Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  By contrast there were to be no treaties with the natives who had defeated Custer a century later. Following the Lakota Sioux victory at the Little Bighorn some of the native leaders, most famously Sitting Bull, sought sanctuary in Canada. The remainder, under Crazy Horse, were relentlessly pursued, and after their inevitable surrender packed off to a reservation. Crazy Horse remained on the reservation for just four months before trying to leave to take his sick wife to her parents; he was seized and, with his arms pinioned, bayoneted to death.

  As well as the battle of the Little Bighorn, the only other clash between natives and whites to have achieved any great fame occurred nearly a quarter of a century later, in 1890 at Wounded Knee, where the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than 200 hundred men, women and children of the Miniconjou Sioux. Unlike the Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee has not been one of those events permanently seared into the public imagination; in fact it was almost entirely forgotten until the book and later the film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee appeared in 1970. What is most remarkable about the massacre at Wounded Knee is not that it happened but the date at which it happened.

  Empire Marches On

  By 1890 the era of hardy pioneers pushing into the unknown was long gone. New York and Chicago were competing to prove that the skyscraper had been invented there (New York was earlier, 1868, but Chicago claimed their 1885 effort to be the first to truly scrape the sky). The authorities in New Orleans were investigating the murder of a city policeman by a shadowy Sicilian gang that they had labelled ‘mafia’. In the wider world a German engineer called Gottlieb Daimler had produced the world’s first four-wheel petrol-engined car four years earlier, and Queen Victoria had already celebrated her golden jubilee. In Russia the execution of an insignificant revolutionary named Alexander Ulyanov drove his younger brother to devote his life to the revolutionary cause, using the nom de guerre of Lenin.

  It can be argued that Wounded Knee was part of a chain of events going back to Mystic and beyond; it could equally be argued to be part of a chain going forward to My Lai and beyond. In any event it signalled the end of the line for Native Americans. The poorest county in America today is not in an inner city ghetto nor in a deep south backwater but in the Badlands of South Dakota. Pine Ridge is the home of the Lakota Sioux. Around the site of the Wounded Knee massacre native Americans are sunk in a slough of alcoholism and poverty; and, with an unemployment level of 65 per cent, most can see no way out.

  By 1890 the campaigns against the natives were not only over but had already passed from the realms of history into the realms of entertainment. Sitting Bull became a star in the touring Wild West show of Buffalo Bill Cody. Twenty years later Geronimo, who had led one of the last Apache campaigns along the Mexican border and had been shipped off to a Florida reservation, joined other celebrities in Washington for the inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt. And Roosevelt himself was helped on his way to the White House by his military prowess not in conflict with the natives but in America’s first global imperial struggle, for in 1898 America had declared war on Spain.

  Before the Spanish-American War there was one last imperial annexation of native land to be consummated. During the civil war the north had been deprived of one essential southern product: sugar. The response was to look elsewhere, and American eyes settled on the islands of Hawaii, 2,000 miles from the mainland. Hawaii had long been an important stopover for American whaling ships, and in 1842 Secretary of State Daniel Webster spelt out American opposition to annexation by any of the imperial powers, a position re-emphasised in 1849 when the United States and Hawaii signed a treaty of friendship. The civil war changed the situation dramatically, and sugar plantation owners from the United States came to dominate the economic and political life of the islands under the so-called Bayonet Constitution of 1887. This was represented as a triumph of democracy over autocracy as King Kalakaua was forced to cede power to an elected assembly, but this assembly was elected not by the people of Hawaii but by property owners, many of whom happened to be American. Pearl Harbor was promptly ceded to the United States. The American oligarchs now in control carried on the traditions of the American pre-civil war filibusters, and had considerable support from influential parts of the US establishment. When Kalakaua’s successor Queen Lili’uokalani tried to regain control a group of oligarchs, mainly American sugar planters and led by Samuel Dole, were able to call upon US marines from the USS Boston, who landed in Honolulu and surrounded the royal palace with howitzers. The queen was deposed and the plotters declared themselves a provisional government. In a pattern repeated elsewhere throughout the twentieth century the administration of outgoing president Benjamin Harrison encouraged the takeover, with the US minister to Hawaii, John L. Stevens, deeply involved in the planning of the coup. The coup leaders declared Hawaii a republic on 4 July 1894. The next step was annexation by the United States, following the path already trodden in Florida, Texas and California.

