From Territorial Empire to the Open Door and Dollar Diplomacy
For just under a half century, from 1898 until World War II, the United States possessed a territorial empire similar to the overseas empires built by European powers, only smaller.
Of course, the United States had not exactly been averse to conquest before 1898; the nation itself was the product of an aggressive form of settler colonialism and had been cobbled together out of land seized from Native Americans, French, Spanish, and British. Even though the purchase of Alaska in 1867 brought new territory disconnected from the United States, it was still part of the North American continent.The Spanish-American War of 1898 thus marked a threshold between continental expansionism and formal overseas empire. For the previous 30 years, but with increasing brutality, Spain had suppressed a nationalist movement in its island possession of Cuba. Out of an admixture of humanitarian impulse, geopolitical ambition, and cultural anxiety, and spurred on by belligerent newspapers in New York, Americans clamored to oust the Spanish and to free Cuba. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898, pressure to intervene against Spain piled heavily upon President William McKinley. Two months later, the United States declared war. By July, US troops had defeated Spanish forces in Cuba; in August, they captured Puerto Rico and the US Navy routed Spain’s Caribbean fleet. To weaken Spain as much as possible, American strategy also called for action against the Spanish Empire in Asia, even though the causes of war were all found in the Caribbean. In May, the US Pacific fleet, then anchored at Hong Kong, sailed for Manila Bay and sank the Spanish fleet. US troops followed and seized Manila in August. The war between the Spanish and the Americans officially came to an end on August 12 when Spain sued for peace.[2807]
War with Spain, a declining European power, may have ended, but the United States now found itself the sovereign ruler of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
In peace talks in Paris, US negotiators had demanded that Spain hand over control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in exchange for $20 million. By December 1898, only eight months after Congress had declared war, the United States was in possession of the largest and most strategically situated island in the Caribbean and a large Southeast Asian nation.In Cuba, nationalist leaders grudgingly acquiesced in the imposition of US rule. Ostensibly, Cubans were now self-governing; in reality, the United States exercised “effective sovereignty.”[2808] Wary of being seen to wage a war of conquest, Congress passed the Teller Amendment shortly after it declared war against Spain. Named for an anti-imperialist US senator from Colorado, Henry M. Teller, the legislation prohibited McKinley from annexing Cuba or acquiring it as territory for the United States. Yet only three years later, in 1901, Congress effectively (if implicitly) rescinded the Teller Amendment by passing the Platt Amendment, named for an arch-imperialist senator from Connecticut, Oliver Platt. The Platt Amendment, which had in fact been drafted for Platt by Secretary of War Elihu Root, reserved for US officials the right, exercised at their own discretion, to intervene unilaterally in the affairs of Cuba. In 1903, the Cuban-American Treaty of Relations codified the Platt Amendment as the domestic law of Cuba as well as the United States.[2809]
In the Philippines, the burden of colonial occupation was even heavier. During the war, nationalist rebels under the command of Emilio Aguinaldo had cooperated with US forces against the Spanish. But cooperation between Filipinos and Americans evaporated once their common enemy had disappeared, and Aguinaldo's anticolonialist followers resisted the American occupation when it became clear that US forces were not about to cede postwar control to the locals. Americans did not think Filipinos, assumed to be savage and wild with no conception of modern statehood or the complexities of governance, were ready to rule themselves.
In 1899 Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of the British Empire, wrote “The White Man's Burden” to encourage the United States to keep the Philippines, but imperially minded Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt—with whom Kipling shared the poem before it was published—needed little encouragement. The United States, imperialist Americans believed, had to seize the Philippines not only for its own national interests, but to better the lives of the Filipinos. Imperialism in this sense was a responsibility as well as an opportunity.[2810]Fighting between Americans and Filipinos broke out in Manila in June 1899. In the bloody war that followed, 4,000 US soldiers and five times as many Filipino insurgents died; estimates of civilian fatalities are inexact but are thought to be as high as 200,000.[2811] To suppress the insurgency, US troops used their military power indiscriminately. They also resorted to torturing captured nationalist rebels; the most infamous method was “the water cure,” which involved force-feeding water down a prisoner's throat until they talked or their stomach burst. Such forms ofbrutality may have helped to crush the insurgency, but they stoked resentment among Filipinos. They also caused outrage among many Americans, and the Senate held investigative hearings on the water cure and other controversial US war tactics. It is difficult to say when the war definitively ended because sporadic fighting continued for over a decade, but the conflict was effectively over by 1902. The Philippines was now an American colony.[2812]
Elsewhere, the United States was busy adding pivotal strategic outposts to its burgeoning empire. As fighting raged in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the summer of 1898, Congress quietly authorized the annexation of Hawaii, making it an official territory of the United States. Five years later, as Congress put the finishing touches on the Cuban-American Treaty of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had fought in Cuba and succeeded McKinley in 1901, engineered the independence of Panama from Colombia; Panama then granted the United States the exclusive right to build a canal that would link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as sovereign control of the canal in perpetuity.[2813]
Despite their small size and lack of strategically vital natural resources, Hawaii and Panama were immensely important acquisitions for the US empire.
