Before I begin to harangue, Dr. Livingston has an announcement that he would like to make.
Let's get it exact, let's see, on the wrong page, okay.
Anyway, the origins, early development of the American Empire,
The Rise of the American Empire, that's a good word, and it's a big topic, the Empire's big, the topic is big, so I want to say a few things.
One of the problems with the American Empire is that there's a lot of sort of empire denial going around.
The mainstream press doesn't seem to think it's plausible that there is an American Empire,
American Empire, who seem to rule the world, but somehow this is benevolent and benign,
somehow an extension of always being attacked for no good reason by foreigners who envy
us and are jealous, something like that. It's very implausible, I think. But nonetheless,
in the mainstream media, and for that matter a lot of mainstream scholarship, you would
never know that there might be an American Empire, and this might be a topic worth looking
One example, just from millions of things you can find on the internet, here's something on world military expenditures.
Okay, at $325 billion, the U.S. military budget for fiscal year, request for fiscal year 2002,
is only six times larger than that of Russia, the second largest spender.
It is more than 22 times as large as the combined spending of the seven countries traditionally identified by the Pentagon
as our most likely adversaries, and I will have such dangerous powers as Cuba, Iran, Iraq, dangerous power of Libya, North Korea, which when they can take time off from eating pinecones will attack us, Sudan and Syria.
And then U.S. spending, projected spending is more than the combined spending of the next 12 nations.
U.S. and its close allies spend more than the rest of the world combined.
Now, I submit that this is unlikely that this is for defense and any traditional meaning of that word.
Even a slightly expanded conception of defense in which we want to protect a few sea lanes seems to me might not be defense.
I suppose it could be argued that we're actually are cowering behind our continental borders and those are a few island possessions with a big fence and we're simply spending all this money because we happen to like and the voters like certain contractors and just want to give them this money I don't think this will hold up so I have a some general things I want to say I think we can take that this is possible give
And talk about the origins. I want to say a few general things and draw some diagrams again.
I think by now the secret, the hidden theme of this whole conference is coming into view.
And it has something to do with the struggle over the long haul between liberty and power.
And we've looked at this in a number of different modes from the standpoint of centralization and the suppression of natural order by the artificial man that Dr. Ludwigsen is speaking of and we've seen some concrete applications of this struggle.
I mentioned the Republican theme in which this was seen as an eternal struggle between court and country and I happen to like the court language.
I mean, this is sort of evocative.
You think of the court and you think of all these corrupt people
hanging around the seat of power,
having dangerous liaisons and spending all the people's money
and plotting all sorts of unnecessary things that they can do.
So now the court is much, much bigger.
The court takes in, I suppose, in this sense,
a large, not just a large bureaucracy,
but a large set of intellectuals,
Maybe some historians, a huge bureaucracy, whole segments of society whose fortunes are tied to the bureaucracy
and various kinds of ideas advocated by the court intellectuals.
So the court party, and this is why it's called a court party, is bigger than the court itself.
And over here we have the country party.
And again, I kind of like that word, even though it's not a perfect term for this.
We could say, alternatively, that these are the state-building party and it's unfinished work, as John Dewey would say.
It just has to keep being built and will never reach the end.
It's just an ongoing process that might... there's just no, you know, final causes anymore, so it just goes on.
And we might think of this as the Libertarian, Decentralist, or some other things.
Anyway, people that are the enemy of that, for very positive reasons, common critique is that you...
I think James Jackson Kilpatrick once wrote that a common liberal notion was that,
oh, you conservatives are just again the government.
Well, for good reason. This is not without some reflection that people might take these positions.
I want to do a little sort of a chart. I hope you can see it in the back.
Well, maybe I'll just erase some of this so you can have a chance of seeing it.
It seems to me that at the danger of producing something like the Nolan Chart,
I'll do a little box chart.
We'll have political possibilities and political economy on one axis, whatever it is.
Anyway, we'll say that there might be laissez-faire liberalism as an economic policy.
And then there might be a general policy of statism.
And this is actually wider because there's many varieties.
There might be mercantilism, there might be communism, there might be some things in between.
So that's actually wider in terms of possibility and in foreign policy you might decide to have empire and intervene all over the place for certain whatever reasons or you might have non-intervention and so you have four possibilities you might have people who say they are for laissez-faire liberalism but yet they objectively seem to be building an empire this has been called many things
might be referred to as the National Review position.
Might be named after my old boyhood hero, Barry Goldwater.
But there's a certain structural incoherence
in that you can't really in the end
determine that you want to rule the world
or even a large portion of it.
And then at home have laissez-faire liberalism.
It's incoherent.
All these other policies in the foreign field
tend to undermine.
And finally, we see these people
drifting into some part of this box here, okay?
