The Anti-Imperialist League and the Battle Against Empire

0:00Well, the title of my talk is The Anti-Imperialist League and the Battle Against Empire. Now, thankfully, Professor Reiko gave us a little bit of the history, so I don't need to go over that ground too much, other than to say that what I'm talking about involves the ending, the last few years of the 19th century and the opening of the 20th century, And that this organization that was formed in late 1898 called the Anti-Imperialist League, the American Anti-Imperialist League, was founded after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, which was a war between the United States and Spain that dealt with issues involving Cuba, as Professor Reiko pointed out, but that also was a very fateful moment in the point of view of American foreign policy, because it also involved the acquisition of territories from Spain by the United States.

0:54And it was this that the anti-imperialists who formed this league sought to oppose because they believed that that would fundamentally alter the American character in undesirable ways. It became an imperial power. Now although they were by and large also opposed to the annexation of Puerto Rico, which in addition to Guam was also acquired from Spain, the emphasis was always on the Philippines. in the Philippines, among the anti-imperialists, and the battle against American involvement in the Philippines, and the refusal of the American government under President McKinley and then Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, to grant independence to the Philippines. And in fact, they waged a war against the Filipinos to prevent their independence. These sorts of things struck the anti-imperialists as, well, undesirable modifications of the and the original American tradition of non-interference and being the well-wishers of independence and freedom for all.

1:51It's worth noting that the impetus for the League, in fact, got started during the Spanish-American War itself, just around the time it was beginning to wind down in the early summer of 1898. The initial moves were made that then became a formal organization in November of that year. The initial meeting was held at Boston's Faneuil Hall and was presided over by a descendant of William Bradford, who had been governor of Plymouth Colony centuries earlier. Now those who later became anti-imperialists and joined this league could be found both among supporters and opponents of the Spanish-American War. and War. So there were people like William Jennings Bryan who had supported the war but then opposed some of the consequences, that is the acquisition of colonial territories. At the same time, a great many anti-imperialists had been against the war to begin with and I'd like to focus on a few of those at the beginning here because their comments on war are, I think you'll find them quite revealing and useful and unfortunately depressingly familiar. For example, Moorfield's story is an interesting

3:02figure, who's an accomplished lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School, sometime president of the American Bar Association, and a supporter of laissez-faire and a well-known advocate of the gold standard and free trade. He was also the first president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP, from 1909 until 1915. The story, by the way, was white. He spoke at the Boston meeting presided over by Bradford and went on to become both a vice The Vice President of the New England Anti-Imperialist League because there were in fact regional chapters founded and eventually became President of the National Organization. Now consider Story's words in April 1898 on the eve of the Spanish-American War. He says,

3:59by the armies, the strength of her fleets, or even by the insolence with which she tramples upon her weaker neighbors. But him who knows that the true greatness of a nation, as of a man, depends upon its character, its sense of justice, its self-restraint, its magnanimity, in a word, upon its possession of those qualities which distinguished George Washington from the prizefighter, the highest type of man from the highest type of beast. It's kind of unkind to say that about prizefighters, but you understand the point. Carl Schurz, who, among other things, was the first German-born American to serve in the U.S. Senate, was likewise deeply involved in the League as an officer, as well as firmly opposed to the Spanish-American war itself. And he likewise wrote in April 1898, the man who, in times of popular excitement, boldly and unflinchingly resists hot-tempered clamor for an unnecessary war, and thus exposes himself Up to the approprious imputation of a lack of patriotism or of courage, to the end of saving his country from a great calamity, is, as to loving and faithfully serving his country, at least as good a patriot as the hero of the most daring feat of arms, and a far better one than those who, with an ostentatious pretense of superior patriotism, cry for war before it is needed, especially if they then let others do the fighting. Thankfully, that's never happened.

5:23He also reminds us of quite an illustrative verse, I believe, from James Russell Lowell, writing around the time of the Mexican War under President Polk in the 1840s. And those verses read, And President Polk, you know, he is our country. And what Short said as a commentary on this was that in our own time we hear with the old persistency the same old plea to the voters of the nation to be loyal to the country right or wrong. And when we probe the matter we find that we are being urged to be loyal not to the country right or wrong, but to President McKinley right or wrong. Lowell's lines might fit the present case with only a little paraphrasing.

