by Cornel West
In examining the deep roots of imperialism in American history, it is important to know that most of the grand democratic projects in human history—from Athens to America—have xenophobic and imperial roots. The most famous of all speeches in democratic Athens—Pericles’ great funeral oration rendered in Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War—celebrated democracy at home while glorifying Athens’s imperial domination of other peoples abroad. “For Athens alone of her contemporaries,” Pericles proclaimed, “is found when tested to be greater than her reputation…we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.” Even the democracy at home he lauded was seriously compromised, rooted as it was in slavery, patriarchal households, and the economic advantage of the cheap labor of resident aliens (like the great Aristotle) who could not vote. Similarly, the democratic experiments of Rome, France, England, and Germany had deep imperial foundations.
The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire—and aided by the French and Dutch empires—even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own new nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against. The Declaration of Independence, principally written by the thirty-three-year-old revolutionary Thomas Jefferson—who himself embodied this paradox, being both a courageous freedom fighter against British imperialism and a cowardly aristocratic slaveholder of hundreds of Africans in his beloved Virginia—offers telling testament to this complex and contradictory character of the American democratic experiment.
The reference in the Declaration to indigenous peoples as “Savages” worthy of American expansionist domination for an “empire of liberty” further reveals this contradiction. In listing the colonies’ charges against British oppression, Jefferson sounds this theme in his last charge: “He [the British oppressor] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” A few years after he wrote the Declaration, Jefferson proclaimed that he trembled for his country when he thought of the suffering of slaves and that God was just—a suffering that he was all too aware enabled his political career, since his slavocratic views were so popular with his constituencies, and a suffering he intimately and directly contributed to in a mighty way in both public policy and personal behavior. Yet in 1783, less than a decade after Jefferson’s Declaration, the chief justice in Massachusetts declared an end to slavery in his state because “a different idea has taken place with the people of America” in which “all men are born free and equal” that is “totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves.”
George Washington wrestled with this tension on the battlefield for his country and within his soul. With his victorious Continental army at Yorktown 25 percent black, he struggled to shed some of his slaveholder’s mentality, ultimately freeing his slaves at his death. He warned his countrymen about getting involved in the imperial affairs and wars of Europe, yet he acknowledged that the future of the young democratic republic rested on westward expansion and imperial subjugation of indigenous peoples. In 1787 Benjamin Franklin, in his closing speech at the Constitutional Convention, uttered a dreadful warning that America would likely end up as a despotic republic with docile citizens:
I agree to this constitution with all its faults, if they are such: because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well-administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism as other forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
From the birth of American democracy, then, the battle was raging over the scope of freedom, the reach of equality, and the tension between democratic and xenophobic elements.
The most painful truth in the making of America—a truth that shatters all pretensions to innocence and undercuts all efforts of denial—is that the enslavement of Africans and the imperial expansion over indigenous peoples and their lands were undeniable preconditions for the possibility of American democracy. There could be no such thing as an experiment in American democracy without these racist and imperial foundations. It is no accident that from the nation’s founding (1789) to the Civil War (1861) the vast majority of Supreme Court justices—the highest rule of law in the land—were slaveholders and imperial expansionists. And for forty-nine of these seventy-two years, the presidency of the United States was held by slaveholders and imperial expansionists. And the only ones reelected president were slaveholders and imperial expansionists.
The most powerful and poignant work ever written about America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic two-volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840)—reached a number of dark conclusions about this lethal mix of race, empire, and democracy. Tocqueville feared that America would produce a new form of despotism in the world—a democratic despotism, a term also used by W. E. B. Du Bois almost one hundred years later. This despotism would be guilty of genocide against indigenous peoples and unable to create a multiracial democracy owing to the deep white supremacist practices of the country’s tyrannical majority. The last and longest chapter of Tocqueville’s first volume—a chapter often skipped over or treated lightly by scholars who fan and fuel America’s denial of its racist and imperial roots—put forward the most difficult and delicate challenge to the American democratic experiment: would race and empire undermine American democracy?
I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices of religion, of his country, or of his race, and if this individual is a king he may effect surprising changes in society; but a whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. A despot who should subject the Americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated will it remain….
