took special note of the geopolitical importance of the
Caribbean, and believed that once an isthmian canal was built that it would become
“one of the great highways of the world,” on par with the Mediterranean Sea.38
Given the state of the Navy in 1890, however, Mahan was pessimistic about
the chances of the United States becoming the dominant nation on the world’s oceans.
Doubtful of the military control that the United States could exert in the Caribbean
with control of only the Gulf coast, Mahan urged the taking of naval bases throughout
36
Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, November 28, 1896, from Henry Cabot Lodge, ed.,
Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918, Vol.
I (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 240.
37
Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1957, originally published 1890), 22.
38
Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 29.
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24
the Caribbean. However, he doubted this would happen because “a peaceful, gainloving nation is not far-sighted, and far-sightedness is needed for adequate military
preparation, especially in these days.”39 Mahan believed that Americans would have
the national character to colonize if they only abandoned their adversity to expansion.
“If legislative hindrances be removed,” then the American “instinct for commerce,
bold enterprise in the pursuit of gain, and a keen scent for the trails that lead to it”
would lead to successful colonization.40
Mahan’s arguments resonated with policymakers in Washington, accelerating
a naval buildup that had begun in the 1880s. Prior to this buildup, the U.S. fleet was
in disarray, comprised mainly of aging Civil War vessels, most of which couldn’t
even fire a gun.41 Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812, written in 1882 at
the age of twenty-three, complained bitterly that “the necessity for an efficient navy is
so evident that only our almost incredible short-sightedness prevents our at once
preparing one.”42 A few years later Roosevelt wrote Henry Cabot Lodge that “we are
actually at the mercy of a tenth rate country like Chili [sic].”43 By 1890, the Navy
was comparably stronger, but still smaller than those of European powers, ranking
just behind Italy’s in terms of size.44 Mahan’s influence in affecting American
foreign policy was much more tangible than the contributions provided by other
intellectuals: after The Influence of Sea Power upon History was published, Congress
39
Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 29–30, 23.
Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 50.
41
LaFeber, The New Empire, 58–60. LaFeber describes the 1880 navy as “a flotilla of death traps and
defenseless antiques.”
42
Theodore Roosevelt, The Naval War of 1812 (New York: The Modern Library, 1999, originally
published 1882), xxvii.
43
Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, January 22, 1888, from Selections from the
Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Vol. I, 63.
44
Zakaria, 47.
40
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accelerated the expansion of the Navy and began to authorize the building of 15,000ton battleships.45
Collectively, writers such as Mahan, Brooks, Strong, and Turner provided an
intellectual basis for the transformation of the United States into an imperial power,
engaging both popular audiences and the attention of policymakers such as Roosevelt.
These writers reflected a growing imperialist impulse within the United States, one
that became suddenly manifest in the wake of the war with Spain. As Mahan wrote
in 1900, “though staggered for an instant by a proposition so entirely unexpected and
novel as Asiatic domination, the long view had done its work of preparation; and the
short view, the action necessary at the minute, imposed primarily and inevitably by
the circumstances of the instant, found no serious difficulty of acceptance, so far as
concerned the annexation of the Philippines—the widest sweep, in space, of our
national extension.”46
By the early 1890s, it became apparent to keen observers such as Rizal or
Martí that the United States would likely join the Europe powers in the global
scramble for empire. Not only was the intellectual basis of empire, the “long view,”
becoming manifest, but concrete indicators that the United States would soon pursue
an empire were emerging. The foreign policy objectives during the last decades of
the nineteenth century were inconsistent and haphazard, but their general direction
was toward an affirmation of America’s global power. Policies oriented toward
increasing American influence in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific were
45
LaFeber, The New Empire, 85.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effect upon International Policies (Boston:
Little, Brown, and Company, 1900), 8–9.
46
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26
counterbalanced only by an uncertainty as to what form this new influence should
take, and a hesitancy to become entangled in those European quarrels that George
Washington had warned of.
Prior to 1898, the United States’ imperialist policies in the Pacific were the
most pronounced, foreshadowing American policy after the war with Spain.
Although William Seward’s attempt to economically dominate Hawaii with a
reciprocity treaty in 1867 proved fruitless, a similar treaty passed in 1876,
dramatically accelerating Hawaii’s transformation into a plantation economy closely
bound to the United States. American missionaries had exerted a powerful influence
in Hawaii for decades before the reciprocity treaty was passed, converting the
Hawaiian ruling class to Christianity and helping abolish traditional land tenure in
favor of private holdings. The treaty greatly amplified the American influence in the
archipelago: in the four years after it was signed, the number of plantations in Hawaii
tripled, with Americans owning two-thirds of all sugar property. Over the next
several decades, the loss of Hawaiian control of Hawaii continued unabated,
culminating in the white elite’s ouster of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. 47
One of the more notable steps in this process was the 1886 renewal of the
reciprocity treaty, which granted the United States exclusive access to Pearl Harbor.
President Grover Cleveland fought vigorously for renewal and the inclusion of Pearl
Harbor, overcoming a well-organized lobby of domestic sugar interests; in Hawaii,
King Kalakaua opposed the renewal of the treaty and the offer of Pearl Harbor, but
foreign planters successfully pressured him into accepting them.
Cleveland’s
historical reputation has generally marked him as an anti-expansionist: his most
47
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 91–92.
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27
notable foreign policy achievements were his rejection of the outright annexation of
Hawaii in 1893 and his vigorous opposition to the Philippine War after his
presidency. But Cleveland only had a more limited view of what an expansionist
policy should look like. He did not believe in territorial expansion, but concurred
with the viewpoint that the United States should economically dominate strategically
important countries, build up its navy, and acquire bases on foreign shores.48
Cleveland’s response to an 1895 border dispute between Venezuela and
British Guyana provides a further example of his support for spreading American
hegemony, if not formal empire. During the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine
signified Latin America as a region of special importance to the United States;
however, British interests in the region precluded the United States from becoming a
singularly dominating foreign power.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, for
example, prevented either country from unilaterally controlling an isthmian canal.
But by the closing years of the nineteenth century, the United States was beginning to
presume a role as the final arbiter in Latin American politics, nearly going to war with
Britain over the drawing of a remote foreign border that had been disputed for
decades.
After years of lobbying the United States to back its claim over the gold-laden
mouth of the Orinoco River and the scarcely inhabited region to its east, the
Venezuelan government’s efforts finally paid off in July 1895 when Cleveland’s
Secretary of State, Richard Olney, wrote a strongly worded memorandum to Great
Britain concerning the boundary.49 Olney pressed for arbitration of the border and
48
49
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 92–93; Zakaria, 141–145.
Zakaria, 148–149.
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28
informed his British counterpart that “today the United States is practically sovereign
on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its
interposition… because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources
combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically
invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”50 After Britain dismissed Olney’s
message, President Cleveland was furious, describing British encroachments into
Venezuela “as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests,” and stating, “in
making these recommendations I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred and
keenly realize all the consequences that may follow.”51
Theodore Roosevelt, following these events closely, was practically giddy
about the possibility of a martial conflict, and saw the Venezuela Crisis as an
opportunity to expand his nation’s territory:
I am very much pleased with the President’s or rather with Olney’s message. I think
the immense majority of our people will back him…. Personally, I hope the fight
will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country
needs a war.… I don’t care whether our sea coast cities are bombarded or not; we
would take Canada.52
Initially, Cleveland’s bellicose stance toward the dispute did win the support of the
public. However, as it started to look as if the United States might actually go to war
with one of the most powerful countries in the world over the demarcation of a far-off
border, this sentiment evaporated, much to Roosevelt’s chagrin. Similarly, the British
50
Secretary Olney’s Note regarding the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute, July 20, 1895, from The
Diplomacy of World Power: The United States, 1889–1921, Arthur S. Link and William M. Leary, Jr.,
eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 54.
51
Quoted in Zakaria, 50–51.
52
Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, December 20, 1895 and December 27, 1895, from
Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Vol. I, 200, 204–
205.
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29
public did not want to go to war with the United States over such a relatively trivial
issue, and both sides ultimately backed down, resorting to arbitration. The United
States did not protest when the arbitration panel gave most of the disputed land to
British Guyana; the North Americans had won the issue at the heart of the dispute,
recognition of the United States’ right to unilaterally intervene in Latin American
politics (The United States did not even consult Venezuela during the year-and-a-half
long crisis).53 On the whole, the incident reflected the growing but still unclear role
the United States was beginning to assume in international politics.
The United States’ policy in Samoa was similarly marked by an uncertainty
over how far American influence should extend. In 1872, Commander Richard W.
Meade signed a treaty with Samoan chieftains offering an American protectorate in
exchange for a lease on the harbor of Pago Pago. The Samoans, fearing British and
German as well as American interest in their islands, sought to play the powers
against each other. The U.S. Senate, interesting in acquiring Pago Pago but wary of
establishing a protectorate, rejected this treaty but passed a similar one five years
later, offering American goodwill and diplomatic support but not an outright
protectorate. By the late 1880s, conflicting interests with Britain and Germany and
the specter of hostilities that might arise from the dispute led to the American
involvement in a round of European diplomacy, resulting in a tripartite protectorate
over Samoa.54
53
Zakaria, 151–152. The U.S. ambassador to Britain, Thomas Bayard, scoffed at the notion that “the
issues of peace or war between the two Trustees of Civilization—the U.S. and Great Britain—should
in any degree be made to depend upon the decision or conduct of such a menagerie as a Venezuelan
government.” Quoted in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward
Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 107.
54
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 88–91; Zakaria, 76–77.
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The buildup to the American declaration of war against Spain shared many of
the features that had nearly propelled the United States into hostilities with Germany
and Britain over Samoa and later against Britain over Venezuela, but on a greatly
magnified scale. The belief that a foreign power was acting unjustly in an area
perceived to be within the American sphere of influence, in conjunction with the
mysterious sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, a series of diplomatic
miscalculations, and a sense of outraged humanitarianism fanned by sensationalist
journalism, made war nearly inevitable after the Cuban Revolution broke out in 1895.
The fact that the remaining portions of Spain’s decayed empire happened to be in the
Caribbean and the Pacific, the two most pertinent areas of American interest, added a
geostrategic imperative that gave an imperialistic direction to an otherwise inchoate
jingoistic attitude.
An alliance of humanitarians and expansionists resulted in a broad spectrum
of support within the United States for intervention in Cuba, but it was the
expansionist faction that shaped American policy in the aftermath of the war. And
with these first few bites of an insular empire, expansionists went into a feeding
frenzy during the next few years, demanding control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines,
and Guam from a defeated Spain, placing Cuba under the suzerainty of the United
States, annexing Hawaii and eastern Samoa, and sending troops to quash the antiforeign uprising in China.
Although the foreign policy of the United States in 1898 was dramatically
different than it had been some three decades beforehand, this change was
evolutionary, not a sudden burst of nationalistic fervor. The change in foreign policy
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31
was swift, but the process of molding attitudes hospitable to empire had been constant
and ongoing. Several historians, beginning with Richard Hofstadter, have explained
American policy in 1898 as the product of a loosely defined “psychic crisis,” in
which psychological turmoil resulting from the devastating economic depression of
1893 led to a sudden surge of imperialist sentiment.55
Robert Dallek succinctly
characterizes this interpretation: “The reasons for going to war [with Spain], the way
in which the country fought and the decision to take colonies at the close of the
fighting… [were] more the product of troubles at home than of opportunities
abroad.”56 This argument, however, fails to account for the steady rise of imperialist
thought and action throughout the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and fails to
explain why the economic tumult of 1893 led to a more aggressive foreign policy
while previous and subsequent recessions did not. The Panic of 1893 might have
marginally increased public support for a policy of imperialism, but it did little to
actually direct American foreign policy in that direction.
Kristen Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood provides a thoughtful
attempt to bridge the gap between gender studies and diplomatic history, arguing that
the “psychic crisis” was actually a crisis in American masculinity. She argues that, as
the economic depression of the 1890s prevented men from meeting “the basic male
obligation of providing for their families,” proponents of expansion “relied on a
commitment to fostering manhood in the United States” by linking war and empire to
55
Richard Hofstadter, “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny,” from The Paranoid Style in
American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965)
56
Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 4.
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32
manly virtues.57 . The masculinity crisis was furthered by the increasing presence of
women in the political sphere, and a desire to emulate the ebbing generation of men
who had settled the frontier and fought in the Civil War.58 The language of manliness
was quite common in the oratory of American imperialists; as Albert Beveridge
declared during a speech glorifying the annexation of the Philippines,
The Republic’s young men are the most virile and unwasted of the world and they
pant for enterprise worthy of their power…. Rebellion against the authority of the
flag must be crushed without delay, for hesitation encourages revolt; and without
anger, for the turbulent children know not what they do. And the civilization must
be organized, administered, and maintained…. A hundred wildernesses are to be
subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled.
Unmastered forests must be felled. Unriven mountains must be torn asunder, and
their riches of iron and gold and ores of price must be delivered to the world.59
Beveridge’s contrast of America’s “young men” with Filipino “children”—not to
mention his sexually laden imagery of subduing, penetrating, violating, and mastering
virgin lands—makes it pretty clear that there was a link between the concepts of
manliness and expansionist warfare.
But the themes of spreading Anglo-Saxon
civilization and mastering unknown and unused lands had a long history in the
American language of expansion. Hoganson’s argument about a crisis in masculinity,
like other variations of the “psychic crisis” argument, fails to convincingly account
for the long-term trends in attitudes toward expansion and empire in the United
57
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the SpanishAmerican and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 9.
58
Hoganson, 11–12.
59
Albert J. Beveridge, For the Greater Republic, not for Imperialism, (Unpublished pamphlet: Address
at the Union League of Philadelphia, February 15, 1899) 3, 10.
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33
States, and her analysis of the relationship between concepts of gender and foreign
policy seems artificially limited to too short a time frame.
The rhetoric of manifest destiny that had driven American territorial
expansion in the nineteenth century was not a far cry from the calls for global empire
that accompanied the beginning of the twentieth.
Many historians, echoing the
argument that American foreign policy at the turn of the twentieth century was rooted
in a temporary loss of self-confidence, have argued that formal imperialism has been
largely irreconcilable with American idealism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for example,
has characterized American imperialism as “spasms of jingoistic outrage” without
“sustained demand for empire.”60 But the concepts and racial ideology that abetted
the expansion of the United States to the Pacific easily transferred to the rhetoric of
building an empire across the Pacific. Empire was a natural step for policymakers to
take in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. As J.A. Hobson wrote in his
influential contemporary study of imperialism, the Philippine War was no “mere wild
freak of spread-eaglism.”61 The fact that further colonial expansion did not take place
after the Philippine War reflects its geopolitical failures as much as public
dissatisfaction with imperialism. American imperialism, in the formal sense, was
short-lived not because it was spasmodic but because it was unsuccessful.
60
Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Pursuit of Power,” from Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds.,
Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume 1: To 1920, Fourth Edition (Lexington,
Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 15.
61
J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965, originally
published 1902), 74.
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34
Fighting Just One Tribe Out of Sixty
The Unexpected Colonial War
In the fall of 1899, Secretary of War Elihu Root had two major problems
facing him. The first was the war in the Philippines, which had been raging for over
half a year. The second was providing an explanation for why, contrary to both the
public statements and private beliefs of the McKinley administration, prolonged
hostilities between Americans and Filipinos had broken out in the first place. The
first problem was the more intractable one: it would take years, thousands of
American lives, and the adoption of brutal counterinsurgency tactics before the anticolonial rebellion in the archipelago could be fully suppressed. Root had an easier
solution for the second problem, at least in the short term: he could just deny that the
war was occurring to any significant extent. Abetted by the rigid censorship in
Manila, Root and other advocates of the colonial policy systematically
underrepresented the extent of the “insurrection” in the Philippines, insisting
throughout the entirety of the war that the violent opposition to American sovereignty
in the archipelago only represented the actions of a small, ignorant minority. Root,
like many of his contemporaries, believed that creating an American Empire would
be a simple process entailing few military difficulties; three years of intense fighting
in the Philippines, however, would ultimately turn policymakers away from formal
imperialism as a means of projecting American influence.
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35
“Against whom are we fighting? Are we fighting the Philippine nation?”
Root asked an audience in Chicago. The Philippines was not a nation, he insisted, but
merely a collection of “hundreds of islands, inhabited by more than sixty tribes,
speaking more than sixty different languages, and all but one… ready to accept
American sovereignty.” American soldiers were being sent to fight “only the single
tribe of the Tagalos [sic], who inhabit less than one-half of the single island of
Luzon.” Even among that single tribe, Root insisted, “the vast majority… want
peace, law, order, and are ready and anxious for the protective government of the
United States.” Tagalogs who acceded to American domination were “the men of
intelligence among them;” the minority of that one tribe out of sixty that opposed the
US were bandits, “men who prefer a life of brigandage to a life of industry.”1 Root
systematically misunderstood and misrepresented the embryonic nationalism that was
driving the Filipinos’ fight for independence.
Subsequent events did not change Root’s public explanation of the far-off
war’s causes. After another year of warfare, he toed the same line. In October of
1900, he told a crowd in Canton, Ohio, that within three months of the arrival of
American reinforcements in 1899, “the insurgent army and the insurgent government
ceased to exist, and we hold all the islands which were subject to Spanish rule without
opposition, save from fugitive bands, half guerilla and half bandit, who are shooting
our men from ambush, and blackmailing, and pillaging, and murdering their own
countrymen.” To press his point, Root even invented a wildly revisionist history of
the Philippine revolution against Spanish rule, insisting that “that insurrection had not
1
Elihu Root, “The American Soldier,” from The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States:
Addresses and Reports by Elihu Root, Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott, eds. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1916), 9.
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36
been a struggle for independence, and the people of the Philippine Islands had never
in their history demanded or sought independence from Spain, or the surrender of
Spanish sovereignty.” Emilio Aguinaldo, the Philippine independence leader who
had briefly allied with the United States during the war against Spain, was
characterized as the leader of “a band of adventurers… with truly Oriental treachery
in their hearts.”2
In reality Root almost certainly knew the situation in the Philippines better
than his public statements would suggest.
