The Spanish-American War, the premise was that we're going to help people
achieve democracy. The Spanish have made that impossible for them and, in the
case of the Cubans, they've been struggling for such a long time and, moreover,
we've got investments on the island and wouldn't it be nice if we'd bring
democracy in and also access to those markets unhampered by Spanish
regulations? And that was, I think, a fair enough paradigm to come on the
world stage with. When the Filipino chapter turned sour, when we had thrown in
our face the very principles that we had justified our imperial venture by
Aguinaldo. He wanted a republic. He wanted one man, one vote. he wanted a
constitution. Those things seemed to many Americans so basic that the refusal
was, indeed, to do ourselves as great, if not greater, harm than the Filipinos
in denying them. And so I'm sure people like Mark Twain and David Starr Jordan
and the progressives who railed against this violation of our democracy
principles were convinced that we would pay dearly later for this. Then there
were others, like Senator Tilman of South Carolina, strange bedfellows, this
anti-imperialistic clique had Mark Twain and Ben Tilman, but Tilman didn't
want any more coloreds in the American republic. "We got enough problems,"
said he. "We don't need these little brown men."
The racist spin that was put on the imperial experiment, the beginnings of it,
is really quite malevolent. Some of our most honorable citizens participated
in it. Theodore Roosevelt, I suppose, was one of the great offenders. Neither
the Chinese nor the Filipinos had any rights that a white man was bound to
respect. It was part of the social Darwinian miasma that just enveloped much
of the American Establishment during this time. There was a very famous
admiral, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote a classic work, still to be
read, I'm sure, at Annapolis, on sea power in which the argument was that to be
great, America must fulfill its imperial mission with an invulnerable naval
flotilla and we must, indeed envelope the globe in order to protect our
markets." There was a combination of racism that people of a different color
were slower evolving and that northern Europeans were way ahead, with a curious
kind of Marxism, although they would have been scandalized if you had said,
"You're thinking Marx." But overproduction was an obsession with many of these
advocates of imperialism and that meant to say, "We're not gonna pay the
workers in this country enough to buy what's produced. And so what are we
gonna do with it?" And the solution was, of course, to ratify and justify
these incursions in China under the rubric of the Open Door policy. And, of
course, at this very moment in time the Boxer Rebellion involved some four or
five thousand American Marines suppressing Chinese irredentism. All of the had
to be justified, though, the economics justified, the racism justified the
economics.
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