The Reluctant Imperialist
GOULD, LEWIS L.
Writers & Writing The Reluctant Imperialist By Lewis L. Gould American imperialism is one of the most contentious subjects among scholars of the nation's past. The United States stepped...
...In fact, what Madrid agreed to was a suspension of hostilities with no recognition of the Cuban insurgency or the right of the United States to intervene...
...Although the United States gained control of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, and went on to begin building the waterway in 1904, popular opinion soon cooled on the idea of adding further territory...
...The dilemmas of U.S...
...In their attempt to understand why the United States went to war in 1898, historians from the 1920s onward blamed McKinley for not standing up to the pressures of those demanding a tough stand and supporting the subsequent territorial adventures...
...The United States stepped onto the world stage in 1898, when its war with Spain led to the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, while Cuba became a virtual dependency once the Spanish were ousted...
...After he said McKinley had "no more backbone than a chocolate eclair," the quip passed into every history text for several generations...
...demands comes up, Zimmerman sometimes deals with it and sometimes simply plays it down...
...What Roosevelt did was part of that strategy, not an isolated act...
...And it is doubtful whether it has improved much since, to judge from our woeful lack of understanding of Middle Eastern languages and the Islamic religion...
...His books include The Presidency of William McKinley...
...They also are the principal characters in Warren Zimmerman's new book, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power (Farrar Straus Giroux, 576 pp., $30.00...
...Careful analysis of the McKinley Administration's policy is less enthralling than portraying a charismatic personality like Roosevelt, but it is an indispensable step toward appreciating how U.S...
...became an imperial power for the wrong reasons at the wrong time...
...The imperial phase was brief...
...started out with an Executive with carefully defined powers, but we are now developing one with prerogatives which must be the envy of crowned heads...
...On February 25,1898, Roosevelt, in his capacity as Acting Secretary of the Navy while his boss was away, ordered Commodore George Dewey to get his Asian flotilla ready for action in case fighting broke out with Spain...
...Until the last 30 years or so, the almost unanimous verdict was that a weak and indecisive Chief Executive had allowed himself to be drawn into the conflict...
...In other words, the U.S...
...This key phase of American foreign policy is indeed important because it speaks to larger present-day issues...
...The gesture, at least in the minds of McKinley's critics, removed the reason for war...
...The men deemed responsible for leading McKinley down the path to imperialism included Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R.Mass...
...Zimmerman, though, remains in the critics' camp...
...For example, he joins the chorus of writers who contend that at the last minute in 1898 Spain granted an armistice to the Cuban rebels...
...To answer that question, generations of authors focused on the performance of the President then in power, William McKinley of Ohio...
...Unfortunately, Zimmerman's treatment of American expansionism is so old-fashioned, and so misleading about the impact of the Spanish-American War on the U.S., that it does little to illuminate contemporary situations arising from that turning point in international affairs...
...Ever since, historians have debated why the U. S. went to war with Spain in support of Cuba's quest for independence...
...Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, and later Secretary of State John Hay and Secretary of War Elihu Root...
...Legend has it that this personal telegram by an impetuous subordinate set the stage for Dewey's victory at Manila Bay on May 1, and the subsequent American takeover of the archipelago...
...Once American troops were in the Philippines the issue became, what should be done about the islands...
...A former career diplomat and ambassador to Yugoslavia during the George Bush I Administration, Zimmerman has himself encountered the issues that shaped the experience of his political quintet...
...The imperialistic ideals of benevolent Anglo-Saxon peoples transmitting democracy to "little brown brothers" quickly became tarnished as American soldiers responded to a guerrilla war with harsh tactics...
...A century ago, too, the correct analysis of a word or phrase was a vital aspect of diplomacy...
...The present interplay of Middle Eastern oil and antiterrorism suggests that such concerns have not disappeared from American foreign policy calculations...
...He wrote few letters that gave clues to his motives, shared his opinions only with a few close aides, and his public speeches often seemed platitudinous to the modern ear...
