Well, the papers has already been commented by Lew Rockwell and in one of the topics have dealt with the, or will be dealing with the idea of the imperial presidency.
And I think it's fitting that we should do so for nothing has so characterized the past century of our history as our revolution toward empire.
It is appropriate that many of the opponents of empire and imperial intervention a century ago were advocates of market liberalism, who saw the events of 1898 and after, especially the annexation of the Philippines, as the first step down the slippery road toward imperial decline, such as had befallen Rome and other civilizations in the past.
One intervention always seems to necessitate another until what was once thought of as an aberration becomes a predictable historical tendency or pattern, and I guess we once thought of impeachment as an aberration, but when you begin to get two of them discussed in 25 years, it no longer is an aberration either, I guess.
For this dire prediction, the opponents of empire were ridiculed by those who saw the
United States as an exception to those tendencies that had plagued other nations and civilizations.
From this progressive, imperialist perspective, one might say we were sort of above or beyond
history, a providential people indeed.
This knee-jerk optimism, however, had not been shared by the Founding Fathers. As early
as 1775, John Adams had understood that a republic was defined by a rule of law, an
empire by capricious acts of its rulers. Elsewhere, I've suggested that aspects of empire were
were already present in the birth of our republic. But there's no denial that the reality by
the turn of the 20th century is that we had become serious players in the empire game.
But with respect to the American Revolution and George Washington, I think our first effort
and Empire, in the sense of the Philippines, was in 1781. We had tried to take Canada
earlier. By 1781, it was pretty clear the Canadians didn't want to be part of the American
states. And Washington sent Lafayette up to take Canada. And he met with the Green Mountain
Boys. And the Green Mountain Boys, Ethan Allen said, yes, certainly General Lafayette. They
They were militia, of course, not standing army.
And they said, we'd be happy to go launch an attack on Canada.
There's just one thing.
We would like three things.
We want double pay, double rations, and plunder.
And Lafayette said, well, General Washington hasn't authorized me to give you that.
And so he said, well, then we'll just go back to the old lady back there in the Green Mountains.
And they departed and so much for the attempt to take Canada, the first American foreign
aid program, 1792, to Haiti.
Most Floridians, I think, will be surprised to learn that my state, with 15 million people
now, fourth in numbers in the nation.
This year, Florida taxpayers don't know it, but we've given a half million already for
Haitian aid.
to Government, not People to People.
Very interesting how these things start as aberrations and then sort of continue.
So we've had a succession of American presidents who've hinted that they're reluctant or ambivalent
about doing this or the other, but we've had one foreign intervention after another.
When McKinley made the decision to acquire the real estate in the Philippines and elsewhere,
it fell to administrators such as Elihu Root and William Howard Taft to design and build
the edifice, the colonial edifice.
In doing so, they helped to move us toward an institutionalization of empire that would
would make it difficult for the nation to disengage from such policies.
And I think it's instructive that the two people that spoke already before me have touched
upon the bureaucracy, as Lowell mentioned, that begins to proliferate around the presidency.
And even with the first president, we have Hamilton there, and those people arguing that
And he was really running the show. And I guess what I'm going to say here is that William
McKinley is there as president and certainly later the flamboyant Teddy Roosevelt. But
you can't understand their presidencies unless you comprehend the role that Elihu Root had
as Secretary of War and then William Howard Taft had in the Philippines and then as Secretary
of War and as President.
And Taft is there for 12 years in one capacity or another.
You could argue on that basis in terms of being in that cockpit of policy that Taft
was perhaps one of the most influential people in the 20th century, though he's not viewed
that way, because we don't see the continuity of the kinds of things that he was doing.