Where you have statism and empire,
which seems at least consistent,
and this has a number of possibilities here
from fairly, I guess, fairly benign ones
over to communism, which expanded some,
but the problem with outright communism
was that since it couldn't calculate rationally,
it tended to undermine its own future
and didn't actually work out well in that form.
Now you might have some combination of anti-empire
and laissez-faire liberalism
where I think we would tend to find ourselves.
I think this at least has the advantage
of being intellectually consistent and coherent.
Now you might have non-interventionists
who are also statists and here we might,
I don't know, Ralph Nader somehow comes to mind.
There might be a mild status.
You might have people who believe
in some sort of highly regulated economy
but have understood that there's some relationship
between empire and things they don't like
or they're opposed to on some other grounds
like pacifism or something.
You see this with some of the so-called isolationists
in the 1930s, someone like Charles Baird
who's in favor of corporatism at home,
some kind of regulated economy, or Lawrence Dennis,
there are a number of people who,
so that perhaps is a consistent position,
but it tends to come out of an analysis
which is descended among others from John Hobson,
which taught people to believe
that the market economy as such,
somehow leads to imperialism,
So you have to regulate the economy to prevent that, and so the cure for imperialism, if that's something you care about, is some form of socialism or corporatism, and indeed the late William Apple Williams might be put in this category, though he's really quite an interesting writer, and I think a historian whose insights are still being deliberately neglected by the historical profession at large. Okay, so, so much for that.
I mean by empire and how do we distinguish empire from imperialism?
I mean it used to be if anyone said anything about imperialism it was,
oh you're echoing the Soviet line because only the Soviets talk about imperialism.
And then maybe in some antiquarian sense there might have been some other imperialism,
but it had nothing to do with anything that's going on now.
So we have empire and imperialism.
This term is sometimes, well it's handy because you can get an adjective from it, you can talk about imperialists.
So clearly these words are related, this is Latin in essence, this is the French form of the same word.
Sometimes there's a tendency to use the term imperialism referring to overseas possessions.
Okay, we're gonna just use them kind of interchangeably,
but turning to empire,
been a number of ways this has been used.
It was very typical in the 18th century
for this to mean any large consolidated,
I'm gonna abbreviate, any large consolidated state.
And typically this might mean
it has irresponsible government.
Sometimes it's used in a more neutral sense,
is just meaning there's some large state somewhere in the 18th century writers.
And in the 20th century, the late 20th century, we have tended to use the word also to refer to overseas imperialism.
That was just to make it more dramatic, in case there's a film.
So one of the interesting things about empires, I think, over the long haul is that
The large consolidated kind of empire on land can be very long-lasting, like the Tsarist state in Russia is an empire, even before the Soviet period this was an empire, it's a huge land-based state, and there have been others, China, and these can be very long-lasting, whereas seaborne empires, empires based on sea power, tend to be a bit more brief, the Dutch, Spanish,
and so on to British.
They tend to be a little, have a little less staying power
in the very long run, at least if we can trust Paul Kennedy,
who wrote that interesting book
on the rise and decline of the great powers
about right before the Gulf War, actually,
I think maybe it was one of the books they were reading
and they said, oh no, we can't go into decline.
We're gonna have to have a war to prove we're not in decline.
That may have been it.
So you can view history as a sort of series of incidents
Incidents in which the court power, the country power is dominant in a particular country you're studying, in a particular place you're studying.
Over the long haul, though, it tends to, you tend to see this ratchet effect whereby the court party, at least in our case,
has gained over the long haul and has never suffered a serious setback.
So we'll just table all of this, and I'll say something about the remote origins of the American Empire.
One, of course, is religious, and there's a number of notions here, but the idea of a redeemer nation,
And there's a book by a historian named Tuvesson,
or Tuvesson, which is quite interesting,
I believe it came out in 1968.
And he says that there's a whole interesting millennial theme
that's present in Protestantism
and articulated sometimes by Protestants
during the American Revolution,
that, well, we've had this wonderful revolution
and now we have to export this to the rest of humanity.
And you get the impression it isn't always meant to be just by being a good example that at some point we will have grown in power and we shall have to go out there and knock heads together and make all these people enjoy the many benefits that we have.
They're not necessarily going to be consulted. We're just going to take them these benefits.
And again, a classic book by Weinberg.
That's a classic book on Manifest Destiny,
by which he means a series of rationalizations
for American expansion over land.
And a third thing I can mention
is that there's a very early interest
in the markets of Asia.
But again, this is fairly innocent.
Somebody found out you can sail a quiver ship to China
and get silk and bring it back,
and it's worth a lot more money
in one place than it is in the other.
So this is a moneymaker in New England.
Shippers are interested in this very early,
particularly once the slave trade is closing down
and they aren't making so much money in New England
on the slave trade.
