The most powerful fleet of warships ever to sail under one flag lined up for a glorious procession off the coast of Virginia on the cool, cloudy morning of December 16, 1907. Thousands of people cheered from the shore and from small boats. Many waved American flags. Only a handful of them, though, knew where this fleet was going.
As a band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” sixteen battleships sailed slowly past the presidential yacht Mayflower at four-hundred-yard intervals. Together they carried fourteen thousand soldiers and marines, along with nearly a quarter of a million tons of armament. All were painted white, with gilded scrollwork adorning their bows. President Theodore Roosevelt, as fervent an advocate of sea power as ever occupied the White House, could barely contain his excitement.
“Did you ever see such a fleet?” he asked his guests aboard the Mayflower, flashing his famous grin. “And such a day? It ought to make us all feel proud!”
Roosevelt had spent much of his presidency pushing for the construction of the ships. He wanted to show them off to the world, but no war was brewing to which they could be dispatched. With typical flair, he decided to assemble them into one spectacular fleet and send it on a long voyage. The Great White Fleet, as it came to be known, would sail south from Virginia, call at ports in the Caribbean, proceed along both coasts of South America, and finally dock in California.
The fleet represented fearsome martial power, but it was more than simply a weapon of war. It symbolized the self-confidence and sense of limitless possibility that gripped the American imagination in the first decade of the twentieth century. Roosevelt thought it a fine idea to show the flag in Trinidad, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Mexico. Even that itinerary, however, was not ambitious enough for him. He was the first president whose conception of American power was truly global, and the Great White Fleet was his way of proclaiming it.
A few hours after the fleet passed out of Hampton Roads, its commander, Admiral Robley Evans, summoned his officers and gave them startling news. Their route would not be as announced. Roosevelt had given him the real plan, to be kept secret until they sailed. The fleet would indeed sail around South America to California, but it would not stop there. It was to cross the Pacific Ocean, enter and cross the Indian Ocean, pass through the Suez Canal, sail across the Mediterranean, pass Gibraltar, and then cross the Atlantic to dock back in Virginia. This would be a tour not around a continent but around the world.
When the plan became public, Roosevelt’s critics howled in protest. Sending such an enormous fleet of warships on such an ambitious trip was highly provocative, they charged, not to mention dangerous and expensive. Senator Eugene Hale of Maine, chairman of the Naval Appropriations Committee, threatened to withhold the necessary funds. Roosevelt replied curtly that he already had all the money he needed.
“Try and get it back!” he dared Hale.
For the next fourteen months, Americans breathlessly followed the progress of the Great White Fleet. After a few sailors were involved in a barroom brawl in Rio de Janeiro, newspaper correspondents began portraying it as skirting constantly on the edge of danger. In fact, the opposite was true. The fleet’s officers and men were welcomed warmly wherever they called.
In South America they were feted with banquets, parades, gala balls, and sporting contests, and a Peruvian composer even wrote a rousing march for them, “The White Squadron.” At Pearl Harbor, they spent six days enjoying luaus, regattas, and other tropical pleasures. In Auckland, New Zealand, Maori dancers performed for them. A quarter of a million people greeted them in Sydney. From Australia they sailed to Manila, capital of the American-owned Philippines, but because of a cholera epidemic they were confined to their ships. Then it was on to Japan, which American strategists had already identified as an emerging rival in the Pacific; to China; back to the Philippines; westward to Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka); and, finally, through the Suez Canal and across the Atlantic to home.
The fleet arrived back at its Virginia base on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1909. A huge crowd turned out despite steady rain. As the giant ships maneuvered into their berths, a military band played “There’s No Place like Home.” President Roosevelt, who had only two weeks remaining in his term, was of course on hand. He later wrote that sponsoring this extraordinary voyage was “the most important service I rendered for peace.”
That is debatable, but the Great White Fleet’s world tour did have profound effects. It gave the navy invaluable experience in the logistics of long-distance deployment. For naval architects, it provided a host of insights that led to the development of the next generation of warships. In every country where the fleet called, it left government leaders and ordinary people with a new appreciation of American power. Most important, it was an ingeniously theatrical form of saber rattling, a proclamation that the United States was now a major force in world affairs. No one who saw the Great White Fleet could have doubted either this nation’s power or its ambition.
HISTORIC SHIFTS IN WORLD POLITICS OFTEN HAPPEN SLOWLY AND ARE HARDLY even noticeable until years later. That was not the case with the emergence of the United States as a world power. It happened quite suddenly in the spring and summer of 1898.
Until then, most Americans had seemed satisfied with a nation whose reach extended only across their own continent. Their leaders had passed up several chances to seize Hawaii. They could have grabbed Cuba when revolution first broke out there in 1868 but did not even consider it. Nor did they try to take the Dominican Republic in the 1870s, when it seemed to be available for annexation.
In 1898 the United States definitively embraced what Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called “the large policy.” Historians have given it various names: expansionism, imperialism, neocolonialism. Whatever it is called, it represents the will of Americans to extend their global reach.
“How stupendous a change in the world these six months have brought,” the British diplomat and historian James Bryce marveled in the autumn of 1898. “Six months ago you no more thought of annexing the Philippine Isles and Porto Rico than you think of annexing Spitzbergen today.”
Some Americans did, in fact, entertain ambitions that reached almost that far. Henry Cabot Lodge was among several members of Congress who urged the annexation of Canada. Roosevelt mused about attacking Spain, and picked out Cádiz and Barcelona as possible targets. Portuguese leaders feared that American troops might seize the Azores.
Several times before the United States emerged as a world power in 1898, it had used its military might to force other countries to accept its goods. Commodore Matthew Perry led gunboats to Japan in 1854 and, in their shadow, induced the Japanese to sign a treaty opening their ports to American traders. In 1882 a naval force dispatched by President Chester A. Arthur did the same in Korea. Only at the end of the century, though, did the American economy reach a level of productivity that made these impositions a central feature of United States foreign policy.
“Here, then, is the new realpolitik,” proclaimed the eminent historian Charles Beard. “A free opportunity for expansion in foreign markets is indispensable to the prosperity of American business. Modern diplomacy is commercial. Its chief concern is with the promotion of economic interests abroad.”
Outsiders watched the emergence of this new America with a combination of awe and fear. Among the most astonished were European newspaper correspondents who were posted in the United States during 1898. One wrote in the London Times that he had witnessed nothing less than “a break in the history of the world.” Another, in the Manchester Guardian, reported that nearly every American had come to embrace the expansionist idea, while the few critics “are simply laughed at for their pains.”
Some of these journalists were unsettled by what they saw. “Love for the impossible, the manic passion for what has never been dared before, penetrates your nerves after an hour, makes your eyes shine and your hands shake, and you run,” wrote La Stampa’s New York correspondent. Le Temps said the United States, formerly “as democratic as any society can be,” had become “a state already closer to the other states of the old world, that arms itself like them and aggrandizes itself like them.” The Frankfurter Zeitung warned Americans against “the disastrous consequences of their exuberance” but realized that they would not listen.
Americans have never worried too much about diplomatic questions. Wild as their land is wild, they have their own opinions, their own politics and their own diplomatic code. Economically and psychologically, they have all that is needed for this. They go forward on the road they believe they must travel and do not care at all what Europe says.
