12
Robert Beisner
Bold=Sections of the interview which were not filmed.
START INTERVIEW
TAPE #013 CONT’D
INT: What were the early objections to imperialism?
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: Well, as the -- ah, anti-imperialists for the most part tended to be older people, ahm, they were old Republicans, many of them old enough to have been in on the founding of the Republican Party, and they stood in their own views for very, ah, clear and important things. And it disturbed 'em a great deal to see the country moving toward war in 1897 and '98. They thought they had, in McKinley, a President who shared their views, and, ah, McKinley actually reassured some of them, including the anti-imperialist Carl Schurz, that there "would be no jingo nonsense in my administration." When me began to actually move not only then into war, but beyond that to annexation of territories, they felt terribly betrayed. And that, I think, accounts for some of their anger, some of the, ah, ah, anguish that actually shows up in their dissent.
INT: Who was Carl Schurz?
BEISNER: Carl Schurz had been a fascinating person. He, ah, immigrated to the United States after the failure of the revolutions in Germany in 1848. He'd had an extraordinary career for half a century. He was an old man by 1898, but he'd been a political reformer. He had fought in the Union Armies, risen to the level of general in the Civil War. He'd been a member of the Senate. He'd been Secretary of the Interior. He'd been a newspaper editor, ah, constantly involved in reform efforts in the -- ah, throughout the latter part of the 19th century. In the course of the anti-imperialist protest, ahm, Schurz frames one of the arguments most articulately that many anti-imperialists shared and that seems most distant from our own time because this is really blatantly racist argument,sort of a con-- combination of racism, constitutionalism, and political principle. And the argument was that it would be totally contrary to American traditions and the Constitution to acquire an empire of people that you then don't bring into the Union in full form as voting citizens. And there's -- Schurz held the parallel belief that it was impossible to give the vote to people who lived in the tropics. I mean literally emphasized tropics and said it was impossible to have a democracy in tropical circumstances. So he had basically a syllogism there. You can't let people in without giving them the vote. You can't give the vote to people from the tropics. Therefore, you don't seize the territory.
INT: Did Schurz believe that the US would share a commonality with Europe and he wanted to avoid that?
BEISNER: Yes. Anti-imperialists ...
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: Anti-imperialists in general looked upon the seizing of an empire in 1898 and '99 as essentially a reversal of American civilization. There's a scholar who once wrote that "China is a civilization pretending to be a state." And in some respects, anti-imperialists thought of the United States not as a state, but as a church. And it was a little bit as though, ah, we had abandoned all the tenets of the religion, the civic religion in 1898. And what that represented to them was that we had become an ordinary country. And the way they thought of what an "ordinary country" was, was in European terms. So to simplify that a little bit, many of them defined American identity, American nationalism in terms of a series of negatives about "We are not like" this, that, and the other. And all those negatives were identified with Europe. "We're not autocratic. We're not -- we don't we have the, ah, war-like habits of the Europeans," and so forth. In 1898 and '99 they felt that the United States had gone over to that. So that also felt like a tremendous betrayal of principles and it accounts for some of the really despairing tone in some anti-imperialist protest. There were people among the anti-imperialists who talked constantly in their letters in their rhetoric about how horrible they feel, how depressed they feel, howdespairing they feel. And at least one very prominent anti-imperialist, ah, who, like others, had been an immigrant to the United States originally, the editor E.L. Godkin, goes back to Britain, where he came from originally because he's so disgusted by American imperialism.
INT: How did the anti-imperialists react to the sinking of the Maine?
BEISNER: In the weeks preceding the war ...
