The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Yet still Great Britain’s overwhelming naval power dominated the oceans, and even the Anglophile Theodore Roosevelt had no doubt about the threat that posed to the United States. “The British Navy,” he wrote his friend Rudyard Kipling, “when, as was ordinarily the case, the British Government was more or less hostile to us, was our greatest danger.” A start was made to develop a rival U.S. navy in the 1880s, but not until Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published his 1890 study, The Influence of Seapower upon History, did it become a priority.

  “The nation neither has nor cares to have its sea frontier defended,” Mahan scolded his readers. “Not only has Great Britain a mighty navy and we a long, defenseless seacoast, but it is a great commercial and political advantage to her that her larger colonies, and above all Canada, should feel that the power of the mother country is something which they need, and upon which they can count… What harm can we do Canada proportionate to the injury we should suffer by the interruption of our coasting trade, and by a blockade of Boston, New York, the Delaware, and the Chesapeake? Such a blockade Great Britain certainly could make technically efficient, under the somewhat loose definitions of international law.”

  Other empires offered a challenge. Germany was moving into the Pacific, and the Meiji regime in Japan was creating a new modern power, but still Britain was the rival to be surpassed. To defend the sea frontiers that suddenly seemed to be so vulnerable, Mahan recommended a navy of modern, steel-hulled, steam-powered warships and, since they needed to take on coal after four thousand miles or two weeks at sea, the seizure of Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific for use as coaling stations. To buttress his argument, he introduced the newly fashionable Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest, reminding his audience that they were engaged in “the race of life” in which “nation is arrayed against nation.” In the last decade of the century it was a compelling thought.

  Around the world, the last spasm in a century of land seizure by Europe was taking place. In fifty years France had expanded south from its Algerian base, taken by force in 1830, to the banks of the Congo River and, by the 1880s, was acquiring most of Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Germany was balancing its acquisition of Pacific islands with chunks of southern Africa. Russia had used the $7.5 million Seward had paid for Alaska to consolidate its hold on Central Asia and in the 1880s was developing Vladivostok as the center of its Far East empire. And the British were adding to their control of nearly one quarter of the world’s landmass by establishing an East African empire from Kenya to Cape Town, a process that in 1898 pitted them against the resistance of Boer farmers in the Transvaal. Not to make use of superior technology to acquire strategic territory and valuable raw materials was unthinkable. Indeed, possession of the Gatling gun and the steam turbine engine virtually made it a moral duty to spread the civilization that made such inventions possible.

  “I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night,” President William McKinley reported of his decision to take over the Philippines in 1898. “And one night late it came to me this way…that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all.”

  Other, more materialist reasons existed for this lurch into empire building. Business was only just recovering from a sharp economic crash in 1893, and as Republican senator John M. Thurston, formerly chief counsel for the Union Pacific Railroad, put it to his fellow senators, “War with Spain would increase the business and earnings of every American railroad; it would increase the output of every American factory, it would stimulate every branch of industry and domestic commerce.”

  The hunger of the railroad and steel industries for new international markets meshed with Mahan’s argument for the United States to join the imperial contest. The naval program accelerated until two new fleets could be put to sea, in the Pacific and the Atlantic. In 1898 President McKinley’s Republican administration, backed by an impressive array of Wall Street, railroad, and newspaper interests, took advantage of Cuba’s rebellion against Spain to push the frontiers of the United States far overseas. By the time the Spanish-American War was concluded, the new American navy had destroyed Spanish fleets in the Philippines as well as Cuba, and American power had colonized the Philippines, Guam, and the other Mariana islands, made protectorates of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and annexed Hawaii and Wake Island.

  What Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war” commanded wide support in the United States, but it appealed especially to the executive branch of government. For a forceful president anxious to overturn the supremacy established by the legislature during Reconstruction, imperialism possessed one great quality—constitutional checks on the president’s power inside the frontier of the United States ceased to apply outside it or at worst were brought to bear too late. The perfect example was provided by President Theodore Roosevelt’s preemptive decision in 1903 to recognize the creation of the state of Panama following an American-inspired revolt against Colombian rule, and to commit funds to begin construction of a canal.