For at least a century, many people in the United States had believed it was their “manifest destiny” to dominate North America. Most cheered when, in 1898, they were told that this destiny was now global and entitled them to influence and dominate lands beyond their own shores. An outspoken band of idealists, however, denounced this change of national course as a mean-spirited betrayal of the American tradition. Among these protesters were university presidents, writers, several titans of industry including Andrew Carnegie, clergymen, labor leaders, and politicians of both parties, including former president Grover Cleveland. They condemned America’s interventions abroad, especially the war against nationalist guerrillas in the Philippines, and urged Americans to allow other nations the right to self-determination that they themselves so deeply cherished. One of these critics, E. L. Godkin, the crusading editor of The Nation, lamented that by new standards, no one was considered a “true-blue American” who harbored “doubts of the ability of the United States to thrash other nations; or who fails to acknowledge the right of the United States to occupy such territories, canals, isthmuses or peninsulas as they may think it is desirable to have, or who speaks disrespectfully of the Monroe Doctrine, or who doubts the need of a large navy, or who admires European society, or who likes to go to Europe, or who fails, in case he has to go, to make comparisons unfavorable to Europe.”
This kind of talk drove expansionists to distraction. Theodore Roosevelt denounced Godkin as “a malignant and dishonest liar.” The anti-imperialists as a group, he wrote in a letter to his friend Lodge, were “futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type” who exhibited “a flabby type of character which eats away at the great fighting features of our race.” On another occasion he described them as “simply unhung traitors.”
In the end, the anti-imperialists failed not because they were too radical but because they were not radical enough. The United States was changing with amazing speed. Railroads and telegraph lines brought Americans closer to each other than they had ever been. Giant factories sprung up and absorbed wave after wave of European immigrants. The pace of life palpably quickened, especially in cities, which had begun to establish their dominance over national life. All of this appalled many of the anti-imperialists. They were elderly traditionalists who wanted the United States to remain the inwardly focused country it had always been. Their calls for American restraint, and their lamentations on the evils of modernity, did not resonate in a country brimming with ambition, energy, and a sense of unlimited possibility.
The first wave of American “regime change” operations, which lasted from 1893 to 1911, was propelled largely by the search for resources, markets, and commercial opportunities. Not all of the early imperialists, however, were the tools of big business. Roosevelt, Lodge, and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan were moved by what they considered to be the transcendent imperatives of history. Expanding, they believed, was simply what great nations did. In their minds, promoting commerce and defending national security fused into what one historian has called “an aggressive national egoism and a romantic attachment to national power.” They considered themselves nothing less than instruments of destiny and Providence.
The missionary instinct was already deeply ingrained in the American psyche. From the time John Winthrop proclaimed his dream of building a “city upon a hill” to which the world would look for inspiration, Americans have considered themselves a special people. At the end of the nineteenth century, many came to believe they had a duty to civilize needy savages and rescue exploited masses from oppression. Rudyard Kipling encouraged their missionary spirit with a famous poem published in McClure’s Magazine as the debate over annexing the Philippines began.
Take up the White Man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild,
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Americans have a profoundly compassionate side. Many not only appreciate the freedom and prosperity with which they have been blessed but fervently wish to share their good fortune with others. Time and again, they have proved willing to support foreign interventions that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate people.
When President McKinley said he was going to war in Cuba to stop “oppression at our very doors,” Americans cheered. They did so again a decade later, when the Taft administration declared that it was deposing the government of Nicaragua in order to impose “republican institutions” and promote “real patriotism.” Since then, every time the United States has set out to overthrow a foreign government, its leaders have insisted that they are acting not to expand American power but to help people who are suffering.
This paternalism was often mixed with racism. Many Americans considered Latin Americans and Pacific islanders to be “colored” natives in need of guidance from whites. In a nation whose black population was systematically repressed, and where racial prejudice was widespread, this view helped many people accept the need for the United States to dominate foreign countries.
Speeches justifying American expansionism on the grounds of the white race’s presumed superiority were staples of political discourse in the 1890s. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana described expansion as part of a natural process, “the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man.” Representative Charles Cochrane of Mississippi spoke of “the onward march of the indomitable race that founded this Republic” and predicted “the conquest of the world by the Aryan races.” When he finished this speech, the House burst into applause.
It was logical that the rhetoric of imperialism would be heavily tinged with racism. What is more interesting is that anti-imperialists also used racist arguments. Many of them believed the United States should not seize foreign territories because doing so would increase the number of nonwhite people within its borders. Ultimately, they feared, these territories might have to be allowed to send representatives to Congress. One of the anti-imperialists, Representative Champ Clark of Missouri, rose to warn vividly of the horrors that would bring.
How can we endure our shame when a Chinese senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan joss in his hand, shall rise from his curule chair and in pidgin English proceed to chop logic with George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge? O temporal O mores!. . .
Mr. Speaker, should [you] preside here twenty years hence, it may be that you will have a polyglot House, and it will be your painful duty to recognize “the gentleman from Patagonia,” “the gentleman from Cuba,” “the gentleman from Santo Domingo,” “the gentleman from Korea,” “the gentleman from Hong Kong,” “the gentleman from Fiji,” “the gentleman from Greenland,” or, with fear and trembling, “the gentleman from the Cannibal Islands,” who will gaze upon you with watering mouth and gleaming teeth.
WITHIN DAYS AFTER THE OVERTHROW OF THE HAWAIIAN MONARCHY, ON January 17, 1893, many American newspapers were condemning it. The New York Evening Post called it “a revolution on a strictly cash basis.” To the New York Times, it was “a business operation purely.” Other papers reported it under headlines like “Minister Stevens Helped Overthrow Liliuokalani” and “The Warship Boston Cut a Big Figure in Hawaiian Revolution.”
As these articles were appearing, Hawaii’s new leaders were securing their power. President Sanford Dole and his “advisory council” declared martial law, suspended the right of habeas corpus, and ordered the creation of a National Guard. Then, evidently worried that even those steps might not be enough to safeguard their infant regime, they arranged for John L. Stevens, the American diplomat who made their revolution possible, to raise the Stars and Stripes over Government House in Honolulu and proclaim that in the name of the United States, he was assuming “protection of the Hawaiian Islands.”
“A company of United States Marines was stationed at the government building, and a force of sailors was given the C. R. Bishop residence and ground,” Dole wrote later. “Under this protectorate, matters quieted down.”
A few days later, Lorrin Thurston, chief organizer of the Hawaiian revolution, arrived in Washington with four other “annexation commissioners.” They brought with them a draft of a treaty providing for the “full, complete and perpetual political union between the United States of America and the Hawaiian Islands.” Before the Senate could vote on it, however, a most unwelcome Hawaiian turned up in Washington: the deposed queen. In a written statement to Secretary of State John Watson Foster, who had replaced the ailing James G. Blaine, she asserted that the rebellion in her country “would not have lasted an hour” without the support of American troops and that the new government had “neither the moral nor the physical support of the masses of the Hawaiian people.”
