Republican Imperatives and Imperial Wards:

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Republican Imperatives and Imperial Wards

• U.S. Expansion Overseas in the Late 19th Century

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The White Mans Burden?

• 1899 cartoon. Uncle Sam balances his new
  possessions, which are depicted as savage
  children
  
• The figures are identified as Puerto Rico,
  Hawaii, Cuba, Philippines, and "Ladrones" (the
  Mariana Islands)

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The Question
It would be better to abandon this combined
garden and Gibraltar of the Pacific I.e., the
Philippines than to apply any academic
arrangement of self-government to these children.
They are not capable of self-government. How
could they be? They are not a self-governing
race What alchemy will change the oriental
quality of their blood and set the self-governing
currents of the American pouring through their
Malay veins? How shall they in the twinkling of
an eye, be exalted to the heights of
self-governing people which required a thousand
years for us to reach, Anglo-Saxons though we
are? --Albert Beveridge to the U.S.
Senate, January 1900
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(No Transcript)
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Expansion

• Had its economic engines
• Quest for
• New markets
• Coaling stations
• Naval bases
• In the late-19th Century the U.S. had its close
  encounters with
  
• Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
  Guam, and Cuba
  
• But

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Questions

• What would be the political relationship between
  Americans and the peoples of potential colonies?
  
• Was citizenship thinkable?
• If not, could America hold an array of islands in
  despotic dependency and still remain a free
  republic?

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Questions

• Where there as Mark Twain asked in 1901, two
  kinds of civilization--one for home consumption
  and one for the heathen market?
  
• The issues that these questions raised were at
  once evident among most Americans living at the
  end of the 19th century.

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Fitness for Government
Many of the Philippine people are utterly
unfit for self-government, and show no signs of
becoming fit. Others may in time become fit, but
at present can only take part in self-government
under a wise supervision, at once firm and
beneficent. We have driven Spanish tyranny from
the islands. If we now let it be replaced by
savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and
not for good. -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
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Discussions of Expansion and National Policy

• Were
• tensely strung between the poles of duty and
  distrust, of missionary zeal and the missionarys
  skepticism toward the prospect of the heathens
  redemption.

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The tension was not new

• Expansionism was not new
• Trans-Atlantic migration, settlement, conquest
• Trans-Appalachian migration
• The Louisiana purchase and Indian Removal
• Manifest Destiny
• The Mexican War
• And the annexation of Texas, California, the
  Southwestern territories, and Alaska

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The tension was not new

• By the end of the 1890s, the decade that saw the
  superintendent of the census declare the frontier
  closed, Americans began to look overseas.
  
• Expansion overseas came into especially sharp
  focus when the U.S. went to war with Spain in
  1898
  
• The U.S. had already established its first
  governing presence (along with Germany and Great
  Britain) in 1890

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1898

• By 1898, Spain had retreated from its colonies
  and U.S. naval and ground forces spread from the
  Caribbean to the Far East.
  
• U.S. pondered questions of the status and
  government of
  
• Hawaii
• Whose white elites had been seeking annexation
  since their coup against Queen Liliuokalani
  (1893)
  
• Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines
• Whose liberation from Spain left many questions
  open

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Arguments Against Imperialism

• There were arguments being made against
  imperialism at the end of the century
  
• American Anti-Imperialist League
• But they came from such a broad cross section of
  Americans that it was difficult to build any type
  of coherent opposition
  
• One anti-imperialist issued a call for all of
  those opposed to imperialism to stand shoulder
  to shoulder
  
• Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Populist,
  Gold-man, Silver-man, and Mugwump
  
• Not to mention women reformers and African
  Americans

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1898-1902

• From the debate on the annexation of Hawaii in
  1898 to the conclusion of the war against
  Philippine independence in 1902
  
• A double edged disdain for the children of
  barbarism
  
• That such backward people were fit for nothing
  but domination by the U.S. who was divinely
  ordained to carry out its mission
  
• That such backward people should be left to
  their own savage ways

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The Result

• Each region (Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the
  Philippines) found itself gripped in U.S.
  possession only at arms length.
  
