BEGIN BOB BEISNER IN THE MIDDLE OF SECOND …



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 ...

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BEISNER: Anti-imperialism is made up of Republicans, Democrats, and political independents. You can sort of say different things about each one.

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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.

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: One of the most remarkable people to appear in the imperialist camp was Andrew Carnegie, a great millionaire and benefactor of good causes and so forth. Carnegie was an immigrant originally from Scotland and although he he'd some anti-English views in his youth, by the 1880s and 1890s enamored of the extraordinary idea of uniting the two countries in some sort of grand transatlantic union that would essentially headed by the United States, but this was symbolized by the fact that Carneg-- Carnegie, ahm, vacationed every summer in Scotland, where they owned a castle called Skibo. And on the top of his castle he flew a flag every time he was there that had the Union Jack on the one side and the Stars and Stripes on the other. He'd managed to sew this. And so, depending upon how you looked at the flag, it'd be either British or American. Ah, he gets very angry about, ah, the seizure of the Philippines and he's been arguing for years and years that American principles were democratic, anti-imperial, ah, that's what the country stood for and he sees the Republicans as betraying this and he fights McKinley very strenuously, writes letters to prominent Republicans all over the country, ah, using furious rhetoric at them. And at one point, ahm, part of the treaty terms with Spain included the fact that United States government paid Spain $20 million for the pil-- Philippines. Didn't simply seize it as the booty of war, but paid the Philippines. When that became known, ah, Carnegie, apparently sincerely, offered to pull out his checkbook and write a check to the United States government for $20 million and in return for which he wanted McKinley to give the Philippines their independence immediately.

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: Another prominent business executive who was part of the anti-imperialist movement, ah, was a man named Edward Atkinson from Boston. He was mainly an insurance company executive, but he also dabbled in a lot of other enterprises and he was kind of an amateur inventor as well. He once invented, ahm, what amounted to kind of an early version of the pressure cooker and argued that instead of striking for higher wages, workers could do much better if they simply cooked more efficiently and recommended his Atkinson oven, for which workers thereafter always called him Shinbone (Unintell.) Atkinson. Ahm, Atkinson's main arguments about im-- about imperialism were economic. And what he mainly did was contradict the arguments of imperialists, who saw the great commercial future for the United States through expansion. And Atkinson argued with, ah, huge amounts of statistics always behind these arguments, which he loved to accumulate, that, ahm, the future of American commerce in places like the Far East and Latin America was always going to be modest until those countries developed far more so they had greater purchasing power. He al-- therefore, that the best place to -- for the Americans to continue to trade was with Canada and Western Europe. So em-- empire made no sense. And he -- and he also made the argument that in order for the United States to expand sales in places like China and the Far East, it didn't need empire. What it needed was open markets. So he argued for those. Ahm, so his economic arguments were very interesting, but the most interesting thing about Atkinson was his methods -- or were his methods as an anti-imperialist.

DIRECTIONAL

CR 28

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: I think the most extraordinary about anti-- Edward Atkinson as an anti-imperialist were his methods. Most anti-imperialists were essentially letter writers and speech makers. It was a very genteel kind of protest. Atkinson insisted on action all the time, and, ah -- and was sensationalistic as well. And one of the things that he did, for example, was publicized the degree to which all armies of empire throughout history had succumbed to venereal disease. And so he spread statistics all over the country in pamphlets about how the American Army in the Philippines would be blasted by venereal disease. Sent pamphlets -- got -- got addresses of soldiers, sent pamphlets to their mothers, ah, with this information and so forth. And then he put all of his arguments together, economic arguments, arguments about political principle, venereal disease and so forth in one sort of unified pamphlet and then, ah, sent thousands of copies mailed to the Philippines, addressed to American soldiers. And this was a test of a very important political principle. Many anti-imperialists believed that one of the consequences of going into the, ah, sort of career of empire was that traditional American political principles, such as freedom of speech, would no longer be able to hold. And Atkinson was testing this. And, sure enough, the -- as soon as the US government learned about this pamphlet in the mailing, the Postmaster General had the pamphlets seized and so they never reached the Philippines and Atkinson was able to, along with others, ah, was able to go the public then and say, "You see? This is what happens. If we seize the Philippines to go and become an imperialist power, we'll no longer have our freedoms."

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: It's always been very hard to use Presidential elections in American history as a referendum for any one particular subject, and that was the case in 1900 as well. Anti-imperialists found it very hard to figure out what to do about the election in 1900. And I've been able to figure out at least six different positions they took in the election. They were just fragmented all over the place. Some of them were so conservative in their political views otherwise, economic views, that they simply swallowed hard and voted for McKinley and Republicans down the line. Others went (Clears Throat) the opposite direction, voting for Bryan and Democrats in Congress. Ah, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., one of the anti-imperialist leaders, came up with a scheme for what he called voting against both parties at the same time, which was very negative and fascinating. He said we should either vote for McKinley, ah, and then a Democratic Congress who would restrain him from further imperial adventures, or we should vote for Bryan and then a Republican Congress to restrain Bryan from wild social experiments. There were others who supported independents of one kind or another. The result was anti-imperialists were all over the place in the 1900 election. Ahm, but it was very hard to figure out what the election meant for the subject, anyway, because the two key opponents, of course, McKinley and Bryan, moved closer and closer in the campaign to one another, McKinley backing off from any idea of further expansionism and Bryan getting closer and closer to the view that, well, this wasn't so bad, after all, "We just won't do it anymore." And the fact that the election then finally had such ambiguous res-- significance for this issue was very bad news for the Filipino rebels because they had seen in the Anti-Imperialist Movement, ah, the promise of a movement back in the United States that would become strong enough to, ahm, produce political results that would mean freedom and independence for them. And they had, ah, actually, ah, helped, ah, support American anti-imperialists and sent letters to the United States, ah, saying, ah, you know, how great the anti-imperialists were and so forth. Ahm, and the -- ahm, they -- they really discovered that the anti-imperialists would not be able to do that for them.

