by Oliver Stone
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, a sometime apologist for the British Empire, understood that Americans’ pretension to superiority was, to say the least, self-serving. Ferguson wryly observed, “To those who would still insist on American ‘exceptionalism,’ the historian of empires can only retort: as exceptional as all the other sixty-nine empires.”14
Although apologists’ claims to moral superiority were certainly overblown, their claims to military superiority seem defensible. Few have more perspective on this topic than Paul Kennedy, whose award-winning 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers noted that the U.S. Empire was in decline, following the habitual pattern of imperial overreach. But, like others, he was dazzled and, one might say, blinded by the ease with which the United States obliterated Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing,” he wrote, reversing his earlier judgment. “I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past 500 years . . . and no other nation comes close. The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap, Britain’s army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies—right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy.” Kennedy was awestruck by the fierce power of the country’s twelve carrier groups. No other empire could compare: “Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison,” he concluded.15
But even these claims deserve closer scrutiny. The United States certainly possesses the greatest firepower, the best trained and equipped and most capable troops, and the most technologically sophisticated weaponry of any military power in history. But this has not easily translated into victory on the battlefield when the enemy employs asymmetrical tactics and the objective is winning hearts and minds.
Confusion over U.S. imperial status has resulted from the fact that the United States exercises the power and functions of an empire but does not take on the traditional trappings of one. Clearly, it has not followed the path of European colonial empires, although it has occasionally dabbled in colonial ventures. These have, for the most part, been adjuncts to overseas economic penetration constituting what some have called an “open-door” empire, one more concerned with control of markets and other forms of economic domination than with controlling subject populations and actual territory. The United States has, however, repeatedly resorted to military force and even prolonged occupations to deal with threats to those economic interests and private investments. More recently, U.S. control has been exercised through what Chalmers Johnson aptly described as an “empire of bases” that are a substitute for the colonies of days gone by. By 2002, Pentagon figures indicated that the United States had some form of military presence in 132 of the UN’s then 190 member nations.16 Add to that the multibillion-dollar carrier battle groups, and the U.S. military presence is truly global. Plus, the United States retains the world’s most potent nuclear arsenal, capable, despite reductions in recent years, of ending life on the planet several times over.
The latest frontier has been military domination of space as part of what the United States calls “full-spectrum dominance.” It was outlined in the U.S. Space Command’s 1997 publication “Vision for 2010” and fleshed out further in the Pentagon’s “Joint Vision 2020.”17 It portends unchallenged U.S. military domination on land and sea and in space.
The American Empire has evolved over the course of more than a century. After fulfilling what journalist John L. O’Sullivan termed its “Manifest Destiny” by spreading across North America, the United States looked overseas. William Henry Seward, Secretary of State to both Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, articulated a grandiose vision that incorporated Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, parts of the Caribbean and Colombia, and Midway Island.
While Seward dreamed, the Europeans acted, gobbling up everything they could get their hands on in the late nineteenth century. Britain led the way, adding 4.75 million square miles of territory—an area significantly larger than the United States—in the last thirty years of the century.18 France added 3.5 million.19 Germany, off to a late start, added 1 million. Only Spain’s colonization was in decline. By 1878, the European powers and their former colonies controlled 67 percent of the earth’s surface and, by 1914, an astounding 84 percent.20 By the 1890s, Europeans had divided up 90 percent of Africa, the lion’s share claimed by Belgium, Britain, France, and Germany. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the leading proponent of an American Empire, observed, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth” and urged the United States to move quickly to make up for lost time.21
During the late nineteenth century, European countries vastly expanded their empires. As illustrated in these maps, by 1878, the European powers and their former colonies controlled 67 percent of the earth’s surface and, by 1914, an astounding 84 percent.
But such an empire was anathema to most Americans, who were struggling to defend a nineteenth-century vision of a producer’s republic from a ravenous industrial capitalist order. The enormous gulf between opulent capitalists and struggling masses shook the foundations of Americans’ democratic and egalitarian ideals. Most farmers and workers deplored the idea that a handful of bankers and industrialists, along with their stable of rubber-stamp legislators and judges, should run the country. Poet Walt Whitman captured that feeling when he described the excesses of capitalism as “a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity.”22
The 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s witnessed some of the bloodiest labor struggles in the nation’s history. In 1877, striking railroad workers and their myriad supporters from all parts of the working class paralyzed much of the nation’s rail traffic as capitalists, haunted by memories of the revolutionary workers who created the Paris Commune of 1871, conjured up their own nightmare visions when several cities, including Chicago and St. Louis, were shut down by general strikes. In Washington, D.C., the National Republican newspaper ran an editorial titled “The American Commune,” which stated, “The fact is clearly manifest that communistic ideas are very widely entertained in America by the workmen employed in mines and factories and by the railroads.” The railroad strike “is nothing less than communism in its worst form, not only unlawful and revolutionary, but anti-American.”23 St. Louis’s leading newspaper, the Republican, concurred: “It is wrong to call this a strike; it is a labor revolution.”24 When local militias proved unwilling or unable to quell the uprising, President Rutherford B. Hayes, who owed his office in part to the railroad magnates, sent in the U.S. Army. The ensuing battles left over a hundred workers dead and a nation bitterly divided.