  In one important respect Hawaii differed from the earlier annexations, and it marked a distinct evolution in American imperial expansion. Spain and Mexico’s territories on the North American mainland had been conquered to obtain space for settlement, and American settlers had been the prime movers in the annexation process. In Hawaii the Americans came not as settlers looking for cheap land but as entrepreneurs looking for cheap labour; the muscle for annexation came not from an army of settlers but from US marines. The pressures for annexation arose not from a desire to colonise in the way the original thirteen states and the rest of the mainland had been colonised but from two quite different desires: the desire of a small group of oligarchs to exploit the people and resources of the islands, and the strategic desire of the United States government to protect its military position in the region. These imperial ambitions were not universally popular in the United States. The takeover outraged the new occupant of the White House, Grover Cleveland, who fired Stevens and demanded that the monarchy be reinstated. On 18 December 1893 Cleveland sent an impassioned message to Congress fulminating against the coup and the annexation proposals. The American people, he declared, had never believed that ‘a desire for territorial extension, or dissatisfaction with a form of government not our own, ought to regulate our conduct’. He was in absolutely no doubt what had happened:

  The provisional government owes its existence to an armed invasion by the United States.… The lawful Government of Hawaii was overthrown without the drawing of a sword or the firing of a shot by a process every step of which, it may be safely asserted, is directly traceable to and dependent for its success upon the agency of the United States acting through its diplomatic and naval representatives.… By an act of war, committed with the participation of a diplomatic representative of the United States and without authority of Congress, the Government of a feeble but friendly and confiding people has been overthrown. A substantial wrong has thus been done which a due regard for our national character as well as the rights of the injured people requires we should endeavor to repair. The provisional government has not assumed a republican or other constitutional form, but has remained a mere executive council or oligarchy, set up without the assent of the people. It has not sought to find a permanent basis of popular support and has given no evidence of an intention to do so. Indeed, the representatives of that government assert that the people of Hawaii are unfit for popular government and frankly avow that they can be best ruled by arbitrary or despotic power.… I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality, that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one, and that even by indirection a strong power may with impunity despoil a weak one of its territory.

  The irony is that Cleveland had indeed mistaken the American people, for that is precisely what they believed – as the history of the previous century clearly showed.

  Cleveland ordered the new American minister in Hawaii to work to restore the queen to power, but the coup leaders si
mply defied him. Passions rose, particularly in the United States, where in 1898 the Anti-Imperialist League was set up. At its national convention in Chicago in October 1899 it issued impassioned declarations, proclaiming that any attempt to exercise sovereignty over an unwilling people was contrary to the American ideal; but within another two years the league had disappeared.

  Four years after the coup in Hawaii conditions were very different. Republican president William McKinley was in charge, the United States was at war with Spain and control of the Pacific was high on America’s list of priorities. Hawaii had the best deep-water port in the region, and in August 1898 the islands were formally annexed to the United States. Two years later Dole was appointed its first governor, and for the next half century Hawaii was effectively the private fiefdom of what were known as the Five Companies, the best known being Dole Pineapple.

