A little less than three quarters of a century ago America had a presidential election marked by a passionate argument over American involvement in Asia. As a result of the “splendid little war” with Spain, the country found that it possessed an empire in the Far East; found also that it was deeply involved in the international politics of the Orient, was fighting to suppress a guerrilla war waged by men of a different color,∗ and altogether was following a course that seemed to have very little in common with American traditions, American ideals, or the precepts of the Founding Fathers.
∗ One aspect of that war is described in “Pershing’s Island War,” beginning on page 32 of this issue.
It was perplexing and disturbing, and a number of prominent Americans correctly believed that it would have long-range consequences that some subsequent generation would find extremely difficult. As members of the subsequent generation most painfully involved in these consequences, we today can perhaps learn something by examining the anti-imperialist campaign that accompanied the election of 1900.
A stimulating text is at hand—Robert L. Beisner’s thought-provoking book Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900, which reviews that unavailing effort to check an irresistible tide and succeeds admirably both in showing what the anti-imperialists were fighting against and why at last they failed.
The hard core of the anti-imperialist movement was provided by the Mugwumps—those public men, mostly wellborn and well-heeled, like William James, E. L. Godkin, Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Carl Schurz, who ever since the abolition of slavery had been reformers in search of a cause. They were joined by such Republican dissidents as Senator George F. Hoar, Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Harrison, and Thomas B. Reed, united, more or less, in the 1900 campaign by a conviction that “the very purpose and destiny of the nation” were now at stake.
They saw America entering the perilous stream of power politics. In their eyes this ended a century of “free security” for America and marked “the beginning of a new epoch of war and international crisis.” They were convinced that if the Republic followed this course it could not be true to its heritage, and they were fond of repeating the Mugwump saying that “Dewey took Manila with the loss of one man—and all our institutions.”
Politically, their campaign never had a chance. The cards were all stacked the wrong way. The Republican candidate was President William McKinley, under whose guidance (or at least with whose acquiescence) the whole expansionist program had come to flower; and McKinley’s running mate was Theodore Roosevelt, who seemed to be the very high priest of rising imperialism. The Democratic candidate was William Jennings Bryan, who blew both hot and cold: he opposed annexation of the Philippines, then from some foggy notion of smart political tactics supported the treaty which confirmed annexation, returned to his original position, and in the campaign devoted himself chiefly to the domestic issues about which he had been so eloquent four years earlier. Besides, McKinley was defending the full dinner pail, Bryan still believed in free silver, imperialism was only one of many issues, and it does not take a political expert to see why the electorate went Republican.
Beyond that, as Mr. Beisner makes clear, the Mugwumps themselves abysmally lacked the talent for mass leadership. They had an irritating way of standing above the battle. They believed that they spoke for the best thought and the best culture in the land, they made no attempt to conceal this belief, they actually had little political influence, and in the end they sadly concluded that “America had lost much of its fineness” because it rejected their counsel. At times they looked altogether too much like men who wanted to lead a revolt of the upper classes against the rising power of America. They lacked the common touch chiefly because they had no understanding of the common people.
Furthermore, as reformers born and bred, they wholly neglected the crucial domestic problems of the day—the central social and political issues that racked post-Civil War America. As William Allen White once unkindly remarked, they wanted reform “only in a certain vague, inarticulate, bullfrog fashion.” And, finally, they were just a little confused about the basis for their opposition to the American presence in the Philippines. It was never entirely clear whether they thought we ought to be out of the islands because it was morally wrong for us to be in them or just because the islands were so infernally far away. They consented readily enough to American expansionism in the Caribbean. As Mr. Beisner remarks, without the Philippines the whole anti-imperialist move probably would never have got off the ground. It failed, in short, to answer the question that is still bothering us today: do we propose to get out of Asia on high moral grounds or because staying there is just too big a job for us to handle?
Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900, by Robert L. Beisner. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 294 pp. $6.95.
Nevertheless, the anti-imperialists were right on the basic issue: going fully armored into the international arena, America was fated to become something different than it had been before, with grave risk to its ancient traditions. The splendid little war that was won so easily left us in permanent possession of Pandora’s box, and when we went into the Philippines we took the lid off it. We are still looking for a way to get the lid back on.
The Balance of Power
By BRUCE CATTON
The catch in all of this is that the lid was coming off Pandora’s box anyway. At the close of the nineteenth century the United States and the world at large were changing in such a way that America was going to be involved in power politics no matter what it did in the Caribbean or in Asia. From Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay to the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947—which can be taken as the more or less formal beginning of the Cold War—was just a half century, and that half century had seen a profound shift in the whole international power structure. When President Truman pledged this country to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he was taking a step that was logically connected with what the McKinley administration did in 1898, but it was a step that almost certainly would have been forced upon us even if the McKinley administration had behaved differently.