It was no coincidence that all of America's seizures of territory between 1898 and 1903 were maritime in orientation; nor was it a coincidence that they all sat astride key travel and communications chokepoints between the continental United States and its two key spheres of influence, East Asia and Latin America. Beginning in 1890, with the publication of his magnum opus The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Alfred Thayer Mahan, a captain in the US Navy and an internationally celebrated strategist, set the tone for US foreign policy when he called for a major program of American shipbuilding. According to Mahan, Britain was preeminent not because it had the most powerful army (it did not), but the most powerful navy. In an increasingly interconnected world, the secret to geopolitical power and security lay in the water, not on the land. Moreover, naval power was better suited to American political economy: large standing armies were thought to be inimical to republican democracy, and they were useless in promoting America’s most basic need for commerce and trade. Thus by Mahan’s thinking, readily accepted by strategists and politicians in Washington, Boston, and New York, the US Navy needed to expand in order to protect American shores and safeguard the merchant marine.[2814] But a large and activist navy also needed coaling stations located along strategic shipping routes. In the approach from North America to East Asia, Hawaii and Guam were critical stepping stones; whoever controlled them, especially the Hawaiian Islands, could control the flow of traffic across the Pacific. The Philippines straddled key shipping lanes between the Pacific and Indian oceans and stood close to China, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Cuba played a similar role as the landmass that bridged three bodies of water—the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean— that were deemed vital to American security; to a lesser extent, this was also true of Puerto Rico. While the United States acquired a territorial empire between 1898 and 1903, then, it was different from the sprawling land empires the European powers had been collecting in Africa and Asia. Unlike the British Raj in India or French Indochina—jewels in the imperial crowns of London and Paris—Hawaii, Panama, the Philippines, and Cuba were simply means to an even more ambitious end.That end was perhaps best expressed by John Hay in his two Open Door Notes, issued to the great powers in 1899 and 1900. Hay's Open Door policy has often been interpreted by historians as an attempt to safeguard US trade with Asia so that wasteful domestic surpluses could be turned into profitable industrial and agricultural exports, predominantly to the vast and untapped China market.[2815] This was certainly a component part of Hay's vision, but only a small part, and trade was by no means the entire vision itself. Rather, the Open Door was a policy of openness, not to improve China domestically—it was not a form of democracy promotion or economic development—but to prevent any single power, or combination of powers, from dominating China. Ostensibly anti-imperialistic, the Open Door actually marked the dawn of the unique form of de-territorialized empire that Americans would build over the course of the following century. A liberal international system that ensured the movement of goods, people, and communications, based on the principle of openness and the abjuration of carving up large nations such as China into colonial holdings, would naturally benefit the largest liberal nation in the international system: the United States. Not coincidentally, Americans had ample access to natural resources in the Western Hemisphere, and thus had little interest in building their own territorial empire aside from a handful of strategically located islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. A world that functioned along the lines of the Open Door would allow the United States to dominate that world.