So they have to have alternatives.
So another problem came up implicitly
in my previous lecture.
And that's a question of landed expansion
and Dr. Higgs mentioned something about this.
There's some debate about whether it constitutes empire
when you just keep absorbing all the contiguous land
next to you.
And I mentioned that Harrington had opened up
this possibility that you could expand over land
indefinitely in the West without making the leap
Making the leap or having the downfall of going from Republic to Empire.
And I'll say this much for what it worked for a while.
Because there was Northwest ordinances and so on, the plan was to, however we acquired the territory,
by war or purchase, to organize into territories of some roughly similar size.
When enough people arrived, they would constitute a new people, organize a republic and form a government and Congress would have to admit them into the Union.
Now the only problem here it seems to me is the Roman problem, you expand rapidly, there's going to be a lot of fighting about the spoils and the details of how this process works.
And of course this cut across the slavery question and a number of other questions and so on.
And so on, but in a way I suppose there were those who argued that in the standpoint of empire in the bad sense that expanding into relatively empty land while it may not be good for the Indians, didn't necessarily undermine the constitutional system in the way that overseas imperialism would, or indeed, and neither of those in their initial phases undermined the way that having a major war of the kind we had in the 1860s
So I'll table that. There are some historians, like Walter McDougall, who say, well, the expansion is just continuous.
First thing you see is Florida, Yucatan, I don't know, this is Cuba, very rough, Baja California, I suppose, keep expanding.
And then they have this habit of expanding, so then they just say, well, it's across the Pacific.
So there may be a way in which this is true for some people, and they say, well, now that we've incorporated all this land into the farm sector,
The farm sector, we've got all these farm exports, we have much more farm exports than we can possibly eat, we'll have to have foreign markets for that.
And the farmers do by the second half of the 19th century become a big interest group, some of them asking for the government to go find them some foreign markets.
But again, this could be done by reciprocity treaties, it doesn't require you to build an empire.
You can see why I didn't go into cartography.
But anyway, that's the map.
So let's fast forward.
The Southern Confederacy has been suppressed.
And then some of the same people suppressed the Plains Indians.
Some of the one or two of the same officers
involved in that process of rounding out the landed internal empire
of the improved and saved union and its government.
And things could have gone back to normal.
We could have said, oh, look, we've got all this land, we could just develop this land peacefully
and develop this big internal market and trade with the rest of the world
and things would go rocking along indefinitely without any great disturbances.
Who's going to attack us? Probably not Canada.
You never know, but you know, not a lot of enemies.
Two huge oceans. Who's going to launch an amphibious invasion?
You know, is the King of Portugal going to attack us?
Probably not. This didn't seem satisfactory to a lot of people.
And by the 1880s, you start to get an agitation that we need a blue water navy.
Captain Mahan starts writing about sea power is the key to world history and we have to build an adequate navy to get in the big power game.
And somehow it isn't enough. We already have a kind of rough dominance in Latin America to the extent that we exercise it.
But also, once again, we cross into the religious sphere and pick up the millennial theme with the missionaries.
I have a lot of missionary effort, and I'm sure this is all well and good, but very often missionaries
go off very far away and involve them in some place, themselves in some place, and save souls.
And then they want their home government to intervene to protect their group in the society
from people that are picking on them or somehow they tend to be a force for
intervention. You might see this in South African history with the London Missionary
Society playing an interesting role in dragging British power further into the
South African frontier and so forth. But also you get writers, people that's sort
of extending the social gospel into foreign policy, like Josiah Strong, who wants a kind of general expansion of American power to help Christianize and uplift and so forth, so there's interesting overlap.
And it's a perfect illustration of what Tom Woods was talking about. There's a great quote from Burgess during the progressive era. He was one of them. I can't think of his first name. What's Burgess's first name?
That's right, of course. Thanks, David. Yes, John W. Burgess, who says, referring to, I think specifically to Roosevelt and his party, the Progressive Party, that the jingoes and the social reformers have gotten together.
Now, the other interpretation would be that they'd always been together because, again, it's an elective affinity.
These are the people that want to increase state power at home and abroad.
There's not a huge distinction to them.
They want to increase the power of the state in all areas.
So that's why that's at least a consistent position.
Now, something else comes into the picture, and that's labor strife in the late 19th century.
Panic of 1873.
More importantly, the panic of 1893,
which can be analyzed, I should think, along the lines of monetary policy and so forth.
But a lot of people interpreted this labor strife and economic recession as proving there was something fundamentally wrong with the political economy.
And leaping into the fray, certain people said, well, it means we need a new frontier.
And the new frontier will take the form of foreign markets.
And this, of course, is the famous Turner thesis.
Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote a famous article in 1893 saying that the frontier had ended.
