"Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hopes to nought."
“The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” by Rudyard Kipling
On February 7, 1899, Senator Benjamin Tillman (D-SC) read stanzas from “The White Man’s Burden” on the floor of the Senate. Unlike many of his colleagues, the virulently racist senator from South Carolina did not share Kipling’s belief in the nobility of imperialism. He scoffed at the idea that Filipinos would submit to American colonization. His speech was an angry coda to a long and contentious debate. One day earlier, the Senate had ratified the Treaty of Paris between the United States and Spain.
Today, the Spanish-American War is recalled as the moment at which the United States became a world power. Yet, the decisions to fight Spain and acquire colonies were anything but calm affairs. For two years, both sides fiercely debated the benefits, costs, and morality of war and empire. Jingoes claimed colonies were necessary in a world of zero-sum geopolitical and economic competition. The opposition countered that imperialism, which entailed ruling foreigners against their will, contradicted American ideals. These debates over war and empire were among the most acrimonious that Americans have ever had on foreign policy, and their outcomes were tragic omens of classical liberalism’s future in the Twentieth Century.
Foreign affairs ranked near the bottom of President William McKinley’s list of concerns on March 4, 1897. In his first inaugural address, he spoke at length about the economic troubles gripping the United States. When he finally got around to foreign policy, McKinley restated America’s traditional guiding principle of non-intervention. “We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression.”
The temptation had gained considerable power in recent years. In late February of 1895, Cuban revolutionaries took up arms against their Spanish rulers. The ensuing guerrilla war triggered a flood of interest in the island. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, owners of The New York Journal and The New York World respectively, saw the chaos in Cuba as an opportunity. They packed their newspapers with stories designed to expand circulation by outraging public opinion, namely accounts of Spanish atrocities. The most lurid reports concerned the forced relocation of Cuban civilians into concentration camps. Indeed, the Journal and the World routinely denounced General Valeriano Weyler, the architect of the policy, as “the Butcher.”
While Hearst and Pulitzer chased profits, others dreamt of empire. A scion of a prominent family in Boston, Henry Cabot Lodge had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Republican Party since he entered Congress in 1887. Jingoistic and preoccupied with the role of the United States in global affairs, he took particular interest in the issue of a transoceanic canal. On March 2, 1895, he addressed the Senate on the need for a canal across Central America, along with the acquisition of Hawaii. Drawing on the ideas of naval theorist Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, Lodge stated, “It is sea power which is essential to every splendid people.” Only a strong navy could control geographic choke points, namely Hawaii and Cuba. More to the point, he declared, “We are a great people; we control this continent; we are dominant in this hemisphere; we have too great an inheritance to be trifled with or parted with. It is ours to guard and extend.”
While Lodge addressed the Senate, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans were out of work. A sharp downturn begun in 1893 had turned into a multi-year depression. By 1896, public frustrations finally exploded. Aided by the spellbinding oratory of a former congressman from Nebraska, populists hijacked the Democratic convention in Chicago. They not only nominated William Jennings Bryan, but also discarded the Democratic Party’s traditional belief in the gold standard in favor of bimetallism (debt relief via currency devaluation). In the general election, which had strong overtones of class warfare, national turnout neared 80% of those eligible to vote.
“If we should have war, we will not hear much of the currency question in elections,” Lodge remarked. He spoke for many elites who regarded Bryan as a dangerous radical, despite the fact that he lost the election. One man who shared Lodge’s desire for a diversion was his friend, and fellow Harvard alum, Theodore Roosevelt. He had received the job of Assistant Secretary of the Navy as a reward for campaigning vigorously for McKinley. Roosevelt flung himself into his job as a naval planner with relish. In consultation with Mahan, Roosevelt gave command of the Asiatic Squadron to Commodore George Dewey. Roosevelt was already thinking beyond the Caribbean. In late September of 1897, he wrote to Lodge, “Our Asiatic Squadron should blockade and, if possible, take Manila.”
