Reluctant Imperialism? William Howard Taft and the Colonial Empire

0:00Well, the papers has already been commented by Lew Rockwell and in one of the topics have dealt with the, or will be dealing with the idea of the imperial presidency. And I think it's fitting that we should do so for nothing has so characterized the past century of our history as our revolution toward empire. It is appropriate that many of the opponents of empire and imperial intervention a century ago were advocates of market liberalism, who saw the events of 1898 and after, especially the annexation of the Philippines, as the first step down the slippery road toward imperial decline, such as had befallen Rome and other civilizations in the past.

0:54One intervention always seems to necessitate another until what was once thought of as an aberration becomes a predictable historical tendency or pattern, and I guess we once thought of impeachment as an aberration, but when you begin to get two of them discussed in 25 years, it no longer is an aberration either, I guess. For this dire prediction, the opponents of empire were ridiculed by those who saw the United States as an exception to those tendencies that had plagued other nations and civilizations. From this progressive, imperialist perspective, one might say we were sort of above or beyond history, a providential people indeed.

1:49This knee-jerk optimism, however, had not been shared by the Founding Fathers. As early as 1775, John Adams had understood that a republic was defined by a rule of law, an empire by capricious acts of its rulers. Elsewhere, I've suggested that aspects of empire were were already present in the birth of our republic. But there's no denial that the reality by the turn of the 20th century is that we had become serious players in the empire game. But with respect to the American Revolution and George Washington, I think our first effort and Empire, in the sense of the Philippines, was in 1781. We had tried to take Canada earlier. By 1781, it was pretty clear the Canadians didn't want to be part of the American states. And Washington sent Lafayette up to take Canada. And he met with the Green Mountain Boys. And the Green Mountain Boys, Ethan Allen said, yes, certainly General Lafayette. They They were militia, of course, not standing army.

3:10And they said, we'd be happy to go launch an attack on Canada. There's just one thing. We would like three things. We want double pay, double rations, and plunder. And Lafayette said, well, General Washington hasn't authorized me to give you that. And so he said, well, then we'll just go back to the old lady back there in the Green Mountains. And they departed and so much for the attempt to take Canada, the first American foreign aid program, 1792, to Haiti. Most Floridians, I think, will be surprised to learn that my state, with 15 million people now, fourth in numbers in the nation.

3:56This year, Florida taxpayers don't know it, but we've given a half million already for Haitian aid. to Government, not People to People. Very interesting how these things start as aberrations and then sort of continue. So we've had a succession of American presidents who've hinted that they're reluctant or ambivalent about doing this or the other, but we've had one foreign intervention after another. When McKinley made the decision to acquire the real estate in the Philippines and elsewhere, it fell to administrators such as Elihu Root and William Howard Taft to design and build the edifice, the colonial edifice.

4:46In doing so, they helped to move us toward an institutionalization of empire that would would make it difficult for the nation to disengage from such policies. And I think it's instructive that the two people that spoke already before me have touched upon the bureaucracy, as Lowell mentioned, that begins to proliferate around the presidency. And even with the first president, we have Hamilton there, and those people arguing that And he was really running the show. And I guess what I'm going to say here is that William McKinley is there as president and certainly later the flamboyant Teddy Roosevelt. But you can't understand their presidencies unless you comprehend the role that Elihu Root had as Secretary of War and then William Howard Taft had in the Philippines and then as Secretary of War and as President.

5:56And Taft is there for 12 years in one capacity or another. You could argue on that basis in terms of being in that cockpit of policy that Taft was perhaps one of the most influential people in the 20th century, though he's not viewed that way, because we don't see the continuity of the kinds of things that he was doing. And I might mention something about empire. How many of you here, just curious, have ever worked in the National Archives around the turn of the 20th century? Anybody? Am I the only one? Okay. Well, you know, there's this nice myth about the British Empire, that it's sort of, you know, in some sort of way backed into empire, sort of muddled in there, you know. Nobody muddles into empire. It is a very conscious, bureaucratic, centralized endeavor if you play it at all. And there's no better way to understand the imperialization of America in the 20th Century than to go look in the National Archives. I don't mean