This August 1883 Puck magazine cartoon depicts the unequal late nineteenth-century battle between labor and monopolists. A number of robber barons are portrayed in the stands at left, including (from left to right) financier and telegraph innovator Cyrus Field, railroad magnate William Vanderbilt, shipbuilder John Roach, and railroad magnate Jay Gould.
The struggles intensified in the 1880s as the Knights of Labor exploded on the scene, successfully striking Jay Gould’s 15,000-mile railroad network in 1885. Gould was no ordinary robber baron. Having once boasted that he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” he was perhaps the most hated man in the nation.25 And the Knights, with their appeal to class unity and democratic socialist philosophy, was no ordinary labor federation. Gould’s capitulation to the Knights’ demands, in what the business newspaper Bradstreet’s called a “complete surrender,” shocked the nation.26 Knights membership skyrocketed around the country, jumping from 103,000 on July 1, 1885, to over 700,000 a year later. The movement was dealt a crushing blow, however, when authorities nationwide used the death of seven policemen in Chic
ago’s Haymarket Square in May 1886 as an excuse to not only destroy the anarchists, who were involved in the incident, but to go after the Knights, who forswore violence and were completely uninvolved in the Haymarket events. Radicals everywhere were targeted in the ensuing Red Scare.
“Haymarket Riot,” May 4, 1886. Authorities used the death of policemen in Haymarket Square to crush not only the anarchists, who were involved in the incident, but also the Knights of Labor. Soon radicals across the nation were under attack.
Looking back on the period, reformer Ida Tarbell recalled that “the eighties dripped with blood.”27 Though the decade did not quite drip with blood, workers did question the legitimacy of a system that empowered the wealthy—the new corporate and banking elite—and marginalized the overwhelming majority of workers and farmers, who experienced limited advances in good times and often devastating setbacks in bad.
Discontent was regularly expressed by angry farmers as well, particularly the ones who organized the Farmers Alliances in the 1880s and the People’s Party in the early 1890s. Historians continue to debate just how radical farmers were, but there is no doubt that most opposed the growing reach of the corporate state, and many of their leaders roused audiences with anti–Wall Street rhetoric. The People’s Party adopted a platform at its first convention in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1892 that declared, “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”28
Edward Bellamy, 1890. With much of the American middle class repulsed by the greed guiding the economy, Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward quickly sold over a million copies upon its publication in 1888. It also inspired the rise of Nationalist Clubs across America, hoping to help realize the author’s utopian socialist vision.
Although the Populists’ appeal was limited to parts of the South, Midwest, and West, the People’s Party won almost 9 percent of the presidential vote in 1892, carrying five midwestern and western states and electing over 1,500 candidates, including three governors, five senators, and ten congressmen. The Populists doubled their vote in 1894, electing seven congressmen and six senators.
Much of the middle class shared the revulsion toward an economy predicated upon the notion that individuals motivated by private greed would somehow produce a greater social good. Middle-class Americans not only sided with the railroad strikers in the Great Strike of 1877, they devoured Edward Bellamy’s enormously popular 1888 utopian socialist novel Looking Backward, which quickly sold over a million copies, making it the second most popular American novel of the nineteenth century, behind Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The financial panic on Black Friday—May 5, 1893—triggered the nation’s worst depression to date. It would last five long years. Within months, 4 million workers lost their jobs. Unemployment soon approached 20 percent.
The nation debated the depression’s causes and sought ways to avoid future economic collapse. Those who believed that the 1893 depression resulted from overproduction argued that the United States needed more markets abroad to absorb its growing surplus. Socialists, trade unionists, and reformers, on the other hand, believed that the 1890s crisis resulted from under-consumption and proposed a different solution: redistributing wealth at home so that working people could afford to buy the products of America’s farms and factories. But few capitalists endorsed that approach, choosing instead to involve the United States in world affairs in ways that would fundamentally transform the nation.