These accusations reinforced the doubts many Americans had about annexing Hawaii, and with the end of its session approaching, the Senate decided not to vote on the annexation treaty. Thurston and his disappointed comrades had to leave Washington without their prize. On March 4, 1893, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated for his second, non-consecutive term as president. Cleveland was a Democrat and a declared anti-imperialist. Five days after taking office, he withdrew the treaty.
On July 4, 1894, the archipelago’s new leaders responded to this rebuff by proclaiming a Republic of Hawaii, with Sanford Dole as president. Under its constitution, most legislators would be appointed rather than elected, and only men with savings and property would be eligible for public office. This all but excluded native Hawaiians from the government of their land, and a few months later, a group of them staged an abortive uprising. The former queen was among those arrested. On the sixth day of her imprisonment, a delegation of officials visited her and induced her to sign a document of abdication. She later said she had signed it to save other defendants from execution, but a military tribunal sentenced five of them to death anyway. The sentences were not carried out, however, and within a couple of years all the plotters were freed. Liliuokalani herself was sentenced to five years in prison, and freed after two.
In 1897, Cleveland was succeeded by William McKinley, a probusiness Republican who sympathized with the imperial idea. A delegation from the Hawaiian government visited him soon after his inauguration. One of its members, William Smith, wrote later that hearing him after years of listening to Cleveland was “like the difference between daylight and darkness.”
McKinley soon announced his support for the annexation of Hawaii, and the lobbying began anew. President Dole himself came to Washington to help lead it. No one paid him much attention, but as he was starting to lose hope, the atmosphere in Washington suddenly changed. In the spring of 1898, in quick succession, the Maine was destroyed at Havana, the United States went to war with Spain, and Commodore Dewey wiped out the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. Annexationists found themselves with a new and hugely persuasive argument: Hawaii would be the base Americans needed in their emerging campaign to project power in Asia.
“The annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, for the first time in our history, is presented to us as a war necessity,” Representative De Alva S. Alexander of New York gravely declared. “Today we need the Hawaiian Islands much more than they ever needed us.”
Many of his colleagues quickly came to agree. In short order, seized by the fever that transformed the United States in the summer of 1898, both houses of Congress approved the annexation treaty. McKinley signed it on July 7, and with his signature, Hawaii became a territory of the United States.
“There is little doubt that Hawaii was annexed because of the Spanish War,” William Adam Russ wrote at the end of his two-volume history of the period. “The chain of circumstances which explains that event goes like this: the United States fought Spain in defense of Cuban rights; in order to defeat Spain it was thought necessary to conquer the Philippines; in order to win the Philippines a halfway stop was needed to serve as a coaling station. In other words, Hawaiian annexation came about when the United States needed the islands for its newly conceived empire.”
Two generations later, following a world war that the United States entered after an attack on Pearl Harbor, many members of Congress were reluctant to grant statehood to Hawaii, partly because of its racial composition and partly because of its distance from the mainland. After Congress voted to admit Alaska in 1958, those arguments became impossible to sustain. On March 11, 1959, the Senate voted to make Hawaii the fiftieth state, and the House of Representatives followed the next day. Three months later, Hawaiians went to the polls in a plebiscite and voted for statehood by a seventeen-to-one margin. Of the 240 electoral precincts, only one, the small island of Niihau, almost all of whose residents were native Hawaiians, voted no.
Native Hawaiians will probably never again constitute even a large minority of the population in the land of their ancestors. According to the 2000 census, fewer than 10 percent of the people living in the archipelago fall into the category “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander.” Nonetheless, during the last decades of the twentieth century, many Hawaiians began to look more closely at their heritage. A movement for “Hawaiian sovereignty” emerged and won considerable support—partly because it never defined specifically what “sovereignty” should be. Few Hawaiians went so far as to advocate separation from the United States, but a surprising number, including some leading politicians, came to believe that Hawaii should be granted some form of autonomy that would recognize the uniqueness of its history and the way it became part of the Union.
In 1993, one hundred years after the American-backed revolution that brought down Hawaii’s monarchy, this movement achieved a remarkable success. Its leaders persuaded the United States Senate and the House of Representatives to pass a resolution declaring that Congress “apologizes to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the people of the United States for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom on January 17, 1893,” and for the subsequent “deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.”
The entire Hawaiian congressional delegation came to the Oval Office to watch President Bill Clinton sign the resolution, on November 22, 1993. “One hundred years ago, a powerful country helped overthrow a legal government,” Senator Daniel Akaka asserted. “We’ve finally come to the point where this has been acknowledged by the United States.”
Supporters of this resolution were not the only ones who considered its passage to be a profoundly important event. While it was being debated, several opponents warned that if passed, it could have far-reaching effects. According to one of the dissenters, Senator Slade Gorton of Washington, “the logical consequence of this resolution would be independence.” Some Hawaiians dared to hope that he would one day be proven right.
Most people on the islands, however, are pleased with the way their history has turned out. They enjoy the prosperity and freedom that comes with American citizenship, and especially with statehood. Their experience suggests that when the United States assumes real responsibility for territories it seizes, it can lead them toward stability and happiness. In Hawaii, it did that slowly and often reluctantly. The revolution of 1893 and the annexation that followed undermined a culture and ended the life of a nation. Compared to what such operations have brought to other countries, though, this one ended well.
ALTHOUGH THE ANNEXATION OF HAWAII PROVOKED INTENSE DEBATE IN THE United States, it was ultimately accomplished with the stroke of a pen. No force in Hawaii had the slightest hope of challenging it. That was not the case in Cuba.
The Republic of Cuba came into existence on May 20, 1902. Its early years were marked by sporadic uprisings and attacks on American property. After a protest against electoral fraud in 1906, American troops landed and placed the country under direct military rule. They stayed for three years. When they left, President William Howard Taft warned Cubans that although the United States did not wish to annex their country, it was “absolutely out of the question that the island should continue to be independent” if its citizens persisted in their “insurrectionary habit.”
Opposition movements matured during the rule of Gerardo Machado in the 1920s and 1930s. All of Latin America was being swept by winds of nationalism and anti-Yankee sentiment, and they blew especially strongly in Cuba, which had strong trade unions, a core of radical writers and thinkers, and a long tradition of resistance to foreign power. The greatest beneficiary was the Communist Party. Founded in 1925 and quickly banned by Machado, it took advantage of its position as an outlawed enemy of the dictator, and by 1930 was the dominant force in Cuba’s labor movement. During this period, Communists managed to persuade many Cubans that they were the nation’s truest patriots.
After Franklin Roosevelt became president of the United States in 1933, he decided that the Machado dictatorship had become an embarrassment and encouraged the Cuban army to rebel. It did so, and out of the ensuing turmoil emerged a sergeant named Fulgencio Batista. By the mid-1930s he was master of Cuba, and he shaped its fate for most of the next quarter century.
Batista broke diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, cracked down on the Communist Party, and invited American military advisers to train his army. He later encouraged American investors, including prominent gangsters, to build what became a spectacularly lucrative tourism industry based on prostitution and casino gambling. His most lasting legacy, however, may have been his cancellation of the congressional election that was to have been held in 1952. Among the candidates was Fidel Castro, a charismatic young lawyer and former student leader. Castro might have gone on to a career in electoral politics, but after Batista’s coup made that impossible, he turned to revolution.
