by Simon Schama
Playing the part of Man was at the core of Theodore Roosevelt’s self-making. Now that the trophies on the walls of his Long Island house, Sagamore Hill, and the reflection he caught in the mirror declared him to be a fine specimen of American manhood, he felt he ought to perform the same invigoration for the American republic. Predictably, Roosevelt had been a child with poor eyesight and sickly frame, who through his bullying father’s admonitions and his own formidably precocious will had turned himself into an example of American masculinity. When his first wife, Alice, died, he took his grief west on to the prairie, farmed cattle, shot at Indians, captured rustlers, so that when the time came to enter politics he could imagine that he personified the authentically American spirit of conquest precisely at the moment when there was no more America to conquer.
Driven by this restless sense of physical self-realization, Teddy Roosevelt was a man of his times as well as a man who imprinted his pugilistic personality upon them. Although he invoked Lincoln and Grant in his Chicago speech as Americans who never shrank from conflict, it was in fact the passing of the Civil War generation and their memories that fed the craving for imperial muscularity. Montgomery Meigs had gone to his rest at Arlington in 1892, by which time more than 300,000 Civil War dead had been interred in seventy-three national cemeteries around the country. After he had demobilized a million and a half men in arms, he remained quartermaster general to a shrunken army of no more than 70,000—the vast majority of whom were finishing off Native Americans as the railroads, mining companies, and cattle ranchers consumed what was left of the open West. So as well as attempting to ensure adequate pensions for the veteran survivors, Meigs reverted to the career that had sustained him before the war: architecture. In particular he designed the astounding Pension Building, a brick-and-terra-cotta galleried temple of immense scale and grandeur. Decorating the facade is a great frieze by the sculptor Caspar Buberl, representing scenes from the war, which include more than tough infantrymen on their march, but also supply wagons and their teamsters, at least one of whom Meigs typically specified must be a liberated slave. Seen in profile cracking a whip over his mule team, it’s one of the great images in American public sculpture.
A year after Meigs’s death in his grand house on Vermont Avenue (also built by him), the young history professor Frederick Jackson Turner stood up at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in July 1893 and declared that the frontier “has gone and with its going has closed the first period in American history.” It was not a happy moment to be making such a proclamation. Five hundred banks failed in that same year, tens of thousands of businesses went under, millions were thrown out of work, and massive strikes were dealt with roughly, tearing apart any sense of shared national purpose. What might restore it; perhaps a blue-water destiny?
A transoceanic imperial presence as a remedy for American exhaustion, saturated domestic markets, and a sudden unwonted sense of territorial claustrophobia, had been promoted before the depression of 1893. Benjamin Harrison, who had got to the White House despite losing the popular vote to Grover Cleveland in 1888, and who had the urge to overcompensate for his dubious victory by exercises of national assertion, beat the drum for the expansion of both the army and the navy. In 1890 the son of Dennis Mahan, the professor who had taught both Meigses at West Point, Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power on World History, and with its lessons in mind Harrison persuaded Congress to fund the construction of sixteen battleships. In 1893 the fleet sailed into New York Harbor as an iron regatta in an attempt to take the city’s mind off economic catastrophe, coming too late to save the election for Harrison. Grover Cleveland, who got his revenge for 1888, was cool to talk of island empires, rejecting the annexation of Hawaii, which under Harrison had seemed a sure thing.
But the sea change was literal, and in the end, unstoppable. What had happened was Herbert Spencer, the kaiser, and Joseph Chamberlain. Charles Darwin had actually taken Spencer’s phrase about “the survival of the fittest” for his own evolutionary theories, but Spencer returned the favor by popularizing a theory of bio-social struggle in which the weak were weeded out and the strong inherited the earth. Thus it was with species, thus it was (to the satisfaction of the likes of Andrew Carnegie) in business, and thus it was, thought the young Theodore Roosevelt, with nations and empires. Put Mahan and Social Darwinism together and look hard at the British Empire and the challenge it faced from imperial Germany, whose kaiser was a devoted reader of Mahan, and the conclusion was inescapable: either the United States had to embark boldly on naval and military renewal, and territorial expansion across the sea, or else it was doomed to become, in TR’s strange obsession, “China.”