7:16for any specific document. Go and look at the way records were kept. Before Empire, we have a quaint government that takes documents and folds them up into thirds and puts a little red string around them. And when you go to work there, since so few of us do, you You kind of blew the dust off and opened it up to read this document, and they were so afraid when I microfilmed a few of them back 30 something years ago. But by the time you get Elihu Root in there, who reorganized the Army, reorganized the State Department, they had to reorganize the record keeping because you can't run an empire with little pieces is a string wrapped around the paper. And you notice it immediately in the way that the records are kept. So here's Taft, who gets into the Philippines, negotiating with the Vatican, the Panama Canal, Cuba, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and dollar diplomacy in a whole bunch of places. So it's an incredible

8:29kind of involvement that we're looking at here. I don't have time in this short presentation to deal with more than just a couple of them. We'll try to get into the Philippines and Cuba if we have time. Taft was a fascinating character. When I was doing research on the anti-imperialist, I was in the Wisconsin archives, and he took a trip back to the Philippines in 1905, and there's this hilarious, I started laughing as I was reading the papers and everyone was looking at me, but if you can picture this, they were on this boat and it was at a small Philippine village out on an island, so between the boat and the dock was kind of a disparity. So there were about five or six little Filipinos, as this fellow described it, holding this ladder while Big Bill Taft, over 300 pounds, is out there in the middle The Man had prickly heat all over him. He had several severe operations while he was in the islands, but there's no question he became a very dedicated administrator for the Empire.

9:43And what the tragedy has tapped, it seems to me, is that here is a man who, when McKinley made the decision to take the Philippines, was opposed to it. He was an anti-imperialist, but he also wanted to be on the Supreme Court sometime in his career, and as you all know, he finally made it after his presidency. So he allowed himself to be convinced, even though he was an anti-imperialist, that the thing to do was go out there and shape things up in the Philippine islands. And he always was thinking of his career, so he managed to use the leverage to become head of the commission to replace Jacob Gould Sherman, who is the one who used the term reluctant imperialist, by the way.

10:35Kevin was president of Cornell and went out in the first Philippine Commission and then went and returned. So Taft went out to the islands and by the time he got there, of course, the insurgency was in full swing. The killing was going on in full swing. And those of us who are Southerners can appreciate the differences between the military and the Philippines, Headed by General Arthur MacArthur and the Civilian Administration headed by William Howard Taft because the Army in the Philippines is very much like Lincoln and Johnson at the end of the Civil War.

11:23They believed they didn't really want to meddle too much in Philippine affairs except to put down the insurrection. And so if you were one of the rebels and you signed the oath with the United States, you could participate again. Now the civilian administrators in Taft wanted to meddle in the Philippine Revolution and They took the position that the Radical Republicans did, and that is, they wanted their people in, you see. Now once you take that position, as we all know, it means the intervention gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

12:11Because you're meddling in a very complex social phenomenon, revolution. and Taft managed to be president or secretary of war when we had the Philippine Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, you know, that's a lot of meddling and revolution. And it's interesting, I guess meddlers get tired after about 12 years because the Northern Army withdrew from its southern occupation after about 12 years. And the regime of Taft in the Philippines, when they seriously went after this, before the Democrats got back in and began a Philippinization of the service, was 12 years, from 1900 to 1912.

13:03And I suppose you take a little comfort in that. But almost every revolution is like the American Revolution, as Carl Becker said, it's not only a question of home rule, it's a question of who is going to rule at home. And we like to talk about self-determination, but really we mean self-determination as long as those people that get in think the way we do. And I think that what Taft tended to do, and what we've done in all these revolutions, is to begin to support people that view the world the way we do.

13:58And the sociologists these days, as they study this, they talk about bureaucracy's ability to Induce Change and they call that state capacity and what it really tells you is how much sociology is this kind of a status study as far as I'm concerned. Now in western civilization the first people who really studied social change were the Catholics in China after Marco Polo as they went out there. The Jesuits had a great debate with the Dominicans, the Franciscans, about how to achieve change in China. And those two philosophies about how to achieve change are still with us today.