  The ambivalence of America’s imperialism was demonstrated again in the remote Pacific islands of Samoa. Almost by accident the United States obtained a naval station at Pago Pago in 1878 through a treaty with the natives. Samoa had limited strategic and virtually no commercial importance. Nevertheless, when Germany tried to annexe the islands American public opinion was outraged; European imperialists were taking away the freedom of poor downtrodden natives. American and German ships confronted each other, and war was only averted when a typhoon destroyed both fleets. Five years later the US did in Hawaii just what the Germans had tried to do in Samoa. Eventually in 1899 there was a classic imperial carve-up, under which Germany got Western Samoa and America got the rest; Britain got the German Solomon Islands. For Germany and Britain their new possessions were minor jewels added to their imperial crowns, but for America this was not imperialism but altruism. Americans were bringing civilisation to distant shores in the way their ancestors had brought civilisation across the Atlantic. The classic example of this, in their own minds, was the war that had only just ended.

  The Spanish-American War is one of the most important episodes in American history and one of the most misunderstood. To the vast majority of Americans it was what one commentator has called a ‘humanitarian war’. The American Civil War is remembered as a noble war to free the slaves, but that is not what the north set out to do. The Second World War is remembered as a noble war to save the world from the horrors of the concentration camps, but that again is not why the war was fought. The Spanish-American War was the exact opposite: it really was fought to save Cuba from its own holocaust, but that is not how most of the world understood it. Even though Cuba had long been the object of America’s imperial desires, Americans maintained that in destroying the last vestiges of the Spanish empire the United States was proving its anti-imperial credentials. For others, American interference in another nation’s internal affairs could only be a sign of imperial intent.

  The war was a turning point not just in American history but in world history, and set a pattern for what would later be called liberation struggles. The conflict started in 1895. At first America was not directly involved, although war with Spain had been looming for decades. The Spanish empire was on its last legs, and national liberation struggles broke out in Cuba and the Philippines. Spain responded with military force, just as European colonial powers would do in various parts of the world after the Second World War, and the struggles developed into full-scale guerrilla wars. The uprising in Cuba was particularly barbaric: the rebels murdered anyone who did not share their views, destroyed property on a massive scale and executed the emissary Spain sent to negotiate. The Spanish reaction far surpassed the atrocities of the rebels: starving civilians were herded into concentration camps, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. An anarchist bomb killed the reactionary Spanish prime minister, and his successor offered autonomy to Cuba and Puerto Rico. This was rejected by the Cuban insurgents, who by now had considerable American support because of the natural identification of many Americans with the rebels’ desire to throw off colonial rule, the prospect of profitable opportunities for American corporations and the presence in the United States of a powerful group of Cuban exiles.

  The Spanish monarchy regarded Cuba as part of the nation. For Spain rebellion on the island was an attempt at secession that was no different from the rebellion within the United States, which, within living memory, had become one of the bloodiest civil wars in history. How would the US have responded if other nations had intervened in that conflict? Queen Victoria objected that the American insistence on Cuban independence was as absurd as proposing that she give independence to Ireland. To Americans the war was about basic humanity; to nearly everyone else it was about seizing territory. The irony is that however noble the original motives the war became an imperial war, and the American demands soon expanded from Cuban independence to annexation by the US of Puerto Rico and eventually to the conquest of the Philippines.

  Although opposed to direct military intervention President McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Havana where it mysteriously blew up, killing 266 US sailors. The explosion is now generally agreed to have been an accident, but at the time interventionists like the assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt convinced most Americans (and probably convinced themselves) that this was a terrorist attack on American citizens. Public opinion pushed McKinley into a war he did not want and would always regret.

  The American army and navy had been preparing for war with Spain long before the Maine exploded. The US Navy War College had prepared a number of plans for surprise attacks on Spanish naval forces, and Roosevelt had outmanoeuvred his boss, the secretary of the navy John Long, to ensure that the hawkish Commodore George Dewey was given command of the navy’s Asiatic squadron, based in Japan.

  The Pope and the major European powers intervened in a last desperate attempt to avert war, but America was unstoppable. McKinley later insisted that if he had been allowed more time by Congress he could have avoided war. He described America’s declaration of war as ‘the greatest grief of my life’.