As the situation in Cuba deteriorated, McKinley faced increasing pressure to force a settlement with the Spaniards. He agreed to file a diplomatic protest over Weyler’s tactics and otherwise try to peacefully resolve the crisis. However, Spain’s conservative rulers refused to budge. Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo rejected the idea of selling Cuba to the United States: “Spain is not a nation of merchants capable of selling its honor.” Unlike Lodge and Roosevelt, McKinley had no desire to forcibly evict Spain from the Caribbean. “I have been through one war [the Civil War]; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.”
McKinley received a reprieve when Prime Minister Cánovas died on August 8, 1897. The new liberal government in Madrid recalled General Weyler and promised home rule for Cuba. When loyalists on the island rioted, the Spanish government allowed the USS Maine into Havana in order to protect American nationals. On February 15, three weeks after arriving in Cuba, an explosion sent the warship to the bottom of the harbor.
The deaths of American servicemen inflamed the bloodlust in Congress; senators flayed the administration for its impotence and threatened to declare war without McKinley’s consent. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Tom Reed (R-ME) did everything in his power to gag debate. Reed shared McKinley’s aversion to foreign adventures, calling expansion “a policy no Republican ought to excuse much less adopt.” He repeatedly gaveled down resolutions extending recognition to the “Republic” of Cuba or some variant thereof. One congressman fumed, “Mr. Reed has the members of that body bottled up so tight they cannot breathe without his consent.”
The pressure became overwhelming by the spring. On April 11, President McKinley requested authorization from Congress to forcibly end hostilities between Spain and the insurgents. In the Senate, Henry Teller (R-CO) proposed an amendment that forced the government to disclaim “any disposition of intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island [Cuba]” excluding pacification. Eager for war, Congress passed the amended joint-resolution by votes of 42 to 35 in the Senate and 311 to 6 in the House of Representatives on April 19. On April 25, 1898, Congress formally declared war on Spain.
Where one debate ended, another began. As his countrymen went off to war, Albert Beveridge, soon to be elected a senator from Indiana, fused economics with Social Darwinism in a speech in Boston. “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands… American law, American order, American civilization will plant themselves on those shores hitherto bloody and benighted but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.” When hostilities ended on August 12, 1898, Beveridge’s words seemed prophetic. The United States had acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from Spain.
“The character and future of the Republic and the welfare of its people now living and yet to be born are in unprecedented jeopardy,” warned Carl Schurz. A political refugee from Prussia and former U.S. Minister to Spain under President Lincoln, Schurz believed imperialism should remain the province of despotic European governments. He and other leaders of the American Anti-Imperialist League, such as Andrew Carnegie, William Graham Sumner, and Mark Twain, insisted that imperialism was incompatible with liberal democracy. Worse, taking up the mantle of empire would make a mockery of the liberal principles that Americans claimed to hold dear.
The fight over imperialism took center stage when Congress reconvened in December. The anti-imperialists needed one-third plus one members of the Senate to block ratification of the Treaty of Paris. However, they had lost the support of the president. In a meeting with a group of visitors to the White House, McKinley explained why he had changed his mind about ruling the Philippines. The Filipinos were “unfit for self-government.” Moreover, they were not strong enough to militarily resist aggression by another imperial power. The only solution was American-rule whereby Americans would “educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them.”
McKinley’s conversion underscored the geopolitical, economic, and quasi-religious arguments that comprised the imperialist case. Spain’s eviction from the Caribbean left the United States unchallenged in the Western Hemisphere. To claims that the United States could not dominate the Pacific Ocean the way it could the Caribbean, Lodge and others argued that the Philippines would serve as a stepping-stone from which American merchants could reach the vast markets of China. As Beveridge had remarked in April, “Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.”
To anti-imperialists, Lodge and his confederates sounded like mad men. From his perch at Yale University, William Graham Sumner mocked those who talked up the glories of seizing foreign markets. In a speech entitled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” he excoriated imperialism as the ideology of the economically illiterate and morally bankrupt.
We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies. Expansionism and imperialism are nothing but the old philosophies of national prosperity which have brought Spain to where she now is. Those philosophies appeal to national vanity and national cupidity. [Emphasis added.]
Others warned about the practical dangers of trying to rule the Philippines against the will of the natives. Carl Schurz did not mince words: “They will fight against us.” Fearing such an outcome, steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie offered the government of the Philippines $20 million to buy the archipelago’s freedom. (The U.S. government authorized a $20 million payment to Spain in the Treaty of Paris.) Carnegie also disputed the idea that American imperialism would be more benign than what Europeans had practiced in Africa and Asia. “Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves more than the natives.”