He was doubtless aware that public
sentiment in the Philippines was decidedly against American occupation, and that the
warfare was not simply the reactionary banditry of a small portion of a minority
group. The commanding American officer in the Philippines, Arthur MacArthur, had
cabled the War Department in June, arguing the impossibility of reducing troop
levels. “As a consequence of persistently following a policy of dissemination this
army now widely scattered is uniformly weak everywhere, and the strain on the
troops has reached the full limit.
The archipelago is overrun, but not a single
province reached has been pacified,” MacArthur wrote. He added, “In sentiment the
natives are a unit against us.” The general was confident that with sufficient time and
force, Filipinos would give into American demands, but this acceptance would only
represent “motives of self-interest” on the part of Filipinos, and not any genuine
acceptance of American promises of benevolence or civilizing influence.3
2
Root, “The United States and the Philippines,” from Military and Colonial Policy, 31–39.
Report of Arthur MacArthur to Washington, received June 24, 1900, from United States AdjutantGeneral’s Office, Correspondence Relating to the War with Spain, Including the Insurrection in the
Philippine Islands and the China Relief Expedition, April 15, 1898, to July 30, 1902, Vol. I.
(Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1993), 417.
3
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37
Minimizing the apparent size of the war in the Philippines and denying the
legitimacy of the short-lived Philippine Republic were essential for maintaining the
two central myths on which imperialists based their logic for colonialism. The first
myth was that the American presence was benevolent and welcomed by Filipinos, a
notion that was clearly at odds with the bloodletting that was occurring in the islands.
The second was the idea that American imperialism was a passive occurrence, that
the archipelago had been thrust by God into the hands of the United States, and that
Filipino incapacity for self-government necessitated American rule. Supporters of
William McKinley’s colonial policy had long sought to expand American military
and economic influence across the Pacific into Asia, and this narrative implied that in
doing so, in joining the European scramble for global real estate, the United States
was merely following its destiny. However, after three years of a difficult and
unexpected colonial war, policymakers reassessed the best way to project American
power abroad, becoming more comfortable with a policy of informal imperialism that
involved the political and economic domination of nominally sovereign countries.
The expansion of American economic and military power across the Pacific
clearly motivated most advocates of William McKinley’s Philippine policy, but the
president himself justified his actions with a more humanitarian rhetoric. Addressing
a group of Methodist church leaders, the characteristically cautious McKinley
articulated imperialism to be a policy driven by Christian brotherliness and selfsacrifice, rather than cold, calculated self-interest:
I have been criticized a good deal about the Philippines, but don’t deserve it. The
truth is I didn’t want the Philippines, and when they came to us, as a gift from the
gods, I did not know what to do with them.… I sought counsel from all sides—
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38
Democrats as well as Republicans—but got little help. I thought first we would take
only Manila; then Luzon; then other islands perhaps also. I walked the floor of the
White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you,
gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and
guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way… that we
could not give them back to Spain… that we could not leave them to themselves—
they were unfit for self-government… [and] that there was nothing left for us to do
but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and
Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.4
McKinley’s supporters echoed his sentiments concerning the Filipino incapacity for
self-government, to the extent that his administration seemed willfully blind to
Filipino nationalism. Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune and one of the
five commissioners sent to Paris to negotiate peace with Spain, shared with McKinley
an initial ambivalence about taking the predominantly Muslim southern Philippines; it
was not until after Reid’s conversation with John Foreman, author of an 1890
English-language history of the Philippines, that he noted in his diary that annexing
Mindanao would be “a far less difficult problem than had been supposed.” Foreman
also convinced Reid that the central islands of the Visayas “would be quite as easy to
manage as the inhabitants of Luzon itself.”5 Reid presumed a hierarchy of resistance
based primarily on religion and secondarily on supposed “savagery.” Nationalist
sentiment and revolt against Spanish rule, concentrated in but not exclusive to the
Philippines’ most populous island, did not fit into this hierarchy. Reid came to the
4
Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relations,
Volume 1: To 1920, Fourth Edition (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 424.
5
Whitelaw Reid, Making Peace with Spain: The Diary of Whitelaw Reid, September-December, 1898,
H. Wayne Morgan, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 64.
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39
negotiating table with the honest belief that any resistance to American rule on
nationalist grounds would be minimal or nonexistent.
Reid and other backers of the colonial policy were given ample forewarnings
of the resistance that would accompany conquest, yet seemed to ignore the evidence
that did not fit their preconceptions. When Felipe Agoncillo, Aguinaldo’s foreign
minister, arrived at the Paris conference to speak on behalf of his government and the
people of the Philippines, he was summarily ignored by all parties and was not
allowed even to issue a statement. The American peace commissioners dismissed the
possibility of Aguinaldo’s government ever wielding any real political power. The
overly optimistic opinions of the American military leadership in the Philippines had
something to do with this sentiment: General Wesley Merritt, appointed as temporary
Military Governor of the Philippines after the Battle of Manila, informed the
commission of his opinion that Aguinaldo could simply be bought off with a minor
post.6
The peace commission’s dismissal of Aguinaldo’s government as potentially
either a legitimate state or a serious obstacle to empire can find its roots in the actions
and words of some of the key players in the initial stages of the American occupation.
The U.S. Consul to Manila, Oscar F. Williams, wrote to the State Department shortly
after Admiral George Dewey’s rout of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay, pressing an
annexationist agenda. He repeatedly told his superiors in Washington how easy it
would be to occupy and govern the Philippines. “Few United States troops will be
needed for conquest and fewer still for occupancy,” he wrote, because “all natives, all
6
Reid, 81, 178.
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40
foreigners other than Spanish, and certain Spaniards in mercantile and retired life will
aid us to every extent.”7
In arguing for annexation, Williams went beyond inordinately optimistic
reporting about the ease of acquiring the Philippines into the realm of outright
duplicity. “The natives are eager to be organized and led by United States officers,”
he told Washington, “and the members of their cabinet visited me and gave assurance
that all would swear allegiance to and cheerfully follow our flag.”8
This
unsubstantiated story provides an ironic counterpoint to Emilio Aguinaldo’s claim
that, during his initial encounter with Admiral Dewey, the Philippines were promised
independence, a claim that later was emphatically denied by the Americans.9 Despite
his hollow assertion of Aguinaldo pledging allegiance, Williams was one of very few
annexationists who, in the early period, considered Aguinaldo’s government to be
militarily and intellectually respectable, but the comments that he sent to Paris
expressing this sentiment were ridiculed.10
The actions of Aguinaldo and Dewey in the aftermath of Dewey’s victory
reflect a convergence of military interests tempered by an uncertainty on both sides
about what the ultimate result of the American military presence in the Philippines
would be. Shortly after the Battle of Manila Bay, Dewey sent an American ship to
transport Aguinaldo from exile in Hong Kong to the Philippines, giving the insurgent
leader some captured Spanish rifles and old American guns, but allegedly without
7
Report of Oscar F. Williams, US Consul to Manila, to the State Department, from the cruiser
Baltimore, Manila Bay, May 12, 1898, from John R.M. Taylor, The Philippine Insurrection Against
the United States: A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction (Pasay City, Philippines:
Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971), 485.
8
Williams to the State Department, from Taylor, 485.
9
David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 41.
10
Reid, 58; “Manila Consul Returns,” The New York Times, December 5, 1899.
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41
giving him any explicit political recognition.11
In the next few months, as
Aguinaldo’s forces surrounded the city of Manila and drove the Spanish from the rest
of the archipelago, Americans and Filipinos continued their tenuous relationship,
allies without an alliance.
While Aguinaldo was negotiating with other Filipino leaders about setting up
an independent government, Admiral Dewey neither formally supported nor opposed
the nascent regime, simply letting Aguinaldo know that “I consider insurgents as
friends, being opposed to a common enemy.” In control of the seas surrounding the
archipelago, Dewey allowed the Filipino rebels to “pass by water recruits, arms and
ammunition, and to take such Spanish arms and ammunition from the arsenal as…
needed.”12 The admiral established somewhat of a rapport with the Filipino rebels, to
the point where Aguinaldo updated him regularly on his political and military plans in
the initial months after his return.13
Despite his regular contact with Aguinaldo, Dewey followed his orders “not to
have political alliances with the insurgents or any faction in the islands that would
incur liability to maintain their cause in the future.”14 When a German admiral asked
Dewey if he recognized a flying Philippine flag, he replied that the Filipinos “have no
government,” and that the flag was just “a little bit of bunting that anybody could
hoist.”15 Regardless of his non-recognition of the Philippine Republic, made explicit
11
Nathan Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical
Foundation, 1947), 57-59.
12
Report of Admiral Dewey to Secretary of Navy John Long, Hong Kong, June 27, 1898, from
Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 61.
13
Report of Admiral Dewey, from Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 61.
14
John Long to Admiral George Dewey, Washington, May 26, 1898, from Admiral Dewey and the
Manila Campaign, 60–61.
15
Testimony of Admiral George Dewey to the US Senate, January 1902, from American Imperialism
and the Philippine Insurrection: Testimony taken from Hearings on Affairs in the Philippine Islands
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42
to international observers and less clearly to Filipinos, Dewey seemed to believe that
Filipinos would be able to conduct their own political affairs. “These people are far
superior in their intelligence and more capable of self-government than the natives of
Cuba,” he wrote Washington, “and I am familiar with both races.”16
American diplomats in Southeast Asia also nurtured friendly relations with
their temporary allies, hinting at but not promising Philippine independence. The
American consul to Hong Kong wrote Aguinaldo that “the United States undertook
this war for the sole purpose of relieving the Cubans from the cruelties under which
they were suffering and not for the love of conquests or the hope of gain. They are
actuated by precisely the same feelings for the Filipinos.”17 Coming on the heels of
McKinley’s declaration on the eve of the Spanish-American War that “forcible
annexation” of Cuba “would be criminal aggression,” and the Teller Amendment that
gave legislative substance to this sentiment, the Filipino leadership initially had
reason to be optimistic about the American military presence.18
Aguinaldo told his troops that “the great North American nation, the cradle of
liberty,” was “the friend to our people.” As he organized the Philippine revolutionary
government and army after his return to the Philippines, he sang the praises of the
United States, perhaps to convince the Americans to recognize their fellow republic,
perhaps to convince himself of the United States’ good intentions. “America has
before the Senate Committee on the Philippines, edited by Henry F. Graff (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1969), 4.
16
Report of Admiral Dewey to Secretary of Navy John Long, Hong Kong, June 27, 1898, from
Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 61.
17
Consul Wildman to Emilio Aguinaldo, quoted in Moorfield Storey and Marcial P. Lichauco, The
Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–1925. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926),
46.
18
William McKinley’s Special Message to Congress, April 11, 1898, from Arthur S. Link and William
M. Leary, Jr., eds., The Diplomacy of World Power: The United States, 1889–1920 (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1970), 21.
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43
come to us manifesting a protection as decisive as it is undoubtedly disinterested
toward our inhabitants, considering us as sufficiently civilized and capable of
governing for ourselves our unfortunate country,” he told his troops a few weeks after
Dewey’s victory.19 But this optimism and good will did not last for long.
In the months after the American military began occupying the city of Manila
proper, the ultimate purpose of the occupation gradually became clearer, and Filipino
sentiment toward the Americans waned from friendliness to suspicion to downright
hostility. The Philippine Army of Liberation surrounded the outskirts of Manila; the
American military was based within. Tensions between these two armies mounted
quickly. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a British barrister traveling through Southeast
Asia at the time, recalled being told by one of Aguinaldo’s aides-de-camp that
We have been led by America and her representatives to believe that we should have
our freedom. If America has changed her mind or her policy, and desires to seize
our country, well, she can have it; but not till she has killed every man of our
people—we love life, but without freedom we prefer death. The Americans call us
niggers, because our skins are browned, but if we niggers desired to take Manila, all
that would be necessary would be to roll into the city sufficient whiskey, wait until
the soldiers consumed it – which would not take them long – and then enter the
city.20
American military officials during this period vacillated between reassuring the
neighboring army of their good intentions and beginning to implement the imperialist
policy that Washington had decided upon. When President McKinley pronounced his
19
Quoted in Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the
Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 37.
20
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, “The Filipino Martyrs: Story of the Crime of February 4, 1899,” from
Eyewitness Accounts in 1900 of the Philippine Revolution, the Filipino-American War and the U.S.
Occupation of the Philippines by a French Journalist and a British Observer (Manila: Trademark
Publishing Corporation, 1998), 70.
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44
policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” to the Philippines in December of 1898, General
Elwell Otis, the top-ranking American military commander in the Philippines,
hesitated at publicizing his statement and redacted any portions that directly stated
that the United States would control the archipelago.
I concluded that there were certain words and expressions therein, such as
‘sovereignty,’ ‘right of cession,’ and those which directed immediate occupation,
etc., which, though most admirably employed and tersely expressive of actual
conditions, might be advantageously used by the Tagalo war-party to incite
widespread hostilities among the natives. The ignorant classes had been taught to
believe that certain words, as ‘sovereignty,’ ‘protection,’ etc., had peculiar meaning
disastrous to their welfare and significant of future political domination.21
Another American general had simultaneously published McKinley’s proclamation in
full, leaving the official messages of the President of the United States and his top
representative in the Philippines at odds and thereby fueling further the sentiment of
American hypocrisy.22 Regardless, the Filipino leadership knew that the United
States would be a formidable opponent, and was willing to overlook repeated snubs to
find a non-military solution to the standoff. Desperate to avoid war, by early 1899
Aguinaldo sought to reach a diplomatic compromise while still preparing for the
inevitable.
Although previously snubbed at the Paris peace negotiations, Felipe
Agoncillo tried repeatedly to ease the tensions between the American and Filipino
armies. He wrote to John Hay, the U.S. Secretary of State, that “in the present
strained position at Manila the impetuous action of a Filipino, or the over-zeal of an
21
Report of General Elwell S. Otis, August 31, 1899, quoted in The Cause of the Philippine War,
Demonstrated by the Report of Gen. E.S. Otis (Boston: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1900),
3.
22
George Frisbie Hoar, Our Duty to the Philippines (Boston: New England Anti-Imperialist League,
1900), 12.
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45
American soldier, might create a condition resulting in grievous loss of life,” and
urged that diplomatic negotiations immediately take place between the two sides. 23
Agoncillo was once again ignored.
In sharp contrast to the policies pursued in the Caribbean basin in the decades
after the war in the Philippines, policymakers summarily rejected the possibility of
negotiating with the Philippine government and turning the islands into an American
protectorate. Aguinaldo and other leaders of the Philippine Republic, wary of other
powers such as Germany or Japan that might threaten an independent Philippines,
wishing to consolidate their political power, and eager to create a political
compromise with the United States, were open to this possibility. While the Treaty of
Paris was being debated in the United States Senate in late 1898 and early 1899,
Aguinaldo proposed an association with the United States that would allow for a
continued American military presence, American control of Filipino ports and
customs houses, and a large role for American advisers in a Philippine government
that controlled only its domestic affairs.24 Although this arrangement would have led
to the Untied States asserting a forceful sort of informal imperialism in the
Philippines, it was declined in favor of formal empire.
Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the most influential and outspoken proponents of
McKinley’s Philippine policy in the Senate, broadly rejected any sort of American
protectorate for the archipelago, instead preferring an indefinite American occupation
and administration. Echoing the notion that the widespread Philippine rebellion was
23
Felipe Agoncillo to the US Secretary of State, Washington D.C., January 24, 1899, from Memorials
from Senor Felipe Agoncillo and Constitution of the Provisional Philippine Government (Boston:
Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), 3.
24
Sheridan, 67.
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46
actually just the banditry of a particularly contumacious tribe, he told his Senatorial
colleagues that creating a protectorate for the Philippine Republic would be to
“enforce [Aguinaldo’s] rule upon the other eighty-three tribes and upon all the other
islands, and then protect him from foreign interference.”
Indirect American
domination of the Philippines “would involve us in endless wars with the natives and
keep us embroiled with other nations,” and would entail “responsibility without
power.”
Lodge favored permanent annexation, and believed that any American
promise of future Philippine independence would “look well in print and keep
insurrection and disorder alive.”25
Once the possibility of a protectorate was
excluded, the only alternatives in early 1899 were legislative defeat of McKinley’s
policies or a war of conquest in the Philippines.
The widespread notion that
Philippine nationalists would quickly succumb to the American military was badly at
odds with reality.
Given the political reality of the situation, soldiers on both sides could see that
war was inevitable, yet a tense period existed where the leaders of neither army
actually wanted to begin hostilities. On the Filipino side, the perception of the United
States as a peaceful, liberal republic, once championed by Aguinaldo, gave way to an
image of America as a bloodthirsty, racist country. Two American naval officers
recorded the impression “that we have mercilessly slain and finally exterminated the
race of Indians that were native to our soil and that we went to war in 1861 to
25
Henry Cabot Lodge, The Retention of the Philippine Islands, Speech of Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge of
Massachusetts, in the Senate of the United States, March 7, 1900 (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1900), 5.
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47
suppress an insurrection of negro slaves, whom we also ended by exterminating.”26
American soldiers doubtlessly reinforced this sentiment with their racist and
contemptuous attitudes toward Filipinos: the rank-and-file were, in the words of one
soldier, “just itching to get at the niggers.”27
As Felipe Agoncillo observed, given the conditions in Manila, fighting
between American and Filipino was bound to spontaneously erupt. Unable to begin
the war without direct orders from Washington, General Otis attempted to agitate the
Philippine army into initiating the fighting, issuing Aguinaldo a series of arrogant
ultimatums to withdraw from certain strategic positions for spurious reasons. Much
to the chagrin of the American military command, Aguinaldo repeated acquiesced to
Otis’ demands.28 Regardless of this, on February 4, a stray spark finally lit the fuse,
as an American soldier shot a Filipino who had ventured too close to the American
lines, and the aftermath of this incident quickly devolved into a full-scale battle. The
next day, a Filipino general met with General Otis, explaining that the fighting had
begun accidentally and offering to withdraw his forces to create a buffer zone
between the two armies while peace negotiations were undertaken. Otis replied that
“the fighting, having once begun, must go on to the grim end.”29
After the first shot had been fired, Washington mounted a propaganda
campaign to demonstrate that the Filipino army had launched the war. Imperialists
seized upon angry threats made by Filipino officers prior to the outbreak of hostilities
26
Quoted in Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the
Philippines (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 102.
27
Quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 176.
28
Miller “Benevolent Assimilation”, 46–56.
