The strains of argument on display hereâthe sense of a new day dawning, the sense of a need for strenuous projects to replace the vanishing American frontier, the sense of commerce as the agent of global harmony, the sense of expansion as divine dutyâachieved apotheosis in the speeches and writing of Indiana senator Albert Beveridge. Even more than Theodore Roosevelt, Beveridge emerged as the nation's leading imperial propagandist. Just days after the United States declared war on Spain, Beveridge challenged an audience at Boston's exclusive Middlesex Club to distinguish “events,” “the arguments of God,” from “words,” “the arguments of man.” With their liberal principles and economic institutions, Americans were “the allies of events and the comrades of tendency in the great day of which the dawn is breaking.” Embarked on its new “imperial career,” the United States would harness untapped labor, idle capital, and congealed industry around the world to save civilization and redeem humanity.
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The nation's power, principles, and divine sanction authorized the United States to go out into the world, Beveridge told an Indiana audience later the same fall. To be sure, by opening new markets to American farmers and factories, and by securing new resources for American manufactures, the nation was destined to dominate “the imperial trade of the entire world.” But it would do so in a public manner befitting “the sovereign power of the earth.”
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Not all Americans were as sanguine as Beveridge and the others about the implications of the U.S. victory over Spain. To William Jennings
Bryan, the Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1896 and a veteran of the recent war, the prospect of empire represented a radical departure from a century of republican rectitude. U.S. victory over Spain left the nation on the horns of a grave dilemma, Bryan warned an audience convened to commemorate George Washington's birthday in February 1899. “The ancient doctrine of imperialism, banished from our land more than a century ago, has recrossed the Atlantic and challenged democracy to mortal combat upon American soil.” The founding fathers had aimed to secure liberty for themselves and their posterity despite regional and economic differences; their successors upheld “self-government as the controlling national idea” and avoided “entangling alliances.” Sure in their understanding of their neighbor to the north, Cubans had appealed to the United States to free them from Spanish tyranny, and in the name of liberty and self-government Americans had done so. “Have the people so changed within a few short months,” Bryan wondered, that they would now force on others the “system of government against which the colonists protested with fire and sword?” Surely, this was not what America was about.
What America was about, Bryan insisted, was the selfless promotion of liberty and prosperity. A product of all the world's great civilizations combined, the United States had transcended them allâand, indeed, transcended nationhood itself. “During its brief existence it has exerted upon the human race an influence more potent for good than all the other nations of the earth combined, and it has exerted that influence without use of sword or Gatling gun.” Where “Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights, American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.” Where the former taught self-interest, the latter will propagate the commandment “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.”
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Ostensibly Bryan differed markedly from proponents of American imperialism. But his “love thy neighbor as thyself” bears striking resemblance to the universalism of his imperialist counterparts, whose logic blinded Americans to the prospect that theirs was not the only way to decorate a house, as Gómez put it, that justice, liberty, and self-government could take different forms in different places according to local customs and conditions. Only by learning to love their neighbors on their neighbors' own terms could Americans promote the ends of
true self-determination and self-government that Bryan ostensibly defended.
It has taken a century or more for the apologists of American empire to begin to come to terms with the alienating effects of U.S. triumphalism on global sentiment. Slower still has been the ability of liberals such as Bryan to acknowledge that the nineteenth-century America they mythologized differed little in its logic from the imperialism they opposed. Only by ignoring the insatiable appetite for land, markets, and resources of a liberal political economy, only by overlooking the conquest of a continent (never mind a century of saber rattling over Cuba), could Bryan make the claim that Americans had intervened in Cuba simply “to aid a neighboring people, struggling to be free.” With friends like Bryan, Cuba needed no enemies. One way or the other, the Americans would come. Cubans had plenty to say about the Americans' arrival, but their protests went largely unheard in a nation swaying to the two-part harmony of imperialism and anti-imperialism.
Though few of these men exercised political power, their views were shared by those who directed U.S.-Cuban policy in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. In the spring of 1907, for example, future president Woodrow Wilson (still celebrated today as a man of peace) observed that “since trade ignored national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the door of the nations which are closed to him must be battered down.” It was the duty of elected officials to ensure that “concessions obtained by financiers ⦠be safeguarded ⦠even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process,” Wilson argued. “Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”
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Against this backdrop, U.S. control over Cuba and the retaining of Guantánamo Bay was inevitable, notwithstanding the Teller Amendment. Cuban independence would be tolerated to the extent that it was consistent with U.S. interests. Only the details remained to be worked out. As Gómez feared and GarcÃa experienced firsthand, this process of adjusting Cuban expectations to U.S. norms began long before the war was over. After the war, proponents of U.S. control over
Cuba made their case in earnest, first insisting that Cubans were unfit for self-government, then arguing that American control over Cuba was fully consistent with the pledge of the Teller Amendment to leave Cuba to its own devices.
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The armistice brought no end to the contest to define the Cuban people in terms suitable to U.S. aims. Unusual only in its detail is the report of
Boston Herald
journalist Herbert Pelham Williams published by Page's
Atlantic Monthly
in June 1899. After the war, Williams walked from Santiago de Cuba to Havana, a distance of some six hundred miles, in order to get a feel for the state of the country. Hence Williams claimed to be something of an authority on Cuban conditions and Cubans' character.