...Four years later when McKinley was killed, the White House had a War Room, multiple telephone lines, and the capacity to send Presidential directives around the globe...
...When McKinley took office in March 1897, the Presidency was a small institution that could be operated with a tiny staff...
...But the costly and difficult experience probably contributed to the lasting suspicion of such initiatives among Americans that the George W. Bush Administration is encountering today...
...Relinquishing this last possession of the once-proud empire without a fight would dishonor the Spanish people and topple the existing government in Madrid...
...McKinley believed the islands could not be "a golden apple of discord" among the powers, and therefore the United States must secure the Philippines in the peace treaty...
...The Navy had for several years been preparing battle plans that included attacking Spain in the Philippines as a means of pressuring it to the peace table in the event of war...
...Zimmerman's account of it is again familiar...
...In the dusty documents of the McKinley Presidency lie insights about the reasons behind the nation's present predicament...
...But as Zimmerman recognizes in another part of his text, that is far from the whole story...
...The United States, on the other hand, believed that Spain's presence in the Caribbean was a relic of European colonialism, that Cuba deserved to be free, and that the rebellion the Cubans were waging against their masters should not be suppressed by the brutal means being employed...
...an independent Philippines, but which of the world's great powers was going to control the islands...
...Because many Americans believe the United States has never been an imperial force, his volume is a timely effort to show the way overseas possessions and territorial ambitions affected the nation...
...A conservative Republican who had the bad luck to have Theodore Roosevelt succeed him, McKinley was depicted as ineffectual by writers from Walter Millis in 1931 to Ernest R. May three decades later...
...As for Theodore Roosevelt, he was a fascinating personality who spun off eminently quotable observations the way George Gershwin wrote songs...
...Theodore Roosevelt worried about maintaining calm and civilized order amid the disintegrating tendencies of nationalism and ethnic jealousies...
...Austin...
...Yet had the author taken the trouble to do that, the resulting narrative might not be so out of focus that it distorts the true implications of the imperial episode at the close of the 20th century...
...Grenville refuted the old stereotypes and raised McKinley in the estimation of historians, if not the public...
...The choice Washington faced was not imperialism vs...
...The answers that McKinley, Roosevelt and Root devised to deal with the instability of their day may seem irrelevant in the world of the 21st century...
...He was an easy President to pigeonhole...
...Placing him at the center of things makes for great reading and will please the popular audience Zimmerman is aiming at, but it bears little relation to the historical reality of the McKinley Administration...
...misdeeds in the Philippines and Cuba brought about the public's pervasive conviction that the rest of the world was flawed and impervious to the wise influence of the United States...
...DIFFERENT perceptions of Cuba's future formed the root problem in 1898...
...To understand what they have to teach, both good and bad, about American foreign policy will require scholars and popular historians alike to try to get at the essence of the nation's imperialistic adventure...
...imperialism evolved...
...Politicians once feared the specter of revolutionary socialism and anarchism in much the same way that terrorism is now seen as a source of anxiety and danger...
...The power of the Commander in Chief, so much a part of the current antiterrorism war, began its inexorable rise to dominance within the government under McKinley and Roosevelt after lying dormant since the Civil War...
...left the Philippines to the tender mercies of, say, Japan, the popular uproar would have been intense...
...The Philippines became a proud possession that we were reluctant to relinquish, but that we could not defend with the resources available to the military before December 7, 1941...
...The distinctions between the inequities of Spanish rule and the humanitarian purposes of the United States soon disappeared...
...Under the December 1898 Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war, the U.S...
...Imperialism finally reinforced isolationism when it became clear that an empire could not be put together or managed on the cheap...
...McKinley quickly learned that Japan, Germany and Russia planned to be a presence in the area if the United States sailed away after the war...
...An anarchist killed McKinley, and other leaders in Europe died at the hands of assassins with similar motives...