29
General C. McReeve, interview in St. Paul Globe, quoted in Memoranda, Mostly Official, Being
Materials for the History of a War of Criminal Aggression (Boston: Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), 7–
8.
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48
as evidence that Americans were not to blame for the fighting.30 Even after it was
revealed that an American had fired the first shot, imperialists repeated this claim.
Henry Cabot Lodge informed the Senate that William Grayson, the Kansas volunteer
who had fired the first shot of the war, “was simply doing his military duty and the
only criticism that could properly be made is, not that he fired, but that he refrained so
long and under such serious and menacing provocation from doing so.”31
Two days after the military standoff had been breached, the major legislative
barrier to empire was also knocked down. The Treaty of Paris was narrowly ratified
in the Senate after the Democratic leader, William Jennings Bryan, threw his support
behind it—despite his opposition to Philippine annexation—in the quixotic belief that
the problem of imperialism could be dealt with later, perhaps as an issue in his 1900
Presidential campaign. With the uneasy peace broken and the legislative stamp of
approval given to a policy that had already been implemented, the PhilippineAmerican War had begun.
The first year of the war was fought in a markedly different way than the latter
years.
According to historian David Silbey, the fighting in 1899 “was as
conventional a conflict between two legitimate states as was any other American war
of the nineteenth century and more so than some.”32 The American political and
military leadership had expected a brief, local, and unorganized resistance, if that;
they were instead faced with a conventional war against a state that could plausibly
assert sovereignty over large areas and had a hierarchical control of its armed forces.
30
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 57–58.
Lodge, The Retention of the Philippine Islands, 28.
32
Silbey, 216.
31
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49
However, the fledgling Philippine Republic simply did not have the capabilities to
sustain a state of war against the United States, and collapsed by the end of 1899 as
the fighting turned into guerrilla warfare.33
Emilio Aguinaldo focused his strategy in the war’s first year on fighting
traditional, set-piece battles, for both political and military reasons.
Fighting a
conventional war would both solidify the power of the state and make the Filipinos
look “civilized,” improper candidates for subjugation because of their adherence to
Western methods of warfare. Aguinaldo considered guerrilla warfare to be a method
of last resort, the death rattle of a defeated army rather than a plausible way of
winning an asymmetrical war.34
Although the political reasons for the way he
conducted the war are sensible, from a military point of view he made a horrendous
mistake by not beginning a guerrilla war more quickly. Undertrained, underarmed,
and outgunned, the Filipino Army of Liberation lost every conventional battle it
engaged in, usually by a huge margin.35 At the Battle of Manila, for example, several
thousand Filipinos were killed, compared to fifty-nine American deaths.36
Aguinaldo’s strategy of conventional warfare, despite its high costs, did
succeed in significantly slowing the advance of American troops through Luzon. By
the fall of 1899, the American military controlled little territory outside of Manila.
However, this reflects Otis’s failures as a general more than Aguinaldo’s military
prowess. Otis pursued an extremely cautious strategy, countermanding the more
33
Silbey, 125.
Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991), 100–117.
35
May, 100.
36
Silbey, 71.
34
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50
ambitious military plans of lower-ranking officers.37 At the same time, he continually
insisted to Washington that, with the war almost over, he did not need any more
troops, and forsook planning how to fill the vacancies that would arise in his army as
the troops who volunteered for the war against Spain were sent home.38 Furthermore,
the facts of the war never once shook Otis’ firm belief that the fighting would be
minimal, and the Philippines quickly subdued. He proclaimed nearly every American
probe to be “the last stroke of the war,” and each of these maneuvers was inevitably
labeled a “complete success.”39
As the Philippine Republic withered away and the remnants of the Army of
Liberation retreated to the mountains, the jungle, and the illusion of civilian life in
preparation for a guerilla campaign, the excessively optimistic military and political
leadership of the United States misinterpreted the lull in fighting as its end. General
Otis asked to be relieved of his duties in the spring of 1900, considering his work in
the Philippines to be done. He informed Washington that “the war in the Philippines
is already over,” and that “there will be no more real fighting.”40 McKinley and his
supporters took Otis’ claims at face value, trumpeting them in anticipation of the
1900 election. Theodore Roosevelt declared at the New York Republican State
Convention, in April of 1900, that “the insurrection in the Philippine Islands has been
overcome.”41
Early in his re-election campaign, William McKinley presented the conquest
of the Philippines as a fait accompli, with the occasional ambush or attack becoming
37
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 96–97.
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 78–80.
39
Quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 73.
40
Quoted in Silbey, 137–138.
41
Quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 102.
38
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51
increasingly rare. However, during the summer and fall of 1900, guerilla attacks
continued to grow in intensity, contradicting this claim.42 Advocates of McKinley’s
Philippine policy used this occasion, however, not to reassess the situation in the
Philippines but to vindicate their attacks on anti-imperialists as traitors. By the
Republican National Convention in June, Roosevelt backtracked to admitting that
some fighting was occurring in the Philippines, but he denied that this had anything to
do with Filipino nationalism. As he explained at his acceptance speech for the Vice
Presidential nomination, “the insurrection still goes on because the allies in this
country of the bloody insurrectionary oligarchs in Luzon have taught their foolish
dupes to believe that Democratic success at the polls next November means the
abandonment of the islands to the savages.”43
Although Philippine independence leaders were clearly hoping for regime
change in the U.S. presidential election, McKinley’s victory did not usher in an end to
the war. During General Arthur MacArthur’s tenure as Military Governor of the
Philippines, the guerilla warfare grew in intensity even as the United States army
resorted to more violent methods of warfare, with political pressure from Washington
easing in the wake of McKinley’s overwhelming electoral success.44 MacArthur’s
approach to the war was far removed from Otis’s: while the previous Military
Governor had perpetually considered the enemy to be few in number, MacArthur
assumed nearly the entire population to be hostile to American rule, and instituted
military policies reflecting this. After an amnesty program begun in the summer of
42
Silbey, 140–142.
Quoted in Walter LaFeber, “Election of 1900,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and
William P. Hansen, eds., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2001, vol. III (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1971), 1886.
44
Silbey, 162.
43
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52
1900 failed to have any significant effect save the surrender of some broken and
obsolete weapons, MacArthur turned to harsher tactics.
He looked towards the
counter-insurgency models undertaken in the American West, in South Africa by
Herbert Kitchener, and most ironically, in Cuba by Valeriano Weyler.45
Lower-ranking officers and jingoistic editors in the United States had long
favored abandoning the façade of benevolent intent in order to fight a war of attrition
in the Philippines. During Otis’s tenure, General William Shafter told reporters in
San Francisco that it might be necessary to kill half the population of the Philippines
to bring justice to the other half.46 Although MacArthur was neither as coldly
bloodthirsty as Shafter nor as loose-lipped in talking to the press, he did press a policy
of indiscriminate violence and collective punishment in order to end the guerilla
warfare. He provided a legal basis for his actions by his severe interpretation of
General Orders 100, which since 1863 had governed the behavior of United States
troops in occupied territory. Although GO 100 required the fair treatment of civilians
and prisoners of war, it took a harsh stance toward guerillas and the populations that
supported them. Guerillas were classified as “public enemies” who were “not entitled
to the privileges of prisoners of war,” and allowed the occupying army to “expel,
transfer, imprison, or fine” civilians who did not avow their allegiance to the United
States.47
Under MacArthur’s direction, American soldiers could wantonly destroy
towns that supported the revolution and put the burden of warfare upon the civilian
45
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 160–164.
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 94.
47
General Orders 100 (Washington: Adjutant-General’s Office, 1863, Government Printing Office,
1898), articles 82, 156, <http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lieber.htm>, April 14, 2008; Silbey, 156–
157.
46
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53
population of the Philippines.48 MacArthur treated captured guerillas as murderers,
rather than as prisoners of war, and allowed the execution of Filipino prisoners as a
retaliatory measure for attacks on American troops.49 Although the execution of
captured or wounded Filipinos and rampant disregard for civilian property had
occurred throughout the war, MacArthur gave legitimacy and encouragement to these
actions. American soldiers wrote home bragging how they “shot the enemy as if they
were chasing jack-rabbits,” but the ruthlessness of American conduct in the
Philippines is most evident in simple numbers.50 Official reports from both Otis and
MacArthur claimed fifteen Filipinos killed for every one wounded. In the American
Civil War, to contrast, five soldiers had been wounded for every one killed; this
astounding gap in the casualty ratio indicates that the murder of wounded Filipinos
was the norm, rather than the exception.51
Although neither GO 100 nor the highest-ranking military officers sanctioned
torture, it, too, was commonplace in the Philippines. The “water cure,” as it was
known, became a common practice and was a focal point of condemnation by antiimperialists in the American press and Congress. Albert Cross, stationed in the town
of Banate in the Western Visayas, recalled witnessing and administering this torture
more times than he could remember. On one occasion, Father August Peña, a local
priest and alleged rebel sympathizer, was tied to a ladder, his head held back, and his
mouth held open while gallon after gallon of water was poured into it through a cane.
“He acted the same as any other man. He would not talk until he got so much. The
48
Silbey, 157–169.
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 162–164.
50
Anti-Imperialist League, Soldiers’ Letters: Being Materials for the History of a War of Criminal
Aggression (Boston: Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), 10.
51
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 189.
49
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54
first time he got it he would not talk and the second time he admitted that he was a
sympathizer with the insurgents.” Cross recalled seeing Father Peña being buried in
the parade ground late one night after another prolonged interrogation.52
If MacArthur’s tenure as Military Governor represented the complete
unraveling of all the humanitarian notions that the Philippine War had been
predicated on, the Philippine Commission headed by William Howard Taft
represented a return to a policy of uplifting “our little brown brothers.” As the
highest-ranking civilian in the archipelago, Taft pursued a policy of reconciliation
with the Filipinos elites who had acquiesced to American sovereignty, an approach
markedly different from the tactics of the military. This attempt at collaboration
earned him the scorn of both officers and enlisted men, who sang that the Filipino
“may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine.”53
Taft and MacArthur opposed each other temperamentally, in their claims to
power on the islands, and in their approaches to ending hostilities in the Philippines.
Continued guerilla warfare did nothing to ease this tension. However, the situation
was alleviated by the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo in the spring of 1901. After
executing a daring and duplicitous raid on Aguinaldo’s mountain redoubt, General
Frederick Funston fostered a sense in the United States that, once again, the war was
finally over. He wrote a self-aggrandizing article in a popular magazine describing
“the exploit which ended the war,” reflecting the belief that Aguinaldo and the
52
Testimony of Albert Cross, court martial cross-examination, October 13, 1902, Burlington,
Vermont, included in Alonzo Fulton Woodside letters, courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.
53
Quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 167.
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55
struggle against American rule were synonymous.54
Although by this point
Aguinaldo held little real authority over the decentralized guerrilla fighters, his
capture and subsequent acceptance of American sovereignty demoralized many
Filipinos and destigmatized surrender. In the months after his capture, warfare ended
in some—but certainly not all—provinces, MacArthur returned to the United States,
and Taft, as Governor-General of the Philippines, was given greater freedom to put
his policies into practice.55
Caught between the narrative of “Benevolent Assimilation” and the realities
of the brutal fashion in which the archipelago had been pacified, the civilian
administration implementing the Philippine policy could not quite bridge the gap
between the dichotomous policies of uplift and mastery in the regions where fighting
had ceased. William Howard Taft was at a loss to explain how bringing liberal
democracy to the Philippines would not result in increased Filipino nationalism and
calls for independence. “My impression is that as they become better educated, as
they understand what self-government is, as they realize what an immense advantage
it will be to them to be associated with the United States, the oratorical use of the
word “independence” will cease to have such weight with them.”56
The first and most important step to making Filipinos realize what a great
advantage it was to be associated with the United States was stamping out any
remaining opposition to that association. Contrasting Taft’s policies of winning over
54
Stuart Creighton Miller, “Racism and Military Conquest: The Philippine-American War,” from
Paterson and Merrill, 437.
55
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 167-175.
56
Testimony of William Howard Taft to the US Senate, from Affairs in the Philippine Islands:
Hearings Before the Committee, January 31 to June 28, 1902 (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1902), 337.
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56
Filipinos ambivalent about American rule, the American military approached the war
from the mindset of the frontier, of totally eliminating any opposition rather than
educating and uplifting its potential opponents. This was especially true during the
last year of major fighting, when Theodore Roosevelt, “that damned cowboy”57 in the
White House, brought a cowboy mentality to the war. Entering the White House
shortly after Adna Chaffee replaced MacArthur as the top military commander, both
the commander-in-chief and the commander in the Philippines approached the war
like it was an extension of the wars to conquer the American West.
In the Tagalog province of Batangas, in southern Luzon, resistance to
American rule continued under Philippine general Miguel Malvar for over a year after
Aguinaldo’s capture. It was only after the U.S. Army resorted to extreme measures—
tactics even more brutal than those sanctioned by MacArthur—that the region was
pacified. Batangueños were rounded up and fenced in like so many cattle, while
anything outside of the concentration zone became fair game for American soldiers to
destroy. Food and buildings outside of the zones were burned so as to deny them to
the guerillas; people found outside of the zones were captured or killed.58 General
Chaffee wrote, “I can’t say how long it will take us to beat Malvar into surrendering,
and if no surrender, can’t say how long it will take us to make a wilderness of that
country, but one or the other will eventually take place.”59
57
As Senator Mark Hanna, McKinley’s former campaign manager and Republican power-broker,
remarked of Roosevelt upon McKinley’s death. Quoted in Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The
Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 38.
58
May, 242–269.
59
Quoted in May, 254.
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57
The concentration zones quickly became sanitary nightmares, and food was
scarce. Peter Lewis, an American private guarding one of these camps, described the
situation to his brother:
Our duty here is not much, all we do is “Guard” and escort all the Native
Women out to pick “Rice” or “Palay”, it is this way in this Province, there are lots of
Insurgents around, and the Commanding General has closed all the “Ports”, no body
is allowed to leave any town without a Pass, or an escort of soldiers; as it is no man
is allowed out of the limits, if caught out he is libel to be shot at, so the women are
only allowed out, the men are not allowed to work in the Rice Paddies so all the
Palay that is ready the women get, every morning at 6 oclock the women assemble
near the Presidentes Queartell, and a squad of soldiers take them out to pick the
“Palay”, they have to bring it all in to town, they bring it in, in sacks and they are
aloud one quarter of what they harvest, the other three quarters are stacked up in our
front yard where we have the men working we have 30 picked men everyday to
thrash the Palay and clean it and stack it away in our quartell. You might not believe
it but it is true, to see a soldier at the head of about 1000 women of all sizes (all dark
complexion) hikeing down the road about 3 miles to the Paddies to get the Palay. If
you ever have seen the American niggers picking cotton then you can just think that
a Rice field looks the same when in working order. When we see that they have a
bag full, why we discharge our rifles in the air and all the bags go up on the top of
their heads and pull for town. That’s the way Uncle Sam has for feeding the
Filipinoes.
There are no more Bamboo houses or Barrioes outside the limit of the
towns in this Province, all the Natives had to move inside the limit and the soldiers
went out and burned all the shaks so as the Insurgents can not sleep in them and all
horses and cattle left are being killed or brought in to town, in the last 2 weeks we
have killed 30 ponies.60
By April of 1902, thousands of Batangueño civilians had died of disease and
malnutrition while in the camps. Outside the camps, the remnants of Malvar’s army,
hungry and broken, were being hunted down by American troops.
60
Malvar
Peter Lewis, Foot Soldier in an Occupation Force, Letters of Peter Lewis, 1898–1902, H.R. Kells,
ed. (Manila: Linguistics Office, De La Salle University, 1999), 123–124.
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58
surrendered on April 16, and by May the Battle of Batangas was over.61 Antiimperialists attacked the “Weylerian methods” that had been adopted, showcasing
them as proof of the corrupting influence of imperialism and militarism.62 However,
it was not the American military’s actions in Batangas that generated the largest
public outrage. This was reserved for the outrageous statements and conduct coming
from the Visayan island of Samar.
On September 26, 1901, shortly after the assassination of William McKinley
and the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt, fifty-nine American soldiers stationed in
Samar, in the town of Balangiga, were killed in an intricately plotted massacre. The
townspeople had smuggled knives into Balangiga by hiding them in coffins, and
attacked the Americans in a night raid. Chaffee responded by appointing Jacob
Smith, a veteran of Wounded Knee with a reputation for giving no quarter in fighting
Native Americans, to the task of avenging the fallen soldiers.63 Smith’s outrageous,
Kurtzian orders to pacify the island seemed custom-made to blare on the front page of
every newspaper in the United States.
“I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn
the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms
in actual hostilities against the United States,” he told Major Littleton “Tony” Waller.
When Waller asked “to know the limit of age to respect,” Smith replied “ten years of
age.” While Waller was making his way into the interior of the island, he received
61
Glenn Anthony May, 262–269.
Erving Winslow, The Anti-Imperialist League: Apologia Pro Vita Sua, (Boston: Anti-Imperialist
League), 8.
63
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 202–204, 219.
62
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59
further notice from Smith that “Samar must be made a howling wilderness.”64 When
these orders, and the actions undertaken in following them, were reported to the press,
even staunchly pro-imperialist newspapers devoted headlines to them and declined to
defend Smith.65
On July 4, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt declared the war to be over for the last
time. Sporadic fighting, especially in the Muslim southern Philippines, continued for
another decade, but the most intense fighting had ended. After three years of warfare,
the Philippines had been won at a very high cost. The fight for their independence
had cost Filipinos dearly: about 50,000 died in the fighting, while at least 250,000
more died of war-related disease and malnutrition.66 For Americans, the Philippine
War was a bad memory, but one that could easily be forgotten. By 1902, any
delusions about building a world empire on the cheap had been shattered. The
contemporary difficulties of Great Britain in fighting the Boer War only reinforced
the notion that building a formal empire was more trouble than it was worth.
At the beginning of the war, many of its advocates considered further
expansion of the American Empire to be an inescapable part of its future foreign
relations.
By the fighting’s end, even some of the most ardent boosters of
imperialism had become disillusioned about the effectiveness of creating a formal
empire. Alfred Thayer Mahan initially believed that after consolidating its holding in
the Philippines, the United States would continue to collect colonies. “We have for
the time being quite sufficient to occupy our activities in accommodating ourselves to
these new conditions,” he wrote in 1900, but “after a brief rest in contemplation of the
64
Quoted in Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 220, 222.
Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”, 230–231.
66
Kramer, 157.
65
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60
present, effort must be resumed” to further expand empire throughout the world. But
the difficulties entailed by the war in the Philippines pushed the United States away
from a policy of formal imperialism. These military difficulties were compounded by
an articulate, albeit fragmented and politically inept, anti-imperialist movement, and
by geopolitical complications arising from the United States assuming the status of an
imperial power.
By 1903, Henry Cabot Lodge believed that the American public had “lost all
interest” in additional colonial expansion, and policymakers soon followed suit.67 In
1906, with the Dominican Republic undergoing a debt crisis and its customs offices
under the temporary control of the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt had a
plausible opportunity to forcibly take a country that American expansionists had had
their eyes on for decades, but instead opted for a policy of indirect political and
economic dominance. “I want to do nothing but what a policeman has to do in Santo
Domingo. As for annexing the island, I have about the same desire to annex as a
gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.”68 Formal
imperialism, once a policy chosen to expand the influence of the United States in the
belief that it would entail few military or political difficulties, had by then been
reinterpreted as a needlessly painful way to project American power.
67
Quoted in Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign
Affairs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 29.
68
Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume II, The
American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913, 198.
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61
Empire as Carpetbag Gove rnme nt
Domestic Opposition to Imperialism
Several months after the start of the Philippine-American War, the Chicagobased humorist George Ade introduced his readers to the Tagalog Kakyak family and
the American agent sent to the Philippines to “civilize” them, Washington Conner.
Over the next several months, Ade’s weekly column in the Chicago Record
chronicled Conner’s attempts to educate the Filipino family about how to behave like
good Americans, satirizing the disconnect between the bloodshed brought about by
the Philippine War and the lofty principles that its supporters claimed. Portraying the
Kakyaks as a humble, warmhearted rural family constantly outwitting the arrogant,
pretentious, and urbane Conner, Ade deftly reinterpreted the mission of “Benevolent
Assimilation” as an example of slick big-city types trying to impose their will on
simple country folks. As Peter Finley Dunne’s Mr. Dooley character remarked, prior
to the Spanish-American War Americans didn’t know whether the Philippines “were
islands or canned goods,” and Ade presented a narrative that the typical reader could
relate to.1
“We are going to begin in this island a process of benevolent assimilation,”
said Mr. Conner.
“What is that?” asked Mr. Bulolo Kakyak.
1
Peter Finley Dunne, “Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War,” from The Anti-Imperialist Reader, Volume
II: The Literary Anti-Imperialists, Philip S. Foner, ed. (New York: Holmes & Heier Publishers, Inc.,
1986), 173.
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62
“A benevolent person,” said Mr. Conner, pulling reflectively at his red
mustache, “a benevolent person is one who has the disposition to do good to others
and make them happy. Assimilation refers to the act of bringing to a resemblance,
likeness or identity. The plan of benevolent assimilation, for which I am the agent,
contemplates the instruction of you islanders in all the details of our American
civilization. We love you; therefore we are going to put before you certain examples
and precepts to enable you to become similar to us. In the language of a popular
song, ‘Of course you can never be like us, but be as like us as you’re able to be.’”
“But why should we try to be like you?” asked Mrs. Kakyak from her place
in the doorway.
“Because we want you to,” replied Mr. Conner. “These islands have fallen
into our hands, or at any rate they will fall into our hands as soon as we get enough
troops here to conquer all of them, and it occurs to us that we have been designated
by a wise Providence to take charge of you simple-minded islanders and educate
you. You are the white man’s burden.”
“We don’t want to be,” said Mr. Kakyak.
“Well, you are, just the same. You have been described to us as ‘half devil
and half child.’”
“He’s not complimentary, to say the least,” remarked Eulalie, with a
frightened glance at her mother.2
Ade was one of just a handful of anti-imperialist writers—Peter Finley Dunne being
another notable member of this group—to attack the Philippine-American War in
such a lighthearted way.
Members of the stolid, Boston-based Anti-Imperialist
League regularly denounced the war as a fundamental threat to the very existence of
American democracy: a typical statement was a May 1899 resolution denouncing the
2
George Ade, George Ade’s “Stories of ‘Benevolent Assimilation,’” Perry E. Gianakos, ed. (Quezon
City: New Day Publishers, 1985), 13–14.
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63
Philippine War as an “attempt to degrade the Great Republic into a Great Empire, to
destroy its moral leadership of the world, and to make it succumb to ideas and
principles which it was born to oppose.”3 Nativists insisted in equally strident terms
that imperialism would compromise the racial purity of the United States, if not its
liberal principles.
Hypocritical actions of the United States in the Philippines, such as the ban on
the American Declaration of Independence as a “damned incendiary document,” were
easy targets for ridicule, but the anti-imperialists were generally a serious-minded
lot.4 Andrew Carnegie, for example, expressed incredulity at the order to ban the
Declaration and interpreted it as a potent political issue rather than as a cause for
mockery. “Were I of the Democratic Party,” he wrote, “I should base the Campaign
largely upon this order, and ask the People if they wished a President capable of
suppressing the reading of the Declaration of Independence in any part of the world.”5
Even Mark Twain, immersed in anti-imperialist activities and writings at this late
stage in his life, satirized the Philippine War with a decidedly cynical outlook that
demonstrated his pessimistic attitude toward human nature, contrasting Ade’s clever
and mirthful humor.
Twain’s short story, The War Prayer, best demonstrates his dour outlook on
the human tendency toward blind nationalism and warmongering. He describes, on
the eve of soldiers being sent off to war, a church packed with parishioners, praying,
3
George S. Boutwell, Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Address of the Hon. George S. Boutwell at a
Conference of Anti-imperialists, Boston, May 16, 1899 (Boston: Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), 2.
4
Jim Zwick, ed., Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the PhilippineAmerican War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), xxxiv.
5
Quoted in Teodoro Agoncillo, Malalos: The Crisis of the Republic (Quezon City: University of the
Philippines Press, 1997), 670.
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64
“make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset, help them to crush
the foe, grant to them and to flag and country imperishable honor and glory... ” A
mysterious stranger interrupts the service, walking to the pulpit and informing the
crowd that he was sent by God to express the unspoken part of their prayer: “O Lord,
our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to
cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown
the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.” The
messenger then exits the church, and Twain ends his short story with a biting line: “It
was believed afterwards, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in
what he said.”6
But even Twain, vocal in his opposition to the Philippine War, to the Boer
War in South Africa, and to the brutalities occurring in the Congo under King
Leopold’s murderous regime, strongly supported the United States’ war with Spain in
1898, caught up in the humanitarian rhetoric that accompanied it. “In Cuba,” Twain
wrote, McKinley
was following our great traditions in a way which made us very proud of him, and
proud of the deep dissatisfaction which his play was provoking in Continental
Europe. Moved by a high inspiration, he threw out those stirring words which
proclaimed that forcible annexation would be “criminal aggression;” and in that
utterance fired another “shot heard round the world.” The memory of that fine
saying will be outlived by the remembrance of no act of his but one – that he forgot
it within the twelvemonth, and its honorable gospel along with it.7
6
7
Mark Twain, “The War Prayer,” from Zwick, 156–160.
Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” from Zwick, 32.
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65
Many committed anti-imperialists, such as Twain, strongly supported the war with
Spain, disappointed as they were with its conclusion. Such was the milieu at the June
1898 meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston that formed the nucleus of the AntiImperialist League.
Gamaliel Bradford’s earlier calls for a rally to protest the
Spanish-American War were ignored; it was not until it appeared as if McKinley
might annex Puerto Rico and the Philippines that Bradford could muster up enough
support to hold the meeting, focusing the agenda on opposition to formal empire.8
Even within the outspoken group of Boston reformers who were to prove the most
vocal, if not the most politically effective, opponents of McKinley’s imperialist
policy, there was nothing approaching a consensus on what a more acceptable foreign
policy would look like. The organization roundly condemned formal imperialism,
but could not quite agree on how and to what extent the United States should assert
itself in world politics. But the ideological differences within the Anti-Imperialist
League were slight compared to the divides that split it and other groups opposed to
the Philippine War.
Opponents of Philippine annexation came from such diverse backgrounds and
ideological standpoints that it was inevitable that they could never form a fully viable
political coalition. Upper class, blue-blooded reformers and poor Irish immigrants;
organized labor and industrialists such as Carnegie; African Americans and Southern
boosters of Jim Crow—the list of anti-imperialists was long, but incredibly
fragmented. But even if this awkward coalition never won any outright political
victories (at least, not until the latter years of the Wilson administration, by which
8
Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge:
Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1972), 73–76.
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66
point the political dynamics in the United States had profoundly changed), it
succeeded in preventing formal imperialism from becoming a de facto policy of the
United States. As Henry Cabot Lodge complained, “The Philippines should be an
American question, not the sport of parties or the subject of party creeds.”9 Antiimperialists made formal imperialism a costly policy in terms of political capital, thus
making informal imperialism—which they generally did not denounce with nearly as
much outrage—a more attractive policy option.
The Anti-Imperialist League exerted its political influence by publishing a
steady stream of articles, pamphlets and books denouncing formal empire and
influencing (or simply writing) the editorial line of anti-imperialist newspapers such
as the Springfield Republican, Boston Evening Transcript, and New York Evening
Post. As the United States began commencing hostilities in the Philippines in early
1899, the influence of the League spread, with local chapters popping up in city after
city, under the general leadership of the Boston reformers.10 The League provided an
anti-war voice in the national discourse, but was not particularly effective politically.
Most of the Congressional opponents of formal imperialism came from the
Democratic Party, most notably from its Southern, white supremacist wing, and
members of the League generally held these politicians in contempt. The League’s
agitation for the election of the anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan in 1900 did
9
Henry Cabot Lodge, The Retention of the Philippine Islands, Speech of Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge of
Massachusetts, in the Senate of the United States, March 7, 1900 (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1900), 3.
10
Philip S. Foner and Richard C. Winchester, eds., The Anti-Imperialist Reader, Volume 1: From the
Mexican War to the Election of 1900 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1984), 273.
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67
little to stop William McKinley’s landslide victory; even in their home base of
Massachusetts, McKinley was reelected with 60% of the vote.11
Members of the Anti-Imperialist League did not make a radical critique of
American foreign policy. Quite unlike the antiwar movement that would swell during
the Vietnam War, the United States’ next prolonged guerrilla war in Southeast Asia,
the League was essentially old, traditionalist, and fundamentally supportive of the
American system. Steeped in the righteousness of their cause, these urban patricians
regularly invoked the historical principles of American liberalism, and cast
McKinley’s colonial policy as a sudden and terrible break in the country’s history.
The Anti-Imperialist League’s platform, for example, stated that the war was a
“betrayal of American institutions at home,” out of step with “the spirit of 1776” and
legacies of Washington and Lincoln.12
George S. Boutwell, the octogenarian president of the Anti-Imperialist
League, best embodied its general character and shortcomings. A lifelong reformer,
Boutwell had served in the Lincoln and Grant administrations and epitomized the
city’s traditional upper-class political activists. His age—and the elderly composition
of the rest of the League’s leadership—stood in stark contrast to the youthful,
emergent generation of imperial-minded politicians that included Theodore Roosevelt
and Albert Beveridge. He struggled to make the anti-imperialist movement attract a
broad base, but was often uncomfortable or self-contradictory in trying to appeal to
social groups outside of his own milieu. He told a group of trade unionists that
11
Walter LaFeber, “Election of 1900,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and William P.
Hansen, eds., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2001, vol. III (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1971), 1963.
12
Carl Schurz, The Policy of Imperialism, Address delivered at the Anti-Imperialist Conference in
Chicago, October 17, 1899 (Chicago: American Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), i.
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68
colonialism would mean “the enslavement of American labor,” forcing workers into
“a competition which is unnatural in its character and which in two decades may
force the American laborer into free competition with the most degraded laboring
populations of the tropical Pacific Islands.”13 But at a previous address to a more
familiar audience, Boutwell admitted, “I am not anxious to be counted as the
particular defender of the interests of labor.”14
Similarly, Boutwell vacillated between appeals to racial justice that echoed his
anti-slavery background, and using racist imagery and fears to gain the support of
nativists.
He explicitly paralleled the subjugation of Filipinos abroad with the
subjugation of blacks in the South, and argued that the acceptance of the former
would justify and inevitably continue the practice of the latter.
In paternalistic
language, he called upon African Americans to oppose imperialism. “I say to the
negro population of the North: Men of your color, eight or ten million of them in the
Philippine Islands, are denied the right of self-government.… I call upon you to stand
up for the rights of other men as other men have stood up for your rights.” But this
did not stop him from simultaneously characterizing Filipinos as the “degraded…
unclad and cheaply fed millions in the East.”15
The one group that Boutwell was certain could turn public opinion against the
war was American soldiers returning from the Philippines. During the early months
of the war, he predicted “the soldiers of the Philippine army will return to America
13
George S. Boutwell, The Enslavement of American Labor: Address Delivered in Faneuil Hall,
January 22, 1902 (Boston: New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1902), 7–8.
14
George S. Boutwell, Bryan or Imperialism, Address Delivered at the National Liberty Congress of
Anti-Imperialists at Indianapolis, Indiana, August 15–16, 1900 (Boston: New England Anti-Imperialist
League, 1900), 14.
15
Boutwell, Bryan or Imperialism, 11, 15.
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69
with fixed opinions in regard to the wisdom and justice of the Philippean [sic] War,
derived from an experience of more value to them than any observations that we
might make.… If their opinions are hostile to our policy, nothing of effort on our part
would work a change.”16 The testimony of soldiers would indeed prove to be a potent
tool of anti-imperialists, but this was mostly because their recollections of committing
atrocities would dampen public enthusiasm for empire. The process of fighting a
colonial war did change the opinion of American soldiers about its necessity, but this
transformation worked both ways.
Some soldiers came to see the essential humanity in their new subjects.
Others, captivated by the martial glories of empire, became ardent imperialists.
Alonzo Fulton Woodside was a soldier of the former class. When Woodside first
arrived in the Philippines, stationed in the city of Iloilo, he was anxious “to make it
hot for the Black Devils,” and referred to Filipinos as “niggers” in describing his first
flirtation with hostile fire. But over the course of the year he was stationed in Iloilo,
his tone changed dramatically. He did not refer to Filipinos as “niggers,” “gugus,” or
“black devils” after his first letter, reflecting a conscious change in terminology from
the racist slurs that his fellow soldiers regularly employed.
Alonzo told Ella a
detailed story about the process of climbing trees to collect sap in jugs to make tuba, a
local alcoholic beverage. He even sent his sister such a jug, which a Filipino made
for him. Socialization and regular interaction with Filipinos seems to have changed
Alonzo’s perception of them, as blatant racism gave way to grudging admiration and
16
Boutwell, Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, p. 3.
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70
warmth. He never talked about overtly political matters in his letters home, but his
perspective on the Philippines clearly changed during his tour of duty.17
Like Alonzo Woodside, Captain H.G. Herndon was sent to the Philippines
with racist preconceptions.
He noted among his comrades “a feeling of
disappointment that they should be sent out to the Philippines to fight niggers,” and
remarked, “our humanitarian war [against Spain] has gotten us into an unfortunate
scrape, and much good blood, worthy of a better cause… will have to be spilled
before we can hope to get out of it.” In one way, Herndon was prescient about what
would be required for an American victory in the Philippines: “The only way to
extricate ourselves, I should say, is by adopting in the East Indies the cold-blooded
and barbarous methods of warfare which we forbade the Spaniards to use against
their rebels in the West Indies.”18
Within of few months of beginning his service in the Philippines, Herndon
had been transformed into a dedicated imperialist, seeing formal empire as a logical
extension of manifest destiny. While stationed in Hong Kong, Herndon had several
lengthy conversations with French and British officers who extolled the virtues of
empire. He quickly adopted a colonial mentality, coming to see formal imperialism
as a noble cause.
I suppose nothing would open the eyes of those wise owls who maintain, in spite of
the evidence of our history, that we are not a colonizing race, and that we haven’t
either the machinery or the genius to administer the affairs of either savage or semi-
17
Letters of Alonzo Fulton Woodside to Ella Woodside, October 25, 1899 to December 26, 1900.
Stephen Bonsal, ed., The Golden Horseshoe: Extracts from the Letters of Captain H.G. Herndon of
the 21st U.S. Infantry, on Duty in the Philippine Islands, and Lieutenant Lawrence Gill, A.D.D. to the
Military Governor of Puerto Rico. With a Postscript by J. Sherman, Private, Co. D, 21st Infantry (New
York: The MacMillan Company, 1900), 61, 51.
18
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barbarous races, which, as they admit, our English kinsmen possess in such a
remarkable degree; but if anything could open their eyes it would be the scenes of
which Manila is the theatre to-day. Here, practically the whole American army has
been transported ten thousand miles from its base into a country of which not one in
every hundred of our men had even heard six months ago, and yet to see them you
might imagine that they had come out a little way on a new road off the Santa Fe
trail to build another army post and protect the white settlers; and, now that I think of
it, that is about what they have come here to do.19
The experiences of African-American soldiers in the Philippines were perhaps the
most profound and internally self-contradictory. An incident involving the all-black
Twenty-fifth Infantry encapsulates the environment these soldiers were fighting in.
As the soldiers disembarked after arriving in the Philippines on July 31, 1899, a white
onlooker apparently yelled, “What are you coons doing here?” to which came the
reply: “We have come to take up the White Man’s Burden.”20
The Philippine-
American War was not only based and fought on racist premises, but also entailed a
reconciliation between whites in the North and South in adopting racist attitudes and
politics. And of course, the racism exhibited by white soldiers toward Filipinos was
equally present in their conduct toward their black comrades.
This racism, in
conjunction with the dark satire of fighting for a white man’s empire, even drove
some African-American soldiers to suicide. A white soldier remarked in his diary
that
While I was sitting here writing the colored Infantry was drilling in extended order
across the river. After the drill one of the men came down and jumped into the river
19
Bonsal, 291–292.
Quoted in David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–
1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 107.
