The Anti-Imperialist League

Where is it when you really need it?

I teach three classes of American History this semester–all covering the period from Reconstruction down to contemporary times. I have not taught this section for a couple of years, so my reacquaitance with the material has been enjoyable. As I always do at this point in the course, I introduce our road to Empire. a story where the dots are easy to connect:

• The megalomania of William H. Seward’s purchase of Alaska,

• The comic-opera overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii,

• The all-too-serious (and illegal) annexation of Hawaii,

• The rush to war against Spain in 1898,

• The American-decreed independence of Cuba, with strings attached,

• The bonus prizes of Guam and Puerto Rico, and

• The question of what to do with the Philippines, resulting in the horrific and almost unknown Philippine War.

With the Philippine independence movement finally quashed in the early years of the 20th-century, the United States was now an official, card-carrying member of the Empire Club. And since then our global presence is best understood in that context, regardless of how deep we smother our real intentions under a comforting drapery of Democracy. So, the real question is this: Did something fundamentally change in the nature of Americans in the late 19th-century, or, perhaps were we, what with the “end of the frontier,” unleashing on the world stage what had been within us all along?

For example, just this week, our navy pursued and captured a Venezuelan oil tanker in the Indian Ocean. It seems we have displaced the Somali pirates in this particular corner of the news feed. A Pentagon spokesman explains:

No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain…By land, air, or sea, our Armed Forces will find you and deliver justice. You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.

Well, I am glad he cleared up my confusion on the issue. Indeed, that must be what this was all about: delivering justice. Thus described, it seems that “delivering justice” is a top priority with us these days. Seriously, though, I am disturbed by just how normative this sort of thing is now, hardly an eyebrow was raised.

Of course, we do seem to have a lot on our plate beyond mere piracy: the Greenland gambit (remember that?), our ongoing (?) take-over of Venezuela, and our intention to starve Cuba into submission (with Russia and China committed to support their ally of 65 years standing)--and that is just in this hemisphere. We are also currently waging (and losing) a hot war against Russia using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Meanwhile, a third of our fleet is massing in the Persian Gulf for a strike against a country that poses no threat to us, ahem. Again, Russia and China are on board to support their neighbor and ally. Meanwhile, sanctions are served-up for everyone!

On a personal note, I attended an Orthodox church event in the DFW area last night. I learned that some Georgians who were scheduled to be there could not attend because their visas had been denied. How very Bidenesque of the current Administration. Since spunky Georgia refuses to fall into line with Washington on sanctions and a whole host of anti-Russian measures, they have to be penalized. Neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan, however, are compliantly reading from the script. (And what was Vice-President J.D. Vance doing in those countries in recent days?) But of course, when push comes to shove, will Uncle Sugar be there to protect them? Maybe they should have a chat with their Kurdish neighbors; or perhaps they should arrange a prison visit to Mikheil Saakashvili.

As bad as all this orchestrated chaos seems to be, I was recently reminded that the Left is no safe haven, either. If anything, the lust for war among the bien pensants of totalitarian neoliberalism runs even deeper, though hidden underneath soothing platitudes about democracy, values, and—even still—the rules-based order. And there is to be no questioning of the narrative, for their “values” are self-proclaimed to be both self-evident and irrefutable.

At the end of the day, they too will support the Empire. Always. What is clear, at least to me, is that our current chaos is not the action of a rising empire, or even a resurgent empire. This scattershot bellicosity is more like the lashing out of a wounded rogue beast, desperately trying to hold on to that which has, in truth, already slipped away. Perhaps on some level the forces that run our country understand this, and this is all a kabuki theater to mask the decline.

But let’s get back to my classes. I presented my students with the following proposition:

Are any of you bothered by the fact that we have 800 military bases in over 80 countries around the world? Are you uneasy with our unthinking and perpetual bellicosity against particular nations either by attempted regime changes, destabilizations and/or “decapitation strikes”, or our sanctions obsession and the weaponization of our financial power? If so, you might well wonder, “Where did THAT sort of thing begin? You could do worse by pegging 1898 as the start-up date of the American Empire project.

To be sure, the author of our text strongly suggests that we had it in us all along, years before 1898. And to this I concur. Our 19th-century westward expansion was a straight-out colonial undertaking. We have presented the Monroe Doctrine as a benign and well-meaning foreign policy statement meant to keep European powers from re-entering the Western hemisphere. Would that it were simply that. Jeff Rich at the Burning Archive is currently conducting a book study of Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World. In connection with that, he has posted four masterful videos dissecting the Monroe Doctrine, here, here, here, and here. This first is an excellent introduction to our motivations at the time.

Clearly, much more was intended than just deterring the Europeans, even from the beginning. And it is even more relevant today, given some contemporary re-imaginings of the Monroe Doctrine. But still, at some point you have to drive a stake in the ground as a place of beginning. And for my students, at least, I will be pleased if they just understand 1898 as the beginning of overt empire-building, the point when we became at least halfway honest about it.