And this was terrible because the frontier had been what had given American society its character,
white Americans had been individualistic and democratic and all these good things.
And if the frontier, that is this endless supply of empty land to the West, if that ran out,
We wouldn't have the social safety valve for discontent in the cities
and they would have more trade unions and socialists and populists and all sorts of unhappiness.
And this was a problem.
And in the great article that Murray Rothbard did on the origins of the Federal Reserve,
which is in the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics,
I can't think of the exact issue, but it's four or five issues ago,
He links up people making the economic argument.
And then here we have people like Conant, professional economists,
making the argument that actually anticipates the Leninist argument.
The argument Lenin made famous after Lenin in some ways plagiarized Hobson's material.
Hobson was writing about the Boer War and what the economic causes were on the British side of the Boer War.
Well, Lennon presents a similar argument in which it's the failure of capitalism,
it's the inherent unbalanced productivity of capitalism
that causes capitalists to demand foreign markets
for investment and for goods.
And we've already got these people who've been dreaming
of the China market all this time.
They want the markets anyway,
here's an economic rationalization where they have to have them,
the economy won't function without them somehow.
I think we would tend to agree
this is not really a great economic analysis.
But it is interesting that this is inverted Leninism,
and the Leninist argument is formulated
by some American economists before Lenin,
formulates this idea.
The difference is that the American writers say that,
well, we like the market economy pretty well.
We just don't think it works very well,
so we want to save it through imperialism,
and this would be good.
And the Leninists are saying,
well, no, imperialism is bad
because bad things happen to the people
in the countries that are subjected to imperialism.
But it is interesting that it's virtually
the same argument, okay.
Now what happens to actually get the process underway?
Well, you've got a number of people,
I think of as a sort of historical block
in the Gramscian sense of their own historical block.
And this includes Theodore Roosevelt, Brooks Adams, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Captain Mahan, or maybe some other people.
And they begin talking about, well, the solution to all of America's problems is a large policy.
And there's no end to things that having a large policy, there's no end to things that this will improve.
and it'll solve the economic problem they believe they have.
It'll also mean that we're playing our proper role
in the world now that we've come to maturity
and mature powers should have colonies
or should have empires, it's just what's done.
It's our coming out party, whatever.
Roosevelt, of course, is this belligerent lunatic
who thinks we should have a war once in a while,
just so we will keep our manly virtues.
You have to have some war.
I don't know if there's other ways to do that, but he seemed to think war was the most obvious one.
So there's a whole number of things that they want to solve at once.
And what happens concretely is that Cuba, which is the last important,
or maybe the last Spanish possession at all in the New World,
Western Hemisphere is undergoing another revolution.
and there have been a number of Cuban revolutions in the 19th century, the 10 years war and so on.
Well, now this is underway again in Cuba, you've got the Cuban independence movement,
inspired, I guess, by the writings of Jose Marti, the last writer to combine nationalism, romanticism,
and maybe liberalism as a package deal, and he goes down to Cuba himself.
All the Cuban refugees are in Ocala and New Orleans and various American cities agitating
and then they actually get something going and Jose Marti goes down there and gets killed
in the first couple of weeks because, I mean, he's a writer, he's not a military guy, but
at least he did what he thought was right.
And so the Spanish authorities have this problem and they're suppressing the Cuban rebellion
and various means that seem a bit stern to outside powers who complain about them like the policy of re-concentracion
where they round up, well they figure out very quickly, this is what always happens in these situations,
that some of the population supports the guerrillas, these people don't have an army, they're not fighting an organized war yet,
they're burning sugar plantations and using hit and run tactics
And they're supported in some parts of Cuba, I think more particularly the East, by the population.
So what people do when they want to win a war like this, invariably, is they say,
well, we'll have to sort of somehow separate the guerrillas from the population.
So they turn to a policy in effect of making a war on the population.
Again, exact parallel with what happens in South Africa, what happens when the Americans,
Well, we'll get to that but shortly in the Philippines, separate the people from the guerrillas by making war on the people you put the people in strategic hamlets and put barbed wire around them and they can't get out and support the guerrillas usually when this happens no one says well we have to provide some way for these people to make a living while this is going on we have to have some clean water we have to have some food medical supplies generally this is very hard on the population when they're suddenly being separated from their livelihood
In Vietnam, the United States got the brilliant idea that you could do this with airplanes.
Just create one of these zones and say, well, we won't bomb inside this zone.
We'll bomb everything outside of it. So I'm not sure that worked all that well either.
Okay, so the Spaniards are doing this.
And in the meantime, we're having a presidential election in 1896.
1996, a number of reasons why this might be important.