20
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drowning himself. They have just got his body. One did the same thing Sunday. I
guess they have been driven hard since they misbehaved.21
Generally excluded from socializing with whites, black soldiers in the Philippines got
along remarkably well with the local population. It is ironic that in doing so, they
likely improved Filipino attitudes about the American occupation, and thus indeed
took up the “White Man’s Burden” of humanitarian uplift with far more aptitude and
vigor than white soldiers. After returning from the Philippines, Charles Steward
wrote in The Colored American Magazine that Filipinos “are hospitable to a fault, and
they have too the full color sympathy, and appear to entertain a decided fondness for
colored Americans, many of whom having come to Manila with the colored
regiments, have married handsome Filipino belles.”22
Philippine independence
fighters tried to exploit the racial tensions within the United States army, distributing
pamphlets and printing huge posters, posted in trenches, reminding African
Americans of the racism that surrounded them and encouraging them to desert.
“Once they see these posters,” Paula Magdalo believed, “the black soldiers will turn
back and abandon their troops in order to join ours.”23 But Magdalo was badly
mistaken. While over a thousand blacks stayed in the Philippines after the war, most
marrying local women, only a handful defected to fight with Filipino guerillas.24
21
John Clifford Brown, Diary of a Soldier in the Philippines (Portland, Maine: The Lakeside Press,
1901), 70.
22
Charles Steward, “Manila and its Opportunities,” from The Colored American Magazine
(Washington), Volume III, no. 4, August 1901, 255.
23
Paula Pardo a Senora Rozalia Magdalo to Rozalia Magdalo, August 23, 1899, from Voices & Scenes
of the Past: The Philippine-American War Retold, Maria Serena Diokno, ed. (Quezon City: Jose W.
Diokno Foundation, 1999), 54.
24
Jack D. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1974), 91–92. Although there were few instances in which black soldiers actively fought
alongside Filipinos, some of them took hold of the American psyche. See Michael C. Robinson and
Frank N. Schubert, “David Fagen: An Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines, 1899–1901” from The
Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 44, No. 1. (Feb., 1975), 68–83.
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Generally speaking African-American soldiers in the Philippines fought as
well or better than their white counterparts; the capture of Cagayen Valley, in
northern Luzon, by the black Twenty-fourth Regiment was one of the most successful
campaigns in the first year of the war.25 However, some parts of the political and
military leadership in the United States were hesitant about the presence of African
Americans in the Philippines. Some officers feared the liberating effect that living
among people of color, in a non-segregated environment, would have on black
soldiers when they returned home. Others, seeing the amiable relations between
black and Filipino through the lens of American racism, believed that black males
would rape Filipino women. Ben Tillman, one of the most prominent and most
blatantly racist Southern anti-imperialists, believed that African-American soldiers
should stay in the United States, where if they committed outrages, “we can shoot
them, as we ought to do, and not inflict them, with their brutalities, upon a helpless
people.”26 But the belief that blacks were more resilient to tropical diseases than
whites, along with the simple need for manpower in the Philippines, overcame these
objections.
A few proponents of imperialism even raised the idea of African-American
colonization, linking the United States’ Pacific Empire with past imperial endeavors,
such as the colonization of Liberia and Grant’s attempted annexation of the
Dominican Republic. General Robert Hughes told a Senate committee that he was
“very much in earnest about giving the darky a chance” as a source of labor in the
25
Silbey, 127–131.
Marvin Fletcher, The Black Soldier and Officer in the United States Army, 1891–1917 (Columbia,
Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1974), 109–111.
26
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74
Philippines.27
John Tyler Morgan, one of the most outspoken Southern voices to
support an American Empire, went even further than Hughes. He believed that
African Americans had to “be repatriated in Africa or in the Philippines, or… they
must, sooner or later, [face]… virtual extermination.”28 Black colonization of the
Philippines—a project that would have enshrined white supremacy in the United
States and transformed expatriated blacks from citizens to subjects—never amounted
to anything more than the pet cause of a few influential figures. Yet the mere fact
that it was raised as an issue at all demonstrates the continuity between American
imperial projects through the nineteenth century and in the Philippines, and between
the oppression of people of color at home and abroad.
For the most part, the black press in the United States—and black leaders such
as W.E.B. Du Bois—recognized this continuity. “No other American citizen is so
vitally interested in the right settlement of the problems growing out of the SpanishAmerican war as the colored man,” wrote Frank Putnam in The Colored American.
“The administration of the national government by its enactments denies the fitness of
the colored men of Porto Rico, of Cuba and of the Philippines for self-government;
asserts by its actions its belief that self-government is the right of only the white
race.”29 Du Bois believed that imperialism united the “race questions” of the United
States and of the world. “Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and
27
Affairs in the Philippine Islands: Hearings before the Committee, January 31 to June 28, 1902
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), 647.
28
Quoted in Joseph A. Fry, John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy (Knoxville:
The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 80.
29
Frank Putnam, “The Negro’s Part in New National Problems, a Personal View,” from The Colored
American Magazine, Volume I, no. 2, June 1900, 69–70.
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75
Hawaiian… [must] stand united under the stars and stripes for an America that knows
no color line in the freedom of its opportunities.”30
African-American opinion on imperialism was not by any means uniform, of
course, and one of the more significant points of debate was the political party to
support in the election of 1900. The Republican Party sponsored imperialism, but the
Democratic Party was responsible for Jim Crow. William Jennings Bryan was a
Western Democrat, and his party’s platform called for “a stable form of government”
in the Philippines, “independence, and… protection from outside interference, such as
has been given for nearly a century to the republics of Central and South America.”
Yet it also condemned Filipinos as aliens who “cannot be subjects without imperiling
our form of government,” and referenced “Republican carpet-bag officials,” still
occupying Cuba in 1900, who “plunder its revenues and exploit the colonial
theory”—a reminder of the Southern terminology of Reconstruction. No mention
was made of civil rights or the recent surge of lynchings in the South.31
Charles Winslow Hall argued for the embrace of the Democratic Party,
despite its “great many leaders whose attitude toward the Negro race is antagonistic,”
and struggled to find common group by adding that “most of these… are in the
Southern States, where ancient antagonisms and prejudices still bias the minds of
many otherwise excellent men.”32
He believed the Republican embrace of
imperialism to be more onerous than William Jennings Bryan’s silence on civil rights.
But a writer for the Washington Bee asked bitterly if “Mr. Bryan’s zeal for ‘consent
30
Quoted in Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States & the
Philippines (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14.
31
Democratic Platform of 1900, from LaFeber, “Election of 1900,” 1919–1924.
32
Charles Winslow Hall, “The Old or the New Faith. Which? A Brief Review of the Present Political
Situation,” from The Colored American Magazine, Vol. I, No. 3, August, 1900, 176.
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of the governed’ extend[s] to native American citizens or is it limited to Malays?” 33
William Jennings Bryan’s failed candidacy demonstrated the fragility of the antiimperialism coalition.
Even among supporters of the Anti-Imperialist League, there was no
consensus on the candidate to support in the 1900 election, largely because
McKinley’s domestic politics were much more in line with their own.
George
Boutwell admitted to voting for McKinley in 1896, and praised his tariff policy, but
urged a vote for Bryan as “the only means before us for the preservation of the
Republic.”34
William Roscoe Thayer, a Boston-based writer, opposed both
McKinley’s foreign policy and Bryan’s monetary policy, and vainly attempted to help
organize a third party with a philosophy resembling classical liberalism.35 He found
support in this endeavor among a “residuum of idealists [who] had been attached to
the Anti-Imperialist League” but could not bring themselves to support the
Democratic Party. This splinter group proved to be politically inept, however, and as
Thayer sadly noted, “we failed to reach that three percent minimum which is regarded
in elections and in liquors as the point at which the authorities should begin to take
notice.”36
George Frisbie Hoar, the Republican Senator who represented Massachusetts
alongside Henry Cabot Lodge, was willing to buck his party on the issue of
Philippine annexation, but kept to a stalwart partisanship when election season came
33
Quoted in Kramer, 119–120.
Boutwell, Bryan or Imperialism, 13, 4.
35
The National Party’s planks included independence and protectorate status for Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and the Philippines; support for the gold standard, free trade, and civil service reform; and an end
to corporate subsidies.
36
See National Party Records, 1900–1903, Massachusetts Historical Society.
34
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around. The septuagenarian Hoar believed the Philippine War to be a betrayal of
American principles, and regretted that the United States did not implement in the
Philippines a policy similar to that which was being enacted in Cuba. “There would
have been to-day a noble republic in the east, sitting docile at our feet, receiving from
us civilization, laws, manners, and giving in turn everything the gratitude of a free
people could give—love, obedience, trade.” Hoar disagreed with William Jennings
Bryan “upon all other questions than imperialism,” and used Bryan’s support for the
ratification of the Treaty of Paris to attack him on that issue. 37 He also attacked the
Democratic Party’s record on race and angrily quoted Ben Tillman’s remarks on
white supremacy and the Philippines, prompting a short squabble with Tillman that
interrupted Hoar’s soliloquy:
We took the government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them.
We are not ashamed of it… With that system – force, tissue ballots, etc. – we got
tired ourselves.
So we called a constitutional convention, and we eliminated, as I
said, all of the colored people whom we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth
amendments.
I want to call your attention to the remarkable change that has come over
the spirit of the dream of the Republicans; to remind you gentlemen from the north
that your slogans of the past – brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God – have
gone glimmering down the ages… You deal with the Filipinos just as we deal with
the negroes, only you treat them a heap worse.”38
Hoar clearly did not want to have anything to do with the Southern branch of the
anti-imperialist movement, but William Jennings Bryans’ supporters in the Anti-
37
George F. Hoar, The Lust of Empire: Speech of Hon. George F. Hoar of Massachusetts in the United
States Senate, April 17, 1900 (New York: The Tucker Publishing Co., 1900), 7–8.
38
Quoted in Hoar, 9–10.
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78
Imperialist League had to explain their awkward alliance with purveyors of Jim
Crow.
Similarly, Southern anti-imperialism has been difficult for historians to
explain or understand. Retelling the history of the war in 1926, Moorfield Storey,
who had been one of the League’s leading spokesmen, and Marcial Lichauco, the first
Filipino graduate of Harvard, recalled their erstwhile Southern allies as “a selfish
element,” full of “misinformation and downright prejudice against Asiatics in
general,” who “had to be contended with.”39 Even otherwise-careful students of
American history have either downplayed the relevance of the Southern antiimperialism or ignored it entirely.
Walter Russell Mead, the eminent writer on
American foreign policy, erred badly in writing that “the South had been consistently
annexationist and aggressive.”40
Daniel Schirmer’s 1972 history of the Anti-
Imperialist League, Republic or Empire, displays a similar historical blind spot,
perhaps aggravated by the author’s leftist sympathies and his desire to portray the
anti-imperialists in a generally heroic light.41
But as much as radical historians such as Schirmer might have been repulsed
by the fact, racist white southerners formed the most politically significant bloc of
opposition to formal empire, nearly derailing McKinley’s plans for empire in 1898
and early 1899 and providing a consistent voice of opposition to colonialism in the
Philippines in the years afterward.
Public opinion and the editorial stances of
newspapers were never uniform in the South on the issue of imperialism, but this
dynamic existed in Massachusetts as much as it did in Alabama. Fifteen of the
39
Moorfield Story and Marcial Lichauco, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 1898–
1925 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926), 78.
40
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 44.
41
Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 108–110.
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79
twenty-five votes against the Treaty of Paris came from Southern Senators, and it is
possible that the anti-imperialist bloc would have won this vote if a handful of
Southern Democrats had not agreed with William Jennings Bryan’s strategy of
ratifying the Treaty to turn imperialism into a campaign issue. 42 Shortly after the
Treaty passed, Senator Augustus Bacon of Georgia led the legislative fight for a
resolution calling for Filipino independence as soon as it was feasible; it took a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Garrett Hobart to defeat the resolution.43
The beliefs that made the cocktail of Southern white anti-imperialism included
a strange blend of white supremacist thought, a sense of historical victimization, a
mistrust of the federal government and the national economy, and even an empathy
for the self-determination of nonwhites. Southern anti-imperialism was at times a
bizarre exercise in cognitive dissonance; to attribute it solely to white racism is to
profoundly simplify the matter. Ben Tillman, whose formative adult years saw him
leading a Southern paramilitary group during Reconstruction, showcases how hatred
of African Americans could simultaneously exist with empathy for Filipinos,
Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans.
Tillman’s defined his world through hierarchies of power: he sought to reestablish white supremacy in his native South Carolina, through violence if necessary,
and to ensure in turn that the white political class of the South was not dominated by
Northern political or corporate interests.44 In a speech pondering the motives of the
42
Tennant S. McWilliams, The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and the Southern Sense of
Self, 1877–1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 60.
43
Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: America’s Forgotten Bid for Empire Which Cost 250,000 Lives
(New York: Longmans, Green and Co Inc., 1961), 231.
44
Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1.
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McKinley Administration in going to war in Cuba, Tillman did not “look forward to a
repetition of the scenes which we had in our State when we were reconstructed.”45
Evoking the mythology of Reconstruction, Tillman decried imperialism as “carpetbag
government” in which greedy businessmen and colonial officials exercised
unchecked power. Tillman believed that the United States could not expand its
territory without either harming white racial purity or becoming an imperial, despotic,
and militaristic state—as it had been, in his view, during Reconstruction.46
Seemingly without irony, he explained that the “party which sneers at and tramples
under foot the doctrine of the consent of the governed in the Philippines will soon
sneer at that doctrine in the United States.”47
Other Southern Democrats took a less abrasive tone than Tillman, but most
still supported his general worldview. After a fact-finding mission to the Philippines,
Senator Bacon concluded that Filipinos “desire beyond all things a brown man’s
government,” and even remarked that the people were “distinctly superior to what I
had expected.”48 White Southerners who did support imperialism disagreed with
Tillman’s views on foreign policy but more or less shared his racial politics; they
simply believed that Jim Crow could become an American export product. Led by
industrialists such as Daniel Tompkins and old-guard politicians such as John Tyler
Morgan, Southern imperialists envisioned a grand American empire that would end
45
Benjamin R. Tillman, Independence of Cuba: No Reconstruction or Carpet-Bag Government Under
Pretense of Patriotic Motives: Cuban Patriots Must Not be made to Pay Spain’s War Debt, Speech in
the United States Senate, April 15, 1898 (Washington: Publisher Unknown), 8.
46
Kantrowitz, 262–263.
47
Quoted in Kantrowitz, 264.
48
Augustus Octavius Bacon, What Senator Bacon Saw in the Philippine Islands: Natives Desire
Independence Above All Things and They Will Never be Content Until They have Obtained It (Boston:
New England Anti-Imperialist League, 1901), 5.
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the South’s economic woes and dependency on Northeastern and English finance by
providing new outlets for cotton and other goods.49
Unlike the anti-imperialists who were divided by outlook and region,
Southern imperialists could find much common ground with the policies of McKinley
and Roosevelt. However, the Anti-Imperialist League was not totally unskilled at
reaching out to potential allies. Middle-class women’s reform groups such as the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in particular, were quite ideologically
compatible with the League. At Gamaliel Bradford’s initial 1898 meeting in Faneuil
Hall, half the audience in attendance was female.50 Edward Atkinson, a prominent
member of the League, sent one of his pamphlets to several hundred women’s clubs,
and wrote approvingly, “the organization of women is proceeding… throughout the
country in a most extraordinary manner.”51
At an address to the Chicago chapter of the Anti-Imperialist League, Jane
Addams argued that imperialism was weakening American’s moral character: “It is
doubtless only during a time of war that the men and women of Chicago could
tolerate whipping for children in our city prison, and it is only during such a time that
the introduction in the legislature of a bill for the re-establishment of the whipping
post could be possible. National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals
determine national events.” The founder of Hull House and celebrated advocate of
the working class also praised the “workingmen, who have always realized, however
49
McWilliams, 68–88; Fry, xii–xiii; D.A. Tompkins, American Commerce, its Expansion: A
Collection of Addresses and Pamphlets Relating to the Extension of Foreign Markets for American
Manufactures (Charlotte, North Carolina: Self-Published, 1900).
50
Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the SpanishAmerican and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 176.
51
Quoted in Hoganson, 177.
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82
feebly and vaguely they may have expressed it, that it is they who in all ages have
borne the heaviest burden of privation and suffering imposed on the world by the
military spirit.”52
Labor unions were one of the major groups in the anti-imperialist coalition,
and Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, was
particularly outspoken in his criticism of the Philippine War. He feared the potential
competition against the “slave labor” of “the degenerate and semi-barbaric people of
the Philippines.”53 Like so many opponents of formal empire, Gompers was not at all
opposed to the expansion of an informal American empire. “It is not necessary that
we shall subjugate by the force of arms any other people in order to obtain that
expansion of trade,” he wrote, noting proudly that “the South American Republics are
practically our wards.”54 Working-class whites on the West Coast, who had been
profoundly hostile toward Chinese and Japanese immigrants, saw Filipinos as the new
face of the “Yellow Peril;” this fear led to an opposition to empire that lasted
throughout the colonial period.55
Irish Americans, and American Catholics in general, had several reasons to be
reluctant about empire. The large Irish community in Boston formed a substantial
part of that city’s working class, and was thus linked to both the labor movement and
the Anti-Imperialist League. Patrick A. Collins, a Democratic Congressman from
Massachusetts and one of the more notable Irish politicians in the country, became a
52
Address of Jane Addams, from The Chicago Liberty Meeting, held at Central Music Hall, April 30,
1899 (Chicago: Central Anti-Imperialist League, 1899), 39, 36.
53
Samuel Gompers to Ed O’Donnell, August 13, 1898, from The Anti-Imperialist Reader, Vol. I, 196.
54
Samuel Gompers to F.B. Thurber, November 25, 1898, from The Anti-Imperialist Reader, Vol. I ,
210.
55
Kramer, The Blood of Government, 407–428.
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leader of the League and campaigned vociferously against imperialism. 56
Imperialism had strong connotations with hated Great Britain, and the discourse of
Americans having the innate Anglo-Saxon talent for colonization surely did not sit
well with many Irish.57
Furthermore, the prospect of fighting and “civilizing”
Catholic Filipinos entailed a religious reason to oppose imperialism.
Indeed,
Catholics of all stripes in the United States tended to be wary of the imperialist
policy; Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria, one of the leading Catholic
intellectuals of the era, went beyond the appeal to religious brotherhood and saw
imperialism as an ugly byproduct of capitalism.