Propelled by Hearst and Pulitzer’s yellow journalism, American public opinion clamored for a military response to the very real humanitarian crisis on our doorstep, particularly after the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor. The relationship between the press and public opinion is one area where I always take a jaundiced view. But in this case, a humanitarian crisis did, in fact, exist. But when you read McKinley’s request for a declaration of war from Congress (to which my online textbook provides a link), there was little to nothing mentioned about the starving reconcentrados. The plea was couched in terms of the damage that had been done to our commercial interests in the Caribbean.

The course of Cuban independence is an interesting one. It was the U.S. Congress who declared independence on April 20, 1898, not the Cuban insurgents. In a sense we wrested Cuba from Spain and set it up as an independent country. Our high-minded Teller Amendment disavowed any intention to intervene in the new republic. By 1901, of course, this was replaced with the Platt Amendment which expressed our more obvious intentions. In short, we had every intention of intervening; and we did, making Cuba an American protectorate. One thing I recall from the Museum of the Cuban Revolution in Havana, is that Castro’s revolution was portrayed as just the continuation of the same fight that started in 1865; first against the Spanish, and finally against the Americans. You do not have to agree with that, but that is their narrative.

While Washington orchestrated Cuba’s independence, they ignored the June 12, 1898 declaration of independence in the Philippines, led by Emilio Aquinaldo. But McKinley simply reflected the mood of the country at large, or at least the portion of it that elected and re-elected him by wide margins in 1896 and 1900. Henry Watterson, a prominent newspaper editor, wrote at the time:

We are a great imperial Republic destined to exercise a controlling influence upon the actions of mankind and to affect the future of the world.

This could be a 2026 Truth Social post without changing a single word. But there were voices speaking out against the path to Empire; primarily the American Anti-Imperialist League. The organization never really caught on with the American public, which was more interested in spreading democracy at the point of a bayonet. But it did attract an odd assortment of adherents, which united for multifarious reasons:

• Andrew Carnegie

• Jane Addams

• Samuel Gompers

• Mark Twain

• William Jennings Bryan

• Grover Cleveland

• Benjamin Harrison

• Charles Francis Adams, Jr.

• William Graham Sumner

• Henry James

To be sure, the motivation of some were hardly noble or selfless, just as is the case for the contempary voices depicted in the caricature at the beginning of this piece. Whatever their particular motivations, however, they did all agreed on one thing: that the path to Empire meant the ultimate death of the Republic. From my textbook, I have attached a few quotes from am 1898 speech given to the League by Rev. Charles Ames in Boston:

How can we undertake to rule subject provinces in distant parts of the globe without trampling on the principles of free government? Once accepting this way of dealing with other people, how long will it be before some occasion will arise for applying it at home? In committing ourselves to permanent military methods of government anywhere, we give up the republic, for we abandon its fundamental principle, even while boasting of the name…

and:

The imperial scheme requires us to go very deeply into military and naval expenditure, that we may be ever on fight footing. We must girdle the earth with strategic possessions, every one of which must be fortified and garrisoned…We are to be a great military nation!...If you object, you are no patriot! But where will be the republic?

and:

The policy of imperialism threatens to change the temper of our people, and to put us into a permanent attitude of arrogance, testiness and defiance toward other nations…We shall be one more bully among bullies. We shall only add one more to the list of oppressors of mankind….The program of imperialism reads to me like a declaration of war for the new century.

These were our Cassandras of that day, ignored and dismissed as unprogressive cranks. The League disbanded in 1920. Who would be the American Anti-Imperialists of today, were we fortunate enough to have such an organization? A few names come to mind:

• Dr. Jeffrey Sachs

• Ron Paul

• Rand Paul

• Thomas Massie

• Marjorie Taylor Green (yes)

• Tucker Carlson

• Larry Johnson

• Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

• Douglas MacGregor

• Judge Andrew Napolitano

• Max Blumenthal

• Glenn Greenwald

• Edward Snowden

• Aaron Maté

• Cenk Uygur

• Michael Hudson

These are the names of Americans that readily come to my mind; no doubt I am omitting many others. History will be kind to them. I just know that if a contemporary Anti-Imperialist League existed, there would definitely be a chapter here close at hand in East Texas, if it depended on me.

My attitude about all this is almost Luddite. I do not wish to return to before the Unipolar Moment; nor before 1963: nor before 1945; nor before 1919; but rather back to something more identifiable with the old Republic that once existed. I hesitate to use the P-word (progress), for it is a false god loaded with too much toxic baggage. True human flourishing often involves repentance and return, to something left behind. There may be no straight path back, if there is one at all. But the attempt must be undertaken. Ilya Glazanov’s The Return of the Prodigal Son (1977) depicts it as good as any.