The Birth of U.S. Imperialism
An Introduction to the
Spanish-American War
by Christopher Conway
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The Problem of Terminology: the Problem with
the Phrase "Spanish American War"
U.S. military intervention has
historically been termed the 'Spanish American War." Many historians in recent
decades have rejected this term for being colonialist. These critics argue
that the term erases and invalidates Cuban contributions to the war effort,
subtly reinforcing the prejudicial view that the only participants in the war
were North Americans and Spaniards.
Key Concepts for the Theory and Practice of U.S.
Imperialism
The Monroe Doctrine (1823) and The Roosevelt
Corollary (1904): President James Monroe proposed the erection of a
symbolic barrier between Europe and the Americas. The U.S. promised to not
intervene in the internal affairs of Europe and in its colonies, whereas the
U.S. declared that Europe should not intervene in the Americas, nor set up new
colonies. The Monroe Doctrine was a phrase that became common in
discussions of foreign policy many years after President Monroe articulated
this perspective, and was a recognizable phrase in the latter half of the
nineteenth century. The Roosevelt Corollary was the work of President
Teddy Roosevelt, and it amended the Monroe Doctrine to include the
possibility of U.S. intervention if the U.S. saw it fit to do so. This was
essentially a paternalistic point of view: if the U.S. decided a country's
internal affairs required policing, then it took it upon itself to take
control of the situation. Roosevelt is famous for having popularized the
phrase "Speak softly and carry a big stick," which accurately
represents the tenor of the Roosevelt Corollary.
Stereocard image of U.S.
soldiers in battle, circa 1898
The Avalon Project at
Yale: The Monroe Doctrine
CIVNET on the
Monroe Doctrine
Thomas Jefferson on the
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine
and a Reaction from The American People, Creating a Nation and a
Society
Walter
LaFeber, Historian, on The Roosevelt Corollary
The
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message
to Congress, 6 December 1904
Manifest Destiny (1845) and the Frontier Thesis (1893):
Manifest Destiny was a phrase coined by a writer who was trying to get
across the idea that it was the providential mission of the U.S. to extend
itself over the frontier, claiming it as a kind of god-given, national right.
Manifest Destiny was not an explicit, policy phrase, but a cultural
concept that reflected Anglo-Saxon attitudes about westward expansion and the
Native American question. The Frontier Thesis refers to the work of the
historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who in 1893 wrote an essay titled "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History." Turner's argument was that
the no longer existent frontier had been central to the construction of the
American character. Turner argued that the U.S. would have to find new
frontiers to conquer in order to maintain its sense of identity. The
ideological formulations of Manifest Destiny and the Frontier
Thesis were popular justifications for U.S. expansionism. In fact, Buffalo
Bill's Wild West Show incorporated scenes from the U.S. intervention in Cuba
in his show, making the link between internal frontier and exterior, maritime
frontier quite clear: the epic of the conquest that had taken place in the
West was now taking place abroad.
The
Many Shades of Manifest Destiny
Frederick Jackson
Tuner's Essay on the American Frontier, complete
Biographical
information on Turner
Does
the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? Richard Etulain
Dollar Diplomacy (1909-1913): A phrase that described President
William Howard Taft's foreign policy, which quite cynically traded money for
political and economic clout in other countries. Dollar diplomacy was used to
meddle in the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic and in Nicaragua. In
Nicaragua, U.S. meddling resulted in the first Sandinista
Revolution.
Dollar Diplomacy by
W.H.Taft
Detailed
Overview of its use by Dr. Steven Schoenherr.
The Gilded Age:Entry coming soon.
Reflections on Economics and Empire
Between the Civil
War and 1900, the U.S. began its apprenticeship as an imperial power. As early
as the 1850's, the U.S. was sending troops to Argentina, Nicaragua, Japan,
Uruguay and China, as well as eyeing sugar rich Cuba for annexation
purposes.The latter half of the Nineteenth Century was spent in
industrialization and the installment and maintenance of a social order that
would prove beneficial to capitalist expansion and progress.