If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States,—that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality, of conditions.
The prophetic astuteness of Tocqueville’s critique is sometimes attributed in part to his outsider status, and yet powerful voices from within the country, both the famous and the largely forgotten, expressed the same fears of the ultimate consequences of racism and imperialism earlier. Their words speak more powerfully than we can today about the menacing nature of these twin forces as the country wrestled with the paradoxes implicit in its founding. The free black man David Walker and the white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child—two public intellectuals in the grand democratic tradition—had already raised Tocqueville’s explosive question. In 1829 Walker published his excoriating Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a work banned in much of America and the cause of his murder in 1830. Highlighting Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy as the author of the Declaration who also, in his notorious Notes on the State of Virginia, put forth a degrading analysis of the inferiority of African Americans, Walker wrote:
Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and our minds? It is indeed surprising that a man of such great learning, combined with such excel
lent natural parts, should speak so of a set of men in chains….
Do you know that Mr. Jefferson was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites? See his writings for the world, and public labours for the United States of America. Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by this people and the world? If you do you are much-mistaken. See how the American people treat us—have we souls in our bodies?…
See your Declaration Americans! ! ! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776—“We hold these truths to be self evident—that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!”
Child, a radical abolitionist, admonished the country about the evils of slavery in 1833 with her An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans:
I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, I cannot fear them….
Should it be the means of advancing, even one single hour, the inevitable progress of truth and justice, I would not exchange the consciousness for all Roths-child’s wealth, or Sir Walter’s fame.
Who does not see that the American people are walking over a subterranean fire, the flames of which are fed by slavery?
The greatest novel ever written by an American, Moby-Dick (1851), is the thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville’s scathing exploration of the evils of nihilistic imperialist power, a power he recognized and abhorred at the heart of the American character. Melville was a staunch antiracist, anti-imperialist, and lover of democracy—ironically, his father-in-law was the judge who sustained the vicious Fugitive Slave Act that was a catalyst for the Civil War—and Moby-Dick can be read, in part, as a commentary on the ills of American democracy. The nihilist Ahab, drunk with power and the crazed embodiment of an absolute will to dominate and conquer—fueled largely by wounded ego and worldly pride—leads his multiracial crew into the abyss of history, with the fetish of whiteness dangling before him.
The greatness of Abraham Lincoln was his courage to confront publicly the nightside of American democracy through deep Socratic questioning, unfailing prophetic love of justice, and excruciating tragicomic hope for a “more perfect union,” even in the midst of the white supremacist hurricane that nearly wiped the American democratic experiment off the map. Despite his distance from fervid abolitionists, his authoritarian lifting of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and his reluctance to embrace multiracial democracy, Lincoln exemplifies the integrity of democratic energy. He knew that democratic experiments require not only courageous truth telling but also practical wisdom. Lincoln was morally opposed to slavery, yet the decision to free the slaves (though those in the Confederate South only) was nonetheless a herculean battle for him. That battle in itself is emblematic of the horrible intertwining of democracy, race, and empire at the core of the nation. He knew all too well the fragility of the support for the Union cause among key border states and that freeing the slaves would likely throw them over to the Confederacy, and so his love of the American democratic experiment caught him in a horrible irony that required him to condone the most antidemocratic of American practices.
Only when he realized that the influx of over 150,000 black soldiers would be pivotal in saving the Union did he issue his Emancipation Proclamation, which then led him to support the New Orleans plan of multiracial voting—a decision directly responsible for his assassination by the white supremacist John Wilkes Booth. His three-minute Second Inaugural Address is the most profound expression of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope ever uttered by an American president, revealing what serious wrestling with the implications of racism and empire can bring out of those who have a passion for democracy matters:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Ironically, immediately following the war, the U.S. government would deploy troops in the imperialist cause of further westward expansion, engaging in a genocidal war against the indigenous peoples. And after the brief twelve-year experiment in multiracial democracy called Reconstruction, the forces of racism would rise up to subordinate black Americans in the brutal and long regime of Jim Crow. In short, the Union won the most barbaric of nineteenth-century wars, but white supremacy and imperial expansionism won the American peace. By the end of the nineteenth century, conquest and reservations loomed large for indigenous peoples, Mexican lands had been fully annexed, Asian workers had been deported, and the U.S. terrorism of Jim Crow reigned over most black Americans. With the end of continental expansion—Manifest Destiny fulfilling its national mission—transcontinental expansionism flourished.