And I might mention something about empire. How many of you here, just curious, have ever
worked in the National Archives around the turn of the 20th century? Anybody? Am I the
only one? Okay. Well, you know, there's this nice myth about the British Empire, that it's
sort of, you know, in some sort of way backed into empire, sort of muddled in there, you
know. Nobody muddles into empire. It is a very conscious, bureaucratic, centralized
endeavor if you play it at all. And there's no better way to understand the imperialization
of America in the 20th Century than to go look in the National Archives. I don't mean
for any specific document. Go and look at the way records were kept. Before Empire,
we have a quaint government that takes documents and folds them up into thirds and puts a
little red string around them. And when you go to work there, since so few of us do, you
You kind of blew the dust off and opened it up to read this document, and they were so
afraid when I microfilmed a few of them back 30 something years ago. But by the time you
get Elihu Root in there, who reorganized the Army, reorganized the State Department, they
had to reorganize the record keeping because you can't run an empire with little pieces
is a string wrapped around the paper. And you notice it immediately in the way that
the records are kept. So here's Taft, who gets into the Philippines, negotiating with
the Vatican, the Panama Canal, Cuba, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution,
the Nicaraguan Revolution, and dollar diplomacy in a whole bunch of places. So it's an incredible
kind of involvement that we're looking at here. I don't have time in this short presentation
to deal with more than just a couple of them. We'll try to get into the Philippines and
Cuba if we have time. Taft was a fascinating character. When I was doing research on the
anti-imperialist, I was in the Wisconsin archives, and he took a trip back to the Philippines
in 1905, and there's this hilarious, I started laughing as I was reading the papers and everyone
was looking at me, but if you can picture this, they were on this boat and it was at
a small Philippine village out on an island, so between the boat and the dock was kind
of a disparity. So there were about five or six little Filipinos, as this fellow described
it, holding this ladder while Big Bill Taft, over 300 pounds, is out there in the middle
The Man had prickly heat all over him. He had several severe operations while he was in the islands, but there's no question he became a very dedicated administrator for the Empire.
And what the tragedy has tapped, it seems to me, is that here is a man who, when McKinley made the decision to take the Philippines, was opposed to it.
He was an anti-imperialist, but he also wanted to be on the Supreme Court sometime in his career, and as you all know, he finally made it after his presidency.
So he allowed himself to be convinced, even though he was an anti-imperialist, that the thing to do was go out there and shape things up in the Philippine islands.
And he always was thinking of his career, so he managed to use the leverage to become head of the commission to replace Jacob Gould Sherman, who is the one who used the term reluctant imperialist, by the way.
Kevin was president of Cornell and went out in the first Philippine Commission and then went and returned.
So Taft went out to the islands and by the time he got there, of course, the insurgency was in full swing.
The killing was going on in full swing.
And those of us who are Southerners can appreciate the differences between the military and the Philippines,
Headed by General Arthur MacArthur and the Civilian Administration headed by William Howard Taft because the Army in the Philippines is very much like Lincoln and Johnson at the end of the Civil War.
They believed they didn't really want to meddle too much in Philippine affairs except to
put down the insurrection.
And so if you were one of the rebels and you signed the oath with the United States, you
could participate again.
Now the civilian administrators in Taft wanted to meddle in the Philippine Revolution and
They took the position that the Radical Republicans did, and that is, they wanted their people in, you see.
Now once you take that position, as we all know, it means the intervention gets deeper and deeper and deeper.
Because you're meddling in a very complex social phenomenon, revolution.
and Taft managed to be president or secretary of war when we had the Philippine Revolution,
the Cuban Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, you know, that's a
lot of meddling and revolution.
And it's interesting, I guess meddlers get tired after about 12 years because the Northern
Army withdrew from its southern occupation after about 12 years.
And the regime of Taft in the Philippines, when they seriously went after this, before
the Democrats got back in and began a Philippinization of the service, was 12 years, from 1900 to
1912.
And I suppose you take a little comfort in that.
But almost every revolution is like the American Revolution, as Carl Becker said, it's not
only a question of home rule, it's a question of who is going to rule at home.
And we like to talk about self-determination, but really we mean self-determination as long
as those people that get in think the way we do.
And I think that what Taft tended to do, and what we've done in all these revolutions,
is to begin to support people that view the world the way we do.
And the sociologists these days, as they study this, they talk about bureaucracy's ability
to Induce Change and they call that state capacity and what it really tells you is how
much sociology is this kind of a status study as far as I'm concerned.
Now in western civilization the first people who really studied social change were the
Catholics in China after Marco Polo as they went out there. The Jesuits had a great debate
with the Dominicans, the Franciscans, about how to achieve change in China.