The Union
Pacific and Central Pacific railroads snaked their way toward each other and
finally met in 1869; figures such as Morgan and Rockefeller created a national
economy by casting a wide and almost totally all-encompassing web of corporate
domination over railroads, steelworks and banks; in the South, Reconstruction
fomented both advances for former slaves and a vicious reaction; the frontier
was eclipsed as a horizon of adventure; and maybe as a reminder of a newfound,
national sense of self, the country's first State Department building -- a
huge and sumptuous affair -- was built next to the White House between the
years of 1871 and 1886, inaugurating an age of administrative
self-consciousness as a world player.
Although the Spanish-American
War and the intervention in the Philippines were preceded by fifty years of
meddling in Latin America, and to a lesser degree Asia and Africa, it was
these two events that marked and tested a fully realized imperial policy.
Unlike the prior interventions, these two, intimately intertwined conflicts
(the U.S. decision to take action against Spain in Cuba made propelled Dewey's
invasion of the Philippines) not only allowed for U.S. capitalist expansion,
but were largely predicated on a consciousness of economic expansion as key to
economic development at home. William Appleman Williams has persuasively
argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) that an imperial
self-consciousness in the American psyche can be traced back to the
Revolutionary Wars and more importantly, to the consolidation of continental
supremacy in 1812.
The views of the first generation of the American
presidency (the 18th Century presidents) were strategically situated for
future elaboration when capitalist forms of production and exchange began to
mature in the United States. For example, in the late 1830's massive growth in
agricultural output and surplus integrated the American agricultor into the
world capitalist marketplace, a fact that was not lost on capitalists such as
August Belmont and James Gillespie, who drew attention to the crucial need for
markets and capital expansion if the American metropolis was to prosper
(Williams 24).
By 1894, with the failure of the Philadelphia and
Reading Railroad, the National Cordage Company, the collapse of 500 banks and
15,000 businesses, the ejection of millions of restless workers into the ranks
of the unemployed and the increasing restlessness of millions more of the
employed, economic expansion was increasingly touted as a very attractive
panacea to the volatility of the social matrix. Quite simply, at the turn of
the century, the U.S. was suffering its first great crisis in the relations of
production. Presidents clambered for answers, and super-star businessmen
power-brokers, such as Rockefeller of Standard Oil, either refused to be left
out of the decision-making process, or were fearfully spied upon by the
presidency for tacit guidance and sanction. Thus, regarding definitions, I think that it is clear that my use of the term
"imperialism" rests on Harry Magdoff's formulation that "restless expansion
--the accumulation of capital -- is the driving force and the very essence of
capitalism" (Magdoff 97).
When talking about imperialism as an
extension of capitalism, a world system, economic realities internal to the
U.S. cannot be disassociated from events in the world scene. Here it is useful
to pause to consider how many business interests in the East Coast
specifically, went from being anti-imperialist to imperialist. Julius W.
Pratt's 1934 article "American Business and the Spanish American War" can be
suggestive, and worth a brief recapitulation: by 1898, Wall Street had gotten
very promising signs that the economy was on an upward trajectory, and talk of
war was a powerful, influential shadow on stock movement. (27) In the West,
however, sentiment seems to have been decidedly more imperialist in the
business community (30). Pratt makes the widely accepted observation that the
conflictive and hostile assertion of European spheres of influence in Asia
stunned the American business community into realizing the stakes of
isolationism. Both Julius Pratt & Walter LaFeber separately note how, as
of early 1898, in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Baltimore, Boston and
Seattle, chambers of commerce lobbied the Federal government for a more
aggressive American posture before European encroachment in
Asia.
Walter LaFaber, in The New Empire: An Interpretation of American
Expansion 1860-1898, (1963), through a careful recounting of networks of
communication and influence between individuals such as Alfred Thayer Mahan
(member of the U.S. Naval Board), Theodore Roosevelt and then President
McKinley, has even argued that the Asian question may have been very much at
the forefront of the decision making process that led to war with Spain.
(LaFeber 383) Be this as it may, subsecuent arguments for retaining possession
of the Philippines most certainly touched on the accesibility of Asia and its
markets. For example, in September of 1898, before the beginning of the
Spanish-Cuban-American war and the taking of the Philippines, in a North
American Review article, one John Barrett could write with awesome prescience
of the debate that would rapidly overwhelm the American government, that: "The
present situation demonstrates the vital necessity of having a naval (as well
as commercial) base in Asiatic waters...The growing importance of the Pacific,
of Pacific commerce, Pacific politics, Pacific lands, and the responsibilities
resting on the United States in connection with that growth, together with the
impending opening of China and the wide reaching effect thereof upon the
United States as well as upon Europe, demand that we do not shirk the duty of
governing the Philippines, which must play a leading part in all this
development. What with...the necessity of finding wider foreign markets for
our surplus products, is it too much to expect that we shall endeavour to hold
the Philippines as a permanent posession if we succeed in taking them from
Spain?" (quoted in Welch [ed.], 65).