Our greed, our superstitious belief in money as the only true God and Saviour of
man, hurries us on with increasing speed into all the venalities, dishonesties, and
corruptions, into all the tricks and trusts by which people are disheartened and
impoverished… [Our] plain democratic Republic is no longer good enough for us.
We are become imperial. We must have might armies, and navies which shall
encircle the earth, to bring into subjection weak and unprotected savages and
barbarians. Why? For glory? No. That is a standpoint we have left behind. For
humanity? Wholesale murder is not humanity. Why? For money, more money,
money without end.58
Surprisingly, the most vocal opponents of American capitalism—members of the
radical labor movement—were not particularly interested in matters of imperialism.
They saw the immediate overthrow of capitalism to be a much more pressing
concern.
56
Asked Eugene Debs in 1900, “What but meaningless phrases are
Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 14.
Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961), 260.
58
J.L. Spalding, What Patriotism Demands: An American Catholic’s View (New York: AntiImperialist League of New York, 1900?), 5–6. See also Thomas T. McAvoy, “Bishop John Lancaster
Spalding and the Catholic Minority (1877–1908)”, The Review of Politics, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January
1950), 3–19.
57
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“imperialism,” “expansion,” “free silver,” “gold standard,” etc., to the wage-worker?
The large capitalists represented by Mr. McKinley and the small capitalists
represented by Mr. Bryan are interested in these “issues,” but they do not concern the
working class.”59 Daniel De Leon, spokesman for the Socialist Labor Party, was
more outspoken than Debs in his opposition to imperialism, but seemed more
interested in showing solidarity with the Spanish proletariat than with Filipinos,
Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, or Cubans.60 Radicals such as Debs and De Leon were
certainly opponents of Philippine annexation, but were far more concerned with
overthrowing capitalism than halting the spread of empire.61
There was one hanger-on in the anarchist movement, however, who had a
particular interest in the Philippines; this man had a peculiar and significant role in
American history. In front of the Temple of Music at the World’s Fair in Buffalo, in
the fall of 1901, Leon Czolgosz shot and mortally wounded President William
McKinley.
Although Czolgosz’s personal background and troubled mental state
certainly were factors that shaped his transformation from a Midwestern factory
worker and second-generation immigrant into a reviled assassin, his views on the
Philippines seem to be one of the decisive factors that led to his making the fateful
decision to kill McKinley. As Emma Goldman, one of Czolgosz’s anarchist heroes,
mused in trying to explain the motives behind the assassination, “Was it because he
59
Eugene Debs, “Outlook for Socialism in the United States,” from Debs: His Life, Writings and
Speeches (Chicago: Geo G. Renneker Co., 1908), 89.
60
The Anti-Imperialist Reader, Vol. I, 111–140.
61
Given the fierce opposition of Debs and other labor radicals to World War One, as well as the antiimperialist attitude with which socialism is usually associated, this is somewhat surprising, but not
necessarily inconsistent with socialist thought at the time. See Shlomo Avineri, ed. Karl Marx on
Colonialism and Modernization: His Despatches and Other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the
Middle East and North Africa (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968).
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85
saw in McKinley the willing tool of Wall Street and of the new American imperialism
that flowered under his administration?”62
The details of Leon Czolgosz’s life are hazy, but the answer to Goldman’s
question seems to be yes. Sometime around 1899, at about the same time that Leon’s
brother Michael returned from service in the Philippines, Leon quit his job at a wire
mill in Cleveland and returned to live on the family farm in Warrensville. There, he
began to develop an interest in socialism, going to Cleveland to see Emma Goldman
speak and following her to Chicago.63 In Chicago, Czolgosz approached Abraham
Isaak, editor of the anarchist newsletter Free Society, asking about “secret meetings”
and coming off as either completely naïve or a hopelessly inept police spy. Isaak
recalled that Czolgosz seemed to have become profoundly disillusioned with the
McKinley administration, complaining about “outrages committed by the American
government in the Philippine islands” that did not “harmonize with the teachings in
the public schools about our flag.”64 Mental illness may have been the ultimate
reason why Czolgosz shot McKinley, but the young radical’s anger over the
Philippines appears to be a proximate cause of his actions.
Ultimately, the political savvy of both the imperialist and anti-imperialist
camps were expressed in the wake of McKinley’s assassination.
Proponents of
imperialism predictably blamed the murder on treacherous anti-imperialist rhetoric;
George Boutwell took a more roundabout tack, strangely trying to spin McKinley’s
death into a vindication of the anti-imperialist message.
62
Quoted in Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 105.
63
Rauchway, 170.
64
Quoted in Rauchway, 101.
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86
It is said of his assassin that he traced his ancestry to Poland, and that the
assassination was due to the spirit of what is known as anarchy. If such are the facts,
we may find a cause for his crime in the history of Poland. In the early part of the
last third of the eighteenth century, Russia, Austria, and Prussia combined for the
subjugation of Poland… As the apparent result of that usurpation of power over a
weaker people, large numbers of Poles became exiles to other continents or scattered
over Europe, they became the promoters of revolution and the disseminators of the
idea that all governments are usurpations and tyrannies, and that they ought not
longer to exist… If we may not trace the assassination of President McKinley to the
dismemberment of Poland, the recognized evils and crimes that have come from that
act of injustice are a warning to England and America in presence of the wars in
South Africa and in the Philippine Islands.65
Boutwell’s strange response to McKinley’s death exemplified some of the worst
faults of the Anti-Imperialist League: as a whole, its leadership was entirely too selfserious and unskilled at shaping public opinion through rhetorical spin. But in the
long run, the League and other elements of the anti-imperialist movement were
successful at spreading public apathy, if not hostility, toward formal imperialism.
The steady drumbeat of anti-imperialist rhetoric, coupled with the failure of the
United States military to rise to the very high level of expected success in the
Philippines and the reports of atrocities committed by American soldiers, steadily
dampened public enthusiasm for formal empire in the years following 1898. Since
most opponents of empire were not especially hostile toward the informal
imperialism that the United States was asserting in China and Latin America at this
time, indirect dominance became an easier program for politicians to sell to the
public.
65
Boutwell, The Enslavement of American Labor, 6.
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87
From Benevolent Assimilation to Benevolent Supervision
The United States in China, Latin America, and the Philippines
Almost a year and a half after his victory in Manila Bay, Admiral Dewey
returned from the Philippines to the United States, arriving amidst great fanfare and a
triumphant parade in New York City.
The centerpiece of his homecoming
celebration was a hastily erected, elaborated decorated arch in lower Manhattan. The
New York Times described the Dewey Arch as “the most elaborate and artistic
structure of its kind ever attempted,” resembling “the great Roman memorial arches,
particularly the Arch of Titus.”1
Militaristic and maritime images adorned the
columns and the top of the arch. The monument was constructed out of staff, a
mixture of plaster and wood shavings; its designers planned to replace the original
edifice with a stone reproduction when time and funding permitted. Two years later,
the structure had become a rapidly deteriorating eyesore, and was torn down.
Attempts to raise money for a permanent arch failed badly, as less than half of the
estimated cost of the project was raised.2
Public excitement for empire-building in the Philippines paralleled sentiment
for the Dewey Arch; what was once embraced as a majestic project soon decayed into
a forgettable, at times unsightly, policy.
Policymakers, too, eventually became
disenchanted with the pageantry of empire. Joining the ranks of the world’s imperial
1
“Dewey’s Triumphal Arch,” The New York Times, July 30, 1899.
“Streetscapes: Monumental Parallels; The Arch and the Bandshell,” The New York Times, May 10,
1992.
2
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88
powers entailed numerous military, political, and diplomatic complications, and
events contemporary with the Philippine War demonstrated that the United States
could achieve its economic and geostrategic objectives in the world without resorting
to formal empire as an instrument of policy. The Open Door policy in China and a
more forceful kind of informal imperialism in Latin America provided two other
models of expansionism, models that entailed far less difficulties than did formal
imperialism in the Philippines.
The United States was not the only economically dynamic country that
became recognized as an expanding military power following the lopsided defeat of a
once-powerful empire in the 1890s. The 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War, which resulted
in Japanese influence over Korea and control over Taiwan, made Japan’s rise as a
regional power apparent to the Western observers who were not so blinded by racial
bias as to miss it. The Japanese saw the victory as a triumph of their modernization,
and a mandate for the expansion of Japanese influence throughout Asia. As a part of
this project, Japanese intellectuals advocated emigration to the south, and viewed the
Philippines as the next step for Japanese cultural expansion, after Taiwan.3 Jiji
shinpo, an influential Japanese newspaper, editorialized on May 7, 1898, that “if we
continue to send emigrants and create Japanese villages and towns [in the
Philippines], the result would be almost like extending the limits of our empire.”4
However, Japanese officials feared a conflict with the United States over the
Philippines, and did not protest the American annexation. An army spokesman,
3
Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1972), 47–49.
4
Quoted in Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 57.
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89
articulating the official policy, stated that “southern expansion is our ideal, but it is
not to be carried out right now.”5
The Japanese reaction to the process of American domination over Hawaii
had been much more tense. There, racial antagonisms inflamed political tensions as
the two countries attempted to carve out spheres of influence in the Pacific. Japanese
immigrants formed a sizeable minority population in Hawaii at the time of Queen
Liliuokalani’s 1893 ouster. The white-led government took steps to disenfranchise
Hawaii’s Japanese population, and looked fearfully upon Japan’s victory over China.
Although the Japanese government had never planned to assert any type of formal
political control over Hawaii, the archipelago was viewed as a place to develop
economic and political influence, where emigrants could freely go and work. After
1895, with this expansionary mindset in place, Hawaiian annexation by the United
States was viewed as a negative potential development, as American immigration and
naturalization laws would have threatened the status of Japanese emigrants.6
In early 1897, the Shinshu Maru arrived in Hawaii, carrying several hundred
Japanese laborers. The majority were refused entry, and ordered to return to Japan;
similar incidents subsequently occurred with two other ships, and over one thousand
prospective Japanese immigrants were turned back.
The Hawaiian government
justified its action with the explanation that a recent group of Japanese immigrants
had disembarked from their ship “with a military step,” and were therefore secretly
Japanese soldiers. 7 The episode outraged Foreign Minister Okuma Shigenobu, who
5
Quoted in Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 60.
Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 49–52.
7
As William McKinley explained the incident, quoted in George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy
Years, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 308.
6
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lodged a protest with the Hawaiian government and sent a warship to Honolulu.
American imperialists, unsatisfied with the informal imperialism that the United
States asserted in Hawaii through the white-run government, seized on Shigenobu’s
response as proof of Japanese territorial ambitions in the Pacific and stressed the need
for formal annexation.8
Theodore Roosevelt, fascinated by and wary of Japanese expansionism,
believed that annexation would prevent the possibility of a conflict between Japan,
Hawaii, and possibly the United States; as he wrote to Alfred Mahan, “If I had my
way we would annex those islands tomorrow.”9 Annexation, however, did not occur
until after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Two days after the Battle of
Manila, with the United States suddenly having a radically different position in the
Pacific, William McKinley proposed a joint Congressional resolution to annex
Hawaii.10
The threat posed by Japanese interests in Hawaii changed some minds on the
question of Hawaiian annexation. George Frisbie Hoar, the most outspoken antiimperialist in the Republican Party, became convinced that Hawaiian annexation
would be necessary to protect American interests in the islands. Even though he
feared that annexing Hawaii might “be the first step in the acquisition of dominion
over barbarous archipelagoes in distant seas,” or lead to “competition with the great
powers of Europe in the plundering of China, in the division of Africa,” the threat of
8
Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 50–51.
Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 51–52.
10
Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 160.
9
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Japanese influence in Hawaii led Hoar to support annexation.11 In the Philippines,
another rising power with imperialist aims in the Pacific—Germany—also presented
a threat to American influence in the region, but Hoar, like other anti-imperialists,
believed that the declaration of an American protectorate over the Philippines would
be enough to protect against “the cupidity of any other nation.”12
Before Dewey had even left Manila Bay, his victory over the Spanish had led
to a moment of political tension with the German Empire. In the weeks after the
battle, a stream of German warships began trickling into Manila bay. By the end of
June, six German warships under the command of Vice-Admiral Otto von Diederichs
were in the harbor, ostensibly to protect German nationals in the Philippines. This
force was noticeably stronger than Dewey’s fleet, and rumors of a secret German
alliance with either the Spanish or Emilio Aguinaldo began circulating in Manila and
beyond.13
Tensions came to a head when a small German craft, conducting a
reconnaissance mission in the middle of the night, was spotted by an American ship.
Dewey ordered a warning shot fired over the German ship’s deck, and had some
unkind words for the ship’s commanding officer after he boarded Dewey’s flagship.
According to Dewey’s account, he warned that if such German maneuvers were to
continue, “an accident might unfortunately occur;” the German officer recalled
11
Hoar, 311.
Hoar, 315.
13
Karl-Heinz Wionzek, ed., Germany, the Philippines, and the Spanish-American War: Four Accounts
by Officers of the Imperial German Navy, translation by Thomas Clark. (Manila: National Historical
Institute, 2000), xiii–34.
12
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Dewey making a brasher edict, that “if Germany wants war, all right we are ready!”14
The incident was only a minor provocation, but it underscored the fact that Germany,
like the United States and Japan, had territorial ambitions in the Pacific. At the
outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Germany already had protectorates over parts
of Samoa and New Guinea, and after the Treaty of Paris, Spain sold the remnants of
its Pacific empire—the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Marianas Islands excepting
Guam—to Germany.
After the issue in Manila Bay was resolved, the multistate protectorate over
Samoa remained as a possible flash point of competing German and American
ambitions in the Pacific. In 1898, instability in the islands led to the decision to
permanently settle the disputed territorial claims; as William McKinley later
remarked, “The arrangement under which Samoa was administered had proved
impracticable and unacceptable to all the powers concerned.” Britain, preoccupied by
events in South Africa, subsequently withdrew from Samoa, leaving Germany and the
United States to divide the islands between themselves. 15 Such a solution proved
workable for the small group of islands.
In China, however, the competition among Western nations and Japan for
acquiring spheres of influence could not be resolved so easily. The American policy
toward China that coalesced at the beginning of the twentieth century was drastically
different than the policy in the Philippines; rather than pursuing territorial ambitions
14
Wionzek, xiv; George Dewey, Autobiography of George Dewey, Admiral of the Navy (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 243–244; Nathan Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign
(Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Foundation, 1947), 56.
15
Zakaria, 160; Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Volume II:
The American Search for Opportunity, 1865–1913 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
90–91. William McKinley, annual message of December 5, 1899, from Akira Iriye, From Nationalism
to Internationalism: US Foreign Policy to 1914 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 326–327.
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93
in the Middle Kingdom, the United States adopted a policy of feigned anti-imperialist
benevolence that helped facilitate its economic goals. And although this policy was
adopted largely by chance, it succeeded in both promoting American interests abroad
and disarming the domestic debate over imperialism.
One of the principle strategic motivations behind the annexation of the
Philippines had been to acquire a foothold in the Pacific from which American
merchants could tap the vast and fabled markets of China.
“The value of the
Philippine Islands,” said Henry Cabot Lodge, “great as it undoubtedly is… is trifling
compared to the indirect results which will flow from… the vast markets of China.”16
But while the United States was invested so heavily in conquering the Philippines in
order to become an Asian power, the Chinese market seemed to be on the verge of
slipping away.
At the end of the nineteenth century, after decades of unequal treaties, a weak
Chinese Empire was forced into repeatedly making territorial concessions to foreign
powers. The war against Japan had resulted in the loss of Taiwan and Korea, and in
1898 and 1899, European powers began making new claims. Germany, under the
pretext of responding to an attack on several of its missionaries, occupied the port city
of Qingdao and claimed Shandong province as a sphere of influence. The other
European powers, looking for concessions of their own, soon followed suit. Russia
made inroads into Manchuria and occupied Lushun, on the southern tip of the
Liaodong peninsula near Korea; the British claimed the harbor at Weihaiwei, on the
Shandong peninsula opposite Liaodong, as well as a large area of farmland north of
16
Henry Cabot Lodge, The Retention of the Philippine Islands, Speech of Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge of
Massachusetts, in the Senate of the United States, March 7, 1900 (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1900), 38.
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94
Hong Kong; and the French claimed special rights in the provinces bordering colonial
Indochina, as well as on the island of Hainan. 17 A partition of China seemed to be
imminent.
“Already America has been drawn into war over the dismemberment of one
dying civilization,” wrote Brooks Adams. “It cannot escape the conflict which must
be waged over the carcass of another.”18 Secretary of State John Hay, however,
attempted to preserve American economic interests in China while avoiding activities
that might lead to involvement in such a conflagration. Strongly influenced by the
American Asiatic Association—a group comprised mostly of prominent businessmen,
along with clergymen, scholars, and diplomats with interests in China—Hay wrote a
note to his counterparts in the European powers and Japan in 1899, encouraging an
open door for foreign commerce in China.19 With studied ambiguity, Hay asked for
the “perfect equality of treatment” of commerce in each country’s sphere of
influence, specifically regarding harbor dues, tariffs, and railway fees.20
Hay failed to clearly define in this note both what constituted “commerce”—
whether or not investment would fall into that category, for example—and what,
precisely, a sphere of interest meant. Nor did he rule out the possibility of the United
States acquiring a sphere of influence in China. When Wu Tingfang, the Chinese
minister to Washington, approached Hay in 1899 to ask about rumors of the United
States planning to seize Chinese territory, Hay’s qualified response was “that if at any
17
Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, Second Edition (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1999), 229–230. See map on page ix.
18
Brooks Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900), 22.
19
Delber McKee, Chinese Exclusion Versus the Open Door Policy, 1900-1906: Clashes Over China
Policy in the Roosevelt Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 16–17.
20
John Hay, First Open Door Note, 1899, from Thomas Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major
Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume 1: To 1920, Fourth Edition (Lexington,
Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 457–458.
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95
future time, which I did not now anticipate, we should desire any conveniences or
accommodations on the coast of China we should approach the Chinese Government
directly upon the subject.”21
The recipients of the Open Door note were confused about its meaning, and
what a pledge to adhere to its principles would entail. The Russian minister of
foreign affairs complained that “in this note the editing of which is so unclear, the
confusion of treaty ports, spheres of influence and leased territories is such that it is
hard for us to understand the intentions of the American Government.”22 Regardless,
Britain, Japan, Germany, Russia, and France all agreed to loosely accept Hay’s
principles, however reluctantly. But scarcely a few months passed before the political
situation in China, once again, shifted dramatically.23
The outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900 forced the United
States Government to adopt a more concrete Chinese policy. The failure of the Qing
Court’s attempts to stop foreign domination led to popular antiforeign sentiment and
the emergence of a militant movement practicing unique martial rituals, the Boxers.