Above all, Williams began, Americans must face the fact that Cubans were essentially “âchildren.' The word describes them almost exactly. Ignorance, delight in seeing or owning pretty trifles, curiosity, the tendency to tell an untruth whenever telling the truth may have unpleasant results, cruelty, wanton destruction of inanimate things which have obstacles in their path, fondness for personal adornment, intense desire for praise, and a weakness for showing off,âthese are the attributes of children.” As such, Cubans needed nothing so much as a firm hand. Unfortunately, U.S. policy in Cuba had been anything but firm, thanks in part to Teller. As a result, Cubans responded as children would: pursuing their selfish interests without any concern for the greater good.
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Yet all was not lost. Children were pliant, and Cubans “malleable to a surprising degree,” Williams observed. “Like children and unlike savages, almost anything can be made of them.” This only made a firm and consistent U.S. policy all the more imperative. “Under suitable government, education, treatment, and guidance,” Cubans might be “developed and uplifted to an extent amounting to transformation.” Indeed, so “extreme” was their “teachableness, and their quickness to adopt new habits of mind and action” that Williams thought it “not impossible” that Cubans might one day “be fit for citizenship.”
But first, several Cuban characteristics would have to be expunged. One was Cubans' “cheerful contentment,” one of their “worst traits.”
Contented people, everybody knows, make bad capitalists and worse laborers. So contented were Cubans in their daily lives that they never ventured beyond “two or three leagues” (eight to twelve miles) from home, thus disqualifying themselves as a mobile workforce. Another salient characteristic of Cubans was their propensity to lie. “It is often hard to tell whether a Cuban lies to you from ignorance or from malice,” Williams observed. “Here the absence of a moral sense becomes apparent. With the Cuban, lying is a matter, not of right, but of policy, his shortsightedness preventing him from perceiving that today's advantage may be tomorrow's loss”âagain, not the stuff of contracts.
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If Cubans' childlikeness, contentment, and shortsightedness made them dubious material for capitalism, hadn't they at least earned the right of self-rule by fighting for it? “It is generally admitted,” wrote one critic of U.S. colonialism, “that a people who fight strenuously for liberty against powerful oppressors deserve to obtain it; and that such a people should be presumed, till the contrary is proved, to be fit to possess it.”
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This is perhaps so as a general principle, Williams argued, but not in the case of Cuba, where Cubans' descriptions of their military feats and “the glorious victories of their somewhat mythical army,” while not “intentional, deliberate, cold-blooded lies,” were nonetheless “monstrous inventions.” Intolerably vain, Cubans were susceptible to the notion “that there was once a band of men worthy to be called a Cuban army, and that they fought battles.” In reality, “there were merely little companies of starving stragglers, who sometimes fired their two cartridges apiece from ambush at Spanish scouting parties, and then scattered.” Then again, Cubans' refusal to confront the Spaniards in open battle was only to be expected in a people “to some degree like a race of slaves.”
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Clinical in his dismantling of Cuban character, Williams attributed it to Spanish rule, thus leaving open Cuba's future, at least a crack. Cubans would have to quit their misbehavior and banish their ingratitude, both of which frustrated the “disinterested” Americans. Above all, Cubans would have to get to work. Sounding much like the conquistadors who preceded him by four centuries, Williams couldn't imagine why unemployed men would eschew jobs in the mines of the Guantánamo Basin, for example. “Left to themselves, the Cubans
would never develop their country,ânot in centuries.” It wasn't so much that Cubans were “shiftless; every man of them can shift for himself so long as he stays in the country. The trouble is that it is so easy to get along and have plenty to eat without doing much work.” Such a people might make “good servants,” but they could not be expected “to be masters of themselves or of anybody else.”
Good Cubans knew this. Indeed, Williams insisted, all Cubans “whose convictions deserve respect”ânamely, merchants, shopkeepers, and men of propertyâearnestly advocated “permanent American control” of the country. Only the “half-barbarous rabble,” many of them “negroes,” still clung “to the old fetish of âCuba Libre.'” If America sailed away, the latter would murder the former, just as GarcÃa and his men had allegedly desired to do to the Spanish at the conclusion of the war. By contrast to the Cubans, the Spanish enemy in Cuba possessed all the capitalist virtues. Spaniards were “men of honesty, industry, and stamina, [who] kept the stores and owned most of the property.” Here was material Americans could work with. Cubans, on the other hand? “Cuba under a republic would be a very unsatisfactory place to Americans.”
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It was the job of Major General Leonard Wood, military governor of Santiago province from 1899 to 1900, and of Cuba generally between 1900 and 1902, to make republican Cuba
satisfactory
to U.S. economic interests. Wood interpreted this challenge much the way his Spanish predecessors had: transforming Cubans into a disciplined and compliant workforce. In an essay published in the journal
North American Review
in May 1899, Wood described the steps he was taking in Santiago province to prepare the local population (30 percent of whom were black or “colored,” and whom Williams would describe as “scum, the refuse of the island”
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) not so much for self-government as for contract labor. In transforming Cubans into a labor force, Wood was aided greatly by the widespread poverty that pervaded the region even before the Americans arrived. “The condition of the people in Cuba today is one of extreme poverty, and in many provinces great suffering for want of food,” Wood reported. He denied the charges of Williams and others that the Cubans were too lazy to work. On the contrary, he noted, Cubans “are not only willing but anxious to work. The problem has never
been one of finding workers, but of giving work to those who wished it.” Throughout Santiago province, and indeed the entire country, every element of infrastructure needed rebuilding, from highways and railroads to bridges and telegraph lines, villages and towns, schools and municipal lines, water and sewer facilities. “Great sections” of the country had “been absolutely destroyed by war.”
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