These were not casual opinions. They formed a large part of the fifth volume of his History of the American People (1902). With its publication Wilson became, as Frederick Jackson Turner saw it, “the first southern scholar of adequate training and power who has dealt with American history as a whole.”42 Other reviewers shared Turner’s admiration for Wilson’s history, yet they couldn’t help but notice the author’s fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose mission,43 in Wilson’s words, was “to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.”44 Wilson scolded Klan members for being hotheaded, yet he defended their motives. They were acting, he wrote, out of “the mere instinct of self-preservation.”45
That was how Thomas Dixon Jr., Wilson’s close friend and former classmate, saw the Klan, too. Dixon wrote his own work on this theme, a novel entitled The Clansman, which was quickly adapted into a stage play. In 1915 Dixon and the director D. W. Griffith used the novel as the basis for a film, The Birth of a Nation. It was an epic history about the South’s redemption by the Ku Klux Klan. And it quoted Wilson’s historical writings in its title cards.
Black activists, understandably fearing what The Birth of a Nation might do to their cause, pressed eastern cities to prohibit the film’s opening. Dixon appealed to Wilson for help, and Wilson staged a special screening in the White House. “It teaches history by lightning” was his judgment of the film,46 according to Griffith, though Wilson declined to issue a public statement. Still, Dixon and Griffith used Wilson’s implicit endorsement to persuade municipal officials to allow the film to open.
The Birth of a Nation became the country’s most popular film.47 The Klan, which by 1915 had become defunct, was relaunched. Its recruiters used the film to draw in millions of members.48
Five months later, Wilson virtually reenacted the plot of The Birth of a Nation by sending the marines to the black republic of Haiti to wrest control from the “unstable” government. The occupation lasted through the rest of Wilson’s presidency—and didn’t end until 1934.
*
For the inhabitants of the world’s colonies, there were two Wilsons: Wilson the liberator, Wilson the racist. And it wasn’t clear which one they would get.
As the First World War approached, Wilson was eager to stress his anti-imperialist side, to present the United States as a beacon of liberty. When the Bolsheviks seized Russia, and their leader, V. I. Lenin, called for the “liberation of all colonies,”49 Wilson did not object. “The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by,”50 he told Congress in a speech outlining his war aims. Those aims—Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”—included “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.”
The U.S. government broadcast the Fourteen Points throughout the world. In China,51 the speech was used for English-language instruction. Many students there could recite the Fourteen Points by heart.
Those Chinese students probably noted a studied vagueness in Wilson’s language. Certainly it fell short of Lenin’s stark demand for an immediate end to empire. But since Lenin was only the head of a pariah state, whereas Wilson governed the richest country on earth, Wilson’s words were the ones that resounded. Hundreds of nationalists from all over the world petitioned him for support. They hoped that with his help, the war consuming Europe might also loosen the hold of European empires.
Albizu had something like that in mind, too. Wilson had “conveyed the impression to the Puerto Ricans that Puerto Rico’s independence would be recognized,”52 Albizu wrote. He joined the army in the hopes of ensuring that recognition. Participating in the war, Albizu believed, would “be of great benefit for the Puerto Rican people.” He imagined what effect “thirty or forty thousand lame,53 blinded, or otherwise mutilated Puerto Ricans” returning from heroic combat in Europe would have had on Puerto Rico’s bid for self-government. This wasn’t an unusual line of reasoning. In India, even the pacifist Mohandas Gandhi urged his fellow Indians to join the war as a way of earning autonomy from the British.
The payoff for all this sacrifice was going to come, nationalists hoped, in the postwar settlement hammered out at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where the Treaty of Versailles was composed. That was where the rules of the new international order would be written. The question at hand was what would happen to the colonies of the defeated powers—Germany and the Ottoman Empire. But the larger question was the fate of empire in general.
Getting to Paris, and getting to Wilson,54 became the chief goal of nationalists everywhere. The Indian National Congress voted to send Gandhi to present its demands. Egyptian nationalists sought to send Sa‘d Zaghlul, a leading reformer. Zaghlul began taking English lessons in the hope of meeting Wilson. “No people more than the Egyptian people,”55 he wrote to Wilson, “has felt strongly the joyous emotion of the birth of a new era which, thanks to your virile action, is soon going to impose itself upon the universe.” Zaghlul’s supporters organized a new political party around the goal of getting him to Paris. They called it the Wafd, which means “delegation” in Arabic.
Less well-known nationalists sought Wilson, too. A twenty-eight-year-old kitchen assistant named Nguyen Tat Thanh,56 from French Indochina but living in Paris, prepared a document outlining his colony’s demands. He signed it “Nguyen the Patriot” (Nguyen Ai Quoc) and walked the peace conference corridors, passing out copies. He gave one to Wilson’s aide, who promised to show it to the president.
Albizu also had his eyes on Paris. But to his chagrin, the War Department held him back in Puerto Rico, where he trained troops. Before his unit could ship out, the war ended.