Economic power was crucial to keeping the door open. Even though it was not yet the hub of a world economy, the financial power of New York, as well as of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco, was critical to America's rise to globalism. Theodore Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, codified the role of finance in US foreign policy as “dollar diplomacy,” by which private capital worked in tandem with the federal government to spread America's influence in China, Latin America, and elsewhere. By taking control of insolvent and mismanaged central banks in Latin America, or by investing in education and infrastructure in China (for example, railroads), American investors, backed by the military and diplomatic power of the United States, could tie these regions tightly to a growing American imperium by making them economically beholden to Americans and by spreading values such as capitalism and republicanism.[2816] As Frank Ninkovich observes, dollar diplomacy was not simply a crude way of enriching American capitalists and industrialists; it was also an early form of modernization theory.[2817] When coupled with the spread of American culture and moral reform, it was a potent force.[2818]
However, Americans often found that their territorial empire required some awkward adjustments. Politically, anti-imperialism commanded a huge domestic following, particularly in New England. With the nation bitterly divided, the 1900 presidential election campaign became in part a referendum on imperialism: the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, vowed to release the Philippines from America's imperial grip; the Republican incumbent, William McKinley, was confident that empire was a vote winner. While McKinley could not compete with Bryan’s rhetorical skills or moral fervor, he proved himself to be a better judge of public opinion: he not only won re-election, he even beat Bryan in his home state of Nebraska. Legally, the Supreme Court validated the new empire in the Insular Cases by ruling that new territories such as the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico had been annexed to, but not incorporated within, the United States. This decision, reiterated in a series of cases in 1901 (and repeatedly reaffirmed in subsequent years), definitively codified the still-uncertain difference between the continental expansion of the nineteenth century and the overseas expansion after 1898. The Constitution did not always follow the flag, wrote Justice Edward Douglas White in his obviously tortured majority ruling in Downes v. Bidwell, because places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines were “foreign to the United States in a domestic 45
sense. [2819]
Thanks to the policies of McKinley and Roosevelt, foreigners in the shadow of American power certainly had no illusions about their place in the system. If they did, Roosevelt removed any ambiguity in 1904 when he issued his eponymous “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which expanded Secretary of State Richard Olney’s 1895 dictum that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.”[2820] The issue for Roosevelt, in 1902 in Venezuela and in 1905 in the Dominican Republic, was European great-power meddling in the Western Hemisphere. Both Venezuela and the Dominican Republic were sovereign republics, but because they were deep in debt to British and German creditors, they were potential targets for intervention. The traditional Monroe Doctrine, first issued in 1823, extended a US protective blanket against European intervention over the entire hemisphere. But the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary went much further, stipulating that if Latin American republics were careless enough to open themselves up to European encroachment the United States reserved the right to intervene preemptively and put local affairs in order—though Roosevelt was careful to stress that, unlike his counterparts in London, Paris, and Berlin, he did not seek any territorial gains. “It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous,” Roosevelt declared in his 1904 State of the Union address, where he outlined his corollary. “If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States.” Otherwise, the United States would be forced, “however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”[2821]
Roosevelt justified his imperial interventions in the name of progress and civilization. The isthmian canal in Panama would further global trade and communications and benefit a number of countries in addition to the United States. The Roosevelt Corollary’s appeal to the civilizational imperative was somewhat different, but it also claimed to safeguard the Western Hemisphere from formal European colonialism. In both cases, Roosevelt argued that US intervention was not simply in America’s interests, but the world’s. This phenomenon, perhaps best termed “progressive imperialism,” was a form of international social control by which an imperial patron, the United States, wielded as much of its power as necessary to maintain stability, ensure justice, and facilitate progress. Whether such unilateral altruism now appears hypocritical or self-serving is beside the point. It was, at the time, seen as a generous, spiritual, and enlightened policy that promised to spread civilization as widely as possible.[2822] The United States was the repository of the world’s hopes, ambitions, and freedoms. “Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical,” Roosevelt explained. “In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large.”[2823]
Progressive imperialism seemed so compelling in large part because Americans were simultaneously remaking their own nation through precisely the same means. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—roughly 1890 to 1920—marked the era of Progressivism, a rare political moment when both Republicans and Democrats (to say nothing of splinter movements such as the People’s Party and the Progressive Party) had a similar ideology as their common denominator. The source of Progressivism’s impulse continues to be debated, but while it undoubtedly had altruism at its core, it was also a widespread attempt by the middle classes to stave off radicalism and revolution, particularly in the big cities that were crowded with poor immigrants with few job skills and little or no fluency in English. The nadir of domestic Progressivism was found in the establishment of the Jim Crow system in the South, which forcibly, strictly, and violently segregated the black and white races. Empires were thus being constructed at home as well as abroad, and white Americans felt they had to shoulder the white man's burden from Manila and Havana all the way back to Montgomery and Atlanta.[2824]