Imperialism

The close of the nineteenth century witnessed the end of the United States' wars with Native Americans in the western regions of the continent. Along with this military triumph came the close of the American frontier. For many, these two developments signaled the dawning of a new age in the American experience. For others, it foretold a continuation of the tragic flaws in American politics and culture. The repercussions of the Spanish-American War helped to crystallize the issues regarding American imperialism in a new century.

For many turn-of-the-century politicians and business leaders such as Albert Beveridge and William McKinley, William Rockefeller and Russell Sage, the United States needed to expand its production of export goods because domestic consumers no longer could absorb the output of American industries. The saturation of the domestic economy resulted in disastrous, cyclical depressions and financial panics. The response of workers was to unionize, strike, picket, and otherwise clamor for economic reforms that would protect them from the rapacious actions of corporations, banks, and railroads. Although most labor unions opposed the build up to war during the mid-1890s, some workers supported the notion of imperialism because of the promise of greater job security and higher wages by expanding foreign markets. By the time the Spanish-American War took place in 1898, most workers supported it. Consequently, many argued for American imperialism based on the notion that expansion would result in greater business profits, enhanced job creation, and fewer social cleavages. Another point of contention was the perception of America's place in history.

Some writers in this period harkened to America's own experience of breaking away from Britain and believed that the United States should not impose the colonial yoke on anyone else. The philosopher William James was a noted anti-imperialist who castigated the saberrattling of the period as unprincipled. Others countered by asserting that the "Founding Fathers" had envisioned America as a "city on the hill," which would serve as a beacon of freedom and civilization to the rest of a benighted world. In this interpretation, often invoked by Theodore Roosevelt and political scientist John Burgess, American imperialism simply was another means by which Americans could teach the meaning of liberty and democracy to others. This view gained currency as European imperialists justified their brutal regimes as civilizing missions of one form or another. Indeed, European imperialism served as an incentive in a different way. Roosevelt and his Navy mentor, Alfred T. Mahan, argued that for the United States to remain a great nation, it had to control certain islands, waterways, and build an isthmian canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Pursuant to this line of reasoning, America could only ensure its strength and security through empire-building. Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The White Man's Burden," encouraged these sentiments. Although many Americans embraced the idea of the United States as a reluctant savior of the world's downtrodden, a vocal number were troubled by the manner in which the rhetoric of salvation differed from the reality of pacification, particularly of people of color. The American Anti-Imperialist League, led by men like Mark Twain, grew from the latter opinion and found powerful evidence to support its position in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.

The American military's refusal to allow the Cuban rebels to confer on Spain's surrender, the imposition of the Platt Amendment onto the burgeoning government of Cuba, and the destruction of the Filipino insurrection in the early 1900s all seemed to confirm the fears of many that U.S. imperialism meant an extension of the cloak of White Supremacy across the globe. The Platt Amendment (1901), which gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, stifled self-determination in Cuba. With specific regard to the insurrection in the Philippines following American occupation, Filipino noncombatants made up roughly 90 percent of the more than 200,000 casualties in a war which included the relocation or eradication of entire villages, the implementation of concentration camps and the indiscriminate killing of women and children. Torture, a sad fact of the conflict, was best represented by the "water cure." When using the water cure, U.S. soldiers and physicians forced large volumes of water—sometimes with salt added—into the mouths or noses of Filipinos until they cooperated with their interrogators.

While some were disturbed by the potential for brutality in American imperialism, others opposed it because of its implications for the national identity. These critics feared that American annexation of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines eventually would mean that people in each territory would claim citizenship rights in America. In a nation already violently subjugating its Black, Red, and Yellow populations, the idea of bringing more people of color into the fold was disturbing. Within this debate, African Americans publicly asserted that U.S. imperialism meant the extension of American racism across the seas. Indeed, this sentiment was reflected in the oft quoted, though truncated, prophesy by W. E. B. Du Bois: "[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea" (The Souls of Black Folk, p. 54.).

Indeed, Du Bois' legendary meditation, The Souls of Black Folk, captured, in many ways, the numerous factors that fueled the debate over the validity of the extension of American power beyond its borders: economic concerns regarding industrial expansion, jobs, and access to raw materials and foreign markets; ideological concerns pertaining to the notion of American exceptionalism; cultural concerns about race, the people who were certain to fall under the shadow of American might, and whether that shadow concealed a sword or a shield. Adding to this volatile mix was the cementing of European colonialism across Africa and Asia. By the outbreak of World War I, the United States' dealings with Mexico and other parts of Latin America convinced many that America had created an informal empire. Because of vocal opposition in many quarters, the first halting strides of American imperialism in the twentieth century were hotly contested and the competing discourses represented conflicting visions of what America should be.

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Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1993.

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Williams, William A. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1972.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492–Present New York: Harper Perennial, 1995.

Zwick, Jim, ed. Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialism Writings on the Philippine-American War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

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