In the eyes of many British observers from Kipling to Buchan, from Chamberlain to Churchill America’s bid for overseas markets thus had much in common with Britain’s fin de siécle “scramble” for more colonies. This, after all, was the era when the New York Times could declare: “We are a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet.”59 Yet two related things made the American experiment with empire different from its transatlantic counterpart. First, the political base for imperialism was narrower; empire appealed much more to the elites of the industrialized North than to the rest of the country. Secondly, the economic rationale of acquiring colonies was more open to doubt. Britain had embraced free trade as early as the 1840s. Nothing had subsequently been done to protect British farmers from the influx of cheaper foodstuffs, as steamships, railways and refrigerators integrated the world’s corn and meat markets. Britain seemed self-evidently to need a global imperium, if only to secure the flow to its domestic emporium of goods it could not grow itself. Moreover, the bankers of the City of London, whose business it was to direct British capital overseas, had a vested interest in a continuation of both free trade and empire. How could the debtor countries of the New World be expected to honor their obligations if their exports of primary products did not have free access to the British market? And if they did threaten to default, what better way to prevent them from doing so than to occupy their countries and govern them according to sound economic principles?60 In the United States there were men who made similar arguments, but there were powerful protectionist lobbies pushing in the opposite direction. Their argument was that the United States had no need of British-style colonies if their function was simply to inundate the American market with goods that Americans could just as well produce for themselves (albeit less cheaply). Other opponents, dismayed at the changing complexion of the immigrants coming to the United States, saw colonies as just a further source of inferior racial stock.61 Though they shared some of its underlying prejudices, protectionism and nativism proved to be false friends to imperialism; pace Kipling, their proponents had no real interest in shouldering “the white man’s burden.”
The first American overseas possessions were islands desirable only as naval bases or sources of guano. The atoll of Midway, formally annexed in 1867 by Captain William Reynolds of the USS Lackawanna, was among the first of these maritime filling stations. A decade later the United States secured the right to use the harbor of Pago Pago on the Samoan island of Tutuila, though it was not until 1899, following a civil war in Samoa, that the entire island became an American possession.62 A year before, Guam had also been acquired, along with Wake Island. Besides being small—even the largest, Guam, is barely two hundred square miles in size—all these new. outposts were exceedingly far away. The nearest, Midway, was literally midway between Los Angeles and Shanghai. The most remote, Guam, lay between Japan and New Guinea, nearly fifty-eight hundred miles west of San Francisco. The first true American colony was also in the Pacific: Hawaii.
That an eight-island archipelago located over two thousand miles from the American mainland should have ended up being the fiftieth state of the Union is a true historical puzzle, particularly as other, more obvious candidates for integration into the United States were passed over. Three groups combined to Americanize Hawaii: missionaries, sugar planters and navalists. To the last group, Hawaii offered, in the words of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, an attractive “resting spot in the mid-ocean, between the Pacific coast and the vast domains of Asia, which are now opening to commerce and Christian civilization,” not to mention a way of “curbing” the already discernible rise of Japan.63 To the sugar producers of the islands themselves, the United States represented a potentially vast market, if tariff-free trade could be achieved. The mission schools meanwhile prepared the Hawaiians for subjugation. The steps toward this fate were swiftly taken: in 1875 a free trade treaty was signed,64 in 1887 a naval coaling station was established at Pearl Harbor, and in 1893 Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown in a coup d’état orchestrated by the American minister to the islands, John L. Stevens. Yet—just as had happened in the case of Texas—Congress drew back. Despite Stevens’s warnings that Hawaii would otherwise become “a Singapore, or a Hong Kong, which could be governed as a British colony,”65 his plan for annexation was rejected.66 Sugar producers feared competition,67 and racialists feared “bad blood and bad customs” (since Americans made up just 2 percent of the islands’ population), while liberals suspected that the American minority had less than democratic intentions. When, in 1897, a draft treaty for annexation ran into bipartisan opposition once again, Theodore Roosevelt was moved to lament “the queer lack of imperial instinct that our people show.”68 It was only after the news of the American victory over Spanish forces in the Philippines that a resolution for annexation could be passed.69
The Hawaiians resisted—but they resisted peacefully. In the election to the first territorial legislature, a Home Rule Party won a majority of seats by mobilizing native voters, who defied the clause in the Organic Act that all debate should be in English.70 Only by co-opting Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, a royal prince who had initially resisted the American takeover, was the local Republican Party able to compete. Little more than a front man for the interests of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, Prince Kuhio could only bewail impotently the decline and fall of his people.71 While the five big sugar companies tightened their grip on the islands’ most fertile areas, the original inhabitants were “rehabilitated”: in effect, shunted onto marginal land.72 This not unfamiliar colonization process did not quite go according to plan, however. The natives had been sidelined in classic fashion, but their places were not taken by American settlers. Instead, as had already been the case before annexation, it was Japanese and later Filipino migrants who came to populate Hawaii. Despite measures to exclude newcomers, the Japanese community grew rapidly. In the early 1920s three in every hundred voters were Japanese, but by 1936 the proportion was one in four.73 Hawaii might be strategically valuable to the United States, but it offered enterprising Americans few economic opportunities to equal those available at home.