For an astonishingly long time, American policy makers deluded themselves into believing that all was well in Cuba. In 1957 the National Security Council reported that Cuban-American relations faced “no critical problems or difficulties.” A year later Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a congressional hearing that there was no likelihood of Soviet influence growing anywhere in Latin America. Blithe assurances like these suggest the shock that many Americans, especially those in Washington, felt when Batista fled the country on January 1, 1959, a few steps ahead of Castro’s rebels.
The day after Batista’s flight, Castro descended from his mountain stronghold to Santiago, the city that the Americans had prevented General Calixto García from entering at the end of the Spanish-American War. In the central plaza, which is named for Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, another nineteenth-century rebel leader, Castro made his first speech as leader of the victorious revolution. He said nothing about his political plans but made a solemn promise. It was one that would have puzzled most Americans, but it thrilled the Cuban soul.
This time the revolution will not be frustrated! This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will achieve its true objective. It will not be like 1898, when the Americans came and made themselves masters of the country.
The Cuban revolution, and especially Castro’s turn toward anti-Yankee radicalism, baffled most Americans. Few had any idea of how the United States had treated Cuba in the past, so naturally they could not understand why Cubans wished so fervently to break out of the American orbit. Many were astonished, just as their grandparents had been in 1898, to learn that “liberated” Cubans were ungrateful to the United States. President Dwight Eisenhower was among the baffled:
Here is a country that, you would believe on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends. The whole history . . . would seem to make it a puzzling matter to figure out just exactly why the Cubans and the Cuban government would be so unhappy when, after all, their principal market is here, their best market. You would think they would want good relationships. I don’t know exactly what the difficulty is.
Castro’s government confiscated foreign corporations, banned capitalist enterprise, and steered Cuba into a close alliance with the Soviet Union. In 1961, exiles sponsored by the CIA invaded Cuba in an attempt to depose him but failed miserably. Eighteen months later, after the Soviets deployed offensive missiles in Cuba, Soviet and American leaders brought their countries to the brink of nuclear combat in the most terrifying showdown of the Cold War. Successive American presidents vowed to bring Castro down, and at several points the CIA tried to kill him. He not only survived but devoted much of his life to undermining United States interests from Nicaragua to Angola. That made him an icon of anti-Americanism and a hero to millions around the world.
Castro was a pure product of American policy toward Cuba. If the United States had not crushed Cuba’s drive to independence in the early twentieth century, if it had not supported a series of repressive dictators there, and if it had not stood by while the 1952 election was canceled, a figure like Castro would almost certainly not have emerged. His regime is the quintessential result of a “regime change” operation gone wrong, one that comes back to haunt the country that sponsored it.
IN PUERTO RICO, 450 MILES EAST OF CUBA, AMERICAN OCCUPATION TROOPS declared the second anniversary of their takeover to be a national holiday. On that day, July 25, 1900, there would be banquets, speeches, band concerts, and a military parade. For the Americans, still caught up in the excitement of their country’s sudden rise to world power, it seemed a wonderful moment to celebrate. They had, after all, acquired at almost no cost a lovely little island ideally situated to guard vital Caribbean trade routes.
Puerto Ricans were in a more somber mood. On the eve of the celebration, Luis Muñoz Rivera, Puerto Rico’s most distinguished political figure, sat down despondently to write his view of what the invasion had wrought.
The North American government found in Puerto Rico a degree of autonomy larger than that of Canada. It should have respected and enlarged it, but only wanted to and did destroy it. . . . Because of that, and other things about which we shall remain silent, we shall not celebrate our 25th of July. Because we thought that an era of liberty was dawning and instead we are witnessing a spectacle of terrible assimilation . . . because none of the promises were kept, and because our present condition is that of serfs attached to conquered territory.
The first decades of American colonial rule in Puerto Rico were an unhappy time. They began with an act of Congress, the Foraker Act, that established the rules by which the island would be governed. It vested absolute power in a governor appointed by the president of the United States. There would be an elected, thirty-five-member House of Delegates, but its decisions were subject to veto by either the governor or Congress. The only Puerto Rican who testified at a congressional hearing on the act was Julio Henna, a veteran civil rights campaigner.
“No liberty, no rights, no protection,” Henna said in an eloquent summary of its provisions. “We are Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.”
During the early years of the twentieth century, four American corporations gobbled up most of Puerto Rico’s best land. On it they planted sugar, a crop suited to large-scale farming. The big losers were families who grew coffee, which is known as the “poor man’s crop” because it can be cultivated on small plots. By 1930, sugar accounted for 60 percent of the country’s exports, while coffee, once the island’s principal crop, had fallen to just 1 percent.
With little access to land, ordinary Puerto Ricans became steadily poorer. One study found that while 17 percent of them were unemployed at the time of the American invasion, 30 percent were unemployed a quarter century later. One-third were illiterate. Malaria, intestinal diseases, and malnutrition were facts of everyday life, and most people had no access to even rudimentary medical care. Life expectancy was fortysix years. Running water and electricity were rare luxuries. The annual per capita income was $230. Politics, in one historian’s words, was dominated by a coalition of “profit-hungry foreign corporations, a colonial state steeped in paternalism and distrustful of the capabilities of the subjects under its rule, and a complacent local political leadership wanting to protect their class prerogatives.”
Part of what made Puerto Rico’s condition so vexing was the permanent uncertainty about its political status. It was never set on the path toward statehood, as Hawaii was, or toward the independence that was ultimately bestowed on the Philippines. Congress granted American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917, and in 1948 gave them the right to elect their own governor. Four years later, they voted in a referendum to accept the unique status of a “free associated state”—part of the United States, but not a state itself. At a glittering ceremony on July 25, 1952, exactly fifty-four years after marines landed on the beach at Guánica, the Puerto Rican flag was raised to fly alongside the American flag over the Capitol building in San Juan.
The governor who presided over that ceremony was Luis Muñoz Marín, son of Luis Muñoz Rivera, whose dream of self-rule the United States had crushed at the dawn of the century. Rarely does the son of a brilliant political leader turn out to match his father in energy and vision, but Muñoz Marín did. He began his long political career as an advocate of independence for Puerto Rico, but in the years after World War II, he concluded that the eternal debate over political status was consuming so much political and emotional energy that little was left for resolving the island’s dire problems. He also believed that in the newly complex Cold War world, keeping a small island within a larger nation made sense. In his speeches and writings, he urged Puerto Ricans to accept realities dictated from Washington and work within them to improve their lives.
Beginning in the late 1940s, political leaders in Washington came to realize that ruling an impoverished colony in the Caribbean made the United States look bad. This sentiment became more urgent when Cuba turned to Communism after 1959 and the Caribbean found itself caught up in the Cold War. Americans began allowing Puerto Rico steadily increasing control over its own affairs. As the island started to flower, not just economically but also intellectually, Puerto Rico became a center of democratic thought and action. Its national life finally began to fulfill the dreams its patriotic sons and daughters had harbored for generations.
Despite more than a century of overt and covert efforts to turn them into “real Americans,” Puerto Ricans cling to their heritage with remarkable ferocity. Spanish is still their language of choice. They send their own team to the Olympic Games, and overwhelmingly oppose any effort to merge it with the United States team. Whether on the island or in New York and the other American cities where more than two million Puerto Ricans live, they are passionate about their native food, music, and traditions. Even in the heart of the melting pot, they have not melted. When they speak of “my country,” most mean Puerto Rico, not the United States.
