America’s First Bid for Empire

America'sFirstBidforEmpire JohnW.Coogan. The End of Neutrality: The United States,Britain, and Maritime Rights, 1899-1915. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981.284pp. JohnMilton Cooper, Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass.and London: Harvard University Press, 1983. 442 + xiv pp. LloydC. Gardner. Safe for Democracy: The AngloAmerican Response to Revolution, 19JJ-1923. NewYork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. 383+ xii pp. Lester D. Langley. The Banana Wars:An Inner Histo,y ofAmerican Empire, 1900-1934.Lexington: University Pressof Kentucky, 1983.255 + viii pp. Arthur S. Link, ed. Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World,1913-1921.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.241 + viii pp. Gordon Martel Empires are suffused with the imperial mentalite; they are not to be confused with states having colonies. All states have colonies, i.e., areas under the control of the central authority that are treated as dependencies, that are deprived of some of the customary political privileges, that are given special treatment in economic, legal and cultural affairs. The error that confuses colonialism with imperialism imagines that, because a body of water separates the central authority from the dependency, an empire has been created. What distinguishes imperialism is ideology. Imperialists take the long view, are entranced by the big picture; they disparage temporary solutions, special interests and local concerns; they speak the language of universality-of natural rights, of new ages, of acting on behalf of all mankind. They compare themselves with empires of the past, and find the past wanting. Their empire willbe of a higher morality: not for them are the empires founded upon the evil institutions of slavery, race or the bourgeoisie. In our own time, when empires have come to be tied to the memories of a wicked past, imperialists have had to eschew imperialism. This has produced the supreme intellectual muddle of our age. This muddle first displayed itself early in the twentieth century, at the time of America's first bid for empire. Americans who supported the war against Spain and the undertaking of a mission in Cuba and the Philippines resented the suggestion that they were beginning to behave as the European great Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17,Number 1, Spring 1986, 81-92 82 Gordon Martel powers had behaved in Africa and Asia. They were not imperialists, they replied, and their mission was not to create empire, but its opposite: they would guard Cuba against the new imperialism of Europe; they would develop the Philippines for democracy, stripping away the layers of backwardness, superstition and dependency. America's first bid for empire was characterized by the assumption that Americans could never be imperialists. Much of the work carried out by historians over the past thirty years has shown this assumption to be groundless, and even those who have not consciously set out with this aim have contributed to the emerging portrait of America on the threshold of imperial greatness. Two characteristics confirm this conclusion: the growing belief on the part of Americans that their ideals and institutions were suitable for.export- that America's mission was no longer to transform a haven or refuge for the discontented or mistreated into a City Upon A Hilland , when these ideals and institutions proved to have difficulty taking root elsewhere they were not abandoned-the backwardness of the economy, the corruption instilled by the old empires, or the lassitude of non-white races accounted for the problems. The imperial idea was too strong to admit defeat. * * * There is no clearer manifestation of the imperial personality than the absolute conviction that one isaself-made man. Two of the greatest presidents of the imperial era in the United States were, in spite of their origins, moved by this conviction. Theodore Roosevelt, rooted in the eastern establishment of New York, and Woodrow Wilson, springing from the southern gentry of Virginia,regarded themselves as having overcome severe handicaps. Self-made men are not invariably imperialists, however; the separation comes when a personal quest begins to be identified with that of the nation or the race. Roosevelt's handicap was physical frailty and an inbred suspicion that, like his father, he...