Before the United States could stake its claim to foreign markets and natural resources, it needed a modern steam-powered navy and bases around the world to supply it. The United States annexed the harbor of the Pacific island of Pago Pago in 1889 and built a new navy between 1890 and 1896.
Pago Pago was just the start. In 1893, American sugar planters, working with the U.S. minister in Honolulu and supported by U.S. marines and sailors, toppled Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani and installed American Sanford Dole, a cousin of pineapple magnate James Dole, as president. The United States annexed Hawaii in 1898. President William McKinley called it “Manifest Destiny.”29
The United States declared war against Spain on April 25, 1898, purportedly to deliver Cuba from Spanish tyranny. The fighting began thousands of miles away in Manila Bay, where, on May 1, Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet. One anti-imperialist noted, “Dewey took Manila with the loss of one man—and all our institutions.”30 The war was over in three months.
Secretary of State John Hay called it “a splendid little war.”31 Not everyone thought the war so splendid. On June 15, 1898, the Anti-Imperialist League tried to block U.S. annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Its ranks included such prominent individuals as Andrew Carnegie, Clarence Darrow, Mark Twain, Jane Addams, William James, William Dean Howells, and Samuel Gompers. But anti-imperialists’ efforts were no match for a nation imbued with the glory of war and the thrill of easy victory in a righteous cause.
When the dust of war settled, the United States had secured the beginnings of an overseas empire, having annexed Hawaii and acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. The Philippines were viewed as an ideal refueling stop for China-bound ships. After wavering about what to do with the islands, walking the White House floor night after night and praying to “Almighty God” for guidance, McKinley opted for annexation, seizing upon the opportunity to civilize one of the world’s “inferior” races, which Rudyard Kipling referred to as the “white man’s burden.”32
Satirizing both the emerging American imperialism and the nation’s ongoing cruelties, this January 1899 Puck magazine cartoon depicts the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as children being lectured to by Uncle Sam. In the back rows sit children reading books labeled with the names of various U.S. states. In the far corner of the room a Native American child holds his book upside down, while a Chinese child stands at the “Open Door.” In the upper left corner an African American is left the menial task of washing the classroom window. The blackboard reads, “The consent of the governed is a good thing in theory, but very rare in fact. —England has governed her colonies whether they consented or not. By not waiting for their consent she has greatly advanced the world’s civilization. —The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.”
Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, the Filipinos had been rebelling against Spanish rule for years, and they naively believed the United States would help them gain independence. They drafted a constitution and established a republic on January 23, 1899, with Aguinaldo as president. On February 4, U.S. forces opened fire in Manila. U.S. newspapers reported this as an unprovoked Filipino attack on unarmed U.S. soldiers in which 22 were killed and 125 to 200 wounded. Filipino losses were estimated in the thousands. Newspapers predicted that the attack would rally support for the imperial cause and ensure Senate approval of the bitterly contested treaty, according to which the United States was to pay Spain $20 million for the Philippines. The New York World observed that the United States was “suddenly, without warning, face to face with the actualities of empire. . . . To rule, we must conquer. To conquer, we must kill.”33 Pressure mounted on treaty opponents to support the troops. General Charles Grosvenor, a congressman from Ohio, declared, “They have fired on our flag. They have killed our soldiers. The blood of the slain cries from the ground for vengeance.”34
The Chicago Tribune described the Senate debate as the bitterest contest “since the impeachment trial of Andy Johnson.”35 Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts warned that the United States would become “a vulgar, commonplace empire founded upon physical force, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and the other classes must forever obey.”36
After much arm-twisting and assurances that this did not entail permanent U.S. control of the Philippines, the treaty was ratified by a margin of one vote over the two-thirds needed. Hoar later observed, the United States “crushed the Republic that the Philippine people had set up for themselves, deprived them of their independence, and established there, by American power, a Government in which the people have no part, against their will.”37 Senator Richard Pettigrew called the betrayal of Filipino independence “the greatest international crime of the century.”38
Filipinos overwhelmingly supported the rebels and provided them food and shelter. The Americans, some of whom employed the tactics they had perfected fighting Native Americans, responded with extraordinary brutality. Following one ambush, General Lloyd Wheaton ordered all towns within a twelve-mile radius destroyed and all their inhabitants killed. When rebels surprised the Americans stationed at Balangiga on the island of Samar, killing fifty-four of the seventy-four men there, Colonel Jacob Smith ordered his troops to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the island into “a howling wilderness.”39 Some of the soldiers happily obliged. One wrote home, “Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill ‘niggers.’ . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces.”40 U.S. officers put hundreds of thousands into concentration camps.