Why did Hawaii ultimately become a state, but not Puerto Rico, ceded to the United States by Spain in 1898? It was certainly not a matter of distance, since the latter is a good deal nearer to the American mainland (just over a thousand miles from Miami). Nor, in economic terms, did one sugar plantation have more to offer than the other. The answer is in fact a legal technicality, revealed when Puerto Rican producers sought to challenge the imposition of tariffs on their exports to the United States. In two simultaneous judgments in 1901, the Supreme Court concluded that Puerto Rico was not a foreign country, but that it was not domestic territory either, and that therefore a tariff on its products was constitutional. Of particular importance was the distinction drawn by Justice Edward Douglass White between annexation and incorporation (which required congressional authority). In his opinion, “Puerto Rico had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.” As such, only certain “fundamental” provisions of the Constitution applied to it. The significance of this ruling, which defined that strange limbo between independence and American statehood occupied by Puerto Rico ever since, was that decisions could now be taken retrospectively about the status of other possessions. Since, under the terms of their acquisition, “formal” as well as “fundamental” provisions of the Constitution had been extended to both Alaska and Hawaii, they must by definition have been incorporated and therefore entitled to full statehood, which they eventually attained in 1959.74
The judgments of 1901 appeared to clear the way legally for the annexation of new and larger colonies that could be treated like Puerto Rico as “organized but unincorporated” and therefore outside the domain of the Constitution. Why, then, has the United States not got more Puerto Ricos? The answer can be expresse
d in two words: the Philippines.
What happened in the Philippines has unfortunately proved to be far more typical of American overseas experience than what happened in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. To be precise, seven characteristic phases of American engagement can be discerned:
Impressive initial military success
A flawed assessment of indigenous sentiment
A strategy of limited war and gradual escalation of forces
Domestic disillusionment in the face of protracted and nasty conflict
Premature democratization
The ascendancy of domestic economic considerations
Ultimate withdrawal
The speed of the American victory over Spain in 1898 was certainly striking. Within just three months of the American declaration of war—the trumped-up pretext for which was the accidental explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay, supposedly the fault of Spain—the Spanish forces in both the Caribbean and the Philippines were defeated. However, the Americans refused to recognize that the Filipinos who had sided with them against Spain had been fighting for their independence, not for a change of colonial master.75 McKinley’s reported justification for annexing the islands was a masterpiece of presidential sanctimony, perfectly pitched for his audience of Methodist clergymen:
I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you… 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—I don’t know how it was but it came…. (1) That we could not give them back to Spain…. (2) That we could not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient … (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for government … (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.76
As McKinley portrayed it, annexation was an onerous duty, thrust upon the United States by the will of Providence.77 Such religious appeals doubtless had considerable public resonance.78 The decisive arguments for the occupation within the American political elite were nevertheless more military and mercenary than missionary.79
The rebellion against American annexation, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, began soon after the publication of the terms of the Treaty of Paris, which ceded the Philippines to the United States in return for twenty million dollars (roughly the same price that had been paid for Texas, California and the other Mexican cessions fifty years before, and therefore a good deal less land per dollar). The islands turned out to cost the United States even more than that. In the space of three years the number of American troops committed to the Philippines rose from just 12,000 to 126,000.80 Although Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901, and the war declared officially over in July 1902, resistance continued on some islands for years afterward. It was not a pleasant war; nor was it to be the American military’s last taste of jungle warfare against guerrillas indistinguishable from civilians.81 Senior officers swiftly resorted to harsh measures: Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered his men on the island of Samar to take no prisoners—a breach of the laws of war—adding: “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the better you will please me … I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms.”82 By the time the fighting was over, more than 4,000 American servicemen had lost their lives, over 1,000 more than had been killed in the war against Spain. Approximately four times as many Filipinos were killed in action, to say nothing of civilians who died because of war-related hunger and disease.83 Meanwhile, William Howard Taft, a judge from Ohio, was put in charge of a five-man civilian commission that sought to win Filipinos over by building schools and improving sanitation, proving, as one of the commissioners ingenuously put it, that “American sovereignty was … another name for the liberty of the Filipinos.”84 The war alone had cost six hundred million dollars. How much would postwar reconstruction add to the bill?
It was not, however, its cost that aroused the initial domestic opposition to the war in the Philippines so much as the principle of the thing. We should not imagine, of course, that the Anti-Imperialist League spoke for a majority of voters.85 But its membership included two former presidents, Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, a dozen senators from both parties, eight former members of Cleveland’s cabinet, to say nothing of the millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The league had enough leverage to make Filipino independence a part of the 1900 Democratic Party platform.86 And in Mark Twain it had on its side the most influential American man of letters of the day.
