17 - Imperialism grows at a gallop
The Republocrats, 17: Imperialism grows at a gallop
By Vince Copeland
Number 17 in a series
Perhaps the best short answer to the thesis of "accidental" imperialism is the actual discussion in the Senate and in the newspapers following the 1899 Senate resolution on the Philippines. Albert Beveridge, a freshman Republican senator from Indiana, startled the country and became a national hero with a speech containing the following super-hawk sentiments:
"Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever: `Territory belonging to the United States,' as the Constitution calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our duty in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, for the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength and thanksgiving to Almighty God that he has marked us as his chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world."
U.S. ships had been trading with Asia for over a century. And attempts had been made to take over Japan in the 1850s. But U.S. business had never actually taken territory so close to China itself as this. The imperialists of 1898 and 1900 were keenly aware of all this and talked about the China prospects at every opportunity.
"China is our natural customer," said Beveridge, and "gives a base at the door of all the East." Looking far ahead to the age of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, who asserted that the U.S. is a "Pacific power," he said: "The power that rules the Pacific is the power that rules the world."
(Quoted in Claude G. Bowers, "Beveridge and the Progressive Era," Houghton Mifflin, 1932)
Riches of the Philippines
Beveridge did not forget to explain that the riches of the Philippines themselves were so fabulous that its hardwood could supply U.S. needs for more than a century; the plantations and mines were immensely productive, too. Nor did he forget the character of the new country as a great outlet for U.S. manufactured goods. This warmed the soul of big business but raised doubts among small business, which could not begin to take part in the export trade.
By and large the Democrats opposed the takeover of the Philippines and would make it an issue in the 1900 election. But they said little during the euphoria over Beveridge's speech.
It remained for Republican Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts to give some kind of answer to this unabashed imperialism on the Senate floor. Hoar was now 72 and had entered the Senate at the beginning of Reconstruction when Beveridge was six years old. He had lived and legislated through a swiftly changing age.
"...Yet Mr. President, as I heard his eloquent description of wealth and glory and trade, I listened in vain for those words which the American people have been wont to take upon their lips in every solemn crisis of our history. I heard much calculated to excite the imagination of youth seeking wealth, or youth charmed by the dream of empire. But the words Right, Duty, Freedom were absent, my friend must permit me to say, from that eloquent speech. I could think of this brave young Republic of ours, listening to what he had to say, of but one occurrence:
"`The devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, and sayeth unto him, All these things will I give to thee if thou will fall down and worship me. Then sayeth Jesus unto him, `Get thee behind me, Satan.'"
The aging senator was obviously not qualified to answer the bold speech on its merits and was no match for Beveridge in any case. But he remained, as far as that was possible in the new political atmosphere and the changing party tradition, loyal to the ideals of his Republican youth. He must have loomed like a ghost above the spit and polish of the new millionaires' club. He must have seemed like a stranger in a strange place, with shreds of the struggle for equality still hanging on him from the battles for elementary democracy in a bygone epoch.
While the newspapers were almost unanimous in their praise of the Beveridge speech, the holdout Springfield (Mass.) Republican of Hoar's state editorialized:
"Mr. Beveridge talks like a young Attila come out of the West, and if his Americanism is now the true brand, then indeed is the Republic no more."
Speech okayed by Wall Street
The speech not only anticipated the sentiments of the dominant Republicans and their big business patrons; it also expressed them more directly. Beveridge had shown this speech to some of the most important Wall Street kings of high finance several days before delivering it in the Senate. George Perkins, a Morgan partner, found it excellent. So did Ira Dodd of Dodd, Meade and Co., a Morgan-influenced publishing firm, as did President McCall of the New York Life Insurance Company, also Morgan dominated.
It was becoming almost a required custom for the very topmost politicians, Democrats and Republicans, to show the drafts of their speeches, if not the whole word-for-word oration, to the real rulers for approval. And whereas speech-writers were not unknown in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such important speech-critics as big bankers, stock manipulators, wholesale bribers of city councils, and steel and coal barons were operating with full authority behind the scenes.