• The U.S. held them
• But at a safe distance from anything
  approximating
  
• Full citizenship
• Equality
• Sacred workings of self-government

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Hawaii
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Hawaii

• Somewhat of an exception
• Sizable population of European and American
  settlers who after 1893 held political control
  and sought statehood
  
• There were Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese,
  American, European, and racially mixed people
  living on the islands but
  
• 1894 Constitution made it very difficult for
  non-whites to participate in government
  
• The franchise was narrowed from 14k to 2,800 most
  of whom were employees of Dole

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Hawaii

• Before war with Spain in 1898, the U.S.
  government rejected annexation of Hawaii in 1893
  and 1897 on primarily racial grounds
  
• The islanders were not fit to be U.S. citizens
  and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act forbade
  citizenship to Asians
  
• With war however, came a heightened sense of
  Hawaiis military potential

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Hawaii

• Opposition to annexation cracked in July 1898
• But
• Congress extended Chinese Exclusion to the
  Territory of Hawaii
  
• Limited U.S. citizenship to all white persons,
  including Portuguese, and persons of African
  descent, and all persons descended from the
  Hawaiian race who were citizens of the Republic
  of Hawaii immediately prior to transfer of
  sovereignty.
• Property qualifications to hold office
• Property and literacy qualifications for
  franchise

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Hawaii

• Petitions for statehood were rejected in 1903,
  1911, 1913, and 1915
  
• It seemed, at least during the GAPE, that the
  U.S. was willing to take Hawaii (for military and
  economic reasons), but not the Hawaiian people
  
• Hawaii would not become a state until 1959

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Cuba
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Cuba

• U.S. leaders thought that Cubans perhaps even
  more than Hawaiians were incapable of
  citizenship
  
• U.S. set about creating a stable, reliable
  mechanism for Cuba government
  
• Favorable to American interests, not the Cuban
  independentistas
  
• U.S. limited the franchise to about 5 of the
  population
  
• But the independentistas still won key municipal
  and assembly elections in 1900

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Cuba

• Platt Amendment (1903) incorporated into a treaty
  with Cuba
  
• Annexation of Cuba had been proscribed in the
  U.S. Declaration of War with Spain, but
  independence had not
  
• The Platt amendment provided provisions for a
  territorial government similar to that of Hawaii
  
• It seemed the U.S. was willing to take Cuba, not
  Cubans

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Cuba

• Platt Amendment (1903)
• Forbade Cubans to enter into treaties with
  foreign powers on their on behalf
  
• Provide for the cession of necessary lands to the
  U.S. for coaling and naval stations
  
• Granted the U.S. the right to intervene to
  maintain Cuban independence, and the
  maintenance of a Cuban government adequate for
  the protection of life, property, and individual
  liberty

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Puerto Rico
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Puerto Rico

• Spanish rule came to an end on October 18, 1898
  when U.S. Major General John Brooke became the
  islands military governor
  
• Initially most military and government officials
  thought that Puerto Rico would become a territory
  and then a state and it residents U.S. citizens
  
• But this did not happen

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Puerto Rico

• Ultimately laws stated that Puerto Rican citizens
  were entitled to the protection of the U.S.
  
• Laws also did away with the U.S. Constitution as
  the legal framework in Puerto Rico and revoked
  its right to send one non-voting member to the
  U.S. House of Representatives
• U.S. Senate report said the revision of Puerto
  Rican status was made because Puerto Ricans were
  
• Illiterate, of a wholly different character, and
  incapable of exercising the rights granted by the
  U.S. Constitution

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Puerto Rico

• Congress decided to
• hold the territory as a mere possession
• And to
• govern the people thereof as their situation and
  the necessities of their case might seem to
  require.
  
• Jones Act (1917) granted Puerto Ricans U.S.
  citizenship, but it imposed requirements that
  left 70 of the pop non-citizens
  
• One historian - U.S. imposed a system of
  government that left Puerto Rico less democratic
  than it had been under autocratic Spain.

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The Philippines
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The Philippines

• Tensions arose soon after Admiral Deweys victory
  over the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in May
  1898.
  
• For the next several months Aquinaldo vainly
  pursued U.S. recognition of the Philippine
  independence movement

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The Philippines

• Hostilities broke out between Aquinaldos troops
  and the U.S. Army on the outskirts of Manila on
  February 4, 1899, and organized warfare continued
  in one form or another until the last of the
  insurgents surrendered in May 1902.

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The Philippines

• Following a brutal, bloody war, the U.S.
  maintained a tenuous presence in the Philippines
  as it pursued what President McKinley had called
  benevolent assimilation for the Philippine
  people.
• Philippine Autonomy Act (1916)
• Placed in the hands of the Philippine people as
  large a share of the control of their domestic
  affairs as can be given them
  
• Set them on the road toward independence