Twain’s attitudes anticipate those of future generations of American antiwar intellectuals. He had begun by welcoming the “liberation” of the Philippines from Spain, writing to a friend in June 1898: “It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom. It is another sight finer to fight for another man’s. And I think this is the first time it has been done.” But by October 1900 he had “read carefully” the Treaty of Paris and concluded “that we do not intend to free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines…. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons in any other land.” Twain’s voice was muffled. Harper’s Bazaar rejected his short story “The War Prayer,” in which an aged stranger utters the following prayer before a congregation: “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle—be Thou near them! … 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 patriotic dead; … help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children wandering and unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land.” Privately, but not publicly, Twain described McKinley as the man who had sent U.S. troops “to fight with a disgraced musket under a polluted flag” and suggested that the flag in question should have “the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”87 His disapprobation carried weight. Opponents of a war do not need to command majority support to undermine a war effort. Although the Democrats failed to thwart annexation in Congress,88 and although their candidate was defeated by McKinley, the extent of opposition to annexation in the Democratic press was impressive.89 The revelation that General Smith and Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller had ordered the summary execution of Filipino prisoners gave the antiwar campaign a glaring opportunity to embarrass the government.90 McKinley could be sure of victory in 1900 only by distancing himself from full-blown imperialism.91
Theodore Roosevelt had once likened the Filipinos to the Apaches and Aguinaldo to Sitting Bull.92 Thrust into the presidency by McKinley’s assassination, he nevertheless hastened to create at least the semblance of democracy in the Philippines, privately admitting that he would “only be too glad to withdraw” from what seemed to be America’s Boer War.93 The first elections to the national legislature called into being by the Organic Act saw fifty-eight out of the Assembly’s eighty seats go to nationalists who had campaigned for immediate independence. Within less than a decade the so-called Jones Act (1916) confirmed that the islands would be granted independence “as soon as a stable government can be established.” Yet it was not nationalist pressure that determined when that day would come. Nor did the decision to grant the Philippines their independence reflect a wholly sincere repudiation of the original annexation on the part of the United States. The decisive campaign for Filipino independence was in fact waged by a coalition of sectional lobbies within the U.S. Congress, motivated almost solely by their own self-interests: sugar, dairy and cotton producers who wanted to exclude Philippine cane sugar and coconut oil from the U.S. market, hand in glove with trade unionists pressing for immigration restrictions against Filipino workers. Indeed, so harsh were the provisions of the original American independenc
e offer of 1933 that the islands’ legislature refused to accept it. Although the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 was somewhat less punitive—it left the future of the American military bases on the islands open to negotiation—its economic provisions remained essentially the same. Independence would mean a phased imposition of American tariffs on Philippine products, a heavy blow to an economy that by this time relied on the American market to buy more than three-quarters of its exports.94 There was much less for Filipinos to celebrate when independence finally came in 1946 than is generally appreciated.
It is perhaps too harsh to dismiss American rule over the Philippines as a failure. But it was certainly far from the success that Franklin Roosevelt later made out.95 Quite apart from the economic plight of the islanders as they were squeezed out of the American market, the strategic gains of American rule proved to be negligible. First, the grandiose American plans for the economic penetration of Asia—which were, after all, the whole point of establishing bases across the Pacific—were no more than half realized. Secondly, when the Japanese launched their military challenge against the United States in December 1941, the American bases from Pearl Harbor to Subic Bay proved to be easy targets.
DICTATING DEMOCRACY
There was, however, an alternative to formal European-style imperialism; indeed, the decision to grant the Philippines political (if not commercial) freedom was part of that alternative. Instead of occupying and running fully fledged colonies, the United States could instead use its economic and military power to foster the emergence of “good government” in strategically important countries. Initially, that meant not just pro-American government but also American-style government. The development of this new approach to empire, which had something in common with the British notion of indirect rule, owed much to the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. But the underlying idea can be traced back to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (December 1904), which declared: “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”96 Wilson, however, went further. Just a week after entering the White House, the new president declared to the press that, in future, cooperation with Latin American countries would be possible “only when supported at every turn by the orderly processes of just government based on law, not upon arbitrary or irregular force…. We can have no sympathy with those who seek to seize the power of government to advance their own personal interests and ambition.” The implicit Wilson Corollary was that only certain types of government would be tolerated by the United States in Latin America. Military dictators were out, but so too were revolutionaries. “The agitators in certain countries wanted revolutions,” he remarked, “and were inclined to try it on with the new administration … he was not going to let them have one [a revolution] if he could prevent it.”97 The future would therefore lie with governments that had the good sense to position themselves between the abhorrent extremes of “arbitrary … force” and “revolution” Against unacceptable regimes the United States reserved the right to use force.98
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