Debating American imperialism

America’s turn from isolationism to foreign interventionism, often attributed to World War II, was the result of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent American conquest of the Philippines. That is the thesis of the journalist and historian Stephen Kinzer in The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. 

On May 1, 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Admiral George Dewey’s warships crippled the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines, a Spanish colony soon to become an American protectorate until after World War II. On September 30, 1899, in a triumphal parade in New York City, the admiral passed under the Dewey Arch, which stretched across Fifth Avenue at 24th Street. According to Kinzer, “It was modelled after the first-century Arch of Titus in Rome but was more ornate.” But as American forces in the Philippines turned from liberators into conquerors, using torture techniques like “the water cure” and engaging in massacres of insurgents fighting for independence, even some of the architects of the intervention had second thoughts. 

The Dewey Arch, initially built of plaster and wood, never became a permanent monument in New York City. Instead, Kinzer writes, “the City Council decided that demolition was the only option and, as The New York Times reported, ‘One morning the work lay on the ground in a hundred pieces.’?”

In the debate about the Spanish-American War and the conversion of the United States into a regional and global great power, the Anti-Imperialist League attracted most of America’s leading writers and reformers. Some, like the German-American senator from Missouri, Carl Schurz, were veterans of the campaign against slavery. Others, like Jane Addams, were leaders of the woman suffrage movement and other contemporary progressive reform causes. Many Southerners opposed American control of Cuba and the Philippines as well, for fear that granting their nonwhite populations rights would undermine white supremacy in the United States. 

Supporters of the annexation of the Philippines similarly tossed out various arguments, like access to Asian markets and the uplifting of the Filipinos themselves. Theodore Roosevelt, whose participation in the war against Spain in Cuba made him a celebrity and put him on the path to the vice presidency and then the presidency, denied that the Spanish-American War and the war in the Philippines broke with American history. In 1899 in a speech titled “The Strenuous Life”, Roosevelt thundered at the anti-imperialists: “Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.”

Roosevelt and the imperialists found their greatest nemesis in Mark Twain. Twain condemned all efforts by Western nations to carve up the non-Western world. Writing of the Boxer rebellion against Europeans and Americans in China, he declared: “My sympathies are with the Chinese. They have been villainously dealt with by the sceptered thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all of the foreigners out and keep them out for good.” Twain’s genius for satire showed in his widely publicised polemics for the anti-imperialist cause. 

But Kinzer is not content to retell the story of the controversy over annexation of the Philippines. He tries to promote an overarching theory of United States foreign policy, and he cites the former Marine General Smedley Butler, who in the 1930s bitterly described his military service in the Philippines, Cuba, China, Haiti, Mexico and Central America as that of a “gangster for capitalism” and “a high-class muscleman for big business.” Recycling the arguments of the venerable anti-interventionist tradition, Kinzer quotes figures like Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, who blamed commercial interests for American participation in World War I, and post-1945 advocates of close Soviet-American ties like Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson. In this way, the rich detail of Kinzer’s account of the debate over American imperialism at the turn of the 20th century gives way to a hasty revisionist account of United States foreign policy as a series of imperial follies. All of American foreign policy for more than a century is attributed to some vague mix of business greed and arrogant folly.

Kinzer is free to make this case, but it should not have been tacked on to the conclusion of the book. His own account does not support the idea that business interests drove the US to go to war with Spain and against the Filipino independence movement. Kinzer himself notes, “Businessmen as a class were at first reluctant to join the rush to war, but by midsummer many had been won over.” Andrew Carnegie was a passionate anti-imperialist, and Mark Hanna, identified with the interests of big business and banking, despised Theodore Roosevelt and thought him dangerous.