Had he wished, Roosevelt could have invoked Jefferson as well as Hamilton for, as war-averse as the founder of West Point had been, he did make it clear that if the American future was to be commercial as well as agricultural (and thus be able to import manufactures), it had to ensure its shipping was always free to sail the ocean. Should there be any threat to that freedom, it had to be resisted, if necessary, with force. A century later, there was a strongly developing sense that if the Pacific as well as the Atlantic were to be kept free for American trade, this required staking out a chain of island possessions that could act as the guardians of that liberty. And if China was indeed a sinkhole of power, into the dangerous vacuum would inevitably come competitors: the Japanese, the Russians, the British, and the Germans, who would take the space and leave none for the United States.
The China of the West was Spain: decadent, superstitious, anachronistically monarchical, and sitting on an empire that was in the process of disintegration. The issue for policymakers once Cleveland had been succeeded by William McKinley in 1897 was how far to help push that empire in Cuba and the Philippines into terminal decomposition. And when that happened, how exactly should America profit? As McKinley’s assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt more or less made his own Mahanian policy, helped by the complaisance of the official head of that department, John Long. And the policy was to make sure, in the event of a Spanish-American War, that there would be American arms in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. Rebellions in both Cuba and the Philippines helped the cause, allowing the yellow press, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst competing with each other in Hispanophobic headlines, to whip up campaigns of indignation against concentration camps and starvation inflicted on helpless natives by the cruel and decadent Don. The USS Maine was sent to Havana, where it blew up (probably, but not certainly, by accident), killing hundreds of American sailors and making the hue and cry for war irresistible for McKinley, especially in a year of midterm elections. For the same reason congressmen were not about to stand in the teeth of a gale of patriotic hysteria as the bodies from the Maine were brought back to the mainland, the journey filmed by Edison’s Vitagraph and watched in thousands of nickelodeons all over the country. War was duly declared, and Teddy Roosevelt resigned from his post at the Department of the Navy to raise a regiment of cavalry for Cuba. The Rough Riders, with Roosevelt’s friend Major General Leonard Wood (personal doctor to McKinley and gung-ho imperialist) as commander, were filmed galloping around in training at Tampa, but thereafter only rough-marched, there being no adequate transports to convey their horses to Cuba. No matter, the battle of San Juan, such as it was, and TR’s part in it, created a military glamour, an aura of virile zeal, that he could convert into votes.
So when Admiral Dewey annihilated the Spanish fleet in Manila Harbor, effectively ending the war, and the Philippines suddenly dropped into America’s lap, what was to be done with them? The story told by the government and by the newspapers about the war in Cuba was of a benevolent and disinterested liberation. In the spirit of the Founding Fathers who had risen against an imperial power, America had come to Cuba to strike the chains from the island and deliver it to its own people. An act of Congress preempted any thought of annexation and required the government to respect Cuban independence as a
nonnegotiable clause in any peace treaty with Spain. And that was how matters unfolded, notwithstanding the insistence of the Americans that they, rather than the victorious Cuban rebels, take the surrender; an act that did not sit well with the new authorities. And then there was the ubiquitous Major General Leonard Wood, who turned himself into a kind of proconsul in Cuba, delivering public health to Havana and sundry other blessings of American civilization.
Respecting, more or less, Cuban rights only made the Filipino rebels—who had been fighting their own war against Spain and might well have succeeded without any help from the Americans—assume that something of the kind would follow for their islands. Had not McKinley himself declared that the annexation of the Philippines would be an “act of criminal aggression?” Yes, he had, but believe it or not there was yet another election coming up before too long, and he was running to keep the White House. And aside from the organs of Pulitzer and Hearst, the New York Tribune, the American Review of Reviews, and the entertainments in the nickelodeon where audiences saw Admiral Dewey on his battleship and the gallant volunteer lads preparing to sail, there were powerful voices urging him to act: Senators Albert Beveridge of Illinois and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. “God has not been preparing the English-Speaking and Teutonic Peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation,” boomed Beveridge. “No! He has made us the master organisers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” More encouragement to do the bold thing came from Britain, where Rudyard Kipling wrote “take up the white man’s burden” to influence the decision. The “best you breed” had an obligation to civilize “your new-caught sullen peoples / half devil and half child.”
