The Untold History of the United States

by Oliver Stone

  One of the most vigorous backers of the U.S. takeover of the Philippines was Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana. Beveridge visited the Philippines to get a firsthand look at the situation. The only senator to have actually visited the Philippines, his views were eagerly anticipated. He addressed a crowded Senate chamber in early January 1900, offering one of the most colorful, blunt, and chauvinistic defenses on record of U.S. imperial policy:

  The Philippines are ours forever. . . . This island empire is the last land left in all the oceans. . . . Our largest trade henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. More and more Europe will manufacture the most it needs, secure from its colonies the most it consumes. Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . . Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic. . . . God . . . has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.”41

  But for McKinley the real prize was the fabled China market, which Japan and the European powers had been carving into exclusive areas for investment. Fearing that the United States would be frozen out of the China market, Secretary of State John Hay issued his first “open-door” note in 1899, asking other nations to grant equal access to commercial activity in their spheres of influence. Although the responses were often ambiguous, Hay declared the following March that all had assented to the open-door principle. Chinese nationalists, however, resenting all foreign domination, sparked a massive uprising against foreign occupiers and their missionary allies. Five thousand U.S. troops joined those from Europe and Japan in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion.

  Thus, the 1900 presidential election between McKinley and William Jennings Bryan took place with U.S. troops tied down in China, Cuba, and the Philippines. At the Democratic National Convention, Bryan defined the contest as a fight between “democracy on the one hand and plutocracy on the other,” and he launched into an impassioned attack on imperialism. In his booming baritone, he aligned his opposition to imperial conquest with the philosophies of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, quoting Jefferson: “If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”42 The voting public, by a narrow margin, seemed to at least acquiesce in the new imperial course laid out by McKinley and his advisors. Socialist Eugene Debs barely registered in the polls.

  After the election, Philippine atrocity stories began to circulate, replete with lurid accounts of murder, rape, and a kind of torture now called waterboarding. In November 1901, the Philadelphia Ledger’s Manila correspondent reported:

  The present war is no bloodless, fake, opera bouffé engagement. Our men have been relentless; have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog . . . whose best disposition was the rubbish heap. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk,” have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet riddled corpses.43

  The presidential election of 1900 pitted Republican William McKinley, a proponent of American Empire and a staunch defender of the eastern establishment, against Democrat William Jennings Bryan, a midwestern populist and outspoken anti-imperialist. With McKinley’s victory, Bryan’s warnings against American Empire would, tragically, be ignored.

  One soldier sent the following account to the Omaha World-Herald:

  Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.44

  Fighting persisted for three and a half years before President Theodore Roosevelt declared the islands pacified. The United States deployed a total of 126,000 troops, 4,374 of whom did not make it back alive.45 The toll among Filipinos was much higher—perhaps 20,000 guerrillas and at least 200,000 civilians, many from cholera.46 Americans comforted themselves with the thought that they had spread civilization to a backward people, but at a hefty price—$400 million. Senator Beveridge felt it was money well spent. But Beveridge underestimated the real cost. The republic of Washington and Jefferson, which had long inspired democratic and revolutionary movements around the world, had started down the road that would soon make it the foe of meaningful change and the defender of the status quo.

  U.S. troops employed the torture we now call waterboarding. One reporter wrote “our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk.’ ”

  In February 1901, while U.S. troops were, in McKinley’s words, uplifting, civilizing, and Christianizing the Filipinos, the U.S. Congress dispelled any lingering illusions regarding Cuban independence. It passed the Platt Amendment, which asserted the United States’ right to intervene in future Cuban affairs, limited the amount of debt Cuba could accumulate, restricted Cuba’s power to sign treaties, and gave the United States a naval base at Guantánamo Bay, which would secure the eastern approach to the Isthmus of Panama. The United States made clear that the army would not leave until the amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution.

  The bodies of dead Filipinos.

  After the war, American businessmen swooped in, grabbing all the assets they could seize. United Fruit Company gobbled up 1.9 million acres of land for sugar production at 20 cents per acre. By 1901, Bethlehem Steel and other U.S. businesses may have owned over 80 percent of Cuban minerals.