  The proper response, as Roosevelt gleefully recalled in a speech at Berkeley, California, in 1911, would have been to submit “an admirable state paper occupying a couple of hundred pages detailing all of the facts to Congress and asking Congress’ consideration of it. In that case there would have been a number of excellent speeches made on the subject in Congress; the debate would be proceeding at this moment with great spirit and the beginning of work on the canal would be fifty years in the future. [Laughter and applause.] Fortunately the crisis came at a period when I could act unhampered. Accordingly I took the Isthmus, started the Canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me. [Laughter and applause.]”

  In his desire to sell the imperial adventure to the people, however, Teddy Roosevelt argued that its roots were deeper than that and grew from the very history of the United States. In the introduction he wrote in 1900 to The Winning of the West, he declared that in occupying the Philippines the United States had simply “finished the work begun over a century before by the backwoodsman, and [driven] the Spaniard outright from the western world…At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement.”

  The United States would pay a heavy price for Roosevelt’s interpretation of history.

  A congressional amendment to the declaration of the Spanish-American War prevented full annexation of Cuba, although treaties with the fledgling nation effectively made it an American protectorate. In 1904, under pressure from its protector, Cuba granted the United States an unlimited lease of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. But technically the island remained independent. It was, therefore, the long campaign in the Philippines against a popular guerrilla movement led by Emilio Aguilnaldo that brought the United States face-to-face with its possession of an empire. Not only did the death toll account for some 250,000 Filipinos and more than 4,000 Americans, but the tactics used, including the use of fortified camps to enclose the civilian population, were as brutal as those used by other empires.

  In a way that astonished many, appalled some, and brought pleasure to a few, American imperialism seemed almost indistinguishable from the British variety. Mahan himself pointed to the similarities each faced and argued, “The annexation of the Boer republics was a measure forced upon Great Britain as the annexation of the Philippines has been upon ourselves.” The once Anglophobic Chicago Tribune proclaimed its belief that “the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are drawing nearer and nearer together for cooperation in peace, and, in logical sequence, in war as well.”

  In the early 1900s the crossing point in coal production was reached, and superiority over the British empire was no longer in doubt. But instead of arriving at an independent identity, it seemed as though the republic’s face had simply merged with the imperial image on the other side of the frontier.

  Attacking U.S. policy, the anti-imp
erialist commentator J. W. Martin condemned the way that “England has suddenly become a guiding star to many of the American people.” In 1902 a committee of inquiry set up by Secretary of War Elihu Root turned up the sort of evidence that is inseparable from military occupation and armed resistance.

  “Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap,” the wife of an officer sickened by the killings wrote to the Philadelphia Ledger in November 1901. “Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men ‘to make them talk,’ have taken prisoners of people who had held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and, an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them up on a bridge, and shot them down one by one to drop into the water below and float down as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.”

  Another officer argued that such cruelty was inescapable: “We exterminated the American Indians, and I guess most of us are proud of it, or at least believe that the end justified the means; and we must have no scruples about exterminating this other race standing in the way of progress and enlightenment, if it is necessary.”

  One critical difference existed between imperialism and westward expansion—the frontier. Right up to that line, the settlers had colonized the land, and the need to have it confirmed as property had given them an incentive to bring government with them. Because the territories carved out by Stephen Douglas’s committee lay within the United States, immediate responsibility for devising the regulations that governed their lives, liberties, and property rested with Congress, and the template that it had to use was the U.S. Constitution. Most of the American empire, however, was not being colonized by settlers anxious for U.S. government, and Congress had no intention of admitting it into the Union.

  In 1904 the Supreme Court had to deal with the dilemma that this posed. It came in the unlikely form of an appeal by Fred Dorr, editor of the Manila Freedom, who had headlined a juicy story about the private activities of a member of the Philippine governing commission with the eye-catching but unfortunately libelous words TRAITOR, SEDUCER AND PERJURER. Dorr argued that since the Philippines lay under U.S. control, he should have had the protection of the Constitution and been tried by a jury rather than by a judge under the civil code inherited from Spain.

  The majority decision of the Supreme Court, written by Justice Edward D. White, dismissed his appeal on the grounds that Congress could devise its own regulations in any form not directly prohibited by the Constitution. It was a matter of being realistic. “If the United States, impelled by its duty or advantage, shall acquire territory peopled by savages,” White pointed out, the Constitution would require it to set up courts, empanel juries, and follow due process, but “to state such a proposition demonstrates the impossibility of carrying it into practice.” In other words, outside its frontier the United States could adapt and adjust its democratic procedures as it saw fit. Dorr, therefore, was not entitled to trial by jury despite living in an American colony.