Election results and public opinion surveys suggest that many Puerto Ricans, perhaps even most, are satisfied with the political limbo in which they live. Their many frustrations are easy to understand, but so is their unwillingness to embrace the unknown implications of either statehood or independence. They have carved out a space in the global cartography that may be indistinct but has considerable advantages. It guarantees that they will not fall into the troubles that afflict their island neighbors—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Jamaica—while allowing them free entry into the mainland, a steady flow of subsidies from Washington, and the right to maintain a good measure of their traditional identity.
Most Puerto Ricans understand that the United States, despite all its misdeeds over a century of colonial mastery, harbors no ambition to oppress them. Almost all wish to maintain their friendly ties to the mainland, although they disagree vigorously on how to do so—by continuing the island’s “associated” status, by joining the Union as the fifty-first state, or by becoming an independent country.
As colonial experiments go, American rule over Puerto Rico has been relatively benign. It did not produce the violent backlash that emerged in countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. This is due mainly to the fact that the United States agreed to take direct political responsibility for governing Puerto Rico, rather than ruling it through local clients.
A reasonable case can be made for the proposition that Puerto Rico would be better off today if the United States had not seized it in 1898. Given the realities of that history, however, it has emerged in better shape than most lands whose governments the United States overthrew. A happy end to this long story, in the form of a resolution to the question of the island’s political status, is at least possible. That would take away from Americans the stigma of ruling another people, a role for which they are psychologically and spiritually unsuited. It would also give them a welcome chance to believe that their toppling of foreign regimes need not always end badly.
OF ALL THE NATIONS WHOSE DESTINY THE UNITED STATES CAME TO MASTER IN the early years of the twentieth century, the Philippines was by far the largest, most distant, and most complex. When it became an American possession, it had a population of over seven million, larger than that of Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Honduras combined. Americans knew less about its seven thousand islands than they knew about the moon.
“’Tis not more than two months since ye larned whether they were islands or canned goods,” the satirist Finley Peter Dunne wrote as the United States took over the Philippines.
The United States ruled the Philippines through an American governor and an advisory legislature, the lower house of which was elected. In the first election, held in 1907, 3 percent of the adult population voted. The overwhelming winner was the Nationalist Party, whose platform called for “complete, absolute and immediate independence.”
Americans ignored this demand for decades. As the world changed, however, many came to agree that independence for the Philippines might be a good idea. It would relieve the United States of the opprobrium reserved for colonizers and—given the extreme closeness of relations between the two lands—would still allow the United States to maintain considerable power over the archipelago. In 1934, Congress approved a proposal to grant independence within ten years. It could not be carried out because World War II intervened but came to fruition a year after the war ended.
On July 4, 1946, the United States formally relinquished power over the Philippines. Soon afterward, General Eisenhower recommended that the United States withdraw from its military bases there, the largest of which were Subic Bay Naval Station and Clark Air Base. He recognized their strategic value but concluded that it was outweighed by the anti-Americanism their presence would certainly provoke. Sadly, his superiors were not as far-sighted, and his recommendation was ignored. A few months after the independence ceremony, the new Filipino government signed an agreement leasing these bases to the United States for ninety-nine years.
Over the years that followed, Subic Bay and Clark grew to become cities unto themselves. Thousands of American soldiers were based at each one, and tens of thousands of Filipinos worked in their commissaries, warehouses, and repair shops. A vast network of bars, bordellos, and massage parlors thrived outside the bases’ perimeters. Just as Eisenhower predicted, these bases became a vivid symbol of American power and a focal point of nationalist anger. Filipino leaders, however, were eager to please their American patrons and did not want to lose the $200 million that the bases brought into the islands’ economy each year.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson began a major escalation of the American war effort in Vietnam, giving Subic Bay and Clark a greater strategic importance than ever. In that same year, an ambitious politician named Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines. The combination of these two factors—the bases’ growing importance and the emergence of Marcos—shaped the next quarter century of Philippine history.
During Marcos’s two four-year terms as president, dissatisfaction with his callous indifference to the injustices of Filipino life set off a series of armed rebellions. In 1971 he declared that since only a strong government could contain the growing insurgencies that his misrule provoked, he had no choice but to impose martial law. He closed Congress, suspended the constitution, canceled the forthcoming presidential election, and ordered the arrest of thirty thousand opposition figures. For the next fourteen years, he ran one of the most corrupt regimes in Asia. Through a maze of government-protected cartels and monopolies, he and his comrades stole billions of dollars. The country, which had been progressing slowly toward prosperity and freedom, slid backward into repression and poverty.
None of the American presidents who dealt with Marcos during his period of absolute power held him in much esteem. His personal and political style repelled Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter could not abide the campaigns of torture, rape, and murder by which he maintained his regime. Ronald Reagan, who had a warm spot for anti-Communist dictators, heard complaints about him from American businessmen who could no longer make money in the Philippines because the ruling clique was taking it all. Despite these reservations, however, the United States maintained its friendship with Marcos until the end. It gave his regime billions of dollars in military aid, much of which he spent on violent campaigns against both rebel insurgencies and peaceful opposition movements. The reason was clear. Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station had become foundations of American military power in Asia, and the United States was willing to do whatever was necessary to hold on to them.
One of the few concessions the United States managed to wrest from Marcos was the release from prison of Benigno Aquino, the main opposition leader. Aquino came to the United States for medical treatment, and, before long, began casting his eyes back on his homeland. On August 20, 1983, against the advice of some of his friends, he returned to Manila. As his plane descended, he slipped into the lavatory to put on a bulletproof vest. It did not help. Seconds after he stepped into the airport, a military squad blocked his way. One of its members fired a shot into the back of Aquino’s head, and he fell dead.
“I point an accusing finger straight at the United States,” declared Raúl Manglapus, an anti-Communist moderate who was one of the country’s leading political figures. “Their support made murder and repression possible.”
The assassination of Aquino proved too much for Filipinos to bear. Under the banner “People Power,” they rose up against Marcos in one of the most remarkable peaceful revolutions in Asian history. Hoping to weaken it, the dictator called a presidential election for February 7, 1986. Aquino’s widow, Corazón, ran against him. The official tally gave victory to Marcos, but no one believed it. Protests escalated, and even powerful military officers began endorsing them. Only the United States remained at Marcos’s side.
“I don’t know anything more important than those bases,” President Reagan explained at a news conference.
Within a few days, however, even American officials had to recognize that their old ally was lost. Soon afterward, he realized it himself. On February 25, he and his wife flew on an American helicopter to Clark Air Base, and then on to Guam. From there they made their way to Hawaii, where the deposed tyrant died three years later.
Corazon Aquino, who became president after Marcos fled, returned to her people the civil rights and public freedoms Marcos had taken from them. Her government failed to make substantial progress toward resolving the country’s huge social and economic problems, but restoring democracy was not its only achievement. It also negotiated an epochal agreement with the United States that led to the closing of American military bases in the Philippines. The last American soldiers left Clark and Subic Bay at the end of 1992.
