Colossus (12 page)

American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours…. We will establish trading posts throughout the world as distributing points for American products…. Great colonies governing themselves, flying our flag and trading with us, will grow about our posts of trade…. And American law, American order, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.
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It was a commercial megalomania personified by Joseph Conrad’s character Holroyd, the bumptious East Coast plutocrat who appears in
Nostromo:

Now, what is Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of 10 per cent loans and other fool investments. European capital has been flung into it with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe. We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.
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Yet such talk, though perhaps in a slightly less brash idiom, might equally well have been overheard in one of the London clubs. The components of economic imperialism were essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic: a desire to reduce other people’s tariffs (hence the “Open Door”),
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a confidence that overseas investment would beget new export markets (especially important in the depression of 1893–97), but also a readiness to use political and military leverage to outwit the competition.
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Equally familiar to students of European imperialism are the ideological currents that were at work: the social Darwinism expounded by Josiah Strong, author of
Expansion Under New World-Conditions
(1900);
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the shrill chauvinism of the Hearst and Pulitzer papers.
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In the eyes of many British observers from Kipling to Buchan, from Chamberlain to Churchill America’s bid for overseas markets thus had much in common with Britain’s
fin de siécle
“scramble” for more colonies. This, after all, was the era when the
New York Times
could declare: “We are a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly
destined to dominate this planet.”
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Yet two related things made the American experiment with empire different from its transatlantic counterpart. First, the political base for imperialism was narrower; empire appealed much more to the elites of the industrialized North than to the rest of the country. Secondly, the economic rationale of acquiring colonies was more open to doubt. Britain had embraced free trade as early as the 1840s. Nothing had subsequently been done to protect British farmers from the influx of cheaper foodstuffs, as steamships, railways and refrigerators integrated the world’s corn and meat markets. Britain seemed self-evidently to need a global
imperium
, if only to secure the flow to its domestic emporium of goods it could not grow itself. Moreover, the bankers of the City of London, whose business it was to direct British capital overseas, had a vested interest in a continuation of both free trade and empire. How could the debtor countries of the New World be expected to honor their obligations if their exports of primary products did not have free access to the British market? And if they did threaten to default, what better way to prevent them from doing so than to occupy their countries and govern them according to sound economic principles?
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In the United States there were men who made similar arguments, but there were powerful protectionist lobbies pushing in the opposite direction. Their argument was that the United States had no need of British-style colonies if their function was simply to inundate the American market with goods that Americans could just as well produce for themselves (albeit less cheaply). Other opponents, dismayed at the changing complexion of the immigrants coming to the United States, saw colonies as just a further source of inferior racial stock.
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Though they shared some of its underlying prejudices, protectionism and nativism proved to be false friends to imperialism;
pace
Kipling, their proponents had no real interest in shouldering “the white man’s burden.”

The first American overseas possessions were islands desirable only as naval bases or sources of guano. The atoll of Midway, formally annexed in 1867 by Captain William Reynolds of the USS
Lackawanna
, was among the first of these maritime filling stations. A decade later the United States secured the right to use the harbor of Pago Pago on the Samoan island of Tutuila, though it was not until 1899, following a civil war in Samoa, that the entire
island became an American possession.
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A year before, Guam had also been acquired, along with Wake Island. Besides being small—even the largest, Guam, is barely two hundred square miles in size—all these new. outposts were exceedingly far away. The nearest, Midway, was literally midway between Los Angeles and Shanghai. The most remote, Guam, lay between Japan and New Guinea, nearly fifty-eight hundred miles west of San Francisco. The first true American colony was also in the Pacific: Hawaii.