...Writers such as H. Wayne Morgan, Paul Holbo, John L. Offner, and John A.S...
...Instead, he has contented himself with a contemporary synthesis of the conventional historical thinking up to the 1960s...
...But those who do not see any of this, or disagree, have had to discover another explanation for the war...
...At the same time, the revelations of U.S...
...foreign policy in a period of international terrorism have their origins deep in our history...
...Failing to appreciate what Cuba represented in political and symbolic terms to Spain made a violent confrontation impossible to avoid...
...In the dispute with Spain, Washington expected Madrid to act in what the McKinley Administration perceived to be the Spanish national interest...
...Spain regarded Cuba as part of its national territory, "the Ever-Faithful Isle...
...What those who quoted it missed is that McKinley was trying to achieve by peaceful methods what Roosevelt wanted to gain by combat...
...When the matter of Spanish intractability in the face of US...
...Each one seemed to make sense, but before long that Asian conquest put the United States on a collision course with Japanese expansionism in the 20th century...
...Lewis L. Gould, a new contributor to The New Leader, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas...
...In addition, the United States saw economic advantages to a peaceful, non-Spanish Cuba, and the lure of markets and profits influenced thinking then no less than they do now...
...He appears not to have consulted the original sources currently available at the Library of Congress and elsewhere that indicate McKinley's leadership, nor has he come to terms with the revisionist literature...
...His decision led the United States into a war with Filipino nationalism that extended into the early 20th century...
...The new school found him a purposeful leader who supervised foreign policy, was tenacious in trying to settle the dispute with Spain peacefully, and skillfully guided the country through the confrontation and its aftermath...
...Zimmerman correctly argues that the situation the United States finds itself in today has its antecedents in the age of imperialism...
...AMERICAN imperialism produced contradictory results for the country and for the men who promoted it...
...The tradition of internationalism within the Republican Party, for instance, owed its strength to the work of Roosevelt, Root, Taft, and others who felt the nation could not retreat from the global responsibilities it had assumed...
...Moreover, part of Roosevelt's frustration was his not being part of McKinley's decision-making group...
...Had the U.S...
...As a scholar of the Presidency wrote in 1904, "In America we...
...In historical hindsight these opposing postures may seem trivial, but they were held on both sides with the kind of passion that frequently produces armed conflict...
...With this country currently helping the Philippines counter Muslim terrorists, the tangled American-Filipino relationship has renewed relevance...
...May seemed to put it best: McKinley "led his country unwillingly toward a war that he did not want for a cause in which he did not believe...
...Did Washington have legitimate grounds for insisting that Madrid give up its last possession in the New World, or was this an unnecessary fight that might have been avoided through negotiation and compromise...
...It is easier-and hardly uncommon-to recycle an accepted interpretation than to dig in primary materials...
...In reality, the opposite is true...
...Still the McKinley Administration, under the guidance of Elihu Root and colonial Governor William Howard Taft, did engage in the equivalent of nation-building in the Philippines with some modest success during the first decade of the 20th century...
...By the early 1960s, however, America's 25th President began to be reinterpreted...
...The blending together of good business and morality thus gave ousting Spain increased importance...
...American troops had been sent into China to put down the Boxer Rebellion without Congressional authorization and the White House was overseeing colonial governments in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines...
...The ability to read the minds of our adversaries, based on a knowledge of their language and culture, was not good in 1898...
...The decision to take the Philippines was based on a series of incremental judgments about defeating Spain, fending off the great powers, and establishing a stable government in the islands...
...What we need is the energy and determination to uncover them...
...Like many of them, Zimmerman finds the ardent, imperialistic Roosevelt a more appealing protagonist than the opaque McKinley...
...Assessing the consequences of foreign policy commitments has not been an American strength either...
...That cannot be done by recycling the clichés of outdated historical accounts, as The First Great Triumph does...
...acquired the Philippine Islands...
Vol. 85 • September 2002 • No. 5