One reason is that it's the end of the Democratic Party,
as we have known it, that the sort of left millennialist
elements associated with populism take over the nomination
and become a permanent force within the Democratic Party
for this kind of social welfare, social gospel thinking,
which is later secularized, I suppose.
This is a simplification, but nonetheless,
You never get a guy like Grover Cleveland again,
unless we count the unsuccessful Al Smith maybe as being a,
but that's another special factor there,
again, a religious factor with Al Smith.
And on the Republican side, William McKinley,
very successful Ohio politician
who is aware of this whole argument about foreign markets
and the relationship of this to the tariff and so forth,
is nominated, is easily elected because at this point,
the idea of the high tariff has been sold
to industrial workers as somehow the source
of their prosperity and other people are afraid
of the populistic Brian and what he might do
in monetary policy.
So McKinley is elected.
And now they've got a problem and an opportunity.
They've got this war in Cuba, 90 miles away famously
from the last part of Florida.
And they say, well, we have American property and maybe, you know, a few American lives might be in danger, we'd like to protect that and get these Spaniards to solve this problem somehow.
On the other hand, I think it's pretty clear that they also realized that if this situation led to a war with Spain, well, it's clear who would win, there's not much question who would win, very unequal contest at that point.
And then the United States could, at the end of such a successful war, take some better real estate from Spain.
That is the Philippine Islands and various islands in the Pacific, which would be wonderful coaling stations and stepping stones through these markets of Asia.
And this is more or less what happens. I won't go through the whole political history.
The American press takes literally any claim made by the Cuban rebels and puts it in the front page.
As was typical of that period, I'm not sure things have changed completely.
The press will just completely make up stories about Spanish atrocities.
So it's hard to sort out.
Nonetheless, there's a campaign going on in favor of the Cuban rebels and humanitarian intervention.
and then McKinley pretends to bow to this public pressure and he pretends to bow to pressure in Congress
when in fact McKinley, like Brer Rabbit, is getting thrown into briar patch, which is precisely where he wanted to go.
I think Forrest MacDonald may be the first historian to have used this briar patch motif,
but McKinley was apparently a master of appearing to not be in charge and to not be making policy,
But he just was very subtle and would manipulate people and accomplish his goals.
I think he's been misunderstood.
And so to make a long story short, by, I guess, by April of 1898,
McKinley gets a declaration of war.
There's been a series of supposed negotiations in which governments have changed in Spain and negotiations go on.
And every time the Spanish government says,
okay, we'll concede that point.
And you think, well, that's it, it's resolved.
Then the Americans come back.
Well, we actually have these two other points.
So the negotiations are probably meant to fail.
It seems like that might be the case.
So anyway, McKinley has a budget for a war
and he's authorized to go to war.
At least he actually didn't proclaim on his own
that he could send troops to Cuba.
And we'll cut through the fun stuff.
We got a new drink, the Cuba Libre, and some new songs, and new public hero Dewey, the, I guess, Commodore, I don't think he was an Admiral, I don't think.
And it's a very brief war. The American casualties in Cuba mostly die of disease and bad food supplied by the Army contractors.
The military casualties are pretty minor compared to a lot of wars.
And it's also used as a means of reconciling the defeated Southerners because they're given prominent positions in the campaign.
Feit and Joe Wheeler is called out of Congress to help lead the campaign in Cuba.
Former Confederate Brigadier Feit and Joe Wheeler and so forth.
So there's a lot of purposes that are served by this.
And in the end, what's important I think is the American acquisition of the Philippines.
We do turn Cuba into a kind of protectorate, but Congress had passed a clause saying we were only in this to save the Cubans and liberate them, so there was no room to maneuver and actually make Cuba into a territory.
But we did acquire Puerto Rico, I guess, of Ladrones, some other islands, and so forth.
The Philippines are the most important because they're the ones that give you a wonderfully large harbor on the way to these Asian markets that these people are interested in.
Now what's interesting, this is not a Marxist analysis because there's not some abstract capitalist class, some big class of capitalists who are calling for this.
This whole policy is the creature of the people who are theorizing it,
ambitious politicians and small segments of business who think they may directly benefit.
So this is the interesting thing.
In fact, Murray Rothbard used to say that the vulgar Marxists,
the so-called vulgar Marxists are always better on these questions
than the high theoretical Marxists who never go out and do the research
and find out who did what and where the money went.
And so it's the, oh, someone who might count as an economically,
a Marxist interested in really following the economic trail,
someone like Philip Foner comes to more interesting conclusions
vis-a-vis who supported war in 1861 than his relation,
I don't know the exact relationship,
but his relative, Eric Foner,
who seems to find fuzzy ideology all around
and high noble causes, so there's a difference.
So the vulgar Marxists are actually better
because they'll go out and do sometimes a hard research.
And we have to, I suppose, emulate this
or where we haven't done it, we can look at their research
at least and see if it holds up.