Just in case McKinley needed it to overcome his doubts (and earlier convictions), he called on a higher authority to help him out. “I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance,” a practice that has become so routine in the White House in the past century that carpets must suffer undue wear and tear. God was in. And He spake to the president thus, saying 1) you’re not going to give the Philippines back to the Spanish, 2) to walk away from responsibilities now would be cowardly and dishonorable, and 3) those Filipinos aren’t ready for self-government and never will be without a prolonged dose of decent strong American administration. So “there was nothing for us to do but to take them…and to educate the Filipinos, to uplift and civilise and Christianise them.” Apparently McKinley hadn’t noticed that the Filipinos were actually already Catholic, or perhaps that didn’t count. At any rate all was well for “I went to bed and slept soundly.”
The motion to annex went through the Senate, although not before opponents expressed their pain and rage at what the government was making of America: a ruthless empire indistinguishable from the British or French. George Frisbie Hoar, the other senator from Massachusetts, was eloquent in a way that sounds through the generations: “You have no right at the cannon’s mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence, your Constitution and your notions of what is good.” But his voice and that of a newly formed Anti-Imperialist League were drowned out in the jingo. Furious at their betrayal by the Americans, the Filipino Republicans, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, decided on resistance. Inevitably, hostile confrontations turned into a shooting war. Once blood had been shed and a call had been made for 70,000 volunteers, America was swept by a wave of patriotic fury. There were more movies featuring Americans against Filipinos, although much of the footage was shot in a back lot in New Jersey with the National Guard dressing up in white pajamas to pretend they were the enemy. Shoot, duck, RUN! In the presidential election campaign of 1900 Teddy Roosevelt traveled over 12,000 miles by train, accusing William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats of being the heirs to the “Copperheads” who wanted to make peace with the Confederacy; pounding tables on behalf of the gallant volunteers who were already sacrificing themselves in battles with the ungrateful Filipinos.
McKinley liked to think that God was watching over his work, but even God had the odd day off, and on one of those days in September 1901 the president was assassinated by an anarchist. TR rushed to Buffalo, where he was sworn in. Though the war in the Philippines had become something no one in Washington had anticipated—a wretched slog with American troops taking heavy casualties from determined insurgents and unable to maneuver in any kind of conventional military manner—President Roosevelt was not about to reverse course. He sent General Arthur MacArthur (West Point) to the Philippines, and the conflict settled down into a horrifying slaughter: Filipinos picking off infantrymen; Americans wreaking revenge by burning villages and crops, and treating villagers, whom they usually called “niggers” or “gu-gus” (after their coconut oil shampoo), as subhuman. Since it was said to be difficult to distinguish between native guerrillas and noncombatants, the massacre of villagers in any area thought suspicious became commonplace and even expected. Torture of prisoners to extract information, especially the “water cure,” became routine. Water was poured through a funnel in quantities to distend the stomach and give the prisoner a sense of drowning. If the torturers didn’t get to hear what they wanted, soldiers would jump or stamp on their prisoners’ stomachs to induce vomiting, and the process would start all over again. Naturally, photographs were taken of the torture. In one of them a soldier stands watching from a few feet away while his comrades administer the cure. With one hand he leans on a pile of rifles; the other is on his hip at his belt. His left leg is crossed jauntily over his right, and on his face is the unmistakable beginning of a smile. Albert Gardner of the 1st Cavalry actually specialized in songs that made the business into a jolly rigmarole: “Get the old syringe boys and fill it to the brim / We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him.”
