Workshop: The Debate on Imperialism
Introduction: As the U.S. turned its attention to territories beyond the North American continent a
fierce debate broke out about the role of the U.S. in the world. The following are a sampling of the that
debate.
The following is an excerpt from Sen. Albert Beveridge's "March of the Flag" speech given at the Indiana
Republican Convention of that year in 1898.
1. It is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose
coastlines would inclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial
oceans of the globe, a greater England with a nobler destiny.
2. It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of
history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing working-folk of all the earth; a
people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heavendirected purposes--the propagandists and not the misers of liberty.
3. It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history heroic with faith in our
mission and our future; a history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into
unexplored lands and savage wilderness; a history of soldiers who carried the flag across blazing deserts
and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset; a history of a multiplying people
who overran a continent in half a century; a history of prophets who saw the consequences of evils
inherited from the past and of martyrs who died [48] to save us from them; a history divinely logical, in
the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves to-day.
4. Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than a party question. It is an American question. It
is a world question. Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of
the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength,
until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind?
5. Have we no mission to perform, no duty to discharge to our fellow-man? Has God endowed us with
gifts beyond our deserts and marked us as the people of His peculiar favor, merely to rot in our own
selfishness, as men and nations must, who take cowardice for their companion and self for their deity--as
China has, as India has, as Egypt has?
6. Shall we be as the man who had one talent and hid it, or as he who had ten talents and used them until
they grew to riches? And shall we reap the reward that waits on our discharge of our high duty; shall we
occupy new markets for what our farmers raise, our factories make, our merchants sell--aye, and, please
God, new markets for what our ships shall carry?
7. Hawaii is ours; Porto Rico is to be ours; at the prayer of her people Cuba finally will be ours; in the
islands of the East, even to the gates of Asia, coaling stations are to be ours at the very least; the flag of a
liberal government is to float over the Philippines, and may it be the banner that Taylor unfurled in Texas
and Fremont carried to the coast. [49]
8. The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer, The rule
of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to
those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our
territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent. How do they know that
our government would be without their consent? Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just,
humane, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from
which we have rescued them?
9. And, regardless of this formula of words made only for enlightened, self-governing people, do we owe
no duty to the world? Shall we turn these peoples back to the reeking hands from which we have taken
them? Shall we abandon them, with Germany, England, Japan, hungering for them? Shall we save them
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from those nations, to give them a self-rule of tragedy?
10. They ask us how we shall govern these new possessions. I answer: Out of local conditions and the
necessities of the case methods of government will grow. If England can govern foreign lands, so can
America. If Germany can govern foreign lands, so can America. If they can supervise protectorates, so can
America. Why is it more difficult to administer Hawaii than New Mexico or California? Both had a savage
and an alien population; both were more remote from the seat of government when they came under our
dominion than the Philippines are to-day.
11. Will you say by your vote that American ability to [50] govern has decayed; that a century's
experience in self-rule has failed of a result? Will you affirm by your vote that you are an infidel to
American power and practical sense? Or will you say that ours is the blood of government; ours the heart
of dominion; ours the brain and genius of administration? Will you remember that we do but what our
fathers did--we but pitch the tents of liberty farther westward, farther southward--we only continue the
march of the flag?
12. "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing
more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be
ours."
13. Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in a magazine article published before the Spanish American
War:
“In the interests of our commerce . . . we should build the Nicaragua canal, and for the protection of that
canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian islands
and maintain our influence in Samoa.... and when the Nicaraguan canal is built, the island of Cuba ... will
become a necessity.... The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present
defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of
march.”
14. "A new consciousness seems to have come upon us-the consciousness of strength-and with it a new
appetite, the yearning to show our strength.... Ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of
fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation. We are face to face with a strange
destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle...."
Washington Post
15. President Theodore Roosevelt on "duty" of United States to be ready to intervene overseas to fight
against evil, unrighteousness, etc. -- from address to Congress, 1904:
The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the
day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace which are
highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have
many times made a wilderness and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or
shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in
unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide
from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling them love of peace. The peace
of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as
we shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a nation, the goal which should be set before all
mankind, is the attainment of the peace of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not
merely safe-guarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs its duty toward others.
Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first
to the cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both
should be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be
divorced. One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the
hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too
unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes
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to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or
thoughtless shortcomings.
16. A few last comments by Theodore Roosevelt:
A. The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should
never be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion on moral grounds. On the whole,
the movement has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands
over which the expansion took place.
B. That's despite what the remnants of Native Americans or Blacks or Filipinos or others might
mistakenly believe. Actually, genocide denial has been a leading and highly valued feature of the
intellectual and moral culture in the United States and remains so right until the present.
C. With regard to the conquest of a half of Mexico in 1848, Roosevelt explained: “It was inevitable, and in
the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately
crowd out the Mexicans from their sparsely populated northern provinces.”
The Anti-Imperialists
Mark Twain Home, An Anti-Imperialist, New York Herald [New York, 10/15/1900]
I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into
the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame for it to content itself with the Rockies. Why not spread its wings
over the Philippines, I asked myself? And I thought it would be a real good thing to do.
I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as
ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution
afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It
seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen
that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to
conquer, not to redeem.
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their
own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the
eagle put its talons on any other land.
Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League (October 18, 1899)
We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil
from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of
Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is "criminal aggression" and open disloyalty to the
distinctive principles of our government.
We earnestly condemn the policy of the present national administration in the Philippines. It seeks to
extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands. We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose
bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war. We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a
needless horror. We protest against the extension of American sovereignty by Spanish methods.
The United States have always protested against the doctrine of international law which permits the
subjugation of the weak by the strong. A self-governing state cannot accept sovereignty over an unwilling
people. The United States cannot act upon the ancient heresy that might makes right.
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We hold with Abraham Lincoln, that "no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's
consent. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government, but when he governs himself and
also governs another man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism." "Our reliance is in the
love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage
of all men in all lands. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just
God cannot long retain it."
Source - American Anti-Imperialist League. "Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League." Text
from Carl Schurz, The Policy of Imperialism, Liberty Tract No. 4 (Chicago: American Anti-Imperialist
League, 1899).
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