Okay, so now we have the Philippines,
Treaty of Paris and so forth.
This is debated in Congress.
There are a lot of people who don't wanna go
into the overseas empire business.
They think, well, it's one thing to acquire
a bunch of land and incorporate it into new states, into the logic of a Republican system,
even though that's changed a little bit since the war of secession.
Still, it's sort of a leap to suddenly get into overseas empire the way the British have done
and the French and the Dutch and so forth.
This might be damaging to our institutions and it might just be morally bad to govern people
without their consent.
In fact, there's a number of ironies.
There were one or two
southern congressmen who made a direct link and said,
well, if the Philippines aren't governed any better
than South Carolina was governed during Reconstruction,
they're in for a bad time.
There were a few that made the direct comparison.
Unfortunately, for getting that kind of argument,
This is, of course, the period of the New South ideologists.
All these guys wanna do is forget about the unpleasant trees
for the most part and be reconciled and be cut in
on the big card game.
And they're willing to be very cooperative
at the national level if they can be cut in.
It's sort of, has something to do with the rise
of Atlanta perhaps, but that might be unfair.
I mean, some of this is just commerce
and I don't object to commerce as such.
But nonetheless, you get some of this criticism, but it's not a groundswell.
And from the old enemies, and this is interesting,
at every stage in the rise of the state, there's a sort of piston effect.
The rise in the power of the state pushes former enemies together into coalition.
So now you have people who say, well, everything was fine.
Nothing wrong with saving the Union by force, but now this overseas empire is wrong.
I mean, Lincoln was right, but it would be wrong to govern the Filipinos without their consent.
It's okay to govern, make the South stay in the Union, but this is wrong.
People draw lines at different places historically.
So now former enemies are in the anti-imperialist coalition.
So you have someone like Edward Atkinson, textile manufacturer,
someone with links to the abolitionist movement, complaining about this new policy, this new state policy,
but not making the analogy
that some of the Southerners would have made.
So you have an interesting coalition
that finds expression in the Anti-Imperialist League
which lasts for a few years, for about 1900
until it kind of just withers away
into his lack of interest, maybe about 1921.
So you have the Anti-Imperialist League,
there's Moorfield's story, there's any number of writers
who try to make the case that it's wrong
to Have an Overseas Empire and Make Various Arguments
in Declaration of Independence or the Nation of Government.
The most interesting thing I think is that
some of the anti-imperialists were driven
to quoting Judge Taney from the Dred Scott decision
against the idea of empire.
Because Taney, and of course, he's saying a lot
of other things and about the specific case of
Was Dred Scott a slave or not?
Tony went into a lot of republican theory
and he said, well, republics are sort of contained systems.
They have to expand in this regular way
that we've already invented.
Otherwise it's not a republican system
and it's not constitutional.
You can't constitutionally govern territories indefinitely
without the consent of the people.
And here he's referring to the Western territories,
whether there might be slavery or not be slavery
in the 1850s, but now the poor anti-imperialists, some of whom are descended from abolitionists,
are having to make this argument and use the argument from Tawny that we can't govern the
Philippines territorially. And then there were some politically incorrect arguments made at the time
by people who said, we've got enough immigrants and foreigners now, we don't really need Filipinos,
and there were some arguments of that type. In fact, well, I won't go into that, but there were
There were some, we didn't want to govern people who we, at the time we had no, very unlikely we'd want to really make them a state, okay.
And then there were certain economic interests who didn't like the idea that if we somehow incorporated the Philippines as territory, then they'd be, they might be within our tariff walls.
And then there'd be Filipino industries competing with maybe our sugar or whatever.
Although the question of our sugar is very complicated because sometimes our sugar is actually in Cuba
But it's being bought by an American company and so forth or our sugars in Utah and Idaho, and it's the beet sugar
producers and their congressmen
Wanting to protect their share of the sugar market. So it's sort of tricky. I mean, we finally give the Philippines independence
But Congress finally votes independence for the Philippines in the 30s
And the sugar argument plays quite a role there
I think, and sometimes you organize labor.
They say, well, gee, we have to give the Philippines
their independence so they won't come here
and lower our wages, all those Filipinos lowering our wages.
And in any event, we want to be able to put them
outside the tariff wall.
So the economic considerations seem to have played
the major role when independence is granted,
but then it's interrupted because then the Japanese
come and occupy the islands.
And so then they're not independent either
till after the war.
But what happened in the meantime?
Well, what happens in the meantime
is that the Filipinos aren't happy.
There's been a revolution like the parallel
to the one in Cuba going on in the Philippine islands
before the Americans became involved in Cuba.
And they're kind of on break.