Albizu got another shot.57 A welcome cable arrived from Cambridge, from the new president of Harvard’s Cosmopolitan Club. There would be a delegation from the Cosmopolitan Clubs of the United States to the peace conference. Harvard had chosen Albizu as its nominee. It’s unclear whether this meant that Albizu’s inclusion was assured, but his classmates seemed to have thought so. In February 1919 they threw a dance to raise $200 to send him to Paris.
*
The leaders of the colonized world raced to Woodrow Wilson in the hopes of winning his support. They were to be profoundly disappointed. The British, who controlled travel within their empire, refused to let Gandhi travel to Paris. They arrested Sa‘d Zaghlul and exiled him to Malta (he eventually made it to Paris, but only after Wilson had left).
Pedro Albizu Campos faced his own ordeal. Like many Puerto Ricans, he identified as white.58 Yet he had Native and black heritage, too (his wife mistook him for South Asian upon meeting him).59 The army had placed him in a segregated black regiment. Albizu objected, protesting that he was white. In what must have been a humiliating episode,60 a board of physicians examined him and concluded that he wasn’t.
After learning of his chance to go to Paris, Albizu rushed to the mainland to make his journey. This time, though, he couldn’t sail straight to the North from Puerto Rico, but had to make his way up through the South from Galveston, Texas. No written evidence survives from Albizu’s journey, but his experience traveling through the Jim Crow South as a “black” man appears to have been searing; for the rest of his life he would speak out against Southern-style racism.61 Whatever happened in the South, it had slowed Albizu considerably. He arrived in Boston too late to get to the peace conference.
Like Gandhi and Zaghlul, Albizu never got to meet Wilson. Even if he had, it’s not clear what he could have done. Wilson spoke eloquently on behalf of smaller nations and their right to self-determination, yet he had southeastern European nations in mind: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and the like. Puerto Rico wasn’t even on the agenda.
Not only did Wilson do nothing to liberate Puerto Rico, he took the war as an occasion to expand the U.S. Empire. In 1917 his government purchased the Danish West Indies, a small cluster of Caribbean islands next to Puerto Rico that offered a population of some twenty-six thousand and, more important, promising naval bas
es. This colony, the U.S. Virgin Islands, became the first populated territory annexed since 1900.
When it came to the nationalists of the colonized world, there is no evidence that Wilson even read their many petitions. Nguyen the Patriot got no response from Wilson. The only nationalist leader from outside Europe who won Wilson’s ear in Paris was Jan Smuts,62 soon to be the South African prime minister, who sought an international system that would bolster the white control of southern Africa.
Smuts got what he wanted. Empire survived, and all the victors’ colonies were left intact. The defeated powers’ colonies, instead of being liberated, were redistributed among the victors. The only novelty was that they were now classified as “mandates” under the League of Nations (this was Smuts’s proposal). The mandates were arranged in a transparently racial hierarchy, with Middle Eastern territories on top (“Class A,” en route to independence) and African and Pacific Island territories below (“Classes B and C”).
The Japanese delegation asked to at least insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. This proposal had a majority of votes behind it—the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable.”63 But Wilson blocked it, refusing to let even the principle of racial equality stand.
*
It would be hard to overstate the consequences of these dashed hopes on the colonized world. The year 1919 was, for the colonies, when the switch was thrown, when nationalist movements abandoned polite petitioning. It was the year when Gandhi gave up his hope that India might be an equal partner within the British confederation and set his sights on independence. It was the year when everything seemed to spin out of control for the British in India: Gandhi’s nonviolence campaigns, government repression (the “Amritsar Massacre”), an invasion by Afghanistan, and an uprising of Indian Muslims that acquired all-India proportions.
In Egypt, Zaghlul’s arrest, along with that of other nationalists, sparked a wave of protests known as the 1919 Revolution. A twelve-year-old boy swept up in it remembers having “exploded with enthusiasm” and going to mosques and meeting halls to deliver impassioned speeches and read poems.64 Koreans declared independence from Japan in 1919, and they took to the streets in the March First Movement. China had a similar uprising, called the May Fourth Movement, emerging in reaction to the peace conference’s handing over of Germany’s territory in China to Japan. One disgusted Chinese protester called Allied leaders in Paris “a bunch of robbers bent on securing territories and indemnities.”65
Such animosity meant little to U.S. leaders at the time—they didn’t have much business in places like Egypt and Korea. But later it would come to mean a great deal. The Chinese protester complaining of “robbers” in Paris—that was a young Mao Zedong. Nguyen the Patriot also gained renown, although by another name: Ho Chi Minh. That Egyptian boy reciting poems and making speeches was Sayyid Qutb, a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration for Osama bin Laden.
And Albizu? Pedro Albizu Campos would become the most dangerous domestic anti-imperialist the United States would ever face.
8
WHITE CITY
From Washington at the turn of the twentieth century, prospects looked good. The United States had gutted Spain’s empire. Its industries were growing swiftly, giving it the world’s biggest economy. Its two richest inhabitants, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, possessed arguably the largest private fortunes in recorded history.1
Yet what struck observers, repeatedly, was how much poverty remained amid the plenty. Gravity-defying skyscrapers spoke to new accumulations of capital, but the shadows of those tall buildings fell over large, polluted slums that were crowded with the unfortunates sucked in by industrialism’s undertow.