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: In the weeks preceding the war and as the clamor for war grew, some people who came to be known as anti-imperialists weren't really alert to the fact that something drastic was about to happen yet. So if you trace them back to the early months of 1898, you don't find them engaged in any particular political activity. Others, frankly, were pro-war and there were some who entered the war thinking this is a great opportunity to liberate the Cubans and strike a blow for freedom, and so forth. Ahm, the predominant number, however, were very concerned because they, ahm, generally speaking, distrusted this kind of emotional nationalism. And one reason they did was because it was such a democratic sentiment and many anti-imperialists were far from being utterly convinced democrats, small "D" democrats. They were, ahm, ah, in many cases sort of aristocratic in their habits, views. Ahm, this is by means true of all of them, but skeptical about democracy and very worried about a sort of a popular rabble being able to push the country into the war. It wasn't that any of them were particularly making a brief for Spain, however. So that you don't find one of the huge differences between the dissent at time of the Spanish-American War and dissent at the time of the Vietnam War, for example, was that you don't find anti-imperialists in 1898 making a brief for Spain or saying, "We should allow Spain to stay in Cuba." What they were focused on was the threat to American institutions, to American ideals, and so forth of moving in an imperial direction, whereas the more radical wing of the anti-war movement and the Vietnam War did in fact take positions that could be labeled as pro-North Vietnamese or pro-communist and made arguments on behalf of, ah, why it was legitimate for the revolution to be allowed to occur in Vietnam.
INT: Was Grover Cleveland's anti-imperialism ...
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: Anti-imperialism is made up of Republicans, Democrats, and political independents. You can sort of say different things about each one.
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: Politically speaking, anti-imperialists made up three main groups. First of all, there was a very large number of Democrats who ended up being opposed to imperialism in one form or another. Large numbers of them, as you follow them through the events of 1898 and 1899, don't look like people full of political conviction. They're simply, you know, "This is something the Republicans are doing. So it's convenient to oppose them." Ahm, and there are Democrats who sort of straddle lines, ah, during the movement. That -- that include -- that group included, however, some Democrats who clearly felt very strongly about imperialism. And among the most conspicuous was former President Grover Cleveland, who, while he had been in office immediately prior to McKinley's term, had tried to extricate the United States from Hawaii, for example, clearly held anti-imperialist principles very strongly, spoke out vehemently against imperialism all through the 1898-99-1900 period. But there aren't too many Democrats like that. Ah, then a very small number, but very conspicuous, ah, Republicans. Imperialism in 1898, of course, becomes a Republican program. And so to speak out against imperialism is to speak out against your President and your party. So this was done sparingly, but it was done by some very prominent people, including George Hoar, who was a long-term -- ah, long-time Senator from Massachusetts who leads the fight against the treaty in 1899 within the Senate. Speaker of the House Thomas Reed of Maine was a Republican who was also very against imperialism. Former President Harrison, ahm, although very much an expansionist in his own term, that is, somebody who promoted the expansion of American power, growth of the American Navy and so forth, drew the line at acquiring colonies and was an anti-imperialist as well, but demonstrated in the way he carried out his anti-imperialism, so to speak, ah, the ambivalence of a party person. He spoke privately, wrote privately about his views, but said nothing publicly until after McKinley was safely re-elected in 1900 and then he comes out. The most important group of all in terms of numbers, leadership, organizational work, the group, for example, that organized the Anti-Imperialist League beginning with meetings in Boston in June ‘98, ah, were independents of all sorts. And, ah, the easiest label for them is simply political independence, but a term common at the time was "mugwumps". And mugwumps was a term to describe people originally who were banned in the Republican Party in the 1884 election because they were unhappy with the Presidential nominee. But the term came to represent people who simply abandoned the whole idea of political party loyalty. They were people who advocated independence as a position. And, ah, that group tended to be very heavily, ahm, concentrated among, ah, writers, intellectuals, university professors, ahm, heavily concentrated in New England. Ah, if you had to do a demographic profile of them in 1898, they were old male northeastern New Englanders, graduates of Harvard and Yale. Ahm, they might very well remember the Civil War in the family in the Republican Party. They were that old, or they were the sons of those people. Like the sons of William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Wentworth Jergenson(?), former Abolitionists.