  In September 1901, a twenty-eight-year-old anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. One of his anarchist acquaintances reported that Czolgosz had complained about the “outrages committed by the American government in the Philippine islands.”47 Ironically, the assassination brought to office a much more committed imperialist, Teddy Roosevelt.

  The new president savored the prospect of a canal through the Isthmus of Panama that would connect the Caribbean with the Pacific. But Panama was a province of Colombia, which refused to relinquish sovereignty for the $10 million the United States offered. Roosevelt took matters into his own hands and seized the canal route from those “cut-throats of Bogota.”48 The United States orchestrated a revolution, sent in warships to keep the Colombian army at bay, and quickly recognized Panama’s independence. In addition to the Canal Zone, the United States received the same right to intervene in Panamanian affairs that it had extorted from Cuba. Secretary of War Elihu Root warned that building the canal would force the United States to police the region for the foreseeable future.

  Plowing on a Cuban sugar plantation.

  The United Fruit Company office building in New Orleans. The Spanish-American War proved quite profitable for American businessmen. Once the war in Cuba ended, United Fruit took 1.9 million acres of Cuban land at 20 cents an acre.

  The United States began policing the region long before completion of the canal in 1914. As U.S. investment in Central America grew by leaps and bounds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, United Fruit Company and other U.S. corporations insisted on stable, compliant governments that would protect their interests. Americans took over banana
and coffee plantations, mines, railroads, and similar enterprises. So much land was devoted to commodity production for export that the countries became dependent on food imports to feed their citizens. The revenue at least enabled them to service their mounting debt to foreign banks.

  Defending American businessmen’s growing investments required the constant involvement of the military to prop up corrupt and dictatorial governments and suppress revolutionary movements. As early as 1905, Root, who had become secretary of state, wrote candidly, “The South Americans now hate us, largely because they think we despise them and try to bully them.”49 Between 1900 and 1925, the United States repeatedly intervened militarily in Latin America. It sent troops to Honduras in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925; to Cuba in 1906, 1912, and 1917; to Nicaragua in 1907, 1910, and 1912; to the Dominican Republic in 1903, 1914, and 1916; to Haiti in 1914; to Panama in 1908, 1912, 1918, 1921, and 1925; to Mexico in 1914; and to Guatemala in 1920.50 The only reason it didn’t intervene more frequently was that it often stayed, occupying countries for extended periods of time: Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, Haiti from 1914 to 1933, the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, Cuba from 1917 to 1922, and Panama from 1918 to 1920.

  Honduras was dominated first by the Spanish, then by the British, and then by the Americans. By 1907, its foreign debt stood at $124 million, its national income at $1.6 million.51 Between 1890 and 1910, foreign banana companies transformed the nation. First the Vaccaro brothers and then Sam “the Banana Man” Zemurray bought up vast plantations and the government officials needed to make sure things ran smoothly. They were soon joined by United Fruit Company of Boston. Beginning in 1907, political instability afforded the United States a pretext to intervene militarily and reinstall the supine government of Manuel Bonilla. U.S. bankers also replaced their British counterparts in controlling Honduran debt. With the political climate improved, United Fruit increased its holdings from 14,000 acres in 1918 to 61,000 in 1922 to 88,000 in 1924.52 In 1929, Zemurray sold out to United Fruit and became the company’s top official. The people of Honduras have remained impoverished ever since.

  The Nicaraguans fared no better. U.S. marines, under the command of Smedley Butler, intervened in 1910 to establish a government friendly to U.S. interests. When growing U.S. domination provoked the ire of Nicaraguans, Butler’s marines again intervened to defeat the rebels, killing two thousand Nicaraguans in the fighting. Butler was beginning to understand that his mission was essentially to protect U.S. commercial and banking interests. As he wrote to his wife during the fighting, “It is terrible that we should be losing so many men fighting the battles of these d . . . d spigs—all because Brown Bros. have some money down here.”53 When the Central American Court, which Roosevelt had established with much fanfare in 1907 to peacefully adjudicate conflicts in the region, condemned the U.S. intervention, U.S. authorities ignored that ruling, effectively destroying the court’s authority. U.S. troops would occupy the country for the next twenty years.