That the world’s richest country should at the same time be so squalid was hard to countenance. The press rumbled with proposals to tame the chaos, clean the cities, and fix whatever was broken. One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy. It imagined a man falling asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakening in the year 2000 to a luminously bright future, a future where everything worked.
Bellamy’s prophecies were exhilarating. Consumers, he predicted, would no longer buy goods in stores. They’d place orders into pneumatic tubes, using what he called “credit cards,” and their purchases would come whooshing back via the same tubes. For a small fee, they could even have music piped into their homes as if it were water.
“It appears to me,”2 Bellamy’s time traveler marveled in a retrospectively hilarious passage, “that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limits of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”
The real showstopper was the city itself. Bellamy’s sleeper could barely recognize Boston in 2000. He gaped at its “miles of broad streets,”3 its “large open squares filled with trees,” and its “public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day.” Clean, spacious, and carefully planned—it was the very opposite of the Gilded Age city.
Nobody had ever seen a modern city like that. But five years later they caught a glimpse. Eighteen ninety-three was the occasion of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, staged (a year late) to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage. To erect the massive ensemble of buildings that would house the exposition, the fair’s organizers hired Daniel Burnham,4 known as one of the first builders of skyscrapers.
Working big appealed to Burnham. He was enchanted by size, seized by what his fellow architect Louis Sullivan diagnosed as a “megalomania concerning the largest,5 the tallest, the most costly and sensational.” With 686 acres of marshy parkland on Chicago’s South Side to play with, Burnham wouldn’t have to limit himself to individual buildings. He could found his own city.
It was, to be sure, a temporary city, made not of stone, but of spray-painted plaster. And he had to rely on other architects to build it. Still, Burnham placed his indelible stamp on it. The city’s structures were enormous, they were neoclassical, and they were, per his instructions, all white.
It struck a resounding chord. Fairgoers bought more than twenty-one million tickets—at a time when the national population was still fewer than seventy million. The crowds were “astonished,” Louis Sullivan remembered.6 “They beheld what was for them an amazing revelation of the architectural art,7 of which previously they in comparison had known nothing. To them it was a veritable Apocalypse, a message inspired from on high.”
*
Burnham’s White City was astonishing. But the impressive thing wasn’t any single building. Rather, it was all the buildings together—more than two hundred of them—designed in a single style, rendered in a single color, and laid out according to a master plan.
It was astonishing because builders at the time couldn’t do that. They wanted to, certainly. Realizing Bellamy’s dream of efficiency, rationality, and hygiene was a chief desire of the leading men and women of the day. It’s just that such large-scale social interventions inevitably encountered resistance. It was one thing to build “broad streets” and “large open squares”—of the sort Looking Backward described—in an unused park, as Burnham had done. But in a real city, such features would have to be ripped out of an already tightly woven urban fabric. Monied interests would have to be convinced, machine politicians mollified, stubborn city dwellers displaced.
This was how it went in the Progressive Era. In one corner stood reformers, intent on imposing order. In the other, a discordant multitude of crosscutting interests and publics. It wasn’t just architecture. From battleground to battleground—politics, public health, the factory floor—the war raged on.
Yet there was one arena where the fight was markedly less fair, where social engineers indisputably
held the upper hand: the empire. Although the overseas territories had dropped off the maps, they were, for a certain type of professional, extremely interesting places. They functioned as laboratories, spaces for bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or consequences. And so, as one reformer put it, “ablaze with pity and with righteous wrath,8 our people flew at the Islands like a White-Wing brigade in a sort of Holy War upon ignorance, superstition, disease and dirt.”
In 1904 Burnham enlisted in this holy war himself. He accepted an invitation to draw up plans for Manila and for a new “summer capital” the government sought to establish in the mountains at Baguio.
The White City was going to the Philippines.
*
Burnham’s invitation came from Cameron Forbes, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandson. Forbes had come to the Philippines as commissioner of commerce and police, a wide-ranging job giving him authority over building roads and quashing revolts. In 1909 he became the governor-general. “Who but a mad dreamer could have planned such a career for me?” he asked his diary on his fortieth birthday.9 “Taken from a counting house in Boston to go to the South Seas, and here, at forty, ruling over such a conglomeration of races, languages, customs, and divergencies as are to be found among the eight millions who live in the Philippine Islands.”
Unlike Britain and France, the United States had few colonial careerists. Its officials tended to come and go quickly, seeing the territories as hardship posts that might lead to higher office back home—as quickly as possible, they hoped.
Still, once in a while, someone slipped into the role of sahib and played it to pith-hatted perfection. In the Philippines, that someone was Cameron Forbes. He delighted in life in the tropics: the exotic Orient, the attentive servants, the languid lifestyle. He loved Filipinos, too, though he loved them, as the nationalist leader Manuel Quezon observed, “in the same way the former slave owners loved their Negro slaves.”10
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