Abstract
In the Democratic Party’s 1900 election platform, anti-imperialism was named as the “paramount issue of the campaign.”1 Upon securing the nomination of the Party, William Jennings Bryan—already a vociferous anti-imperialist by 1900—delivered a lengthy denunciation of American foreign policy. Bryan was among the ringleaders of the American anti-imperialist movement, which opposed the expansion of U.S. power and sovereignty overseas. The movement began during the War of 1898 as a result of then rumored plans to acquire the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Those rumors proved well founded. The Philippines was purchased for $20 million, while Guam and Puerto Rico were acquired as a war indemnity. As part of his campaign, Bryan expressed flaws in the logic of imperialism through oratorical syllogisms invoking apocalyptic imagery of national ruin to outline the consequences of imperialism:
The young man upon reaching his majority can do what he pleases. He can disregard the teachings of his parents; he can trample upon all that he has been taught to consider sacred; he can disobey the laws of the state, the laws of society and the laws of God. He can stamp failure upon his life and make his very existence a curse to his fellow men and he can bring his father and mother in sorrow to the grave; but he cannot annul the sentence, “The wages of sin is death.” And so with the nation. It is of age and it can do what it pleases; it can spurn the traditions of the past; it can repudiate the principles upon which the nation rests; it can employ force instead of reason; it can substitute might for right; it can conquer weaker people; it can exploit their lands, appropriate their property and kill their people; but it cannot repeal the moral law or escape the punishment decreed for the violation of human rights.2
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Notes
Fred Harvey Harrington, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898–1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22, no. 2 (September 1935): 211.
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 412;
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1959), 209;
John Rollins, “The Anti-Imperialists and Twentieth Century American Foreign Policy,” Studies on the Left 1 (1962): 9–24.
Only a few studies have evaluated the movement throughout its full existence, and these are typically descriptive accounts rather than analytical. See E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970);
Jim Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement, 1898–1921,” in Whose America? The War of 1898 and the Battles to Define the Nation, ed. Virginia M. Bouvier (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001);
Maria Lanzar-Carpio, “The Anti-Imperialist League” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1928).
Robert L. Beisner, Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 220.
There are some exceptional transnational histories that touch on aspects of the movement’s international networks and collaborations. See Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 117–19, 355–56;
Jim Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the Origins of Filipino-American Solidarity,” Amerasia 22, no. 2 (1998), 65–85.
Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism; Beisner, Twelve against Empire; Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1972);
Ernest R. May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1967).
Robert L. Beisner, “1898 and 1968: The Anti-Imperialists and the Doves,” Political Science Quarterly 85, no. 2 (June 1970): 187–216.
Paul Kramer’s definition of empire as a “dimension of power in which asymmetries in the scale of political action, regimes of spatial ordering, and modes of exceptionalizing difference enable and produce relations of hierarchy, discipline, dispossession, extraction, and exploitation” is a useful one for understanding how the notion power is at the heart of the imperialism. Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (December 2011): 1348–91.
For an account of “empire” and associated terminology, see Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (London: Polity, 2007).
Charles Fried, Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 47.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Daniterous World (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 20.
For a rich examination of linguistics as a framework for the study of history, see Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
Since Harrington’s study, the most influential works on anti-imperialism have concurred on the movement’s failure as a result of its diversity. See Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 222–33; May, American Imperialism, 95–115; Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism, 290–96; Richard E. Welch, Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 156–59.
James A. Zimmerman, “Who Were the Anti-Imperialists and Expansionists of 1898 and 1899? A Chicago Perspective,” Pacific Historical Review 46, no. 4 (November 1977): 589–601;
Jim Zwick, Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imperialist League (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2007), 45–51.
For two outstanding studies of law in American foreign policy and its value as an analytical framework, see Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006);
Daniel Margolies, Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 45.
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© 2012 Michael Patrick Cullinane
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Cullinane, M.P. (2012). Introduction. In: Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002570_1
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