In short, Wall Street realized
that force might be a necessary ally for the implementation of an "Open Door"
policy. A good example of this can be found on a cover for an issue of
Harper's Weekly of the time, in which Uncle Sam cries out: "A fair field and
no favor...I'm out for commerce, not conquest!"
Stereocard story image from 1900, reflecting U.S. popular
consumption of the war in Cuba
Racism Towards Cubans in the U.S.
John Paul Johnson's
book, Latin American in Caricature, contains hundreds of North American
political cartoons of Latin Americans from the nineteenth to the twentieth
centuries. With regards to U.S. imperialism in Cuba, Johnson's anthology of
images amply illustrates the degrading stereotypes of Cubans that were
disseminated before, during and after U.S. intervention in Cuba. Generally
speaking, Cubans were represented as children, implying their essential
political immaturity, which was then contrasted with the adult image of Uncle
Sam. Also, Cubans were often presented as pickaninnies, or grotesquely
exaggerated black children who spoke in minstrel English, and who were prone
to "act up" and misbehave. It is apparent that racist stereotypes of black
Americans were being projected outward onto Cubans as a justification for U.S.
intervention in Cuba. After the War, U.S. generals involved in the military
government the U.S. imposed in Cuba, described the Cuban people in terms that
were quite similar to these demeaning images. For these men, Cubans were
stupid, irresponsible, immature, violent, and savages akin to Africans, and
therefore, unprepared for democracy.
Consequences of the So-Called "Spanish American War": Coming
soon.
José Martí: Cuban Critic of U.S. Imperialism:Coming
soon.
The Agenda of this Website: Reflections on the Hate Email I've
Received
This site gets heavy traffic, about 100 hits a day, and
I've gotten several snotty emails from people who have been offended by the
content of this website. Apparently, for some, it is way unpatriotic to
examine historical processes that might cast a negative light on this nation.
I disagree with this notion. The purpose of this website is educational, and
its content is based upon research which is very much in the mainstream of
contemporary historiography.
Bibliography
Barrett, John. "The problem
of the Philippines". In Welch Jr., Richard E. (Ed.) Imperialists vs.
Anti-Imperialists, The Debate Over Expansionism in the 1890's. F.E.
Peacock Publishers: Itasca, Illinois 1972.
Beveridge, Albert. "A Taste
of Empire". In Sievers, Harry J (Ed.) William McKinley 1894-1901:
Chronology -Documents-Bibliographical Aids. Oceana Publications: New York
1970.
Cave, Alfred A. "Canaanites in the Promised Land: England's
Providential Theory of Empire". American Indian Quarterly, volume XII,
no. 4, Fall 1988.
Foner, Philip. The Spanish-Cuban-American War and
the Birth of American Imperialism 1895- 1902. Monthly Review Press: New
York 1972.
Green, Theodore (Ed) American Imperialism in 1898.
D.C. Heath and Company: Boston 1955.
Jenkins, Leland. Our Cuban
Colony, A Study in Sugar. Vanguard Press: New York 1928.
LaFeber,
Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion
1860-1898. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, London 1963.
Lodge,
Henry Cabot. "The Philippine Islands". In Green.
Magdoff, Harry.
Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present.
Pratt,
Julius. "American Business and The Spanish American War". In
Green.
Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy. Dell 1969.
Wisan, Thomas. "The Cuban Crises as related
to the New York Press". In Green.
Zinn, Howard. A People's History
of the United States. Perennial Library, Harper & Row: New York 1980.
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Links on U.S. Imperialism
U.S. Imperialism at the
Beginning of the Twentieth Century Historical and elegant.
An American
Anti-Imperialist: Mark Twain Historical and of literary interest.
Let the Bloody Truth
be Told: U.S. Imperialism Large and current.
Excerpts from Eduardo
Galeano's "Memory of Fire," on U.S. Imperialism in Latin
America
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