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{237} Epilogue Undoings Redux The Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to the U.S. military occupation of Cuba and the Philippines in 1899, brought the United States a glimpse of a new bi-oceanic empire far beyond the imaginings of Ulysses S. Grant or Frederick Douglass. Given that the occupation of the Philippines in particular was accomplished through deceit and against the wishes of the Filipino people, one imagines that had Douglass been alive, he would have been one of the most vociferous opponents of this new imperialistic aggression on the part of the United States. Or was this aggression truly new? A number of historians and cultural critics have argued that 1898 was the ‘‘natural culmination’’ of a history of U.S. imperialism that can be traced back to the Louisiana Purchase and Monroe Doctrine of the early decades of the nineteenth century and then forward to the war with Mexico, diplomatic and filibustering efforts to gain Cuba during the 1850s, and various other ventures in Caribbean and Asian expansionism from the 1850s to the 1890s.∞ Although this imperialism narrative continues to hold considerable sway, some historians have recently asked searching questions about whether history actually unfolded so tidily and predictably. Louis A Pérez Jr., for instance, argues that there is ‘‘a persistent historical elusiveness’’ about the war of 1898, and that the longstanding interest of many U.S. leaders in taking possession of Cuba was just one of a myriad of factors that led the nation to the war, including widely held sympathies for Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain and (with the sinking of the Maine) mere ‘‘accident.’’ Eric T. L. Love is similarly wary of seeing the war as a culminating expression of a national consensus on white empire, pointing out that the December 1898 Treaty of Paris, which authorized occupation, passed by only a single vote in the Senate in February 1899.≤ What if one senator had voted otherwise? Clearly, dissent and debate remained central to the war of 1898, as {238} Epilogue did thinking about race and nation. But the connections between white racial nationalism and the war remain unclear. The popularity of social Darwinism at a time of increased immigration may have led to what Anders Stephanson has termed ‘‘a kind of civilizational imperialism under Anglo-Saxon impress.’’≥ Or, as Love contends, the pronounced AngloSaxonism of the period may have contributed to a resistance to imperialism , grounded in long-standing concerns that expansion into ‘‘non-white’’ nations threatened to undermine the supposed purity of a white United States. Among the key anti-imperialists of the late 1890s, unsurprisingly, was Frederick Douglass’s former nemesis Carl Schurz, whose racist desire for a white U.S. nation led him to join the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had their own, nonracist reasons for opposing U.S. imperialism. Arguments that the war of 1898 was the inevitable expression of U.S. Anglo-Saxonist imperialism fail to note that some opponents of the war based their opposition on a privileging of whiteness. It was for this very reason, as Love observes, that supporters of the war ‘‘worked deliberately, and successfully enough, to remove race from the debates,’’ so that the war was presented as an anticolonial intervention and revenge for the sinking of the Maine rather than as an effort to expand a white empire.∂ Indeed, the anti-imperialist Twain initially supported the war of 1898 on just such humanitarian and patriotic grounds. Though there were anti-imperialists of all sorts during the late 1890s, the time may have simply been ripe for imperialists like McKinley and Roosevelt to assert their collective will. Understood in this way, the war was at least partly the result of human decision making in the flux and confusions of the moment. But perhaps it was also the result of an imperial literature that fueled the growing enthusiasm for war. According to some critics, Richard Harding Davis’s popular novel Soldiers of Fortune (1897) helped to pave the way for foreign intervention through its presentation of ‘‘imperial masculinity’’ working on ‘‘behalf of political and economic freedoms.’’ And yet contemporary reviews of Soldiers convey little sense that readers were making connections between the fictional South American country of Olancho, where Davis’s hero Robert Clay works to develop U.S. economic empire, and a possible invasion of Cuba. Moreover, Clay himself is genealogically linked to the filibusterer William Walker, whose...

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