The story of Washington’s rule over the Philippines, first direct and then indirect, is above all one of lost opportunity. Americans waged a horrific war to subdue the islands at the beginning of the twentieth century, but once they won, their brutality ended. They did not impose murderous tyrants the way they did in much of Central America and the Caribbean. The parliamentary election they organized in 1907, although hardly democratic by modern standards, was the first of its kind in Asia. In the years that followed, they treated their Asian subjects no worse than the British did, perhaps better than the Dutch treated Indonesians, and certainly better than the Japanese treated people in the countries they occupied during World War II. When France was fighting to hold on to Indochina in the 1950s, the United States had already granted independence to the Philippines.
During their decades of power in the Philippines, however, Americans never sought to promote the kind of social progress that might have led the country toward long-term stability. As in other parts of the world, Washington’s fear of radicalism led it to support an oligarchy that was more interested in stealing money than in developing the country. The United States did bequeath to the Filipinos a form of democracy, but when the archipelago was finally allowed to go its own way, in the 1990s, it was as poor as it was unstable.
What would have happened if the United States had not seized the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth century? Another colonial power might have done so, and perhaps found itself caught in the trap that the Dutch faced in Indonesia, or the French in Indochina. Alternately, Filipinos might have been able to maintain their independence. That could have led them to a happier twentieth century. Even if it did not, it would have spared the United States the blame, justified or not, that many Filipinos and others around the world assign to it for the troubles the Philippines now faces.
NEARLY A DECADE PASSED BETWEEN THE TIME THE UNITED STATES SUBDUED the Philippines and its next “regime change” operation. During that time, it adjusted its approach. President Taft adopted a policy he called “dollar diplomacy,” under which the United States brought countries into its orbit through commercial rather than military means. He assured foreign leaders that they had nothing to fear as long as they allowed free rein to American businesses and sought loans only from American banks. The first to reject those conditions was President José Santos Zelaya of Nicaragua.
Nicaraguans remember Zelaya as a visionary who dared to imagine that his small, isolated country could reach greatness. His sins—impatience, egotism, an autocratic temperament, and a tendency to mix public funds with his own—were and are common traits among leaders in Central America and beyond. Few others, however, have matched his reformist passion or his genuine concern for the downtrodden.
Zelaya wandered the world unhappily in the years after his overthrow. He ended up in New York, and in 1918 he died in his apartment at 3905 Broadway. Although he never returned to his homeland, his memory and, more important, the memory of how the United States had pushed him out of power burned in the hearts of Nicaraguans. That made it impossible for his successor, General Estrada, to consolidate power. Estrada was finally forced to resign, and his faint-hearted vice president, Adolfo Díaz, the former chief accountant of the La Luz mining company, succeeded him.
The ascension of this weak and pliable figure to the presidency marked final victory for President Taft and Secretary of State Knox. Knox quickly arranged for two New York banking houses, Brown Brothers and J. and W. Seligman, to lend Nicaragua $15 million and take over the country’s customs agency to guarantee repayment. By 1912, Americans were also running the country’s national bank, steamship line, and railway.
Nicaraguans never accepted their country’s role as a protectorate of the United States. At the end of 1912, Benjamin Zeledón, a fervent admirer of Zelaya, launched a futile but heroic rebellion. He died while fighting the United States Marines. Among those who saw his body being dragged to a cemetery near Masaya was a teenager named Augusto César Sandino. It was a decisive moment.
“Zeledón’s death,” Sandino later wrote, “gave me the key to understanding our country’s situation in the face of Yankee piracy.”
Fourteen years later, with United States Marines still occupying his country, Sandino launched a rebellion of his own. At first the State Department sought to dismiss his guerrillas as a “comparatively small body” made up of “lawless elements” and “ordinary bandits.” That view became steadily harder to sustain, and finally, in 1933, President Herbert Hoover decided the United States had shed enough blood in Nicaragua and ordered the marines home.
With the Americans gone, Sandino agreed to talk peace. He traveled to Managua under a guarantee of safe conduct, and in remarkably short order agreed to end his rebellion and rejoin the country’s normal political life. That settled the matter for everyone except the ambitious young commander of the American-created National Guard, General Anastasio Somoza Garcia. He correctly saw Sandino as a threat to his ambitions and arranged for him to be assassinated. Soon afterward, General Somoza seized the presidency for himself.
Shortly before Sandino was killed, he prophesized that he “would not live much longer,” but said that was fine because “there are young people who will continue my fight.” He was quite right. In 1956 an idealistic young poet assassinated President Somoza. Soon afterward, a group called the Sandinista National Liberation Front, named for Sandino, launched a rebellion against the dynastic Somoza dictatorship. It seized power in 1979, formed an alliance with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and proclaimed a nationalist program that directly challenged American power. President Ronald Reagan responded by sponsoring another round of war in Nicaragua’s mountains and jungles. This turned Nicaragua into a bloody battlefield of the Cold War. Thousands of Nicaraguans died in a conflict that was in part a proxy fight between the United States and Cuba. American-sponsored rebels did not achieve their main goal, the overthrow of the Sandinista regime, but in 1990, two years after the war ended, Nicaraguans voted the Sandinistas out of office. The country remained deeply polarized, however, and one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.
In few countries is it possible to trace the development of anti-American sentiment as clearly as in Nicaragua. A century of trouble between the two nations, which led to the death of thousands and great suffering for generations of Nicaraguans, began when the United States deposed President Zelaya in 1909. Benjamin Zeledón took up arms to avenge him. Zeledón’s death inspired the young Sandino, who, in turn, inspired the modern Sandinista Front.
For all his faults, Zelaya was the greatest statesman Nicaragua ever produced. If the United States had found a way to deal with him, it might have avoided the disasters that followed. Instead, it crushed a leader who embraced capitalist principles more fully than any other Central American of his era.
That terrible miscalculation drew the United States into a century of interventions in Nicaragua. They took a heavy toll in blood and treasure, profoundly damaged America’s image in the world, and helped keep generations of Nicaraguans in misery. Nicaragua still competes with Haiti to lead the Western Hemisphere in much that is undesirable, including rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and deaths from curable diseases.
Not all of Nicaragua’s misfortune can be attributed to a single cause. At the dawn of the twentieth century, though, it was headed toward a very different future from the one that unfolded. If Nicaragua had been left to develop in its own way, it might have become prosperous, democratic, and a stabilizing force in Central America. Instead it is just the opposite.
SAM ZEMURRAY LIKED TO DESCRIBE HONDURAS, WHICH LIES JUST ACROSS Nicaragua’s northern border, as a country where “a mule costs more than a congressman.” He bought plenty of both, and a string of pliable presidents as well. In the years after the coup he sponsored in 1911, his Cuyamel Fruit Company and two others—Standard Fruit and United Fruit—came to own almost all the fertile land in the country. They also owned and operated its ports, electric power plants, sugar mills, and largest bank.
In exchange for these concessions, the fruit companies promised to build a rail network that would tie the country together. They never did. The only lines they built were the ones they needed, connecting their plantations to Caribbean ports. The Life Pictorial Atlas of the World, published in 1961, devoted exactly one sentence to Honduras: “A great banana exporter, Honduras has 1,000 miles of railroad, 900 of which belong to U.S. fruit companies.”