Spreading their influence through antiforeign propaganda, as well as intermittent
official support, the Boxers began harassing and attacking missionaries, Chinese
Christians, and foreign-owned property as the movement spread from Germandominated Shandong province north and west into Manchuria and Zhili. As the
Boxers cut off communications and transportation between Peking and Tianjin, the
21
Quoted in Michael H. Hunt, Frontier Defense and the Open Door: Manchuria in Chinese-American
Relations, 1895–1911 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 33.
22
Quoted in Hunt, 31.
23
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 173.
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two centers of foreign populations, and laid siege to the foreign legations in Peking,
rumors of Chinese atrocities spread.24
Western retribution was swift and violent.
Bypassing Congress, William
McKinley ordered a force of several thousand American troops stationed in the
Philippines to join the international expedition to quash the Boxer Rebellion and
protect the legations.25
The eight participating nations quickly and successfully
accomplished this mission. Jasper Whiting, a correspondent for the Westminster
Gazette, recalled the conflict thus:
It was delightful walking along the winding road in the early morning, often
following the very path that the relief troops had taken a few days before.
Everywhere were evidences of the devastation wrought by the invading armies.
Corn fields and crops were going to waste. Villages were deserted and destroyed,
and occasionally a dead body marked only too plainly the path of the avenging hosts.
…When we entered Peking we found the city swarming with foreign troops
but deserted by the Chinese. Evidences of shot and shell and fire were to be seen on
all sides. Acres upon acres of a once thickly populated city had been burnt to the
ground… Everybody, I think, without exception, who had been through the city,
looted; and those who came after, those who were most eloquent in their
denunciation of the practice on the day of their arrival, soon could not resist seeing
their friends bring in from their daily jaunts treasures of priceless value and even
greater interest. The one excuse offered was, “If I don’t take the things somebody
else will.”26
24
Akira Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism, 168–169; Hunt, 17–18.
Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism, 169; Zakaria, 164, cites this incident—during which
the Chinese declaration of war on the United States was completely ignored—as a clear manifestation
of the rising power of the executive branch.
26
Jasper Whiting, The Journal of Jasper Whiting (Boston: Napoleon Tennyson Hobbes, Junior, 1902)
102, 111, 122–123.
25
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U.S. participation in the occupation of Peking further tightened American
involvement in imperial politicking in China, and forced Hay to more forcefully
articulate his nation’s goals in the region.
From the beginning of the crisis,
McKinley’s administration made it clear that the United States was going to avoid
direct collusion with the other powers involved. General Adna Chaffee, commanding
officer of the American force, was ordered to “avoid entering into any joint action or
undertaking with other powers tending to commit or limit this Government as to its
future course of conduct.”27 In the aftermath of the conflict, the United States sought
(unsuccessfully) to moderate other countries’ demands for a harsh indemnity
payment, but also kept several thousand troops stationed in north China, a tangible
commitment to the goal of protecting American interests in East Asia.28
Seeing a China under tremendous internal strain and external predation, Hay
began to formulate two mutually contradictory policies. First, he called upon foreign
nations to respect the territorial integrity of China. Second, he considered joining the
scramble for Chinese territory. Hay’s second Open Door note was less equivocal
than his first; he flatly stated in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion that “the attitude of
the United States” was to “preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity,
protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and
safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the
Chinese Empire.”29 But Hay was pessimistic about the chances of the Open Door
policy succeeding, and hesitant to withdraw American troops from China when the
27
Quoted in Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism, 169.
Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism, 169–170; LaFeber, The American Search for
Opportunity, 175–176.
29
John Hay, Second Open Door Note, 1900, from Paterson and Merrill, 459–460.
28
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repercussions would be unclear. In a note to Alvey A. Adee, the third-ranking
official at the State Department, Hay wrote:
The dilemma is clear enough. We want to get out at the earliest possible
moment. We do not want to have the appearance of being forced out or frightened
out, and we must not lose our proper influence in the final arrangement. If we leave
Germany and England in Peking, and retire with Russia, who has unquestionably
made her bargain already with China, we not only will seem to have been beaten, but
we run a serious risk of being really frozen out.
…There is, therefore, not a single power we can rely on, for our policy of
abstention from plunder and the Open Door….
The inherent weakness of our
position is this: we do not want to rob China ourselves, and our public opinion will
not permit us to interfere, with an army, to prevent others from robbing her. Besides,
we have no army. The talk of the papers about “our preeminent moral position
giving us the authority to dictate to the world” is mere flap-doodle.
…Anxious, therefore, as I am, to get away from Peking, I cannot help
feeling that if we retire… we shall be left out in the cold.30
A panoply of solutions was offered to the China problem. Secretary Root, fearing
“complications which might discredit our policy among our own people,”
recommended withdrawing from China in order to avoid “the currents of intrigue and
aggression of other Powers.” While Root strongly supported formal imperialism in
the Philippines, he believed that maintaining a military presence in China would lead
to the United States becoming swept up in a European power struggle—especially
since “discordant elements at home” might further complicate matters by making the
30
John Hay to A.A. Adee, September 14, 1900, from Walter LaFeber, “Election of 1900,” in Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and William P. Hansen, eds., History of American Presidential
Elections 1789–1968, vol. III (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1971), 1958–1959.
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99
resolve of the United States appear unsteady.31 Edwin Conger, the U.S. minister to
China who had unsuccessfully recommended taking Zhili province—which included
Peking—as a sphere of influence in 1899, continued to advocate territorial claims
while American troops were in China. The Naval Department similarly supported
taking a naval station on the Chinese coast.32
Briefly, Hay took their advice. Only a few months after penning his second
Open Door note, he cabled Conger an order to try to acquire special rights at Samsah
Bay, in Fukien province. Both China and Japan, which had an interest in the region,
responded to the attempt by appealing to the principles that Hay had so recently
articulated. Hay quickly backed down, preferring to stay with the Open Door policy
rather than functionally abandon it and join in the race for Chinese territory and
concessions.33
Hay’s decision to stick with the Open Door paid off. Although Russian and
Japanese interests in Manchuria would present an obstacle for the policy, for the most
part it succeeded far beyond Hay’s low expectations. The other powers, excluding
Russia, withdrew from China in 1901 pledging to respect the Open Door principles;
subsequently, Hay decided to take the Open Door a step further. He clarified that
loans were an inherent part of commerce to be protected under the Open Door, and
with the backing of Britain and Japan, pressured Russia into withdrawing from
Manchuria.34
31
Elihu Root to William McKinley, September 11, 1900, from LaFeber, “Election of 1900,” 1957.
Hunt, 30, 33.
33
Hunt, 33–34; LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 176.
34
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Second Edition (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., 1972), 51; Zakaria, 172.
32
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100
The Open Door policy, while navigating the treacherous waters of
international diplomacy, also succeeded in largely sidestepping the contentious
domestic debate over imperialism. The policy, which expanded American influence
and promised a large outlet for American goods, satisfied both sides of the debate;
even though it was formulated in the heat of the race between William McKinley and
William Jennings Bryan, the Open Door policy never became a significant campaign
issue. Bryan’s adherence to the Open Door after he was appointed Secretary of State
in Woodrow Wilson’s administration attracted a few calls of backsliding, but
demonstrates that all but the most committed anti-imperialists were willing to accept
such a mechanism of informal imperialism.35
The biggest short-term challenge to the Open Door came from an unexpected
source; it was neither European powers nor domestic anti-imperialists that posed the
most potent threat to American economic expansion in China, but Chinese public
opinion. The Open Door policy was presented as an example of benevolence in
American foreign conduct, and the basis of a unique and friendly relationship
between China and the United States. Elihu Root, reflecting in 1904, believed that
the Open Door “brought a moral force of recognized value to protect peaceful and
helpless China from dismemberment and spoliation,” and that “none other but
America could render the service which we have rendered to humanity in China.” 36
But the domestic politics of the United States spoke of anything but friendship.
35
Williams, 46.
Elihu Root, “External Policies in 1904,” from The Military and Colonial Policy of the United States:
Addresses and Reports by Elihu Root, Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott, eds. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1916), 105.
36
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101
At the same time John Hay was beginning to implement his policy in China,
American restrictions on Chinese immigration became dramatically tighter. Although
fairly tight restrictions had been imposed upon Chinese immigrants since the 1880s,
beginning in 1898 Terence Powderly, the Commissioner General of Immigration and
former head of the Knights of Labor, enhanced these restrictions. Powderly sought a
total ban on Chinese immigrants, and encouraged the harassment and intimidation of
Chinese people already within the United States in order to drive them out. In 1902,
Congress gave its blessing to Powderly’s policy, which was already effectively in
force. In a move twisting American expansionism and American nativism,37 General
Elwell Otis decided to apply the exclusionary policy to the Philippines, where
Chinese immigrants and their descendents had formed a sizeable and influential
community during the Spanish colonial period.38
Outraged at the American immigration policy and interpreting the Open Door
as a method of economic control, rather than a policy arising from paternalistic good
will, Chinese students, merchants, and patricians, along with Chinese-Americans and
temporarily the Chinese government, organized a boycott of American goods. 39
When the boycott began, rumors spread in the United States that a third party—Japan,
or perhaps Germany—was truly behind the event, secretly manipulating the Chinese
public.40
The San Francisco Chronicle shifted the blame inward, accusing the
American Asiatic Association of starting the boycott “for the purpose of breaking
37
McKee, 28–29.
McKee, 35.
39
McKee, 103–110.
40
McKee, 111–112.
38
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102
down our exclusion laws.”41 But as the boycott spread across the Chinese coast in
1905, it became undeniably evident as a manifestation of genuine Chinese anger
toward American policies. As American goods sat uselessly in China, the Roosevelt
administration began to reconsider the contradictory policies of an open door in China
and a closed door in America.42
In 1906, the boycott came to an unsatisfactory conclusion as the Chinese
government turned against the boycott, its funds dried up, and the Chinese-American
community—which had financially supported the effort—was devastated by the San
Francisco Earthquake. Legislation to reform American immigration policy, which
had prompted a lengthy Congressional debate, was quickly tabled.43 The incident
imparted a lesson on Theodore Roosevelt, however, that benevolence in foreign
policy had to extend beyond mere rhetoric: his administration cancelled nearly half of
the Boxer indemnity China owed to the United States, as “proof of sincere friendship
for China.”44 The Chinese government, at Roosevelt’s urging, used this remission to
help Chinese students go to the United States to study.45
Formulated concurrently, the American models of imperialism in the
Philippines and in China were markedly different, despite their underlying rhetorical
justifications of benevolent intent. When there was an apparent vacuum of power in
the Philippines after Dewey’s victory in Manila, the McKinley administration was
quick to serve the economic and political interests of the United States by seizing
formal control of the archipelago before another power—or the Philippine
41
Quoted in McKee, 112.
McKee, 126–145.
43
McKee, 171–198.
44
Root, 334.
45
Hunt, 170–173.
42
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103
Republic—did. In Hawaii and Samoa, the threat of competing with another nation
for control accelerated the process of annexation. When the Chinese Empire began to
collapse, there clearly was no such vacuum as there was in the Philippines, but rather
a clash of powerful nations, occupying the capital in the aftermath of the Boxer
Rebellion and vying for regionalized control and influence. This made informal
imperialism, the exercise of economic might and influence without political
domination, the preferable option.
In both cases, American policymakers severely underestimated the
nationalism of the people they were being so “benevolent” toward, and widespread
racist attitudes undermined the rhetoric of protection and uplift. In the Philippines,
this misunderstanding resulted in a bloody, prolonged war and the diminution of
public enthusiasm for an overseas empire. In China, it led to a boycott that hurt some
American exporters and entailed a moment of political introspection, but as the
wealthiest country in the world the United States was much more resilient to
economic warfare than to guerilla warfare. The Open Door largely avoided the
domestic debate over imperialism, and allowed the United States far more latitude in
foreign affairs by enabling an easier withdrawal from regions threatened by other
powers, as was the case in Manchuria. It goes perhaps a bit too far to say, as historian
William Appleman Williams has, that the Open Door was “a brilliant strategic
stroke” that “became the strategy of American foreign policy for the next halfcentury,” but as a model of empire, it had far more long-term influence than did the
administrative colonialism of the Philippines.46
46
Williams, 45.
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104
Latin America was also a prime area of interest to expansionists in the United
States at this time, who linked it both ideologically and physically—via the Panama
Canal—to the country’s interests and empire in the Pacific. The countries spanning
the Caribbean basin were of particular importance; in that region, the United States
simultaneously attempted to increase its economic activity and political clout while
consolidating its naval control in order to protect the isthmus. For the most part, after
annexing Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War the United States did not
further pursue colonies in what William Howard Taft privately called the “dirty socalled republics of South America.”47 Instead, it followed a policy of informal
imperialism that was more direct than the Open Door policy in China, manipulating
Latin American politics and finances, or sending in troops when using economic
leverage seemed unworkable. As Philander Knox, Secretary of State during Taft’s
Presidential term, put it, the United States was engaged in “benevolent supervision
over Latin American countries,” an activity meant to “reflect credit upon the
hegemony of our race and further advance the influence of Anglo-Saxon
civilization.”48
Accompanying this “Benevolent Supervision” was a surge of
investment in Latin America: as U.S. overseas investment went from less than a
billion dollars in 1897 to $3.5 billion in 1914, nearly half went into Mexico and the
Caribbean basin.49
Immediately prior to the outbreak of war with Spain, the United States
Congress had pledged, through the Teller Amendment, not to “exercise sovereignty,
47
Quoted in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 205.
48
Quoted in Schoultz, 207.
49
Lafeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 196.
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105
jurisdiction, or control over [Cuba] except for the pacification thereof.”50 But during
the ensuing occupation of Cuba, the sentiments behind this statement lost traction,
and proponents of Cuban annexation began to devise ways to get around it. General
Leonard Wood, Military Governor of Cuba for most of the North American
occupation, recommended that the United States simply continue to occupy Cuba
indefinitely, without making any further statements about independence.
Wood
believed that Cubans would quickly embrace the advantages of a North American
government, as they were already “rapidly realizing that annexation is the best thing
for them.”51
President McKinley spent the first years of the Cuban occupation without a
firm commitment to any long-term policy, and his administration was content to
observe the ramifications of the colonial policy in the Philippines before deciding a
plan for Cuba. In 1899, McKinley stated that “the destinies of Cuba are in some
rightful form and manner irrevocably linked with our own,” but believed that it was
for the future to determine “whether those ties shall be organic or conventional.”52
While the Philippine War was making the difficulties of a colonial war all too
apparent, the McKinley administration and its allies in Congress devised a way to
grant Cuba formal independence while still keeping the island economically and
politically dependent upon the United States.
The Platt Amendment was rushed through Congress and forced into the new
Cuban Constitution; it prevented the Cuban government from undoing policies
50
The Teller Amendment, from Paterson and Merrill, 394.
Quoted in David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean 1898–1917
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 51.
52
Quoted in Healy, 52.
51
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106
undertaken by the U.S. military government, impaired Cuba’s rights to conduct its
foreign policy, granted the United States the right to a naval base, and allowed for
unilateral North American intervention “for the preservation of Cuban independence,
[and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property,
and individual liberty.”53
The United States was not hesitant to exercise this
measure: after the ruling, pro-U.S. government of Cuba collapsed following rigged
elections in 1905, Theodore Roosevelt sent in troops to stop Cuba from falling “prey
to misrule and anarchy.” However, as he wrote to Frank Steinhart, the U.S. Consulgeneral in Cuba, Roosevelt “loathe[d] the thought of assuming any control over the
island such as we have over Porto Rico and the Philippines.”54 North American
troops remained in Cuba for three years, and returned again in 1912, 1917, and
1922.55
Anti-imperialists were not particularly pleased with the Platt Amendment, but
many were willing to accept it as a far more palatable alterative to annexation. As
Senator Hernando Desoto Money, a Mississippi Democrat, explained during the brief
debate on the Platt Amendment, “I would rather have this amendment passed… than
to see the United States continue to be the possessor of Cuba, holding her people in a
state under which they are already chafing.”56 Although the subsequent debates on
North American involvement in Latin American issues occasionally became heated,
they never took on nearly the political intensity that the Philippine War did. Because
formal imperialism was largely rejected as a way to expand the influence of the
53
The Platt Amendment, from Patterson and Merrill, 395.
Quoted in Schoultz, 198.
55
Zakaria, 169, 7
56
Quoted in Schoultz, 149.
54
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107
United States, debates over foreign policy were much less impassioned than they had
been immediately after the Spanish-American War.57
The expansion of the United States’ involvement in Latin American affairs at
the beginning of the twentieth century was due in a large part to the power dynamics
that had been shaped by the Spanish-American War, but the withdrawal of Britain as
a rival for primary influence in the Western hemisphere was also a factor. Britain
continued to have a significant influence in the Americas outside of its colonies—
quite notably in Argentina—but this influence was primarily economic, and
unthreatening to the security interests of the United States.
The British clearly
acknowledged the United States as the hegemonic power in the Western hemisphere
after the Venezuelan crisis of 1895. This is clearly illustrated by a 1903 boundary
dispute between Alaska and Canada, a dispute that was resolved in a very different
fashion than the boundary dispute that occurred several years beforehand.
Gold was discovered in southern Alaska late in the nineteenth century, in the
panhandle adjacent to the Pacific coast, a region with a vaguely defined border. After
Theodore Roosevelt sent troops to enforce the claim, an arbitration panel of three
Americans, two Canadians, and one Briton was created.
Roosevelt naturally
appointed three partisans, with Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge accompanying a
57
The one exception to the abandonment of formal imperialism in Latin America is the Virgin Islands,
which Theodore Roosevelt unsuccessfully attempted to purchase from Denmark; the transaction was
finally made under the Wilson Administration in 1917. Zakaria, 169. Roosevelt also made a
halfhearted attempt to purchase Greenland from Denmark. Henry Cabot Lodge believed Greenland to
be “profitable in minerals like Alaska,” but agreed with Roosevelt that the purchase was not a pressing
matter. Henry Cabot Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt, May 12 and June 10, 1905, from Henry Cabot
Lodge, ed. Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–
1918, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 120, 136. These exceptions prove the
generalized rule that territorial expansion no longer held favor as a policy: Both Greenland and the
Virgin Islands were European colonies, both were small in population, if not size, and neither attempt
at purchase was conducted with particular enthusiasm.