CUT

DIRECTIONAL

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: Teddy Roosevelt despised the anti-imperialists and constantly implied that they were of less than full masculine character, I mean in terms like "nervous nellies" and others were constantly used.

INT: How was the movement revived?

BEISNER: After the election of 1900, the Anti-Imperialist movement just about disintegrated. Ah, but it revives, ah, very intensely, but involving a smaller group of people. These were probably the really hard core anti-imperialists who cared deeply, most deeply. In 1901 and 1902, after reports came out and were widely publicized that the US Army was committing horrendous atrocities against Filipinos in the Philippine -- American-Philippine war, and those finally came to result in widely publicized Army court marshals and anti-imperialists publicized those a great deal, and strongly condemned, ah, the United States Army for that. Some of the people who became -- sort of became the leaders in 1901 and 1902 were not the same who had been the most prominent in 1898 and 1899. And one man in particular, Morefield Storing, Massachusetts, carries on as an anti-imperialist all the way into the years of Woodrow Wilson and beyond, ah, fighting constantly the campaign to free the Philippines.

DIRECTIONAL

INT: Talk about Mark Twain's shift.

BEISNER: Yeah. Twain writes his Essay to a Person Sitting in Darkness in 1902, I think, 1901 or '2, yes.

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: I don't know a whole lot about Twain. The reason I don't know a whole lot about Twain is because when I did all my research years ago, I looked all him for me -- for him in 1898 and '99 as an anti-imperialist and he's not there.

DIRECTIONAL

BB: I remember something else. I think Twain was abroad for much of '98 and '99. He was like touring Egypt and the Nile or something.

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INT: Reflect on the tremendous disillusionment after the war as to US identity.

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BEISNER: The Anti-Imperialist Movement as a formal movement does die really in 19-- with a few exceptions, in 1900 and 1901. And later protest movements such as anti-war protesters in the 1960s, I don't know think particularly conscious of them, but a lot of the concerns that the anti-imperialists articulated in 1898 and '99 are still with us and certainly echoed in the anti-imperiali-- in the anti-war movement of the 1960s as well. And one of the key ones is the -- sort of this crushing sense that anti-imperialists felt that, you know, they have lost something terrible -- terribly important about America, that the belief which might be hubristic and arrogant or even ignorant that America is a totally unique and uniquely virtuous civilization, ah, they adhered to that. And they believed that 1898-98 (sic) proved that they were wrong. And it was devastating. You find that echoing again in the 1960s at the time of the Vietnam War when American protesters said, "You know, this isn't the kind of war Americans fight. This is a kind of war the French fight or the British fight or the Germans fight." And there was a lot -- that -- that was echoed. Another -- the other, I think, key connection between the anti-imperialist sense and their arguments and other later groups, ah, has to do with the whole idea of empire, whether it's a formal empire or a kind of great power informal empire later, is incompatible with, ah, running a liberal democratic state. So that while democratic American political institutions in the 1960s and so forth remain democratic at least in formal ways, ahm, oppositionists in the 1960s, ahm, were hounded by the FBI. Ah, their mail was read. Ahm, their speech in some respect was curtailed. Ah, the FBI was accumulating files on all kinds of innocent Americans. And some of that can be regarded as the consequences of, you know, this is what happens when you go, ah, and you decide to become a great power and try to rule half of the world.

DIRECTIONAL, CUT, DIRECTIONAL

INT: Talk about how the Anti-Imperialist Movement may have given women a political voice.

BEISNER: You know something I don't. It might be the case, but I don't know a whole lot about it. I mean they're not ... I'll take a shot at in my own formulation. I don't know if you'll want it.

DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: Women played a very inconspicuous role in the Anti-Imperialist Movement, but that's because they still played a very inconspicuous role in American politics and social movements generally. Ahm, the women that I'm aware of in the late 19th century, the turn of the century, who were becoming increasingly, ah, assertive, ah, eager to play a role in society, were preoccupying themselves with a lot of social issues in the cities and with immigrant groups, with child welfare, matters of that sort. If you look at the rosters of the anti-imperialist leagues or all the subgroups within the Anti-Imperialist League, ahm, it's a male role call. And, ahm, the men organized the groups, they ran the groups. Ahm, you, ah, find very few speeches on public platforms made by -- by anti-imperialist women. The only conspicuous person in the sense of a woman whose name, ah, Americans of our time will still remember is Jane Adams, who combined her sensibilities and activities about, ah, cities and immigrant groups with her opposition to imperialism and was one of the most vigorous leaders in the Chicago community of the Anti-Imperialist Movement. The other thing that's interesting is to examine the rhetoric of the imperialists of the time and see the degree to which ...

DIRECTIONAL, CUT, DIRECTIONAL

BEISNER: Many anti-imperialists leaders might in fact have been uncomfortable if they had too many women allies at the time, because they were already being assaulted by Teddy Roosevelt and others as, ah, being, ah, milliners, nervous nellies, and the gendered talk among anti-- among imperialists, excuse me, expansionists in attacking the anti-imperialists at the time was quite extraordinary. And, ah, there's clearly a cam-- an effort on the part of imperialists, however conscious it is, I don't know, to make the public think of these, ah, men as, ah, not men. And the more allies that they might have had who were in fact feminine, the more they themselves might have felt handicapped.

END INTERVIEW

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