Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

During the summer of 1898, Theodore Roosevelt left the government and set out for Cuba with his own personal regiment. Made up of cowboys, Native Americans, and polo-playing members of the Harvard class of 1880, Roosevelt’s Rocky Mountain Riders (known to the press as the Rough Riders) would be decimated by malaria and dysentery on the island, but their skirmishes with the Spaniards at San Juan Hill, east of Santiago, would also get their leader nominated for a congressional Medal of Honor and propel him into the highest elected political office.

Peace was restored by the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, a treaty that launched the United States into a hitherto unimaginable role as an explicitly imperialist power in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The treaty gave Cuba its independence, but the Platt Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress in 1901 actually made the island a satellite of the United States, while establishing an American naval base at Guantánamo Bay on Cuba’s south coast. Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut had attached an amendment to the Army Appropriations Bill, specifying the conditions under which the United States would intervene in Cuban domestic affairs. His amendment demanded that Cuba not sign any treaties that could impair its sovereignty or contract any debts that could not be repaid by normal revenues. In addition, Cuba was forced to grant the United States special privileges to intervene at any time to preserve Cuban independence or to support a government “adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” The marines would land to exercise these self-proclaimed rights in 1906,1912,1917, and 1920.

In 1901, the United States forced Cuba to incorporate the Platt Amendment into its own constitution, where it remained until 1934—including an article that allowed the United States a base at Guantánamo until both sides should “agree” to its return, a stipulation the American government insisted upon on the grounds that the base was crucial to the defense of the Panama Canal. The Platt Amendment was a tremendous humiliation to all Cubans, but its acceptance was the only way they could avoid a permanent military occupation.

Even though the Canal Zone is no longer an American possession, Guantánamo Bay remains a military colony, now used as a detention camp for people seized in the U.S.-Afghan war of 2001-02 and the Iraq war of 2003. (Because Guantánamo is outside the United States, these prisoners are said to be beyond the protection of American laws, and because the Bush administration has dubbed them “unlawful combatants,” a term found nowhere in international law, it is argued that they are also not subject to the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. On October 9, 2002, the U.S. government dismissed the commandant at Guantánamo, Brigadier General Rick Baccus, for being “too soft” on the inmates.) 5The United States did not directly annex Cuba in 1898, only because of its pretensions to being an anti-imperialist nation, its desire to avoid assuming Cuba’s $400 million debt as well as Cuba’s large Afro-American population, and Florida’s fears that, as a part of the country, the island might compete in agriculture and tourism.

The Paris treaty also transferred the Spanish territories of Puerto Rico and Guam to American sovereignty, where they remain to this day.* Most important, in exchange for a mere $20 million payment to Spain, the treaty awarded to the United States the entire Philippine archipelago—3, 141 islands located off the coast of China and Vietnam, some 7,952 miles from Los Angeles but less than 2,000 miles from Tokyo. The payment, however modest, was important to America’s leaders, proof that they were not, as some critics charged, engaged in a “land grab” similar to those of the other new imperialist powers of the time—Germany, Russia, Italy, Belgium, and Japan—not to mention the old imperialists, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

The Filipinos themselves proved less than eager to be “benevolently assimilated,” as President McKinley put it, and under the leadership of a nationalist patriot, Emilio Aguinaldo, who had aided Admiral Dewey in wresting control of Manila from the Spaniards, they revolted against their new American overlords. Although American troops captured Aguinaldo in 1901 and forced him to swear loyalty to the United States, the fighting went on until 1903. Whereas the Spanish-American War (Cubans call it the Spanish-Cuban-American War) cost only 385 American deaths in combat, some 4,234 American military personnel died while putting down the Filipino rebels. The army, many of its officers having gained their experience in the Indian wars, proceeded to slaughter at least 200,000 Filipinos out of a population of less than eight million. During World War II, in a second vain attempt to escape imperialist rule with the help of a rival imperialist power, Aguinaldo collaborated with the Japanese conquerors of the islands.

Exercising what the historian Stuart Creighton Miller calls its “exaggerated sense of innocence,” the United States portrayed its brutal colonization of the Filipinos as divinely ordained, racially inevitable, and economically indispensable. 6These ideas had a powerful impact on the Japanese, who were attempting both to lead an anti-Western Asian renaissance and to join the imperialists in exploiting the weaker nations of East Asia. Their emulation of other “advanced” nations in taking the imperialist route would lead ultimately to war with the United States.

One prominent American imperialist of the time, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, was fond of proclaiming, “The Philippines are ours forever ... and just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. ... The Pacific ocean is ours.” A constant theme in the congressional debate over annexation of the Philippines was that they were the “stepping-stones to China.” Beveridge believed it America’s duty to bring Christianity and civilization to “savage and senile peoples,” never mind that most Filipinos had been Catholics for centuries. 7Even opponents of annexation like Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina argued that it was absurd to talk about teaching self-government to people “racially unfit to govern themselves.” 8At the time Tillman made his comment, the most powerful political force in the United States was New York’s Tammany Hall, not exactly a model of enlightened self-government. President McKinley called the Filipinos his “little brown brothers,” while the troops in the field sang a ditty with the line “They may be brothers of McKinley, but they sure as hell are not brothers of mine.” Such attitudes, high and low, contributed, ironically enough, to an emerging Japanese sense of racial superiority and a growing belief in their divinely ordained “manifest destiny” to liberate Asia from Western influence.

The Spanish-American War not only inaugurated an era of American imperialism but also set the United States on the path toward militarism. In traditional American political thought, large standing armies had been viewed as both unnecessary, since the United States was determined to avoid foreign wars, and a threat to liberty, because military discipline and military values were seen as incompatible with the openness of civilian life. 9In his famous Farewell Address of September 17, 1796, George Washington told his fellow Americans, “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is—in extending our commercial relations—to have with them as little political connection as possible.” 10To twenty-first-century ears, this pronouncement seems highly idealistic and, if perhaps appropriate to a new and powerless nation, certainly not feasible for the world’s only “superpower.” Washington’s name is still sacrosanct in the United States, but the content of his advice is routinely dismissed as “isolationism.”