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108
likeminded Republican Senator. He told the three that the dispute was “not in my
judgment one of those which can properly be considered open to discussion,” while
he blasted Wilfried Laurier, the Canadian Prime Minister, for appointing “advocates”
instead of judges.58 As neither Americans nor Canadians were likely to be swayed by
the other side’s arguments, it was up to Lord Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice of
Great Britain, to decide the matter. Alverstone gave most of the disputed territory to
the Americans, angering Canadians while promoting his country’s new policy of
appeasing the United States in the Western hemisphere.59
Even more telling of the new power dynamic in that part of the world was the
Hay-Pauncefote Treaty between the United States and Great Britain, which overruled
the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty providing for joint Anglo-American influence over a
future canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The first Hay-Pauncefote
Treaty, signed in 1900, allowed for the United States to independently build and
control such a canal, under the condition that it was not fortified. Henry Cabot Lodge
led the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty, sensing that the United States could squeeze
out more concessions from Britain. Lodge’s bluff went uncalled: in 1901, HayPauncefote was renegotiated, allowing for the North American fortification of the
Canal. The Senate quickly passed this version of the Treaty, paving the way for an
Isthmian Canal.60
North American diplomacy toward Great Britain prior to the construction of
the Panama Canal could be considered somewhat rude, but it paled in comparison to
58
Theodore Roosevelt to Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Turner, March 24, 1903, from
Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Vol. II, 4–5.
59
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 190; Zakaria, 168.
60
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 192.
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109
the attitude the United States adopted in its dealings with Colombia. The initial
reluctance of the Colombian government to allow the United States to build a canal in
the province of Panama on favorable terms came at a bad time.
Theodore
Roosevelt’s jingoistic attitude, general disdain for the people of Latin America, and
personal interest in the canal did not bode well for Colombia. His tenure as President
came when interest in building an isthmian canal, long simmering in the minds of
North American expansionists, was coming to a boil. Ferdinand de Lessep’s failed
attempt to build a French-owned canal in the 1880s made the construction of a canal a
more urgent matter for policymakers in the United States, and the naval buildup in the
1890s and the colonial acquisitions of 1898 only intensified this desire.61
After a period of legislative maneuvering in 1902, Congress abandoned the
once-popular plan for a route cutting through Nicaragua, instead authorizing
President Roosevelt to purchase the assets of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ failed Panama
Canal Company and build in Panama.
Soon after, Secretary Hay reached an
agreement with the Colombian minister to the United States, Tomás Herrán, allowing
for the construction and operation of a canal across Panama. The Colombian Senate,
in turmoil after years of civil war, unanimously rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty,
partly out of the indignity of being offered a much lower payment than was given to
French shareholders, partly out of concerns for losing sovereignty over the strip of
Panamanian land that would encompass the canal.62 Roosevelt was outraged by this
decision, writing that
61
62
Healy, 24–28.
Schoultz, 160–164.
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110
To the worst characteristics of 17th Century Spain, and of Spain at its worst under
Philip II, Columbia has added a squalid savagery of its own, and it has combined
with exquisite nicety the worst forms of despotism and of anarchy, of violence and of
fatuous weakness, of dismal ignorance, cruelty, treachery, greed, and utter vanity. I
cannot feel much respect for such a country.63
Roosevelt’s actions reflected his words. Working with Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who
controlled the descendent of de Lessep’s Panama Canal Company, he instigated a
revolution in Panama, sending in warships to stop Colombia from sending troops.
Panamanians, for their part, needed little persuasion; living in an isolated and
secession-minded province, the prospect of a canal slipping away to be built in
Nicaragua stirred revolutionary sentiment that was intensified by North American
encouragement. They were not completely pleased, though, at the outcome of their
revolution: John Hay bypassed any Panamanian voice while appropriating the rights
to the canal, instead negotiating with Bunau-Varilla for a treaty that gave the United
States effective sovereignty over a ten-mile-wide strip that bisected Panama.64 The
newly independent country was to receive $10 million plus $250,000 annually in
return for granting the United States “all the rights, power and authority within the
zone… to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such
sovereign rights.”65 Despite having formal control over only the Canal Zone, the
United States ran Panama as a de facto colony for the next several decades, testing the
limits of informal imperial control.66
63
Quoted in Schoultz, 164.
Schoultz, 165–169.
65
Panama Canal Treaty, 1903, from Paterson and Merrill, 503–504.
66
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 194.
64
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111
While Roosevelt was encouraging revolution in one part of Latin America, he
was beginning to proclaim the United States as the guarantor of order for the rest of
the region. The inability of certain Latin American countries to pay their foreign
debts, in particular, resulted in North American intervention and financial adjustment,
a strain of “Benevolent Supervision” that left a long-term legacy on inter-American
relations.67 Financial problems in Latin America also led to further consolidation of
the influence of the United States over the region.
In 1902, the governments of Germany and Great Britain notified the United
States that they were going to send warships to Venezuela to forcibly collect their
debts; the German ambassador was careful to emphasize that “under no
circumstances [do] we consider in our proceedings the acquisition or the permanent
occupation of Venezuelan territory.”68 Satisfied with having received requests of
permission from European nations to forcibly intervene in Latin American affairs,
Roosevelt initially had no quarrel with their plans. However, after the attempt at
intimidating Venezuela devolved into a blockade and actual naval fighting, Roosevelt
pressed for arbitration to settle the debt issue, ordering Admiral Dewey to conduct
fleet operations in the Caribbean in a thinly veiled threat.69
When a similar debt crisis occurred in the Dominican Republic in 1904,
President Roosevelt’s response was markedly different. Early in the year, he wrote to
his son, “San Domingo is drifting into chaos…. Sooner or later it seems to me
inevitable that the United States should assume an attitude of protection and
67
The neoliberal Washington Consensus on economic reform in underdeveloped nations could be
considered a successor to these policies.
68
Quoted in Schoultz, 180.
69
Zakaria, 169–170.
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112
regulation in regard to all these little states in the neighborhood of the Caribbean.”70
By December, having recently won the Presidential election in a landslide, Roosevelt
decided to put this attitude into force. In his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,
Roosevelt announced that, in order to make “neighboring countries stable, orderly,
and prosperous,” any “chronic wrongdoing” in such countries “may force the United
States, however reluctantly… to the exercise of an international police power.”71
Soon afterwards, Roosevelt made an agreement with the Dominican government
ensuring its territorial integrity in return for letting U.S. agents run the customs
houses and pay off the Dominican debt with the revenues.
Roosevelt further
instructed the Navy to quash any rebellion in the politically unstable nation.72
Overall, the actions of the United States in Latin America during this period
were inconsistent: the North Americans alternatively played at being international
policemen, debt collectors, and revolutionary instigators.
All of these actions,
however, were motivated by the common goal of institutionalizing North American
hegemony in the region, through means that were varieties of informal imperialism.
Roosevelt’s policies in Latin America were far more intrusive than those in China,
even as the idea of the United States having a sort of special, benevolent, and
protective relationship with both regions formed the rhetorical backbone of policy.
These informal imperial relations were instigated, to a certain extent, in order to avoid
another costly colonial war such as was happening in the Philippines. But even after
the hefty price for formal control of the Philippines was paid, the American presence
70
Quoted in Schoultz, 183.
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, 1904, from Paterson and Merrill, 507.
72
LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 198–199.
71
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113
in the archipelago became increasingly seen—most notably by Theodore Roosevelt—
as unnecessary, even as a source of strategic weakness.
As early as 1907, Theodore Roosevelt privately expressed his feeling that the
Philippines had become the United States’ “heel of Achilles,” a point of vulnerability
in the Pacific and “all that makes the present situation with Japan dangerous.”73 After
Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912, Roosevelt went public with his desire to sever
ties with the Philippines. In a 1914 essay in The New York Times, he wrote that the
American navy had a paramount interest in defending “our own coasts, Alaska,
Hawaii, and the Panama Canal and its approaches.” Roosevelt continued,
I exclude the Philippines. This is because I feel that the present Administration has
definitely committed us to a course of action which may very probably make the
early and complete severance of the Philippines from us not merely desirable but
necessary. I have never felt that the Philippines were of any special use to us. But I
have felt that we had a great task to perform there and that a great nation is benefited
by doing a great task.74
Roosevelt’s public explanation that weak-kneed Democrats pledging Philippine
independence had caused his change in heart was not entirely honest. Although the
Democratic platform of 1912 had, like every Democratic platform since 1900, called
for conditional independence for the Philippines “as soon as a stable government can
be established,” Wilson was personally more ambivalent about when Philippine
independence should come.75 As President of Princeton in 1907, Wilson told an
audience at Columbia University that “a long apprenticeship of obedience” would
73
Quoted in LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 207.
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Navy as a Peacemaker,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine,
November 22, 1914, 5.
75
Democratic Platform of 1912, from George E. Mowry, “Election of 1912,” in History of American
Presidential Elections, Vol. III, 2176.
74
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114
have to be a prerequisite to Filipino independence.76 In his speech accepting the
Democratic nomination in 1912, Wilson only announced that “as trustees” of
Filipinos, Americans had to “make whatever arrangement of government will be most
serviceable to their freedom and development.”77 This was not a direct call for
independence, but merely a continuation of the rhetoric of American benevolence and
good governance in the Philippines.78
The first legislative victory for anti-
imperialists came in 1916—two years after Roosevelt’s essay—when the Jones Act
promising delayed but “ultimate” independence for the Philippines was passed;
Wilson, who had worked hard and successfully to dilute the measure, approved of the
final version. Wilson would not publicly call for granting Philippine independence
until November of 1920, after a decisive Republican electoral victory had made him a
lame duck.79
Japan’s continued rise as a major power seems to have caused Theodore
Roosevelt’s rethinking of the Philippine policy at least as much as Democratic calls
for independence.
Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905—a victory whose terms
Roosevelt had personally mediated—made the country’s military strength and
expansionist aims quite evident. Rivalry over influence in the Pacific and China, in
addition to tensions between Japanese immigrants and nativists in the United States,
made the threat of war with Japan conceivable. Internal documents from the U.S.
War Department show that in such a scenario, “more or less complete seizure and
76
Quoted in Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the
Philippines (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 344.
77
Acceptance Speech by Governor Woodrow Wilson, Baltimore, August 7, 1912, from Mowry,
“Election of 1912,” 2234.
78
Kramer, 360–361.
79
Kramer, 387.
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115
occupation of the Philippine Islands” could be expected, but that nonetheless the
archipelago’s “fate… must rest with the present garrison.”80
Hoping to stave off such a scenario, Roosevelt applied a mixture of diplomacy
and shows of force. William Howard Taft was sent to Japan shortly after the victory
over Russia in order to establish a diplomatic understanding. The resultant TaftKatsura agreement provided American recognition of Japanese “suzerainty over
Korea,” which became effective in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. In
return, Japan acknowledged that it “had no aggressive designs whatever on the
Philippines.”81 This agreement was basically an American concession to growing
Japanese power: it overrode an 1882 American treaty with Korea promising “amity
and commerce” between the two nations, and at least implicitly promising American
support for Korean independence.82
In 1907, Roosevelt took a more aggressive
posture, telling the War and Navy Departments to “have the entire fleet of battleships
transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast.”83 Thus began the cruise of the
U.S. naval fleet around the world, an endeavor meant to demonstrate American
military power to the rest of the globe, and especially to Japan.84
Roosevelt had quite a bit of personal respect for Japan’s culture, even if his
beliefs were at times tempered by Orientalist stereotypes; this attitude also shaped his
policies toward Japan. He wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge:
80
War Plan Orange, from Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism, 349–350.
The Taft-Katsura Agreement, July 29, 1905, from Arthur S. Link and William M. Leary, Jr., eds.,
The Diplomacy of World Power: The United States, 1889–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970),
100–101.
82
Chester A. Arthur to Korean embassy, 1884, from Iriye, From Nationalism to Internationalism, 277–
278; LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 205.
83
Quoted in Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 163.
84
Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 163.
81
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116
As for Japan, she has risen with simply marvelous rapidity, and she is as formidable
from the industrial as from the military standpoint. She is a great civilized nation;
though her civilization is in some important respects not like ours. There are some
things she can teach us, and some things she can learn from us. She will be as
formidable an industrial competitor as, for instance, Germany, and in a dozen years I
think she will be the leading industrial nation of the Pacific… Whether her
tremendous growth in industrialism will in course of time modify and perhaps soften
the wonderful military spirit she has inherited from the days of the Samurai
supremacy it is hard to say.85
Because of his personal fascination with Japanese culture and the possibility of
upsetting diplomacy in Asia, Roosevelt was not favorable to the virulent antiJapanese sentiment that emanated from labor organizations on the West Coast.
“These Pacific Coast people wish grossly to insult the Japanese… and with besotted
folly are indifferent to building up the navy while provoking this formidable new
power… which if irritated could at once take both the Philippines and Hawaii from us
if she obtained the upper hand on the seas.”86 Roosevelt was disgusted at antiJapanese attitudes, and wary of their consequences, but San Francisco’s segregation
of Japanese students in 1906 pushed him to make concessions to nativist sentiment
lest a crisis occur.87
The Japanese government, for its part, preferred to save face on the
immigration issue rather than have its policy of expansion through overseas
settlement proscribed by another country. In 1907 and 1908, a series of diplomatic
85
Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 16, 1905, from Selections from the
Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Vol. II, 153.
86
Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, June 5, 1905, from Selections from the Correspondence
of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, Vol. II, 135.
87
Kramer, 349.
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117
notes between the two countries led to the policy known as the Gentlemen’s
Agreement, which restricted Japanese labor emigration to America.88 At the same
time, the two governments entered into the Root-Takahira agreement, by which the
U.S. recognized Japan’s dominant position in Manchuria and agreed to “maintenance
of the existing status quo.”89
In the years after they succeeded in restricting Japanese immigration to the
United States, nativists set their sights on Filipinos. As the number of Filipino
immigrants—legally defined as U.S. nationals—to the United States steadily
increased after World War I, the clamor for Filipino exclusion likewise grew. By the
1920s, the anti-immigration lobby had become a well-organized, politically powerful
force, as witnessed by the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which banned the
immigration of non-Filipino Asians and also restricted European immigration.
Nativist attacks were not just restricted to the political arena, however: from 1929–
1930, there were at least twenty incidents of racial violence against Filipinos in
Western states.90
In 1928, Congressman Richard Welch, a California Republican, introduced a
bill that would have reclassified Filipinos as “aliens,” thus banning Filipino
immigrants entering the United States. When this bill failed in Congress, nativists
shifted their support to the movement for Philippine independence. Agricultural
producers, wishing to apply tariffs to Filipino goods, similarly joined the struggle
after an attempt to add a tax on Philippine imports to the Smoot-Hawley Act failed.
88
Iriye, Pacific Estrangement, 134.
The Root-Takahira Agreement, November 30, 1908, from Link and Leary, 102; LaFeber, The
American Search for Opportunity, 207-208.
90
Kramer, 397–414.
89
Wertz
118
Like the coalition that had originally opposed Philippine annexation three
decades ago, the nativists and protectionists made strange bedfellows with other
elements pressing for Filipino independence.91 Philippine nationalists, in particular,
recognized the strange symbiotic relationship between the oppression of their fellow
Filipinos overseas and their goal of independence. In a speech memorializing a
young Filipino man killed in a race riot in California, Jorge Bocobo, dean of the
Philippine Law School, hoped that such violence was “part of the inscrutable designs
of Providence” to end the “unnatural association” between American and Filipino.92
In 1934, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which entailed the
creation of an internally autonomous Philippine Commonwealth and called for
independence ten years after the adoption of a new Philippine Constitution. The Act
also reclassified citizens of the Philippines as aliens, allowing for only fifty
immigrants annually, and provided phased-in tariffs on Philippine goods.93 In signing
the bill, President Franklin Roosevelt repudiated the cause once championed by his
distant cousin.
“Our nation covets no territory,” he proclaimed upon the act’s
passage, “nor sovereignty over a people gained through war against their will.”94 The
Japanese invasion of the Philippines during World War II marked the last chapter in
the American-Philippine colonial relationship; in a second instance of inverted
American familial relations with the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur
liberated the islands that his father helped conquer. On July 4, 1946, the Philippines
formally became independent after nearly half a century of American sovereignty.
91
Kramer, 414–424.
Quoted in Kramer, 413.
93
Kramer, 424–427.
94
Quoted in Kramer, 424.
92
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119
Conclusion
By the 1930s, the foreign policies engineered by the administrations of
William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt—“Benevolent Assimilation” in the
Philippines, “Benevolent Supervision” in the Caribbean basin, and the Open Door in
China—all came to a close. The Tydings-McDuffie Act heralded the beginning of
the end of American control of the Philippines; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good
Neighbor policy repudiated the overt manipulation of the Roosevelt Corollary and the
Platt Amendment; and the Japanese invasion of China and the creation of the puppet
state of Manchukuo ended the principle of Chinese territorial integrity that the Open
Door policy was meant to protect.
These three policies were put to rest at approximately the same time, but met
quite different fates in the afterlife. The principles of free trade embodied by the
Open Door continued to inform American foreign policy through the twentieth
century and beyond. The desire to preserve order and protect investments overseas
embodied by “Benevolent Supervision” also persisted, albeit typically in a much
more covert manner.
And although the United States continued to dramatically
expand its military presence in the world after World War II, this was notably done
without attempting to wrest control of a given base’s hinterland.
Like the Dewey Arch, formal American imperialism was short-lived and
quickly deteriorated from the grand to the unsightly. The territories annexed after the
Spanish-American War had long-lasting or permanent relationships with the United
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120
States, but Americans at all levels of society quickly lost enthusiasm for further
conquests. In the long run, this attitude proved beneficial to the promotion of U.S.
interests abroad. As the empires of Europe slowly dismantled after World War II, the
United States had no need for a long and painful farewell to an era of imperial
triumph and glory: the American ideal of creating a globe-spanning formal empire
had begun and ended with the Philippine War.
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121
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