And those two philosophies about how to achieve change are still with us today.
The Jesuit view is that you work with the existing elite and you try to find common
denominators like heaven and tian as being, the Dominican view is the pure unadulterated
were none of this compromise and going to the masses and of course they got
involved with such arguments that the Chinese Emperor finally threw them out.
But when I lectured in the Philippines for the State Department in the 1980s I
was reminded of how the United States instead of allowing the kind of
of Revolutionary Development that people like Senator Borah argued in the 20th century as one of our great anti-imperialists that we had to allow.
We always went back and retrenched ourselves with the existing rulers, in this case the people who'd been sympathetic to the Spanish.
And I gave a talk at the Makati Business Club. It's sort of like the New York Chamber of Commerce.
There were about 1,500 people out there. I'd been dragged away from the Joint Economic Committee where I was working as an economist on housing to lecture in the Philippines because I'd written on this.
And this fellow took me aside. He was a Harvard Ph.D. economist, Philippine minister. He said, you have a Spanish name.
and so he took me to his club and here was this magnificent thing out of late 19th century Paris, Gilded, etc.
All the wives had just returned from either Madrid or Paris on shopping tours and he regaled me, said,
We said, you know, we Spanish have been here, we've had to endure the brown man, the yellow man, the Japanese, the brown man again, but we survive and endure in all of this.
And the real tragedy at the end of World War II, we put into a kind of Orwellian black hole the Filipinos who had fought against the Japanese.
One, about imperialist meddling on Taft's model, is that revolutions from the American
and any other, very complex social phenomena, just as the market is a very complex economic
phenomenon. And you have about as much chance as an outsider trying to meddle through intervention,
Military intervention in a vast thing like the Chinese Revolution as you have as some kind of progressive planner meddling in the market.
And I think the two are very similar, the analysis there.
Lesson two about empire is, as was touched on, that it requires a very large bureaucracy to carry out imperial policies.
Thus, by 1902, there are already almost 3,000 American civilian bureaucrats in the island,
more than there were Filipinos administering policy,
And this did not include American teachers or the military.
By the way, we have this image that the military is this kind of neutral observer.
That is nonsense.
People, historians like John Gates, who studied the American army in the Philippines,
those boys were getting, the officers, were getting indoctrinated at West Point by the faculty
about the virtues of progressivism.
And they went out in the islands and practiced it. What was said earlier about the universities.
By the turn of the century, as anti-imperialists like William James were aware, American universities
were always turning, were beginning to turn out public administrators. And they had a
job out in the Philippines, obviously, if they wanted to go there. Taft in one of his
His reports argued that the Philippine Foreign Civil Service that he was building was more
honest than the American Civil Service, and that was probably true.
But these young people who went out there as administrators and then administered to
the little brown brother, what do you think they wanted to do when they came back to the
United States?
They wanted to become an administrator in the progressive movement.
When you can't understand the New Deal, which was being commented upon, unless you understand
and some studies have been done on this, how many of the New Dealers were old frustrated
progressives from the turn of the century in the Roosevelt years and after.
The great creation of this period was the Bureau of Insular Affairs, the BIA, not to
The BIA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs
But significant that the military and not the civilians were in charge of the BIA
And Elihu Root compared it to, well, like everybody else's colonial office
Like the British, but it really wasn't
because of the extent to which the military was in charge of so-called American state-building.
And it was so important that by the time, by 1912, it had been elevated to major general.
The head of the BIA was a major general. And the papers of the BIA are extraordinary in
in terms of showing this enormous bureaucratic involvement and institutionalization of empire.
The church lands were one of the things that Taft had to get involved with the Vatican
over the friar lands in attempting to settle that issue.
So that what you get here by the time Taft comes back to become Secretary of War and
he continues with Philippine policy is an enormous American bureaucratic involvement
out there. And it would have gotten deeper and longer if people like Taft and the Republicans
had stayed because in Taft's idea the Filipinos were never going to be ready for self-government
for a century or so. The anti-imperialists, by the way, did triumph. There were many younger
ones like Cordell Hall, who were young anti-imperialists in 1898, who continued and gained power and
worked to get us out of the Philippines, which we did under Woodrow Wilson, made finally
and finally the promise of Philippine independence and the British were infuriated by this because Gandhi and all kinds of nationalists all over Asia immediately asked if the United States can do this, can make a promise of independence, why can't other nations?