14:46The Jesuit view is that you work with the existing elite and you try to find common denominators like heaven and tian as being, the Dominican view is the pure unadulterated were none of this compromise and going to the masses and of course they got involved with such arguments that the Chinese Emperor finally threw them out. But when I lectured in the Philippines for the State Department in the 1980s I was reminded of how the United States instead of allowing the kind of of Revolutionary Development that people like Senator Borah argued in the 20th century as one of our great anti-imperialists that we had to allow.

15:38We always went back and retrenched ourselves with the existing rulers, in this case the people who'd been sympathetic to the Spanish. And I gave a talk at the Makati Business Club. It's sort of like the New York Chamber of Commerce. There were about 1,500 people out there. I'd been dragged away from the Joint Economic Committee where I was working as an economist on housing to lecture in the Philippines because I'd written on this. And this fellow took me aside. He was a Harvard Ph.D. economist, Philippine minister. He said, you have a Spanish name. and so he took me to his club and here was this magnificent thing out of late 19th century Paris, Gilded, etc.

16:26All the wives had just returned from either Madrid or Paris on shopping tours and he regaled me, said, We said, you know, we Spanish have been here, we've had to endure the brown man, the yellow man, the Japanese, the brown man again, but we survive and endure in all of this. And the real tragedy at the end of World War II, we put into a kind of Orwellian black hole the Filipinos who had fought against the Japanese.

18:32One, about imperialist meddling on Taft's model, is that revolutions from the American and any other, very complex social phenomena, just as the market is a very complex economic phenomenon. And you have about as much chance as an outsider trying to meddle through intervention, Military intervention in a vast thing like the Chinese Revolution as you have as some kind of progressive planner meddling in the market. And I think the two are very similar, the analysis there. Lesson two about empire is, as was touched on, that it requires a very large bureaucracy to carry out imperial policies.

19:29Thus, by 1902, there are already almost 3,000 American civilian bureaucrats in the island, more than there were Filipinos administering policy, And this did not include American teachers or the military. By the way, we have this image that the military is this kind of neutral observer. That is nonsense. People, historians like John Gates, who studied the American army in the Philippines, those boys were getting, the officers, were getting indoctrinated at West Point by the faculty about the virtues of progressivism. And they went out in the islands and practiced it. What was said earlier about the universities.

20:18By the turn of the century, as anti-imperialists like William James were aware, American universities were always turning, were beginning to turn out public administrators. And they had a job out in the Philippines, obviously, if they wanted to go there. Taft in one of his His reports argued that the Philippine Foreign Civil Service that he was building was more honest than the American Civil Service, and that was probably true. But these young people who went out there as administrators and then administered to the little brown brother, what do you think they wanted to do when they came back to the United States? They wanted to become an administrator in the progressive movement.

21:06When you can't understand the New Deal, which was being commented upon, unless you understand and some studies have been done on this, how many of the New Dealers were old frustrated progressives from the turn of the century in the Roosevelt years and after. The great creation of this period was the Bureau of Insular Affairs, the BIA, not to The BIA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs But significant that the military and not the civilians were in charge of the BIA And Elihu Root compared it to, well, like everybody else's colonial office Like the British, but it really wasn't because of the extent to which the military was in charge of so-called American state-building.

22:04And it was so important that by the time, by 1912, it had been elevated to major general. The head of the BIA was a major general. And the papers of the BIA are extraordinary in in terms of showing this enormous bureaucratic involvement and institutionalization of empire. The church lands were one of the things that Taft had to get involved with the Vatican over the friar lands in attempting to settle that issue. So that what you get here by the time Taft comes back to become Secretary of War and he continues with Philippine policy is an enormous American bureaucratic involvement out there. And it would have gotten deeper and longer if people like Taft and the Republicans had stayed because in Taft's idea the Filipinos were never going to be ready for self-government for a century or so. The anti-imperialists, by the way, did triumph. There were many younger ones like Cordell Hall, who were young anti-imperialists in 1898, who continued and gained power and worked to get us out of the Philippines, which we did under Woodrow Wilson, made finally

23:39and finally the promise of Philippine independence and the British were infuriated by this because Gandhi and all kinds of nationalists all over Asia immediately asked if the United States can do this, can make a promise of independence, why can't other nations? Certainly, that was not due to Taft's efforts, because he would have wanted us very much to stay. I don't think we should judge Taft too harshly, however, in his inability to understand the difference between nationalism and people being sympathetic to the United States.