  This was the rational choice. Other nations faced by the conflict between democratic values and the command structure of empire had made similar decisions. What makes the case stand out, however, was the minority opinion of the “Great Dissenter,” Justice John M. Harlan. “Neither the life, nor the liberty, nor the property of any person, within any territory or country over which the United States is sovereign, can be taken,” Harlan declared, “under the sanction of any civil tribunal, acting under its authority, by any form of procedure inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States.”

  This was what Lincoln’s Constitution required: the guarantee of individual rights on a basis of absolute equality, as promised by the Declaration of Independence. There could be no adjustment to different races or different places—“the Constitution,” Harlan maintained, “is the supreme law in every territory, as soon as it comes under the sovereign dominion of the United States for purposes of civil administration.”

  On one fundamental point, however, White and Harlan were in agreement—democratic values as practiced inside the frontier of the United States were not compatible with imperial rule. That was why the line that marked the limits of the nation was so important. The freedom that had been won at such cost and defined the very nature of the United States could not be exported.

  Even Roosevelt, the standard-bearer of imperialism, accepted that a fundamental error had been made and admitted in 1907 that he would be “glad to see the [Philippines] made independent.” When it was suggested that the Dominican Republic should be made an American colony, he exclaimed, “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.”

  Chapter 12

  The American Frontier

  A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Politics,” 1844

  When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his speech entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893, he did so as a young Wisconsin professor with no reputation. His thesis, that the frontier deserved serious study by historians, could hardly have been more far-fetched. History was concerned with the study of constitutional and military events, while the frontier was the stuff of dime novels and Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling circus. Worst of all, Turner was offering a deliberate challenge to the University of Chicago’s head of history, Professor Hermann von Holst, the supreme authority on the events leading to the Civil War. The seventh and final volume of von Holst’s magisterial Constitutional and Political History of the United States had been published the year before, delineating with Teutonic thoroughness—it was originally written in German—the divisions, and especially the conflict across state lines, that slavery had triggered between federal and state constitutions.

  What Turner’s audience heard was an aggressive demolition of von Holst’s analysis. “It is believed that many phases of our political history have been obscured by the attention paid to State boundaries and to the sectional lines of North and South,” Turner stated. “… But, from the point of view of the rise and growth of sectionalism and nationalism, it is much more important to note the existence of great social and economic areas, independent of state lines, which have acted as units in political history.” The emphasis on states’ rights and slavery was, he concluded simply, “a wrong perspective.” To say this in Chicago was equivalent to giving a middle-fingered salute to von Holst.

  In place of the forces that divided the United States, Turner proposed that the most important element was the unifying experience of the settlers’ expansion across the continent. “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West,” he declared in his opening paragraph. It was important because, from the moment the first English colonists arrived, the infinite opportunities and extraordinary challenges presented by the wilderness had transformed the outlook of generations of immigrants pushing westward and “promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.” Sweeping away arcane discussion about the significance of dusty paragraphs in half-forgotten constitutional conventions, Turner presented the influence of wide horizons and immense forests on living people with hopes and dreams. It was an exhilarating, easily understood picture. “The demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward,” and from the physical and psychological demands of building a cabin, breaking the virgin soil, and holding off hostile attacks emerged the distinctive characteristic that made Americans different—“that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventi
ve turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”

  Frederick Jackson Turner

  His speech began and ended with the report of the superintendent of the 1890 census that the empty places were now filled, and the “frontier line” no longer existed. But the elegiac tone was tempered in a defiant final paragraph: “America has [always] been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased.”

  Despite his eloquence, little suggested that his ideas, indeed the very phrases, would remain in currency more than a century after they were delivered. Lacking analytical detail, the speech failed to inspire enthusiasm among his audience of constitutional historians. Even the influential endorsement of Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton University missed the point about the frontier’s continuing influence. What Wilson welcomed was the idea of the frontier as “a stage of development,” and he concluded that it must lead to the west becoming increasingly civilized and “eastern,” rather than that the western experience should leave a permanent imprint on the American character. This was an understandable mistake, because as Turner himself admitted the frontier had ceased to exist, making it difficult to explain how its influence could continue to affect future generations.