START TAPE #014
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: The Anti-Imperialist Movement really takes off in June '98 after the organization of the Anti-Imperialist League. And the timing is significant, because this is -- this is when it has become apparent that McKinley has probably decided to, ah, take all of the Philippines for the United States. And the mood of that meeting is really interesting because, ahm, the -- the over-- the overall sense was that extraordinarily momentous things were happening. One of the great writers, sardonic writers of the time, Ambrose Bearce, for example, once wrote that, you know, taking an empire is not like smoking a cigarette. And the people who went to this meeting were of that view, and one of them said that, you know, "Dewey took Manila with the loss of one man and all our institutions." And that's the mood of this -- of this meeting, and they -- ahm, they -- they gathered together and framed what it is that they're for, what it is they're against. Ah, but from the outset there are arguments among them because they're -- they make distinctions according to particular territories that are involved, for example. Ahm, one of the principles you can notice is in a way the farther away from the United States the territory that McKinley is interested in acquiring, the more virulent the opposition. And another principle might be, and I'll combine these in a second, is -- has to do with the degree of opposition to American imperialism. So American troops, for example, walk into Puerto Rico totally unopposed and there's virtually nothing said about Puerto Rico in the Anti-Imperialist Movement. They don't oppose it. They hardly talk about it. Cuba, many of them are very ambivalent about. They're happy to get Spain out of Cuba. There are quite a few anti-imperialists who reconcile themselves to some permanent relationship with Cuba, but they're not -- they're not crazy about it. In the Philippines, virtually every single anti-imperialist is opposed. And they're opposed because it's so distant, because they are certain that involvement in the Philippines will pla-- place the United States on a road for a permanent, ah, sort of career of imperialism, will also propel it into conflict with other great foreign powers. And the population of the Philippines seems overwhelming and it's made up of dozens of different kinds of peoples, speaking all kinds of languages and all the sort of social and racial and cultural, ahm, ah, I was going to say ambivalence, but it's more than that. It's these people are very Anglo-Saxon minded and -- and the peoples of the Philippines seem totally alien to them and they can't imagine absorbing them in any form into the American republic. Ahm, but they also can't imagine ruling the Philippines. This is a very important part of their opposition to the Philippines. They can't imagine ruling the Philippines without changing the nature of the American republic. They're history-minded people. They know about the history of empires and they don't think it's possible for a democracy to be an empire, that trying to rule an empire thousands of mile abroad, they're convinced, will corrupt American democratic institutions.
DIRECTIONAL
INT: Talk about the Treaty of Paris from the anti-imperialist perspective and Carnegie ...
BEISNER: I th -- my sense is that Carnegie treated the loan not very lengthily, and then, ah, talking about the Senate just to bring him in as, you know, part of the story.
DIRECTIONAL
BEISNER: The debate in the Senate over the Treaty of Paris was one of the most extraordinary in congressional history, and it came not that many months after an equally, but less known, ah, extraordinary debate about the annexation of Hawaii. Ahm, it goes on for several weeks. Ah, there's vigorous opposition to the treaty by, ahm, many Democrats, which -- who had taken this as a party position. And -- but the real rhetorical drive in opposition to the treaty comes from two Republicans who were fighting the President. And the most conspicuous was George Hoar of Massachusetts. And the other was Eugene Hale, another New Englander from Maine. Hoar makes extraordinary -- makes an extraordinary battle in the treaty, ah, fight, including, ah, impassioned speeches about how horrible he feels because he's opposing his party and he's opposing his President. Hoar had been one of the most partisan Republicans in New England. The debate is complicated at the very last moment by the fact that just as the Senate is about to prepare for votes, the first news comes in that Filipinos have rebelled against American rule in the Philippines. And so there's a strong sentiment that flashes through the Senate that "We have to support our boys in the Philippines." And it's like there was a patriotism aroused instead of doubts. I mean the fighting in the Philippines causes a lot of people to have doubts, but in the Senate it has the impact of turning a number of people who were thinking of opposing the treaty into supporting it. The other thing that happens in the Senate debate that's quite extraordinary is that near the end at a climactic moment, William Jennings Bryan, who's, of course, not in the Senate, but the prospective Democratic nominee, again in 1900, suddenly reverses position and tells Democrats in the Senate that they should vote for the treaty on the grounds that it would be better to deal with the issue of imperialism in the 1900 election instead of here. And, ah, that outrages people like Hoar, and sort of confirms in his mind everything he already thought about Democrats and Bryan and others. But, ah, even with those two extraordinary events, the Senate passes it by only two votes, a margin of two votes. Of course, it's (Unintell.) two votes over two-thirds, which it had to be. So it's a very close call and, ahm ... I kind of lost that one.