24:24through the BIA records. He constantly is castigating the Filipinos who are his Filipinos because they may make a statement that appears to him anti-American. And the Filipino conservatives are always explaining to him that if we don't say these things, we'll have no credibility as a kind of comprador scallywag in front of our own people. And Tam could never seem to understand that. In the same way that John Foster Dulles and a whole bunch of American policymakers with respect to this idea of social revolution could never seem to understand that someone can be a communist and a nationalist, as Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong were.

25:17And so Taft could never comprehend that distinction. The biggest tragedy was Taft's unwillingness to allow the publication in 1908 of Colonel John R.M. Taylor's four volumes on the Philippine Insurgency. And before he died in the 30s, Taylor was still trying to get that study published because he feared that the United States, if it ever got involved in another guerilla insurgency in Asia, ought to have the benefit of that study. And the reason Taft didn't want it published is because it embarrassed so many of the Filipino politicians who've now become our quote-unquote friends in the islands I'll switch very quickly since I only have apparently five minutes left to the Panama Canal now most of us think that that was a wonderful sort of thing remember Teddy took the canal he once justified this with respect to Western Civilization.

26:37In a talk, and he asked Ella Hugh Root after about an hour, have I justified myself? And Root turned to him and he said, oh yes, Teddy, you were accused of seduction. You proved conclusively you were guilty of rape. You know, today, whenever somebody invokes Western Civilization as a rationale for policy out there. You better be careful and look where your pocketbook is. Now, of course, we talk about the necessity to save the world with the IMF. And when the UFOers and NASA get together, no doubt, no doubt, we will be told that there is going to have to be something called intergalactic salvation. And then you better certainly watch out for The Theory of Money and Credit

27:59in 1978, when Jimmy Carter was moving toward fulfilling getting out of the canal zone. And Ronald Reagan, who's supposed to be something of a free market fellow, revealed himself as basically just a jingoist because he ran around saying, oh, we can't get out of the islands. I mean, excuse me, the canal. But that's absolutely silly. Look, there was a railroad across the isthmus from 1855 to 1914 built by Commodore Vanderbilt. It paid a profit every year until the canal came in. The canal has been a massive, massive subsidy by the American taxpayer to the shipping industries of various countries.

28:48When I did the study, who was the biggest user of the canal? Japanese ore carrying ships going from Brazil to Osaka. So then, of course, the American steelmaker wants a subsidy so he can compete with that Japanese steel that we subsidized in the canal. And the best kept secret, except Forbes magazine was the only one pointing out a true capitalist market perspective. Railroad bridging has replaced the need to take a ship down there with a unionized crew, go through the canal locks with the water from Lake Gatan, and come back up the other side. And we have at least a dozen now of such railroad bridging with containerization and all the rest of that. And had there been no canal, that's what would have happened.

29:44I'm sure that there would have been two railroads down there before the Justice Department got

30:19We had to spend $175 million of American taxpayer money because there was a K then. Well, who's going to do that when the Panamanians have it? Well, I want to very quickly close. I have a great quote here from TR in which he says, he tells Taft, the kind of presidency we need is one that leads the Congress around because they're really not too informed and able to act, etc. et cetera. And that's what the Presidency has become. But I want to finish with one question. What is the similarity between Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and William Crystal? They all three are on record as saying that they really think we need TR again. Crystal and the neocoms have put him forward as their Boe ideal.

31:14Newt Gingrich tells us that he came out of that whole tradition, his uncle was a Gifford Pinchot Taft man. And Bill Clinton wants to be on Mount Rushmore. And I think, I don't think he'll make it, but if he does, they may not put his face up there as his most familiar appendage. Thank you very much.