They're kind of on break because the Spanish government
had a few years before this negotiated a truce and said,
look, we'll give you a bunch of money
if you'll quit fighting us.
So Aguinaldo's agents went to Hong Kong
and bought a bunch of weapons.
And then the Spaniards said apparently,
well, we won't give you the second check.
It seems it's not what we wanted.
So this is a sort of rebellion and suspension.
It's a potential rebellion.
And as soon as they find out that the Americans
may be entering a war against Spain,
they say this is our opportunity and they appear in arms.
And so there's a very brief naval battle
in Manila Harbor and then we proceed to occupy the outskirts of the city and the Filipino
insurgents be a part of the occupying.
This breaks down very quickly for a number of reasons and one of which is that the Philippine
insurgents believe that they have been led to believe, they think they've been sort of
been hinted that the Americans have come to liberate them and suddenly when they learn
about the peace treaty they find out the Americans have come to be the new
landlords and some of them are unhappy and the more militant ones then proceed
to continue the struggle against the Americans and this is what in American
historiography is referred to for some reason as the Philippine insurrection I
don't know why this is Indians have insurrections but it's not a proper war
somehow because we acquired the territory fair and square through
of International Treaty at Paris, and these guys are just insurrectionists and so on.
And this costs several times more than the whole Spanish-American War itself did.
This is the consequence that costs more than the original exercise.
And I have the figures in my article, not to be as shamelessly self-promoting as the previous speaker,
But in my article, in the Costs of War book,
I have the figures on this, on the costs,
and then I have the article on McKinley
and in the presidency book, so you could look for it there.
Anyways, it's very costly,
and it's also very costly for the Filipinos,
about 200,000 of whom managed to die
while they're being incorporated into the empire of freedom.
Now, this isn't all battlefield deaths.
I mean, so many insurgents are killed, that might be,
I don't remember, I have to look it up myself,
but a lot of this is just,
when you proceed to fight a counterinsurgency,
now we're doing exactly what we complained, officially,
that Spain was doing in Cuba.
Now we're doing the same thing,
we're wiping out whole villages
regarding the entire population
of parts of the Philippines as the enemy.
becomes a very ugly war because, again, it's the same thing.
Well, we don't know who the friendly ones are.
You know, who are the friendly natives?
We don't know for sure.
So it's one of the just one of the logical
natural problems of empire is trying to separate out
who your supposed friends are and so forth.
And so this is all, this is sort of malnutrition,
disease, everything attendant on the war,
disruption of normal food production and so forth.
So it's not all battlefield deaths or massacres, although there is a lower figure of maybe
on the order of 10,000, I can't remember.
Okay, to make a long story short, this continues down to about, I think, 1902, and it ends
because Roosevelt officially, Roosevelt who's now president, because McKinley, McKinley's
been re-elected in the meantime with Roosevelt as vice president, and then he unfortunately
takes a trip to Buffalo, New York, where some immigrant shoots him, and it's unfortunate.
And then Teddy Roosevelt becomes president. I don't know if people wanted this, to put
Roosevelt in the vice presidential slot. Now he's president. Well, he simply signs a proclamation,
well, you know, the Philippine troubles are over, officially. So there was a little fighting
It came down to about 1910 in the lower islands, especially the southern islands where they're particularly difficult because they're Muslims and they have these funny bolo things that they will throw at you and the rocks wind around your, the rope around your neck and you're dead or something, so this is when we adopted the, I think what the 45 automatic replaced the 38. We had to have more stopping power, right, because of this part of it.
A whole reorganization of the Army, because the Army hadn't performed brilliantly.
I mean, there's some funny stories about all the supplies piling up in Tampa,
and the officers are all drinking, getting soused at Mr. Plant's hotel,
and the enlisted men are all enjoying the sinful delights of the port of Tampa,
And then they're all getting sent winter uniforms to go to Cuba and all sorts of logistical problems in getting the expedition off the ground.
Oh, there's one funny anecdote I can't leave out, and this is just to drop back to the actual little bit of fighting.
There is a huge amount of fighting, and Roosevelt did not win the war all by himself by charging up with his volunteers.
This is not true. It's just his version.
But there was a very funny incident at the Battle of Las Guasimas where Fighting Joe Wheeler and his men advance and the Spaniards start to run and Wheeler says,
Come on boys, we got the damn Yankees on the run, forget which war he's in. So it's the best quote from the war.
So anyway, now we have the Philippines and now it's proving costly to keep the Philippines.
This is constantly at the end of the Philippine people.
But I think what happens in the end
is that enough of the ilustrado class,
this is the educated class, people of illustration,
ilustrados, I think there's some of these people,
all these people are flexible.
And they say, well, we'll just have to,
you know, we can get along with the Americans.
After all, we got along with the Spaniards.
We collaborated with them pretty well.
