THE AMERICANS WHO SAID 'NO!' TO EMPIRE
HAVANA, FEBRUARY 15, 1898 — At 9:40 p.m. on a muggy tropical evening, the still waters of Havana harbor are shattered by an explosion. The battleship Maine begins to sink. Going down with the ship are the usual casualties of war — two-thirds of its crew and truth itself.
Within days, a shrill battle cry rings from coast to coast. “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” Newspapers, especially William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, saturate public opinion with cries of revenge.
Come April, Congress declares war. By August, America has ended Spain’s empire, taking Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. President William McKinley is triumphant. His Secretary of State praises the “splendid little war.” But in Boston, a small but defiant committee begin to stir memories of 1776.
“Americans are imperialists and also isolationists,” historian Stephen Kinzer noted. “Both instincts co-exist within us.” So lest the voices of jingoism drown the voices of reason, then or now, let us remember not just the Maine but also the American Anti-Imperialist League.
The league, which would grow to include Mark Twain, Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie, and other luminaries, began with a letter. In June, as American troops prepared to land in Cuba, a Boston banker worried that the impending war, “insane and wicked,” was “driving the country to moral ruin.” Two weeks after the letter ran in the Boston Transcript, hundreds assembled in historic Fanueil Hall to form the Anti-Imperialist Committee.
The committee had only words to fight the growing frenzy, but the words came from on high, starting with the Founding Fathers. European nations had carved up the world, taking colonies from Morocco to Mandalay. But this was America. . .
America, where George Washington warned that “foreign alliances, attachments & intrigues would stimulate and embitter.” Where John Quincy Adams proclaimed that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Where Lincoln had stated, "no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.”
Yet the war came. The Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill. Cuba fell into American hands. Then that fall in Manila, Admiral George Dewey refused to let Filipino rebels into the occupied city. The anti-imperialists’ worst fears were coming true. “We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. . .”
By December, President McKinley’s call for “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines affirmed the league’s suspicion that America’s “criminal aggression. . . seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands.” And when US troops began fighting the same Filipino rebels they had sided with against Spain, the picture was clear.
The Filipino people, rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo declared, “will never consent to become a colony dependency of the United States.” But the fighting, including atrocities on both sides, continued. Would no one speak up?
February 1899: Rudyard Kipling urges the Americans to “take up the White Man’s Burden.” Jane Addams fires back: “To ‘protect the weak’ has always been the excuse of the ruler and tax-gatherer, the chief, the king, the baron; and now, at last, of ‘the white man.’” And the Anti-Imperialist Committee has become a league with 100 branches and 25,000 members.
The league pumped out pamphlets and broadsides with quotes from the Founding Fathers. Andrew Carnegie offered to donate $20 million, the price America had agreed to pay Spain for the Philippines, if U.S. troops there were withdrawn. The war went on. Enter the league’s scorching voices.
America’s war in the Philippines, the philosopher William James wrote, was “piracy.” “We are cold-bloodedly, wantonly and abominably destroying the soul of a people who never did us an atom of harm in their lives.” The stars and stripes, James concluded, “are now a lying rag, pure and simple.”
And when, in 1900, Americans voted for imperialism by handily re-electing McKinley and VP Theodore Roosevelt, hero of San Juan Hill, the Anti-Imperialist League enlisted the most beloved author in America.
“I have tried hard,” Mark Twain had written, “and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess.” Now Twain blasted the US for playing “The European Game” of colonizaton. What would “the person sitting in darkness,” i.e., the Filipino, say when American troops took over, Twain wondered.
“The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: ‘There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive's new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land."
Americans, Twain concluded, “have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us. . . We have stabbed an ally in the back. . . we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world.”
Filipino rebels surrendered in 1902. Subsequent investigations proved that the explosion that sank battleship Maine was caused by coal fumes. America held the Philippines as a colony until 1946. The Anti-Imperialist League, by then, was long since abandoned.
But lest the voices of jingoism drown the voices of reason, then or now, remember the anti-Imperialist League. Remember, and summon your own scorching voice.