6:08The side of our country must always be took and Mr. McKinley, you know, he is our country. Well, again, this is a fairly familiar phenomenon, I believe. Well, one of the best known members of the Anti-Imperialist League was Mark Twain. And incidentally, there were a great many illustrious figures in the Anti-Imperialist League, to whom I will refer later. But Twain, from 1901 until his death in 1910, was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. And a fellow named Jim Zwick has collected some of Mark Twain's anti-war writings into a book, and it's absolutely excellent. Zwick has an excellent anti-imperialist website online. If you do a search for Jim Zwick, it'll come right up. I love that last name, by the way, Zwick. When The Passion of the Christ came out, for a while I wanted to be Tom Caviezel.

6:54Then I came across this guy. I'd kind of like to be Tom Zwick, I think. All right, anyway, this is really this number... But I'd like to read an excerpt from one of Twain's stories. It's called The War Prayer. The War Prayer was not published in Twain's lifetime. It was thought of as being too radical. And in fact, Twain himself lamented, I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth. Well, after he died, he'd left instructions, please somebody try to get this thing published. It was later published. Well, the story of the War Prayer was a vivid commentary on the misappropriation of religion on behalf of nationalistic causes, particularly war. Now I myself as a Catholic am fairly well mortified to know that the war crazed version of modern evangelicalism is what is on display to the non-Christian world as Christianity.

7:46So I very much appreciate Twain's point and I would urge fellow Christians to take his critique in the proper spirit. The story begins with a church service in which the pastor calls down the blessings of God upon American forces that they may be successful and safe as they wage war against the enemy. And then a frail old man enters the church and pushes the pastor aside and explains that he's just spoken with God himself, who wishes to hear the other half of that prayer, the half that was only in their hearts and uttered only implicitly. And he says,

8:32is aware of and then he goes on to say you heard these words grant us the victory oh Lord our God that is sufficient the whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words elaborations were not necessary when you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory must follow it cannot help but follow it upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer he commanded me to put it into words listen and this is the other half of the prayer O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle. Be thou near them, with them in spirit. We also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

9:23O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells. Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead. Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain. Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire. Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief. Help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst. Sports of the sun, flames of summer, and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. For our sakes who adore thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet.

10:20We ask it in the spirit of love of Him who is the source of love and who is the ever faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. The story ends abruptly with people considering this man a lunatic and then presumably carrying on as before, unaffected. Well, what sorts of things did the League itself do? Well, they did what they could as intellectuals. They held public meetings and lectured, and they published books and pamphlets and leaflets, published newspaper articles to bring the information before the public. What kind of information? Well, they brought information about what exactly was going on in the Philippines. What kinds of atrocities were being perpetrated? These were things that a lot of people were not frankly interested in hearing, but the anti-imperialists helped to keep these issues front and center.

11:09Now, it's sometimes said of the anti-imperialists that they were thinking only in terms of the good of the United States when they opposed colonialism and imperialism. That is to say that their main critique was that the soul of America will be destroyed if she becomes an imperial power. And it is true that they did make that argument. But I think this is not entirely fair to at least some of the anti-imperialists who actually were concerned about the Filipinos themselves. In 1901, for example, the League passed a resolution instructing its executive committee to use its best efforts in promoting a petition for the President of the United States that General Aguinaldo, Emilio Aguinaldo was the leader of the Filipino rebels, should be permitted to come to this country under safe conduct to state the case of his people before the American Congress and nation.

12:01Well, needless to say, Theodore Roosevelt ignored that appeal, was not really interested in hearing from Aguinaldo. But that was the sort of thing the League tried to do. Or, as I indicated before, they sought to uncover and report abuses against the Philippine population. For example, the anti-imperialists were seeking to point out the methods of torture that were often used to get information out of some of the people. And we have here, for instance, a letter that was publicized by the Anti-Imperialist League by a private A.F. Miller of the 32nd United States Volunteers, who described the so-called water cure, which was one of the favorite methods that was used. Private Miller said as follows, We go out on a hike, catch a negro, which is a term they used to refer to natives of the Philippines, and ask him if he has a gun.

12:51A Sergeant in the Ninth United States John E. White told the Atlanta Constitution that to make a prisoner talk after the water has been forced into them, the soldiers would tap the man's stomach with the butt of their guns. And if the water did not spurt out of him high enough to satisfy them, in effect, they would, quote, playfully jump on him.

