First Great Triumph
By Warren Zimmermann: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power
Farrar, Straus and Groux, 562 pages, $30
Americans typically do not think of themselves as imperialists. Quite the opposite, they pride themselves on idealism abroad with no history of the heavy-handed colonization practiced by European powers. But for a brief moment, when it declared war on Spain in 1898, the U.S. went on a colonial binge.
In just a few months, the U.S. replaced the Spanish in Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. It annexed Hawaii, and the following year claimed uninhabited Wake Island and negotiated a division of Samoa with Germany that secured Pago Pago’s deep-water port.
Not long afterward the U.S. declared an Open Door policy in China, which was being partitioned by Europeans. Informally imperialistic, the policy ensured that the U.S. would have equal commercial opportunity. Wanting to build a canal connecting the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, the administration of Theodore Roosevelt sought an agreement with Colombia to use its Darien isthmus. When the Colombian senate balked at the deal, the U.S. promoted a revolution that created a new country in the Darien, Panama, whose government would cooperate.
“This burst of offshore conquests” Warren Zimmermann writes in “First Great Triumph,” his diplomatic history of the era, “made America a genuine overseas empire.”
Using a familiar approach, Zimmermann tells this story chiefly through five “wise men” who played seminal roles in shaping their nation’s aggressive reach abroad:
– Alfred Thayer Mahan was a mediocre, irascible naval officer but a brilliant theorist about the necessity of naval power. Key to his influential argument was the need to acquire overseas coaling stations to support the Navy.
– John Hay, who began his career as an aide to President Abraham Lincoln, went on to diplomatic posts overseas, journalism (he wrote editorials at the New York Tribune for Horace Greeley) and business (thanks to his wealthy father-in-law). Not particularly ambitious, but experienced internationally, the increasingly conservative dilettante became secretary of state under Roosevelt and designed the Open Door policy.
– Elihu Root was an accomplished New York lawyer and a domestic political reformer. Although without much foreign-affairs background, he became secretary of war under President William McKinley and secretary of state after Hay’s death during the Roosevelt administration. A respected problem solver, his first assignment was “to establish U.S. colonial government on all the islands taken from Spain and to prepare Cuba for independence.”
– Henry Cabot Lodge, who had a fierce desire to impose his will, became the Senate’s leading spokesman for imperialism. ” `I cannot bear to see the American flag pulled down where it has once been run up,’ ” said the Massachusetts Republican, ” `and I dislike to see the American foot go back where it has once been advanced.’ “
– Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest of the group and the most aggressive, drew inspiration from these men and worked closely with them, especially while assistant secretary of the Navy under McKinley and as president.
These leaders did not always support or like each other in their public or personal lives. (Hay had an affair with Lodge’s wife.) But they shared similar goals and exemplified the highly emotional forces at large in the country: Manifest Destiny, which deemed it inevitable that the U.S. should spread its self-proclaimed civilizing institutions and values abroad; social Darwinism, which dictated that Americans must expand lest other nations outdistance them; and the desire for overseas markets, which was driven by fear that Americans could not buy all that their manufacturers produced.
Historians debate the impact of these factors as well as others on American colonizing following the Spanish-American War. Some have noted the crises of confidence in economic and political institutions at the time; others the influence of foreign political figures who favored imperialism and held sway, briefly, with foreign-policy elites in the U.S.
Zimmermann sensibly stresses the indisputable factor of “imperial opportunity.” First, the U.S. military had become formidable in the wake of Mahan’s urgings. Second, Zimmermann writes, “The strategic importance of Cuba, the U.S. interest in the island’s sugar economy, and a well-publicized record of Spanish atrocities against the Cuban people combined to make war with Spain a realistic option.”
As the widely different strands of these arguments suggest, this is a complicated history riddled with contradictory motives. On the one hand, political leaders decried Spanish rule and desired to spread American ideals about democracy. On the other hand, their policies worked against popular rule and reflected racist views. ” `The most ultimately righteous of all wars,’ ” Roosevelt said, ” `is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman.’ “
Guided by such thinking, American military leaders did not allow allied insurgent forces in Cuba or the Philippines to attend Spanish surrender ceremonies. Occupation forces perpetrated gruesome atrocities against Philippine rebels who did not want Spanish or American rule. ” `As near as I can make out,’ ” Root said, ” `the Constitution follows the flag–but doesn’t quite catch up with it.’ “
So sensitive and contradictory were these sentiments that only one of the five wise men, Mahan, used the word “imperialism.” Roosevelt preferred “Americanism” and Lodge the “large policy.”
The urge to colonize ended quickly. The U.S. would never again take formal control of another land. Zimmermann, however, does not belong to the school of thought that this turn-of-the-century imperialism was an aberration. He views it as a “culmination” that would establish habits of thought that carried on.
In making his case for war, President McKinley gave birth to the human rights doctrine by “contending that the United States had both a right and a duty to intervene when another country abused its citizens.” Lodge was a convicted unilateralist devoted to sustaining American military and economic might. As such he opposed entry into the League of Nations, where Americans would not be a dominant influence, an attitude that lives on today in the Bush administration.
Zimmermann’s history is marred by triteness in descriptions of the wise men, useless repetition and an urge to digress on such topics as late 19th Century Washington lifestyles. But if a shorter book would have been better, Zimmermann has admirably succeeded in just the way one might expect from a career diplomat such as he. It is fair-minded, lucid and practical.
Zimmermann’s cautionary notes for contemporary policymakers resonate as war with Iraq looms. Roosevelt and his friends were so intent on projecting American power abroad that they shoved aside their most cherished American ideals. Philippine rebels were denied prisoner-of-war status, thus making it easier to take retribution. When the Senate was forced by public opinion to investigate U.S. military atrocities, it withheld critical testimony from the final report.
Moreover, American political leaders went to war before they had thought through what they would do to rebuild the nations they liberated. As Zimmermann shows, rebuilding is more difficult than winning, which helps explain why the U.S. did not continue to acquire colonies. Americans do not have much stomach for long-term responsibilities abroad that call into question their idealism.