Let's just get along with the Americans and cut our losses.
But it is interesting that when the Japanese arrive,
In 1941, Aguinaldo is still alive, and he proceeds to collaborate with the Japanese.
He's quite happy to do that, so it's one of those funny things.
Okay, so this is an interesting story.
Well, what happens institutionally?
Well, there are some interesting cases constitutionally
about whether the Constitution applied to these new territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.
These are the insular cases and I think it was the Secretary of War who said that once the court decided these cases that they seemed to mean that the Constitution follows the flag but doesn't quite catch up with the flag.
So eventually we draw up a kind of fundamental law for the Philippines, the Institute of Self-Government eventually.
And we give the Philippines the whole Bill of Rights, except for two.
This is as we institute a local government to replace Taft and the purely American bureaucracy.
So we give them all the rights except two, and guess what those two might be?
Trial by jury and right to bear arms.
That's odd. Why would those two be left out?
So, this is interesting, but safety is important in these situations.
Okay, so this enhances the presidency, because it gives McKinley an occasion to expand the so-called war powers,
which Lincoln had invented, which is Lincoln's theory that there were war powers inherent in the presidency.
It's nowhere in the Constitution.
And Raoul Berger has shown this in a very good book on executive privilege.
And before that, there's a book by Edward S. Corwin,
the fact that it may be his only good book that I know of,
Edward S. Corwin, in 1947, called Total War and the Constitution.
And he made the case that Lincoln had simply invented the whole idea of war powers.
There's two separate clauses.
One clause is purely administrative, it's kind of housekeeping, it's,
you know, if you have a chief executive, then he would, you know, enforce the laws.
This is peacetime.
The President shall take care that the laws are enforced, some words to that effect.
Elsewhere it says that the President is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
So I guess they can issue orders, tell him to salute, shine their shoes.
If there's a war, he can actually draw up a battle plan.
The two clauses don't seem to have any organic connection, but in Lincoln's mind,
this was a big, vast, unlimited fund of war powers inherent in the presidency,
which he then proceeded to act on that theory.
So McKinley is now able to act in his capacity as ruler of foreign territory
and starts issuing some of these administrative orders that Tom was talking about.
I don't know if the curve goes up at that point, but he issues some.
And we have an expansion of the bureaucracy because now we have to have the Bureau of Insular Affairs.
I don't know why they just didn't put it in the Bureau of Indian Affairs
since the American troops in the Philippines had tended to...
Many of the officers had fought in the last Indian wars and they tended to think of the
Filipinos as sort of Indians who were, you know, further west, had the Indian, had the
same Indian fighting attitude. Might have just merged those two bureaucracies.
And so we have the reorganization of the army because of logistical failures, but also we've
emerged as a world power. And this is interesting, can someone advise me on the time?
Is that with questions?
Pardon?
Five minutes without Q&A.
Okay, good, I can do that.
Okay.
Well, it's interesting, because now we are emerging as an international power.
And the British are sitting up and taking notice, and the British are saying, well,
our backward cousins are emerging as a great power.
They're surpassing us industrially.
We need to shape up our backward cousins.
And we need to turn them into the junior partner in an Anglo-American world hegemony.
It would be nice to the Americans.
So we won't criticize anything that they're doing in the Philippines,
even though it's the exact same sort of thing they complained the Spaniards were doing in Cuba,
and, you know, pursue the Anglo-American friendship, okay?
And this is reciprocated in the Boer War.
During the Boer War, Secretary Hayes is as pro-British as he could have been
without actually being on the British payroll and attempts to prevent any criticism.
The delegates arrive from the Boer Republics and he won't see them.
And so if you had a funny thing at the Democratic Convention where, let's see, that would be...
I guess it's the next convention.
No, no, it's just 1900, can it be?
Yeah, hang on.
Well, I guess the imperialism issue is already on the table, yeah.
Democratic convention, I guess it would be 1900.
You have a funny thing where a few of the Democrats
take an interest in the imperialism issue
in a general kind of way,
and they have, some of them are waving
The Transfall Flag of the South African Republic at the Democratic Convention
So it's an interesting thing.
They saw these issues as being the same British imperialism,
one place, our imperialism in the Philippines.
And so did the leadership.
They felt a certain commonality with the British
and sympathized with the British and their problems running an empire.
and indeed there always been a wing in the American political system that had
forever felt a great kinship to the British and wanted to pursue the British
project except it would be the American project this has been in place as long
as there's been people like Alexander Hamilton around it seems to me okay so
Do I have anything at all in terms of time?
No, if you want to answer, I have a few questions.
Okay, we'll make a long story short.
This all gets worse because then we have now a world power
and Wilson has to get us into the First World War,
and many things happen because of that.
Okay.
Thank you very much.