Strikes, political protests, uprisings, and attempted coups racked Honduras for decades. To suppress them, the country’s presidents maintained a strong army that absorbed more than half of the national budget. When the army could not do the job, it called in the United States Marines.
The suffocating control that Americans maintained over Honduras prevented the emergence of a local business class. In Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, coffee planters slowly accumulated capital, invested in banks and other commercial enterprises, and went on to assert civic and political power. That never happened in Honduras. The only option available to energetic or ambitious Hondurans was to work for one of the banana companies. These companies were triumphs of the American free market, but they used their power to prevent capitalism from emerging in Honduras.
In 1958 the Liberal Party, which Sam Zemurray’s coup had forced from office nearly half a century before, finally returned to power. Its leader, Ramón Villeda Morales, took over a country in which United Fruit was the biggest company, the biggest landowner, and the biggest private employer. He called it “the country of the seventies—seventy percent illiteracy, seventy percent illegitimacy, seventy percent rural populations, seventy percent avoidable deaths.”
Villeda tried to pass a land reform law, but was forced to withdraw it under intense pressure from United Fruit. When his term was about to expire in 1963, the Liberal candidate who was nominated to succeed him vowed to revive the law, and also to curb the power of the army. That combination disturbed some powerful Hondurans. Ten days before the election, the army staged a coup, installed General Oswaldo López Arellano in the presidency, dissolved Congress, and suspended the constitution. Military officers ruled Honduras for the next eighteen years. During this period, the fruit companies’ grip on the country weakened as plant diseases ravaged several of their plantations and banana production in other nations increased.
In 1975 the Securities and Exchange Commission discovered that General López Arellano had received $1.25 million in secret payments from United Brands, the conglomerate that had absorbed United Fruit. The army reacted by removing López Arellano from the presidency and replacing him with another officer. At the New York headquarters of United Brands, the scandal had a more dramatic impact. Eli Black, the company’s president and board chairman, became the focus of a federal investigation. On the morning of February 3, 1975, he smashed a hole in the window of his office on the forty-fourth floor of the Pan Am building and jumped through it.
Honduras held its next election in 1981, and Roberto Suazo Cordova, a country doctor and veteran political infighter, emerged as president. True power, however, remained with the military, specifically with the highly ambitious army commander General Gustavo Alvarez. That suited the United States, because Alvarez was a fierce anti-Communist who detested the Sandinista movement that had recently come to power in neighboring Nicaragua. When the Reagan administration asked him to turn Honduras into a base for anti-Sandinista rebels, known as contras, he eagerly agreed. Soon hundreds of contras were operating from camps along the Nicaraguan border, and thousands of American soldiers were flying in and out of the ballooning Aguacate air base nearby. From 1980 to 1984, annual United States military aid to Honduras increased from $4 million to $77 million. Once again, it had surrendered its national sovereignty to Americans.
Rivals forced General Alvarez from power in 1984 but did not dismantle his repressive machine. It had two purposes: supporting the contras and repressing dissent within Honduras. To achieve this latter goal, the army established a secret squad called Battalion 3-16, trained and supported by the CIA, that maintained clandestine torture chambers and carried out kidnappings and killings. The most powerful figure in the country during this period was the American ambassador, John Negroponte, who studiously ignored all pleas that he try to curb the regime’s excesses.
While the contra war raged, progress toward democracy in Honduras was impossible and citizens faced a frightening form of government-sponsored terror. The war had another effect, which did not become clear until years later. Thousands of poor Honduran families, submerged in grinding poverty and fearful of the military, fled the country during the 1980s. Many ended up in Los Angeles. There, large numbers of Honduran teenagers joined violent street gangs. In the 1990s many of these youths were deported back to Honduras, where they faced the same lack of opportunity that had forced their parents to flee. Soon they established in their homeland a replica of the bloody gang culture they had absorbed in Los Angeles.
These awful turns in Honduran national life were in part the result of United States intervention, and they symbolize the unimaginable consequences that “regime change” operations can have. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Americans deposed a government in Honduras in order to give banana companies freedom to make money there. For decades, these companies imposed governments that crushed every attempt at national development. In the 1980s, when democracy finally seemed ready to emerge in Honduras, the United States prevented it from flowering because it threatened the anti-Sandinista project that was Washington’s obsession. That was the period when Honduran children turned up by the thousands in Los Angeles, where many of them fell into the criminality they later brought home. Honduras, a miserably poor country where the average person earns less than $3,000 a year, was unprepared for this plague. It sank into a tragedy more brutal than any it had ever known.
No one can know what might have happened in Honduras if the United States had never intervened there. Two facts, however, are indisputable. First, the United States has been the overwhelming force in Honduran life for more than a century. Second, Honduras today faces a nightmare of poverty, violence, and instability. Hondurans bear part of the blame for this heartrending situation, but Americans cannot escape their share.
THE SHATTERING EVENTS OF 1898 ESTABLISHED THE UNITED STATES AS A world power. In the first years of the twentieth century, it began flexing its newfound political muscle. The first region to feel the effect was the Caribbean Basin. Once the United States resolved to build an interoceanic canal, it felt the need to control events in nearby countries. “The inevitable effect of our building the canal,” Secretary of War Elihu Root asserted in 1906, “must be to require us to police the surrounding premises.”
Most of the nations in these “surrounding premises” were still searching for their modern identities. Viewed from the United States, they seemed chronically unstable or in turmoil. Americans came to believe that by establishing “order” in these unhappy lands, they could achieve two wonderful results simultaneously. They would bring economic benefit to themselves while at the same time civilizing and modernizing nations that seemed primitive and crying out for guidance. Caught up in the all-encompassing idea of their country’s “manifest destiny,” they convinced themselves that American influence abroad could only be positive and that anyone who rejected it must be bad.
“All that this country desires is that the other republics on this continent shall be happy and prosperous,” Theodore Roosevelt declared, “and they cannot be happy and prosperous unless they maintain order within their boundaries and behave with a just regard for their obligations toward outsiders.”
The “outsiders” toward whom Latin Americans were supposed to behave properly were businessmen from the United States. Countries that allowed them free rein were considered progressive and friendly. Those that did not were turned into pariah states and targets for intervention.
The first burst of American expansionism was over by the time President Taft left office at the beginning of 1913. By then, the United States owned Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and had turned Cuba, Nicaragua, and Honduras into official or unofficial protectorates. Through a series of political and military maneuvers, it had come to dominate the Caribbean Basin. It had also annexed two uninhabited but strategically located Pacific atolls, Wake and Midway, as well as Guam and the islands that became known as American Samoa. In each of these places, it established naval bases that became valuable assets as it began projecting power around the world.
“The tendency of modern times is toward consolidation,” Senator Lodge asserted. “Small states are of the past, and have no future.”
The leaders of those small states, like José Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua and Miguel Dávila in Honduras, found that powerful figures in Washington considered their independence deeply threatening. Their overthrows marked the end of a period during which Central America was moving toward profound social reform. They dreamed of transforming their feudal societies into modern capitalist states, but American intervention aborted their grand project.
Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in accordance with their own interests rather than the interests of the United States, and American influence over them would diminish. Establishing that influence, though, was the reason the United States had intervened in those countries in the first place. Americans had to choose between permitting them to become democracies or maintaining power over them. It was an easy choice.
If the United States had been more far-sighted, it might have found a way to embrace and influence reformers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras. That could have produced a fairer social order in those countries, with two results. First, it would have improved the lives of many who have instead lived and died in poverty. Second, it would have eased festering social conflicts that periodically exploded into violence and dragged the United States into new rounds of intervention.
Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American principles, and the rhetoric of American democracy. They were critical of the United States, however, and wished to reduce or eliminate the power it wielded over their countries. Their defiance made them anathema to American leaders, who crushed them time after time.
The course the United States followed brought enormous power and wealth but slowly poisoned the political climate in the affected countries. Over a period of decades, many of their citizens concluded that democratic opposition movements had no chance of success because the United States opposed them so firmly. That led them to begin embracing more radical alternatives. If the elections of 1952 in Cuba had not been canceled, and if candidates like the young Fidel Castro had been allowed to finish their campaigns for public office and use democratic institutions to modernize Cuba, a Communist regime might never have emerged there. If the United States had not resolutely supported dictators in Nicaragua, it would not have been confronted with the leftist Sandinista movement of the 1980s.
In the quarter century before 1898, much of the world suffered through a series of economic crises. The United States was not exempt, passing through depressions or financial panics in the mid-1870s, mid-1880s, and early 1890s. Political leaders saw overseas expansion as the ideal way to end this destructive cycle. They believed it would answer the urgent questions raised by two epochal developments that changed the United States at the end of the nineteenth century: the closing of its frontier and the greatly increased production of its farms and factories. Successive presidents embraced the “open door” policy, which they described as a way of bringing all nations into a global trading system. It might better have been called “kick in the door,” because in reality it was a policy of forcing foreign nations to buy American products, share their resources with the United States, and grant privileges to American businesses, whether they wanted to or not.
American leaders clamored for this policy because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its “glut” of overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While wealthy Americans were lamenting it, huge numbers of ordinary people were living in conditions of severe deprivation. The surplus production from farms and factories could have been used to lift millions out of poverty, but this would have required a form of wealth redistribution that was repugnant to powerful Americans. Instead they looked abroad.
By embracing the “open door” policy, the United States managed to export many of its social problems. The emergence of markets abroad put Americans to work, but it distorted the economies of poor countries in ways that greatly increased their poverty. As American companies accumulated vast sugar and fruit plantations in the Pacific, Central America, and the Caribbean, they forced countless small farmers off their land. Many became contract laborers who worked only when Americans needed them, and naturally came to resent the United States. At the same time, American companies flooded these countries with manufactured goods, preventing the development of local industry.
The first American “regime change” operations had effects that rippled across the country and around the world. Within the United States, they brought together a nation that was still divided by the legacy of the Civil War; secured the power of the sensationalist press, especially its most ardent exponent, William Randolph Hearst; and convinced most Americans that their country was destined for global leadership. They also robbed Americans of an important measure of their innocence. The scandal over torture and murder in the Philippines, for example, might have led Americans to rethink their country’s worldwide ambitions, but it did not. Instead, they came to accept the idea that their soldiers might have to commit atrocities in order to subdue insurgents and win wars. Loud protests followed revelations of the abuses Americans had committed in the Philippines but, in the end, those protests faded away. They were drowned out by voices insisting that any abuses must have been aberrations and that to dwell on them would show weakness and a lack of patriotism.
American presidents justified these first “regime change” operations by insisting that they wanted only to liberate oppressed peoples, but in fact all these interventions were carried out mainly for economic reasons. The United States annexed Hawaii and the Philippines because they were ideal stepping-stones to the East Asia trade; took Puerto Rico to protect trade routes and establish a naval base; and deposed the presidents of Nicaragua and Honduras because they refused to allow American companies to operate freely in their countries. In none of these places was Washington prepared for either the challenges of rule or the anger of nationalists.
Why did Americans support policies that brought suffering to people in foreign lands? There are two reasons, so intertwined that they became one. The essential reason is that American control of faraway places came to be seen as vital to the material prosperity of the United States. This explanation, however, is wrapped inside another one: the deep-seated belief of most Americans that their country is a force for good in the world. Thus, by extension, even the destructive missions the United States embarks on to impose its authority are tolerable. Generations of American political and business leaders have recognized the power of the noble idea of American exceptionalism. When they intervene abroad for selfish or ignoble reasons, they always insist that in the end, their actions will benefit not only the United States but also the citizens of the country in which they are intervening—and, by extension, the causes of peace and justice in the world.
Two other facts of geopolitical life emerge from the history that Americans made between 1893 and 1913. One is the decisive role that presidents of the United States play in shaping the course of world events. There is no limit to the number of “what if” scenarios to which this evident fact can give rise. If the anti-imperialist Grover Cleveland had not lost the election of 1888 to Benjamin Harrison (Cleveland won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College), the United States would certainly not have supported a revolution against the monarchy in Hawaii. If someone other than William McKinley had been president in 1898, he might have decided to set Cuba and the Philippines on the path to independence after the Spanish-American War. If the strongly probusiness William Howard Taft had not won the presidency in 1908 and named the corporate lawyer Philander Knox as secretary of state, Washington might not have insisted on crushing the Zelaya government in Nicaragua and, with it, the hope for modernization in Central America. Since presidents can so decisively shape the fate of foreign nations, it is no wonder that non-Americans sometimes wish they could vote in American elections.
A second fact that jumps from the history of this era is the absolute lack of interest the United States showed in the opinions of the people whose lands it seized. American leaders knew full well that most Hawaiians opposed the annexation of their country but proceeded with it anyway. No representative of Cuba, the Philippines, or Puerto Rico was present at the negotiations in Paris that ended the Spanish-American War and sealed their countries’ fates. In Nicaragua and Honduras, even American diplomats conceded in their dispatches to Washington that the Liberal reform project was far more popular than the oligarchic regimes the United States imposed. The idea that the victorious power should listen to public opinion in these countries would have struck most Americans as absurd. They believed Latin Americans and Asians to be as they were portrayed in editorial cartoons: ragged children, usually nonwhite, who had no more idea of what was good for them than a block of stone.
Although much has been written about the profound changes that 1898 brought to the United States and about the decisive impact that year had on former Spanish colonies, less attention has been focused on the impact in Spain itself. There, the great defeat was for many years described simply as el catástrofe. It marked the end of an empire that had survived for more than four centuries and had played a decisive role in world history. Inevitably, the collapse of that empire led to a period of recrimination and self-doubt. It also, however, produced a group of brilliant poets, novelists, and philosophers who became known as the Generation of ’98, and who together constituted probably the most important intellectual movement in Spanish history. These figures, among them Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Ortega y Gasset, proclaimed a cultural and spiritual rebirth for their country in the wake of its loss. Their belief that a nation can achieve greatness within itself, rather than through empire, helped lay the foundation for the Spanish Republic that came to life in the 1930s and, more successfully, for the vibrant Spain that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. Some have even seen in Spain’s resurgence a model for the way countries can not only survive the loss of empire but emerge from it to become stabilizing forces in the world they once sought to dominate.