I’ve been wanting to read this title for years now after having found Stephen Kinzer’s various books on DC’s overseas adventures, while at the same time stumbling upon Mark Twain’s anti-war writings collected in Weapons of Satire. Coming of age during the Terror War and the interminable occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, learning about the American occupations of Cuba and the Philippines was a pivotal moment for me, shifting me more toward complete cynicism about DC. Stephen Kinzer writes at the beginning of A True Flag that the current debate in the Middle East (referring then to the Terror War, not Trump’s Hormuz disaster) is not a novelty – that Americans have argued about the proper role of America in international affairs since at least the end of the 19th century. Here, focusing on Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt as spokesmen for anti-imperialism and imperialism respectively, Kinzer tells the story of how America became an empire while beating liberty and self-determination’s drum. The number of actors who take the stage, though, make it even more interesting than a debate between Twain and TR, because we witness men like Hearst and Bryan taking unpredictable stances during the debate as it unfolds.
The United States of the 1890s was a virile and booming nation, moving full steam ahead into the industrial future — but to some, the future seemed to promise nothing but stagnation. The frontier was closed! Manifest destiny had been fulfilled — now what were we to do? Where to find new markets for America’s rapidly expanding factories and its cheap immigrant labor? Go west, young man — far west. By way of Spain! Spain was having a bit of a restive colonials problem, and Cuba was close enough that Americans were catching wind of it. Many Americans were sympathetic to the plight of rebels fighting against an overweening empire; wasn’t that the way the US of A got started? There was also a sincere belief that, as the new century dawned, it was time for the New World to throw more full off the rusty shackles of the Old, and America could help. There were, however, less idealistic motives. Some, like Roosevelt, were spoiling for a fight: it had been too long since the US Army wet its blade — a nation that didn’t “get action” would grow soft and feeble, prey to others! Others saw war as a way to turn the Spanish empire into a new market for America’s humming factories — and still others, like Hearst, saw it as a way to sell newspapers.
The Spanish-American war would not last long; in the course of a summer, American forces had won battles against Spain in Cuba and across the great Pacific main, seizing Guam and establishing occupation of the Philippines. While the government had preached that it was going to war purely to take down a tyrannical empire, to allow the Cuban and Filipino people to govern themselves, the peace treaty McKinley offered was strictly between the US and Spain — no input from the peasants, thank you — and effectively ceded the Philippines directly. While anti-war voices had already begun decrying the Spanish-American war before it started, demanding the Constitutional prerogative for going forth in search of monsters to destroy, the debate over the Treaty would so light a fire under them that a proper organization would be formed.
This was not a collection of intellectuals and cranks, either: there were heavyweights like Andrew Carnegie aboard, labor leader Samuel Gompers, andthe very influential Democratic senator, William Jennings Bryan. At this time, foreign intervention was so new, and American constitutionalism so ingrained, that the approval of the treaty came down to the wire. Astonishingly, though, William Jennings Bryan evidently began asking his allies in the Senate to support the treaty, while at the same time making speech after speech against the war itself. When enraged and betrayed anti-imperialists demanded an answer, Bryan meekly responded that he felt it more probable that the Filipinos could arrive more quickly at liberty once a firm foundation of peaceable order had been achieved. (A more cynical take is that Bryan did not want to catch fire during next year’s elections for undermining the treaty: I can’t countenance that given what else I know of Bryan, but it’s not the most outlandish suggestion.) Hearst, too, who’d ginned up the war to sell papers, was by this point more interested in championing other things. Who wants to read about a guerilla war, month after month? As the Filipino resistance to American occupation persisted, however, and the military resorted to more and more brutal measures to destroy it — including treating ten year old boys as potential combatants — people did start taking interest. Still, when McKinley was felled by an anarchist’s bullet and arch-crusader Theodore Roosevelt took over, the anti-imperial movement knew the time had come to admit defeat.
Kinzer closes the book by looking at the course of intervention since then, and to the American public’s generally unreliable resistance to it. We seem to only care about overseas escapades when they impact our lives directly, like Vietnam’s draft or the surge in gasoline prices that followed Bush’s misadventure in Iraq. There was something noble about the anti-imperialist movement Kinzer documents here, because people were outraged at the principle of it. The American Republic was supposed to be a new thing in the world, a shining city set on a hill — and, as that sermon continued, the eyes of the world would be upon us. That meant that engaging in imperialism, even and especially in the name of expanding ‘freedom’, would not only be immoral in itself, but would do lasting damage to the idea of the American republic. The Stars and Stripes would be bloodstained — not by patriots, but by victims.
Quotations
Gómez turned it down, adding poignantly that he wished he had never agreed to American intervention in Cuba. “None of us thought that it would be followed by a military occupation of the country by our allies, who treat us as a people incapable of acting for ourselves, and who have reduced us to obedience, to submission, and to a tutelage imposed by force of circumstances,” Gómez wrote. “This cannot be our fate after years of struggle.
From the interrogation, Funston learned that Aguinaldo was in a remote outpost called Palanan awaiting reinforcements. Funston developed an astonishing Trojan horse plan: assemble a force of Macabebe scouts, dress them as insurgents, sail with them to the American base closest to Palanan, lead them on a hundred-mile trek inland, take them into Palanan pretending to be the expected reinforcements, and then surprise and capture Aguinaldo.
One of [Twain’s] pieces reads like an obituary for the United States. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic,” he wrote. “She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work. Trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on, the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.”
Related:
Weapons of Satire: Anti-War Writings on the American-Philippine War. Mark Twain. Edited by Jim Zwick.
We Who Dared Say No to War, ed. Tom Woods and Murray Polner. An anthology of anti-war writing from across the political spectrum.
Ain’t My America, Bill Kauffman. On anti-war conservatism.
Reading Freely 