The anti-imperialist movement in the United States in 1899 and 1900 was a
movement that was arguing that the United States should get out of the
Philippines, that if the United States stayed in the Philippines two things
would happen. One would be that Americans would corrupt themselves because of
the brutal way in which they had to fight this war, that this was an immoral
war and Americans shouldn't be involved in it. The other argument that the
anti-imperialists made was that even if McKinley won this war, he could not
extend constitutional rights to the Filipinos, that the American Constitution
was only meant for certain races and would only extend as far as the American
continent. It could not stretch across water without snapping and it could not
really be applied to non-Anglo-Saxon peoples. The anti-imperialist movement
was really an upper class white movement based largely in New England and the
Middle West. It was a movement whose members had grave doubts whether or not
the United States could absorb other races into its system. We were already
having enough trouble dealing with the African American issue in the 1890s, and
these people thought that by adding the Philippine problem to the mix that the
Constitution could collapse. In this sense the anti-imperialists were
profoundly conservative. They saw McKinley and they saw Theodore Roosevelt as
revolutionaries, as people who were trying to put American power into places it
had never been before, and who were willing to use means which Americans had
never used outside the Western Hemisphere before, and that you couldn't do this
with this kind of a society without breaking down and corrupting the society.
In this sense McKinley, this man who is a profoundly conservative Republican,
appears to these people as the cutting edge of the revolutionary movement in
the United States. And the anti-imperialists see themselves essentially as
safeguarding the good, traditional American values of the middle and late 19th
century.
Imperialists have a good deal of influence in 1899 and 1900 in part because
they include some very important political leaders, and also because they are
financed by Andrew Carnegie's millions. Carnegie, the steel magnate, believed
that taking the Philippines was one of the great historic mistakes in American
history. And, in fact, Carnegie had the peculiarly American solution for
taking the Philippines, what he suggested to McKinley was that he, Carnegie,
would personally pay McKinley $20 million to buy the Philippines and then he'd
turn them back to the Filipinos. McKinley turned this particular offer down,
at which point Carnegie then turned to the anti-imperialists and began to
finance the anti-imperialists. The anti-imperialists reached, I think, a peak
of their influence in the early part of 1900.
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