13:44These are very playful people, you understand. which usually has the desired effect, and when they get through with him, if there are any guns concealed or buried around there, he will very promptly produce them. A journalistic investigator wrote in 1901, the Spaniard used the torture of water throughout the islands as a means of obtaining information, but they used it sparingly, and only when it appeared evident that the victim was culpable. Americans seldom do things by halves. We come from here and announce our intention of freeing the people from three or four hundred years of oppression and say we are strong and powerful and grand. Then to resort to inquisitorial methods and use them without discrimination is unworthy of us and will recoil on us as a nation.

14:33It is painful and humiliating to have to confess that in some of our dealings with the Filipinos And we seem to be following more or less closely the example of Spain. We have established a penal colony. We have burned native villages near which there has been an ambush or an attack by insurgent guerrillas. We kill the wounded. We resort to torture as a means of obtaining information. These were the kinds of things the anti-imperialists wanted to bring into the public eye, and yet so often they found the public was unmoved. One anti-imperialist meditated upon this. What is the significance of such silence? Do we realize that amidst all the sunshine of our rich, prosperous life, we are being weighed in the balance of a true civilization, of eternal justice, and are being found wanting?

15:24It is the product of arbitrary government authority without justice, force from which the lifeblood of righteousness and truth has run out. Indeed, not everyone found the Anti-Imperialist League especially endearing. The Grand Army of the Republic's New York Chapter Commander called for all League members being stripped of their citizenship and, quote, and, quote, denied the protection of the flag they dishonor. Teddy Roosevelt described the anti-imperialists as, quote, simply unhung traitors and liars, slanderers, and scandal mongers to boot. In about 1968 or the late 60s, Political Science Quarterly featured an interesting article by Robert Beisner, who was one of the scholars of the Anti-Imperialist League, and he was Beisner was interested to compare the anti-imperialists of 1898 and the years following to the doves, the anti-war activists of 1968, and he did some interesting comparisons and contrasts.

16:30One thing he noted was that compared with some of the maybe rougher around the edges protesters of 1968, the anti-imperialists were relatively genteel, Beisner found. So, for example, Thorsten Veblen, as a child, had defaced property in his neighborhood with classical Greek obscenities, in classical Greek. So this is the sort of thing he means when he says these folks are relatively genteel. And then he contrasts that with some of the more vulgar forms of protest that occurred in the late 60s. And he actually quotes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. There's a hack government historian, if you ever wanted one, who insisted in 1966 that the President did not want a large Asian war and quoted President Johnson as saying, I don't want to save my face, I just want to save my rhymes with glass.

17:25To which Elizabeth Hardwick replied, I can't, being a lady, use that word, but does he conceive of that portion of himself as extending all the way to Southeast Asia? Funny thing is, today, that seems relatively genteel to me, I think. But for all their alleged gentility, nevertheless, the anti-imperialists were withering in their own way. E.L. Godkin said that the U.S. government had substituted keen, effective slaughter for Spanish, old-fashioned, clumsy slaughter. William James, the philosopher, was astonished that his country could, quote, puke up its ancient soul in five minutes. Andrew Carnegie, the great industrialist, wrote to a friend who favored expansion, It is a matter of congratulation that you have about finished your work of civilizing the Filipinos.

18:18It is thought that about 8,000 of them have been completely civilized and sent to heaven. I hope you like it. Well, again on this line of the alleged gentility of the anti-imperialists, we have the example of the great Edward Atkinson. Edward Atkinson had been involved in the anti-imperialist league since that initial meeting at Boston's Faneuil Hall. He actually wrote to the War Department, it was called the War Department, aren't those quaint days when at least they'd be honest? It's the War Department, let's be honest about it, to get a list of soldiers serving in the Philippines And he wrote, this is actually a letter he wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury. He wrote,

19:21Well, they never got back to him with a list of addresses so that he could send anti-war propaganda to the troops in the Philippines. So he went ahead and did it anyway. He started to send some pamphlets to at least a limited group of officers and American officials and other people in the Philippines as a start. Postmaster General ordered that all Atkinson pamphlets heading for Manila be seized from the mails. Atkinson then thanked the government for all the attention, pointing out that interest in his pamphlets had risen dramatically throughout the country. He wrote, I think the members of the cabinet have graduated from an asylum for the imbecile and feeble-minded.