  Dewey moved the fleet to Hong Kong and then set sail for Manila. On 25 April 1898 America declared war (this declaration was backdated to 21 April to cover a military blockade of Havana that had already been set in place). On 30 April the US fleet of modern warships arrived in the Philippines. Their arrival was not a complete surprise and the Spanish admiral Patricio Montojo had no illusions about the likely outcome of the battle. For fear that the Americans would shell the city he moved his ships away from Manila and into shallow waters, so that when his ships were hit they would settle on to the bottom of the bay leaving enough of the vessels above water to enable his sailors to escape and scramble ashore. The next day, 1 May, Dewey easily destroyed the wooden vessels of the unfortunate Spanish admiral. As an American soldier was to say eighty-five years later, when the United States invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, it was ‘like Star Wars fighting cavemen’. There were no casualties on the American side; 381 Spanish sailors were killed or wounded.

  On 3 June McKinley sent Spain his formal demands:annexation to the United States of Puerto Rico, part of the Pacific Marianas islands, a port in the Philippines and independence for Cuba. The Spanish response was to send military reinforcements to the Caribbean, but American forces proved themselves superior. During the battle for Havana Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned from the department of the navy to get closer to the action, led the famous charge of the US volunteer cavalry against Spanish outposts at San Juan Hill. Detractors would later point out that the hill had been virtually cleansed of defenders by American Gatling guns before the famous charge, and that Roosevelt’s cavalry attacking from the right arrived after those attacking from the left had already seized control of the summit, but such carping did not detract from the reckless bravery the future president demonstrated on the day, nor from the mountains of priceless publicity his exploits garnered.

  The US navy went on to destroy a Spanish naval squadron off Cuba, and the Spanish forces on the island capitulated. An American invasio
n of the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico was successful, leaving the Philippines still to fight over.

  The war for the Philippines would be a model for many later conflicts. Dewey brought the guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo back from exile in Hong Kong to lead the insurrection. However, following the victories in Cuba and Puerto Rico, it became obvious that Spain would be forced into conceding defeat. Dewey started secret negotiations with the Spanish governor in Manila and the Spanish garrison surrendered to American troops, who in turn stopped the guerrillas entering the city. The result was inevitable: the guerrillas’ struggle for liberation from Spain became a struggle for liberation from America.

  Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy played a role in Philippine struggles for independence as long and mythic as Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s in Poland. Both men initially fought in struggles for national liberation and then went on to see their nations sucked into alien empires, inspiring them to arms yet again. But the two were very different, and although Aguinaldo today is revered by many as the father of Philippine independence, his reputation does not have the unsullied aura of Kosciuzsko. He was already a prominent member of the local elite when he joined a secret society dedicated to driving the Spanish from the Philippines, the Katipunan, in 1895. Guerrilla war broke out the next year, and Aguinaldo grabbed command of the rebel forces after murdering the Katipunan’s political leader. When the Spanish offered rebel leaders bribes to go into exile Aguinaldo took the money and left for Hong Kong. After Dewey brought him back Aguinaldo resumed military command of the rebels, and claimed credit for the Spanish army’s eventual defeat.

  Just as Napoleon’s seizure of Poland from Russia had done little to improve the life of ordinary Poles, so the seizure by America of the Philippines gave nothing to the guerrillas who had started the conflict. Aguinaldo fought on and declared the country’s independence on 12 June 1898, but in 1901 he was captured by American troops. He was offered his life if he would pledge allegiance to the United States, which he did. Aguinaldo continued to campaign for independence for over forty years, but before that could be achieved his country was bloodily transferred from one empire to another when Japan seized the islands in the Second World War. Aguinaldo spoke out in support of the Japanese occupation, but in his post-war trial successfully pleaded that he had done so only because the Japanese had threatened to murder his whole family. Finally in 1946 America granted the Philippines independence, insisting that Independence Day be 4 July. Sixteen years later Independence Day was changed to 12 June, in recognition of the day sixty-four years earlier on which Emilio Aguinaldo had first declared independence; Aguinaldo himself rose from his sickbed to attend the celebrations.