  In 1922, The Nation ran a scathing editorial titled “The Republic of Brown Bros.,” which echoed Butler’s assertion that the marines were there to do Brown Brothers’ bidding. The piece detailed how the bankers had systematically secured control over Nicaragua’s customs, railroad, national bank, and internal revenues with “the State Department in Washington and the American Minister in Managua acting as private agents for these bankers, using American marines when necessary to impose their will.”54

  Augusto Sandino was among the many Nicaraguans committed to throwing off the yoke of U.S. tyranny in their country. In 1927, he and his guerrillas engaged in a bloody battle with U.S. marines before retreating into the mountains. He reemerged the next year and, with popular backing, waged a guerrilla campaign against the occupying forces and their Nicaraguan National Guard surrogates. One U.S. planter wrote Secretary of State Henry Stimson that the military intervention had “proved a calamity for the American coffee planters. Today we are hated and despised. This feeling has been created by employing the American marines to hunt down and kill Nicaraguans in their own country.”55 Understanding this and fearing that U.S. military involvement in Central America was undermining his ability to protest Japanese actions in Manchuria, Stimson pulled the marines out of Nicaragua in January 1933, leaving things in the hands of the National Guard under the leadership of Anastasio Somoza. With the marines withdrawn, Sandino announced his readiness to negotiate but was captured and executed by Somoza’s National Guard. In 1936, Somoza seized the presidency, brutally exercising power that he and his two sons would not relinquish for another forty-three years until they were overthrown by the Sandinista revolutionary movement, named after Sandino, triggering another war with the United States under the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

  General Smedley Butler fought in the Philippines, China, and Central America. He wrote that he was “a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers . . . a gangster for capitalism.”

  No one had more firsthand experience intervening in other countries than Major General Smedley Butler. Butler enlisted in the marines at age sixteen when the 1898 war against Spain began. He first fought against the Filipino insurgents and then helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in China. Before long he was commanding one Central American intervention after another. Having already received two Medals of Honor, Butler commanded the 13th Regiment in France during the First World War. For that service he received the Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, and the French Order of the Black Star. A tiny bulldog of a man, Butler wrote a book titled War Is a Racket, which is still quoted and admired by many military men. At the end of his long and highly decorated service, he reflected upon his years in uniform:

  I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

  I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. . . .

  During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.56

  Long after Butler’s retirement, war would remain a “racket” as U.S. troops and intelligence operatives fanned out across the globe to defend the economic and geopolitical interests of American capital. They would occasionally improve the lives of those they left behind. But more often, as we detail in the following pages, they would leave misery and squalor. The record of the American Empire is not a pretty one. But it is one that must be faced honestly and forthrightly if the United States is ever to undertake the kind of fundamental structural reforms that will allow it to play a leading role in advancing rather than retarding the progress of humanity.

  Chapter 1

  WORLD WAR I:

  Wilson vs. Lenin

  The election of 1912 found Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, in a hard-fought four-party race against two former presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—and Socialist Eugene Debs. Though Wilson won the electoral college vote handily, the popular vote was closer: he received 42 percent to 27 percent for Roosevelt, the Progressive Party candidate,
and 23 percent for Taft. Debs, running for a fourth time, tallied 6 percent of the vote.

  Wilson would put his personal stamp on the office and the country to a much greater extent than his immediate predecessor or his successors. Descended from Presbyterian ministers on both sides of the family, Wilson could be strongly moralistic and infuriatingly and self-righteously inflexible. His rigidity was often fueled by the dangerous belief that he was carrying out God’s plan. He shared his predecessors’ sense of the United States’ global mission. In 1907, the Princeton president declared, “The doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. . . . Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.”1 In keeping with that sentiment, he would repeatedly transgress against the sovereignty of unwilling nations. And he shared his southern forebears’ sense of white racial superiority, taking steps to resegregate the federal government during his tenure in office. Wilson even screened D. W. Griffith’s pioneering though notoriously racist film Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915 for cabinet members and their families. In the film, a heroic Ku Klux Klan gallops in just in time to save white southerners, especially helpless women, from the clutches of brutish, lascivious freedmen and their corrupt white allies—a perverse view of history that was then being promulgated in less extreme terms by William Dunning and his students at Columbia University. Upon viewing the film, Wilson commented, “It is like writing history with Lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”2