20:10They have evidently found out their blunder because the administration papers suddenly ceased their attacks on me all on the same day, and I missed the free advertisement. I am now trying to stir them up again to provoke another attack. Now, some sectors of the League were reluctant to support Atkinson in this, although the Chicago branch was fairly supportive. But he continued his work, and he observed in 1899 that his latest pamphlet was, quote, This is the strongest bid yet for a limited residence in Fort Warren. As early as 1896 though, Atkinson had written to the New York Evening Post with an interesting suggestion for a petition to be drawn up to the US Congress along the following lines. It is requested that an act may be passed to the effect that any citizen of the United States who proposes to force this country into a war with Great Britain It is suggested that representatives in Congress shall be assigned to the command of brigades.

21:28Of course, men who, in high public position, have expressed such an earnest desire to assert and defend the honor of the country at any cost, would most enthusiastically vote for this enactment and would immediately enroll themselves for actual service in the field. This proposal for the immediate enrollment of the Jingo Army will at once develop the sincerity of purpose of the advocates of aggression and violence by their enlistment. An indirect but great benefit would then ensue by the removal of these persons from the high positions in which they have proved their incapacity to deal with questions of peace, order and industry, and to give them the opportunity to exert and prove their military prowess. Well, that didn't actually go through, you know, needless to say. Yeah, I know it, right.

22:14But interestingly, again, Atkinson-like story was for laissez-faire, which was an important strain in anti-imperialist thought. George E. McNeill, for example, summed up the position this way, Wealth is not so rapidly gained by killing Filipinos as by making shoes. Simple. Andrew Carnegie, again, the great industrialist who was an anti-imperialist. Some of you may know he offered to purchase the independence of the Philippines with a check for $20 million, which is the amount that the U.S. government had paid Spain for the islands. The New York Times denounced the offer as, quote, wicked. Are they ever right about anything, the New York Times?

22:56But at the same time, labor leaders like Samuel Gompers belong to the League, as did other people like Jane Addams, William James, and a great many others who might be associated with the left. So it really was a cross-ideological organization. And yet, the anti-imperialists were unsuccessful. The Philippines were eventually granted their independence decades later, but by and large the American population seemed fairly uninterested in what the League had to say. This was something they had to face. Now, why were they unsuccessful? That's a topic for another day. But there is at least some food for thought in these words by Felix Morley in his book, Freedom and Federalism. Felix Muller was a great old right journalist and writer, and he said this, The problem of empire-building is essentially mystical.

23:46It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great, that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such, an Englishman to an Irishman, an American to a Mexican, merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatsoever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort. And finally, from Morley, Empire building is fundamentally an application of mob psychology to the sphere of world politics. And how well it works is seen by considering the emotional satisfaction many English long derived from referring to the empire on which the sun never sets.

24:33Some Americans now get the same sort of lift from the fact that the stars and stripes now floats over detachments of quote our boys in 40 foreign countries. Forty. That's quaint. That's obviously decades ago, only 40. What's going on? Are we losing our backbone? So the anti-imperialists lose. But what can we learn from them? I think part of the reason that they lose is precisely the reason that's identified by Felix Morley. is that people have been taught to identify with their state as being, in effect, the highest expression of themselves. So when you criticize their state, it is as if you are criticizing them, and they will jump to its defense at the drop of a hat. They think of their government as a football team, the local team, ra-ra, go team. And you notice that at football games, even when you obviously have a case of pass interference, The crowd boos when the referee calls pass interference on their team, because ra ra go team, the truth be, well we'll say darned in the spirit of the rest of this talk.

25:34And in effect the same thing goes on now, because when you look at typical conservative type outlets, let's say, it is like you are reading the old Pravda. No propaganda is too embarrassing for them to repeat. They'll just go and repeat it. Propaganda that if the Soviet Union had uttered it in the late 70s, well, they would have been the first to condemn it as ridiculous and propagandistic. But again, ra-ra, go team. Whatever will make the team look good, that we will support no matter how ridiculous. This is difficult. This is a difficult problem to overcome. It is a difficult kind of false consciousness, as Joseph Salerno said earlier. and but this is more than anything what needs to be overcome people need to learn at some point that the government is not you these people who are governing and who are oppressing people around the world and who are looting you are not you they are a different people they're a different group of people from you they

26:33are not you they expropriate you to carry out their worldwide scheme but they are different from you and they are not you and they are alien and unnecessary now Now, this is a radical message, but I don't see any other message that can break through this fog. President Polk, he is our country. That was bad enough. President McKinley, he is our country. That was much worse. But what genuine American patriot, in the sense to which story refers, could bring himself to say, George W. Bush, he is our country? That alone, I think, reminds us of how important it is to oppose empire with every ideological tool we have at our disposal. So thank you all very much.