That an eight-island archipelago located over two thousand miles from the American mainland should have ended up being the fiftieth state of the Union is a true historical puzzle, particularly as other, more obvious candidates for integration into the United States were passed over. Three groups combined to Americanize Hawaii: missionaries, sugar planters and navalists. To the last group, Hawaii offered, in the words of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, an attractive “resting spot in the mid-ocean, between the Pacific coast and the vast domains of Asia, which are now opening to commerce and Christian civilization,” not to mention a way of “curbing” the already discernible rise of Japan.
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To the sugar producers of the islands themselves, the United States represented a potentially vast market, if tariff-free trade could be achieved. The mission schools meanwhile prepared the Hawaiians for subjugation. The steps toward this fate were swiftly taken: in 1875 a free trade treaty was signed,
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in 1887 a naval coaling station was established at Pearl Harbor, and in 1893 Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown in a
coup d’état
orchestrated by the American minister to the islands, John L. Stevens. Yet—just as had happened in the case of Texas—Congress drew back. Despite Stevens’s warnings that Hawaii would otherwise become “a Singapore, or a Hong Kong, which could be governed as a British colony,”
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his plan for annexation was rejected.
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Sugar producers feared competition,
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and racialists feared “bad blood and bad customs” (since Americans made up just 2 percent of the islands’ population), while liberals suspected that the American minority had less than democratic intentions. When, in 1897, a draft treaty for annexation ran into bipartisan opposition once again, Theodore Roosevelt was moved to lament “the queer lack of imperial instinct that our people show.”
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It was only after the news of the American victory over Spanish forces in the Philippines that a resolution for annexation could be passed.
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The Hawaiians resisted—but they resisted peacefully. In the election to
the first territorial legislature, a Home Rule Party won a majority of seats by mobilizing native voters, who defied the clause in the Organic Act that all debate should be in English.
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Only by co-opting Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, a royal prince who had initially resisted the American takeover, was the local Republican Party able to compete. Little more than a front man for the interests of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, Prince Kuhio could only bewail impotently the decline and fall of his people.
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While the five big sugar companies tightened their grip on the islands’ most fertile areas, the original inhabitants were “rehabilitated”: in effect, shunted onto marginal land.
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This not unfamiliar colonization process did not quite go according to plan, however. The natives had been sidelined in classic fashion, but their places were not taken by American settlers. Instead, as had already been the case before annexation, it was Japanese and later Filipino migrants who came to populate Hawaii. Despite measures to exclude newcomers, the Japanese community grew rapidly. In the early 1920s three in every hundred voters were Japanese, but by 1936 the proportion was one in four.
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Hawaii might be strategically valuable to the United States, but it offered enterprising Americans few economic opportunities to equal those available at home.

Why did Hawaii ultimately become a state, but not Puerto Rico, ceded to the United States by Spain in 1898? It was certainly not a matter of distance, since the latter is a good deal nearer to the American mainland (just over a thousand miles from Miami). Nor, in economic terms, did one sugar plantation have more to offer than the other. The answer is in fact a legal technicality, revealed when Puerto Rican producers sought to challenge the imposition of tariffs on their exports to the United States. In two simultaneous judgments in 1901, the Supreme Court concluded that Puerto Rico was not a foreign country, but that it was not domestic territory either, and that therefore a tariff on its products was constitutional. Of particular importance was the distinction drawn by Justice Edward Douglass White between annexation and incorporation (which required congressional authority). In his opinion, “Puerto Rico had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.” As such, only certain “fundamental” provisions of the Constitution applied to it. The significance of this ruling, which defined that strange limbo between independence and American statehood occupied by Puerto Rico
ever since, was that decisions could now be taken retrospectively about the status of other possessions. Since, under the terms of their acquisition, “formal” as well as “fundamental” provisions of the Constitution had been extended to both Alaska and Hawaii, they must by definition have been incorporated and therefore entitled to full statehood, which they eventually attained in 1959.
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The judgments of 1901 appeared to clear the way legally for the annexation of new and larger colonies that could be treated like Puerto Rico as “organized but unincorporated” and therefore outside the domain of the Constitution. Why, then, has the United States not got more Puerto Ricos? The answer can be expressed in two words: the Philippines.

What happened in the Philippines has unfortunately proved to be far more typical of American overseas experience than what happened in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. To be precise, seven characteristic phases of American engagement can be discerned:

1. Impressive initial military success
   
2. A flawed assessment of indigenous sentiment
   
3. A strategy of limited war and gradual escalation of forces
   
4. Domestic disillusionment in the face of protracted and nasty conflict
   
5. Premature democratization
   
6. The ascendancy of domestic economic considerations
   
7. Ultimate withdrawal
   

The speed of the American victory over Spain in 1898 was certainly striking. Within just three months of the American declaration of war—the trumped-up pretext for which was the accidental explosion of the battleship
Maine
in Havana Bay, supposedly the fault of Spain—the Spanish forces in both the Caribbean and the Philippines were defeated. However, the Americans refused to recognize that the Filipinos who had sided with them against Spain had been fighting for their independence, not for a change of colonial master.
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McKinley’s reported justification for annexing
the islands was a masterpiece of presidential sanctimony, perfectly pitched for his audience of Methodist clergymen:

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you… that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was but it came…. (1) That we could not give them back to Spain…. (2) That we could not turn them over to France and Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient … (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for government … (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.
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