America was not morally dead to the atrocities. By early 1902 anti-imperialist writers had gathered enough information on torture and indiscriminate massacre to publish a report titled Atrocities Perpetrated Against the Civilian Population. Senate hearings were called during which the junior and senior senators from Massachusetts divided exactly down the middle on the issue: Henry Cabot Lodge making sure that much of the testimony appeared behind closed doors to the “Insular Affairs Committee,” while his nemesis George Hoar conducted the hearings as best he could in public. In a post–Abu Ghraib world the defenses are familiar: we’re told not much of this happened, and when it did the army conducted its own thorough investigations and discovered that most of the accusations were unfounded or exaggerated. Yes, there were bound to be a few rotten apples, but these were either the occasional American soldier driven mad by tropical fevers, or else a handful of native allies, the Macabebe. And in any case, it could not be expected in such a place that war could be played by the rules that obtained among the civilized. These were savages who would cut your throat as soon as look at you. Either America wished to win this war, or it did not. If it did it must be expected to take savagery to the enemy. Anything else was a dereliction of duty.
This was, pretty much, the view of the most important living American, President Roosevelt. But it was not the view of the second most important—or at any rate famous—American living, namely Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain. As much as TR, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Randolph Hearst, Edison, and Henry Adams were one kind of American voice, loud with their Hamiltonian sense of global destiny, Twain and Henry Brooks Adams and W. E. B. DuBois had the other kind of patriotic voice, which saw in military intoxication a perversion of everything the American democratic experiment was supposed to stand for.
Twain was no pacifist. He had been in Vienna when the Spanish-American War began, on yet another of the trips meant to right his perpetually shaky fortunes. Predictably he had been lionized but equally predictably found himself having to defend American intervention in Cuba. As best he could he insisted that this would be no war of imperial annexation, but a disinterested assi
stance to the Cuban revolutionaries, who would reap the benefits of victory. There would be a free Cuban republic with its own constitution; everything would be hunky-dory between benefactor and protégé, and they would all live happily ever after.
By the time Twain returned to New York on the SS Minnehaha on 16 October 1900, American foreign policy had become, in his mind, tragically indefensible. He was the country’s greatest celebrity; his white whiskers and mischievous eyes known through the many photographs, right across the nation. And almost the first thing out of his mouth after he had walked down the gangplank was an attack on the Philippine annexation and war. “I have read the Treaty of Paris [between Spain and the United States] carefully,” said Twain to the reporter from the New York Herald, “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 and not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and our 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.” Ten days earlier he had already sounded off along the same lines for the World in London. “It [the Philippines regime] was not to be a government according to our ideals but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extraction immensely greater. I’m sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it and all it means to us as a nation.”
Instantly Twain became the voice (and vice president) of the Anti-Imperialist League. In 1901 he published a withering attack on the sanctimonious pretensions of missions to the uncivilized: “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The tone was acid, caricaturing the civilizing mission as a rum business: “Extending our blessings to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well on the whole and there is money in it yet.” American policy had been enthralled by the British, by Cecil Rhodes and the appalling Joseph Chamberlain, and the Boer War. That’s what drove the Philippine War: naval envy. “It was a pity, it was a great pity, that error, the one grievous error, that irrevocable error. For it was the very place and time to play the American game again. And at no cost. Rich winnings to be gathered in again, too rich and permanent, indestructible; a fortune transmissible forever to the children of the flag. Not land, not money, not dominion—no something worth many times more than that dross: our share, the spectacle of a nation of long-harassed and persecuted slaves set free through our influence; our posterity’s share, the golden memory of that fair deed.” And Mark Twain—the embodiment of everything American, the scourge of humbug—ended by directly attacking two of his countrymen’s most cherished objects, the uniform and the flag: “our flag—another pride of ours, our chiefest. We have worshipped it so; and when we have seen it in far lands—glimpsing it unexpectedly in that strange sky, waving its welcome and benediction to us—we have caught our breath, and uncovered our heads and couldn’t speak for a moment for the thought of what it was to us and the great ideals it stood for. Indeed we must do something about these things…We can have a special one…just our usual flag with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”