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Eric T. L. Love is associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Eric Love challenges prevailing notions of race and imperialism by presenting a critical reinterpretation of the complex interactions between politics, race, labor, immigration, and foreign relations at the dawn of the American century. Using memoirs, speeches, newspapers and journals, and governmental and diplomatic papers, diaries and private letters, Love rewrites the history of race and U.S. imperialsim from the end of the Civil War to the annexations that followed the 1898 Spanish-American War.

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Race over Empire

The University of North Carolina Press

Contents

Preface1 American Imperialism and the Racial Mountain2 Santo Domingo3 The Policy of Last Resort4 Hawaii Annexed5 The PhilippinesEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

Chapter One

Race is and will remain a vital part of the story of American imperialism. That it loomed large in the minds of policymakers, that it was a potent force in nation building, policy formation, and expansionism, has been demonstrated repeatedly and convincingly in the historical literature. In answer to the question at the center of this book-how did race move, shape, and even perhaps inspire late-nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism?-there is a remarkable level of consensus among historians, who assert that racial ideologies rooted in white supremacy gave expansionists a grand and compelling rational for empire. Anglo-Saxonism, social Darwinism, benevolent assimilation, and the "white man's burden"-almost unassailable elaborations of white supremacy-justified the annexations that followed the war with Spain in 1898, brought millions of people of color under the jurisdiction of the United States, and helped to elevate the nation to the status of a world power. The pages that follow challenge this convention; they begin with a critical review of the literature. While the reigning narrative on race and empire has recovered significant aspects of the past, it has also been fettered by clearly identifiable and long-standing problems. Put another way (borrowing Langston Hughes's most elegant metaphor), it can be said that a racial mountain stands between historians and an accurate accounting of race, racism, and late-nineteenth-century American imperialism.

The conventional narrative can be summarized briefly. In the three decades following the Civil War, an expansionist, market-oriented foreign policy evolved that gave America's global affairs renewed logic, coherence, motive, and direction. The search for markets, for dependable outlets for the nation's massive and growing agricultural and industrial production, advanced with each passing year. It was a restless, aggressive movement, infused with a peculiar urgency by the cycle of economic growth and collapse that occurred in every decade between 1870 and World War I. Leading economic theorists of the era believed the cause of the recurrent booms and busts was "overproduction." American capitalism suffered, they said, because it had become too efficient, too productive. Ironically, it had become too successful for its own good. Inventing, assembling, building, sowing, and reaping more than domestic markets could absorb destabilized the economy, drove tens of thousands of businesses into bankruptcy and millions of workers out of jobs, and fed what was, by the standards of the time, a species of social malaise of the most fearful kind. Farmers and the urban working classes turned to political radicalism: toward insurgent populism, unionism, socialism, public demonstrations, and protests that all too frequently exploded into violent (and occasionally murderous) confrontations with capital. The solution to overproduction and the attendant social chaos, theorists said, was to find and open new markets abroad where the excess production could be sold off, profitably. This would lift the economy, employment, and wages and suppress political and class tensions. It was a beguiling stratagem embraced by a mass of followers: agrarians and industrialists, social theorists and economists, public intellectuals, missionaries, military men, and others, all of whom subscribed to a common vision of natural greatness whose prerequisite was empire. As this outward advance brought the United States into contact with nations thickly populated with polymorphous, dark-skinned peoples-literally millions of individuals consigned by science, theology, sentiment, prejudice, history and tradition to a class of inferior races-these accounts maintain that at home white supremacist ideas saturated the culture, dissolved the class, sectional, religious, and ethnic divisions among whites, and unified that race.

In this interpretation, white supremacy became an indispensable feature of the imperial project. Nell Irvin Painter, for example, wrote that "[i]n justification for empire, Anglo-Saxonism combined variously with arguments for Anglo-American identity, the white man's burden, manifest and ordinary destiny, and duty." Painter went on to say that imperialism "rose above politics and laws because within the unity that was human history, Americans [believed that they] were playing a pre-ordained role. Imperialism," she insisted, "was elemental, racial, predestined." Alan Dawley stated that racial nationalism fueled the outward thrust and cited as evidence statements by the Reverend Josiah Strong ("Strong expanded Manifest Destiny from continental to global dimensions, writing of 'the final competition of races'") and Senator Albert Beveridge regarding the duty of English-speaking nations to govern "savages and senile peoples."

Though Michael H. Hunt maintained that race "served equally as a reason for a cautious self-limiting policy and as justification for a bold, assertive one," he concluded that in the final account, race ideology favored imperialism. "Had the issue of [annexing Hawaii and the Philippines] been resolved on the basis of racial arguments alone," Hunt wrote, "the opposition might well have stymied the McKinley administration." Annexation triumphed in 1898 in large part, he said, because the imperialists "could play more directly on Anglo-Saxon pride" than those who opposed expansionist policies on racial grounds. Charles S. Campbell agreed that race ideology's effect on imperial policy was ambiguous: "it led to a belief in the righteousness of annexing supposedly inferior people," he observed, "but it led also to a disinclination to annex them, out of fear that the superior [racial] stock would be depreciated." Like Hunt, Campbell, in the final account, set his ambivalence aside and declared: "whereas racism was a deterrent [to territorial imperialism] in the 1870s, it was not in the 1890s. On balance," he concluded, "the belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy encouraged territorial expansion at the end of the century."

Within this body of work, historians drew a direct connection between empire and the rise of a rigid, often brutal domestic racial social order: what Rayford Logan famously called "the nadir" of the African American experience and American race relations. According to Joseph Fry, in the years after the Civil War, social Darwinism "provided an ostensibly scientific rationale" for racial oppression at home and imperialist aggression abroad. Emily Rosenberg concurred. In the 1890s, she wrote, "[c]oncepts of racial mission, so well rehearsed at home, were easily transferred overseas." Many scholars were persuaded. Especially influential were observations that historian C. Vann Woodward put forth in both Origins of the New South and The Strange Career of Jim Crow, where he explained that by 1898 "[t]he North had taken up the White Man's Burden" and "was looking to southern racial policy for national guidance in the new problems of imperialism resulting from the Spanish war." Woodward pushed his assertion further, declaring that the imperialists modeled their policies not just on ideas borrowed from the old Confederacy but also on the actual...