Thus an excellent book to read in connection with Mr. Beisner’s work is Louis J. Halle’s The Cold War as History. Mr. Halle here undertakes to examine the Cold War from a detached viewpoint, discussing it precisely as a historian might do a century afterward. The book is written as if the Cold War were something we had already lived through, an affair that had not only a beginning but an end. The end, to be sure, has unfortunately not yet arrived, and yet Mr. Halle believes that it is in sight; or, at least, that the time of greatest danger has already passed. It is nice to find someone so hopeful; meanwhile, The Cold War as History does shed a good deal of light on the eventful half-century between McKinley and Truman, and it is worth reading even by those who may not share Mr. Halle’s optimism.
What Mr. Halle begins with is the assertion that by the end of the nineteenth century “the foundations of the long-standing world order on which American detachment depended were crumbling.” America had been able to be detached because of the long stability of the balance of power in Europe. In terms of power, Europe until then was the whole world, and its balance of power was a world balance. America could remain happily isolated as long as that balance existed.
In other words, says Mr. Halle, our detachment from international power politics rested on the great Pax Britannica, because the European balance of power had been maintained largely by British naval supremacy. But as the iSgo’s ended, that supremacy was beginning to come to an end; Germany, Japan, and the United States itself were becoming strong naval powers, as a result of which Europe’s balance was no longer in equilibrium. The British navy was no longer omnipotent, and so the New World was no longer strategically detached. Now America found itself involved in power politics in a way and to an extent no American had foreseen—not because it had thoughtlessly taken on an empire in Asia, but because the whole world had changed.
The great lesson of World War I, as Mr. Halle remarks, was that the chief responsibility for policing the balance of power now lay with us. We ignored the lesson, tried to return to our traditional isolation, and eventually found ourselves in World War II—which, essentially, was a fight to re-establish a stable power structure. After both of these wars, America tried to devise an alternative to power politics, Woodrow Wilson bringing forth the League of Nations, Franklin Roosevelt the United Nations. Neither succeeded, and both of them, in Mr. Halle’s view, simply reflected “the naïveté of the American mind in the first half of the century.”
And the Cold War (to continue with Mr. Halle’s argument) developed because World War II left a power vacuum—military, economic, and political—in Europe. We had fought to eliminate German power and had succeeded; England was exhausted, France was itself part of the vacuum, the vacuum had to be filled by something, and across Europe came the Russian armies. This in turn pulled the United States back to Europe, back into international affairs everywhere, and there developed what Mr. Halle considers the central condition of the Cold War—the mutual opposition of two Europes, one led by Russia, the other by America.
At which point we start looking again toward Asia. For this reason: “Europe had offered solid ground on which the United States could make a stand. By contrast, Asia was a swamp.” There was a common understanding with the Europeans; with the Asiatics there was none whatever. And this, the author suggests, blinded us to the fact that the Cold War was essentially “a spasm … brought on by a collapse of the Western power structure,” and that “by the end of 1962 the spasm appeared to be over.” The two sides were by no means ready to swear eternal friendship, but they were beginning to be ready to make peace, and Mr. Halle believes this peace will eventually be achieved “although its achievement would be delayed by all the repercussions of the American involvement in Asia.”
The Cold War as History, by Louis J. Halle. Harper and Row. 434 pp. $6.95.
He points out that heretofore such conflicts between powerful societies resulted finally in military conflict. Yet despite all of the shooting that has been going on, this ultimate conflict has not taken place. Here is his explanation:
Since 1945, however, the presence on the scene of weapons that could, presumably, destroy the greatest societies in one blow, had had a major inhibiting effect on this tendency. What was historically unique about the Cold War was the restraining influence of the new weapons, which had prevented a conflict on the grand scale from culminating in general war. In the new weapons, then, lay the hope of the world, no less than its peril, as it moved into an unknown future.
Cold comfort? Possibly. Yet perhaps a world which refrains from a new world war simply because it is so terrified by the thought of the catastrophe such a war would bring is, after all, beginning to learn something. In any case, here is a most provocative study of recent world history.
GO NOT IN SEARCH OF MONSTERS
By BRUCE CATTON
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that, by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the color and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, July 4, 1821 Quoted in the Introduction to Twelve Against Empire