Certainly, that was not due to Taft's efforts, because he would have wanted us very much to stay.
I don't think we should judge Taft too harshly, however, in his inability to understand the difference between nationalism and people being sympathetic to the United States.
through the BIA records. He constantly is castigating the Filipinos who are his Filipinos
because they may make a statement that appears to him anti-American. And the Filipino conservatives
are always explaining to him that if we don't say these things, we'll have no credibility
as a kind of comprador scallywag in front of our own people.
And Tam could never seem to understand that.
In the same way that John Foster Dulles and a whole bunch of American policymakers with
respect to this idea of social revolution could never seem to understand that someone
can be a communist and a nationalist, as Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong were.
And so Taft could never comprehend that distinction.
The biggest tragedy was Taft's unwillingness to allow the publication in 1908 of Colonel
John R.M. Taylor's four volumes on the Philippine Insurgency. And before he died in the 30s,
Taylor was still trying to get that study published because he feared that the United
States, if it ever got involved in another guerilla insurgency in Asia, ought to have
the benefit of that study.
And the reason Taft didn't want it published is because it embarrassed so many of the Filipino
politicians who've now become our quote-unquote friends in the islands I'll switch very quickly
since I only have apparently five minutes left to the Panama Canal now most of us think
that that was a wonderful sort of thing remember Teddy took the canal he once justified this
with respect to Western Civilization.
In a talk, and he asked Ella Hugh Root after about an hour, have I justified myself?
And Root turned to him and he said, oh yes, Teddy, you were accused of seduction.
You proved conclusively you were guilty of rape.
You know, today, whenever somebody invokes Western Civilization as a rationale for policy
out there. You better be careful and look where your pocketbook is. Now, of course,
we talk about the necessity to save the world with the IMF. And when the UFOers and NASA
get together, no doubt, no doubt, we will be told that there is going to have to be
something called intergalactic salvation. And then you better certainly watch out for
The Theory of Money and Credit
in 1978, when Jimmy Carter was moving toward fulfilling getting out of the canal zone.
And Ronald Reagan, who's supposed to be something of a free market fellow, revealed himself
as basically just a jingoist because he ran around saying, oh, we can't get out of the
islands.
I mean, excuse me, the canal.
But that's absolutely silly.
Look, there was a railroad across the isthmus from 1855 to 1914 built by Commodore Vanderbilt.
It paid a profit every year until the canal came in.
The canal has been a massive, massive subsidy by the American taxpayer to the shipping industries
of various countries.
When I did the study, who was the biggest user of the canal?
Japanese ore carrying ships going from Brazil to Osaka.
So then, of course, the American steelmaker wants a subsidy so he can compete with that
Japanese steel that we subsidized in the canal.
And the best kept secret, except Forbes magazine was the only one pointing out a true capitalist
market perspective.
Railroad bridging has replaced the need to take a ship down there with a unionized crew,
go through the canal locks with the water from Lake Gatan, and come back up the other
side. And we have at least a dozen now of such railroad bridging with containerization
and all the rest of that. And had there been no canal, that's what would have happened.
I'm sure that there would have been two railroads down there before the Justice Department got
We had to spend $175 million of American taxpayer money because there was a K then.
Well, who's going to do that when the Panamanians have it?
Well, I want to very quickly close.
I have a great quote here from TR in which he says, he tells Taft,
the kind of presidency we need is one that leads the Congress around
because they're really not too informed and able to act, etc.
et cetera. And that's what the Presidency has become. But I want to finish with one question. What is the similarity between Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and William Crystal?
They all three are on record as saying that they really think we need TR again. Crystal and the neocoms have put him forward as their Boe ideal.
Newt Gingrich tells us that he came out of that whole tradition, his uncle was a Gifford
Pinchot Taft man. And Bill Clinton wants to be on Mount Rushmore. And I think, I don't
think he'll make it, but if he does, they may not put his face up there as his most
familiar appendage. Thank you very much.