The Civil War was the first modern war—a use of modern technology and the resources of a modern state for mass mobilization. In this way, the fight over race and empire literally pushed the American democratic experiment into modernity. But that modernity brought temptations and challenges of its own for our democracy. In the wake of the war, triumphant industrialism ran amok, and the dogma of free-market fundamentalism reigned supreme. The country gave birth to a new breed of plutocrats, the “robber barons,” who ran unregulated monopolies and accumulated obscene financial fortunes. Ironically, the rights of these corporations were defended in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment enacted to defend the rights of black Americans. The link between transcontinental expansion and plutocratic wealth should not go unnoticed. Empire and corporate elite power, alongside race dividing the citizenry at home, are the age-old formula of nihilistic rule in America.
The American democratic experiment entered the twentieth century as a full-fledged empire with overseas possessions (Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Samoa—or over six million peoples of color) and with domestic racist systems of terror over black, brown, Asian, and red peoples. It also had attained hemispheric hegemony over South and Central America by giving new force and enforcement to the Monroe Doctrine, which in 1823 first stipulated U.S. imperial “sovereignty” over the South American and Central American nations. Most peoples of color were confined to poor rural communities, and wave after wave of immigration from Europe filled U.S. cities with a new population to be exploited as cheap laborers. The formula of corporate elite power alongside racist division of the citizenry would seem to have prevailed; yet, fortunately, this formula often overreaches, resulting in corruption, graft, greed, internal bickering, and a democratic backlash.
The complex intertwining of democratic commitment and nihilistic imperialism is at the heart of our democracy, and democratic commitment has made great strides. There have always been countervailing democratic forces pushing for the realization of the democratic vision expressed in the Declaration. The three most indigenous forms of democratic radicalism initiated by white males in the American democratic experiment—populism, progressivism, and trade unionism—made major contributions to taming the corruption, graft, and greed of plutocratic elites and corrupt politicians. The farmers-led populist movement was a backlash against the free-market fundamentalism of “the money kings” and “the business princes” of the Gilded Age. It called for more democratic participation of rural producers in the shaping of government and business policy. The progressive movement was an urban middle-class backlash against the corrupt ties of politicians to corporate elites and the unfettered greed of financial bosses. It called for more democratic input and bureaucratic efficiency over public policy. The trade-union movement was the worker-led backlash (often by new immigrants) against the free-market fundamentalism of corporate owners and financial bosses. It called for more democratic control over the workplace, especially
more say in wages paid to laborers.
These three crucial movements all expressed, in different ways, the democratic aspirations of predominantly white male citizens within the limits of the American empire of that day. Rarely did either movement target white supremacy or imperial expansion. In fact, all three movements tended to be xenophobic and imperialist even as they were deeply democratic. They stand as vital achievements in deepening our democracy, and yet we must acknowledge the limits of each in coming to terms with the legacy of race and empire, as well as the need for continued vigilance on all three of these crucial fronts. The Georgia congressman Thomas Watson, nominated in 1904 and 1908 for president by the Populist Party, was one of the most courageous Populists—often willing to fight alongside black farmers in the Jim Crow South—yet he ended his populist career as a major proponent of the Ku Klux Klan. Woodrow Wilson was an exemplary progressive politician who struggled sincerely against the corporate abuse of power. Yet one of his first acts as president was to reinstate white supremacist segregation throughout the U.S. capital, and his famous freedom charter in foreign policy did not extend to Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Eugene Debs was one of the greatest trade unionists as well as the leader of the U.S. Socialist Party. His crusade against vast wealth inequality was legendary, yet despite his own antiracist views, he could not convince his organization to integrate with peoples of color.
The energetic armies of American democrats won terrific battles against the dogma of free-market fundamentalism, but they fell far short of completing the task of fulfilling the dream of democracy for all peoples. As the American empire reluctantly joined the great world struggles in the twentieth century against the nihilistic forces of imperialism and fascism, it did so with great battles yet to be waged within as well.