He's the man. I grew up in a house located at the corner of Washington Avenue and McKinley Street. So I did experience an intermittent curiosity as a child about what McKinley had done as president. All I really learned when young was that he was killed in office and that Teddy Roosevelt then became the youngest U.S. president ever. That's the kind of thing that stuck in my tender head.
Also, I did wonder why Teddy Roosevelt was on Mt. Rushmore. Still do, I guess. As far as sheer importance to the country's history is concerned, either McKinley or - even more - James Polk should rate more highly, these being the two great conquistadors of U.S. empire, the latter continental and the former (McKinley) the pioneer of overseas land-grabbing.
The origins of overseas U.S. empire, as manifested (no pun) in the "Spanish-American War" of 1898 and afterward, a war prosecuted by McKinley, was this week's topic in class. The main text that students read was the introduction and first chapter of Arc of Empire: America's Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam, the excellent recent book by Michael Hunt and Steven Levine. In the introduction, the authors lay out their conception of U.S. empire, and in the first chapter they give a detailed account of the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, which is still sometimes neglected as a theater of conflict in histories of the Spanish-American War.
I put that term in quotation marks above because, as H&L and others point out, the U.S. defeat of Spain's forces was only the beginning of the conflict, particularly in the Philippines; much more and longer fighting occurred between U.S. forces and Filipino nationalists, lasting a good many years. Indeed, Alfred McCoy, in his brilliant book Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, suggests that nationalist or regional insurgency in the Philippines, while greatly weakened by the Americans and their Filipino allies - and both these accounts stress the crucial importance of the American cultivation of local allies through a "strategy of attraction" and the cession of limited political powers and patronage to Filipino clients - never entirely disappeared. That is to say, counterinsurgency became a structural part of the U.S. regime in the Philippines, and remained so in the independent Philippines after 1946 (and does so today).
My students began to show their skill and intelligence as readers this week. Many of them spoke up and indicated they had no trouble understanding H&L's discussion of U.S. empire, and students also showed that they had read the narrative of the Philippine war carefully and had grasped H&L's explanation of the several phases of the conflict and the strategies and tactics that U.S. forces used at different stages of the war. They also proved attuned to the ambiguities of the U.S. stance toward the Filipino nationalists represented by Emiliano Aguinaldo just before and during the fighting with Spain.
As I usually do, I began class by asking students for reactions to the readings: What struck them most powerfully, what did they think it was important that we talk about, what questions did they have?
The first hand up was from a student who said he was surprised and rather shocked by what he termed the "brutality" of U.S. forces in the Philippines, particularly the use of what we now call water-boarding against Filipino prisoners. Some other students agreed this was shocking. However, some said they were not shocked by this information. When I asked why not - Was it because "war is hell," or because they expected American forces, perhaps particularly in this historical situation, to have done such things? - the reply from the latter students was, basically, the war is hell option.
This framework of reaction and discussion is familiar to me from my past teaching in America. I suggested to my Norwegian students that there is a third option besides (1) being shocked by atrocities in wartime and (2) believing these to be routine and inevitable in wartime (a view that can have the effect, even if unintended, of draining the issue of moral content, since the logical consequence of such a view is that the only way to avoid atrocities is to renounce warfare, and very few will embrace absolute pacifism; therefore wartime atrocity becomes regrettable but something one has to accept as an ugly fact of life). This is (3) that counterinsurgency warfare against a nationalist mobilization with substantial popular support tends to feature atrocious behavior of a distinctive kind. It's early innings, and there is going to be much more time in which to make this point.
Students realized right away, even in last week's introductory discussion, that whether one considers the U.S. an empire (past or present) depends on how you define empire. This week we discussed H&L's interesting conception of empire. On the one hand, they accept the idea of informal or indirect empire. Outright colonial rule, with direct governmental administration by an imperial power (as with the U.S. in the Philippines or in Puerto Rico following the war with Spain) is only one form of imperial rule. Empires throughout history have sometimes formed client states or other instruments (e.g., chartered corporations) through which they exercise dominion. On the other hand, H&L limit the concept of empire by asserting that it is a matter of political and military rule. They do not accept loose or expansive notions of economic colonialism or neo-imperialism, and they do not believe that domination of international trade by one country in a bilateral relationship equals imperial control. One curious ambiguity in their narration of U.S. empire in East Asia is that they do not always make clear when and where they think the U.S. actually achieved empire and where it merely aspired to imperial status. The Philippines is a no-brainer, but beyond this...we'll see what my students think in the coming weeks. I was impressed by how they handled the material they had for this week.
In my own prepared lecture material for this week's class, I focused on the deep background to U.S. overseas expansionism, discussing the politics of continental conquest in nineteenth-century America, going back to the antebellum period and the U.S.-Mexico War of the 1840s, up through the repeated (eventually successful) efforts of U.S. planters and missionaries to get the United States to annex Hawai'i and other matters. Also I covered tariff and trade politics in the late nineteenth century, amid the economic travails of American farmers and the mounting class conflict between industrial workers and the combined forces of industrial capitalists and the state. Whew.
Finally we discussed the motivations for U.S. overseas empire. H&L rather breezily state they are uninterested in questions of motive. Again, curious. Nonetheless, they suggest that the history of the United States as a "settler state" predisposed white Americans to believe they had a right and destiny to continually expand their dominion over peoples they viewed as inferior and less deserving of land. Some of my students saw clearly that this suggested a strongly cultural explanation of U.S. imperialism, emphasizing white Americans' belief in their racial (as many would put it today) superiority. I agreed that this seemed to be what H&L were arguing, and I suggested that white supremacy might help smooth the path toward empire, but I wasn't sure it was persuasive as a causal explanation.
I pointed out that, whatever the specific reasons impelling American leaders toward foreign wars, of conquest or otherwise, once the idea of waging war gets into their heads, it turns out to be rather easy for them to come up with all kinds of reasons why doing so is a good idea. Students were attuned to McKinley's rhetoric of "honor" and "destiny," which he said compelled the United States to make war in 1898 and to take and keep outright possession of the Philippines. I noted that in more recent times, explicit notions of national destiny have tended to play an insignificant role in justifying U.S. warfare. However, McKinley's idea of national honor is, perhaps, not so different from contemporary assertions that the U.S. has a transcendent moral obligation to use military force abroad.
I told students that I really was not bent on discussing Syria - but that we could talk about it if they really wanted to. They didn't, but it did hover in the background of our discussion. Perhaps it will loom larger next week. We shall see.
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