Expressing himself even more boastfully if less religiously, but putting his finger on the economic source of the war's popularity, Chauncey Depew waxed forth at the Republican convention of 1904:
"The American people now produce $2 billion worth more than they can consume and we have met the emergency, and by the providence of God, by the statesmanship of McKinley and by the valor of Roosevelt and his associates, we have our market in Cuba ... in Puerto Rico, in Hawaii ... in the Philippines, and we stand in the presence of 800 million people, with the Pacific as an American lake, and the American artisans producing better and cheaper goods than any country in the world.... Let production go on ... let the factories do their best, let labor be employed at the highest wages, because the world is ours. ..."
Despite his talk of high wages, Depew probably understood quite well that the main export to the Philippines and/or to China, etc., would be capital goods, that is, the means of hiring labor at super-exploitative wages, ultimately to compete with U.S. labor.
This process had already been going on around the edges, so to speak, when he delivered this cocky message. And he himself was closely connected to just those capital goods industries which were seeking this kind of foreign market.
It is estimated that U.S. foreign investment, much of it in Latin America at the time, totaled $700 million in 1897, just before the Spanish-American War. By 1914 this had grown to $3.5 billion--five times as much. Without the war this could not have happened. The figure may not sound so big in comparison with the total product of the United States, even in those days. But it must be emphasized that then--and now--the owners of this foreign investment were the same small number of people who run the government and the political parties.
The railroad tracks, steamship docks, mines, sweatshop factories, etc., were getting into place for more young people to die for their increase and perpetuation. This would be delayed until 1917, however, when the Democratic Party played the part that the Republicans had in 1898.
Election of 1900: McKinley again
Big money was well satisfied with the Republican William McKinley and once more united behind him in the election of 1900. He had proved to be most compliant and agreeable and managed to fill his Cabinet with the most outstanding representatives of big business. He did this again at the beginning of his second term.
His election campaign was run by Mark Hanna, who went on the attack against the "free silver" advocates while painting McKinley as an advocate of sound money and thus a friend of the working people. This was the general Republican line and, as in the 1896 campaign, they captured a great many industrial workers' votes, often by threatening--as in 1896--that businesses would be shut down if William Jennings Bryan were elected.
Bryan did not emphasize free silver as much as he had in 1896, nor did he repudiate it. He attacked the imperialism of the Republicans very strongly and fairly effectively. While McKinley won again, the wave of super-patriotism washed up only another percentage point or two in the plurality of his victory. McKinley got 7,207,023 votes to Bryan's 6,358,138. Bryan had slightly more votes than in 1896. But the wonder is, in light of today's apparent indifference to foreign conquest, how vigorously he and the Democrats opposed the imperialist drive.
'Down with imperialism!'
The Democratic platform explicitly condemned imperialism and called for the U.S. to get out of the Philippines. At the Kansas City convention, there were festoons of flags and slogans, as at most conventions. But here the slogans had a radical bite. On one large sign was painted the U.S. flag and beneath it the words: "The flag of the Republic forever, of an empire, never!"
The Democratic Party was still leaning leftward, although many of the gold-standard crowd had come back to it, including some anti-imperialists among the wealthy.
Bryan took the lead in declaiming against the imperialist course that the Republican-led government had taken. Both Bryan and his party thought this course could be reversed if they were elected. They probably had little understanding of the more or less inevitable character of imperialist expansion, arising out of the economic realities of the productive system and its push for ever more markets.
"[Bryan] counseled merchants that trade is profitable only when mutually advantageous. He admonished missionaries that their duty was to teach the gospel of love and not to act as advance agents for fleets and armies."("Bryan" by Louis W. Koenig, p. 330)
His view of imperialism, like his view of business, was not dynamic but static. He wanted to keep things as they were (eliminating corruption and outright illegality, of course) and saw nothing wrong with the smaller businesses, including some multi-million-dollar ones, just so long as they did not become too big.
"Imperialism, Bryan contended, was a new chapter in the struggle between plutocracy and democracy. The two major parties were instruments of the struggle. The Republican Party was dominated by those `influences which constantly tend to elevate pecuniary considerations and ignore human rights.' The Democratic Party, in contrast, was friendly to `the honest accumulation of wealth; it has no desire to discourage industry, honesty and thrift'. ... Property rights, he argued, are most secure when human rights are respected." (Koenig, p. 326)
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