While Schurz, Carnegie, and others lit into Republicans, the Democrats had their own anguished debate. Many clung to the party’s traditional belief in limited government, and they warned that imperialism would reap a large standing army, lavish military spending, and greater executive power instead of national glory. Yet, the rank-and-file received no support from the Democratic Party's nominal standard-bearer, William Jennings Bryan. While he supported the war for the somewhat moral reason of ending Spanish oppression of the Cubans, Bryan viewed imperialism in almost purely political terms. He craved the presidential nomination in 1900, and he saw imperialism as a potential wedge issue to use against the Republicans. Accordingly, he urged Democrats to vote for ratification.
Bryan’s perverse logic appalled many Democrats, including former President Grover Cleveland. The only Democrat to occupy the White House since the Civil War, he strongly opposed imperialism – he stopped the annexation of Hawaii in 1893 because he believed the treaty was illegal. Alongside other leading men, Cleveland signed a petition that called on the Senate to renounce annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The document also contained an extraordinary appeal to liberal principles: “In accordance with the principles upon which our Republic was founded we are duty bound to recognize the rights of the inhabitants.”
The petition arrived in Washington, D.C. just as the Filipinos prepared to take matters into their own hands. On February 4, they attacked American troops near Manila. Whether influenced by Bryan’s arm-twisting or the deaths of American servicemen, the Senate voted 57 to 27, one more vote than necessary, to ratify the Treaty of Paris on February 6, 1899.
For Tom Reed, ratification capped off a miserable year. His party had launched a war of conquest, illegally annexed Hawaii (by joint-resolution rather than treaty), and committed itself to the subjugation of the Philippines. During the debate over ratification, he found himself torn between his convictions and his partisan duties. As Speaker of the House, he quashed a prospective bipartisan resolution denouncing imperialism. But in private, he fumed about McKinley’s volte-face. When all but two Republicans voted for ratification, he made the most important choice of his career. In April of 1899, Reed announced his resignation from Congress.
Despite a costly war in the Philippines, the Republican Party held both chambers of Congress and the White House in the election of 1900. Even fate intervened on the side of imperialism: McKinley’s assassination in September of 1901 elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. After finishing off the Filipinos in 1902, Roosevelt busied himself with turning the Caribbean Sea into an American lake. In 1903–1904, imaginative and coercive diplomacy yielded the land to build a transoceanic canal across Panama, along with exclusive American control of the canal zone. In his State of the Union Address in 1904, Roosevelt announced the right of the United States to exercise “international police power” in the Western Hemisphere. The avowedly pro-interventionist president won reelection convincingly in 1904.
As the new century progressed, many of the leading anti-imperialists passed away. Tom Reed went first, dying in 1902 after practicing law in New York. Carl Schurz and Grover Cleveland supported conservative Democrat Alton Parker for president in 1904, before passing in 1906 and 1908 respectively. William Graham Sumner and Mark Twain continued to write until their deaths in 1910.
Andrew Carnegie found himself left virtually alone to carry the mantle of anti-imperialism in an imperial age. After retiring from steelmaking in 1901, he began to give away his fortune. In 1903, he provided $1.5 million to build the Peace Palace, which would house the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. In 1910, he gave $10 million to create what became the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
This rearguard action against imperialism echoed the fundamental argument that anti-imperialists had made at the turn of the century: America’s greatness stemmed from its adherence to, let alone its founding on, liberal ideas. At a time when European nations were carving up Africa and Asia in the name of spreading “civilization,” anti-imperialists rightly charged that Americans who desired colonies were implicitly admitting that their country was not exceptional.
But by the time the Peace Palace opened on August 28, 1913, Americans had largely forgotten about the war with Spain and the counter-insurgency in the Philippines. The great debate had been settled; imperialism did not imperil democracy.
In less than a year, the great powers of the world would plunge into the abyss.
(Note on sources: This article draws heavily on The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890 - 1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman and American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865 – 1900 by H.W. Brands.)
